GEO‑Design
Design Academy Eindhoven, 2020
'GEO–Design'1 is a two – year master's course at Design Academy Eindhoven2 lead by Formafantasma.
This platform explores the social, economic, territorial, and geopolitical forces shaping design today. The department GEO–DESIGN acknowledges the legacy of industrial production as the fundamental source for the designer's expertise and agency in contemporary society while problematizing and addressing its historic contribution to environmental and social instability and its incompatibility with models of sustainable or even survivable futures. Students will develop research and communication tools to facilitate a deeper understanding of today's complex reality but most of all, to propose transformative interventions through design and its material, technical, social, and discursive possibilities.
The designer can be a critical agent in the global system, but their skill set and perspective must expand rapidly beyond isolated, self – referential processes. The GEO-DESIGN projects – DESIGN will be radically rooted in an expansive understanding of reality – but one that acknowledges how "real world" problems are easily reduced to briefs for well – funded design solutions with negligible benefit to their intended users. GEO–DESIGN assembles a framework of diverse knowledge – from material histories to cultural world – views, from humanism to ecology, from plant and animal rights to artificial intelligence, from the Earth's core to outer space. The programme of this department aims to dissect these complex entanglements, fostering a community of practitioners such as Designers, Architects, Artists but also talents with a background in human and scientific studies with curiosity and ambition towards design as a tool to develop an investigative practice and as an instrument to facilitate change. In GEO–DESIGN, trans – disciplinary collaboration is not only a way to increase the scale and depth of research, but an ethical position that respects the expertise, lived experience, skills, resources, or communal significance of individuals and institutions in other fields. These interrelations ask designers to address environmental responsibility, politics, inequality, and other issues arising from the design's complicity across multiple industries, communication networks, and aesthetic cultures. As a department, GEO–DESIGN will grow as an octopus, with a complex central consciousness and individual far – reaching tentacles. Students will build up new methodologies combining hands – on material techniques with innovative media formats, historical philosophy with urgent critical discourse, transparent collaboration with tactical subversion.
Whether individual or collective, research will be performed through multiple intersecting channels, including theoretical reflection, systematic but open – ended prototyping, and strategic communication. The programme will foster rigour, critical thinking, and communication skills across multiple forms of research – theoretical, applied and material – with the support of a variety of practitioners, known for their engagement of urgent themes and experimental methods. The team of mentors will include designers, architects and artists with research – based practices, as well as design curators and writers. Other disciplines and forms of expertise will be represented by lecturers and leaders of workshops and seminars.