设计研究硕士（MDes）计划挑战学生理解和影响塑造当代生活的基本过程。如果快速变化的气候，媒体系统，能源流，物质经济和移民人口是我们时代的新挑战，那么设计学科就如何应对这些复杂的开放性条件提供了独特的见识。设计教育学与科学或人文科学研究不同，它通过高度互动的思维和学习方式，通过动手，跨学科的多媒体实践直接参与技术，物质，空间，生态，政治，经济，热力学和行星技术文化生活的维度。为了增强下一代设计师和城市主义者的能力，该计划在协作的沉浸式环境中采用了新颖的方法和替代方法。最终，GSD的医学博士在一系列实验室，
The Master in Design Studies (MDes) program challenges students to understand and influence the underlying processes shaping contemporary life. If rapidly changing climates, media systems, energy flows, material economies, and migratory populations are the emerging challenges of our time, then the design disciplines offer unique insight on how to navigate these complex, open-ended conditions. Distinct from research in the sciences or humanities, design pedagogy involves highly interactive ways of thinking and learning, through hands-on, cross-disciplinary, multimedia practices that directly engage the technical, material, spatial, ecological, political, economic, thermodynamic and planetary dimensions of cultural life. Seeking to empower the next generation of designers and urbanists, the program utilizes novel and alternative methodologies in a collaborative, immersive environment. Ultimately, MDes at GSD challenges conventional ways of learning-through field work, fabrication, collaboration and dissemination-in a range of labs, seminars, workshops, initiatives, publications, and ongoing projects whose scope and diversity are unmatched by any other design school in the world. The program consists of three semesters of coursework. Students in each area undertake a core set of courses, followed by research methods and related topical courses, selected from offerings within the GSD or from the many other schools and departments at Harvard. Students may elect to complete the program in three semesters of coursework, or they may extend their research into a fourth semester by pursuing an MDes Thesis Project, conducted independently or in collaboration with their peers and GSD faculty.