Department of Design

Doctoral Studies at Aalto Design Research

Studying for a doctorate with us


We supervise and support a lively community of doctoral researchers. 

Apart from individual programmes of research, doctoral activities include:

  • access to a varied set of doctoral courses across the School of Arts, Design and Architecture and beyond at Aalto University;
  • courses on methods, contexts and presentation in design research;
  • a monthly departmental seminar programme;
  • opportunities for exchange visits to partner institutions.

Nearly all doctoral students at Aalto Design Research are located within departmental research groups, benefitting from close contact with their researchers and specific research foci. 

Applications for doctoral study in the Department of Design open in March each year. There is just one annual intake of students which is in September. Applicants are encouraged to consider how their proposed research addresses the department's research foci, research groups or the research of particular professors.

Further information on the Doctoral Programme in Arts, Design and Architecture 

Contact us regarding research and doctoral awards

Public Defenses in the Field of Design

A collage of the process of dyeing with achiote, a fruit that yields orange colour. A blue-dyed hand is holding it while liquid is poured.

Public defence in Design, MA Leonardo Hidalgo Uribe

Colours also grow from the land: rethinking dominant textile colour practices through ethnographic research on bio-based dyeing crafts.

Events
Collage of the various elements composing the food environments of urban eaters -  both connecting and separating them from the food system

Public defence in Design, MAA Kata Fodor

Understanding urban food environments: How to accommodate sustainable diets in the space between our plates and the planet?

Events
Pictograms of indigenous Amazonian nationalities of Ecuado

Public defence in Design, MA Nathaly Pinto Torres

Indigenous pictograms as devices for knowledge, identity, and resistance, pushing participatory design toward communal,
territorial practice

Events
Doctoral hat floating above a speaker's podium with a microphone.

Public defence in Design, MA (New Media),  M.Sc.(Arch.) Jaana Hyvärinen

Prototyping for service – collaborative, transformative and translational practice (title of the thesis).

Events
Shimmering Wood -samples

Public defence in Design, MA Noora Yau

Shimmering Wood – Experimenting with Nanocellulose-Based Structural Colour (title of the thesis).

Events
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