mdi.fba.up.pt

Context

The Image Design MA springs from its cultural and media surroundings: images are now literacy bytes and production and reproduction mechanisms unfold in complex open-ended playgrounds.

This MA is sustained by the development of applied research projects, driven towards appropriate interventional cultural, social and aesthetic contexts, poured into the development and practice of visual systems. These projects sustain a perennial powerplay with the outside realm and will be developed with national and international partnerships.

The MA will investigate Image in the media and its stance in opposition to different media in an attempt to see it as a crossboundary osmotic vessel. The Image Design course also researches contemporary contexts of creation and jouissance, giving a historical lowdown on reshaping image action playgrounds. Furthermore, we will develop visual language universes focusing and supporting conceptions of reality, socialization, Art and Design.

The student will take on the role of author as the creator of advanced epistemological, aesthetic and imagistic visual communication structures. Similarly, the teacher will be involved in learning and research processes, sharing with the students and other teachers their finds in the classroom and during project development.

Contents

Image Design is structured around the following development guidelines:

• Identifying visual repertoire essential to contemporary culture.
• Creating and interpreting images shaped from spatial and temporal contextualized contexts. Image contextualization as a fundamental process of its impact, symbolic power and pragmatism.
• The analysis of detail and the whole through the image focused on individual and collective output.
• Narrative mechanisms as conceptual and symbolic unveiling processes.
• Mediation as an inquiry into the borderline separating reality and fiction.

These vectors express themselves in the pre, post and ongoing production of analogue and digital based projects, defined by content organization and browsing, visual design and efficiency.

Goals

This MA's main goals are completely hands-on:

• The Image Design MA intends to promote the acknowledgement of Image focused Design in international and national academic, cultural and professional contexts. Even though intimately connected with other Image Design practical elements, the Image Design MA studies Image independently in several operational contexts.
• The Image Design MA wants to contribute crucially towards the growth of visual literacy in widespread cultural and social contexts. In a post-linguistic world it is decisive to develop systematized communicational visual contents.
• The Image Design MA is centred within larger Image reshaping contemporary procedures on a cultural and technological playground. It’s clear that the historically based Image media, technologies and contexts are ever expanding, collapsing and converging. New semantic and structural possibilities must be nurtured through repeated media resource and underframing philosophical updating in an advanced study course contextualization.
• The MA will also keep an inquiring historical viewpoint on Image as a constantly updating process in tandem with the previous worklist. History is defined as a fabric of interpretative and analytical possibilities, enveloping the MAs strategy of contouring innovative structures and shapes of Image focused historical construction, its associated contexts and technologies.
• Upturning the aforementioned standpoints into applied research, the Image Design MA intends to use its projects and research areas as a showcase for their perpetual social, cultural and artistic relevance. The Image Design MA will pinpoint action contexts and stands in an arena of institutional partnerships with which it will engage in development projects in several contexts: media broadcasting contents; exhibits; urban rehabilitation projects; editorial projects; education and literacy programs and others…

Structure

The MA's building blocks for the first year are curricular modules; a research project will fill up the second year (it will be a follow up on the previously developed syllabus or MA courses) with a wrap up thesis.

The project’s subject is its major: there you will find the practical development context for all of 1st year's curricular contents; projects developed in this major will spring out from research and dissertation projects which will be worked on during the course’s 2nd year.

All practical-theoretical subjects will be set up under the following guidelines:

• advanced technological training in all subjects and their demands.
• experimental lab work, whose main goal will be the expansion of all possible playgrounds within subject defined workfields. All 1st year theoretical subjects are extended over one semester. They cement a historical, methodological and conceptual repertoire fuelling projects and thesis.