Global Design - MDes

As a global design community, we share the values, principles, practices and processes that create pervasive acts and outputs which can address the crisis threatening the future of the planet and its peoples.

We must optimise the imagination, speculation and vision of our craft to bring together and activate scientists, technologists, ecologists and politicians in a mission to improve lives now.

Our MDes Global Design programme is for designers who want to play their part in that mission. We are looking for committed graduates who are passionate about activating global, local and individual change in order to build a sustainable and vibrant future for the planet, its ecologies and its people.

This programme allows students from both practice and non-practice backgrounds to explore sustainability, ethics, health, safety and the environment through a research culture that prioritises relationship building, trans- and inter-disciplinary exploration and stakeholder collaboration.

Working trans-collaboratively with local and global communities, you will develop a self-identified project, setting an intention to anticipate, enact and effect a transformation of global significance.

Throughout the programme you will engage with concepts, methods and practice that develop your understanding of how change happens. Our particular focus is on the future orientation of design and how alternative visions can be fashioned by human agency in a way that is simultaneously playful and speculative, as well as intensely rigorous.

Whether your interest is in research-led practice or practice-led research, we expect you to locate your research within the wider Global, Ethical, Social and Political contexts relevant to the landscape of contemporary Art & Design research.

Indicative course content includes:

• The Ethics of Design

• Design Anthropology

• Design Activism

• Participatory Design

• Sustainable Futures

• Design Philosophy and the Post-humanities

Career

The MDes Global Design programme enables students to enhance their careers as, or to become, established designers leading towards a career, a PhD, or to a Professional Doctorate in either art or design. Cardiff School of Art and Design offers Professional Doctoral programs in both Art and Design.

The MDes Global Design programme is designed to enable students to achieve the attributes of greater flexibility, adaptability, individual responsibility and autonomy as professional designers or researchers.

The course aims to develop individuality, creativity, self-reliance, initiative, and the ability to perform in rapidly changing environments as well as increasing competence with research skills and methods which will make graduates highly employable as academics and/or researchers, or enable them to develop an active and sustained practice as designers.

The MDes Global Design enables graduates, as well as mid-career and professional practitioners from both within and outside the discipline of Global Design to negotiate and examine strategies of design for change.

All students receive individual PDP tutorials to support employability and life-long learning. Students will be expected to maintain learning journals evidencing continuous visual documentation that integrates opportunities for self-reflection in order to help them develop as effective and confident learners.

At the conclusion of the programme, a very high percentage of MA graduates establish or continue their professional practice, enabled by the links they have made with design studios or organisations associated with the visual arts and design. Some elect to continue with their Global Design studies at CSAD by undertaking a PhD.