The art and design education at the School of Art, Southeast University, can be traced back to the establishment of the "Drawing and Crafts Department" in 1906. Since the late 1980s, after Southeast University restored its liberal arts programs, it established an Industrial Design major in 1994, which was renamed Product Design in 2012. In 2002, it was approved to offer a Master of Design degree, and in 2005, it was approved to offer a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree. In the 2014 "2014 China University Discipline and Major Evaluation Report," the Product Design major ranked 5th. In the fourth round of discipline evaluation by the Ministry of Education in 2017, Design was rated as a B-level discipline. In 2018, the Product Design major, jointly ranked 3rd out of 333 institutions nationwide by the China Science Evaluation Research Center, the China Education Quality Evaluation Center of Wuhan University, and the China Science and Education Evaluation Network.

The Department of Design upholds the School of Art's philosophy of "pursuing perfection," adheres to a people-centered approach and a comprehensive, coordinated, and sustainable scientific development perspective, and relies on the high-quality disciplinary resources of Southeast University. It embraces the integration of science and art, employing innovative strategies, focusing on human systems, the environment, and society. The department aims to discover design thinking and directions for the times and the future, incorporating cultural awareness, global competence, and a sense of social responsibility as key components and main supports. It fosters a balanced education in general and liberal arts, combining inheritance with innovation, to cultivate research-oriented, leading, international, and interdisciplinary design talents with a strong sense of national responsibility, international vision, scientific awareness, and cultural spirit. Driven by comprehensive reform and innovation and entrepreneurship, the Department of Design has gradually established a design innovation talent training system that emphasizes both moral and artistic cultivation, integrates science and education, and promotes industry-academia collaboration. It achieves alignment and collaborative development with the university's advantageous majors in engineering, information technology, humanities, and life sciences, constructing an innovation platform that integrates innovative mechanisms, facilitates asynchronous team collaboration, and optimizes systematic outcomes, thus forming a unique and powerful design discipline nationwide.

The Department of Design has long been committed to theoretical research and teaching practice in design. In recent years, its full-time faculty members have won over 50 international, national, and provincial/ministerial awards, secured over 10 national social science and Ministry of Education humanities and social science projects, won one national gold course award, and published over 30 academic works and textbooks (including one national planning textbook and two provincial/ministerial key textbooks). Faculty members have guided students to win over 500 awards in major international and domestic design competitions, and over 100 teaching and research achievements have been transformed into teaching resources, highlighting the department's strong teaching practice capabilities and earning widespread praise from the industry.