This is a project driven course, anchored in social engagement, where individual or small group projects are developed and executed by students. Projects allow a broad range of hands-on studio-created, painting, photo-based image developing processes to be incorporated into digital formats of design. The course enables students to enhance existing design skills: to develop their creativity and imagination, and build confidence in creative experimentation and research techniques around topical issues – trying out a range of visual expressions through found materials fine tuning fundamental techniques such as working through drawing, handmade prints, painting, photography, digital design and mixed media.

What Type Gender was one of the projects for Creativity for Socially Engaged Graphic Design

Students made masks of the type of gender role they most feared to be labeled with, and acted out this role in an everyday scenario of shopping as an intervention. Back in the classroom they used their experience to evaluate the gender roles, designed posters offering an antidote to narrow social roles.

Student work (2013) What Type Gender for Creativity for Socially Engaged Graphic Design

A female student declared in her final outcome, a poster, and the right of women to urinate everywhere as a way to break stereotypical gender roles.

Students produce a portfolio of rigorously researched topics specific to the cultural industries alongside with images that act as handbook for their own professional ways forward.

The module enables course members to take responsibility for their continuing professional development. It achieves this through a series of taught activities and directed learning that engages with the challenges of developing a career in an organization or of building a small business in the creative industries.

Course participants acquire an understanding of themselves, their ambitions, barriers and opportunities to success. In the light of this understanding they initiate a personal development programme. Teaching and learning on this module is interactive and experiential. There will be supportive study materials to make possible independent learning in addition to the time spent on directed study.

TRASH BANGKOKStudents examined Thailand’s environmental policies on sustainability, recycling and trash collection over 14 weeks resulting in data analysis, photographs, artwork and ideas around sustainability collected in a research journal. Final outcome was a large-scale model of Bangkok made from waste.

LIFE ON A THREAD was another module which investigated interdependence and balance in nature. Students mapped natural life in Bangkok and looked at what species thrived or were under threat in an urban environment. They concluded that bats and bees were near extinction in the city, which would in the end disrupt a balance between insects and plants that were maintained by the bats and the bees.