Program Overview

As a global design community, we share the values, principles, practices and processes that create pervasive acts and outputs which can address the crisis threatening the future of the planet and its peoples.

We must optimise the imagination, speculation and vision of our craft to bring together and activate scientists, technologists, ecologists and politicians in a mission to improve lives now.

Our MDes Global Design programme is for designers who want to play their part in that mission. We are looking for committed graduates who are passionate about activating global, local and individual change in order to build a sustainable and vibrant future for the planet, its ecologies and its people.

This programme allows students from both practice and non-practice backgrounds to explore sustainability, ethics, health, safety and the environment through a research culture that prioritises relationship building, trans- and inter-disciplinary exploration and stakeholder collaboration.

Working trans-collaboratively with local and global communities, you will develop a self-identified project, setting an intention to anticipate, enact and effect a transformation of global significance.

Throughout the programme you will engage with concepts, methods and practice that develop your understanding of how change happens. Our particular focus is on the future orientation of design and how alternative visions can be fashioned by human agency in a way that is simultaneously playful and speculative, as well as intensely rigorous.

Whether your interest is in research-led practice or practice-led research, we expect you to locate your research within the wider Global, Ethical, Social and Political contexts relevant to the landscape of contemporary Art & Design research.

Indicative course content includes:

• The Ethics of Design
• Design Anthropology
• Design Activism
• Participatory Design
• Sustainable Futures
• Design Philosophy and the Post-humanities