autonomous design

Like Social Design, Perception, Narrative and Performance recurs in every undergraduate year. This course brings together various methodologies and techniques that help you perceive, investigate and then represent context and process visually. You are also given digital and analogue tools to learn to communicate ideas and narratives you developed during the design process. In this way, you learn to register the specificity of a situation, environment and/or community. This allows you to communicate your vision, which you develop in the course of the bachelor, to your target audience. In addition, the first-year Participatory Practices programme introduces students to forms of participatory artistic work, shared authorship, cocreation and other forms of collaboration. 

The theoretical component Context and Design supports these practice subjects and addresses concepts, frameworks and reflections from the contextual field that drives Social Design practice. Such as, for example, ideas around the responsibility and social position of the designer/artist, around sustainability, social equality, participation and commons or around contemporary production processes in comparison with historical and anthropological examples. 

During the Master year, you work independently on a personal project under the guidance of a theory and practice mentor. During a collective master class – in close interaction with external professionals – you will delve deeper into fundamental aspects of artistic and design practice, thus strengthening substantive processes.

Alumni autonomous design work on artefacts, products, services, (inter)actions, situations, relationships, environments, political practices, organisational models or open systems, among others. Through purposeful assignments and experimental moments of making, they hone their own vision of the world, discover what positive engagement they can incorporate, what new sustainable models or ways of working they can develop and deploy to that end and – last but not least – in what way they can best translate their conceptual creations to an audience. You will thus find connections to a very diverse professional field: from socio-cultural organisations and creative incubators over ecological design platforms and urban maker collectives to self-founded critical-autonomous making practices.

KASK & Conservatorium offers English-language master programmes in the visual arts, audiovisual arts, drama and music. Each year, dozens of foreign students choose the master programmes of our faculty to continue their studies. The presence of students from different international backgrounds is an enrichment for our educational tradition and provides an added value to the training of foreign master students and Flemish students moving on from the Dutch-language bachelor programmes alike.

The programmes are organized so as to facilitate encounters between Dutch-speaking and English-speaking students in informal contexts, in seminars and courses, and even in artistic projects they start up together. There are no differences in curricula, competencies, learning outcomes or organization between the English-language programmes and their Dutch-language counterparts. English-speaking candidates holding a master’s degree in music can also go in for the advanced master contemporary music or one of our postgraduate programmes.

Don’t hesitate to contact the study and learning track counsellors with your questions.