You'll be introduced to the University and the technical workshops and facilities available to you. The first term includes a range of lectures and seminars and you’ll start to explore your creative practice. 

Contexts and Methods

A series of lectures and seminars are used within this unit to address core thinking and practices in contemporary and historic architecture, fine art and design. An overview of key thematic debates, historic movements, concepts of cultural production, spatial perception and cognition, material tactility and embodied relations are outlined. These form a critical intellectual context for you to contemplate your particular research agendas.

Exploratory Practice

This unit provides an intensive first immersion into creative studio practice. It generates distinct individual modes and themes of enquiry that may subsequently inform the detailed development of a project proposal for the latter stages of the MA. It secondly introduces you to the complexities, demands and moments of failure inherent in self-managing and delivering ambitious fabricated spatial outcomes.

During term two you begin developing your MA project, evaluating and testing out the aims of your proposal over a sustained period of self-directed study. 

Project Development

Work undertaken during the ‘Project Development’ unit normally builds upon that initiated in previous units of the MA. It seeks to explicitly integrate stands of theoretical and applied or practical research into a considerably more resolved and advanced line of enquiry that can sustain the remainder of the MA project.

In the third term of the course, you'll apply the knowledge gained through your research to create a final body of work. 

Final Realisation

This unit is the culmination of the MA programme of study and so forms an exposition and practical manifestation of ideas, concepts, and degrees of sophisticated practice achieved. It should achieve a resolution to investigations initiated in all previous units and deliver a single body of work that demonstrates advanced conceptual, technological and practical capability.

To support all of our current students and our recent UK and EU alumni to progress to the next level of study, we have developed a new range of fee discounts across a range of courses.

• Read more about fee discounts

We've got extensive contacts across the range of interior design disciplines. Live projects, research analysis and feasibility studies will draw on our wide range of contacts and associations.

Connections include specialists in the related fields of audio-visual technologies, lighting design and interactive design.

Recent guest lecturers have included:

• David Callcott, CADA Design, retail and leisure design consultants (London and Hyderabad, India)
• Emma Vane, Production Designer for Atonement, the Harry Potter series, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Captain America: The First Avenger
• Finlay White, ModCell, sustainable construction
• Mick Pearce, award-winning international architect (Title: Bio-mimicry and the 3rd industrial revolution)
• Phil Hughes, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, museum and exhibition designers (London, New York, Beijing)
• Uwe R. Brückner, Atelier Brückner, exhibition design (Stuttgart, Germany).

Career opportunities exist within design or architectural consultancies in retail, leisure, exhibition, office, hotel, residential and cruise ship design, as well as in the fields of design management, interior or film-set design.

Our course has a strong ecological focus with opportunities for engaging with both the theoretical and practical aspects of real-world sustainability.