Experience Design

“The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” — Steve Jobs

Experience design is a holistic and integrative approach to design that focuses on the quality of the human experience in concrete situations. It employs investigation, analysis, creativity, and technology as tools to understand human goals, needs, and desires and to mediate the human experience. The Graduate Certificate in Experience Design at Northeastern University embraces research-driven design thinking for entrepreneurship and innovation, focusing on important global challenges of today. For example, in the context of healthcare, an experience designer does not focus on the design of any one technology product, information system, or physical space. Instead the designer is charged with understanding and improving the overall sequence of events and interactions that impact the patient before and during a hospital stay as well as through follow-up care.

Northeastern’s College of Arts, Media, and Design offers three experience design graduate program options to best suit the unique goals and aspirations of individual learners: the Master of Fine Arts in Experience Design (2 years, 60 credits), the Master of Science in Experience Design (1 year, 32 credits) and the Graduate Certificate in Experience Design (1 year, 16 credits). All three move beyond design thinking to produce outcomes that demonstrate the value of human-centered research and design methods. They draw on findings from a range of professional and scholarly disciplines (including business, psychology, human-computer interaction, engineering, and cybernetics) to understand and shape specific situations – that extend across many industries and aspects of life: healthcare, public service, travel, education, entertainment, shopping, dining, and the nature of work itself.

Through examining how people behave in a real context in relation to the constructed world and emerging technologies, CAMD’s graduate degrees in experience design allow working professionals or graduates from design and other disciplines (such as architecture, business, engineering, communications, computer science, healthcare, humanities, and the social sciences) to gain knowledge and experience in the design competencies needed to address societal challenges. To accomplish these goals, students will learn how to invoke cooperation, collaboration, and integration across disciplines and practices.

We prepare students to be vital contributors and leaders of professional experience design teams where technological innovation intersects with design. Graduates will be able to analyze how people undergo real-world situations, enabling them to enrich experience by orchestrating new design-driven relationships. They will be equipped with the skills to identify shortcomings as well as opportunities for improved engagement between artifacts and systems—virtual or physical—and the humans who encounter them.

The Graduate Certificate in Experience Design offers a four-course curriculum that introduces fundamentals of advanced design processes, and allows individual specialization through the selection of an elective. The certificate is intended for practitioners and students who wish to acquire competencies in experience design to complement their skills and address their professional needs. For recent graduates, this certificate is a perfect introduction to the field, which may be a portal into taking a full master’s degree. For mid-career and current graduate students, earning this certificate is a way to specialize within the field. Embedded in the CAMD graduate course offerings, students in the certificate program will have the opportunity to join CAMD graduate students from diverse disciplines for a range of events, exhibitions, guest lectures, and workshops.

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