The Master Design of Experiences exists at the nexus between critical design, experiential, theatrical, filmic, semiotics, political and musical practices. It aims to teach students how to engineer situations, to design experiences and events to best support social dreaming, social actions and power shifts within institutions, companies and governments.

Students have rarely before been given the tools and means to learn to understand their profession in terms of the increasingly multi-faceted and malleable role it assumes in today’s world (which is ever-changing and disorienting). The Programme encourages students to use their own voice, style, tone and aesthetics as manifested in final outcomes of performative product scenarios, products embedded in the context of the built environment and the institutions.

The curriculum is concerned with a contemporary and strategic foresight implying politics, sustainability, institutions, new technologies and scientific developments both in Artificial Intelligence and in the current digital ecosystems. It makes innovative use of a variety of practices to engage members of the public with the experiences and the debates created.

Unconventional Research Office

The Master Programme produces research through practice and education as a research practice. Students are investigating, unravelling, characterising and speculating on the commodities of the act of thinking. By questioning the social and cultural capital of education, projects are opening up discussions on the manufacture of knowledge, confronting past and present fears. As a part of the programme, the Unconventional Research Office intends to demonstrate the state of ideologies in contemporary societies, where knowledge is interwoven with the idea of the nation-state and cultural heritage while current developments in technology propose a global notion of ‘collectiveness’. Through the production of written texts, podcasts and multimedia projects, students are acting as a point of dialogue between stakeholders portraying the value of social dreaming, experiences and theatre as critical research practices in institutions.

Partner Institute

The University of the Underground was founded in February 2017, as a charity with a ANBI status (RSIN 8575.82.781), with the purpose of creating a global engagement with society as a whole, bringing generations together to democratise access to public institutions and trigger changes and critical reflections through the use of creative, experiential and design practices.

The University of the Underground aims to produce unconventional research and design practices to better understand and challenge the formulation of culture, the manufacture and commodities of knowledge. It believes in a transnational form of education, which goes across borders and beyond nation-states. It is are based in Amsterdam but will be nurturing other tuition-free global initiatives internationally.

It was founded to reinvigorate creative education threefold: it aims to forge a more diverse leadership by offering free education to the next generation of creatives. It aims to maintain, support and cultivate countercultures that will reactivate the public’s engagement with democratic institutions and their plausible futures. And it aims to define new models of education and cultural leadership that will spread across borders. The University of the Underground exists to show young creatives how to engineer situations, design experiences, and ignite social change in institutions and governments.

The University of the Underground is composed of a multidisciplinary international team as part of its advisory board, guest tutors and teaching team. The board of the University of the Underground is composed of professionals from different fields of interest such as MOMA Senior Design curator Paola Antonelli, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery Hans Ulrich Obrist, WeTransfer president Damian Bradfield, intellectual activist Prof. Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Andreyevna Tolokonnikova, filmmaker Douglas Trumbull and award-winning author Dave Eggers to name a few.