New MFA in experience design in Sweden

Konstfack, the largest university college of arts, crafts and design in Sweden, is starting a two-year masters programme in experience design with a strong arts focus:

“In the Experience Design Group we believe art, design and media have real and measurable consequences on how we behave towards basic human problems. While conventional forms of art and design such as painting and industrial design embrace two and three dimensions, at EDG we design Time itself. Time, left to itself, is an unreflective sequence of moments. Time, subjected to design, becomes meaningful Experience. So while we do incorporate two and three dimensional media in our work, we feel closer affinities to composers and architects – those working in time-based art and design practices. To design time as immersive experience is to persuade, simulate, inform, envision, entertain, and forecast events. It is to influence meaning and modify human behavior.

The Experience Design Group is devoted to innovative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practice-led research in the creation of new knowledge. Experience Design, a discipline relevant to artists and designers, explores and investigates the interplay between meaning and sensation within immersive experiences. To this end, our work is the creation of hybrid practices by synthesizing art and design, emerging paradigms of experiential and practical knowledge, history, theory and the experience economy.”

The Experience Design Group website – which is a bit of a flash nightmare – presents the programme’s three focus areas:

• Persuasive experience – How has art and design been used as an instrument to alter human behavior, and how will it be used in the future?
• Humanitarian experience – Can art, design, craft, and media have a real and measurable consequence on basic humanitarian problems by affecting the experience of being at risk?
• Environment experience – How do you begin to orchestrate the experience of an individual in a designed environment?

The programme, which is lead by Ronald Jones, an artist, critic and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, will start in September.

Five blogs are associated with/promoted by the programme:

• Experience design by Rolf Hughes
• Art and Design Research Methodologies by Rolf Hughes
• The End of Me by Rolf Hughes
• Efter Kritiken (in Swedish)
• Interactive architecture bynRuairi Glynn. Bartlett School of Architecture.

For more information, do check this 16 page pdf download.