The 2024-2025 academic year marked the first full year of courses from the Joseph Ballay Center for Design Fusion (JBCDF).  The JBCDF, founded through an endowment from Professor Emeritus Joseph Ballay and his wife Sue, establishes a formal presence of design expertise and outreach at Carnegie Mellon University and creates a new outlet for the School of Design to advance its distinct approaches to problem-solving, interdisciplinary collaboration, and curricular innovation.

This year's courses included Bugs & Bioinspiration, Comics, Cybernetics and Dynamics of Change, Creative Concepting, Designing for Presence, and Patterns in Nature. 

Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design is proud to announce our three new PhDs in Transition Design. Our latest cohort, consisting of Fas Lebbie, Alexander Polzin and Matthew Wizinsky, represents a fascinating array of thought, work, and research in the field of Transition Design.

Kristin Hughes recently reflected on "Designing with CARE," a 15-week long project which tasked student teams with designing solutions for the complex world of gynecological oncology care coordination. The trajectory of this project began with Hughes' own personal battle with cancer and resulted in truly thought provoking solutions from Design students presented on site at UPMC Magee's Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA.

The School of Design's Dina El-Zanfaly and the School of Computer Science's Kris Katani have developed Origami Sensei, an AI-powered mixed-reality system that assists beginners in creating origami.

Carnegie Mellon University is pleased to announce the launch of the Transition Design Institute website, a new resource for researchers, educators, practitioners, and communities working to address complex societal challenges. Transition Design is a transdisciplinary, systems-oriented approach developed at CMU that aims to catalyze positive, systems-level change and facilitate intentional transitions toward more sustainable, equitable, and desirable long-term futures.

Each year, the School of Design holds our Design Awards program during Design Week of the spring semester. This event celebrates the academic talents of our students and their contributions to the school. Several awards are presented during the event: School of Design awards, Donors awards, and Partnership awards (organizations that the school has associations with). All of our awards are funded by generous alumni, individual donors, and organizations to honor student achievements and passions. We are grateful to all of our donors for their support.

Sapna Tayal, a senior specializing in Product Design, was recently awarded the 2025 IDSA Merit Award. Each year, IDSA student chapters across the US nominate one undergraduate senior who exemplifies excellence within the industrial design field. Representing Carnegie Mellon, Sapna will compete at the IDSA district level for national recognition. Seniors Parrish André, Stanley Ip, Veronica Michaels, Sandy Youssef, and Elin Zhou were also recognized for their product design work.

In the Making is the Carnegie Mellon University School of Design Class of 2025’s senior show. It is a cumulation of four years of work across three disciplines in design from 38 designers represented through over 250 projects.

Sophomore Arden Rusu (BDes ’27) was recently commissioned to design the poster for the International Poetry Forum’s upcoming event “Poetry of the Underworld”: Srikanth Reddy.“ The event, featuring a reading and book signing with acclaimed poet, University of Chicago professor, and poetry editor for The Paris Review, Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, will take place on April 15th, 2025 at 6:30pm at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall.

Assistant Professor Kelsey Elder has been named the recipient of the 2024 Communication Design Educators Award in the Teaching category by Design Incubation—an honor that celebrates his innovative contributions to design education and the continued impact of his course Variable, a typographic journey that merges code, culture, and critical making.