Early Design Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design
Early Design Education (EDE) at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) is a set of five academic programs that introduce design and its potential to change the world to audiences of varied ages and familiarity with design.
These programs are crafted to engage participants with design thinking and methods across scales, under the assumption that the program is one of the earliest experiences of thinking through making. Each program makes use of the breadth and depth of design talent at Harvard’s GSD to a global public. We invite high school students through mid-career professionals to join us and discover design at Harvard.
Our Programs
Harvard GSD Design Discovery Virtual
Explore Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design in three weeks, from anywhere in the world—no visa required. You bring your best ideas, and we provide digital software, a physical design kit, and design thinking instruction by Harvard GSD faculty and graduate students.
Harvard GSD Design Discovery
Three weeks at your own studio desk in the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Gund Hall, going deep into a design concentration of your choice: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, or Urban Planning+Design. You’ll learn to think through making, visualization and modeling skills, analytical methods of evaluating physical sites, and develop a portfolio of design work through the studio methods of iteration and review.
Harvard GSD Design Discovery Youth
Learn, draw, model, and build under Harvard GSD graduate-student instructors to examine how design answers big questions. You’ll leave with a Harvard design certification and personal portfolio of work. Open to Boston-area high school students. No tuition cost or design experience needed.
Equity in Design Mentorship
An academic and professional mentorship program for diverse Boston-area high school students interested in design, ran in partnership with the Boston design firm Perkins&Will. This program links high school participants with current GSD students and a professional designer to support design education and unfold potential design career paths.
Harvard Undergraduate Architecture Studies
An undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree program in Architectural Studies that teaches thinking through making within the liberal arts context of Harvard College. Run in partnership with the Harvard College History of Art & Architecture department, students of the program receive a Harvard A.B. degree in History of Art and Architecture, Design Studies. Admission questions and processes are managed by Harvard College.
Click on the diagrams above and visit our GSD EDE Program Comparison page for more information!
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