Final year undergraduate student Danny Nasr is raising funds for his project “Migrants of Circumstance”, which seeks to aid Syrian refugees currently based in Lebanon. Refugees face many problems, including discrimination and lack of adequate healthcare and education. It is the latter that Danny’s idea aims to address, by developing an informal, community-based educational framework. You can donate to the project until May 31st.
The Design Council have announced their list of 70 young designers to watch, as part of their 70th anniversary celebrations, and we are happy to notice the names of Lukas Valiauga (a final year BA Design student) and Chang Hee Lee (alumnus of the MA in Design: Critical Practice) on the list.
The full list of Ones to Watch can be found here. Alongside other ideas grouped under the headline ‘Living in the city’, Lukas Valiauga is present with City Live, an immersive campaign designed to change people’s perceptions of homelessness in Manchester. Chang Hee Lee is featured in the Rethinking Reality section with his project “Essence in space”, which was exhibited at the Goldsmiths Postgraduate Design Show “TILT” in 2013.
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.
BA Design student Lukas Valiauga is about to start his third year, and he has sent us a call for entries to his project on luck:
“I am starting an investigation of what is luck. My aim is to collect stories of any type of luck, and hear different myths, perceptions and superstitions people might hold upon it. By doing so, the project aims to understand elements that luck might be reconstructed of.”
You can submit your own story of luck to Lukas’s blog here , as well as read about the lucky event that gave him this idea.
Goldsmiths Design Blog 