Creating value through design is an extraordinary ability that holds the potential to effect profound change. In our shared goal to design innovation and creativity, we focus on design across disciplines by centering sustainability, exploring physical, digital, and printed media within complex production systems.
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.
All admitted applicants are considered by the academic department for generous scholarships, and awarded students are notified in their letter of admission.
In addition, The Marc Rosen Scholarship Fund for Packaging by Design was created to drive new and innovative thinking in the realm of packaging excellence. Its intent is to foster future-facing design development, stretch our boundaries of creativity and catalyze exciting redefinitions of packaging success. Read more about our two, full-funding scholarship opportunities here. Recipients will be notified prior to the start of their first semester.
All of the above funding opportunities do not require a separate application; all admitted students are considered.
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.
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.
Sustainability and Design
This course explores the contemporary role of sustainable practices as a necessary competency for emerging designers. There is positive and increasing pressure for effective design solutions that balance creativity with social, environmental and economic factors. Through an examination of current best practices involving circular economy and sustainable material management, life-cycle analysis tools and industry reports, students will research, analyze and synthesize core principles of sustainability within a wide array of communications and package design scenarios. DES-634
Packaging Design I/II
This first course on packaging design explores the critical elements of form-making within the context of the field. It covers various media and methods for exploring and developing three-dimensional packages, including sketching, rendering, and physical and computer modeling. The course emphasizes the development of a greater sensitivity to sculptural form, volumetric and spatial relationships, and ergonomics through hands-on engagement. The second course, in the third semester, emphasizes the application of graphic design elements to various types of products. The design process involves analyzing and positioning packages from a marketing point of view. It also includes the development of brand marks, visual graphics, and color schemes for individual products and related product lines. DES-630/DES-631
Cross-Platform Design
Cross-Platform Design explores the ever-evolving media landscape in which design must function. This course utilizes detailed research methods to effectively understand user behavior and contexts of use. Students then use this information to develop innovative cross-platform design solutions, both physical and digital, supported by clearly articulated strategies, while leveraging both traditional and new technologies and counterpart communication media channels. DES-645
The Capstone Arc
These two end-of-degree courses guide students through the process of developing a Capstone Project over the course of the semester following their Capstone Research course. Students will develop a design brief that articulates the scope of the project based on their pertinent research and design investigations. Each student will produce work based on a particular area of interest, where they find an opportunity to innovate and define a position within the broadest definition of the packaging field. DES-690/DES-695
Our Faculty
Our outstanding Communications Design faculty teaching in the MS program are accomplished professionals and scholars committed to empowering students’ abilities and creativity. They are dedicated to explore and incorporate new disciplines into design practice while promoting an ethical view of the profession and their responsibilities as designers
We believe that design at its best is a force for good: it connects, enables, sustains, empowers, and humanizes. Across our programs, we explore the expansiveness of this idea. Students here design messages, objects, spaces, and systems, and discover the power of your practice—to creatively change the world we inhabit and the world at large.
The design studio is at the core of your educational experience at Pratt. We consider the design studio a creative space and a community. The culture of the design studio is one of creativity, experimentation, and exploration. Students together with faculty are encouraged to take risks and to push the boundaries of what is possible. The studio then becomes a community to find support, encouragement, and inspiration.
Sustainability and material exploration drive our passion for making. We are hands-on and immersive; any student of design can discover, iterate and refine their investigations through our many labs.
We develop disciplinary fluency in our program of study and we celebrate the interdisciplinary nature of design critical to address the plurality and complexity of the environments in which we operate.
Pratt is a diverse, international community of students and faculty working together in a very local community, connecting with our immediate and global neighbors, in the hyper international city of New York.
Pratt’s distinguished alumni are leading diverse and thriving careers, addressing critical challenges and creating innovative work that reimagines our world. Graduates move on to a diverse selection of companies and institutions, including Gensler, Rockwell Group, Mac, MoMA, the NY Times, Pepsi, L’Oréal, Tom Ford, RISD, Nike, Apple, Scholastic, BBDO, TBWA, and Google. Many also become entrepreneurs and principals leading their own studios and businesses.
