MA Material Futures

Course overview

MA Material Futures encourages a wholly multi-disciplinary approach to design. Through trans-disciplinary practice and collaboration, you will explore how we will live in the future. By working with experts, taking risks and blurring the boundaries between design, science and technology, you will look beyond existing disciplines, anticipating the future needs, desires and challenges that we face in the 21st Century.

We believe that only by observing and analysing how we live today we can begin to explore how we might occupy tomorrow. Considering the current and future context of design decisions is key to our ethos. We will encourage you to combine social, scientific, political, environmental, ecological and economic inquiry. These insights will help inform future design scenarios, material propositions and research-led speculations.

Taking materiality as the starting point of the design process – literally the things we can touch, feel, interact with and observe – we integrate high and low technological materials and processes. Our students explore and come from a diverse range of disciplines. These include the worlds of fashion and architecture, as well as industrial, communication, textile, critical, digital and speculative design.

This course is assessed through: Design portfolios; Presentations; Project proposals; Critical journals; Design projects.

MA Material Futures has established various links with industry in London and beyond, allowing students to work on international design projects and initiatives. MA Material Futures itself has contributed much to debate around design, both through the media and by organising and delivering papers at international conferences.

MA Material Futures students are expected to establish their own network of contacts and develop collaborations within industry as part of the development of their master’s project. Employers have included Adidas, Distance Lab, Banff New Media, Castelbajac, Donna Karan, Etam, Hussein Chayalan, Line Consultants, Louis Vuitton, Margiela, Media Lab Europe, Nicole Farhi, Speedo, Ted Baker, Design Lab, Trend Union and Nissan Design Europe.