Category: Alumni

Critical Practice and Fashion workshop with recent MA graduates

Hannah Korsmeyer and Cyrielle Andre, recent graduates from Critical Practice and Fashion, will be holding a workshop exploring the complementarity of both these fields on Monday 7 December at Goldsmiths. Fashion and Critical Practice students are invited for a collaborative day of learning through making: “Working together in the studio, we will not only be exploring our own understanding of what “critical practice” and “fashion” are, but what unexpected creative insights can be gained from a process of making to question.”

What will the workshop be about? Hannah &Cyrielle provide us with some quotes that reflect their approach:

‘[All] design is ideological, the design process is informed by values based on a specific world view, or way of seeing and understanding reality. Design can be described as falling into two very broad categories: affirmative design and critical design. The former reinforces how things are now, it conforms to cultural, social, technical and economic expectation. Most design falls into this category. The latter rejects how things are now as being the only possibility, it provides critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values.’
Dunne and Raby, Design Noir, 2001

‘Learning through making, manifesting things in the world, moving away from the narrow notion of “professional” skill in order to produce and manifest. Strategic making is making from below, from the grass roots or the existence of everyday life. It is not a matter of applying means to some utopian end, but instead to manifest new meaning into the current as a proposition, a dialogue”. The Fashion Condition Collective, 2014

‘Please refer to Section X’: Design graduates curate exhibition on asylum seeking procedures

Please refer to section X poster

Goldsmiths Design graduates Rebecca Glyn Blanco and Danae Papazymouri are the curators of ‘Please refer to Section X’, an exhibition questioning the UK asylum seeking process, opening today (Friday, 20 Nov) at the Goldsmiths Student Union.

The exhibition is situated in the first floor staircase of the Student Union building (Dixon Road, Tiananmen Building) and it will stay open until 11 December. ‘Please refer to Section X’ is “part of Goldsmiths Students’ Union Refugee Response Campaign in collaboration with Amnesty International Society, Goldsmiths University of London and Goldsmiths Design Graduates. This night will also mark the launch of the Goldsmiths Students Refugee Response Campaign.”

Paid Internship with Common Works

Common Works is a London-based multidisciplinary design studio with two Goldsmiths Design alumni among its founders (read our previous interview with Common Works’ Chris Waggott here). They’re currently looking for an intern to assist them with video production.

The position is paid and available immediately; candidates should have practical experience with Adobe Creative Cloud, skills in operating a DSLR / other camera packages and recording audio – read a full job description on the Common Works website. To apply, send a portfolio link to info@commonworks.co.uk.

Design alumna worked on heartbeat-connecting device

Nowadays technology makes it easier for us to see and hear our loved ones even when they are far away from us, but a new product developed by the start-up Little Riot (which includes Goldsmiths Design alumna Marion Lean) may bring a different kind of intimacy to long-distance relationships: Pillow Talk is a device that allows wearers to share each other’s heartbeats. Comprised of a wristband, app and speaker, the system transmits one partner’s heartbeat directly to the other one’s pillow.

Little Riot, the all-women start-up which developed Pillow Talk, was founded by Joanna Montgomery and also includes Marion Lean, who graduated from an MA in Design: Critical Practice at Goldsmiths in 2012. Marion says: “Pillow Talk offers a way to completely rethink the way we interact using technology today. At Goldsmiths we’re taught to go out and disrup the status quo, and given by the numbers of requests we’ve already had it seems people are keen for disruption.” (You can read a detailed story on Pillow Talk on the Goldsmiths website).

If you want to help Pillow Talk become a real-life product, you can support it on Kickstarter until 10 December. It seems the idea is already quite popular, and it has been featured in many media outlets, including Wired and the Daily Mail.