Lifelong Learning Master's Degree in Design for Emergent Futures II

Presentation

The Master in Design for Emergent Futures (MDEF) is an immersive learning program that focuses on Barcelona city as an experimental playground, in which design can be used to understand, develop, test and speculate interventions that respond to the wicked problems of our time.
The Master is organized by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, in collaboration with the Fab Academy. The practical content of the Master is developed by Fab Lab Barcelona, the research and innovation center at IAAC. It is a multidisciplinary design course which focuses on turning ideas into actions to transform the state of society.
The master evolves the practice of design beyond objects, aesthetics, form-finding and pure speculation through an approach of ‘designing interventions’ and hands-on-learning. The approach enhances the technical capabilities of designers in digital fabrication, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology in order for them to physically explore their ideas. On the other hand, the approach elevates the critical thinking of designers and provides them with communication tools and philosophical understanding to build new narratives about the possible futures that can be triggered in the urban context of today. It collects the solid design and academic knowledge of Elisava School of Design and Engineering, professional and research experience of Fab Lab Barcelona and the pioneering distributed education model for digital fabrication of the Fab Academy program.
The second academic year of the MDEF allows students to deepen their training and further develop the Project presented at the end of the first academic year. It also allows students to continue their research and innovation agendas using a multiscalar, experimental and realistic approach, and turning the projects developed in the first year of the program into living platforms for academic research, business development or direct impact on open source communities. Student agendas during the second year of MDEF has three different focuses and the same number of possible directions after the completion of the program.
The MDEF II offers a unique approach to develop the best combination of these three dimensions in student projects, contributing to scale and exploring distribution and sustainability strategies through innovative methods.

Coordinators and teaching staff