Design involves creativity, criticality and transformation. Design calls into question the state of things and makes an impact. Design challenges preconceptions, prejudices, norms, and stereotypes and provokes emotions, thoughts, sensibilities and actions. Design can enhance our lives and our relationships to the world. It can make us attentive and empathic to the ecological and socio-cultural systems in which we live. In a world of many challenges, design can be an agent for sustainable change.
In shaping our futures, designers will face unprecedented challenges compared to what conventional designers faced during the twentieth century. In fact, the role of the designer will and should change. Instead of only designing for mass production, which was important during the first phase of industrialisation, designers of futures must handle multiple roles and increasingly complex issues. As agents for change, designers will play key roles in shaping futures of sustainability.
On the Design+Change Master's Programme at Linnaeus University we challenge the traditional role of the designer, working across disciplinary and media boundaries to define new roles that meet contemporary and future needs. For design to confront the crises we are now facing, we need to work together with other academic disciplines and cultural practices and in partnerships with professional designers, community organisations, businesses, activists and governmental bodies.
Students on the Design+Change Master's Programme can choose to extend their existing knowledge in a specific design field or explore new ones. The programme focusses on artistic and experimental processes and creative research, and students will develop their capacity for critical reflection in making well rounded and futures oriented design proposals. Particular attention is paid to contemporary and emerging design disciplines such as critical and speculative design, social design, metadesign and design activism. Furthermore, students are introduced to and practice relevant methods for questioning the current state of things, opening up to ways of thinking and shaping futures creatively and differently.
