Postgraduate Certificate in IDS

Interdisciplinary Design Strategy Postgraduate Certificate

The Institute without Boundaries (IwB) has a nine-month intensive postgraduate certificate program called Interdisciplinary Design Strategy (IDS) offered through the School of Design, at George Brown College in Toronto. The program teaches design strategy, research, and collaboration to students from diverse professional and academic backgrounds.

In the IDS program, students and faculty collaborate with a partner organization to understand and tackle real-world challenges. Guided by the demands of a major project partner, students learn skills, conduct research, create comprehensive proposals and present their work to stakeholders and the public. The IDS program runs in tandem with the IwB’s research, special projects, and consulting work thereby giving students and partnering organizations the opportunity to learn from one another.

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Students experience the demands of a real project and develop the intellectual and creative rigour required to tackle it.

Teaching & Learning Methodology

The IDS program changes theme from year to year, paralleling the arc of the Institute’s major research concerns. Our curriculum is composed of core courses, modules, research trips, and hands-on work with our partners. The curriculum is tailored to the students’ learning needs, the major project research objectives, and the partner organization’s goals.

The Institute has pioneered a graduate-level curriculum using a design-based education model that fosters learning across disciplines, integrating specialized knowledge, and breaking down geographic, cultural, and social barriers.

Throughout the semester, students engage in a process of research, analysis, conceptualization, proposition, visualization, experimentation, testing, revision, and presentation of their ideas and projects. The Institute also hosts lectures, seminars, workshops, and intensive learning sessions from industry leaders. This process combines apprenticeship with classroom and studio-based education, forming a unique pedagogical approach.

The IDS program is very demanding and provides a myriad of critical thinking and hard skills. Graduates of the IDS program receive a postgraduate certificate in Interdisciplinary Design Strategy. The IwB’s design education prepares students for a variety of jobs at a strategic level across industries, in the private, public, and not for profit sectors. Our graduates can also be found in top design offices internationally.

Curriculum

After completing the Regional Ecologies Project, a five-year research plan to examine complex networks and interconnected systems of innovation that define our regions, the IwB is shifting its research focus to the future. Future Ways of Living will investigate the emerging economic, environmental, technological, societal, and cultural forces shaping society and their impact on human experiences of affordability. As basic human needs become increasingly expensive in major urban centres around the world, this is an opportunity to use design as a method to understand and direct these emerging forces to imagine more affordable futures—redefining and designing affordability in the context of the 21st century

Future Ways of Living

As we transition to the 21st century, global forces such as geopolitical fragility, mass migration, income inequality, rapid urbanization, economic restructuring, precarious employment, global warming, and exponential technological innovation are challenging our existing societal constructs and transforming the ways we live. This can have both positive and negative impacts on our human experiences, and as designers, we often react to these forces rather than anticipate them to achieve our collective aspirations.

Future Ways of Living is both a research method and a call to action developed to foster anticipatory design. As a research method, it aims to investigate and visualize the past and present forces shaping society, which inform an understanding of potential futures. As a call to action, it challenges us to imagine and create what ought to be, rather than what exists. This approach encourages the development of tangible design outcomes that can contribute to more responsible, humane, sustainable, democratic, and resilient futures.

We have an exciting year ahead. Stay tuned for our project work! 

For more information, visit the GBC G414 program page or contact us.

To apply to the IwB, please click here.

In addition to the academic division, the IwB also has a special projects division.

To find out more about the IwB please visit our FAQ or contact us.