Interaction design and new perspectives on museums at the MUTAGEN/Musée des Refusés show

Last week, the 2017 graduating class of the MA in Interaction Design exhibited their final projects, alongside work by current students of the MA in Design: Expanded Practice.

Interaction Design graduates have reached the end of a 15-month programme, and their output reflects the diversity of their perspectives and approaches, with projects tackling topics as varied as redefining the limits of architecture, Saudi futurism, or measuring time through a drawing machine.

Meanwhile, the very first cohort of Expanded Practice students are responding to the Musée de Refusés brief, reinterpreting the museum to showcase objects and ideas rejected by traditional museum spaces. Students worked in groups and offered innovative interpretations, from investigating museum artefacts acquired through colonialism to proposing a museum space where touching the displays is encouraged.

Interviews with more details about the projects will be coming soon, so watch this space! Meanwhile, more photos from the exhibition can be found on our Facebook page.

MUTAGEN/ Musée des Refusés: MAID/ MADEP joint exhibition

Next week, the 2017 graduating class of the MA in Interaction Design, and current students of the MA in Design: Expanded Practice will exhibit their work in a joint show in the St James Hatcham gallery, MUTAGEN/Musée des Refusés.

Opening times:

Thursday, 14 December: 4-9 pm (private view)

Friday, 15 and Saturday, 16 December: 10 am- 6 pm

Mutagen is a set of projects from the fourth graduating cohort of MA Interaction Design at Goldsmiths. This diverse and inventive group have accomplished a huge amount during their 15 month programme, not least in the strategies they have developed to take on the demands of the courses they undertake. You will see how their graduating projects mix empirical and speculative approaches, while responding to human computer interaction, interaction design and co-design, and grappling with social theory. Come and see these projects, and speak to the people who have articulated individual and bold routes through the entanglements that characterise an expanded field of Interaction Design.

The Musée de Refusés (based on the Salon de Refusés) is a space in which what is rejected by museums, cultural institutions and/or by society as a whole may claim attention. There may be many reasons for the rejection; but essentially the ‘refused’ is not considered to be the sort of thing the museum or other cultural authorities are looking for. The Musée de Refusés contains the kind of things that are not of interest, concern or use to society … often times determined not to be in society’s ‘best’ interest.

Any rejection is inevitably reciprocally constituted; the thing rejected, in its very rejection, rejects the authority that rejects it. So when an ‘authority’ (a museum) with an encysted (insisted) ideology, through an instituted juridical process, refuses to embrace what a work is or does, the work, in turn rejects the regular expectations, systems of validation and ultimately, the constitution of that authority.

MAID student to present graduation project at symposium in the US

On 4 December, MA Interaction Design student Michael Mogensen will be part of a panel at the Corcoran School of Art & Design at the George Washington University in Washington DC called “Wisal, a Symposium on Cross-Cultural Collaboration”. Michael explains:

“I will present the collaboration between myself and Saudi artist Ahaad Alamoudi called “NIUN: Saudi Futures.” The project is supported by arts organisation Culturunners and funded by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture. The project consists of a film, an installation, and a series of events around our idea of one Saudi future; it responds in part to recent events in Saudi Arabia, as well as the distant past. The project is also my final project as part of the MA Interaction Design degree at Goldsmiths.”

Make@MEET workshops with MA Interaction Design students/alumni

This July, Michael Mogensen (MA Interaction Design 2017), Erica Jewell and Julie Parisi (MA Interaction Design 2016) designed and taught Make@MEET, a one day workshop in Jerusalem to Year 3 students from the Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow (MEET) programme. MEET brings together young Israeli and Palestinian leaders to create positive change through technology and entrepreneurship, in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The summer intensive programme consists of an accelerator for four startups created by the participants. The Make@MEET workshop introduced them to tools to challenge their biases and assumptions, particularly around the user in the context of their startups, as well as to generate ideas and work through problems. The attendees were given a brief (“make someone’s life easier”) and then taken on field trips to observe and choose a subject, followed by rapid prototyping and presentation of their designs.

Images courtesy of Michael Mogensen and Erica Jewell; more photos can be found on Erica Jewell’s blog. Another workshop will be held in December.