The Programme employs tools and approaches from a wide variety of disciplines and is aimed at young international and Russian specialists from a variety of professional backgrounds with a strong interest in working on urban-related projects who would bring their own unique perspective, vision and expertise to the initiative.

During the intensive program, students work in small teams to research and develop original speculative interventions and platforms. Urban design projects include spatial plans, but the Strelka program also emphasizes strategy, cinema and software.

The New Normal is an experimental postgraduate programme of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design - an educational institution in Moscow, Russia, founded in 2009. The Institute promotes positive changes and creates new ideas and values through its educational activities. Strelka provides new learning opportunities, while the City remains at the centre of the Institute`s research.

Education programme 2017/18 focuses on research and design for the city and explores the opportunities posed by emerging technologies for interdisciplinary design practices.

Something has shifted, it seems. We are making new worlds faster than we can keep track of them, and the pace is unlikely to slow. Have our technologies advanced beyond our ability to conceptualize their implications? If so, such gaps can be perilous.

In response, one impulse is to pull the emergency brake and to try put all the genies back in the bottle. This is ill-advised (and hopeless). Better instead to invest in emergence, in contingency: to map The New Normal for what it is, and to shape it toward what it should be.

The second year of The New Normal design research program at the Strelka institute builds on the work of the previous year. This year, we shift our focus East, and toward emergent systems of value: ecologies, logistics, governance, addressing, gaming, moving, seeing, living. Our design research will explore four interrelated areas.

Benjamin H. Bratton is the new Programme Director of the Strelka Institute. As one of the most important global design theorists, he brings an extraordinarily interdisciplinary scope to our research.

Participants of the programme will be in residency in Moscow as well as go on research trips within Russia and to China.

After graduating from the programme students will become a new kind of professional who is no longer limited by a particular occupation; they will no longer be just architects or UX designers or economists. In 5 months they will expand their professional training and acquire skills and methods that will enable them to create and apply multifunctional and multidisciplinary solutions to current urban problems.

As they develop their own vision for their design practice, they may develop projects toward many different formats and outcomes: online and offline, physical and virtual, fact and fiction. They will be encouraged to try and master new skills and experiment with diverse platforms.