The first term curriculum (October-March) is built around intensive seminars, collective learning sessions and excursions facilitated by the interdisciplinary COOP teaching team. Renowned researchers and practitioners in the field will visit our studio space at the Bauhaus, for regular guest lectures and workshops, providing insights into current practices, debates, and discourse in design and architecture studies. Frequently, course work will take participants to educational and cultural institutions in the region, in Berlin and abroad.
In the second term (April-September), participants focus on individual research projects for completing their Master’s thesis. Developing and implementing your research design for the thesis project will be supported on an individual base by selected academic advisors, as well as collaboratively by a structured research colloquium providing space for peer feedback.
The Design Research Laboratory focuses on how processes of knowledge production in and by design can be framed, studied and analyzed. In an intensive seminar sequence with excursions and hands-on workshops, three main modes how designers contribute to produce knowledge(s) will be explored: Design as Research, Design as Education, and Design as Projection.
Design as Research… offers a deeper inquiry into changing design discourses and research perspectives on knowledge types and practices – such as knowledge of actions and meanings, routines, norms, values and theories as well as practical skills and competencies. The course’s structure comprises historical and theoretical reflections within different time layers. It traces lines of debate from the “invention” of design as a research-based practice at the Bauhaus school to critical reflections on design concepts in its historical context that align design with universalist and modernist knowledge regimes.
The seminar analytically situates knowledge(s) within material culture and design ecologies, challenging design discourses deeply rooted in a colonial past, and discussing alternative narratives in design and architecture history and research. Against this backdrop the course introduces design anthropological approaches and discourses on renegotiating design knowledge and action, cultures of making and designing as radically collaborative, situated and participatory, as a mode of collective practice and the associated epistemological upheavals.
Design as Education… takes as its starting point the Bauhaus as part of a broad and international school reform movement that initiated a paradigm shift in art and design education. Based on the controversial and manifold narratives surrounding the transcultural pedagogical legacy of the Bauhaus, the course comprises the study of different creative learning experiments, radical pedagogies, progressive education institutions and learning environments, that are reflected in their historical contexts and theoretical framings. Thus, the course is structured along methods and tools, institutions and spaces of design learning – as “third educators”. It pursues the questions what types of knowledge, values and norms are reproduced in design and architecture education, and what alternatives in the context of critical postcolonial and feminist approaches are visible in the learning environments of design schools? Dealing with knowledge canons reproduced in design education, the seminar discusses approaches from the De-schooling movement and community-based learning in the field of design and architecture education and discusses places of learning as microcosms of societal transformation and democratic participation.
Design as Projection… explores the projective properties of design, architecture, and other kinds of spatial practice by tracing how different strategies of anticipation and materialization are employed in order to change society. This includes a reflection on the collateral effects of these practices and strategies in a multi-scalar perspective, for example regarding externalization, environmental justice, toxicity or landscape transformation. The course asks in which ways design practice and research continue to reproduce dissociative knowledge patterns or seek to develop awareness and reflexivity in regards to these planetary concerns. By close readings of designed objects, spatial and discursive interventions, we trace how architecture and design participate in knowledge production, societal transformations as well as in tangible larger anthropogenic processes of degradation, or repair and reconciliation.
How do learners learn to become designers? How do designers learn to become (academic) researchers? Providing an overview of major traditions and theories in the field of design research, this course gives an introduction to such notions as research, knowledge, and creativity in the design field. It offers analytical tools for understanding creative processes and their products. Participants acquire foundational and broader knowledge of design research, knowledge types and the methods of various scientific disciplines. A lecture series offers an overview of the history of modern design research and presents discourses, projects and concepts in the field. Accompanying seminaries introduce methods and techniques of scientific work, from literature research to archive study, data analysis, material studies, interview techniques, or qualitative methods such as participatory observation. The course enables participants to take a reflexive and confident approach to apply these methods in the framework of their Master’s thesis and future design research endeavours.
A key aim of the program is to nurture essential academic research and writing skills, to build up trust in your own capacity of handling academic texts and workflows, and to train your capability to engage critically with a research subject. This includes developing a reflexive practice of research and writing, leading up to an individual research-based thesis project. In the second term, the colloquium will focus on the application of these strategies in each individual thesis, offering a structured space for a collaborative feedback and discussion of projects in progress.
International guest lecturers contribute to the curriculum by a series of talks situating current design research within their distinct academic and professional contexts. Elective workshops with guests and researchers from the COOP partner institutions further expand this perspective through practice-oriented exploration of diverse research approaches.
Our MSc program offers the opportunity to pursue individually chosen topics in Design Research Master’s thesis projects and to work in close cross-disciplinary exchange with academic mentors and peers in the process – from proposal elaboration to research design and implementation, from developing your research questions and methods to writing and presentation strategies. It is our aim to enable and empower participants to seek original pathways towards reflexive and situated knowledge production in Design and Architecture studies, both independently and collaboratively, considerate of positionality and proficient of the state of the art, theory and methodology in their field(s) of engagement.
Concluding the first term, the proposal module serves as a test phase for elaborating an independent, original design research argumentation as a thesis exposé. In the second term, participants develop and elaborate their research argumentation to a full thesis advised by their mentors within 20 weeks. Proposals and Master’s Theses will be presented for feedback and discussion in public colloquia.
Here you will find abstracts of selected Master’s Theses as pdf for download.
