Urban planning and design

It was at Harvard University that the first formal North American programs in city and regional planning (1923) and urban design (1960) were established. Since then, Harvard has played a leading role in the education of urban planners and urban designers. The Department of Urban Planning and Design is home to both professions, offering a first professional degree in urban planning and a post-professional degree in urban design. Composed of internationally experienced scholars and practitioners, the department’s faculty explores the built environment from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and points of view. The department’s pedagogically innovative combination of interdisciplinary studios, lecture courses, seminars, and independent study, coupled with a relatively small student size of roughly 100 individuals drawn from around the world, create an intimate, engaged educational atmosphere in which students thrive and learn. Accredited by the Planning Accreditation Board and open to students with an undergraduate degree, the two-year professional Master in Urban Planning degree program focuses on planning for the development, preservation, and enhancement of the built environment. Students learn how to understand, analyze, and influence the variety of forces-social, economic, cultural, legal, political, ecological, and aesthetic, among others-shaping the built environment. The post-professional, two-year Master of Architecture in Urban Design and Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design degree programs enable architects and landscape architects to address the larger scale of urban problems through formal techniques and application of knowledge from complementary areas of expertise such as real estate, law, and the history of urbanism.

by Alex Kreiger,

Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design

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Design From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All human made products are designed.

Design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system. It can be used both as a noun and as a verb and, in a broader way, it means applied arts and engineering (See design disciplines below). As a verb, "to design" refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component with intention. As a noun, "a design" is used for either the final (solution) plan (e.g. proposal, drawing, model, description) or the result of implementing that plan in the form of the final product of a design process^]. This classification aside, in its broadest sense no other limitations exist and the final product can be anything from clothing to graphical user interfaces to skyscrapers. Even virtual concepts such as corporate identity and cultural traditions such as celebration of certain holidays are sometimes designed. More recently, processes (in general) have also been treated as products of design, giving new meaning to the term process design.

The person designing is called a designer, which is also a term used for people who work professionally in one of the various design areas, usually also specifying which area is being dealt with (such as a fashion designer, concept designer or web designer). Designing often requires a designer to consider the aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object or a process, which usually requires considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design. With such a broad definition, there is no universal language or unifying institution for designers of all disciplines. This allows for many differing philosophies and approaches toward the subject. However, serious study of design demands increased focus on the design process.

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