Master of Arts in Graphic Design including Professional Placement

Kingston University

This module introduces ways of theorising contemporary and historical design to enable you to locate your practice within wider professional, social and political contexts and an interdisciplinary framework. You will investigate key current issues within design and participate in urgent critical debates, developing a theoretical and conceptual vocabulary with which to position what you do as a practitioner.

This module introduces critical making as a method of reflecting on and reconfiguring your individual and/or collective practice in an expanded mode of graphic design. Critical Making challenges design conventions and finds new ways of giving shape to contemporary issues and ideas through the visual and material tools of graphic design. A radical critical function is assigned to the act of designing in a synthesis of thinking and making. This process is enabled through play, experiment and risk-taking within and alongside academic rigour.

This module asks you to think about the role of the designer now and what it might be in the future. It takes the position that many of the jobs you may have in the future do not yet exist – it is you that will create them. You will work on projects individually and collectively that ask you to communicate across disciplinary boundaries in diverse environments with hybrid ways of making and thinking drawn from different contexts, methods and philosophies. Real-world scenarios set by external partners will be examined through elective collaborative projects that situate your creative practice within the contemporary paradigms of precarity and uncertainty, providing a space to address issues such as climate literacy, design education and the future of work, and in doing so anticipate contexts for your practice within the cultural and creative industries and beyond.

This module focuses on anticipating future modes of graphic design, helping you to formulate a space for your future individual and/or collective work and/or further study. Drawing on personal experiences and contemporary design debate you will work with your peers, tutors, and visiting lecturers as co-researchers in the future field of graphic design, to position the form and context of your future practice, education, research and/or profession. Through projects and workshops, we will anticipate new multidimensional and/or hybrid practices in local and global contexts. As a community of practice, we will work to forge more sustainable, critical, and imaginative links between, culture and commerce, the individual and collective, the environment and design innovation.

This module helps you to build a space for your future practice through enquiry-led learning, conceptual depth, critical imagination, and practice-based research. You will embrace creative agency as a means of initiating, testing, and completing your research project individually or in collaboration with internal or external partners. By assimilating the learning established so far on the course, you will have built an individual critical position on graphic design, identifying real-world contexts for your practice, and innovative modes of communication in an expanded notion of the discipline.