DESIGN MAJOR

The Design Major offers creation and research situations for students, which enables them to analyze and experiment with space and contemporary objects.

Design is now confronted with situations of great tension and challenge, under pressure between various contexts in fields of experimentation and questioning: economical and social, cultural, technological… The designer is confronted with complex urban situations due to a blend of interests, approaches, skills, multiple and diverse representations.

This major’s teaching is progressive. During the first degree program (years 2 and 3), expanded fields of design are treated: objects, space, microarchitecture and digital processes… The second degree program (years 4 and 5) provides the choice of a studio in which the student will build up his/her own project.

The goal of the teaching team (in which artists and teachers from outside the school are associated) is to favor students’ educational support of their own research territory, linked to urban investigation fields (use, mutation, technological evolution, public issues…). The students’ follow-up is assured by a teaching team in which the collective workings and methodological requirements pivot and are articulated around Studios, Research and Creation Platforms (ARC) and Workshops. Progressive teaching enables the student to gradually determine his/her territory of investigation.

The three Design studios (teaching spaces/time that combine practice and thought) are based on urban issues (public urban space, group spaces, body/city interface, digital city…). These studios equally welcome students having favored a more global approach to design, like object or graphic design.

The design studios teaching privileges territories and different environments, which are linked to social innovation and sustainable development: new emerging landscapes, new forms of territorial organization.

The Lentigo Studio takes special interest in urban spaces, through the city’s new uses leading to meaning for digital processes. Nowadays, this studio includes research on augmented reality, interactivity, links between the individual course and group spaces. It focuses on new interactive museology.

The DOA studio (Design Object Affordability) develops a professional approach to the product’s dimension, prototyping and invites people from outside the school. The product is approached through the interdependent relationship it has with its environment.

The ARC and workshops offer precise or complementary incursions into practice, thought or environments.

The Design major is regularly involved in public and/or professional events: (Designer’s Days, D’DAYS, International Design Biennale of Saint-Étienne, Maison de l’architecture et de la ville, PACA, Bouches-du-Rhône architects union…), which promote the students’ work.

Design major students regularly team up with of Art major students through transversal projects; the relationship with the architecture school (which is next to the ESADMM) and other institutes of higher education and research, which give birth to group work sessions and shared research projects.