Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: 2 years
MA Design: Ceramics, Furniture, Jewellery will develop your creative abilities, imagination and expertise. Framed within one course, we use design to explore these evolving disciplines, embracing ideas of practice beyond traditional definitions. This creates a range of hybrid practices disrupting assumptions around design, craft and production.
Your creative focus will evolve through a structured process of research, design ideation, exploration, development and evaluation. Encouraging you to expand skills intellectually, contextually and practically, extending and exploiting design strategies from your own and other disciplines. To question and test ideas through teamwork, collaborations and group critiques.
We embody design as a process and a practice of transformation. We view design as research in and for practice, as modes of thinking, as ways of communicating to diverse audiences.
The sustainability and ethicality of production is an urgent challenge to each of our disciplines. We are interested how this challenge shapes all forms of manufacturing – from master craftsmanship, artisanship and the hand-made to factory production and contemporary technologies. In single artefacts, mass-market delivery and all stages in-between.
The nature of production and consumption constantly changes, in the face of complex social, economic, environmental challenges and technological innovation. What could or should be the role of the ceramic, furniture or jewellery designer in the twenty first century? By engagement, reflection, negotiation and evolution, we challenge you to shape the future.
Re-framing a discipline or industry, places emphasis on strategic awareness within design and requires a set of responsive, generative and critical skills to complement your creative process and material knowledge.
We encourage you to question who you are as a designer. How will you shape your discipline? Will you design for a market-led focus, collaboratively with industry partners, regeneratively for a community of practice or identify ways forward as a thought and practice leader?
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The application, indicative design research focus and the portfolio will be assessed in relation to:
Through the professional experience of the teaching team there are strong links with commercial, artistic, craft and industrial bodies in London, nationally and internationally. Over the duration of the MA, meetings with practitioners, industry professionals, and participants in the wider design community will enable you to learn to communicate effectively across a range of different environments.
Future careers and graduate prospects
MA Design: Ceramics, Furniture, Jewellery graduates move speedily into self-employment, developing businesses at the highest levels finding opportunities to progress their independent practice at both a national and international level. These includes students showing work at the Victoria Miro Gallery and Sotheby’s and collection designs for Swarovski, MADE, Top shop and the House of Fraser.
MA Design: Ceramics, Furniture, Jewellery graduates work for design teams in Europe and Internationally either in their country of origin or increasingly in a country of their choice. A significant minority enter educational work at Masters level.
MA Design: Ceramics, Furniture, Jewellery begins with your project focus. Discussed on entry, this initial vision develops into a plan of action. The three units of the course guide the development of your research and design direction, from research and design investigation through trialling and experimentation, to your final high-level resolution.
Design Research is a wide-ranging activity which includes visual, social, cultural, economic, material and technological information interrogated and explored through the design process itself.
Developing a strategic awareness of your professional potential by reviewing international trade events, seminars, production facilities, materials sourcing, technological advances, sustainable and ethical debates, exhibitions and social and retail environments both digital and tangible. This process is supported by lectures, seminars, peer presentations and tutorials and your explorations in studio practice.
Critical thinking is central to the course ethos and practice. You will be encouraged to draw on the full range of your experience, resources and abilities.
The essence of Unit 1 is the introduction to a whole new world of possibilities.
Designing from day one, Unit 1 explores and interrogates a diverse range of design and research methods, skills and techniques relevant to designers of ceramics, jewellery or furniture.
Unit 1 orientates your practice and yourself within the course and develops your contextual, critical and research skills at the onset of your postgraduate experience. It will integrate you directly into the course postgraduate community and will include a period of introduction to the course, the College and University resources and London’s design cultures.
Building your confidence and pushing the boundaries of your ambition.
Unit 2 is divided into two sections, Speculative Futures in the summer term Year 1, Materials Matters in the autumn of Year 2. Unit 2 focuses on reflectivity, contextualisation and positioning in response to the design research directions developed in Unit 1.
This unit incorporates personal and professional development, entrepreneurship and innovation. Exploring, interrogating and reflecting on the diverse range of production and delivery methods for contemporary materials and digital practice. Engaging with emerging sustainability and ethical standards in global production.
Unit 3 brings your project focus to a practical and critically reflective conclusion, evidencing how you have specified, managed, implemented, and evaluated a Self-Directed Design Project. Producing high level practice outcomes and evidence of understanding the value generated in your design process and outputs, in diverse and variable contexts.
Start your creative future at University of the Arts London About University of the Arts London (UAL) University of the Arts London (UAL) is hos...
