What if you could actually learn something new about a subject you care about, not skim it, actually learn it, without signing up for another full degree?
Courses don't have to be the slow, bloated kind. A sharp, specific question can do more in twenty-five hours than a semester-long survey ever will.
That's the bet behind micro-credentials: short, focused courses that sit alongside a degree rather than replacing it, each built around a single sharp question instead of a broad survey. Six of them now exist, each anchored to a different piece of the green transition, and each aimed at a different blind spot design education keeps leaving unaddressed.
Back to First Principles
The introductory course exists because "sustainability" and "New European Bauhaus" get used constantly in design conversations without much agreement on what they actually mean. It walks through the Bauhaus movement's core idea, that function and simplicity aren't opposed to beauty; they're part of it and builds from there into what sustainable design principles look like in practice. Think of it as the shared vocabulary the other five courses assume you already have.
Class Without Walls
Where does design learning happen when it isn't happening in a studio? This course looks at digital and alternative learning spaces through a New European Bauhaus lens, treating online platforms, virtual crits, and hybrid classrooms not as a lesser substitute for the physical room but as spaces with their own logic worth designing well. A student in Vilnius and a mentor in Palermo working through the same brief in real time is the kind of exchange this format makes possible.
Clothes That Come Back
Fashion is one of the most material-intensive industries there is, and most design students never get formal training in what happens to a garment after it's sold. This course works through circular economy principles as applied specifically to clothing: how a jacket gets designed so it can be taken apart, rewoven, or resold rather than landfilled. The practical case studies are the point here. Students leave with a working method, not just an argument for why circularity matters.
Selling Without the Waste
Digital advertising feels weightless, but it isn't; servers, data centres, and constant content churn all carry a real environmental cost. This course teaches students to build ad campaigns for screens that are climate-neutral and resource-efficient by design, without defaulting to print as the "sustainable" alternative. A campaign that reuses one well-made asset across a season, instead of generating fresh content daily, is exactly the kind of shift this course is built to teach.
New Life, Old Objects
Every city has industrial leftovers; old factories, disused machinery, structures nobody quite knows what to do with. This course treats those objects and spaces as raw material rather than waste, working through how to repurpose them with an eye for both aesthetics and structural sense. A defunct water tower reimagined as a small gallery isn't a hypothetical here; it's the kind of brief students actually work through.
Designed to Include
Accessibility is too often treated as a compliance checkbox added at the end of a design process. This course puts it at the start instead, introducing the major categories of disability alongside the assistive technologies and adaptive strategies that support them, then applying that knowledge to public space design. A bench that works for someone using a wheelchair and someone who just needs a moment to rest turns out to be a genuinely different design problem than a bench that works for neither.
None of these six courses claims to solve the green transition on its own. Together, they're a bet that design education changes faster through six sharp, 25-hour interventions than through one slow curriculum overhaul and that students and working professionals, already stretched thin, will actually show up for the short version rather than pausing a career or a course load for a full new degree.
Each course is worth a single ECTS credit and built to be finished in about a week of real study time. They're part of Futures Designed, co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme, developing and integrating micro-credential courses into existing Art & Design higher education programmes across Europe.
If you're teaching something similar in short-course format, we'd like to know what's working.