The Postgraduate Program in Design at Srishti Manipal allows graduates or professionals to extend and enhance their design knowledge through inquiry-based practice. The 2 years MDes program covers dimensions that foster the ability to become an independent, self-critical, creative designer. The blend of art, design, and technology focuses on transdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to information, teaching deep engagement with society, environment, and self. The program facilitates graduates to lead to a career in academic or industrial research and development, work with innovation labs and centres, established mainstream large Industries. With the focus on design through research graduates work with emerging experimental start-ups to become social entrepreneurs, shaping the emerging ecology of start-up organisations in India through design-driven innovation.
Graduating students can chart their careers not only in the burgeoning software/hardware industry, but also in government, NGOs, & urban and rural development think tanks as Strategic Design Innovators and practitioners.
Through these courses an aspiring practitioner learns about technology, both existing and emerging, be sensitive to the impact it is creating on the world by designing for environmental impact, business strategy, socio political context, focused inquiry into human (and sometimes non-human), experimenting with various materials, like textile, wood, etc.
Learning Approach
The Inquiry-based learning space cultivates creative practice through engagement in diverse contexts, collaborative and participatory approaches leading to knowledge development. The pathways are closely interlinked and intertwined. Each learner gets an opportunity to explore the intersections of the paths, and thereby begin to work on developing their own unique, individual practice. The open-ended structure allows the learner to navigate through the various disciplines, where a student can specialise on their core while finding connections and interconnections with allied fields. Focusing on the pedagogy of research through design, it encourages rich-making skills available profusely at all levels in the Indian context through locative making. With an interdisciplinary approach, the course lets one engage and integrate social innovators, technology, theories, methodologies and advanced skills of design thinking, making by doing.
Course Structure
• The engagement is divided into two phases. The first year focuses on understanding and appreciating the design thinking theories, methodologies and advanced skills. And the second year focuses on applying the understanding to drive a reflective inquiry into a complex real-world wicked problem.
• The Postgraduate Program in Design thereby offers a unique opportunity to chart a new direction in one’s creative practice towards contributing to knowledge creation and expansion going beyond the traditional skill-based design roles.
Courses Offered in the Academic year 2024-25
