About the programme

As Academy students from this master’s programme, you will graduate as a Master of Arts in Design or Architecture, depending on whether you preceding bachelor’s degree is in Design or Architecture, with specific focus on prospective challenges and opportunities in a changing society.    

As designers and architects, you can translate concepts such as circularity, sustainability, innovation or user understanding into concrete and tactile design and architecture proposals, that can help create actual change. Tackling ‘wicked’ problems that arise from complex challenges requires one to be able to work across disciplines. 

This is why the entire programme is structured around project-based modules where you get to work with actual companies and organisations and real-world challenges, in collaboration with students of social science from Copenhagen Business School (CBS). 

Collaborative projects are undertaken in groups of students from both the Royal Danish Academy and Copenhagen Business School, divided according to the profiles of the design and architecture students. The programme is specifically directed at facilitating the exchange of knowledge between design, architecture and management into fruitful and constructive meetings through design thinking methods for innovation and entrepreneurship. With a point of departure in your professional field as a design or architecture student you will gain experience working within an interdisciplinary environment.

We place great importance on explorative ideation and the development of concrete material strategies and proposals, while at the same time honing ones written analysis, theoretical knowledge and dissemination. 

For Academy students, all project work is supervised by studio teachers within their specific branch of design and architecture. 

Students are encouraged to spend time in the studios at Campus, engage actively in each other’s projects and learning, and contribute to an inclusive, tolerant, and ambitious study environment. 

Over the course of the four semesters, you will obtain knowledge about business models and organisational strategies based upon tools from design thinking such as user- and stakeholder facilitation, design processes for innovation, user-inclusive approaches to design, as well as design approaches for sustainability in the broadest understanding of the word. 

This way you will learn how to position your own project work strategically through working actively together with business- and management students with approaches such as stakeholder involvement, funding, future scenario testing and communication through design and architecture. You will learn how to explain your design process and interact in cross-disciplinary collaborations with knowledge and awareness of your own role and competences as a designer or architect.