Designed by Cambridge
An image from Cambridge University’s 2021 ARCSOC summer show (image: The University of Cambridge).
Promising to “merge arts and science”, the University of Cambridge has announced a new undergraduate course in design.
The Design Tripos is the first new undergraduate course launched by the university in a number of years, and has been developed by the Department of Achitecture in collaboration with the Departments of Engineering and Materials Science & Metallurgy.
Billed as “[blending] technical content with design freedom”, the four-year course will begin in October 2024 and feature studio work and practical skills, as well as taught courses in the humanities, social and natural sciences, and maths.
“It’s pioneering – we’re merging the arts and sciences under the umbrella of creativity and design, and constructing the course to be as open and interesting as possible,” said Michael Ramage, director of Cambridge’s Centre for Natural Material Innovation, and deputy head of the university’s Department of Architecture. “We don’t know of any other single degree course that brings these three subjects together like this.”
Whether the course measures up to Ramage’s claims remains to be seen, but the university has set high hopes for it, promising that it “will offer a different kind of creativity, and a new approach to tackling societal and environmental issues, including poverty and climate action.”
Key to this, the university argues, is the interdisciplinary aspect of the Tripos. “Pressing challenges – such as achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and reaching sustainable development for all - are likely to be addressed directly as design challenges, rather than as separate mathematical or engineering challenges,” said Ramage. “They don’t fit into a neat academic box; unlocking creativity requires collaboration and knowledge across a variety of disciplines.”
He continued: “We know there is general interest among students to apply their education to global grand challenges, and particularly sustainability challenges, which can be met through design. But it’s very hard to study across disciplines - there’s no way you can create a degree like this simply by taking classes from those three different departments, which are all in three different Schools at the University. That’s why we’ve had to design the degree from scratch.”
Alongside these hopes for the degree’s content, the university has said that the course will aim to reduce gender imbalance on its courses. In the past three years, fewer than 40 per cent of applications to Engineering and Physical Sciences at the university have been from female students.
Varsity also reports that the university aims to use the course to grow student intake to its Department of Architecture, which reported a 35 per cent increase in applicants for last year.
While the course’s scope seems to place a heavy onus on the discipline – is achieving net zero really a design challenge? – its willingness to roll engineering, material science and mathematics into the field does feel exciting and welcome. The sustained excellence of the 40-year-old Innovation Design Engineering MA/MSc, jointly run by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, clearly shows that this approach has legs.
Story source: The University of Cambridge