Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: MA 2 years full-time
The proliferation of information and data available today provides both challenges and opportunities for how we understand, navigate and communicate our complex world. It also places communication designers in a potentially influential role as interpreters, facilitators and activators of knowledge, truth and insight.
Communication is at the heart of how we construct and convey power, how we motivate and mobilise, and shape our societies, communities and identities. This course understands communication as deeply intertwined with complexity. It is an increasingly vital skill in empowering responses to our most pressing and complex challenges – without resorting to simplification.
MA Communicating Complexity is a creatively led communication design course in a world-leading graphic design programme. On this course you will be encouraged to advance experimental approaches to communication. Project briefs set in collaboration with a range of industries and sectors, as well as by your student cohort provide a springboard for creative and future-facing approaches. Course Learning Outcomes are referenced to UNESCO’s Learning objectives for achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Innovation in communication design is critical to even the most ambitious ideas and technologies as well as organisations seeking to make an impact at scale. By foregrounding complexity, this course encourages more inclusive, accessible, and culturally resonant inroads into the world’s challenges with the ambition to equip you with the ability to bring clarity, context, and criticality to engaging with and communicating complexity.
The standard entry requirements for this course are as follows:
AP(E)L – Accreditation of Prior (Experiential) Learning
Exceptionally applicants who do not meet these course entry requirements may still be considered. The course team will consider each application that demonstrates additional strengths and alternative evidence. This might, for example, be demonstrated by:
Each application will be considered on its own merit, but we cannot guarantee an offer in each case.
For fees and funding information, please see website
Unit 1: Communication & Complexity
This unit develops a shared foundation for the study and practice of communication design in the context of global and local challenges. It unpacks a range of terminology, contexts and methods associated with both contemporary communication practice and notions of complexity.
The first dictionary definition of complexity is “having many parts and being difficult to understand or find an answer to” (Cambridge Dictionary). The starting point for this course is to prioritise the design of more inclusive and accessible discourses around complex matters, beginning with what may be difficult to understand – and therefore to communicate – while questioning the impulse to simplify for the sake of communication.
Unit 2: Collaborative Practices for Common Good
This unit addresses the theme of collaboration through co-operation with other postgraduate courses in the College. By working co-operatively with fellow students from other courses, you will experience at first hand the value of diverse cross-disciplinary thinking and problem-solving that is central to communicating complexity.
Unit 3: Knowledges, Publics & Innovations
This unit features a sequence of context-specific and collaborative projects which experiment creatively and purposefully with contemporary local and global challenges. The ambition to challenge Eurocentric defaults and approaches to communication, information and data runs through all projects in this unit.
Knowledges explores the accessibility, interpretation, and dissemination of knowledge. It asks you to engage with the relationship between the form and circulation of knowledge. Publics explores how collaborative and participatory approaches to complex communication problems can achieve positive social, environmental, and economic change. Innovations focuses on how techniques, methods and approaches to communicating complexity can be applied to understand and re-imagine existing practices, technologies, networks and institutions.
At the end of the unit, students are supported to reflect on their practice and begin to define and scope their final major projects leading into Unit 4.
Unit 4: Major Project
The course culminates in a self-directed design project which significantly elaborates on your learning in prior units and supports your future ambitions. You will demonstrate how communication design can be harnessed to positively impact individual, institutional and public understanding of and engagement in pressing complex issues. You are encouraged to bring your own prior experience, local context and positioning to defining and developing this project. You will also be asked to project the legacy of your project beyond the end of the course in a way that demonstrates you have considered its long-term impact.
Important note concerning academic progression through your course:
If you are required to retake a unit you will need to cease further study on the course until you have passed the unit concerned. Once you have successfully passed this unit, you will be able to proceed onto the next unit. Retaking a unit might require you to take time out of study, which could affect other things such as student loans or the visa status for international students.
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