Master Talk & Tour

We look forward to welcoming you to our annual Masters Talk & Tour Programme at the Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) on Tuesday January 16, 2024 from 10am–4pm CET. We’re delighted to offer visitation both in person and online via our livestream. During this day, DAE will open its doors to prospective students to explore our five Master Departments: Critical Inquiry Lab, Information Design, Geo-Design, Social Design and Contextual Design. For more information, have a look here and sign up for our livestream through the registration link of the event.  

All departments of the Master Programme at DAE are committed to facilitating students in developing their own research-based design practice. The two-year study begins with a mixture of guided studios, workshops, lectures, as well as discursive contextualisation, enabling second-year students to embark on independent projects combining theory with praxis, and vice versa. The intimate scale of the programme ensures students receive attentive, individual mentorship drawing from the diversity of practices embodied in our unparalleled cohort of tutors at the school. 

Our Master Departments negotiate the histories of design with a critical, yet transformative ethos. We understand research-based design as a field open to curious thinker-doers who don’t necessarily come from a background in the field of design itself. We seek committed, experimental students who are looking to broaden their practices, develop their aesthetic languages, and learn to establish problem-spaces for their work, attuned to the urgent challenges of our present that demand reimaginations of our conditions of coexistence.   

The vision and aims of our Master programmes 
During the MA Talk & Tour, the heads of our five master departments will present the vision, ambitions and structure of their educational curricula, giving students a clearer insight as to which programme they most align with, prior to submitting an application or seeking a portfolio review. 

Critical Inquiry Lab 
The Critical Inquiry Lab is a transdisciplinary MA programme at the intersection of design-based research, critical theory and our planetary entanglements. The department is orchestrated through hands-on making and writing, focusing on experimental research methods and tools for social (re)organisation and public mediation. 

Heads of department: Saskia van Stein, artistic and managing Director of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and Patricia Reed, theorist, artist, and designer. 

Information Design  
MA Information Design is dedicated to the exploration of the politics and agency of information and its modes and contexts of production. By rejecting pre-defined professional roles, the programme combines technical knowledge with intellectual rigour and curiosity, in order to address the entangled relationships between social injustice, regimes of extraction, racial discrimination, spatial violence, and the climate emergency. 

Head of department: Marco Ferrari, Studio Folder (agency for visual design and spatial research) 

Geo-Design 
MA Geo-Design investigates how design can interface with complex phenomena in the physical and material world by means of research, new objects, and cinema. How can design be a neighboring discipline to ecology, geology, biology, physics, technology, geopolitics, and cognitive science? And how can the research, narratives, experiments, ideas, poetics, and solutions that emerge from this adjacency be brought into the world collaboratively? 

Heads of department: Metahaven, artists working in design, filmmaking, and writing. 

Social Design 
MA Social Design is concerned with design and material culture’s capacity to affect change, and the consequences of this responsibility. Its focus is on facilitating designers in researching and developing practices resonant with contemporary social, ecological and political urgencies.    

Interim Head of department: Nadine Botha, research designer, editor, writer, and curator. 

Contextual Design 
As designers we are always designing within multiple contexts at the same time: within the wider contexts of society, within the context of systems of power and oppression, within contexts of modernity and colonialism, within the context of ecological destruction as well as spatial, social and historical contexts.  

Head of department: Afaina de Jong, architect and researcher. 

Meet tutors and alumni 
During the MA Talk&Tour you get a taste of what it’s like to study at DAE by joining presentations by tutors and alumni. We are extremely proud of our community of tutors and alumni. All of them are professionals from, or related to, the design field with both national and international practices.  

In preparation for the day we encourage you to take a look at graduation projects of our recent alumni. 

Care and administration 
Studying is a moment of deep reflection while obtaining new knowledge. Care is an important topic at Design Academy Eindhoven as each group is very diverse where different people with different backgrounds come together. At the MA Talk&Tour the student counsellor will be present to answer all your questions related to care. For practical issues regarding visa, housing or tuition fees, you can meet the student administration. 

Tour  
On January 16, 2024 you have the opportunity to see the workshops, teaching and meeting spaces at DAE by taking a guided tour through the school.  

Application 
Our MA online application deadlines are February 1 and April 1, 2024. Apply early as with each round available spots to the programme decrease. More information.