Curriculum

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The course sequence for the Certificate consists of four courses: one foundation, two design skills, and one advanced design.

  • The foundation level offers students a variety of points of entry into design — encouraging you to explore foundational design courses offered throughout campus. The foundation course cannot be used to fulfill major requirements as it is intended to introduce you to design in other contexts.
  • Next, a pair of design skills courses are required that focus on particular design capabilities such as visualization, understanding customer/user needs, concept generation and selection, prototyping, collaboration, and communication. These courses may leverage design expertise within a single discipline or have a multi-disciplinary focus.
  • The final course is an advanced design course that challenges you, while working in teams, to tackle a difficult “wicked” problem and innovate around it using interdisciplinary design.

No more than one of the four courses fulfilling certificate requirements can be used to fulfill a student’s major requirements. The minimum number of required units for certificate completion is nine.

The Design Innovation Certificate allows you to take a range of courses outside your discipline that introduces you to, or expands, your context for design. The courses include existing courses in a variety of departments as well as newly developed courses in Design Innovation (denoted by the DES INV course designation). Since not all DES INV courses satisfy requirements of the Certificate, students are advised to check the official listing of approved Certificate courses.

List of Approved Certificate Courses

Current BCDI Course Listings

Looking for approved BCDI courses currently available for enrollment? Check out our course listings via the following links:

Spring 2025

Fall 2024

For more course options, please review our list of successfully petitioned courses:

Course Petition Options

Who is sponsoring?