The School of Design Strategies is a division of the Parsons School of Design at The New School, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in the areas of design management, integrated and transdisciplinary design, and urban design. The School of Design Strategies was formed from the restructuring of Parsons School of Design during the deanship of Tim Marshall from 2006 to 2009, which consolidated a dozen Parsons departments into five schools: the School of Art and Design History and Theory; the School of Art, Media and Technology; the School of Constructed Environments; the School of Design Strategies; and the School of Fashion. The School of Design Strategies was initially created to “advance innovative approaches to design and business education in the evolving context of cities, services, and ecosystems.”

The initial degree offerings of the School of Design Strategies included bachelor’s programs in Design and Management, Environmental Studies, Integrated Design, and Urban Design; and a graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design. As of 2025, the school also offers graduate degrees in Theories of Urban Practice, Design and Urban Ecologies, and Strategic Design and Management. The Parsons Scholars program also exists within the School of Design Strategies, which offers scholarship-funded pre-college coursework to students from New York City public schools. In addition, the school presents the Stephan Weiss Lecture Series, a biannual series of lectures given by international leaders in the fields of business and design. As of 2026, Jeongki Lim is the dean of the School of Design Strategies.

Otto von Busch is a professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design. He has a Ph.D. in design from the School of Design and Craft at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. In the fall of 2025, von Busch led Critical Making + Activism (PSDS 5401), a graduate-level course in the School of Design Strategies. The following description was copied from The New School Course Description Archive website in June 2026:

Design is the practice of translating ideas into action. In this course, we will focus on the action part. Starting with critical perspectives to explore asymmetrical and contested contexts of design, we will then use simple and primitive making methods to ideate and prototype tools to intervene in these contexts. We will study activist methods ranging from civil disobedience and hacktivism to lockpicking and direct action and translate these into a series of simple but practical design projects. Utilizing the making center, we will use simple hand tools to build models, scale up to full size, and test and evaluate our interventions with our peers. You will leave the course having built a range of practical projects and honed in on several critical design capabilities with which to intervene and alter our immediate world. No hands-on skills are needed to start with, but you will have built a lot when we are done.

References

"Critical Making + Activism." The New School Course Description Archive. Accessed June 3, 2026. https://courses.newschool.edu/archive/courses/PSDS5401/18231/202510/

“Design Strategies: Cities, Services, Ecosystems.” The New School: Parsons. Accessed June 25, 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20110625102201/http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/design-strategies-school-sds/

“Faculty,” The New School: Parsons. Accessed August 19, 2025, https://www.newschool.edu/parsons/faculty/jeongki-lim/

“Parsons 2010-2011 Catalog.” New School Course Catalog Collection, NS.05.01.01. The New School Archives Digital Collections, New York, New York.

“School of Design Strategies.” The New School: Parsons. Accessed August 19, 2025. https://www.newschool.edu/parsons/design-strategies-school/

“Stephan Weiss Lectures.” The New School: Public Programs and Events. April 14, 2023. https://event.newschool.edu/stephanweisslectureseriestheli