What is Project Design?

In our society today, we are confronted with social agendas such as declining birthrate, aging population, energy issues, issues of public health, and conflicts. All of which we do not have a definitive answer. What we need is creativity and visionary mind to generate ideas and projects anew in order to respond to unprecedented social challenges. Through the process of Project Design we invent visionary concepts, formulate and conceptualize ideas that are innovative in answering global problems.

Project Design is a creative process to envision and in creating a feasible concrete project plan of what we desire to realize in the society. It is a cycle of processes to generate ideas, to conceptualize the ideal project, develop a feasible plan to achieve what we envision, to deliver and to realize the innovative framework we designed.

We believe that by repeating the processes above it is possible to design, and create feasible projects that can make a difference in our society.

In the world that is constantly changing, we are expected to invent transforming ideas that can shift existing paradigms. What we are aiming to do is to find ideas and concepts that can provide a possible solution to a problem, and to actualize the ideas we invented into real life. The Master of Project Design program helps to realize innovative ideas we envision for our desired future. The scope in which MPD aims to cover is broad and extensive; to identify the essence and the principles that underpin social phenomena, to question the fundamentals of the problems we are encountering, to repeatedly conduct field research and enhance discussions, to create an integrated project plan, and make a presentation of the project plan in front of the stakeholders. By repeating these steps in a cycle, it is possible to realize a feasible project plan that can transform existing paradigms and bring innovation to our societies.

The goal of MBAs is to train management skills to potential directors and managers, while the purpose of MPD is to train those who can take up the role as social entrepreneurs, who envision long-term benefits of the society by generating new industries of the future, and in creating innovative social frameworks that can solve core agendas in our society.

Many of the problems we are faced in the world today have no definitive solutions. Similarly, there are no definitive answers to judge if the project aimed to solve global problems is right or wrong. What we need is a project design that has the power to realize what we envision, and in making others engage in the process.

What makes MPD different from MBA is the emphasis on ‘creativity’ and ‘being creative’ on top of the management skills and methods taught at MBA. Courses of MPD enables students to acquire skills required to develop innovative ideas, or the ‘seeds’ of new projects to discover the latent needs and wants in our society in addition to the knowledge, and methods of business management equivalent to the courses offered at MBA.

The courses taught at MPD will introduce skills to help students conceive creative ideas, to generate the idea into a feasible plan, in communicating and disseminating the ideas to our society. Students will be taught the skills needed to nurture and cultivate the ‘seeds’ of creative ideas that will enhance design thinking, and in actualizing the concepts to a project plan. Putting the emphasis into developing a ‘creative mind’ is not yet the mainstream of the existing educational system, where studies on business management learn from past case studies. The uniqueness of MPD lies in our vision to value human senses, emotions, inspirations and aspirations in addition to theories derived from case studies.