Project 20

MA:X overview

With MA students from the Culture and Contexts unit

This year MA students through MA:X (offered as part of the postgraduate optional unit cluster Culture and Contexts) will have the opportunity to join one of 4 Unit X projects.

The Neighbourhood project links with the National Trust, RNIB and design studio Standard Practice on a city greening project to explore how nature can nurture new communities around the NOMA site on the edge of the Northern Quarter. This hands on project will explore new methods of community engagement, grass-routes initiatives, materials and prototyping to garden new models for socially engaged city space. IKEA will also be working with us again this year to rethink their sustainable future regionally and globally. The project will utilise design-led approaches to innovation, exploring complex societal challenges to generate insights and develop design proposals that change the way we think about our lifestyle, the products we use and spaces we inhabit.

The Migrant Voices project will be working in partnership this year with the Olympia Music Foundation to create a cross disciplinary range of contemporary art and design responses with an emphasis on exploring ways of documenting performance within personal storytelling working with the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE (Race Archives and Community Engagement) Centre.

In Fabric: The Art of Place is an international project in partnership with China Academy of Art. The project invites you to contemplate the city as a starting point. How do we, as humans, participate in the city and how do we conceptualise our place in the world. How do we dream a future? This project is concerned with the symbiosis of fabric and space and is heavily influenced by materiality, physicality and the process of making, manifesting in site-specific installation.