MA Design (Furniture)

MA Design: Furniture focuses on your individual design practice and will broaden your career and research horizons.

Course overview

MA Design (Furniture) will develop your creative abilities, imagination and expertise. Framed within one course, we use design to explore these evolving disciplines, embracing ideas of practice beyond traditional definitions. This creates a range of hybrid practices disrupting assumptions around design, craft and production.

Your creative focus will evolve through a structured process of research, design ideation, exploration, development and evaluation. Encouraging you to expand skills intellectually, contextually and practically, extending and exploiting design strategies from your own and other disciplines. To question and test ideas through teamwork, collaborations and group critiques.

We embody design as a process and a practice of transformation. We view design as research in and for practice, as modes of thinking, as ways of communicating to diverse audiences.

The sustainability and ethicality of production is an urgent challenge to each of our disciplines. We are interested how this challenge shapes all forms of manufacturing – from master craftsmanship, artisanship and the hand-made to factory production and contemporary technologies. In single artefacts, mass-market delivery and all stages in-between.

The nature of production and consumption constantly changes, in the face of complex social, economic, environmental challenges and technological innovation. What could or should be the role of the ceramic, furniture or jewellery designer in the twenty first century? By engagement, reflection, negotiation and evolution, we challenge you to shape the future.

Re-framing a discipline or industry, places emphasis on strategic awareness within design and requires a set of responsive, generative and critical skills to complement your creative process and material knowledge.

We encourage you to question who you are as a designer. How will you shape your discipline? Will you design for a market-led focus, collaboratively with industry partners, regeneratively for a community of practice or identify ways forward as a thought and practice leader?

We are committed to developing ethical design practices. To achieve this, we are working to embed UAL's Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice into the course.

Good first degree in a relevant subject