Open call: Readerships programme

Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) is one of the world’s leading design schools and firmly committed to research in its programmes. The various departments within the four-year Bachelor programme and the two-year Master programme educate students to become critical and socially involved designers. In addition to these teaching programmes, DAE has international readerships, which focus on collaborative, research driven and interdisciplinary projects. 

DAE is home to a community of over 700 students from more than 40 countries. The school considers its identity as a point of encounter between diverse cultural backgrounds and histories as a valued asset and a fundamental prerequisite to its ability to form designers to operate effectively in a global context. Being a University of the Arts that specialises in Design, DAE is also a productive environment for debates, lectures and the production of discourse. This aspect of reflection is an important building block for both our curricula and our research agenda and enables DAE to train people who are able to make meaningful contributions to social developments worldwide.

For this reason, DAE is overhauling its programme of Readerships to underscore their position as the spearhead of its research activities, reaffirming them as a site of excellence and a source of pioneering knowledge that drives and inspires all other activities within the school, and furthering its community’s aspiration to achieve diversity, equality and justice at every level of society. 

We are therefore pleased to announce the launch of an ambitious new programme of Readerships in late 2020. The new Readerships programme will pivot around the notion of Becoming. 

Becoming acknowledges that it is time to revisit how both human and non-human actors could have a perpetual and meaningful agency in effecting change. The relatively brief history of human presence on Planet Earth has been characterised by a constant state of transition, and in recent times this transition has gathered speed. Accelerated evolution seems to envelope every aspect of our lives—a sensation of continuous transformation, exciting and terrifying at the same time, calls on those of us alive in these times to rethink every aspect of our existence, from the simplest to the most complex. In our work, in our social relationships, in our creative pursuits, in our struggle to survive on a planet under threat from our own past and present activities, we are constantly pursued by the sense that transition is inevitable. 

Becoming will require inventiveness, coordination and empathic abilities. We see the role of the designer as important in giving form, but even more important in managing processes of complexity. The scale of the challenges that lie ahead require concerted efforts from across the disciplinary spectrum, and the switch that needs to be made is often radical. As individuals, businesses, governments, non-profits and institutions all struggle to find alternatives to impending crisis, there is a desperate need for professionals capable of bringing together, structuring collaboration, unpicking the stratified problematics of organisational practice. We see the designer as a non-individualist capable of multiplying their own knowledge and skills through the knowledge and skills of others, making the previously unthinkable possible. Alumni of DAE are known for their open and curious attitude, not being afraid to allow doubt, enabling openness in the outcome, rather than aiming for fixed results. Designers able to contribute to today’s challenges in a contextual and multi-species oriented approach, contributing to the construction of a just, diverse and non-extractive economy and society. 

This is the ethos that will drive the upcoming cycle of out Readerships. These readerships will connect sectors, investigating strategies and ultimately help stimulate the necessary change. Through the individual readerships and associate readers we will cultivate a research climate that will permeate learning within the school at every level, investigating design-led strategies. The research areas this Open Call aims for are within the domains of Education, Energy and the City.  

Information about candidates profile and application can be found here.