Our Interior Design program draws students with imagination, values, and agency. You’ll design spaces from social, material, spatial, and sustainable lenses, with access to experimental technology and off-site professional opportunities.
📍1111 8th St., second level
Interior Design Studios
Media Gallery
Materials Library
Student POV: Mez Deboo
Interior Design at CCA
About BFA Interior Design
Your design laboratory
✍ About BFA Interior Design
From the home to the office to public buildings to mass transit, interior designers are curators of materials and space. This practice is human centered, as you partner with your clients, architects, makers, and more to craft intentional spaces through light, sound, and temperature. Our NASAD-accredited, four-year professional degree program is collaborative and interdisciplinary, just like the profession itself. We also connect materiality to sustainability, so you’ll consider the ecological impact of your choices as you envision future environments.
Bay Area connections
San Francisco is a locus for interior design, with global firms like Gensler, boutique agencies like Nicole Hollis, tech companies, and community-driven organizations. You’ll gain real-life experience through internships, field trips, and advanced courses. We also partner with community-centered nonprofits, such as Berkeley-based Girl Garage, a camp for girls to learn construction. Junior and seniors intern with architecture and interior design firms, which sets them up for success. In fact, 100% of our Interior Design students graduate with employment.
🛠️ Your design laboratory
Our state-of-the-art spaces accommodate a diverse set of materials and processes, so you can work with traditional materials like textiles, glass, ceramics, wood, and metal, or push the boundaries through emerging technologies like virtual and augmented reality, LEDs, and sensors. For example, you can prototype your own fabric on 3D printers, such as students did at the Autodesk Technology Centers.
Materials Library
The most innovative, emerging, and sustainable materials are available at your fingertips in the Materials Library, which includes over 1,000 samples. This ever-growing collection, with new and innovative samples, is searchable online by five categories of criteria: composition, form, process, properties, and application.
Digital Craft Lab
Art and science intersect in this research lab, which supports experimentation and material innovation. We use advanced computation, robotics, responsive environments, and rapid prototyping to reconsider how architecture and interior design are produced from sustainable, ecological, and innovative standpoints.
