Global Challenges + Sustainable Developments: Study Profile

In Spring 2021, the Angewandte in cooperation with Tongji University Shanghai launches its new joint master’s programme in “Global Challenges + Sustainable Developments” as a double degree master’s.
The degree programme provides an international group of students with the essential knowledge and competences to tackle the Grand Global Challenges. Students are trained in skills and abilities that support them in “provoking the system” by combining artistic methods, creative strategies, and design-thinking concepts, with a deeper understanding of societal issues and challenges. They obtain the competences to critically reflect and consider the global impacts of economic and political changes, a particular focus will bet set on China and its international relations.

• Inter- and transcultural collaboration
• Envisioning change + applying innovative strategies
• Radical interventions
• Applying artistic strategies
• Managing cross-disciplinary projects

The programme has a workload of 150 ECTS, which equals a minimum period of studies of five semesters. Students will be able to spend two semesters at the internationally renowned College of Design and Innovation (D&I) at Tongji University Shanghai. In the run of the programme students from both universities meet during two semesters, once in Vienna and once in Shanghai. Students initially enrolled by Angewandte will acquire 60 ECTS at Tongji University in Shanghai.

The master thesis consists of the development and the realisation of an inter-, cross-, or transdisciplinary research project in a chosen study field using artistic as well as scientific strategies, contextualized in one of the five study fields.

Our core teaching team is made up of internationally practicing and publishing artists, designers, and theorists, and is supported by an extensive guest programme of experts from various scientific and societal fields. We are a small department and place value in the peer-learning and intensive group work that this proximity can engender.

Graduates are trained to work as cultural mediators and designers of communication and work processes between diverse disciplinary fields and art, between non-academic and academic groups, as well as organizations based in China and in several European and non-European countries. They will work as experts in transformative innovation processes as well as transcultural translators in cross-disciplinary projects between China and specific European and non-European countries.

Students will acquire

• abilities to discover and investigate topics connected to the grand global challenges profoundly and to make it fully accessible for their  own strategic purpose;
• profound theoretical and practical skills in applying artistic, design, and aesthetic strategies in various kinds of collaboration with diverse societal players;
• inter- and transcultural knowledge, experience, and competences in regard to the cultural, political and societal differences and common grounds of the two contexts and two universities based in Vienna, Austria/Europe and Shanghai, China/Asia;
• advanced competencies to acquire and develop adaptivity for change, creative competence, social and emotional intelligence, societal responsibility, and inter- and cross-disciplinary knowledge for strategic planning and communication.