Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design

Throughout the two-year course the Contextual Design Master aims to increase the students’ awareness of how each designed object, and each designed strategy, is a node in a network of relationships with other people, things, and contexts. To underscore the personal responsibility of the designer we speak of authorship, which is not taken in its narrow interpretation of personal ‘stardom’ or ‘signature design’, both of which are embraced by the market as seduction strategies, but the truer conception of authorship as accepting ‘ownership’ and working from genuine commitment. Authorship implies the designer takes personal responsibility for all implicit meanings of a design, as well as the implications and consequences it carries.

One of the main aims of the Contextual Design Master is to cultivate the power of the imagination and narrative. No matter how tight a space we are in, it is through the power of imagination that we can create a space, a context, in which we can relate to not only ourselves but also to others. We ask our current and prospective students to imagine that they are boundless, as if they are free, even when constrained. The artistic talents and experiences of students are the fertile starting points for observing, researching and arriving at this space of freedom from which to question the world with their own design ethos and personal commitment.

Kennismaken met deze afstudeerrichting?

The Geo—Design MA investigates how design can interface with complex phenomena in the physical and material world by means of research, new objects, and cinema.

The Geo—Design MA aims to launch research questions about design and the external world with an orientation towards the planet and the planetary.

To investigate how design can be a neighboring discipline to ecology, geology, biology, physics, technology, geopolitics, and cognitive science, the Geo—Design MA considers how design is already involved with these fields through its existing ways and means of production—as expressed through raw materials and their extraction, supply chains, infrastructures of production, its physical, cultural, informational, and aesthetic ecologies, and other factors.

In addition to this, the department explicitly seeks out new problems and ways of making that interface between design and the external world, trying design’s capacities at providing hypotheses, answers, and interventions.

Kennismaken met deze afstudeerrichting?

MA Information Design is a programme dedicated to the exploration of the politics and agency of information and its modes and contexts of production. It operates as an outpost for research and an arena for the interrogation of ideas and practices within and beyond the field of design. By rejecting pre-defined professional roles, the programme foster the development of individual and collaborative trajectories that empower the designer to become an intellectual figure, who can decode and re-code complexity within a fluid landscape of possible engagements—from autonomous artistic practices to strategic roles within small collectives or large institutions.

Kennismaken met deze afstudeerrichting?