Overview of Environmental Design

Maryland Institute College of Art

Can redesigning a water bottle help save our planet? How about a building that breathes, dinnerware for the blind or a neighborhood rescued from urban blight? These are just a few of the questions our students and their projects have asked.

In the Environmental Design Department we believe that designers will increasingly find themselves at the center of converging professional disciplines. The historic barriers between design and nearly all other professional disciplines are quickly dissolving away. In their place are new paradigms that put the designer in a crucial role to integrate diverse expertise in pursuit of solving complex social issues.

This is hugely important because nearly everything in your life is designed. The page you are reading, the chair you are sitting in, the room, building, block and city around you, even the airplane above your head and the train below your feet were all ideas turned into form. Each began as a question, "why isn't there a ..." and ended with a solution that changes how we live, work and play. A solution that changes the world.

The goal of the environmental design department is to create informed, critical, and passionate investigators of built form. From the smallest prototyped object, to furniture, to interior spaces to architecture to entire cities, environmental design is deeply concerned with addressing societal dilemmas through the exploration of form and materials.

The exploration of ideas, forms, drawings, and tools is a holistic process, requiring mastery of different mediums, concepts and methods. Students develop through visualizing and constructing their ideas. In Environmental Design this means acquiring comfort across the full spectrum of available techniques. From traditional hand and power tools to advanced rapid prototyping and remote sensing, from freehand sketching to 3D animations, MICA students gain the necessary training to fully realize their ideas.

By equipping students with the technical and conceptual tools demanded by today's professional design firms, our students are well prepared to utilize their talents under a broad range of project types, sizes and locations.

Graduate School & Careers

Graduates of MICA’s environmental design program have been accepted into the highly competitive master’s of architecture programs at Catholic University, Syracuse University, and the University of Maryland, College Park. Others are working in architecture and industrial design firms in Baltimore and New York. A wide array of internships have been developed for MICA students in environmental design, including an industrial design internship at Baltimore-based Black & Decker.

Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration & Real-Work Experience

MICA’s environmental design department regularly collaborates with the engineering program at The Johns Hopkins University. MICA students take courses in structural engineering at JHU, and Hopkins engineering students taking courses at MICA. For a project posed by the Baltimore City Department of Planning, students from Osaka University of the Arts teamed up with MICA environmental and graphic designers for the sort of “blue-sky” project they might encounter as professionals— to propose a variety of solutions to improve a site in downtown Baltimore. Their proposals, which ranged from signage to site design, were critiqued by architects from the international architecture firm RTKL. A group of MICA students traveled the following summer to both Japan and Korea to continue the collaboration.

Recent Visiting Architects, Planners, & Designers

Summer Study Abroad

Environmental design students travel each summer to important sites in Europe to focus on architecture and urban spaces, and the relation of one to another, with a faculty group that includes an architect, an urban planner, and an art historian.