Category: Alumni

Lior Smith about design for happiness and social good

We continue our programme of updates from the class of 2012! Today, a chat with Lior Smith, a BA Design graduate who is now, in her own words, as busy as she could have hoped to be, working in service design, teaching, doing freelance graphics and continuing work on her Goldsmiths thesis project on top of it. Basically, things have been great for Lior since she graduated, and now we’ll let her tell us more about it herself.

Q: What was your final project about?

A: It was about well-being. I researched positive psychology and communicated my findings. I made a toolkit to help people understand themselves better, and how they can be happier. During the project I also dressed up as a superhero around campus for two months, to see if giving makes you happy. Continue reading “Lior Smith about design for happiness and social good”

Lizzie Mary Cullen, Goldsmiths Design graduate, illustrator extraordinnaire

A 2008 BA Design graduate, Lizzie is a freelance illustrator and designer with several awards to her name (amongst other things, she won Gold Design Award in 202 from Best of British Illustration); her elaborate artwork opens a window towards a world of fluid geometry, swirls and patterns, familiar landscapes that are nevertheless in a different dimension. She has worked with MTV, HTC, Zizzi restaurants, Harvey Nichols, The Guardian and many others. Continue reading “Lizzie Mary Cullen, Goldsmiths Design graduate, illustrator extraordinnaire”

Olivia Clemence doesn’t take smell for granted

Behind a red door in a very old building works Olivia Alice Clemence, our BA Design graduate whose work has made it to the pages of Wired recently. She shares a small and cozy studio with two other creative people, where she was kind to invite me for hot tea (in a Michael Jackson-printed cup) and a chat, on a rainy evening – because we can’t leave all the good stories to Wired, can we?

Scent_bottles

I had barely stepped inside and Olivia was already showing me the tools and ingredients of her craft: the distilling kit (custom-made for her) that she uses to capture scents, and her cabinet of around 60 wonderful and unusual smells bottled in small glass containers. The principle and instruments of the steam-distilling process are very old discoveries, but to untrained eyes like mine it looks as if I’m taking a peek at a bit of magic and alchemy. She allowed me to get a whiff of one of her recent works, a perfume designed for the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. “What’s in it?” I ask, unable to pin down the unusual tones hidden under the pleasant surface. She tells me: the combined smells of beer, coffee, peanuts, carpet, wood, Subway sandwiches…the essence of the Centre itself in a nutshell (or, a glass vial). Continue reading “Olivia Clemence doesn’t take smell for granted”

Design as storytelling: Blair Francey

Blair Francey is a 2012 MA Design: Critical Practice graduate at Goldsmiths; when it came to chatting to him about his work here and beyond, we had to resort to Skype, as he has already returned to his native Canada. We had quite a bit to talk about: Blair runs his own design startup, BFDesign, offering branding, print media, consultations and social media planning services. The firm has been going for 4 years and Blair told me he was very pleased with how it was going. He also had good things to say about his time at Goldsmiths, which he called an “eye-opener”, expanding his idea about what a designer is and does, and giving him the chance to be around designers from so many different backgrounds and specialties, and…well, here’s some of the actual chatting:

Q: Tell me more about your graduation project, “Public Transit Remixed”.

A: The more politicians talk about expanding the transit network here in Toronto and the province, the more I realized how little they talked about the actual experience of being on transit. It was always centered around moving people further and faster. So I wanted to approach public transit from the experiential standpoint … what does it mean to ride transit and how can it become more than just jumping on a train to get somewhere? How can it become engaging for everyone, more inclusive, easier to use … Continue reading “Design as storytelling: Blair Francey”