A master that combines critical thinking, design, and communication to understand and rethink how exhibition experiences are conceived and experienced today beyond the museum.
The program trains designers capable of intervening in this constantly changing ecosystem, with discernment, sensitivity, and a strategic view of the role of design in contemporary culture.
Exhibitions have become one of the most influential cultural languages of our time: they articulate narrative, form, criticism, and experience. They are tools capable of producing knowledge and transforming the way we interpret the world.
In this master, we explore how these cultural devices are created, interpreted, and transformed, and how design articulates this entire ecosystem of disciplines.
Exhibitions are no longer confined to museum display cases; today they live in streets, institutions, brands, social movements, digital platforms, and hybrid formats. This master analyzes the ecosystem to understand how exhibition design operates in rapidly changing cultural, commercial, and technological fields.
Every exhibition is a narrative and, as such, a device for producing meaning. Far from being neutral: it constructs discourses, defines memories, and participates in the symbolic representation of the world. What is being told, how is it being told, and who is it addressing? From these questions, the master approaches the exhibition narrative from the perspective of research and the conscious articulation of content, understanding curating and design as critical and strategic practices of cultural communication.
In a context dominated by immersive experiences and digital devices, we take a critical look at technology. It is not about impressing but about assessing when it contributes to the discourse and when it distorts it, when it shapes experiences and when it standardizes perspectives. We advocate a balance between materiality and virtuality, between physical space and digital media.
Space is not just a container, it is an active narrator that can generate tension, surprise, disruption, or calmness; it can guide, condition, or challenge the reading of the experience. We explore how space creates meaning and how design decisions transform the relationship between work, content, and audience.
To rethink what an exhibition is, we need to expand its tools. This master integrates contributions from anthropology, dramaturgy, architecture, lighting, sound design, and other languages that are unusual in this field. The goal: to open up new ways of narrating, interpreting, and activating the exhibition experience.
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This unit establishes a theoretical and critical basis for understanding exhibitions as constructions of power, memory, and representation. Through a historical and social overview, it analyzes how the exhibition environment has been transformed and expanded into public spaces, the media, the digital realm, and also the commercial sphere, where it functions as a tool for communication and brand narrative. The aim is to develop a critical view of the role of museums, institutions, and new exhibition formats, while learning to conceptualize narratives and discourses based on research, selection, and articulation of content.
This unit explores space as an active narrator and examines the relationship between architecture, staging, and visitor perception. It develops sensitivity to materiality, light, sound, and words as expressive languages, integrating interactive and immersive technologies to design meaningful experiences. This unit encourages formal and sensory experimentation with criteria of sustainability and accessibility, and addresses archigraphy as an intrinsic tool of exhibition identity and considers communication as a constant dialogue between the inside and the outside.
In addition, students learn to plan and produce complete exhibition projects (budget, schedule, and team coordination), consolidating a practice able to balance narrative, critical thinking, and technical and economic viability.
This unit addresses mediation as an extension of the expository narrative and as a tool for activating participation. Students design and implement activities, workshops, and formats that amplify the audience’s experience, and conceive physical or digital devices intended for interaction and communication. Through the analysis of cases of cultural dissemination and visual campaigns, we explore how communication can amplify the impact of an exhibition and generate continuity and memory.
The TFM is the space where all the program’s competencies converge. Each student develops their own exhibition project that articulates concept, space, audience, and communication, applying research, conceptualization, and design methodologies in a professional or experimental context. The work encourages the exploration of expanded and interdisciplinary formats and requires planning, prototyping, and communicating complex ideas visually and narratively. The process culminates in the construction of a personal, ethical, and critical view of the role of the designer in contemporary exhibition environments.
Each academic year, students with very diverse professional and cultural profiles of more than 80 nationalities from all over the world attend their master’s or postgraduate training at Elisava. We want to promote connections and networks among students beyond the context of each master’s degree to promote the exchange of knowledge through very diverse projects: we organize interdisciplinary workshops and conferences; transdisciplinary projects with students from several master’s degrees; collaborations with companies, institutions and NGOs…
Do you want to study the Master in Design for Exhibition Environments at Elisava? In this section you will be able to check all the information on the annual call for scholarships, which recognize, reward and disseminate the talent and excellence of future master’s students.