MA Sustainable design Work In Progress online and offline shows.
The MA Sustainable Design students currently have a brilliant Work in Progress poster exhibition on the third floor of Mithras House – this exhibition is running alongside a series of ‘small talks’ and an online work in progress exhibition that launches on 7th February.
This Sustainability’ and ‘Design’ can be slippery terms. Sustainable Design is diverse, contested and a continually shifting discipline, making it an exciting place to study, work and research. When discussing sustainability challenges, we engage with ongoing debates about the most pressing issues, including equality, ecological concerns, consumption and good health. Overarching themes examined by this group of students include:
• the complex and entangled nature of sustainability
• the need for togetherness and collective action
• design beyond post it notes and misplaced fixes
• design beyond solutionism, giving form to change making action
• new modes of design to negotiate contemporary sustainability challenges
The MA Sustainable Design programme students are from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and worldwide. Collectively, we bring a wide range of life, educational and professional experience working with design and change-making agendas. Through our studies, we bring together theories, practices, ideas, and experiences, critiquing how design can understand, define, and attend to complex issues of sustainability. We have been exploring and embracing counter-conventional and alternative ways of thinking, working with(in), and practising design during the last semester. We continue to develop our critical understanding of conventional and established modes of design through the work and reflect on their relevance and application to contemporary sustainability discourses. The work presented in this exhibition presents the unique ideas and approaches that respond to our research. COVID-19 presents us with ongoing challenges. We continue to face limits to participation. Nevertheless, opportunities arrive as our material and digital worlds increasingly converge.
This collection runs parallel to a series of online public ‘small talks’. Together these platforms present our work in progress that we hope you enjoy.
Please join our conversations.
Dr Tom Ainsworth (course leader)
Sally Sutherland (Design Star PhD Candidate & visiting lecturer)