MA open day

On January 21, 2026, Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) welcomes prospective students to our annual MA Open Day. This full-day programme is held in person at DAE in Eindhoven (Netherlands) and offers an opportunity to explore our facilities, ask questions about the MA study in research-based design and learn about our five MA departments: Contextual Design, Critical Inquiry Lab, Geo-Design, Information Design and Social Design.

MA Studies at DAE
The two-year Master courses at DAE offer an educational setting to work intensively with leading professionals in the field of design, as well as adjacent disciplines. As the field’s self-understanding rapidly evolves, MA students are provided mentorship towards the development of their own practice and topical research interests, responsive to contemporary analyses of our time. Throughout the study, students encounter diverse research-based design skills, tools, materials, concepts and processes, interweaving theoretical knowledge with know-how.

DAE’s MA departments consider design as a transdisciplinary mode of thinking through making and foster pedagogies of ‘co-autonomy’, as students explore various methods of material manipulation, conduct field research, analyse and produce data, speculate on future histories, collaborate with other fields of knowledge and learn how to position their practice within the noise of our complex societies. The five departments offer a nourishing, international peer environment to host the playful risk-taking that research-based design necessitates.

MA research departments
The Master programmes at DAE consist of five research departments:

Contextual Design
Head of department: Afaina de Jong, architect and researcher. “[Within Contextual Design,] the design process is not very linear but process-oriented, without a pre-determined goal in mind, which can have many outcomes. (...) It’s actually interesting and fitting that the knowledge base can appeal to students from many different walks of life and backgrounds and doesn’t have the limit of the Eurocentric perspective.”

Critical Inquiry Lab
Head of department: Patricia Reed, theorist, artist and designer. As a hybrid theory-praxis programme, we expand upon ‘critical inquiry’ in design-based terms: connecting transdisciplinary discourse with hands-on, experimental methods. In conditions of planetarity that entangle human and more-than-human life-worlds across scales, geographies, materials, and histories, the development of methods becomes a means of crafting workable research-based pathways into this complexity, in shareable, public-facing forms. Across various mediums and contexts, we foreground inquiry as a recursive process between sensing, thinking, and making.

Geo-Design
Heads of department: Metahaven, artist collective, designers, filmmakers, writers. “The Geo-Design MA is interested in how the exploration of design in a planetary sense can result in accessible, influential, and forward-looking outcomes. It investigates how research can interface with the planetary through graphic design, technology, object-making, filmmaking, and more. Designers, makers, artists, and scientists of all stripes arrive at the programme with a variety of personalities and backgrounds. Geo-Design nourishes the personal trajectories of the students both as individuals and as a collective.”

Information Design
Head of department: Marco Ferrari, Studio Folder (agency for visual design and spatial research). “Information design occupies a space between disciplines, as it deals with the ways in which different forms of knowledge formalise their findings and develop their methods of communication and tools of dissemination. (...) We are not just looking at how information manifests itself, or is visualised, but rather at the assumptions behind the production of these representations.”

Social Design
Head of department: Nadine Botha, research designer, editor, writer, and curator. Social Design engages with the material, relational, and political conditions that shape everyday life. Through research, experimentation, dialogue, and collaboration, students develop methods for acting thoughtfully within complex social realities. The programme fosters critical reflection, creative agency, and ethical practice, exploring how design shapes communities and opens possibilities for hope. Welcoming students with diverse experiences and perspectives, it combines collaborative learning with attentive, individualized guidance. Graduates take active, responsible roles in shaping the world. 

About DAE
Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) is one of the world’s leading design schools, recognised internationally for its forward-thinking and renowned tutors and alumni. For over 70 years, it has trained designers to make their mark on the future by thinking freely and openly about what design can achieve, consistently exploring the discipline as an instrument of material, social, environmental and critical innovation. More about DAE’s MA Open Day here.