Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: MA 2 years full-time
MA Graphic Communication Design explores how the production of knowledge is intertwined with its form, context, and circulation. The course takes an expanded approach to the idea of research, combining studio and writing practice to engage critically with graphic design as both a creative practice and a subject of study. Through iterative and open-ended experimentation with visual media and tools of communication, students develop work that investigates existing knowledge, activates positions, and projects new forms of knowledge—within and beyond the discipline.
Engaging with studio and writing practice as a form of rigorous enquiry, students and staff together explore how graphic design is a situated and relational discipline that both reflects and reconfigures its cultural, social, and environmental conditions. From this position, our community of practitioners critically interrogates the academic and professional contexts for practice as well as the very nature of the discipline itself, continually co-defining and re-defining the expanding field of graphic design.
MA Graphic Communication Design, along with BA Graphic Communication Design and a small group of PhD students, is part of the Graphic Communication Design programme. In addition to sharing an academic team and studio spaces, the programme offers a range of extracurricular events, lectures, live briefs, and other activities.
Engaging with climate, racial and social justice in the Graphic Communication Design Community at Central Saint Martins
The accelerating climate and ecological emergency is exposing the unsustainability and injustice of the political, social, and economic systems that have created them. An overarching goal for our programme community has necessarily become to question how graphic communication design practices can critique and intervene in the systems of extraction and exploitation that have led us to the brink of collapse.
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 cannot guarantee an offer in each case.
For fees and funding information, please see website
It's easier and more affordable to print a newspaper or a book, publish a web page, or shoot and edit a video than it's ever been before. This democratisation of media is energising, but what becomes of the professional designer? By asking important questions such as why we design, what it means to claim identities as graphic communication designers, and where being a designer may take us, graduates of MA Graphic Communication Design are well equipped to take a pro-active and innovative approach to building their futures.
Our interrogative approach to careers is underpinned by a wide range of practical exposure and support. Students attend weekly Graphic Communication Design programme lectures by contemporary practitioners, which explore a variety of professional practices and offer insights into life as a designer. The programme also hosts alumni events where graduates share their experiences and network with students. The university also provides a wide range of practical careers support available to all students at UAL.
Our graduates have gone on to launch their own studios and publishing companies, work for large-scale institutions and corporations around the world, freelance in their chosen areas, or develop their own new models for design practice. An increasing number of our graduates are following the MA with PhD study and choosing to pursue a design research career.
Unit 1: Methods
In Unit 1 you will challenge conventional notions of research by exploring how the media, methods, and skills of graphic communication design practice can be used to enquire, to interrogate, or to speculate new forms of knowledge. Guided by studio briefs set by tutors, you will initiate a series of iterative and process-led experiments. These experiments will develop your understanding of, and capacity to engage in, open-ended enquiry through making. In lieu of singular and closed outcomes, each of your projects will grow through systematic engagement in a method.
Unit 2: Methods ↔ Positions
In Unit 2 you will explore how positions arise through, or are inherent in, experimentation with methods and media. You will situate yourself within the discipline of graphic design, such as in context of a medium, production process, or mode of distribution. You will also explore how graphic design frames your engagement with broader contexts, such as social and environmental conditions, institutions, markets, technologies, other fields of study, etc.
Your coursework will develop through continued iterative and process-led experimentation, and by critically contextualising your practice through reading, writing, and association. This will enable you to explore how a research practice articulates, enacts, and publishes (makes public) new forms of knowledge through and about graphic design.
Unit 3: Methods ↔ Positions ↔ Projections
In Unit 3 you will project your research practice into new territory through a more critical interrogation of the relationship between the form of a message, its medium, and its context. Building on your iterative, experimental, and process-led work from previous units, you will consider how engaging with the details of production opens more possibilities for your work.
You will also consider how projections, as acts of publication, distribution, and/or circulation, are relational and contextual. You will explore how your practice develops though its interaction with networks, publics, and audiences.
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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