Nadine Botha named as interim head for Social Design MA
Botha has been teaching at the school for more than five years alongside her professional practice, and has helped shape the Social Design MA programme under Otero Verzier as a core member of the teaching team.
The MA Social Design has been running for over a decade, and encourages students to explore practices that embody care, exploring new social roles for designers attuned to contemporary environmental, political and social challenges. The programme’s curriculum and teaching team, consisting of practicing designers, writers, artists and scientists, will remain the same for the 2023-24 academic year.
Originally from South Africa, Botha has a long-standing relationship with the Academy. As a DAE graduate, she received the Gijs Bakker Award for her project, The Politics of Shit, in 2017.
Her work explores how unseen social, political, legal, economic and cultural systems design our objects, bodies, homes, cities, technologies, experiences and knowledges, through a wide variety of formats and outputs. Examples include The Orders of the Undead – an exploration of disease, coloniality and mortality through the mythology of the zombie – and Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness, looking at the impact of mass production of sugar on society since the 15th century.
She is also a leading design journalist, having previously been an editor-at-large for DAMN Magazine, and regularly contributes to a wide range of publications, including Design Observer, the Financial Times and Metropolis. In 2018, she was associate curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennale – School of Schools, and is co-curator of the DAE Graduation Show 2023.
Marina Otero Verzier has been head of the Social Design MA since 2019. In 2022, she won the Wheelwright Prize for her research on data-centred architecture, and the growing demands of her practice have led to her stepping down as head of the programme.
“At the master department we work with professionals who also work outside of the academic walls. We strongly believe in the synthesis between professional and academic expertise to develop an educational programme which resonates with and challenges the status quo,” said DAE executive board members Joseph Grima and Raf de Keninck. “However, this also leads to inevitable changes as practices are always in flux. Nadine brings stability to the programme in this time of change.”
We would like to thank Marina Otero Verzier for all her hard work leading the Social Design MA programme for the last few years and wish her well in these exciting future endeavours.
