Ilyanna Kerr and Simon Jeal have put together a lovely blog documenting their Methods and Processes workshop with First year BA Design students. Loads of lovely explorations of words and images.
Category: Alumni
‘Be water, my friend’: towards a proficiency of uncertainty by Belen Palacios
I have recently become a Graduate Learning Facilitator in the Design Department. As I make the overlap from a learner to a teacher, I realise that I am not just a graduate in ‘Design’, but a graduate in ‘Uncertainty’.
Initially this course makes you doubt yourself, to avoid designing by mirroring the self. You must forget what everyone told you design is, in order to start defining what you think design should be. Your first year isn’t only about emancipation, independence and taking responsibility; as uncomfortable as it it, this first year is about re-shaping your perspective.
The course then makes you doubt your surroundings. At this point you question what your role is in the socio-cultural complexity of the world (yes, the world). By then you would have gotten used to the uncertainty. You live through your questioning mindset. That is the strategy: no stability. You are in a constant state of uncertainty, and you learn to understand and accept it.
After this process, there is no ‘default designer’ expected of you. The expectations are that you perform beyond your potential. Rather than climbing the tiers of academia, your eyes open to the fact that the toolkit and ability of your BA needn’t be lesser than those of a more specialised qualification. The borders melt away between graphics, interaction, product, architecture, fashion… Instead, you learn to analyse and attack any situation, because you no longer have a default safe zone. You learn to adapt. “Be water, my friend.”
Graduates worry that they have no discipline to fit vacancy requirements. It doesn’t matter how many Adobe applications you master because you are proficient in uncertainty. Your skills are your strength against a frightening brief; your infatigable fight to reveal the un-seen; your bravery to question what is taken for granted. You aren’t against the design industry, you are what the design industry should be wishing for.
Introducing the “GLFs” (graduate learning facilitators)
This year we’ve developed a new role in the department: a graduate learning facilitator (I know a terrible title, but we owe that one to HR). We’re trailing the role to see if it helps support the learning experience of our undergraduate students. We currently have 5 ‘facilitators’, who finished the BA Design in June 2014. Their role is to act as a bridge between staff and students – to ensure a vibrant and engaging studio culture. They’re here to bring some of their (recent) learning, directly back to the current cohort. In someway they can be seen as the cultural memory of the programme; a way for us to maintain and transfer the learning from one year group to another, both in terms of skills and topic knowledge. The idea is that they bring another perspective to experience of being a design student (hopefully they can reassure our current students that ‘it’ll all be ok’ in the end!).
We have two GLF’s in the first year (Tee and Belen), two in the second (Birute and Charlie) and one in the third year (Hannah). I’ve asked them over the next month to write a post reflecting on their experience. So far, they’ve run some great workshops, help design the briefs and contribute to the development of the degree show. We’re also asking them to engage in staff research projects to start to break down the ‘research / teaching’ divide.
MA Interaction Design show: Anuradha Reddy- “Algo News”
The last of our interviews from the MA in Interaction Design show features Anuradha Reddy, who was previously featured on the blog with her work for the “NOT THIS” MA show in September. At the MA Interaction Design graduation show, Anuradha exhibited the project “Algo News”:
My project is about how machines can process and understand data in various ways and develop multiple interpretations of it. It explores one particular type of data: news media. The news content is mistranslated by an algorithm, and each news item is converted into about 10 different news stories based on the original story.
For example, if the original news story says: “I’m extremely sorry”, the tenth mistranslation may be “I’m extremely happy”. It seems like the machines may have some sort of thought- it makes you think about what they actually understand from your data, and it starts opening conversations about machine learning. Continue reading “MA Interaction Design show: Anuradha Reddy- “Algo News””
Goldsmiths Design Blog 