MA Transversal Design

New as of fall semester 2024/25: Master’s programme in Transversal Design* at the HGK Basel.

Transversal Design is a research-oriented, transdisciplinary master’s programme at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW (HGK Basel). On this programme students develop practices that include—alternative media, speculative models, practices of care, tools for solidarity and radical proposals for worlds in transition. Our design focus is not primarily about objects or products but on processes, modes of relating, questions of environmental-social justice, and the critical infrastructures on which we collectively depend. 

You will work on self-led projects mentored and supported in the Critical Media Lab and HyperWerk at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) of the HGK Basel. Guided by an expert team and internationally recognized visiting lecturers and researchers you can design, film, draw, program, publish, code, play, build, research, organize, or write. Shaping practices around the important questions of why, how, and for whom in theory and practice, in organizing the futures-we-need. 

You are interested in global-societal contexts and are open to norm-critical experimentation, design justice, critical media and collective self-organization. Study with us if you are interested in designing exemplary scenarios, speculative experiences, radical proposals, and are open to collaborative togetherness and experimentally guided work. 
 
The application process for the new master’s programme Transversal Design is open now until March 15 2024. Find more details on the programme and admission process here.

*Subject to def. approval by University Board 

Research at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM)
IXDM Research at the HGK Basel nurtures a set of activities and a community of students & researchers working at the intersections of design, media, arts & technology. We focus on practice-based and creative situated approaches for configuring other infrastructural realities and grounded imaginations. We work on future-facing, collective research that has an agenda. We work on what’s needed to articulate, imagine and reconfigure media and infrastructures. We aspire to do critical work to strengthen the struggle against extraction, oppression, and exploitation, pursuing an agenda of justice and material equity.

Our current research attends to (but is not limited to) infrastructures for energy, AI, XR, NetZero, future work, green transitions, computation, biodiversity, digital publishing, video archiving, toxic materials, institutional operations, urban resilience, urban commons, decolonial listening, social transformation, life affirmation and critical access. Our practices depart from trans*feminisms, queer theory, computation, intersectionality, anti-coloniality, disability studies, historical materialism, design and artistic practice to generate currently inexistent vocabularies, imaginaries and methodologies.

*Images above: (1) Jamming with fertiliser synthesisers and prototyping of soil sensors; Workshop Regeneration 2030. Organised by the research project “Regenerative Energy Communities” with Prof. Dr. Helen V. Pritchard, Head of Research IXDM in collaboration with Climate Neutral Växjö 2030. (2) Tool belt from the “Nani&Friends Performance” and installation “Bubbles and Giggles”; Collaboration between Master students, artists and researchers at the “Energy Giveaway at the Humuspunk Library”, AIA gallery, Zurich Art Weekend, inspired by the master’s workshop on “Productions of Care”. (3) Curated by students of process design at HyperWerk. Instead of paying with money customers at the Open House 2023 of the HGK Basel could exchange anything from the assortment for stories, drawings or a vocal performance. (5) How and for whom do we create shared spaces? Process designers at HyperWerk gather different approaches to coming together and bring them into an exchange: spaces are not simply there, they are made through collective action.