IED – Istituto Europeo di Design Madrid
About
We can remember the Spanish domination over Milan, lasted almost two centuries, and that in southern Italy. In a way, the decision that Spain would be the first country outside Italy to host IED campuses came quite naturally.
Introduction
Innovative professionals for the urban and domestic habitat.
Centuries of shared influences have marked the historical and cultural relations between Italy and Spain. We can remember the Spanish domination over Milan, which lasted almost two centuries, and that in southern Italy. In a way, the decision that Spain would be the first country outside Italy to host IED campuses came quite naturally.
In this city, one of the most important in the world and a crossroads of European and Latin American cultures, IED develops its teaching in design in its traditional areas (Design, Fashion, the Visual Arts and Communication), while also implementing innovative areas to train professionals capable of designing interactions, services, and systems that put the focus on the individual. These are professionals who are conscious of contemporary issues able to design according to environmental, ethical-social, economic, and political requirements.
Design
For years, our students have been distinguishing themselves professionally, nourishing both the Made in Italy phenomenon and production in their countries of origin with their creativity and competence.
IED Design is the school’s concrete and complete response to the countless and diversified requirements of the professional design community.
These days, design is a crucial constituent in every area of production, contributing contents, lexica, codes of expression and of form, and technical and functional aspects. Street furnishings, fashion accessories, automobiles, and IT hardware are just some of the fields where appreciation of the value of design has shot up in recent years.
The designer is by definition an innovator of forms and functions, an interpreter and at the same time a precursor of emerging aesthetic lines and of contemporary functional requirements. The courses at IED Design are tailored to develop these gifts, while at the same time favoring the acquisition of extensive technical and design skills in the course of workshops and numerous active partnerships with leading industrial concerns.
Fashion
90,000 firms and 800,000 jobs are the vital statistics of the Italian fashion system. If we relate them per capita to the country's population, they translate into a world supremacy in terms of quality, quantity, and economic impact.
IED Fashion is a complete, exhaustive response to the increasingly diversified and specialized training requirements expressed by the fashion system.
A complete school in its own right, based on the principle of cross-fertilization and the completeness of its teaching methods which, in line with IED philosophy, combines knowledge with know-how, theory with practice.
Fundamental to this approach is the school’s relationship with the entrepreneurs and professionals working in the Italian fashion business, the world’s largest concentration of clothing industrialists and creatives. The people who work in this industry have achieved success and international renown as a result of the fashion system’s ability to blend an entrepreneurial spirit with creativity and perception of innovation.
IED Fashion points the way for its students to live and feel this sense of fashion, in an embracing whole and in its individual parts, as an interaction between different perspectives and a combination of diverse professional skills. As the courses aim at training the professional profiles vital to the industry, these range from the more purely creative to the strategic areas, from organizational to commercial aspects, from marketing to image and communications work.
Visual Arts
The images and sounds, that are engrained in our lives convey values and meanings pertaining to very different areas of the production system, such as fashion, product design, all the different areas of industrial production where it is applied, and culture and politics.
IED Visual Arts are the creative lab where one can learn about the instruments, the specific language and expressions, new techniques, and the technology needed in order to develop a visual communications project.
We live in a world where images and sounds pervade our daily existence and are the primary vehicles we use to transmit values and significance of our ideas and products, which between them are so diverse, such as fashion, design, different types of industrial production, and advertising; but also cultural, political and social fields.
The way a concept or project is ‘presented’ is no longer considered just an accessory. It determines and contributes significantly to the success of the communication of a message.
Knowing how to operate in this environment with professionalism and competence means you possess an eclectic and varied cultural background, based on a deep understanding of both the social-cultural aspects of the situation, as well as the new information technologies which are continually changing the role of the images and sounds of communication itself.
Today, one designs and produces within the system of multimedia, but multimedia must be considered from two points of view; the impulsive and constant changing of digital technology, and at the same time, the coexistence of other types of media that require other skills and creative competencies.
The courses offered in IED Visual Arts are a source of continuing pride and make this school unique in the panorama of Italian educational programs. The continuous technological updates which students have access to, following a long and historic tradition, make this school a research laboratory where one can experiment in order to develop higher creative skills, both in relation to the contents of the program, as well as the language, thereby helping to form and qualify its students and prepare them for the job market of today.
Communication
Italian excellence in design and in noble craftsmanship will require more and more entrepreneurs and managers with a proactive stance towards local production
IED Communication is the first IED platform dedicated to training in the management of creativity in business processes.
It proposes an alternative model to the traditional schools of economics, commercial studies, and communication, concentrating mainly on the needs of creativity and artistic sensibilities which Italy is so famous for throughout the world.
IED Communication area proposes management training in which “design thinking” is the prevalent theme. This creative approach, typical in the world of design, conditions the management and financial aspects of all businesses and which are a natural part of any business study experience.
The objective of the school is to train a manager who will be capable of promoting and managing, as a part of the management team in a creative or more traditional company, the development process of new products and services, taking a leading strategic role. In this sense, this path of study represents an evolution in the traditional figure of a design manager, which aims to broaden his competence in terms of strategy, services, management, and marketing.
All of the courses offered by the IED Communication area are strongly attuned to the themes of sustainable development, both from an environmental as well as a social point of view: the courses are designed with the theme of sustainability present in every aspect of the educational process, so that aside from having in common just the principles of what is right and necessary, it actually constitutes an integral part of the total identity of the IED Communication Area.