MA Design for Social and Environmental Innovation

Northumbria University, Newcastle

If you’re fed-up with the way things are or the way they’re going and you want to create more hopeful futures, this course is for you, whatever your background.

You might be fed-up with wasteful lifestyles, unfair systems, cultural intolerance, harmful production and consumption cycles, who gets a say and who doesn’t, and how data is shaping our lives. On this course you will learn about these issues and many more as you undertake types of designing that aim to make positive change.

If you believe that we can change things for the better, that bright ideas and hard work can positively change lives, then this course is for you.

The knowledge and practices of different types of design, informed by social sciences, economics, politics and emerging science underpin this course. Your day-to-day will include design-led innovation, design activism, social design, relational design and participatory design channelled towards navigating the complex and tricky transitions faced by communities, enterprises, and institutions as we move towards new ecological, technological, social and political realities.

If you want to learn from world-leading experts and with real-world organisations, this course is also for you.

This is a highly practical course - you will learn through working on a range of projects with real communities, enterprises, and institutions exploring futures and their consequences. You’ll be taught by leading academics from across the disciplines. Working in multidisciplinary teams with your peers and alongside professionals from partner organisations, this Master’s course will help prepare you for future employment using design as a tool for responsible innovation and change.