Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: MA 2 years full-time
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?
We are committed to developing ethical design practices. To achieve this, we are working to embed UAL's Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice into the course.
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
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.
Unit 1: Exploring the Landscapes
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.
Unit 2: Dreaming Big
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: Moving on Up!
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.
Evaluating the project through a critical lens allows you to plan your next steps beyond CSM. The final stages of the course encourage further personal and professional development. This structure is devised to support your, digital communication, networking, evaluation, resolution and career development to enable you to confidently present, perform and embody your new professional persona.
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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