Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM), Basel Academy of Art and Design

The Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) is organized around two spaces and communities – HyperWerk and Critical Media Lab – and houses the Bachelor programme Process Design, the Master programme Transversal Design, and the PhD programme Make/Sense.

HyperWerk is a space of possibility for new and unexpected forms of design, and a matrix for transdisciplinary project work by and with students, staff, and the public. It provides a connective structure for the BA program Process Design and acts as a seismograph for the sometimes still weak signals of social change. HyperWerk is a learning laboratory that reacts to current developments with flexible experimental arrangements and seeks to experimentally unsettle its own methods.

The Critical Media Lab is a community, a space and a platform for research and practice at the intersections of design, media, art, and technology. We combine perspectives and methods from humanities scholarship and scientific research with art and design and focus on practice-based research. The lab provides discursive, community and physical support for scholarly exchange, critical publishing, and experimental pedagogies.

At the IXDM Institute scientific and design-related and artistic methods and modes of presentation become intertwined in innovative ways. Design, research and knowledge generation are understood as discourses and practices that mutually define one another. For this reason the IXDM-based projects join up basic design and media research with the practice of design and media in specific usage contexts. We rely on a combination of historical and ethnographic methods with design-related approaches such as design-prototyping, data visualization, sonification and speculative design to better understand past and current events and to reflect on future developments.

Current research projects are focused on superordinate topics such as the conception of experimental knowledge, creativity cultures, design and media critique, and material epistemologies. The projects conducted at IXDM not only promote the innovative development of new questions and insights but also contribute to the experimental advancement of new methods and forms of interdisciplinary research. The IXDM research group’s wide range of competence and expertise ensures that these targets can be met.