Design Research (M.Sc.)

Course content and objectives

The Program: Design (as) Research

What constitutes the knowledge cultures of design? How have designers’ concepts of knowledge changed, and what are the consequences? Is designing a research activity, and how do designers “do” research?

The one-year COOP Design Research MSc integrates design and research as transdisciplinary fields at the intersection of design anthropology, material culture studies, architecture and design research, history and theory, as well as social sciences. The program critically engages with current concerns in design studies and architectural research, departing from the multiple modern legacies unfolding around the Bauhaus, as design’s status as a clearly defined discipline has been challenged along with the anthropocentric notion of its power to shape an exclusively man-made environment. In manifold ways, design as a knowledge culture still rests on modernist ideas of “world making”, of the creation of “artificial things”. The COOP Design Research MSc critically interrogates this expansive cultural, political and social practice which manifests itself in objects, systems and structures of everyday life.

The program offers a learning space for reflecting and diffracting design’s theoretical and practical frameworks, the hegemonic ideologies and radical epistemological shifts affecting the practices of designers and architects, as well as the consequences for the environment and the earth. This includes a critical revision of design ideals rooted in euro-centric modernity, perceiving their entanglements with (post)colonial, capitalist patterns of resource exploitation, environmental and social injustice, as well as the urgency of placing them in the context of contemporary ecological and decolonial discourses and practices.

Please refer to www.coopdesignresearch.de for more information.