Master's Program in Collaborative and Industrial Design

Master's Program in Collaborative and Industrial Design

The Master’s program in Collaborative and Industrial Design (CoID) focuses on design's role in society. It provides skills to work as design entrepreneurs and in a range of roles within industry, business, communities, education and the government. The program extends industrial design into interaction design, service design, co-design and other emerging fields in which design activities can enhance the quality of the environment and people’s life. Students learn empathic, critical, strategic and technical skills needed in design innovation processes. They are also encouraged to explore novel roles in design industry.

The CoID program perceives design as a human-centred and multidisciplinary collaborative activity. It provides its students creative skills in problem-setting, problem-solving, and teamwork. Over the duration of the programme, students develop an understanding of design in relation to contemporary culture and to the innovation system, be it local or global, private or public. The students achieve an ability to design, lead design work, and collaborate with non-designers, and thus gain the skills to shape change in contemporary communities and companies.

Students are trained in concept design, co-design, service design, strategic design, and design research. They learn skills needed to capture and reframe design briefs and problems to justify their insights and make well-grounded design concepts. They learn to construct these concepts with models and prototypes and to argue for and test their design ideas through research. They learn strategic design skills needed in entrepreneurship and to manage innovation in business settings, as well as co-design skills to manage social innovation in organisations and the public sector.

The CoID program fosters students’ skills in designing, communicating, writing and visualizing. Students gain an understanding of design research methods and learn to apply them in academic, societal and business contexts. The program provides the students with skills needed to continue in doctoral studies. These include skills in academic research and analysis of information, in applying these in ill-structured and ambiguous design and research tasks, and in reporting their findings rigorously.