Tag: MA Design Critical Practice

MA graduate Yang Song wins A’ Design Award 2015

Yang Song, a 2014 graduate of our MA in Design: Critical Practice, has won the A’ Design Award for “Familiar and Unfamiliar”, a project developed at Goldsmiths and exhibited at last year’s Postgraduate Design Show. “Familiar and Unfamiliar” is comprised of moving furniture with clockwork mechanisms, handmade in the Goldsmiths workshops.

Yang explained for the A’ Design Awards website the idea behind the project: “The inspiration mainly comes from the memories of daily objects during my childhood. We cherish old objects as our close friends, because sometimes they could recall us the old times of ourselves. […] We are surrounded by thousands of fast-food products, our values as well as perceptions become “fast-food”. Consequently, the modern society is a familiar but unfamiliar world to us. Through this design oriented programme “Familiar and Unfamiliar”, I intend to explore the true meanings of daily objects in our everyday lives and the true meaning of life itself”.

You can read a more detailed description of the project on the website of the A’ Design Awards, where you can also find an interview with Yang Song.

 

Meet Andrew Denholm, MA in Design: Critical Practice student

Let’s start the new year with the last of our interviews with new MA students on their first term at Goldsmiths. Today, we meet Andrew Denholm, who is on the MA in Design: Critical Practice: 

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What is your background? What did you do before studying here?

I studied Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art for 4 years. After graduating i have worked as a freelance illustrator and designer. I worked on lots of different projects from magazine illustrations to packaging designs. If you are interested in my work check it out at https://www.facebook.com/andrewdenholmillustration.

Why did you choose Goldsmiths and why this particular course?

I wanted to go to Goldsmiths as i had visited the university and seen the fantastic facilities they have. I also had been to a graduation exhibition and seen the amazing work coming out of the school. The design department had some great courses but the Critical Practice course in particular was what gained my interest. It allows me to do lots of reading and learning while also getting to make new designs in the workshop. I found this to be a good balance for a designer.

How are you feeling about your choice now? What are your expectations for what’s to come?

I am really enjoying the course so far. It has been a huge learning curve but i feel that it is all very relevant and interesting. I hope to learn more computer software and start to get more hands on with making. The models we have chosen for next year will be really good.

What’s the story of your photo from the day of the MA Intro?

The photo shows my group holding up the laser cut masks i made. I put them up around town as street art so i thought they would be a good object to represent what i was doing at the moment as a designer.

Evan Boehm on narrative spaces

Between the moment I asked Evan Boehm for an interview after hearing that his interactive short film “The Carp and The Seagull” had won an award from Adobe and the time I got around to publishing this article, Evan already had another success to report: he was nominated for a Webby Award (the Oscars of the Internet!) and shortlisted for another three- in one category, he shared the list with such famous names as Pixar’s Brave and Prometheus. “The Carp and the Seagull” received most of the honours, but Evan’s installation for the hit reality tv show Project Runway also got recognition.

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Evan is a Motion Director and a graduate of Goldsmiths’ MA in Design: Critical Practice; his now famous short, an expansion of his thesis project on narrative spaces and creating a spatial representation of a story, is not just a tale but an experience, allowing the user to interact with it and see different elements of it from different viewing angles while looking at the same geometric space. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is time to do so and play with the 3D environment while learning the story of the encounter between a spirit and fisherman Masato. Then, read the chat we had: Continue reading “Evan Boehm on narrative spaces”

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”