Unit X 2015 Level 5 Choosing your Project
Introduction to Level 5 and this booklet. Unit X at Level 5 gives you an opportunity to develop areas of interest that will compliment and extend your practice. The project options set out by staff of the Art School allow you as a practitioner the opportunity to place yourself and your practice in a real world context. This not only allows you the opportunity to have a supported view of potential career paths but also allows you to further develop your skills. The Focus for the projects are split as follows; #
‘Pass it on’ – This focus allows you the opportunity to look at educating others through Art and Design.
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‘The Client’ – Looking at Industry led client briefs.
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‘Blue Sky Thinking’ – Projects that emphasise innovation through Art and Design practice.
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‘The Market’ – Working to produce an outcome that could be a product, a publication, something marketable to an audience.
There are eight Projects to choose from, 2 within each area of Focus. Please read through this booklet thoroughly before making your choice. If you wish to arrange work experience as your project for the unit please discuss this with your tutor and contact the Placements team for support and guidance. Options Process. Online option recording will go live on moodle on January 12th 2015. Questions and Answer sessions will be help on Wednesday 14th January 2015, should you want to find out more about your considered options before making a final decision. Times and venues will be posted on Moodle. It is advisable to speak with your tutor before making any choice as they will be able to advise you and ensure you get the most from this opportunity.
Placement and Work Experience Students may negotiate to undertake a full-time work placement during Unit X. This must be discussed with a programme tutor to establish suitabllity of this to the programme being studied. The organisation of the placement must then be undertaken by the student with the support and guidance of the Placements team. For advice and guidance go to. http://www.artdes.mmu.ac.uk/administration/workexperience/
# Pass it On - Educator. In this project you will work with local Primary/Secondary Schools, or Community Arts groups to develop and deliver an event or workshop activity for them. You will be introduced to a number of different ways of working as an artist educator, be that Artist in Residence, Teacher or Independent Artist delivering workshops to the general public. Working in small teams you will use your own practice, approaches and experience as a starting point for engaging others in creative activity. This might be delivering practical courses at an arts centre based on your own work, working with or mentoring secondary age pupils seeking help to develop their portfolios or helping primary school children or adults with learning difficulties to explore the world through creative activities. You will gain experience in project development, planning and delivery as well as developing expertise in skills sharing and mentoring. This project is suitable for people who think they might in the future want to deliver workshops as part of their own practice, or have an ambition to become a teacher.
# Pass it On - Engagement. In this project you will work alongside curatorial and learning staff from Manchester Art Gallery (MAG) and TATE Liverpool to gain first hand experience of gallery public engagement. You will join an intensive workshop week hosted by MAG, and observe how a major institution encourages access to its collection and touring exhibitions, by a wide range of age-groups and communities in Manchester. You will also gain an insight into storage and conservation of art and design artefacts, and will join curators tours of the galleries. You will design potential engagement activities in response to the special exhibitions, culminating in a gallery takeover event for Thursday Late, which is open to the public. During March-May 2015 MAG’s special exhibitions are Eastern Exchange (contemporary craft and design from East Asia) and Design for Modern Living (a fine art & design show based on MAG’s collection since the 1930s). Engagement will suit a wide range of students across art and design, and particularly those who seek careers in the galleries and museums sector.
# The Client - Fashion Industry. The project will be undertaken in groups, identified in the first weeks and allocated according to your design/ creative philosophy and approach to practice. The fashion-based brief concentrates on developing a range of 12 looks for an external client. Focussing on Men’s or Women’s wear for a high profile Brand, for example in the past two years of Level 5 Unit X, this has been KENZO and DKNY. The project will consist of tutorials and workshops that enable you to further develop your research and design skills, together with range planning, finishing and fabric skills – essential in intelligent fashion design. This project would be of use to students wishing to develop their ability to work in a brand – led creative consultancy model. It will be fast-paced and Industry focussed.
# The Client - Property Industry Interventions. This Unit X project invites students to engage with a professional property client. You will be collaborating with Bruntwood, who with over hundred offices in the North-West, are one of Manchester’s leading commercial landlords. Working for Bruntwood’s head of Brand Strategy, you will be looking at scheme proposals for refurbishing at least one of their city centre office buildings. This will involve research, analysis and evaluation of the existing accommodation and its current occupants, then working in groups to pitch concept proposals for the redesign of the building, including detailed design proposals for the reception area(s). As part of this Unit X project, you will investigate Bruntwood’s brand identity; who are their ideal target clients and how can your proposals make a difference to their business model. You will be working in groups for a ‘dragon’s den’ style pitch to Bruntwood and it might be that Bruntwood choose to work with a ‘winning proposal’, or ask for more information following your group work presentations. If so we will build that time into the project. Like in the ‘real world’, we will be flexible in accommodating our clent’s requirements. During the project we will invite industry friends to review your proposals and advise on presenting to a professional audience. There will also be an opportunity to develop an individual project around something of special interest to you and your design practice. This might be a piece of furniture, detailed technical study, illustration or a brand / graphic proposal. We see this as a great opportunity to promote and market yourself and your work to a leading industry client.
# Blue Sky Thinking - Future Forecasting. “Trend forecasting is much like archaeology but to the future.”
- Lidewij Edelkoort
This is a project about forecasting future design. It asks you to explore how changes in the world around us will affect what consumers want over the coming years. You will use this to develop a resource that provides inspirational information to other designers or people working in the creative industries. This project is open to students from any programme; the outputs can be in any design context. There will be opportunities to work on live projects (these are in development). Part One - Cultural Radar Working in groups of two or more, research some of the key external issues that you feel will affect how consumers buy or interact with design in the next couple of years (e.g. environmental issues, economic concerns, cultural events). From this, create a short, illustrated digital presentation that involves all members of the group. This should be very much ideas based – think of it as a trigger that would encourage and motivate someone to work with your information. Part Two – Forecast Resource Use your group presentation (with any ideas you found interesting in other groups’) to develop a trend, forecasting or inspiration source. This could be a book, a zine, a film, an online resource or an outcome in any other media. Its function should be to provide other people working in the creative industries with inspirational source material to engage with their audience in two or three years time. You should undertake significant visual and contextual research, and produce a substantial quantity of development work in a range of media. Part of this should include experimentation with a format for the final outcome and evidence that the clients you are targeting your work at would be receptive to your proposed future intelligence.
# Blue Sky Thinking - Reinvent:Reinterpret:Remake. City Rooftops; This project will allow you to reinterpret and transform rooftop spaces with creative problem solving through up-cycling and re-hashing existing ‘industrial materials’ towards contemporary solutions for seating, skins, shelterings, coverings, fencing, divides, bird boxes, follies, parasols, gazebos and or sculpture for the urban rooftop space. Sustainability - This project will involve the interrogation of sustainable materials. You will be sampling, testing and manipulating a range of media to identify opportunities for new products and processes. Materials and suppliers are currently under discussion. - Final draft will be published on moodle. This project will suit those wishing to develop new approaches to material manipulation and through practice, identify opportunities for future products around the theme of sustainability.
# The Market - Whitworth limited Editions. ‘Design today is characterised by a rich heterogeneity of ideas, limited-edition work is only one of these manifestations, but it is one of the most exciting because it includes some of the most beautiful, poetic and progressive objects being created at this time.’ - Wava Carpenter This project places the student in partnership with the Whitworth Art Gallery and support the development of emerging creative practitioners who broadly sit within the field of making. Students will gain access to the new building and will meet staff from various teams within the organisation including curatorial, visitor engagment and commercial. The project provides an opportunity to propose artefacts in limited edition format for sale within the shop. This project should be of interest to students who wish to develop their practice as: - - -
An independent craft practitioner A designer responding to client brief An artist responding to location / collection
Students can respond to the brief as an individual practitioner or in collaboration with others as part of a design team or creative partnership. An ‘event’ during the first week of the project will facilitate the finding and forming of partnerships. The Whitworth are seeking to work with emerging designers and makers from the School of Art. They would like students to develop proposals for artefacts to be sold in the gallery shop. Products or artefacts should convey the Whitworth ethos of a Playful, Intelligent and Personal approach. Ideas developed should be bespoke, created by North West based makers/designers and presented as a limited edition (1-10). The Whitworth exhibitions on around this time include: Cornelia Parker and Cia Guo-Qiang.
# The Market - Publishing. There has never been a better time to self-publish. Titles proliferate on almost any subject you care to think about and often there are a range of approaches to popular subjects aimed at smaller or niche audiences. Social networking and mobile devices offer a range of opportunities for extending the brand of a publication and delivering content in ways that are no longer limited to the printed page. This project will take a collective and collaborative approach to the creation of publications, while emphasising and encouraging other entrepreneurial behavior across disciplines. Centred around the theme of “Work in Progress�, it will challenge you to think about how we begin to articulate and document practice, while also questioning the role that art and design has to play in not only delivering visual content, but also in persuading an audience about the viability of a project. The generation of content will include personal responses to themes, spaces, interviews and artist studio visits across colleges within Unit X and externally across Manchester and beyond. The first week will include a workshop with HORT, a world-renowned, multi-disciplinary studio to kick start this project. Keynote speakers could include Anthony Burrill, Intern Magazine and The Poundshop amongst others. The project will package together content from a variety of disciplines for a new Art School publication as part of the Righton Press re-launch. This will include identifying an audience, generating content, then ultimately presenting and producing a high quality publication. This will be delivered through collaborative projects, workshops and events all focused on an inter-disciplinary approach. Alongside this there will be the opportunity for self-initiated publications and events.