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

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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. Analysing 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 third term Design Studio aims to refine the work developed by students during the first and second term of the Master program (research and design). After identifying areas of interest from weak signals in the first term, and creating their design space and interventions, students will be encouraged to take a further step into their projects, focusing on designing an improved intervention in the real world (digital or physical). Special efforts will be geared towards the development of projects in the context of the current global pandemic, and how such interventions take place in new contexts (domestic, digital, new locations), while contributing to the previous work in tems one and two, and continue building the project’s vision for desirable futures..

The Design Studio time will be dedicated to supporting the students to adapt their work in the current special global context, develop their final design intervention in new spaces, and communicate their project to build new narratives, taking into account the current “new normal”. During the studio, studio leaders will bring invited guests to introduce topics of interest to the process and to participate in tutorials during the desk crits.

## Deliverables

At the end of this trimester we expect you to update who you are and what makes you unique (identity) and your personal “vision” of your future as a professional. Create a specific post on your website.  

## Additional Resources

Speculative Everything - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

Adversarial Design - Carl DiSalvo

Massive Change - Bruce Mau, Jennifer Leonard and Institute without Boundaries

Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change - Victor Papanek

Liquid Modernity - Zygmunt Bauman

Who Owns the Future? - Jason Lanier

This Changes Everything - Naomi Klein

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism - Evgeny Morozov

Democratizing Innovation - Eric Von Hippel

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things - Michael Braungart, William McDonough

Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet - Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World - Jeremy Rifkin

The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs

The Third Plate - Dan Barber

Free Innovation - Eric Von Hippel

Limits to Growths - Donella H. Meadows

The Human Face of Big Data - Rick Smolan

## Faculty

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