Our modules are a popular optional choice for students from other departments. At the University of Warwick, Design Studies offers modules that cover all spheres of design. This means that you have the opportunity to undertake an experiential learning journey exploring complex areas of design whilst defining your own specialism by testing various paradigms of scholarship and practice.
Please complete our Optional Module Interest Form to register your interest
Our first year modules are designed to introduce students to a broad array of design disciplines. Taking these modules gives students an opportunity to experiment as they gain a broad understanding of design disciplines.
Design in Context provides an introduction to the conceptual and socio-political context of design through an exploration of tangible things such as objects and architecture, alongside immaterial assets like apps and organisational systems. Structured in a way that partners a chronological framework with a thematic approach, it takes examples from across the globe to investigate the twin legacies of both Modernism and Postmodernism. This module forms a useful foundation for those keen to develop an academic grounding in design theory.
Intro to Design Practice allows you to explore and investigate design from holistic and reductionist perspectives and the diverse forms of thinking and making in design. Design is introduced as an inter /trans/ multi-disciplinary endeavour through considerations of personal practice and methodologies, social, and life-centred design. Through a journey of unlearning, experimenting, play, and curiosity you will consider design practices from the artefact to the system level. You will explore how design has impacted the world, solved, and created problems.
From education, health and social care, banking, or local government, the demand for ethical and considered design is at an all-time high. This module will introduce you to UX with the distinct yet overlapping disciplines of Service & UX Design through a live design brief. You will conceptually and visually explore the social paradigm of designing and how to navigate the needs of diverse groups who might have been at a mismatch in current systems. Delivered in a studio environment, you will be developing and proposing UX digital or hybrid solutions to a service problem.
Visual Practice & Curiosity blends theory and hands-on experimentation as students cultivate their own visual identities. This is a module of uninhibited exploration, which asks students to delve deep into the essence of their distinctive personal narrative. From design principles, to storytelling, and making practices, students will develop their understanding and capabilities in visual communication, research, and proposal. This studio-based module provides a base for future changemaking and is useful to those who want a space to reflect on their own positionality
There is an enormous responsibility on designers to gain a better understanding and relationships with eco-system around us in order to engage with new design ecologies and regenerative practices which foster a culture of repair and replenishment. This module will take you on a journey of regeneration by exploring methods and approaches in sustainable architecture, life-centred product and UX design, visual communication for change, alongside other disciplines through intricate practice-led design briefs.
Year Two
Our second year modules expose students to different areas of design. These modules provide the ideal testing ground for students to explore and reflect on the values that guide them and the topics that interest them.
This module will engage students in the processes and methods of Systemic Design. From Systems Thinking to Practice, this module will prepare students for the processes of dealing with complexity as an aspiring designer. As a basis for sustainable innovation, this module will introduce students to systemic practice towards understanding how to research a system and its models, how to read and scope a system, how to map and synthesise it and scope design interventions in multiple areas of leverage towards systems change.
This module fosters students' development in becoming designerly agents for change through engagement with their local and regional communities. Social Design understands design as an ethically driven philosophy seeking to make improvements to the lived experiences of people, communities, and the environment.
Social Design is a joint module run between Warwick's Design Studies Department and the Warwick Institute of Engagement. The module is about working with and for a local community towards sustainable innovation.
Materials are foundational to our very existence, in how we exist, perceive ourselves and others, our environments, our histories and our futures.
This module explores approaches to materials through a transdisciplinary lens and an international perspective. It combines theoretical and practical approaches that call on both the sciences and the humanities to consider and interact with materials. Students will be able to pursue a diverse series of routes assessing the lives of materials through their qualities and transformations.
This module is a deep dive into world building and a holistic practice-led enquiry into how society and its systems are designed. In this 10-week journey students will be researching, analysing and designing their own future city. From culture to political systems, to policies and regulation, to services and infrastructure, students will be developing their understanding of how the world around us is designed and constructed and how much of a role design plays in the totality of life in the social, natural and built environments.
You can read through the full module outline here.
Spatial Agency provides designers with new ways of looking at the production of space and acting with agency for social good. It seeks to shift the design of the built environment away from disciplinary siloes and the patronage of clients, towards a more communitarian paradigm, built on the development of generic design skills.
Weekly activities seek to engage students with the ways that spaces can be understood, building practical skills and thus how spatial agency can be enacted. The aim is to act with transformative intent in a collaborative manner with and on behalf of communities.
* Please note: Module availability and staffing may change year on year depending on availability and other operational factors. The School for Cross-faculty Studies makes no guarantee that any modules will be offered in a particular year, or that they will necessarily be taught by the staff listed on these pages.
