Course summary

The MDes in Interior Design at Glasgow School of Art focuses on practice and research-based learning, developing independently-minded designers who challenge society and interrogate the field of interior design in new and innovative ways. The programme frames studio learning as a pedagogically stimulating space that fosters critical reflection and experimentation within a vibrant community of professionals. The programme encourages students to take risks, reflect on their creative process, engage in peer learning, and utilise GSA's various technical, library, and archive resources. The programme’s structure focuses on the designer's role in shaping relationships to technology, process, sustainability, digital and augmented realities, the consumer high street, accessible design, and the 21st-century design studio. The programme employs a range of pedagogical approaches focusing on practiced-based research and critical analysis in the field of interior design, enabling students to acquire key skill sets and attributes, enhance design thinking, develop innovative strategies, and reflect on their professional practice. Students take significant responsibility for managing their learning, and the programme emphasises self-reliance and personal academic development. Independence, creativity, experimentation, and critical thinking are viewed as educational methods that enable students to address the evolving needs of society with empathy, social awareness, conceptual mindsets, and diverse forms of expression. The curriculum explores existing disciplinary territories and pushes their boundaries, asking why interiors are produced rather than how, while encouraging the exploration of emergent aspects of the discipline and linking with the expertise and research interests of departmental staff. Operating in an academically rigorous environment and engaging with a range of methods, skills, and tools, Stage 1 of the programme focuses on the key principles of theory, research, and practice, Stage 2 on multidisciplinary production, craft, and conceptual approaches, and Stage 3 on undertaking a project merging research, practice, and students’ own expertise. The MDes in Interior Design explores a range of themes grouped around historical and theoretical frameworks encouraging reflective and analytical approaches. The projects draw from territories such as recent histories of UK interior design, technologies, utopias, re-purposing buildings, and user-centred design, and the psychology of enclosure, people, places and things. Indicative themes also include surrogate space, virtual and actual space, hard and soft methods of visualisation, analogue and digital representation of constructed space, archaeology of the recent past, reimagining erased space, place and memory, the interior in cinema and theatre, materiality, and sensorially visualising the unseen. The programme reflects the importance of disciplinary autonomy and interdisciplinary dialogue and approaches via studio-based practice, cross-school elective courses, and its location within a supportive and diverse postgraduate community. The programme aims to emphasise formal and informal cross-disciplinary discourses within the Stage 1 core course on design research methods and Stage 2 PGT elective courses and reflects a sharing and collaborative ethos, including in exploring and developing relationships with external partners. Whether an interior designer, a designer from another discipline or with related, relevant work experience, students are encouraged to position themselves within the broad creative arc of the discipline, to emerge as advanced practitioners with a hand in shaping its central tenets, facilitating professional pathways or research at PhD level.