Elisava Masters Beyond

Master Beyond Products

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The current social, economical and environmental status demands for a deep reconfiguration of the products we consume. This master questions the role of the profession and encourages students to use products as a medium to identify, denunce, criticise or propose. We do not defend one model only; there are as many models as designers out there. We will work with you to transform your practice beyond by questioning, provoking and challenging the cultural, social, economical, technological or material establishment.

Direction
Jordi Canudas
Luis Eslava
ECTS credits
60 ECTS (400 hours)
Duration
September – July
Schedule
Three mornings/week

The Master Beyond Products is backed up by Elisava, Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, an institution with 60 years of experience sharing knowledge to design and transform the world. The school develops projects to generate and transfer knowledge, address present and future challenges and foster change.

Elisava is a space to become a professional with the skills needed to design products, services, and environments to create a more environmentally responsible, inclusive, and community-focused society.

Luis Eslava
Founder (Luis Eslava Studio) 

Luis focuses his research and development in the creative process, the materiality of the objects, and in the bridge of craftsmanship with industrial processes. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, he worked for Camper and lived in Japan before coming to Spain, where he now combines his professional practice with academia as Elisava’s Head of Product Design as well as tutor on some of the Masters’ programmes.  

Master Beyond Product Elisava

Jordi Canudas
Founder (Jordi Canudas Studio) 

Jordi graduated from the Royal College of Art with a MA Degree in Design Products. He is a member of the London-based collective ‘OKAY Studio’ and his work can be found within the MoMA collection in New York. His studio was awarded with the Best of Year award from Interior Design magazine, Metropolis Likes and the Wallpaper* Design Award. Jordi is currently teaching at Elisava in Barcelona and in Bath Spa University, United Kingdom. 

Master Beyond Product Elisava

Júlia Esqué
Founder (Júlia Esqué Studio) 

Julia is an independent designer specialized in the possibilities of product design. She has collaborated with brands such as Paloma Wool and Nomad Coffee. Alongside the studio work, she also teaches and runs workshops at different design schools including Elisava, where she studied her Undergraduate Degree in Product Design.  

Master Beyond Product Elisava

Julia Lohmann
Professor (Aalto University) and Founder (Julia Lohmann Design Studio) 

Julia is a German-born designer and researcher, director of Julia Lohmann Design Studio. Julia studied at the Royal College of Art, where she has also taught and completed an AHRC-funded collaborative PhD scholarship between the RCA and the Victoria & Albert Museum.  

Darryl Matthews
Vice President (Nike Catalyst Footwear Design) 

Darryl is a product designer, currently working as a designer for Nike, where he leads the line of innovation and special projects. He is also part of Nike’s new approach and design proposal, ISPA (Improvise. Scavenge. Protect. Adapt), in which they try to expand the design possibilities and open up new issues and situations in which design and the creative spectrum may have a place. 

Master Beyond Product Elisava

Marc Morro
Product Designer (Marc Morro Studio) 

Marc is a furniture designer founder of AOO and Marc Morro Studio. After graduating in Industrial Design, he launched Surtido, for which he was awarded with the 2010 Premi Ciutat de Barcelona. He co-founded the design gallery Otrascosas de Villar-Roses and he was also put in charge of Pecha Kucha Barcelona. Now, Marc splits his time between being mainly in charge of AOO and commissioning personal projects.
 

Master Beyond Product Elisava

Lolo & Sosaku
Design and art studio 

Lolo & Sosaku are a Barcelona based artistic duo. Encompassing installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, sound and video, Lolo & Sosaku’s wide-ranging practice explores the capacity of creating new meanings through the association of the objects, the surroundings and the spectator. Their work has been represented, among others, at the Museo Reina Sofia, MACBA, Sónar, Matadero, and they have an upcoming exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, Paris.  

Master Beyond Product Elisava

Raw Edges 

Colours, patternmaking and movement form a large part of the DNA at Raw-Edges. The ideas of energy and provocative illusion are aimed at bringing out the kid in all of us who engage with it, an ongoing battle against boredom perhaps!

Master Beyond Product Elisava

Guillermo Santomà
Founder (Guillermo Santomà Studio)  

He uses simple mechanisms to alter familiar objects in a constant process of deformation creating complete environments. His work denotes an interest in the systematic transformation of the ways of objectifying, organizing, analyzing and, therefore, of transmitting.

Master Beyond Product Elisava

Raquel Quevedo
Director (Raquel Quevedo Studio) 

Raquel Quevedo is an artist and graphic designer whose practice runs mixing graphic, sculpture, installation, spatial interventions, digital art, typography, publishing & artist books. Recently she has worked for Comme Des Garçons, Loewe, Icon Design, CCCB and artists and influencers such as Najwa Nimri and Dulceida. She has been awarded with several Laus Awards and her work has been featured at Vogue, It’s Nice That, Printed Pages, Neo2, Vein Magazine, Bound Magazine among others. 

Lucas Muñoz
Director (Lucas Muñoz Muñoz Estudio)

Crafting pieces that take a personal look to our artificial environament and using tools as humour and rawness, his body of work includes a wide range of typologies that span from boats and speakers to chairs and lamps.

Master Beyond Product Elisava

We understand product design in a very wide sense. It is a profession in constant evolution to adapt itself to the present and future needs. It is in that context that this course is structured with the aim of questioning and mentoring the students to define what product design can be and the role they want to play in it.

100 chairs in 100 days its 100 ways, Martino Gamper
Master Beyond Product Elisava
Tubular Armchair, Lucas Muñoz

Design should be a tool to change paradigms, a new language to examine, analyse and critique what is happening around us, and, above all, to offer answers. In the workshop by Lucas Muñoz we will observe and explore what we have near: the problems, situations and events in our environment. With less manipulation and infrastructure, let’s design with a creative, committed, robust mind.

It’s the moment. MO from Movement is born. A new look at consumption in cities that is committed to inclusion and sustainability to create value and make more conscious consumption possible.‍

Master Beyond Product Elisava
Meteorite Sound System, Lucas Muñoz
Hora, Raw Edges

“Challenge new objectives and methodologies that imply the need to create new processes and mechanisms for the development of future objects and design scenarios”

We will find new parameters and alternatives to challenging the industry into evolving; it’s our duty to do so, taking into account the state of our society. New goals and methodologies need new processes and mechanisms to develop future objects and design scenarios. We’re far past the point of criticising and questioning, so you will learn to subject technology and industry to design, not the other way around, to give concrete answers. This is all we are going to learn in the workshop by Stefano Mancuso and Raw Edges.

Fine Cut, Raw Edges
Master Beyond Product Elisava
The Toaster Project, Thomas Thwaites
Master Beyond Product Elisava
The Toaster Project, Thomas Thwaites

“I make objects to explore the psychological and social impacts of technology. I often weave my research and making process into a story, told through live performance-lectures, published books, moving image and in exhibitions”, Thomas Thwaites.

There are no boundaries to knowledge and curiosity: we need to understand where we come from, where we are and where we are going. Studying and analysing various concepts and seeing how different fields of study present them will help you acquire a global and critical vision of our (problematic) situation, past, present and future. Thomas Thwaites will cover this topics in his talk during the master.

Master Beyond Product Elisava
100 chairs in 100 days its 100 ways, Martino Gamper

Design comes in many forms. Exploring and working with different disciplines in the workshop by Martino Gamper will develop new systems and methodologies that include cross-sectional knowledge. Interdisciplinary tools are no longer optional: they are the basis of innovative design.

Master Beyond Product Elisava
100 chairs in 100 days its 100 ways, Martino Gamper
Master Beyond Product Elisava
Keenfolks, Guillermo Santomá

With the workshop by Guillermo Santomà & Raquel Quevedo, we will make you wonder what shapes, languages ​​and concepts fit the different representations of any given object. Thus, we will analyse the subjective attributes we attach to it and the impact your particular way of telling it can have on an object.

“A quote, an aphorism, a slogan, the advertising ability to give function to what is built, the tension that exists between the thing and its word. Meaning without functionality, an object becomes an object only when it discovers it is in opposition to something else when it discovers its function: when a chair discovers that it is the same as another chair. Meaning tries to redeem itself from the direct confrontation between thing and thing, between a chair or an image of a chair. In the importance of not being abstract, the perfect object does not allow contemplation. The emergence of need is a possibility to give shape, sculpt, name the thing letting it be represented.”

Master Beyond Product Elisava
Miami Coach, Guillermo Santomá
Master Beyond Product Elisava
Simon, Guillermo Santomá
Master Beyond Product Elisava
Prólogo, Raquel Quevedo
Master Beyond Product Elisava
Money Makes Me Ugly, Raquel Qevedo
Master Beyond Product Elisava
The department of seaweed, Julia Lohmann

You will work on a project, positioning yourself in an alternative and non-existent scenario, whether in the near or distant future, to develop and shape ideas, concepts and realities from things that have not yet happened. We will find the tools to build different realities and shape them, anticipate designs and narratives for the future, foster critical design beyond the consumer and purely functional framework.

The Department of Seaweed (DoS) by Julia Lohmann is a transdisciplinary platform exploring seaweed sustainable resources. It employs an empathic, more than human-centric approach. The DoS works in dialogue with an expanding network of experts from science, design, art, crafts, philosophy, policy and justice. The DoS and its members’ research, network, organise workshops, public events and exhibitions.

Master Beyond Product Elisava
The department of seaweed, Julia Lohmann
Master Beyond Product Elisava
The department of seaweed, Julia Lohmann

Processes and our different approaches will guide this workshop with Lolo & Sosaku; we will merge physical and non-physical crafts to design through new perspectives. There are endless prospects to how we face our creation process; therefore, using digital and analogue potential tools, you will go beyond traditional technologies and dive into hybrid work models. The result will only remain a mystery.

We investigate the possibilities of sculpture as an expanded field. The nexus that unites our work is the quest for an object in contact with its surroundings and with the spectator, an entity that seeks friction and tension, exploring the capacity of creating new meanings. Our work moves between different artistic languages such as sculpture, installation, kinetic art and painting, often incorporating music and sound.

Master Beyond Product Elisava
Lolo & Sosaku at their studio
Master Beyond Product Elisava
Studio Lolo & Sosaku
Master Beyond Product Elisava
Biometric Protection Accessories, DOES Work and Digo Digital
Master Beyond Product Elisava
Biometric Protection Accessories, DOES Work and Digo Digital

We need to learn the tools to understand and detect what is happening around us before these events occur, while they are taking place, and even when they have passed: this is how we will know from where we want to design and the impact that our proposal will have. Detecting evidence and trends helps in the workshop by  Saúl Baeza (DOES Work) lay the groundwork for our creative process. How can we translate all this information, into a formal proposal, into a product?

Master Beyond Product Elisava
Ostrich Pillow Hood, DOES Work
Master Beyond Product Elisava
Ostrich Pillow Hood, DOES Work
TEDx Talk, Philippe Starck

→ Question the present

Designer Philippe Starck, with no pretty slides to show, spends 18 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question “Why design?”. Listen carefully for one perfect mantra for all of us, genius or not.

Master Beyond Product Elisava
La voce del maestro Achille Castiglioni, Eugenio Bettinelli

→ Curiosity

“If you’re not curious, forget about it. If you are not interested in others, what they do and how they behave, then being a designer is not for you,” said Achille Castiglioni, advising his students.

Much has been written and spoken about Achille Castiglioni, the architect and designer, but his work as a teacher is much less known. Yet for more than 20 years, between 1969 and 1993, Castiglioni sought to transmit his passion for design to thousands of students, first at the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Torino, then at the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. With this work, Eugenio Bettinelli explores this aspect of his career, little explored by critics thus far.

Master Beyond Product Elisava
ISPA Manifesto, Nike

→ Resourcefulness: ISPA MANIFESTO

Darryl Matthews assures “Our landscapes are rapidly changing, and so is our mentality – the way we perceive our everyday lives. The art of living is becoming more ad-hoc. We tackle problems at once. We wanted to express this approach by using the materials and components at hand, rather than waiting for the perfect moment or “proper” approach”.

 

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