Design week have featured the launch of the University of the Underground in an article on their website, written by Sarah Dawood. 

To read the full article, follow this link. Words by Design Week. 

A new free, postgraduate design university has been established, which hopes to attract young designers excited by politics and social activism. The University of the Underground is a concept created by design consultancy Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios, and MA degrees will be granted by Amsterdam-based postgraduate arts university Sandberg Instituut. With classes split between London’s Village Underground and Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, it offers a two-year Masters (MA) degree in design which will ask students to consider contemporary affairs such as politics, sustainability, new technology and scientific developments like artificial intelligence. Students will spend three months in London and the rest of the course in Amsterdam. It will also incorporate other art forms such as theatre, film and music into its syllabus.

The first year of the course will consist of four-to-eight week briefs around redesigning government and social design systems, including workshops and radio podcasts where students will be expected to direct, perform and talk as well as design, and field visits to conferences and test laboratories.The second year will focus on coming up with concepts and developing designs.

The aim is to “encourage students to use their own voice”, says Nelly Ben Hayoun, and enable them to make an impact on wider issues such as “governmental systems, institutions and power structures” – for example, the design systems of an organisation like Greenpeace.

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To read the full article, follow this link.