Design courses

About Global Design - Mdes/pgd/pgc in Cardiff Metropolitan University

Course Overview

As global designers we are equipped with the values, principles, practices and processes to create pervasive acts and outputs that address the crisis threatening the future of the planet and its peoples. We must optimise the imagination, speculation and vision of our craft to bring together and activate scientists, technologists, ecologists and politicians in a mission to improve lives now.

Our MDes Global Design course is for designers who want to play their part in that mission. We are looking for committed graduates who are passionate about activating global, local and individual change in order to build a sustainable and vibrant future for the planet, its ecologies and its people.

Working trans-collaboratively with local and global communities, you will develop a self-identified project in partnership with real-world clients and established researchers. Throughout the programme you will engage in methods, processes and approaches to designing for change, in a way that is simultaneously playful and speculative, as well as intensely rigorous.

The programme allows students from both practice and non-practice backgrounds to explore an interest in relation to sustainability, ethics, health, safety and the environment through a research culture that prioritises relationship building, trans- and inter-disciplinary exploration and stakeholder collaboration.

Whether your focus is research-led practice or practice-led research, we expect you to locate your research interests within the wider Global, Ethical, Social and Political contexts relevant to the landscape of contemporary Art & Design research.

Course Content

The MDes Global Design programme offers students the opportunity to develop projects within the applied research culture of the multidisciplinary CARIAD research centre, where they will be encouraged to develop specialised knowledge through research-informed processes and community engagement.

Whilst this is not mandatory, being active within a culture that prioritises people, can enable students to develop competence through contexts in which everyone, not just designers and researchers, has a stake. 

Other research and practice skills will evolve through a transdisciplinary mode of enquiry supported by a dedicated module (constellation) delivered by the research active academics and groups across CSAD.

Methodologies, expertise and theoretical underpinning are drawn from, amongst others: 

• Design Anthropology
• Design Activism 
• Human-centered design
• Design for Health
• Democratisation of Technology
• Design that moves/design that touches
• Sustainment and Sustainable Futures
• Design Philosophy and the Post-humanities. 

This course is driven by the students’ self-defined project. To support this, each student is allocated a Personal Tutor and in addition to subject-specialist members of staff from within the School. Together they form the supervisory team.

The nature of the discipline is such that the course relies on our skilled practitioners as the key facilitators of learning and reflecting this, a variety of delivery mechanisms will be deployed, with a common focus in that they will seek to develop your skills as proactive and reflective independent learners. 

Employability & Careers

The MDes Global Design programme enables students to enhance their careers as, or to become, established designers leading towards a career, a PhD, or to a Professional Doctorate in either art or design. Cardiff School of Art and Design offers Professional Doctoral programs in both Art and Design.

The MDes Global Design programme is designed to enable students to achieve the attributes of greater flexibility, adaptability, and individual responsibility and autonomy as professional designers or researchers. The course aims to develop individuality, creativity, self-reliance, initiative, and the ability to perform in rapidly changing environments as well as increasing competence with research skills and methods which will make graduates highly employable as academics and/or researchers, or enable them to develop an active and sustained practice as designers.

The MDes Global Design characteristic is that it enables graduates, as well as mid- career and professional practitioners, from within and outside of  the discipline of Global Design to negotiate and examine strategies of design for change.

All students receive individual PDP tutorials to support employability and life-long learning. Students will be expected to maintain learning journals evidencing continuous visual documentation that integrates opportunities for self-reflection in order to help them develop as effective and confident learners.

Academic qualification equivalents

• Postsecondary diploma or a degree or 2–3 year diploma (media-related is desired)

English language requirements (one of the below):

• IELTS      :      6.0 overall* with no sub score lower than 5.5
• PTE         :      Overall - 52, Reading - 51, Speaking - 51,Listening - 51,Writing - 51

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