The Master in Transversal Design at Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW encourages collaboration and experimentation across a range of design disciplines.

School: Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW
Course: Master in Transversal Design
Location: Basel, Switzerland
Course dates: September 2025 to July 2027 (four semesters, starting annually)
Application deadline: 15 March 2025

Transversal Design is a research-oriented, transdisciplinary master's programme. On this programme students develop practices that include alternative media, speculative models, practices of care, tools for solidarity and radical proposals for worlds in transition.

The design focus is not primarily about objects or products but on processes, modes of relating, questions of environmental-social justice and the critical infrastructures on which we collectively depend. Students work on self-led projects and are mentored and supported. Guided by an expert team and internationally recognised visiting lecturers and researchers students can design, film, draw, program, publish, code, play, build, research, organise or write. Shaping practices around the important questions of why, how and for whom in theory and practice, in organising the futures we need.

The course is for students interested in global-societal contexts and are open to norm-critical experimentation, design justice, critical media and collective self-organisation. Study with us if you are interested in designing exemplary scenarios, speculative experiences, radical proposals and are open to collaborative togetherness and experimentally guided work.

The master's programme Transversal Design is aimed at people who want to rethink processes, relationships and infrastructures on which humanity collectively depends and design future ways of living. Individuals with a bachelor's degree in design, art or architecture are addressed, as are applicants with an affinity for design and those interested in design from fields such as anthropology, urban planning, social work, economics, cultural and media studies, natural sciences, computer science and environmental sciences.

Find out more about the course and apply >

Jamming with fertiliser synthesisers and prototyping of soil sensors as part of the Workshop Regeneration 2030, organised by the research project 'Regenerative Energy Communities' with Prof Dr Helen V Pritchard. Design in collaboration with Climate Neutral Växjö 2030. Photo: Leah Ireland, 2022, CC4r.

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