Postgraduate

In Glasgow

Price on request

Description

  • Type

    Postgraduate

  • Location

    Glasgow (Scotland)

The programme seeks to develop design practitioners and professionals who are capable of operating in collaborative working environments, utilising the skills and knowledge of others and responding in a reflective and sympathetic manner to the demands, constraints and opportunities afforded by the context within which design practice occurs.

Facilities

Location

Start date

Glasgow (Glasgow City)
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Glasgow School Of Art, G3 6RQ

Start date

On request

About this course

ENTRY REQUIREMENTS
All applicants should normally have a good first degree in a relevant subject area, or equivalent industrial or professional experience. All applications to the MDes in Design Innovation should include:

: completed Postgraduate Application Form, including two academic references
: a 500-word typed statement, outlining reasons for applying for the programme
: a portfolio of visual material, preferably submitted as a CD Rom and/or DVD
: a copy of academic qualification certificates.
...

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Course programme

The Master of Design (M.Des) in Design Innovation provides the opportunity for students to engage with the craft of user-led and co-created innovation in design practice across a variety of fields and in widely differentiated social, economic, technological and industrial contexts. The programme responds to the changed context within which design practice occurs in the 21st century, a context within which the discipline-based skills of the product designer, ceramist, visual communicator or textile designer must sit alongside the working practices and expertise of a professionally-diverse and often globally-dispersed workforce.

The curriculum and content of the M.Des in Design Innovation is currently built around three specialist pathways - in Transformation Design, Environmental Design, and Service Design. These pathways share some common curriculum content, and students on the different pathways are encouraged to work collaboratively, thus enhancing the possibility for interdisciplinary work.

With Transformation Design, the role of the designer moves from that of communicating function, controlling form and determining the experience of design objects, to that of inspiring participation, enabling possibilities and supporting on-going system-wide design and redesign. The facilitation of innovative, productive and creative design processes, that is, are prioritized over the delivery of end products; skills, methods and possibilities are communicated to users in order to enhance social and cultural modes of interaction with design.

The field of Environmental Design interrogates the relationship of the designer to the built environment. The recent growth of interest in adding visual value to the built environment has opened up discussion regarding using traditional materials such as glass and ceramics to enhance the exteriors and interiors of buildings. There is, however, a consciousness that tradition has to change in order to fit into a contemporary context, and that a new framework for defining current practice has to evolve. Such a framework might include such factors as: the interrelationships between place, community and culture; the role of the designer as a facilitator of cultural change; the diversity of traditions and visual identities at local and global levels; the significance of sustainability. Environmental Design as an area of practice and enquiry is necessarily interdisciplinary, exploring and exploiting material practices and synergies across the School of Design (including product design and textile design), as well as initiating discourse with other fields such as architecture and town planning.

Service Design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service, in order to improve its quality, the interaction between service provider and customers, and the customers experience. Although the subject initially took off in the areas of management and marketing, Service Design has subsequently developed as a design discipline. Service Design is the specification and construction of technologically networked social practices that deliver valuable capacities for action to a particular customer. Like Transformation Design, that is, Service Design is concerned with facilitation of creative opportunities, rather than the delivery of concrete end products. Service Design is an activity that suggests behavioural patterns or scripts to the authors interacting in the service, leaving a higher level of freedom to the customers behaviour.

The programme of study is aimed at postgraduate students who wish to expand and develop their creative practice through an exploration of user-led, collaborative and research-focused techniques of design innovation. Students completing the programme will have developed the capability to respond confidently to theoretical, conceptual and technological challenges that arise through their creative practice, as well as having attained a high level of technical ability in the application and use of tools within social, technological and professional contexts. Students will also have achieved an awareness of the historical, theoretical and methodological novelty of such approaches and the manner in which these are linked to the social, economic and technological arrangements of 21st century life and the challenges and opportunities that it presents.

Objectives

The programme seeks to develop design practitioners and professionals who are capable of operating in collaborative working environments, utilising the skills and knowledge of others and responding in a reflective and sympathetic manner to the demands, constraints and opportunities afforded by the context within which design practice occurs. Candidates on the Design Innovation programme will become trans-disciplinary practitioners who can respond to both the demands of local communities and those of multi-national corporations, as they seek to innovate the artefacts, services and experiences that constitute the experience of modern life.

Requirements

ENTRY REQUIREMENTS

All applicants should normally have a good first degree in a relevant subject area, or equivalent industrial or professional experience.

All applications to the MDes in Design Innovation should include:

  • completed Postgraduate Application Form, including two academic references
  • a 500-word typed statement, outlining reasons for applying for the programme
  • a portfolio of visual material, preferably submitted as a CD Rom and/or DVD
  • a copy of academic qualification certificates. For pending certification, applicants should ensure that referee reports contain an indication of the predicted result.

Overseas applicants for whom English is not their first language should normally obtain a minimum score of 6.0 in the IELTS test or equivalent.

Design Innovation

Price on request