Innovate and Engineer in the Vibrant Heart of Catalonia!
Our Design & Engineering Study Abroad program in Barcelona, Spain, presents an opportunity for a semester or academic year filled with creativity and innovation. Tailored for students who aim to combine the practical aspects of engineering with the creative elements of design, this program is offered entirely in English, allowing you to break new ground while immersed in the dynamic backdrop of one of Europe’s leading cities for innovation and design.
Highlights:
English-Taught Curriculum: Dive into an interdisciplinary curriculum that bridges the gap between design and engineering. Engage with subjects such as sustainable architecture, urban planning, industrial design, and civil engineering, all conveyed through the universal language of English.
Cultural Integration: Discover Barcelona’s renowned design scene and architectural marvels firsthand. Participate in workshops, tours, and events that embed you within the local design and engineering communities.
Strategic Location: Situated in a city celebrated for its architectural ingenuity and creative spirit, Barcelona serves as an unparalleled classroom. From the iconic works of Antoni Gaudí to the city’s cutting-edge tech hubs, immerse yourself in an environment where creativity meets practicality.
Barcelona’s status as a leading center for design and engineering provides an exceptional setting for students. The city not only offers a multitude of learning opportunities but also acts as a gateway to exploring new design paradigms and engineering solutions.
Take a step into a semester or academic year in Barcelona to merge your engineering acumen with creative design, all within the pulsating energy of Spain’s most innovative city.
Fall
Sep, 2025 -
Dec, 2025
Spring
Jan 6, 2025 -
May 1, 2025
The available courses for students vary by program and are distributed between the SSA center and local universities. Please see the selection below, and contact us for the most current course information:
Design is an increasingly complex profession where the limits between traditional specialist areas have become blurred. Nowadays designers must be capable of covering every field in this extensive market and mastering the diversity of services they can offer.
Elisava’s Study Abroad program offers a comprehensive look at the design and the emerging new opportunities. It does so in a multicultural environment in which different disciplines and knowledge areas merge. Thus, students can complement their training based on their interests to be able to materialize projects in any area.
This course connects different branches of human knowledge like architecture, design, sociology, and history and intends to develop a cognitive map of the world. The course analyses the basic theories and practices of art, architecture, and design from the Industrial Revolution to the present day and discusses their social and cultural impact. Taking Barcelona as a case study, the course will provide the student with analytical and discursive tools in order to develop a global understanding of the design and its relationship with the social context from a critical and innovative point of view. The course takes advantage of the extensive resources of Barcelona, complementing the classes with visits to the city’s museums such as MNAC (National Museum of Art of Catalonia), MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona), Joan Miró Foundation, and the Picasso Museum, emblematic buildings by Gaudi, Mies van der Rohe, and other world-class architects, among others.
The capacity to communicate through images and express the relevant aspects of a project, from the idea to the final proposal, is a fundamental aspect of design. This course is aimed at providing students with representation concepts and techniques that are broadly applied in design fields. Based on exercises, talks, and workshop sessions, the course embraces the ability of students to define and show their ideas by learning about the options and features that Adobe Suite offers as a powerful suite specifically conceived for design professionals. Mandatory for participants without experience in digital representation and visual narrative, the course is also recommended for those design students who want to deepen their knowledge of digital tools. The course also approaches the basic concepts of video editing and production, as well as the fundamentals of presentation techniques.
Through demonstrations, workshops, and studio sessions, this course will improve students’ creativity and knowledge regarding innovative ways of creating and doing, both traditional and contemporary. As creative minds and human beings in a constant learning process, we must understand the importance of context and the interactions between the artist/designer and the surrounding world. This course will guide students through research and project exercises, culminating in the creation of an ephemeral installation within the public space of Barcelona. Visiting and re-visiting the city will help students reach an immersive understanding driven by analysis, data visualization, sketches, and presentations.
The Interior Spaces course introduces design students to the complexities of the development of interior spaces, as well as putting them in touch with the local architecture and design culture. The course structure is designed to provide a general framework for the development of a range of projects, from small-scale briefs to larger-scale proposals for a residential interior. The program provides the student with knowledge and skills in all areas of space planning, theory, concept, model-making, and freehand drawing as well as communication. With the active participation of the students, several practical exercises integrated within the course promote a conceptual and experimental approach to design through a hands-on learning method. It usually begins with a presentation to provide the theoretical foundation that aims to deepen the comprehension of a specific subject.
Graphic Design is the discipline that uses visual concepts to communicate ideas. This course aims to practice Graphic design tools, Colour, Image, Composition, and Typography and the relation between them. Typography is one of the most important tools for graphic designers. Students will experiment with movable type fonts to digital typography movement. In this course, students will learn how to design projects that will range from artistic and experimental calligraphy, typography, poster composition, branding, or editorial design to digital interaction. The students will also learn basic communication skills, considering that contemporary narratives require the capacity to deal with static and dynamic images.
This course focuses on product and furniture design, covering the entire process from conceptualization, formalization, development, and pre-production of a designed object from the human, domestic, or work environment. The course will analyze the social, ergonomic, and aesthetic environment of the user, the method for producing the final work, and its impact on the environment as a whole. As part of the development and design of products, the class will visit factories, and showrooms, design boutiques, and will use the school’s workshops to produce a model of a piece of furniture.
Retail is naturally the showplace for new ideas, new concepts, and new products. As such, the store environment serves as the selling stage for the latest merchandise offerings of the day, and a tool of communication used to create a dialogue with the targeted customer. Through effective visual merchandising, the retailer communicates both the attributes of the brand and the attributes of the products offered. The main goal of this course is to introduce students to the importance of retail design and visual merchandising as an integral component of a successful retail strategy. The principles, philosophies, and technologies of both, retail design and visual merchandising will be studied through exploration of the marketplace, visits, and hands-on classroom experimentation.
In the last years moving images have become the new graphics in the digital world. The net is full of Graphics animating fonts, illustrations, and pictures that move creating the sensation of dynamism. The main goal of this subject is to introduce students to the motion graphics field and also learn visual communication as a tool to facilitate the communication of ideas. The content will focus on Storytelling, Digital Illustration, Digital filmmaking, and the Digital tools that help to build it all.
This course introduces the necessary tools for conceptualizing and developing comprehensive packaging projects. Packaging is one of the most relevant branches of contemporary design not only for practical reasons since almost all products going to the market require a package that protects them and preserves their quality, but also from a conceptual point of view, since it is the complex crossroads of highly demanding technical requirements and exciting opportunities for communicating the values of the products and their brands to the public. In this course, students will learn to communicate the attributes of a product and the placement of a brand. The goal is to understand the factors affecting the production and selection of a package for a specific product, its possibilities, and materials.
This course focuses on food from its origins to the present, in order to understand the complex system behind the fact of “feeding” people. The course will approach this subject from gastronomy, anthropology, history, etymology, and food systems amongst other disciplines, thus the course has the aim of giving the students diverse approaches and tools to make them capable not just of understanding this interdisciplinary subject but also design objects or services in relation with food and gastronomy with sense and content. The course will introduce students to the interaction of design, as a creative process, with food and health, as fundamental parts of the human being.
ELISAVA is an internationally oriented educational and research institution affiliated with Pompeu Fabra University. The school is situated in Barcelona and is home to around 2,200 students and more than 800 teachers.
In the year 2000, Elisava was awarded a National Innovation and Design Award. Since 2013, it has been ranked among the top 100 design and architecture schools in Europe according to Domus magazine.
Fall
Sep, 2025 -
Dec, 2025
Spring
Jan 6, 2025 -
May 1, 2025
The mission of SSA is to promote our students’ in-depth understanding of Spanish-speaking countries through specifically designed and academically rigorous university-level and cultural travel programs.
INSTITUTIONAL RELATIONS COORDINATOR; WEST/MIDWEST
The IRs are your go-to contacts for navigating the complex study abroad process.
They aim to respond to all inquiries within one business day.
Don’t hesitate to drop a message. No question is too small!
INSTITUTIONAL RELATIONS COORDINATOR; SOUTHEAST
The IRs are your go-to contacts for navigating the complex study abroad process.
They aim to respond to all inquiries within one business day.
Don’t hesitate to drop a message. No question is too small!
INSTITUTIONAL RELATIONS COORDINATOR; NORTHEAST
The IRs are your go-to contacts for navigating the complex study abroad process.
They aim to respond to all inquiries within one business day.
Don’t hesitate to drop a message. No question is too small!
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