Jaya van den Berg

The Design for Interaction Master’s programme focuses on the ways in which people and products interact: how does a user understand, use, and experience a product? This raises the question of how designers can conceptualise products that are relevant to the user. The goal of the programme is to educate designers who understand what people do with and expect from the products they use in everyday life, and who are able to design products appropriate to their needs’ concerns and abilities.

The course equips students with the knowledge and skills to compose and apply an appropriately researched professional design process to problems related to mass-produced products, resulting in proposals that take account of the desired function, all user aspects, environmental responsibilities and cultural suitability. The graduate will be able to present the proposals, illustrate the desirability of the proposed products and fully justify the applied decision-making in a detailed design report. Graduates will be able to produce a business plan describing and quantifying the necessary steps to transform the proposals into a real product.

The course equips students with the knowledge and skills to apply the design process to problems related to mass-produced products, to produce conceptual sketches, technical specifications, rendered images and physical or virtual 3D-models to communicate proposed solutions in a professional way. The graduate will be able to participate in debate around current design thinking and movements, based on historical reference and position the results of their work in the business framework that generated the need for the design input.