Design school programs rank among top 20 nationally

Three programs in The Design School in the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts were ranked among the top 20 design and architectural programs in the country.

The 12th annual DesignIntelligence’s prestigious rankings placed the ASU undergraduate interior design program eighth in the country and the undergraduate industrial design program ninth. The ASU architecture program landed among the top tier – 17th – of graduate schools in the country, placing ahead of Princeton University and Texas A&M University.

“The most competitive design and architecture schools in the country are ranked by the nation’s top firms in terms of which schools are best preparing students for success in the profession and four out of five of those firms are ranking our graduates in the top 10 or top 20 of the nation,’’ said Darren Petrucci, director of The Design School. “That’s significant for me.’’

The annual DesignIntelligence “America’s Best Architecture & Design Schools’’ rankings is an in-depth survey that asks some of the nation’s elite architecture, landscape architecture, interior design and industrial design firms to evaluate which programs are doing the best job at preparing students for their professions based on the graduates these firms have hired.

The 360 firms participating in this year’s evaluation also ranked ASU’s industrial design program as first in the area of research and theory, one of five skill areas assessed. In further recognition, the industrial design program was ranked fourth in the nation by deans and department heads of industrial design programs.

The ASU architecture program was also recognized as among the top three graduate programs in the 13-state western region that includes California, Oregon and Washington.

In addition to architecture, industrial design and interior design, The Design School at ASU also offers landscape architecture, urban design and visual communication design. The school is one of the most comprehensive and collaborative design schools in the country requiring its students to master their respective fields of study but to also understand, communicate and collaborate across the other design disciplines.