Home Abroad (Blended Learning)

Graphic Design and Visual Communication

This course focuses on Graphic Design and Visual Communication in Barcelona. The student will be able to meet some graphic designers from the city and learn their way of designing. During 10 weeks, the course aims to teach students the basic tools of visual communication in order to present their projects. This course will discuss graphic design as an essential element of communication across social, cultural and functional boundaries.

Students will experiment with Typography, will produce short videos, will learn about Barcelona Graphic Designers and will work on an editorial piece.

Furniture and Product Design

This course focuses on the areas of product and furniture design, covering the entire process from conceptualization, formalization, development and pre-production of a designed object from
the human, domestic or work environment.

The course will analyze the social, ergonomic and aesthetic Barcelona product design environment. The ways of producing the final work and the impact of this on the environment
as a whole.

Students will approach the semantics of objects, their functional and communicative capacity along with the integration of materials and technology. Online visits to factories, showrooms or design boutiques from Barcelona will be part of the course approach.

Retail and Interior Design

The Interior Spaces and Retail design course introduces design students to the development of urban habitat and selling stage, and puts them in touch with the local architecture and design culture.

The course structure is designed to provide a general framework for the development of a range of projects, from small scale briefs to a larger scale proposal for a residential interior and
a retail space.

The program provides the student with knowledge and skills in all areas of space planning, theory and concept, model-making and freehand drawing as well as communication.

Food Design 

This course focuses on food from the origins to the present in order to understand the complex system that has been developed around the need of “feeding” people. The topic will be approached from gastronomy, anthropology, history, etymology and food systems, amongst other disciplines, since the course aims to offer to the students’ different approaches and tools to make them capable not just to understand this interdisciplinary subject but to create design objects or services in relation with food and gastronomy with sense and content.

The course will introduce students to the interaction of food design, as a creative process, with food as a fundamental part of human being not only based on the tangible aspects (space, forms, product, packaging...), but in a wide range of approaches, from culture to territory, from well-being to aesthetics. We must understand the whole relation of man with environment to create innovative ways, systems or products to enhance this interaction. Designing in a creative way will allow us to find out new ways of understanding our world and improving it.