180 university credits

Product design is the principle subject in this programme which also includes design-related subjects. For us, the product is always in relation to the person and the body, as well as to the environment and to spatiality. Our students create objects and spaces that should be experienced, used and communicated, and that should act in contexts with a large number of different circumstances.

Teaching is focused on design and its practical methodology. By combining theory and practice students are challenged and are helped to develop a critical, reflective approach with a high degree of concern for current problems in the world.

The three years of the BA programme consist of courses that are frequently project-based in the form of lectures, seminars, tutorials, practical lessons and study visits. By combining artistic methodologies, modern and traditional techniques and an experimental approach, understanding and praxis are interwoven into knowledge that can be used in practical applications.

Some students are more visual and artistic while others have a more practical approach; and a third group has a more theoretical bias. We seek to promote, challenge and encourage students with their individual differences and abilities so that they graduate as reflective, committed and professional designers. The programme is characterized by its openness to ideas and its sensitivity which paves the way for new ideas and new forms that suggest what design may be in the future. Examples of how design can pose questions, challenge, influence and develop our world can be seen in this year’s graduation projects.

Margot Barolo
Programme Director

180 university credits

The Fashion programme at Beckmans College of Design combines theory and practice supervised by professional designers who are among the leading names in the field. Just as with the college’s other programmes students have the opportunity to meet many guest lecturers. These may be specialists in everything from experimental draping methodology or design focused on ”zero waste” (sustainability), to branding strategies and working with plumage/feathers.

What is most important in achieving a successful result on the part of our students is their own ambition and their desire to make the most of their studies. Thirst for knowledge as well as not being afraid of challenging oneself are important motivations. The ability to enjoy not just one’s own achievements but also those of one’s fellow students is also important in the progress from student to professional fashion designer.

Right from the start, students at the Fashion programme learn to relate to how the fashion world actually works. Accordingly, students present their graduation projects in line with the fashion world’s so called system in the form of a catwalk show to which the press and the public are invited. At the graduation exhibition the public will encounter a documentation of the catwalk show in just the same way that the fashion world communicates.

After achieving their BA many students continue their training elsewhere and Beckmans College of Design is proud of all the graduate students who are accepted for MA courses at prestigious institutions abroad. Many students receive immediate job offers and both Swedish and foreign head-hunters seek to engage our future graduates. Their new workplace can just as well be the Swedish brand Whyred as Christian Dior in Paris.

Pär Engsheden
Programme Director

180 university credits

Students attending Beckmans programme for Visual Communication gain expertise with the help of artistic, conceptual and technical exercises. Working with individual assignments they develop their own language of design while collaborative tasks foster a professional approach to other parties. Collaboration can take place within the class, between programmes at Beckmans and with external collaborators in the form of guest lecturers and assignments.

The students’ graduation show is the most free-ranging of the courses. Students select a subject to work with for eighteen weeks – a task that demands courage, imagination and discipline. In this year’s exhibition we encounter several studies that, taken together, show what students of the Visual Communication programme wish to contribute to their subject field.

Having completed the BA programme, some students continue studying for an MA, some begin to work as freelancers, while others are taken on by design or advertising agencies. Successful study at Beckmans enables graduates to work in the borderland between artistic and commercial operations as well as exclusively in either of these fields. Whatever they choose to do we want to ensure that they have a solid foundation for their professional life and that they can survive in an uncertain future. We hope that their openness to new issues, as well as to methods and techniques, that so enrich life at Beckmans, are something that they will take with them in their professional careers.

By claiming that our students have something to offer to the profession and are not just concerned to conform to the current situation, we hope that the design field in which they work will become even more multidimensional and stimulating.

Samira Bouabana
Programme Director