Outline
Design for Change is an exciting interdisciplinary programme which seeks to holistically address complex global challenges such as ageing populations, disruptive technologies, economic instabilities and inequalities, conflict and displacement and environmental degradation and injustices through design-led interventions.
It aims to foster a new breed of designer for the 21st century. To do this, it offers a particular blend of eco-social design.
As a student of Design for Change, you will develop the skills to research, ideate, communicate and deliver propositions for change that are just and equitable, and socioculturally, politically and environmentally aware.
You will be supported to develop tactical, critical, strategic and creative approaches that draw imaginatively on a variety of disciplinary fields, theories, philosophies and methods.
Together with other students and staff you will have the opportunity to be part of design efforts to face the urgent challenges of our shared contemporary world with humility and with hopefulness.
The programme embodies and promotes ways of designing that are slow and systemic. You will study emplaced, relational ways of designing for change that are also conscious of the importance of positionality, habit, ritual, practice and belief, and cultural and social difference.
You will be guided to consider the more-than-human in your design, and to explore alternatives to the status quo.
The programme seeks to broaden perspectives, cultivate humility, enable learning from and working with others, and privilege the experiential, the observational, and the monistic (rather than dualistic).
When studying Design for Change, you will be encouraged to be playful! We value the ability to play, to create and experiment, to try and fail and see this as a valuable and necessary part of learning. The programme cultivates a design(ing) that is non- or even anti-consumerist, activist, materially-conscious and conscious of material conditions.
Design for Change actively seeks designerly approaches to challenges that are often global and yet also locally felt. We do so critically and hopefully; as a Design for Change student you will be supported to be imaginative, principled – honing and defining your (design) values – and to embrace the prefigurative.
Our programme is ideal for students who are looking to broaden their existing specialist approaches from a range of disciplines across the arts, humanities and social sciences. We welcome those who are keen to explore – with us – how design might bring about the changes you want to see in the world.
Students on the Design for Change programme come from all corners of the world, bringing unique perspectives and diverse backgrounds with them to enrich the studio. Over your year of study at ECA, together with staff, you will learn to work together and create a plural community of practice.
Beyond your year here, as alumni, you will become part of a much wider design movement for change. Therefore, while Design for Change is a programme, it is also becoming a way of seeing and engaging with the world.
It is a shared ethos – one that connects its community of practitioners in their common goal of using design as a critical tool for good. It is a community whose members encourage one another to question the role of design, and the implications of design interventions, while striving to create positive change for today and tomorrow.
Programme Structure
Over the course of a year, the Design for Change programme moves from taught and structured elements through to supervised but independent and student-led study.
Design Labs
The design labs are courses offered by the programme in both Semester 1 (Autumn-Winter) and Semester 2 (Winter-Spring). They provide thematic focus to open project briefs, encouraging independent interpretation in the design studio. These labs have several aims for developing your design-for-change-based skillset:
- To help you unlearn certain, perhaps assumed perspectives and ways of working.
- To introduce you to a variety of different ways of designing and living, as demonstrated by others/other cultures, from which to learn.
- To develop the imaginative use of analytical and critical design research methods.
- To encourage application of contemporary methods of participation, production and prototyping to discover new insights.
- To facilitate excellence in forms of collaboration in and communication, presentation and dissemination of your work.
The design labs are complemented by two elective course options, which you choose from subjects offered across the wider College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences.
Designing for Change: Projects and Practices
Our programme adopts a project-oriented pedagogy, but what does it mean to design and carry-out a design research project for change?
This Semester 2 course, common to all students on programme, is designed to support you in preparation for your summer dissertation by identifying and outlining precedents and approaches relevant to projects that embrace designs for change.
You will be supported in developing your dissertation topic and a methodology specially tailored for it.
Dissertation
The programme ends with an independent dissertation project embracing student-led, situated, and practical interventions addressing real-world challenges.
All students take this course. You will have opportunities to self-organise, to work with communities or groups of your choosing or to arrange to complete a work-based dissertation with a local, national or international partner, applying your skills to real-world situations.
The year ends with a student-led Degree Show or exhibition of works, which presents both an opportunity for celebration, and valuable experience in communicating and presenting your designs to wider audiences.
Teaching
Design for Change’s main teaching is conducted through studio-based lectures, workshops, crits and seminars.
Your teachers are an engaged group of interdisciplinary design researchers and educators who are passionate about helping to shape the world for the better.
On the programme, we will invite you to engage in making, reading and writing, critiquing, experimenting and exploring.
The method of teaching is discursive: you will be invited to speak aloud and engage in conversation with each other and with staff, as part of collective efforts to analyse and discuss the course content and your contributions.
The content of the courses draws on the research interests and projects of the staff, as well as responding to current events and global movements (such as the Circular Economy, Slow, Buen Vivir or Transition movements) and frameworks (such as the Sustainable Development Goals).
As our students come from diverse backgrounds, the programme is a broad one and the teaching stretches to bring these different perspectives together. As such, it relies on you bringing your existing skills and interests to your studies and sharing them with your colleagues and cohort.
For similar reasons, programme staff signpost the resources that ECA and the wider University provides students for specific technical upskilling (for example, inductions and learning opportunities in the ECA workshops, online courses and software packages), and we draw on the expertise of our ECA technician colleagues.
Assessment
The Design for Change programme assesses student work and learning by considering both process and product, and all of the programme-provided courses are coursework assessed (we have no exams, although elective option courses may do).
