
Design, the Georgia Tech Way
Design, the Georgia Tech Way
We think it's important to understand how technology enables better design, and how to fuse that technology into buildings, products, lifestyles, cities, regions, and even healthcare.

Design Grads Voted '40 Under 40'
Mehdi Nourbakhsh Ph.D. BC'16, and Sophia Prater BSID'06, are in the 2022 cohort of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association's list of "40 Under 40".
Prater is the founder and lead UX designer at Rewired and the chief evangelist of Object-Oriented UX. She is the host of the OOUX Happy Hour meetup and the OOUX Podcast. Nourbakhsh is the founder and CEO of YegaTech, a technology consulting company in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. He started YegaTech with the mission of helping AEC professionals and companies grow by curating their data and creating impactful artificial intelligence technologies.

Darren Waller Inspired by Music to Manifest His New Life
Music has always been a big part of Darren Waller’s life. During his time as a Georgia Tech football player and student, Waller learned more about his rich family past in jazz through Assistant Professor Chip Crotts' course.
Waller is the great-grandson of Thomas “Fats” Waller, a charismatic pianist, prolific composer, and the first Black man to write the score for a Broadway musical. Music runs through his veins, and even now as an NFL player with the Raiders, music continues to be positive and creative outlet for him.
Georgia Tech Team Wins Solar Decathlon
The Georgia Tech student team, "English Avenue Yellow Jackets", is the 2022 Design Challenge Residential Division Grand Winner for the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon. They also took home first place in the contest's new Retrofit Housing division. Their winning entry retrofitted a 102-year-old house in Atlanta's English Avenue neighborhood.
In addition to a net positive retrofit, the English Avenue Yellow Jackets provided solutions for rainwater harvesting and graywater reuse, a financial model that included land trust subsidies, and an additional 60 years' worth of projected weather data that proved the house would stay net positive even in cases of extreme weather.
Board of Regents Approves Global Development Degree
The new Master of Science in Global Development at Georgia Tech is a one-year collaborative degree that combines courses in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, the School of City and Regional Planning, and the School of Economics.
Recovering History with Digital Design
School of Architecture Assistant Professor Danielle Willkens can do amazing things with digital architecture reconstructions, including taking people back to Selma, Alabama in 1965.
A Georgia Tech team exhibit, which won a People’s Choice Award while on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History recently, will be on display in the School of Architecture. Willkens leads the team of student researchers who created the exhibit.

A Local Perspective, Globally Realized
School of Architecture students recently explored one of the world’s rarest ecosystems to study how architecture can simultaneously protect the environment and elevate human community.
As the habitat of the mountain gorillas in Rwanda grows, farmers are being displaced. Georgia Tech student architects met with relocated communities, visited the Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, and presented designs for model communities to house the relocated people.
Majors and Degrees
Design Research
Our six research centers focus on a range of crucial issues, many of which impact our daily lives. Our topics include the development of cities and regions, the healthcare environment, helping those with physical limitations, and new ways to create music.