---
title: Design Studio
page_type: course
track:
course_type:
feature_img:
img_caption: 
faculty: 
    - tomas-diez
    - oscar-tomico
    - mariana-quintero
---

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## Syllabus

MDEF Research, Design, and Development studios aim to take research areas of interest and initial project ideas into an advanced concretion point, and execution plan. The studio structure in three terms could be understood as follows:

**TERM 1 Research**: Understanding what it means to design for emergent futures. Analyzing the past and finding weak signals. References, state of the art. Identifying areas of interest. Experimenting from the first-person perspective.

**TERM 2 Design**: Forming the present through interventions in the real world. Building the foundations of your design space, forming strategic partnerships. Applying knowledge into practice through iterative prototyping. Testing ideas and prototypes in the real world.

**TERM 3 Development**: Refining interventions and identifying desirable futures. Establishing roadmaps for the construction of emergent narratives.. Communicating and disseminating your project through speculative design.

The first term Design Studio aims to create a solid ground for the students to start developing their projects. Weekly activities will be set to interlink results from the courses like their mappings, cartographies, experiments, 1st person design activities, prototypes, with their personal development plan. In order to propose an area of intervention at the end of the trimester. The Design Studio activities will consist of presentations, group activities, short exercises, and personal coaching. The specific goals are the following:

- To develop a critical position in the student’s design practice.
- Define possible areas of intervention, based on the Atlas of the Week Signals.
- Prototype an alpha version of the design space and iterate.
- To build personal and collective repositories of resources.

## Deliverables

A design space that is adaptable and can grow over time including the state of the art, your weak signals, resources, and personal projects. Frame your ideas in relation to your area of interest provided in the AWS. Create a design space where these relationships are visible. Your design space should contain at least: •3 objects/products that represent the issues you are enquiring in a tangible way. •3 kinds of materials that express some of the qualities of these issues. (If you had to represent your issue through materials, which would they be?). •3 reference projects or initiatives that are working around those issues (pictures, blueprints, etc) •2 reference technologies / methodologies that are being used to investigate/attend those situations •2 possible contexts in Barcelona (or not) in which you would be interested to place an intervention •2 experiments that allow you to prototype your intervention. The format of this deliverable can be physical or digital, but document it with pictures or screenshots to submit to your drive folder and share with the class.

## Faculty

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