MFA in Design with Specialisation in Embedded Design
Summary
Joining the Embedded Design master’s program offers a unique opportunity to engage with the critical aspects of design in diverse organizational landscapes. Embracing sustainability, innovation, and disruptive thinking, EmDes equips you to become a proactive agent of change. By fostering collaboration alongside a penchant for questioning conventions, you'll emerge as a dynamic force in the design field. Whether pursuing traditional or unconventional paths, this program empowers you to shape the future of design with confidence and impact.
About
Companies and organisations in private, public, and non-profit sectors are increasingly seeking competence and knowledge in meeting the challenges of globalisation, digitalisation, and sustainability. In response to these global challenges, organisations and communities must rethink their models of action and their current approaches to value creation. This requires going beyond innovation for novelty's sake to fostering a deeper understanding of designing for change in and with organisations, ecosystems and economies.
The master’s programme in Embedded Design addresses the field of design that is particularly situated in complex and systemic contexts. It prepares you to be a friendly collaborator whilst simultaneously taking a critical—and even disruptive—stance in your role as a designer. This stance, the program’s linchpin, emphasises designerly actions in terms of material form-giving (gestaltning) and the reconceptualisation of systems of relations. This reconceptualization emphasises an explorative and reflective search for alternative configurations. The programme highlights the situated and messy character of organisational life and the role of material agencies in collapsing or connecting the micro levels of practices and routines with the macro level of institutional systems. Therefore, within an embedded design practice, the contextualisation of organisations constitutes an arena for experimentation and intervention. You will develop a deeper understanding of how design can be used in many types of organisational contexts.
A focus on sustainability
The embedded design programme is one of GU’s sustainability labelled programmes and is fuelled by an interdisciplinary collaborative process where design tools act as enablers to unpack and reframe today’s societal challenges. In this programme, we work together to gain the skills designing in and around corporations, institutions, public organisations, and society, providing sustainable and long-lasting proposals for change. These proposals involve artefacts, services, social interventions, and organisational reconfigurations, among other possibilities.
A collaborative and interdisciplinary learning environment
Lectures, seminars, and workshops are influenced by collaborations with partner organisations and other departments at the University. Each Student contributes to a dynamic learning environment where the studio is a hub where open dialogue and groupwork are foundational aspects. Our aim is to develop the field of design and to critically reflect upon the role of a designer as collaborator-yet-critical-consultant. Thus, you will learn how to balance workingin a group and with real-life project partners in a collaborative manner. We dare to provoke the status quo in our collaborative approach, and we do so by employing design skills and methods via, e.g., visualisation and communication techniques, interventions, form-giving, experience design and proposals for change, to name just a few. Companies, organisations, and communities enrich the education through our collaborations, lectures, workshops, and real case projects. Volvo Group, Lynk & Co, Afry, Rise, Urban Futures, Act! Sustainable, The Swedish Public Employment Agency, and the City of Gothenburg are recent partners. While the University, itself, provides opportunities and accessibility to other educations, multi-disciplinary research, researchers, and networks. As a student, you will develop and articulate your emerging embedded design practice, both through discussion and projects, as you investigate possible career paths.
Programme structure and content
The programme intertwines theory with practice, where real projects provide a foundation for reflection on your future role as a designer. You will develop and deepen your practice by problematizing and reflecting on various critical perspectives, e.g., design regarding ethics, intersectionality, the Anthropocene etc.
The first year progressively articulates an embedded design practice through an experiential learning environment where many forms of collaboration are employed.
While in the second year, one works with organizations and partners in a long, explorative design project, hear you as students, with support, set up your own projects and partnerships. In the final term, the thesis project is an in-depth contribution to our field which is done by conducting and disseminating a design project together with a written component. Within the programme’s timeframe there are co-reading activities and an elective course where you meet students from other programmes at HDK-Valand.
Who should apply?
- Do you have a design or an interdisciplinary background and want to apply your various interests to create explorative design work within an organisational context?
- Are you interested in how global social issues can be influenced by design?
- Do you picture a dynamic and unconventional future career in design?
If you believe design can be a process of change and want to collaborate and disrupt the status quo by addressing global, social, and organisational challenges, then apply for the master’s programme in Embedded Design
Prerequisites and selection
Requirements
Bachelor's Degree in Design of at least 180 credits or equivalent. Applicants must prove their knowledge of English: English 6/English B from Swedish Upper Secondary School or the equivalent level of an internationally recognised test, for example TOEFL, IELTS. In addition, approved work samples are required.
Portfolio
Find the portfolio instructions for the MFA Programme in Design with Specialisation in Embedded Design here:
More information about Portfolio
Selection
The selection is based on an assessment of submitted work samples.
After graduation
Graduates of the programme will receive the degree Master of Fine Arts in Design with specialisation in Embedded Design.
You will be prepared to work in academic research as well as at design consultancies, with titles of consultant positions such as, yet not limited to, Service Designer, Strategic Designer, Design Researcher as well as in-house positions in companies, municipalities, or
governmental agencies. Moreover, and revealing the programme’s core motivation, you will also gain the competence to apply your skills in unconventional realms that go beyond the above list of job titles. We expect that you will be able to use your skills from the embedded design practice to make change in new organisational contexts, adapting to an increasingly global, sustainable, and digitalised society.
Facilities
HDK-Valands facilities on Kristinelundsgatan, where the programme is situated, are situated in the middle of Gothenburg in the same building complex as Röhsska Museum of Design and Crafts. It is an international study environment with well-equipped workshops close to the arts.
More information about facilities
Exchange opportunities
Exchange studies are possible in the third semester of the programme, providing the opportunity to study at several interesting universities around the world.
