Get to Know Us

It is the public centre of the Directorate-General for Universities and Higher Artistic Education of the Community of Madrid that offers official public higher education in Design at undergraduate and postgraduate levels within the EHEA (European Higher Education Area).

The Madrid School of Design is part of the network of public higher education institutions under the Ministry of Science, Universities and Innovation of the Community of Madrid, together with the Royal Higher Conservatory of Music of Madrid, the Royal School of Dramatic Arts, the Higher School of Singing, the Higher School for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, and the Higher Conservatory of Dance.

 

The Madrid School of Design (ESD Madrid), as a public institution, understands design as a service to society aimed at promoting quality of life, equality among people, innovation, the humanisation of technologies, and cultural and economic exchange.

In this regard, ESD’s objective is to research and respond to social demands by educating design professionals capable of investigating, proposing, and optimising new products and services while addressing the multiple dimensions involved (scientific, humanistic, technological, and artistic). Students are trained to anticipate trends and analyse emerging social situations and needs, with the aim of delivering the most innovative solutions.

We understand design as a broad-spectrum profession, connected to many other disciplines that contribute to shaping the new scenarios of a complex and constantly changing world.

The ESD campus offers the four undergraduate specialisations in Design (Interior Design, Graphic Design, Fashion Design, and Product Design) as well as two official Master’s degrees in Interactive Design and Commercial Space Design.

The building, composed of two main sections and an annex, is an open and light-filled space, featuring workshops and multi-purpose classrooms. At the top of the building stands a distinctive structure housing a design business incubator.

Our facilities are continuously evolving to adapt to the needs arising from the identity, scale and objectives of a school that remains attentive to the changes of a constantly evolving society.

In many of these transformations, our educational community actively participates through projects developed across different courses and in workshops specifically created for this purpose.

As part of our educational activities, and together with 25 institutions from different countries that participated in our “The School Grows” workshops, we built a unique structure in the school garden through a collaborative project with the Recetas Urbanas studio. This initiative was later showcased at the Venice Architecture Biennale as an example of collaborative ephemeral architecture. These two new classrooms are now used for both Master’s programmes and undergraduate courses.

The Madrid School of Design has a broad faculty of professors specialised in different disciplines and with extensive teaching experience, including researchers and design professionals, enriching both the theoretical and practical education of students.

ESD currently has nearly 800 students, distributed across the four undergraduate design specialisations offered at the institution (Interior Design, Graphic Design, Fashion Design, and Product Design) as well as the two official postgraduate programmes in Interactive Design and Commercial Space Design.

The distinctive characteristics of these programmes determine an average student-to-teacher ratio of 20:1 across subjects. This deliberately limited number, essential for the proper development of academic activities, ensures continuous and direct contact with professors, resulting in a personalised learning system supported by close academic mentoring, aligned with the pedagogical approaches established in the Bologna Declaration.