Modules available for academic year 2026/27 - SECOND YEAR MODULES ONLY
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 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 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.
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.
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.
* 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.
