Design is more than an industry, or a product. Design is our everyday and our future. At Design Investigations,
we equip students to become designers of tomorrow.
Design Investigations is a multi-disciplinary
design education that builds on a history of industrial design, to include speculative design, ecological design,
and design futures in the study program.
We encourage our students to experiment, play and question
different topics, as well as interrogate the social, cultural, environmental and technological
implications of their
work in the world.
Our focus is on design-through-making. In the program, students innovate
through material and aesthetic experimentation, working hands-on with emerging technologies like AI, prototyping regenerative
designs and building more-thanhuman futures.
We instigate new ways to think about design.
We invite our students to explore the how, what, why and for whom of design. Rather than confine a student's outlook to traditional
design history, practice and theory, we consider everything from data to politics, artificial intelligence to biology as part
of the designer’s playing field.
This is a course for the curious, and the driven, an opportunity to question convention
and shape better futures through design.
During their time with us, students will…
DEVELOP
TANGIBLE DESIGN SKILLS TRANSFERABLE ACROSS INDUSTRY
• Dive into future-relevant topics, with studio briefs
covering everything from the future of food, AI and emergent technologies, to energy futures, democracy, counterfactual history,
biodiversity, and non-human perspectives.
• Engage in both individual and group projects, collaborating
with senior students in our Vertical Studio structure.
• Acquire practical skills in specialist areas including
worldbuilding, filmmaking, sound design, speculative design, material prototyping, regenerative food production, and electronics.
LEARN FROM AND ALONGSIDE LEADING PLAYERS IN DESIGN, TECHNOLOGY, ARTS, ECOLOGY AND MORE
•
Our workshops are led by renowned designers and industry leaders including Lucy McRae, Rimini Protokoll, Saeed Taji Farouky,
Sara Hendren, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez.
• Attend guest lectures by world-leading experts and international
practitioners. Previous speakers have included Genevieve Bell, Monika Farukuoye, Resolve Collective, Kenric McDowell, Nick
Foster, Thomas Thwaites, Feifei Zhou, Dan Hill, James Bridle, Stuart Candy, and others.
• Engage in external
projects with clients and partners such as Google Research, Google Artists & Machine Intelligence Group, the Natural History
Museum Wien, Werkraum Bregenzerwald and the London Design Biennale.
• Professional internships and Erasmus
semesters give students exposure and firsthand experience from various practices and educational environments. Past internships
include L’Oréal, Atelier Iris van Herpen, BMW, IDEO, mischer'traxler studio, Superflux, Biofaction and Studio PSK.
WHERE DESIGN INVESTIGATIONS TAKES YOU
• Our students graduate with a highly desirable
set of practical skills and critical thinking capacities that take them into roles such as designer, technologist, curator,
researcher and creative consultant, in fields of design, tech, advertising, academia and more. Many of our alumni have gone
on to run their own businesses and design studios.
Admission Process
Digital
registration and portfolio submission from 15th – 29th 12.00 p.m. (midday) January 2025 via the central registration tool
of the University of Applied Arts Vienna
https://application.uni-ak.ac.at.
We evaluate students based on a portfolio submission, however we don’t ask for what you might conventionally assume
to be a portfolio. Rather we request that your ‘portfolio’ consist of between 1 to 3 images representing you, your skills,
interests and experience. We can't wait to see your ideas!
Following your portfolio submission, the exam takes
place from 3rd to 5th March 2025 between 10:00 -18:00. You will work on a number of engaging design-related tasks, followed
by interviews with Anab Jain and tutors of the department.
