The Masterstudio Industrial Design course at Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW helps students hone an individual approach to design that embraces environmental and social sustainability.

School: Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW
Course: Masterstudio Industrial Design
Location: Basel, Switzerland
Course dates: September 2025 to July 2027 (three or four semesters starting annually)
Application deadline: Annually in March, continuous enrolment

The Institute of Contemporary Design Practices (ICDP) at the Basel Academy of Art and Design offers a unique programme at the campus, featuring the Masterstudio Design and three studios: industrial design, fashion design, and scenography. To fully harness the potential of design as a practice that shapes living environments and thus impacts the world around us in response to today's urgent issues, we have made the studios more permeable. We offer our students – currently from over 17 nations – training in design, space, fashion, art and related disciplines, allowing them to collaborate and network internationally with each other, faculty, visiting lecturers and experts from both academic and practical fields.

The Masterstudio Design at the Institute of Contemporary Design Practices (ICDP) is composed of three studios: Masterstudio Industrial Design, Masterstudio Scenography and Masterstudio Fashion Design. Each studio has a disciplinary focus. In addition, the research discourse of the ICDP focuses on Digital Integration, Design Cultures and Circular Design and is reflected and communicated multi-dimensionally.

The Masterstudio Industrial Design provides a high-level, individualised, professional and research-oriented qualification on the basis of “advanced design”. The programme enables the students to methodically and creatively hone their own individual forward-looking approach to design. Product design and project work are embedded in our international network, taking place in close cooperation with selected experts affiliated with the ICDP.

The Masterstudio Industrial Design programme focuses on three main contemporary research areas: Digital Integration, Design Cultures and Circular Design. The discourses surrounding global crises such as climate change or social inequality provide the basis for concrete research questions and design solutions for sustainability and ecology, future planning and technology, interaction and materiality. Rather than adhering to the entrepreneurial dynamic of maximisation, we take the idea of a collaborative, systemic, inclusive and sustainable economy as our starting point.

"What makes the Masterstudio Design at the Institute Contemporary Design Practices (ICDP) at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW so special is the interaction between the three studios, Industrial Design, Scenography and Fashion Design. While each studio has a strong disciplinary focus, collaboration and exchange between the three disciplines is an essential part of the programme. Students also get the opportunity to complete their MA thesis as a team, which promotes a reality-based approach to work."

Find out more about the course and apply ›

Image: Jasmin Plankensteiner – Mono Alpin, 2023. Photography by Camilla Fivian.

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