Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries

Course Structure

1. [\'This unit involves opening and informing your imagination and we facilitate this by exploiting the interdisciplinary and cultural cross-fertilization that our postgraduate programme provides.\', \'The principal strategy involves teamwork in which rotating groups of students work with each other to respond to projects that are deliberately created to get your adrenalin pumping. Briefs are freshly created each year to challenge contemporary expectations and assumptions.\', "Project are short and demanding, rarely lasting more than two weeks and deliberately asking questions that defy predictable answers: For example we might ask you: \'If money had a smell what should it smell like?\'", \'A question like this tends to challenge everyone not least because it acknowledges our capacity to utilize our embodied knowledge in a strategy of sensuous scholarship that employs the full range of our multi-sensory capability.\', \'This strategy of taking you outside of the familiar conventions of creativity tends to quickly locate the discipline and culturally condition resistances to change. We are concerned to build awareness of personal and collective resistances that may inhibit the creation of new paradigms.\', \'This unit becomes a much more personal journey in which each student devises and completes their own research project.\', "We never predict or prescribe the best way forward but we support our students in finding their own \'best way.\'", \'For some students this will be personal and entrepreneurial, for others it may be the opportunity for a radical reassessment of themselves, their values and their potential.\', "We enable this ambition for productive change by a deceptively simple educational strategy that is based on the concept of a \'journey of discovery\' in other words \'your journey.\'", \'We require all students to create a question to frame their research mission and to give that question dimension through a series of artefacts that enable you to take your question into the real world in order to ascertain evidence of resistance and support.\', \'The journey is fully documented in a series of diaries in which you record what you have done, why you did it and what you have learnt.\', \'The MA Applied Imagination journey is completed with an exhibition that comprises evidence of the journey taken and the knowledge gained. The exhibition will feature your question, your artefacts, your diaries and a 650-word synopsis of the knowledge that you have gained.\', \'MA Applied Imagination lasts 45 weeks full-time or 90 weeks part time over two years.\', \'MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries is credit rated at 180 credits, and comprises 2 units. Unit 1 (60 credits) runs for 15 weeks full time, 30 weeks part time. Unit 2 (120 credits) follows the completion of Unit 1 and runs 30 weeks full time, 60 weeks part time.\', \'Both units must be passed in order to achieve the MA, but the classification of the award of MA derives from your mark for Unit 2 only.\', \'The difference between the two modes of study is that full time students are involved in more intensive study and, because they are not engaged in full time employment, test their ideas, research and working methods within the College environment with their peers as well as seeking out external verification and challenge.\', \'Part time students spend less time in formal peer interaction but are expected to test their ideas within their own professional practice as well as with each other as much as is possible. For part time students, the developmental process is necessarily slower and less intense during the first year but timetables are constructed to provide maximum opportunity for preparatory critical engagement.\']