Call for applications: MA programs in Fine Arts, Integrative Design, Visual Communication and Iconic Research, Art and Design Education

The FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel offers four distinct MA programmes: Fine Arts, Integrative Design, Visual Communication and Iconic Research, and Art and Design Education. Based on your design experience or your previously articulated artistic statements, you broaden your skills and knowledge in a creative interplay between experiment, research, theory, and critical reflection. Supported by a professional environment with an open conceptual framework, you learn to translate creative ideas into relevant aesthetic articulations on an advanced level. The courses of the Master programmes take two years to complete. Graduates are awarded the internationally acknowledged title of Master of Arts. 

All courses are held at the Campus of the Arts in Basel, Switzerland—a creative cluster that provides an ideal study environment. 

Integrative Design
Our angle: the challenges of today’s complex lifeworld cannot be adequately met through a single discipline approach, which is why we rely on the idea of integrative design. In an ongoing exchange with mentors and external specialists, you translate aspects of research, economics, technology, and culture into future design positions. You get the opportunity to further develop your special fields of knowledge, interests, and skills in an interdisciplinary and inspiring learning environment. Your MA degree qualifies you to work in professional, cross-disciplinary networks and apply your skills in design agencies, in art and creative ventures, or set up your own business in a field of your own choice.

Fine Arts
What would be the best output after studying a master of art? The discovery of one’s own practice, the experience of the importance of an artistic community, sensing the questions that define today’s horizon—nature, gender, race – but also learning how to learn, developing an attitude that would allow the development of new imaginations of art and the social, of art and the non-human of art and technology. Specific seminars on the ocean, on consciousness, and on the future of exhibiting coexist with a reflection on technical skills, hours in the different media workshops, the interaction with international guests, the organization of projects, and, very importantly, the hours in which you tell your mentors about your work and the challenges you are facing. 

Visual Communication and Iconic Research
One significant effect of todays digitized communication is the ease of creating and disseminating images for communication. In opposition to language—which has been reflected on since antiquity—images have not gotten an equivalent field of reflection. As the practice of visual communication finds itself at the center of the described flood of images, it is crucial to engage in interdisciplinary projects in order to broaden the understanding of how images generate meaning in social exchange. Following this line of thought, the MA programme merges practice-led design processes with aspects of iconic and media theory. The combination of practical processes of image creation and a theoretical reflection on images and media, enables students to engage in practice-led inquiries of iconic and media research. 

Art and Design Education
In our new Learning Lab Arts and Design, students link up their own art, design, and communication projects with current academic discourse, theoretical reflection, and practical experience. They expand on and deepen their acquired skills in the fields of art and design education and artistic research. In the course of their studies, the students get the opportunity to broaden their knowledge on art, design and education, and learn what teaching and communicating art is all about. They apply their acquired skills and knowledge to develop their own art, design, and education projects at schools and in cultural institutions. A BA degree in Art and Design Education qualifies you to work as an educator in institutions involved in art, culture, or design. An MA degree in Art Education entitles you to teach at upper secondary schools (level II), to and to engage in research-oriented, advanced work.