Vision & Mission

MISSION STATEMENT

Design Academy Eindhoven is a platform for education and research where creative minds work together in exploring design’s potential for making transformative contributions to a pluralistic, inclusive world.

VISION

1. Design is a social and political activity.
   Every design requires the designer’s awareness of the responsibility for how it may affect life.
2. The world is in need of creative minds able to design alternatives.Our planet is facing huge environmental and social challenges. DAE’s programmes explore how designers can design visions and alternatives needed to face them. Designers become agents of collective transformation by conceiving socially and ecologically conscious forms of living and working.
3. Design is an act of collaboration.
   Improving the world is rarely an individual act. Mostly it is the product of cross-disciplinary collaboration between broad groups at different levels. We see the role of the designer as essential to such collaborative networks, capable of leveraging the potentials of design knowledge and creativity while retaining the ground-level vision of its impact on humans and other beings.
4. The academy is a place to meet, exchange, and interact.
   DAE is much more than a catalyst for individual growth. It is an inviting meeting place where all involved can discover how to make, think and work in differing contexts and situations, and together contribute to society.
5. Pluralism is essential in education.
   We foster dialogue and understanding, while supporting the coexistence of different and even competing approaches. By being confronted with a variety of visions and perspectives, we actively take positions and establish where we stand both individually and collectively. Freedom of expression is at the core of DAE’s educational philosophy, as is DAE’s code of conduct.
6. Learning happens in between the real and the imagination.
   Design occupies a dialectical space between the world that is and the world that could be. Central to DAE’s approach to design education is a process of trying to grasp the world by increasing awareness of our own contexts and involvements, while simultaneously exploring new visions and imagining other world. Design occupies a dialectical space between the world that is and the real and the imagination.
7. Learning by doing requires curiosity and dialogue.
   The starting point of all our learning is curiosity, which importance we inculcate and stimulate. Curiosity goes hand in hand with criticality. While making, dialogue helps us question assumptions, and find what we never thought of. It is the courage to embrace failure what ultimately guides us in exploring the unknown, questioning received ideas, deepening insights, and continuously develop as designers.
8. Learning is a communal endeavour.
   We all learn from being engaged in education, no matter what our role in the academy is and how experienced we are. Together we constitute a learning community that consciously builds on a mutual exchange of ideas, insights and experiences.
9. Design education requires diversity, inclusivity, democracy, and solidarity.
   At DAE we have a strong commitment to social responsibility. We prefer not to act or think hierarchically and value the strength of the collective intelligence.

→ Quality Agreements 2019-2024

This document describes the plan Design Academy Eindhoven has formulated in consultation with students, teachers and staff in light of the quality agreements. The intentions laid out in this document can be directly linked to the themes of the Strategic Agenda of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) and therewith the common agenda of the VSNU, VH, ISO and LSVB:

1. Intensive and Small-Scale Education
2. More and Better Guidance of Students.
3. Study Success.
4. Differentiation of Education.
5. Appropriate and Good Educational Facilities.
6. Improving the Professional Quality of Teachers.

The plans are consistent with the policy framework described in the Institutional Plan 2018, with the sharpening of the academy’s vision. Financial backing is guaranteed by pre investments in 2015–2018 focused on the curriculum renewal of the BA programme.