DAE Congratulates 2024 MA Graduates

“I think one of the things that really sets it apart as a design school is the degree to which …you’re part of a global community of people who are interested in reflecting on what design should be”

He ended his speech by encouraging these future designers to put these reflections into practice and that their “[careers] will be defined not by your intentions or by what you think design is, but what you actually do in the world, what you actually produce”.

Next, the stage was handed over to the head of the Masters department Ilse Meulendijks, who hosted a small Q&A with the respective heads of the individual Masters departments to share their reflections on this year’s graduating class.

When asked how this year’s group of Contextual Design graduates challenged the department’s core programming, department head Afaina De Jong posited towards the future saying that “there’s always this tension between the Graduation Show that’s coming up and this kind of museum setting or gallery setting and the actual work from which the design was born from”, and that “this year’s group really contributed to exploring how to curate your design when it’s made for people or when it’s made for the gallery.”

Also alluding to the complexity of externalising design ideas, The Critical Inquiry Lab department co- head Patricia Reed said that her students spent time “negotiating a different figure of the designer who is not only working to externalise ideas but to know that it also reconstructs certain assumptions and general relations to reality as a movement of interiority, in order to challenge the type of world any sort of tomorrow may bring.”

After the larger panel reflection, each department broke off into their own individual ceremonies where personal anecdotes on each graduate were read out before signing their diploma.

Emma Lambaa Bonde, Social design graduate and winner of both the Best Thesis and Cum Laude awards expressed she wasn’t expecting something so personal and “that I felt [department head, Nadine Botha] saw each and every one of us during the program.”

Botha also commented on her first year as full-time head of the social design department, saying that “it was phenomenal to see so many amazing projects, so many fascinating topics come together in such brilliant design ways.”

She was particularly impressed by the complexity of these topics, adding that “there were many prevailing themes grappling with the real challenges that we’re facing in the world today. The war, the climate anxiety, the burnout culture, but also our relationship to each other and ourselves and how this makes sense in these kinds of times.”

The ceremony concluded with an arrangement of drinks and hors d’oeuvres made by Design Academy’s own ZBar team.