This doctoral program focusing on ‘intelligent sustainable design for industrial transformation and future living’, aims to cultivate the global leaders of ‘sustainable design and innovation’ in the knowledge economy network era, and integrates high standard design research to drive innovation, to lead the industry development and industrial upgrading, and finally to benefit all human beings.

This doctoral program emphasizes the education of academic talents in terms of Design Research and Design Innovation, highlighting abstract learning and thinking ability. The program encourages the students to conduct interdisciplinary academic researches on sustainable design, to achieve collaborative innovation with other subjects, to face the challenges from the real world, and to make contributions to the scientific development and social progress.

This doctoral program offered by Tongji University College of Design and Innovation (D&I) aims to cultivate academic talents in design research and design innovation. The program creates the environment to stimulate the student’s commitment and passion to research, social responsibility and awareness of the mission of the era, and the aspiration toward excellence. Through rigorous training, the student will be able to build a broad theoretical foundation, in-depth understanding of theories within her/his area of inquiry, and advanced academic and academic management capability. The program focuses on nurturing an outstanding research quality that integrates innovative thinking, interdisciplinary and proactive learning, independent research, as well as good command of communication, cooperation, and interaction with people.

Doctoral students in this program need to acquire a solid and extensive body of knowledge from humanities, science, and engineering subjects, and research theories and methods in their own research domains. They will systematically study design history, research methodologies, the philosophy of design, cutting-edge design theories, and related design research methods. They are required to read the literature of design and relevant disciplines widely and critically, including research literature from social sciences, humanities, engineering, materials science, economics, management, etc. In particular, the students will establish a robust view of the design discipline regarding the following crucial aspects: the nature of design— in both general and specific senses—and its evolution paths; patterns and characteristics of design behaviors; theories, methods, and practices of design innovation; design principles, processes, methods, tools, and techniques in the specific domain; and interdisciplinary theories related to science, social sciences, and humanities.