Alumni – Page 16 – Goldsmiths Design Blog

Goldsmiths Design Festival talks and workshops

Paulina Klapetek at the 2015 Goldsmiths Design Festival

More and more exciting events are being added to the programme of the Goldsmiths Design Festival, opening later this week. All of the following talks and workshops are free to attend:

MA Design and Innovation student Sanchit Kedia is organising two festival events as part of his graduation project “Firefly”. On Thursday, 15 September, a materials workshop focused on DuPont Corian and its creative applications will take place between 2-5 pm, while on Friday, 16 September, Divij Jhamb of TRL will hold a talk on “Driving Consumer Innovation through Co-Creation” at 2 pm.
Another Friday event (starting 3.30 pm) features guest speaker Cat Drew of Policy Lab in a talk about bringing new policy tools and techniques to the UK Government using design.
Ar 4.30 pm, a lecture with Goldsmiths Design’s Tobie Kerridge will take an emergent project as a case study for discussing how interests can shape a framework for practice based design research.
Friday evening will end with “Untangling Stories”, an experimental performance with MA Design and Environment student Paulina Klapetek, followed by a Q&A.
Finally, on Sunday, 18 September, come hear Jimmy Loizeau and Liam Healy talk about “Design Unlikely Futures“, a project that emerged from volunteering at the Calais refugee camp.

We’re also happy to announce the second confirmed speaker at the Alumni Reunion evening (16 September, 6.30 pm): Chasity Johnson, an MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship graduate, will present Haute Ecology, an online ethical apparel company “for those who want to look fly without destroying the planet”.

Correspondence from Goldsmiths Design’s Charlie Evans, Designer in Residence in Taiwan (V)

This summer, Charlie Evans (2014 BA Design graduate, and currently a Technical Tutor in the Department) spent two months in Taipei, on a Designers in Residence program for the British Council in Taiwan. Charlie sent us regular correspondence with impressions from his experience; we’re publishing his fifth letter today.

I’m working on an installation and performance for the night market in Gongguan. I’ll be using various types of tape and applying it to people’s knees, a technique that athletes use which I’ve been researching in Taipei.

Why I’ve chosen the night market: Continue reading “Correspondence from Goldsmiths Design’s Charlie Evans, Designer in Residence in Taiwan (V)”

Goldsmiths Design Festival news: Fashions and Embodiment workshop, Alumni evening

Only ten days remain until the start of this year’s Goldsmiths Design Festival (15-18 September), when the department opens its doors for a series of free design events, including the 2016 Postgraduate show!

The Masters students’ final exhibition will be open on 16-18 September, after an industry and press private view which takes place on the evening of September 15th. For a peek at the graduation projects, have a look at the Festival website, where students are uploading information and images on their work, tackling a variety of topics from diagnosing eating disorders amongst Chinese youth to crowding on the Underground and cat cafes.

But the festival includes other events as well. All day on 15 September, artists Celia Pym and Emma Hoette will be facilitating a Fashions and Embodiment workshop, initiated in collaboration with the Goldsmiths Fashion Research Unit and the MA Fashion Programme, and supported by Goldsmiths Annual Fund. The workshop will explore the relationship between fashion and movement through the acts of wearing and repairing; all participants must bring with them at least one garment that requires mending.

On the evening of 16 September, the Design department and the Development and Alumni Office at Goldsmiths will host a Design alumni evening reception. The first confirmed Design alumnus to be a speaker at the event is Nicholas O’Donnell-Hoare (MA Design: Critical Practice 2010), currently Head of Design and UX at Pi ltd, and a PhD student at the University of Dundee where he is researching Disruptive technologies and Design for Sustainability. (This is a good time to re-read an old interview with Nicholas on the Design blog).

Drifting as a community space: alumnus Tee Byford on his Channel 4 series “Driving Sideways”

Whether you take an interest in the motorsport of drifting or not, the Channel 4 series of short films “Driving Sideways” is well worth a watch. Its ostensible focus is drifting itself, a driving style in which the driver keeps the car in a state of oversteer; the real stars, though, are not cars but the humans who thrive in this fringe community.

The director and creator of the series is Goldsmiths Design alumnus and visiting tutor Tearlach (also known as Tee) Byford, who found out about drifting after a friend he’d stumbled upon by chance in a pub invited him to observe an event: “I went with my little camera, just to see if it’s interesting. And I did realise that what they were doing was far beyond just driving a car. Actually, it was a community centre, and the car was the architecture, the device that allowed those people to come together and have this sort of common sense of place and belonging.”