What you will study
The course offers a hands-on approach to design, encompassing research techniques, collaboration, learning through making and developing finished objects intended for craft, industrial production or conceptual prototype. You'll work in the studio and workshops on specific projects reflective of the modules comprising the course. Activities can include specialist lectures, workshop inductions, group and personal tutorials, seminars and symposiums.
You'll need to be self-directed, reflective and practical in your approach, with direction and purpose.
This course is part of the Design School's postgraduate programme. The structure, shared with students from other design courses, enables you to explore your individual specialist interests within an integrative learning environment that provides an understanding of the value and role of interdisciplinary methods and ways of working. The influences and impact of thinking from other related design subjects on your own specialist study is an important aspect of the identity and the community of interdisciplinary practice at masters level in the Design School.
This structure is designed to help progress and develop your independent learning, encouraging you to construct and explore projects concerned with areas of particular personal interests. The overarching course philosophy, based upon an emphasis on research, methodology and design thinking, allows individual and personal concerns to be explored through focused study in product and furniture design.
Modules
The two shared modules of the Design School's postgraduate framework both commence with a symposium, in which high-profile external speakers present their work and contribute to a debate on a topic of relevance to all courses in the Framework.
Core modules
Designing Research
30 credits
The aim of the module is to give you an understanding of the design research tools and methods that are available to you, to inform and support the development of your practical study, and to provide the basis of your further study on your course. Practical research methods are explored, with an emphasis on the development of creative and evidence-based approaches to experimentation, and critical reflection on practical design work.
Creative Futures
30 credits
This module is based on the assumption that the best jobs/careers in the creative industries do not exist – they are invented from individual creative ambitions. The module explores how this can be approached in practical terms. The programme of study encourages you to develop a personal and critical approach to your future career, and how this can inform the development of your individual major project for the Major Project.
Creative Practice 1: Design Thinking & Making
30 credits
This module provides a dedicated product and furniture design study opportunity. It occurs in Teaching Block 1. Students are offered a number of optional and compulsory briefs engaging both practical and theoretical design faculties.
Briefs are open to individual interpretation, designed to promote creative independence and establish the benchmark of Level 7 critical expectation at the outset of the student experience.
The briefs encourage engagement with a number of key principles and processes that students need to develop to prepare them for a capstone project later in their studies.
Critical Practice
30 credits
This Teaching Block 2 module extends and builds directly upon the dedicated product and furniture design study experience of Teaching Block 1. It runs in parallel with the Creative Futures module DE7301 on the full time mode and exercises independent, focused practical design research to underpin the Major Project proposal undertaken within DE7301.
The module aims to prepare students to begin realisation of their Major (capstone) Project upon completion. Students take responsibility for either continuing to develop their thematic practical design enquiries already established in Context I, refining and editing material and developing new research and study as necessary, or embarking upon new self-initiated enquiries.
The module consolidates the role of practical design experimentation as a key element of the design research process and helps establish credibility for progression on to the Major Project. Students should become increasingly confident about moving into realms of uncertainty and exploring unfamiliar design territory, taking risks and articulating personal viewpoint. They are encouraged to explore and use industry networks and contacts outside the Faculty to expand their knowledge and outlook, further lending their study rigour and credibility.
The Major Project
60 credits
The Major Project – the capstone project – consolidates the knowledge gained in earlier modules, and is informed by your prior learning within the Design School's postgraduate interdisciplinary framework and course-specific specialist study.
You will extend your work on the course thus far in the form of a practical design proposal, defining and developing a substantive solution to an individually defined design-related problem. In so doing, you will demonstrate advanced understanding and application of contemporary design practice as it can be brought to bear on a specific challenge of sustainability.
Optional placement year
Many postgraduate courses at Kingston University allow students to do a 12-month work placement as part of their course. The responsibility for finding the work placement is with the student; we cannot guarantee the work placement, just the opportunity to undertake it. As the work placement is an assessed part of the course, it is covered by a student's Student Route visa.
Optional modules
Professional Placement
120 credits
The Professional Placement module is a core module for those students following a masters programme that incorporates professional placement learning, following completion of 120 credits. It provides you with the opportunity to apply your knowledge and skills to an appropriate working environment, and to develop and enhance key employability skills and subject-specific professional skills in your chosen subject. You may wish to use the placement experience as a platform for your subsequent major project module, and would be expected to use it to help inform your decisions about future careers.
