Geo—Design

How can design be a neighboring discipline to ecology, geology, biology, physics, technology, geopolitics, and cognitive science? And how can the research, narratives, experiments, ideas, poetics, and solutions that emerge from this adjacency be brought into the world collaboratively?

The Geo—Design MA investigates how design can interface with complex phenomena in the physical and material world by means of research, new objects, and cinema.

Read an interview with the Geo—Design heads Metahaven here.

The Geo—Design MA aims to launch research questions about design and the external world with an orientation towards the planet and the planetary. Founded in 2020, the Geo—Design MA is open to applications from designers, filmmakers, architects, and artists at various stages of their practice, as well as to applicants from related backgrounds in physical sciences, the humanities, politics, and other fields.

Having originated as a platform to address design’s historical contribution to environmental and social instability and its incompatibility with models of sustainable or even survivable futures, Geo—Design unites these urgencies with the creation of design research that points a way forward. Geo—Design’s curricular structure aims to utilize the full two years of the course for continuous educational input in combination with the development of a series of collaborative and independent projects, resulting in a student’s successful graduation.

Students will develop their work under the guidance of an interdisciplinary tutor team consisting of practitioners in the design, art, and filmmaking fields as well as academics and theorists. Tutors will both provide in-person feedback sessions as well as class-wide and department-wide seminar lectures, highlighting the integrated character of MA studies at the DAE, the need for discourse-building and shared knowledge, and the continuous research that tutors carry out as part of their practices.

To investigate how design can be a neighboring discipline to ecology, geology, biology, physics, technology, geopolitics, and cognitive science, the Geo—Design MA considers how design is already involved with these fields through its existing ways and means of production—as expressed through raw materials and their extraction, supply chains, infrastructures of production, its physical, cultural, informational, and aesthetic ecologies, and other factors.

In addition to this, the department explicitly seeks out new problems and ways of making that interface between design and the external world, trying design’s capacities at providing hypotheses, answers, and interventions.