MA Design

Arts University Plymouth

MA Design at Arts University Plymouth develops products, practices and applications for contemporary society through a speculative lens to imagine design beyond the status quo of production and consumption. It does this by teaching design as an active mode of research that seeks to positively impact human and planetary wellbeing.

It encourages innovation and solutions-based ideation through study and practices that demonstrate new ideas on usability, supply-chains, models of production, fabrication technologies, life cycle analysis, consumer behaviour and digital-material interfaces.

Through this course your learning will follow a design process based on practice-led research methodologies and project development informed by material investigation, iterative production, co-design, prototyping, visualisation and reflective market analysis. You will be encouraged to consider both small-scale and mass market manufacturing, identifying the ways that your designs may potentially impact communities, the economy and the environment. Your ideas will be refined through peer team working and in collaboration with an external partner or institution whom you identify as influential or necessary to your design ideas and target market.

As a designer, you face a number of urgent challenges beyond the aesthetics and form of your work. This course teaches design strategies, analytical skills and existing material practices to help you reimagine the designer’s role in relation to nature and ecological systems, and the use of new and emerging technologies in the face of some of humanity’s most ‘wicked’ problems. We value design principles based on full life cycle awareness aimed at a more circular production ethos, now integral to an ethical approach to design that furthers human and planetary wellbeing. Through a structured interdisciplinary process of research and design taught through an MA curriculum shared across postgraduate creative subjects, you will expand your critical, contextual and practical knowledge of design, incorporating design thinking and industry leading strategies to prepare you to lead or propose possible design futures.