Welcome Students

Getting Started with a Student Account

There’s finally a place for you to practice the design process first-hand, show off your design skills, develop a portfolio of work, earn digital badges and get feedback from peers, teachers and design professionals around the world. Work on projects through a school or program or tackle challenges on your own knowing there’s a whole network of designers on DiscoverDesign.org to support you.

Next Steps for Students

  • Take a look at other students’ work in the Student Gallery
  • Once you're ready, start your own Design Challenges
  • Check out any of the ongoing Competitions
  • Your teacher can assign projects and due dates to you if you're using DiscoverDesign as part of a class.

Apply For Badges

You can apply for badges once you’ve completed a design challenge or by heading to the Badges page.

Follow these steps to apply for a badge:

  1. Select a badge.
  2. Choose media from a completed design challenge and select it for review.
  3. Your Teacher (or a Mentor) will be able to review your work, compare it to the badge criterion, and then award you a badge – or give you feedback about what you need to work on further in order to be eligible to earn a badge.

Help keep DiscoverDesign a supportive learning environment

As part of our community, you are sharing your design projects and ideas with students, teachers, and architects, from many different places and cultures, and with all levels of experience. CAF has designed and provided this website to help you explore architectural design and to communicate the ideas about design projects that you develop. In turn, we need your help to make this community a supportive place for every participant. Here's how you can help:

  • Respect the work and opinions of others. When sharing your design projects, keep in mind that many people of different ages and backgrounds will see your work, ideas, and comments.
  • Offer constructive and specific comments. Ask questions. Instead of only criticizing a design project or simply saying that you do like it, please be specific and explain what you like about it and offer suggestions on how to make it better.
  • Help keep the site friendly. If you or others would find comments or a design project mean, insulting, or otherwise inappropriate please flag the comment as inappropriate. You may also write to discoverdesign [at] architecture.org. We will review and may remove any design, project, user, username, or comment at our sole discretion.

Check the Terms of Use from time-to-time, because we are always trying to improve our guidelines. Thank you for joining and contributing to the DiscoverDesign community!