Exhibiting our Research Excellence Benz Kotzen
The School of Design Annual Exhibition celebrates the high quality and wide scope of design work that is undertaken across our programmes. This display is largely visual, with stunning and evocative graphic and illustrative pieces that culminate from weeks, sometimes months and in some cases years of keen and creative thinking that unravels sets of problems that are enthusiastically conquered by the students. In Film and TV and Animation, the skilful and creatively produced work integrates sound, image and word bringing together practical and avant-garde productions that challenge the intellect and can evoke strong emotions. And whilst words are often used across the board, particularly in graphic design, the word is king across the disciplines, in the writing of essays on theory, context and history and particularly in students’ dissertations which acquire increased intellectual rigour and writing proficiency as they progress through their undergraduate programmes and into post graduate taught programmes. These works in words, accompanied by supporting images, (some of which are showcased at the 2022 exhibition) are extremely important “outputs” as they confirm both the writing and design abilities of prospective employees at job interviews as most creative jobs require their employees to be able to write all sorts of documents from simple letters to complex reports. The term “output” is extremely current, particularly in the context of the REF. The Research Excellence Framework ‘is an internationally recognised system for assessing the quality of research in the UK’s Higher Education Institutions’. This submission identifies the highest quality outputs that have been produced by academic staff during the REF period which was from 2014 until the end of 2020. The outcome of the submission to the REF by the University as a whole, is used to calculate the funding that is allocated to institutions for the next REF cycle. The submission is not only important in terms of funding, but it also indicates the strength of research across the staff in the School of Design and particularly as a means of calculating the growth in quantity and quality of research from 2014 to the end of 2020, calculated from the outputs themselves (60%), Impact Case Studies (5%) and the Research Environment (15%). Submissions to the REF are organised according to 34 separate Units of Assessment (UoAs) devised to cover the full range of research activity areas. The philosophy of the School of Design was to submit as many staff as possible, i.e. those who are undertaking research under Unit of Assessment 32, Art and Design: History, Practice & Theory. This resulted in 33 (30.5 FTE) staff submitting outputs at an average of 2.5 outputs per person (as required by the REF) with a total number of 75 high quality outputs, (books, book chapters, edited books, refereed journal articles and Multi Component Submissions [MCSs]) most of them at 3* and 4*, i.e. of quality that is ‘internationally’ and ‘world leading’ and our impact was also predominantly 3* and 4*. The 17 MCSs were an outstanding new addition to the submission 21
