Digital Design (MA)

Teacher: Alexia de Visscher

Master 1 & 2

The Digital Design orientation proposes to explore the modes of graphic creation and distribution in digital environments by taming the tools, by “practicing” them or in other words by “doing with them”. The course aims to emphasize editorial forms in the broad sense that are part of a digital practice and that pass through different types of media. The act of publishing (in the sense of making public) can embody several states: from the digital flow of the screen to the stabilization of print or, in a hybrid way, to fit into digital and/or analog spaces.

The course is structured around a theoretical and cultural component and a practical component (partly in collaboration with bachelor's professors) in order to understand the different tools, protocols and workflows in digital publishing environments. The use of free software is favored with the aim of understanding its functioning thanks to the opening of its code. Experimentation, collaboration and co-learning as well as discussions and documentation are part of the learning methods and constitute an application of a culture of design integrated into the culture of free software. Combining tools, diverting them and developing recipes contributes to the empowerment of the student.

As part of the research projects carried out by the students and in relay to the contents raised in the other courses of the EU, the Digital Design orientation constitutes both a methodological support (workshop practice, path of research , protocols and experiments, relationship to technique and documentation) as much as a field in itself to be explored. It is a question of problematizing digital design at one place of the research, in a specific or transversal way within the project carried out by the student.

In M2, the content of the course revolves around one or more issues of digital design in the context of the student's research. Particular attention is paid to the responsibility of the designer in the construction of discourses, images and knowledge. And this, through practices and processes that summon not only techniques but also ethical, philosophical and political positions intimately linked to the forms they design.