Master [Design Innovation and Citizenship] From Glasgow School of Art

The Masters in Design Innovation & Citizenship at The Glasgow School of Art explores the relationship between design practice and contemporary society and encourages a design-led critique of the present aimed at informing the future. The programme asks design practitioners to step beyond their traditional professional and occupational role and to consider the broader application of design practices, as a means of formulating and articulating social change.

This programme offers students the opportunity to address directly both the prevailing and emerging social and economic production of interactions, interfaces, services and experiences. In challenging the purpose, methods and ambitions of current design practice, students will identify opportunities for new design activity, pioneer innovative forms of engagement and collaborate with citizens to generate responses to emerging problems, political issues and social phenomena.

Graduates will be able to demonstrate a research focused, critical and collaborative design process, capable of tackling the challenges of 21st century life; of exploring the transformative possibilities of new technology and data; of mapping the changing role of the public sector and its interventions in the lives of its citizens; of identifying and developing new social and economic models of design and production; of utilising the language and practice of design to formulate innovative approaches to complex problems and emerging social relationships.

Graduates of Design & Citizenship will seek to deploy their creative capacity beyond the world of consultancy or in-house design, embracing challenges within areas as diverse as public policy, private sector enterprise, citizen or social advocacy, public sector service provision, social enterprise and/or the voluntary sector. We believe the designer as citizen is a reflective professional who is as intellectually adept at formulating a new design challenge as he or she is at creating an innovative response to such a challenge.