Category: Interviews and features

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”

A tour of the workshops with Andrew Weatherhead

After taking a tour of the Design workshops with Senior Workshop Tutor Andrew Weatherhead, it’s easy to understand why students tell me about how much they love this space. It’s filled with a sense of wonder and innovation, and Andrew Weatherhead’s enthusiasm about the tools and technology available is contagious.

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“The workshops reflect the interdisciplinary nature and creative critical practice of the programmes themselves”, he says. Unlike other universities, where students are specifically taught furniture design, for example, here they can and are encouraged to try their hands at a bit of everything. Whatever your material of choice, you’ll find some tools to help you experiment: there’s a room for heavy metals, one for woodwork, one for clay and other soft materials (where we found some tiles of green ceramic freshly out of the kiln, made by a student from the soil of her homeland), a room for textiles (where 3rd year student Hefin was busy putting together a woolen space suit for his final project) and, of course, the student favourite- the digital lab. Continue reading “A tour of the workshops with Andrew Weatherhead”

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?

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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”