Designexploration

Explaination

In today’s already highly complex working world, tomorrow’s designers are confronted with constantly changing social, ecological, political and technological structures. This often makes predictions and planning impossible. In order to be able to act productively in this world, it is not only necessary to have a curious view of constantly changing contexts, but also a critical and proactive examination of existing structures and the general certainty of what has been learned.

If in the future shoe soles grow from mycellium and bee colonies serve as models for adaptive organizational structures, we designers:inside will make a decisive contribution. Design exploration enables theory and practice to dovetail on an explorative as well as application-oriented basis, so that a sustainable development of individual projects and personalities can take place in a constantly changing world.

The master.design focus on design exploration uses a design-explorative approach to understand complex topics and to investigate them using a combination of open-ended and result-oriented design processes. This is done, for example, by means of interactive form and material exploration or the development of speculative-visionary concepts and interventions. With a special focus on a future-oriented, cross-disciplinary way of seeing and thinking, students with diverse expertise should be particularly addressed. By learning and applying observation and reflection processes, with a view to the role of designers in the complex world of tomorrow, an open culture of creation and discussion is to be developed already during the course. Individual goal-oriented and open-ended processes of physical making and producing, the reflection of this on a theoretical level as well as the localization of one’s own work in current events are taught.

Contents

Methods and tools:

  • Exploration processes (material and technology experiments)
  • prototyping
  • Design-specific network research (human, object and environment)
  • Speculative Design
  • critical design
  • Observation and perception development
  • Communication & coordination training
  • personality development
  • Design Discourse
  • Development of (novel) design processes
  • Exhibition design and communication in space

Study goals

Students acquire the ability to deal with complex issues and to investigate individual subject areas through different phases of productive making, as well as to develop them themselves. By learning to deal creatively and productively with unpredictable dimensions of the design process, students in this concentration will not only be prepared for traditional fields of work, but will also be empowered to work in new professional fields and transdisciplinary teams.

Upon completion of the program, they will have an increased interest in and ability to innovatively link practice, research, and theory, and will be motivated by impulses, even from contexts outside of design, to reflect deeply on themselves and their work. A curious and creative approach to classical and innovative design methods, production systems, materials and technologies enables them, with the help of aesthetic and integrative designs, to understand design as more than just an applied discipline. Rather, they contribute to establishing design more firmly in our society as a form of knowledge culture on a practical and theoretical level.