Content and structure

Designers are often taught to frame every issue, no matter how complex, as a problem to be solved. In the Master’s Major in Industrial Design, we believe that designing for complex realities requires more inclusive approaches geared towards transdisciplinary exchange and collaborations. The two-year programme builds upon a hybrid understanding of design in which its tangible and expressive potential aligns with imaginative, alternative and critical perspectives. By expanding the concept of industrial design, the course brings together prototypes with thought experiments and innovations with speculations in exploring potential technological applications and their implications. Against a backdrop of rapidly shifting ecological, societal and technical relations, students are empowered to go beyond convenience-driven and user-centred design to envision and enable opportunities for more meaningful forms of interaction. 

Course content.

The Master’s Major in Industrial Design provides an education for designers that enables them to play significant and meaningful roles in the development of technological futures. The two-year programme offers a platform where designers can engage with different emerging technologies and explore their potential impact on everyday life. The course aims to cultivate practice-based approaches, where students develop their design and research skills through interdisciplinary projects that are speculative, experimental and innovation-led. 

Course structure.

During the first year, the focus is placed on improving your ability to engage in research and personal reflection, expanding your design and communication repertoire and building research knowledge in relation to your field of interest. In a series of set individual and collaborative projects, you will explore different design approaches, contexts and roles in relation to speculative and innovation-led practices. All of the projects, methods and learnings in the first year are instrumental for building towards your own MA project and producing a body of work that reflects the professional context you wish to practice in.  

At the start of the second year, you are expected to initiate your own thesis project and to define whether it is aimed at design for innovation or design for speculation. Throughout the third and fourth semesters, you will become progressively independent. The final semester is entirely devoted to the implementation of your design project, completion of the written thesis and presentation of the work in an exhibition context. 

The course offerings will evolve each year to reflect the students’ practices and the changing nature of the design profession in response to the world around us. 

Minor-specific 

A quarter of the course time is reserved for the cross-disciplinary Minor programme. This programme sharpens writing skills and teaches research methods, design theory and methodology, digital research techniques, presentation skills and entrepreneurship. Students can also choose between a range of courses focused on future careers: applied entrepreneurial (design as artefact), critical and speculative (design as statement) or communicative and reflective (design as reflection). 

Skills acquired in the course.

When you graduate, you will be able to: 

  • Bring a design perspective to debates on technology, society and ecology;

  • Engage with new technologies from a functional, entrepreneurial and critical vantage;

  • Translate abstract issues into concrete design proposals and anchor projects in social, cultural, technological, and economic contexts;

  • Distinguish technological applications from their impacts, and be able to design both;

  • Demonstrate an awareness of the impact of various technologies on everyday life;

  • Apply the skills required to communicate and test ideas with the help of the appropriate means such as video scenarios, models or prototypes;

  • Work successfully in project teams requiring contributions from multiple disciplines;

  • Demonstrate an individual approach to design and be able to apply the skills acquired on the programme in a position of responsibility (industry, design agency, research, etc.).

Admissions requirements.

The Master’s Major in Industrial Design is aimed at creative practitioners who want to critically engage with current social, technological and ecological challenges through a curiosity-based and practice-led approach. We are looking for makers with an open mindset who have a Bachelor’s degree in design or a design-related discipline, e.g. engineering, architecture, art, fashion and media communication. 

Our studio culture is geared towards exchange and requires students to develop their individual design approach and their own forward-looking project themes. Students will thus be expected to engage in a proactive dialogue with tutors, lecturers and researchers to draw upon their expertise. 

Benefits of studying at ZHdK.

During your studies on the Industrial Design programme, you will benefit from the project-based collaboration with the Master courses Interaction Design and Trends & Identity. We value the importance of interdisciplinary exchange between disciplines and through collaborations with a broad international network of designers, researchers and creative practitioners. As part of your studies, you will get the opportunity to undertake an international group study trip to foster exchange and expand your cultural mindset. 

Our extensive workshop infrastructures Design & Technology Lab and Industrial Design Lab offer you the hands-on opportunity to experiment with new technologies and tools such as rapid prototyping, physical computing or immersive devices.

Studying at ZHdK offers you a wealth of benefits.

  • Great opportunities to actively shape your future: ZHdK offers state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary and yet highly specialized training.  

  • Our campus (Toni-Areal) is an educational and cultural hub that unites all creative disciplines under one roof and is unique across Europe. 

  • ZHdK is home to vanguard projects and events. 

  • You will benefit from a wide range of professional networks and collaborations with the creative industries, as well as with other national and international educational institutions.