UAL L3 Extended Diploma in Art & Design

Semester One

Semester 1 helps you build your knowledge of the essential skills in your chosen area of art or design, establishing the confidence to try out new ways of thinking through new ways of making.

This module promotes experimental approaches to creative practice. We will begin by working together during a diagnostic phase to assess your skills, experience and ambitions, and create a personalised approach to your learning. You will build your knowledge of essential skills and core knowledges relevant to the practice and discourse of your chosen specialism.

You will think about concept generation, where ideas come from, and how our physical engagement with materials and methods informs both our knowledge and the direction of the creative process.

You will undertake a series of individual and collaborative projects that help you strengthen your understanding, develop your own creative and visual language, and explore new methods and materials, both traditional and digital. Group and individual project briefs will provide the supportive structure for practical activities that interrogate the ideas and influences at play in creative problem-solving.

In this module you will learn alongside artists, designers and visual communicators from across our MA programmes. You will develop advanced research skills and methods, understand the importance of primary and secondary research, analysis of objects, images and texts, develop your critical thinking, and build confidence with academic study skills and conventions needed for successful study at postgraduate level.

You will go on to apply these skills to research projects that explore the theoretical landscape of contemporary creative practice. You will examine case studies from a variety of different disciplines that make use of current critical methodologies—including archives and collections, design activism, institutional critique, collaboration, participation and co-design, material and object studies, culture jamming, hacking and disruptive design, and identity, ethnography and auto-ethnography as the dynamic research tools through which concepts are created, analysed and critiqued.

Semester 2 looks to the future, and helps you find a focus for your practice.

This module gives you the opportunity to put into practice what you learned last term, focusing your ideas and ambitions and pursue an individual direction.

Inter-disciplinary dialogues set up in Semester 1 are continued through regular crits and project reviews with tutors and peers, engaging all students in critical discussion and sharing of knowledge.

To build your portfolio, you can take part in live and industry projects, and you will be encouraged to build a public profile for your practice or brand. These briefs will help you build an autonomous approach to independent enquiry-based projects that form the heart of the module. Through self-initiated projects you will develop your independent thinking, problem-solving and problem-setting skills, enabling you to show real engagement with current issues and critical or theoretical contexts that shape your field of practice. You will apply your subject knowledge, research skills and critical enquiry to propose an original project that responds to or challenges issues, situations and problems encountered on the course, engaging appropriate critical methodologies to identify a contemporary question or issue, in so doing focusing on a defined area of art or design practice as a ‘testing ground’ for your Independent Major Project next term.

Your position as an emerging designer will be strengthened through Creative Futures, in which you will work with other MA students to explore art and design in a social context, exploring the critical, technological, environmental, geopolitical and ethical issues that impact on contemporary creative practice—and the ways in which artists and designers today are responding to the challenges we face today, while speculating about what tomorrow may bring.

As part of this module you will have the opportunity apply for an internship (including competitive internships offered by our partner Hearst Magazines UK). Alternatively, you will identify and approach an industry mentor, or design and develop a professional or industry-facing project around your own emerging practice. By building on your engagement with the contemporary professional practice of your discipline and the exploratory projects you have completed, you will have the confidence to develop a proposal for your final MA project to be realised in Semester 3.