Institut für Designforschung (IDF)
Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig
Course Description:
_____
The transformation towards greater sustainability, global justice and a “good life” is the central social issue of our time. Design in particular must rise to this challenge and use innovative products, services, and systems to help develop suitable alternatives to seemingly no-alternative development. But, transformation design doesn‘t just want to offer new solutions to problems. It wants to stimulate social debates and rethink things and circumstances. In other words: Transformation Design consistently understands design from the perspective of human, social, and cultural needs and attempts to make a sustainable contribution to the future viability of society without neglecting the economic [and as I would necessarily emphasize, ecological] framework.
_____
The Master’s program in Transformation Design at HBK Braunschweig teaches project-based skills to reflect, initiate, and help shape change processes. Questions of sustainability and future viability of society play a central role and are viewed from a design method and theory perspective. At the same time, design itself is being reinvented as processes, connections, and interactions with other disciplines, institutions, and civil society are taken into account in the design process.
_____
In her role as Acting Professor of Transformation Design, Dr. Anna-Sophie Springer teaches across Environmental Humanities, Design Research, Critical & Spatial Theory, and Experimental Ecological Practices in courses such as Social Transformation, Critical Futurities, Writing & Publishing, and An Introduction to the History of Sustainability, as well as a studio-based seminar in the first and second years of the Transformation Design MA program.