Packaging, Identities and Systems Design, MS
This STEM-designated program prepares students to make meaningful and impactful contributions across various design practices. It prepares students to enter a professional world fitted with a level of professional competency to join the community of next generation leaders in sustainable practices, packaging innovation, and integrated design systems. This multidisciplinary program explores real-world challenges to understand how designers can reimagine form-making, branding, and production frameworks.
Overview
The MS in Packaging, Identities and Systems Design is the contemporary evolution of a degree first offered in 1966. The curriculum helps students gain the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive as designers while providing the creative space to nurture personal passions. During the program, students apply contemporary design processes, methods, tools, and technologies toward sustainable solutions that address social and environmental concerns, and build capacity to adapt and augment these skills throughout their lives.
What We Offer
The program’s coursework allows students to achieve competency in exploring and expressing inclusive and universally accessible design solutions across two, three, and four dimensions by continuously evaluating the impact of design decisions on local and global resources and communities. Students work diligently to engage complex problems and anticipate the multivariate impact their projects would have. The program is firmly grounded in real-world design practice, while encouraging aspirational and speculative design approaches as part of each student’s process.
Throughout their course of study, students gain the capability to research, identify and ethically incorporate current sustainability practices in material use, distribution, life cycles, earth ecologies, and social practices. They demonstrate knowledge and critical understanding of a wide range of design theories and histories within their socio-economic context, and direct that expertise toward both applied and theoretical frameworks. It may include complex branding systems, inventive solutions for sustainable packaging, virtual experience systems, or innovative applications of nascent materials.
When You Graduate
Students strengthen the skills and knowledge they bring to the program while also developing new, complex capabilities. Upon successfully completing the program, students will be prepared to enter the varied field of design practice as they develop humility, social sensitivity, and cross-cultural competency to provide strategic leadership that takes into consideration a plurality of perspectives within a multidisciplinary professional or academic environment. Our graduates work in small and large practices, create iconic and influential work, build successful careers, and become leaders in their fields.
What You Should Know
The MS in Packaging, Identities and Systems Design is a STEM-designated program with classes offered during the day and evenings. A minimum of 48 credits is required for degree completion. We welcome students with previous experience in design and adjacent disciplines, but also professionals from different backgrounds. A few years of working experience in any field is recommended. Please see application guidelines in the “Apply to Pratt” section.
| Semester 1 | Credits | |
|---|---|---|
| DES-604 | Typography | 3 |
| DES-620 | Design Systems | 3 |
| DES-630 | Packaging Design I | 3 |
| DES-634 | Sustainability and Design | 3 |
| Credits | 12 | |
| Semester 2 | ||
| DES-628 | Structural Packaging | 3 |
| DES-633 | Prototyping and Production | 3 |
| DES-639 | Design Ethics and Practice | 3 |
| HAD-641 | Origins of Contemporary Communication Design | 3 |
| Credits | 12 | |
| Semester 3 | ||
| DES-631 | Packaging Design II | 3 |
| DES-645 | Cross-Platform Design | 3 |
| DES-690 | Capstone Research | 3 |
| Elective | 3 | |
| Credits | 12 | |
| Semester 4 | ||
| DES-640 | Design Management | 3 |
| DES-655 | Packaging and the Retail Space | 3 |
| DES-695 | Capstone Project | 3 |
| Elective | 3 | |
| Credits | 12 | |
| Total Credits | 48 | |
Prerequisite Courses
(only if required upon acceptance)
| Code | Title | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| DES-601 | Design Process + Methodology | 3 |
| DES-602 | Design Technology | 3 |
Upon completion of their studies, students:
- Apply contemporary design processes, methods, tools, and technologies toward sustainable solutions that address social and environmental concerns, and build capacity to adapt and augment these skills throughout their lives.
- Achieve competency in exploring and expressing inclusive and universally accessible design solutions across two, three, and four dimensions by continuously evaluating the impact of design decisions on local and global resources and communities.
- Gain the capability to research, identify and ethically incorporate current sustainability practices in material use, distribution, life cycles, earth ecologies, and social practices.
- Demonstrate knowledge and critical understanding of a wide range of design theories and histories within their socio-economic context, and direct that expertise toward both applied and theoretical frameworks.
- Develop humility, social sensitivity, and cross-cultural competency to provide strategic leadership that takes into consideration a plurality of perspectives within a multidisciplinary professional or academic environment.