Master Beyond Products

The Master Beyond Products proposes a novel way to look at the product concept. By questioning the profession itself and encouraging students to challenge the established processes, we aim to have you develop your project methodology to help you improve the idea of «product» and help you start building a professional profile coherent with this direction.

The Master Beyond Products is aimed at designers and creatives of any field, with a sensitivity and knowledge of product design; nonconformists who understand the need to rethink and explore the possibilities of discipline beyond the established.

We will question, map and explore products through three different perspectives:

Critical

Speculative design, art and design, anthropology, sociology.

Manufacturing

Crafts and industry, new technologies, design through manufacture.

Environmental

Context, sustainability, materials.

And through them, we will foster:

• Developing a critical spirit and dealing with design problems in their social context.
• Learning about new specific tools required by each field of work.
• Creating an identifiable work methodology.
• Incorporating perspectives from other disciplines (graphic, product, industrial, engineering…) into said work methodology.
• Working in a team with international professionals from different fields.

We will work with you to transform your practice beyond by questioning, provoking and challenging the cultural, social, economic, technological or material establishment. The academic year will be established in three sections:

Get lost

One-week long, disruptive workshops to get lost, resent and demolish our established design foundations, develop diverse experiences and perspectives, and help you question your design practice.

Find

Intensive tutorial sessions where the students define a briefing for their final project and formalise it for a WIP show in mid-February. After determining their work fields, we will encourage design hubs to exhibit their thoughts and ideas and help to define the brief to face the last part of the Master Beyond Products.

Define

Defining personal projects towards a Final Show presentation, participating in weekly mentoring sessions and weekly tool capsules. Specific project-specific and communicative tools will be given to each student to develop their methodology.

The final projects will reflect everything students will have unlearned and relearned and the steps they have followed to approach the product concept in their particular way. The itinerary proposes:

• Questioning pre-established knowledge to be able to approach groundbreaking design paradigms.
• When developing innovative products, knowing and understanding the current socio-economic and cultural context.
• Understanding product design as an attitude, a transformative tool impacting the current or future context.
• Researching in areas of personal interest to define the basis of a personal project.
• Studying and understanding different methodologies and systems from other disciplines and fields that can be involved in one transversal design process.
• Learning to design and develop projects in fictitious or future scenarios, to develop a critical and analytical methodology.
• Managing and efficiently capturing the results of the creative process and translating them into a solid objectification and conceptualisation.