Master Designer in Sustainable Innovation

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You’ll be educated to become a designer in sustainable innovation and develop the required skills to drive creativity in a multi-disciplinary team. The Design pedagogy of the school has been carefully considered to develop you and your skills in the domain of Design, Sustainability, and Leadership.

Design is concerned with understanding and addressing human needs: understanding through observation and questioning, to see a need or opportunity that we can address with our creativity. In the current times of transition to sustainable production and consumption, and to developing social innovation, companies are requested to do multiple steps within their processes. Designers in Sustainable Innovation with a degree from BESIGN The Sustainable Design School have the required skills to start the procedure of change and to ensure a successful implementation for the entire ecosystem of the company. Therefore the job offers for our graduates are from existing companies in various product fields. Our graduates are enabled to address the complexity of change, always with human values in mind.

Entry requirements: Bachelor's degree in Design or Architecture, 240 ECTS

A transversal program with many multidisciplinary entries

Learning by doing

At BESIGN The Sustainable Design School, Design is taught by “doing”, with a responsible attitude towards the great opportunities of sustainable development. Corporate companies work with our institution to develop real projects of sustainable innovation. The project teams are composed of students from each study level with multi-disciplinary (architecture, design, engineering, marketing, social sciences) and multi-cultural backgrounds (international students). Each semester 5 different companies contribute to our education with exciting problems. The encounter between the representatives of the companies and our students allows us to create tight links and provides internship or job opportunities.

New methods

Design thinking, frugal innovation, knowledge design, and social innovation, are some of our pedagogical methods. International exchange periods are also an essential part of our design education.

• Thinking by drawing: Drawing is the first tool of a designer. Drawing allows materializing imagination and develops the transversal dialogue between different job profiles, to enhance the representation of brand cultures and of the world, it also helps the designer to think, holding a drawing pen in his hand, about new creative stories for the future.
• Sustainable design: How to conceive storyboards for the future, with a responsible focus on societal, environmental, economic, and cultural concerns of the world (the 4 pillars of sustainable development)? Eco-design, analysis of product life cycle, and bio-mimetics are new creative methods.
• Social sciences: If the definition of design is “how to help mankind to have a better life on our planet”, the knowledge of others is the most central understanding for a designer. User sociology, anthropology, and semiotics are fundamental pieces of knowledge of all design processes.
• Learning by doing: What can be more attractive for a future professional designer than being part of a team, facing the demand of sustainable innovation for a major corporate company right upon the first year of studies? Learning by doing includes encountering real professional life, building a professional network for future internships and job opportunities, to discussing with people from different generational perspectives.
• Prototyping: Nowadays the manufacturing of products is in hand reach. Mock-up and analogical prototyping (with traditional tools) and numeric tools (at the fab-lab of our institution, 3D printers, laser cutters), allow confirming the shapes of sketched products. Prototyping is also possible via electronic constructions of interactive objects.
• Innovation methods: Design thinking, frugal innovation, knowledge design, bio-mimetics, social innovation, and open innovation, are some of the essential methods to learn, to apply to diverse types of conception. At BESIGN The Sustainable Design School, we even design our own design methodology!
• Digital tools: Following the manual drawing, the numeric tool is taking over. CAO and DAO in 2D and 3D are fundamental to representing, conceiving, illustrating, and animating objects within their spatial context. The numeric tool is also essential for communication between the different profiles of creators.
• Other methods: Engineering, marketing, architecture, and sociology are next to design the big actors of innovation. Understanding and speaking the language of other professions, receiving the added value of different perspectives, working in crossed teams, in a transversal and multi-disciplinary way, to mixing the different cultures of the world are some of the many ways to boost creativity.
  

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