The ESDI Higher School of Design was founded in 1989 as an initiative of the Fundació del Disseny Tèxtil (FUNDIT), thanks to the support of government bodies (Ministry of Industry and Generalitat de Catalunya), and more than 90 business groups and significant companies in the textile sector.
The objective of creating this school was to bring competitiveness to the Catalan business fabric and to respond to the needs of society and industry, in a territory with a strong textile tradition. Its current mission is to support and promote industry through design and innovation, with an international vocation but with a territorial balance, providing the necessary educational tools to train people capable of redesigning and transforming the world.
ESDI is located in the set of industrial buildings that made up the Conditioning and Docks of wool, a storage and analysis centre of the Sabadell Manufacturers Guild dating from the early 20th century. In 1989, the project to transform the building into what is now the ESDI Higher School of Design was carried out. The intervention won the Bonaplata Restoration Prize in 1991, as a good example of the recovery of the historic spaces that the industrial revolution left in Catalonia.
This profound relationship with industry is the raison d’être of the school and a fundamental pillar of its educational model.
At ESDI we are dedicated to training designers with a unique approach: we seek to cultivate a creative profile, endowed with critical thinking and an exploratory vision of the world. Our students not only learn to design products, services and environments, but also become agents of change capable of questioning and engaging in dialogue with different sectors of society, production, science and culture.
