Over the past decade, rapid technology has radically changed everyday urban life. Software now organizes city life just as well as the program of urban planners: the physical and digital environments are intimately intertwined.
The Minor UrbanIxD explores how to design such hybrid environments, in a way that ensures that the city becomes a resilient and healthy system. This question is urgent for the next generation of designers, as they will enter a field that requires an understanding of both spatial and mediatized experiences of social interaction in physical places and the digital mediation of these interactions through online platforms. Moreover, they are a generation that has to deal with complex social and environmental challenges from the start of their careers.
This transdisciplinary minor aims to be a workable collaborative platform on which both the physical and digital design fields, as well as the humanities, are equally represented. This offers students not only the opportunity to look beyond their own field, but also to reformulate their design questions through different disciplines and perspectives.
In the minor Urban Interaction Design, students from different study programs learn to design interventions and experiences in and for the city in which digital and physical experiences are intertwined. The minor has a transdisciplinary approach, in which a design is created from multiple perspectives. The first part of the program consists of a series of boot camps (Urban planning, Product Design, Digital Design and Applied Psychology). In the second part of the programme, the students conduct field research in Barcelona and Amsterdam. Subsequently, students work in teams on a project with an actual client. Established designers working in the field of Urban IxD are regularly invited for guest lectures and inspiration sessions.
The minor starts in February 2023 and lasts 20 weeks. In the Summer, the results from the minor are presented at a symposium and exhibition.
Part of the minor is financed by Comenius Network and Centre of Expertise Creative Industry – CoeCI