Fall Semester Elective 2027

Through demonstrations, workshops and studio sessions, this course will exercise student‚s creativity and knowledge regarding both traditional and contemporary, innovative ways of creating and doing. As creative minds and human beings in a constant learning process, we must understand the importance of context and the interactions between the artist/designer and the surrounding world.This course emphasizes collective creation, building teams and bringing students out of their comfort zones. This course will guide students through research and project exercises, culminating in the creation of an ephemeral installation within the public space of Barcelona. Visiting and re-visiting the city will help students reach an immersive understanding driven by analysis, data visualization, sketches and presentations. Students will select the most interesting ideas and make them happen.

This course relates different branches of human knowledge like architecture, design, sociology, history and art with the aim of developing a cognitive map of the world. The course analyzes the basic theories and practices of art, architecture and design from the industrial revolution to the present day and discusses their social and cultural impact. TakingBarcelona as a case study, the course will provide the student with analytical and discursive tools in order to develop a global understanding of design and its relationship with the social context from a critical and innovative point of view.The analysis of Barcelona, which epitomizes the formation process of the modern industrial city and its shifting to the post-industrial metropolis of the globalization era, will be related with the specific contexts of the students, with the aim of reflecting on the different approaches to the design issues from a multicultural perspective.The course takes advantage of the extensive resources of Barcelona, complementing the classes with visits to the citys museums such as MNAC (National Museum of Art of Catalonia), MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona), Joan Mir Foundation and the Picasso Museum,emblematic buildings by Gaudi, Mies van der Rohe and other world class architects, among others.

This course introduces the tools necessary for conceptualizing and developing comprehensive packaging projects. Packaging is one of the most relevant branches of contemporary design not only for practical reasons, since almost all products going to the market require a packagethat protect them and preserve their quality, but also from a conceptual point of view, since it is the complex crossroads of highly demanding technical requirements and exciting opportunities for communicating the values of the products and their brands to the public. In this course students will learn to communicate both formally and graphically the attributes of a product and the placement of a brand. The goal is to understand the factors affecting production and selection of a package for a specific product, its possibilities and materials.

The capacity of communicating through images and expressing the relevant aspects of a project, from the idea to the final proposal, is a fundamental aspect of design. This course is aimed at providing students with representation concepts and techniques that are broadly applied in design fields. Based on exercises, talks and workshop sessions, the course embraces the ability of students to define and show their ideas bylearning about the options and features that Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Indesign and Adobe Illustrator offer as a powerful suite specifically conceived for design professionals. Mandatory for participants to the Study Abroad programme without experience in digital representation and visual narrative, the course is also recommended for those design students whowant to deepen their knowledge of digital tools and learn more about the Adobe Suite. The course approaches also the basic concepts of video editing and production, as well as fundamentals of presentation techniques, in order to provide students with a complete range of options that they will put into practice in many visual communications required by the Study Abroad programme as well as by future design projects.

This course delves into the interconnected world of

food design and food systems, examining how the act

of “feeding” operates within cultural, environmental,

and societal frameworks. By exploring gastronomy, anthro-

pology, food systems, and design thinking, students will

gain a comprehensive understanding of how food impacts

and is impacted by human behavior and global systems.

The course adresses the relationships between food,

health, sustainability, and culture. It explores how to create

objects, services, systems or experiences related to food

that are innovative, sustainable, and contextually

meaningful in creative and impactful ways.

This course focuses on product and furniture design, covering the entire process from conceptualization, formalization, development and pre-production of a designed object from the human, domestic or work environment. The course will analyze the social, ergonomic and aesthetic environment of the user, the method for producing the final work and the impact of this on the environment as a whole. Students will approach the semantics of objects, their functional and communicative capacity along with the integration of materials and technology. As part of the development and design of products, the class will visit factories, showrooms and design boutiques as well as use the school's workshops.

Modules: – Design management – Creativity – Techniques of model construction – Technical project development – Suppliers, materials research, and the hardware – Presentation skills and project communication – Trade fairs and the latest trends – Preparation for final project presentation

The Interior Spaces course introduces design students to the complexities of the development of the interior spaces, as well as putting them in touch with the local architecture and design culture. The course structure is designed to provide a general framework for the development of a range of projects, from small scale briefs to a larger scale proposal for a residential interior. The program provides the student with knowledge and skills in all areas of space planning, theory and concept, model-making and freehand drawing as well as communication. Priority is given to learning strategies that foster critical thinking, problem solving and decision-making capabilities. As a result, students will increase their creative skills and get a substantial vision in all areas related to interior space design. With an active participation of the students, several practical exercises integrated within the course promote a conceptual and experimental approach to design through a hands-on learning method. It usually begins with a presentation to provide the theoretical foundation that aims to deepen the comprehension of a specific subject. During class, students will develop a quick draft resolution, PowerPoint presentations, and/ or a physical model.

Retail is naturally the showplace for new ideas, new concepts and new products. As such, the store environment serves as the selling stage for the latest merchandise offerings of the day, and a tool of communication used to create a dialogue with the targeted customer. Through effectivevisual merchandising, the retailer communicates both the attributes of the brand, and the attributes of the products offered. This is the reason why the construction of a coherent narrative -involving spaces, products and graphic elements- is an essential requirement for retail design and visualmerchandising.The main goal of this course is to introduce students to the importance of visual merchandising as an integral component of a successful retail strategy. This course will include an in depth analysis of the retail store environment. The principles, philosophies and technologies of visual merchandising will be studied through exploration of the marketplace, visits, and hands-on classroom experimentation.

This course focuses on Graphic Design as the discipline that uses visual concepts to communicate ideas. The course aims to practice the tools of graphic design, Colour, Image, Composition and Typography and the relation between them. Typography is one of the most important tools for graphic designers. Students will experiment from movable type fonts to digital typography movement. In this course students will learn how to design projects that will range from artistic and experimental typography to poster composition, branding, editorial design and digital interaction. Students will also become familiar with basic communication skills, considering that contemporary narratives require the capacity to dealwith static and dynamic images.

In the last years moving images have become the new graphics in the digital world. The net is full of Graphics animating fonts, illustrations and pictures that move creating the sensation of dynamism. The main goal of this subject is to introduce students to the motion graphics field and also learn visual communication as the tool to facilitate the communication of the ideas. The content will focus on Storytelling, Digital Illustration, Digital film-making and the Digital tools that help to build it all.