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Objectives
Why study Design in the Universidad de los Andes?
The Uniandes designer is a manager, an innovative person, someone with the capacity to understand, change and modify reality approaching it as a strategy.
Our designer gas a number of possibilities rather than limits. He is a paradigm breaker, a creator. He is always in the forefront.
Teaching design is based on recognizing the autonomy of the designer-to-be as source of creative talent and self-construction. Besides learning to arrange, compose and specify objects or messages, the student finds out something to disseminate: a timely and interesting discourse addressed to an active and intelligent audience. It is about awakening an original, unique voice along with a competent technique.
In our program, the student plays a leading role in his/her learning process, adopting responsible decisions and arguments. The professor, with his experience and expertise in the field, promotes autonomy and guides the process within the learning environment.
Students can direct their studies to the concentration on products or for communication. Our syllabus offers a high percentage of elective courses (48%), thus allowing students to prepare a map of their professional interests and adjust it with courses of other programs within a multidisciplinary framework.
Competences developed by the program
Instrumental competences: the program develops competences aimed at integrating physical and sensory skills to typical design activities for proper use of space, matter and image focused on representing ideas. It deals with understanding the relation between individuals and their environment.
Cognitive competences: the program elaborates on competences associated with the areas of knowledge. It strives to take advantage of the learning, thinking, behavioral and experience capabilities so that students articulate their knowledge with information processing strategies and ease their processes of perception, description and classification indispensable to understand and explain the reality.
Other cognitive competences: the program develops those competences needed to apply knowledge in out-of-class contexts. The objective is to provide students with the tools to interpret, argue and propose design actions that reveal their suitability and independence to determine crucial elements, make scientific critics, generate and apply new knowledge, etc. It develops procedures involving various processes of innovation, discovery and questioning.
Integrating competences: the program develops the competences that our students need to show their talent and values as responsible professionals and citizens. It fosters fundamental behaviors to assume personal and social commitments, interact with the working environment, develop teamwork skills and share knowledge with others, provide a self-assessment of processes and results, be responsible for their actions, boost changes and transform reality with ethics and creativity.
Study Plan
Our syllabus consist of a 4-year (8 semesters) undergraduate program. The first year of preparation is intended to provide students with the fundamentals of Design. The second year corresponds to the concentration where students are able to choose between one or two concentrations, and the last two years are devoted to the advance courses of the concentration.
Compulsory courses of the concentration of product
Product 1, product 2, product 3 and product 4, to be studied preferably during the second and third years (concentration cycle).
Product Design is studied from four different and complementary dimensions: Experience, culture, development and strategy.
Compulsory courses of the design concentration for communication
Communication 1, communication 2, communication 3 and communication 4, to be studied preferably during the second and third years (concentration cycle).
Design for Communication builds the concepts from four perspectives: Sensory, narrative, performative and interactive.
If the students are pursuing double concentration, they must study the aforementioned courses (Product 1, 2, 3 and 4, Communication 1, 2, 3 and 4, 4 Elective Courses of Communication and 4 Elective Courses of Product), which implies approximately one additional semester (18 credits).
For this cycle, the Study Plan also offers a broad range of courses on traditional and new means adapted to the student career preference, who may choose the means to deepen on one of the concentrations or choose a diverse set of means that offer a holistic vision.
The basic means are courses focused on providing flexible tools to sketch and create prototypes. These courses are offered during the first year (basic cycle), and have proven to be useful to face design challenges and problems in the future.
The means, simply said, are courses offered during the second and third year (concentration cycle) and are specialized on one subject. Each mean is studied separately and students are taught to design for it, from the conception stage until the specification and production of final pieces.
Media Courses to be pursued
These courses are also valid for any of the two concentrations. However, it is important to resort to the counselor in order to establish the adequate path for each student professional project and individual compte.
Students must enroll in two Basic Media courses (6 credits), usually in the First Semester. Two courses of Basic Means B, in the Second Semester. Several courses are available and students may choose any course depending on their abilities. There is no problem if later on they wish to complement their education with an additional basic media course.
Students must enroll in two Media A courses (6 credits), which introduce the basic design and the morphology of each media, focusing on several dimensions and incorporating technique principles, effects on human factor and history, two courses (6 credits) of Media B (focused on solving design problems related to the specific media to provide technology elements, effects on human experience, state of the art and design trends.) and an elective media course (3 credits), which lead to the 6th Study of the Study Plan where the resulting project demands the appropriate maturity of the productive organizations or the media chosen by the student.
The program requires a minimum of 27 credits or 9 courses in the subject of media, but students are encouraged to further concentrate on more courses.
The list is extensive and it is changed according to the demand and availability of themes.
Cycle of Advance Studies, semesters 7 and 8
It is aimed at allow ing the students to integrate contents, methodologies, research techniques and media in the corresponding concentration(s) to propose a graduation project. In this cycle, students are assigned functions typical of the professional design practice; in Study 7, students take over the role of the designer in a working team to prepare a highly complex project about important issues. In Study 8, students decide the topic of a design project within their concentration. To finish the cycle, students present a Graduation Project that identifies a design opportunity, proposes a problem autonomously and addresses it with a holistic, comprehensive approach by defining how such perspective adds value and shapes reality.
Disciplines of the Study Plan
The disciplines correspond to the set of courses with a function within the syllabus. The curriculum of the Design Program consists of three disciplines: Studies, Means, and Concentration.
Studies
The study is a space for reflection, discussion, testing and application of knowledge to design; its main objective is to promote autonomy, creativity, and teamwork under the guidance of a professor. The core activity is based on developing a project that determines what to design and how to do it properly.
The study of design is the program's backbone.
Means
Means refer to the raw material for designers, where they can express their ideas and sensitivity. A designer is able to use the means when these are understood from human, historical and technical perspectives. The program offers a wide range of courses that approach not only the traditional means but also the modern ones.
Concentration
Concentration courses provide theoretical and conceptual elements to approach project development (in the disciplines of study) and ellaborates on how to take ownership of and create a given mean (in the disciplines of means).
The program offers two complementary paths to address design; the student may choose one or both of them; this selection will be made as of the Third Semester, just by enrolling in the corresponding courses (the adviser will guide you through this decision)
Concentration in Design for Communication
It addresses the communication process as an act of Design and the message as the output. Hence, images, moving images, graphs, information, interaction, experience and environment are designed and turned into story-telling products that establish relations between the people and their background.
Concentration in Product Design
It represents the basis of the knowledge necessary to face experiences and design for different meansin a responsible, crticial manner.
It promotes sensitivity and competences to define the identity and configuration of products and services, their components, functions and relations with people and their background.
It adopts the physical and aesthetic experiences integrated to the product's added value in face of society, thus, integrating each element designed to more complex systems such as industrial, technological, economic, social, envrironmental and cultural.
Model Program
First Semester
Second Semester
Model Program: Design for Communication Emphasis
Third Semester
Fourth Semester
Fifth Semester
Sixth Semester
Programa Modelo: Ciclo de Estudios Avanzados: Énfasis en Diseño Para la Comunicación
Seventh Semester
Eighth Semester
Model Program: Product Design Emphasis
Third Semester
Fourth Semester
Fifth Semester
Sixth Semester
Model Program: Advanced Studies Product Design Emphasis
Seventh Semester
Eighth Semester
Alumni Profile
The Department of Design of Universidad de los Andes is an academic venue of excellence. Its students are educated to become professionals with leadership, creative capacity and innovative attitude.
Alumnae can approach reality in a critical and flexible manner from different design dimensions, in which new knowledge and environment opportunities are integrated and translate into concrete answers.
Uniandino designers are offered an increasing number of possibilities in this changing world. This allows them to build their own profile and direct their professional practice towards conducting investigastions, developing new products, services, experiences and generating strategies in the area of design and art direction.
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