MA Service Design

Course summary:

This is a unique transdisciplinary course that allows you to develop and apply service design to a broad range of societal and business challenges.

About this course:

By exploring design at a strategic level, MA Service Design offers the opportunity to work collaboratively with experts from different fields. You will learn service design research methods and processes, offering opportunities for user-centred and co-designed innovation. The course has a commitment to ethical practices of design, focussing on socially responsive design approaches applied to "wicked problems", for example within healthcare, public services, local government, and policy environments. The course has a particular focus on start-up entrepreneurship, global future trends and addresses futures and emerging technologies critically.

Anyone Interested.

Course details:

The course is structured to develop strategic and creative expertise within the design and delivery of innovative service experiences. You'll be encouraged to undertake projects that will tackle many of the social, corporate and environmental challenges facing the 21st century.

From the very beginning of the course, you'll work collaboratively in a wide variety of contexts, through research and co-design strategies.

You'll gain the confidence to engage with stakeholders and learn how to analyse and apply the results of this engagement through meaningful interventions. Course projects can be as diverse as conceiving services to mitigate the digital divide of senior citizens in a London borough, improving the employee experience of a major retailer, through to realising an innovative business proposition for a start-up. Student's Major Projects have ranged widely in terms of subject and geographical location. Recent examples include redesigning educational systems in India, creating games to facilitate conversations between relatives of transgendered people, to designing digital services for refugee camp volunteers in Greece. MA Service Design is aimed at applicants from a design discipline who wish to broaden their understanding of innovation and design as a collaborative interdisciplinary process. The course is also open to students with backgrounds in social sciences, business and innovation and other related fields. The teaching staff are active researchers and practitioners in different areas of design and innovation, and this feeds directly into the teaching as well as the projects students engage with.

Practice and theory are both embedded into everything that you'll do, so each practice-based project will have underpinning theory, and each theory-based assignment will have an element of practice or research-through-design. Your lessons will take the forms of lectures, practical workshops, tutorial sessions, presentations and pitches, industry talks, museum visits and technical sessions.

Fees & Funding:

Home/EU fee

University of the Arts London (UAL) is Europe’s largest specialist art and design university. Its unique creative community is made up of six renowned Colleges, each with its own world-class reputation: Camberwell College of Arts, Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Arts, London College of Communication, London College of Fashion and Wimbledon College of Arts.

UAL is the world’s sixth best University for Art and Design in the QS World University Rankings 2018. Offering an extensive range of courses in art, design, fashion, communication and performing arts, UAL is the main talent pipeline to the UK’s creative industries.

Home to a diverse community of over 18,000 students from 129 countries, UAL has a track record for launching and furthering careers. Our graduates can be found in every part and at every level of the creative and cultural sectors, from heads of global business to self-employed practitioners, and on shortlists for awards ranging from the Turner Prize to the Oscars.

Building on UAL’s association with some of the most original thinkers in the arts, students and staff are inspired to challenge convention, generate new ideas and nurture talent. Home to award-winning staff and students for more than a century, UAL’s Colleges are at the forefront of learning, creativity and practice in their specialist subjects. This close-knit College structure offers opportunities for learning and enquiry for people at all stages of their creative development.