Bachelor Design Art Technology

Bachelor Design Art Technology

Your telephone. The music you listen to. Your favourite Netflix series. A chat. The internet. The weather map on Buienradar. Almost everything around you is designed by people. In our time, technology plays a key role in those designs. But that is still a means to an end. Ultimately, it is about how people relate to each other.

The Bachelor of Design Art Technology at ArtEZ in Arnhem challenges you to become an artistically critical designer who uses technology as an artistic tool and/or for applied design. The course has originated from the discipline of interaction design. But where interaction design focuses on designing for and through computers, Design Art Technology also teaches you to think critically about what you design. You learn to question the systems underlying the technology. Because it is not only about the design itself, but also about how you use it in society, in relation to the environment.

Important accents in our intensive course curriculum are a broad view of the role of technology in social issues, personal profiling based on your own fascinations and ample room for experimentation as part of the creative process.

Course structure

First year

In the first year you build a basis of knowledge and skills. You learn to program and look at shape/colour/composition. You design an object that produces electronically driven music. You learn to design with algorithms and with software programs such as Unity. In addition to practical lessons, you study theory subjects such as art history and design methods, and you immerse yourself in basic ideas about interaction.

Second year

The second year is all about the question of: What can I do with everything I learned in the first year and how do I relate to it? Through assignments that invite research and experimentation, you push back the boundaries of human-computer interaction and the ways people communicate with each other. For example, you design podcasts and immerse yourself in interactive storytelling and games. In addition, as in the first year, you will take classroom lessons, such as the subject of critical engineering, in which you will investigate the intricacies of the Internet and how you can ensure that the computer works for you by writing scripts. In an individual project with a student from another art discipline (Dance or Creative Writing), you seek partnerships and learn from each other’s disciplines.

Third year

From the third year on, you will be looking more and more emphatically for your own signature. What interests me? What do I want? What are my skills? What is my position there? You will be taught subjects such as Media Archaeology, Information Spaces and Digital Art and Design with Machines (where you learn to apply machine learning and concepts of Artificial Intelligence). In addition, you will have plenty of room to immerse yourself in a subject and direction of your choice, be it in the technical field or about socio-political issues or popular visual culture. In the Transition project, you practise your multidisciplinary approach to problems that are difficult to solve and work on your communication skills.

Fourth year

In the fourth year you specialise in a direction of your choice. This individual profile is reflected in your thesis, research assignment and practical assignment. A three-month internship is part of your specialisation. All students of the Bachelor of Design Art Technology show their work at the ArtEZ finals in Arnhem.

After the Design Art Technology course, you can continue your studies with a national or international master course such as the Royal College of Art in London, Leiden University or CAFA University in Beijing. Would you like to combine your artistry with a job as a teacher? After the Bachelor of Design Art Technology, you can obtain a first-level teaching qualification in two years at the Tailor-Made Fine Art and Design in Education course. ArtEZ offers this study in both Arnhem and Zwolle.

During the course you will get to know the many possibilities in the field and choose your own direction, so the careers our former students have embarked on after their studies vary greatly:

• Students who are good at programming sometimes choose to work at an internationally leading creative coding studio; there is a huge demand for creative coders in the field;
• Others have joined a design agency, for example in the field of information design, time-based installations and new technology;
• Some started their own design studio or as an autonomous artist;
• Yet others have started a collective that organises musical and cross-cultural events.