Masters Compare - Find your perfect masters course.
Masters Compare - Find your perfect masters course.
Study Details: Two years (60 weeks) low residency
The proliferation of information and data available today provides both challenges and opportunities for how we understand, navigate and communicate our complex world. It also places communication designers in a potentially influential role as interpreters, facilitators and activators of knowledge, truth and insight.
Communication is at the heart of how we construct and convey power, how we motivate and mobilise, and shape our societies, communities and identities. This course understands communication as deeply intertwined with complexity. It is an increasingly vital skill in empowering responses to our most pressing and complex challenges – without resorting to simplification.
MA Communicating Complexity is a creatively led communication design course in a world-leading graphic design programme. On this course you will be encouraged to advance experimental approaches to communication. Project briefs set in collaboration with a range of industries and sectors, as well as by your student cohort provide a springboard for creative and future-facing approaches. Course Learning Outcomes are referenced to UNESCO’s Learning objectives for achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Innovation in communication design is critical to even the most ambitious ideas and technologies as well as organisations seeking to make an impact at scale. By foregrounding complexity, this course encourages more inclusive, accessible, and culturally resonant inroads into the world’s challenges with the ambition to equip you with the ability to bring clarity, context, and criticality to engaging with and communicating complexity.
Collaborative projects: The course is comprised of design challenges drawn from external organisations in different sectors, for example from government and media to healthcare and technology.
Prioritising inclusive and accessible approaches: By welcoming complexity, the course welcomes multiple voices and methods simultaneously.
Engaging with climate, racial and social justice in the Graphic Communication Design Community at Central Saint Martins
You may be invited to an interview following our review of your application. We select applicants according to potential and current ability in the following areas:
Industry Experience and Opportunities: Live projects, co-designed with partners, are a core feature of the course. Students respond to up-to-the-minute questions and challenges emerging in different sectors. The projects are an opportunity to apply the ideas and methods to real-world contexts.
Course partners include research units, archives and labs; government departments and non-government organisations (NGOs); and partners in the technology, transportation and health sectors.
Projects include the creation of new interfaces, methods, engagement processes, visualisation languages and design propositions. In the second year, students build on these experiences, embedding collaboration with partners as a core part of their own research project.
Through this combination of experience, opportunities, networks and projects, students are prepared to apply their learning in their current or new careers.
This unit develops a shared foundation for the study and practice of communication design in the context of global and local challenges. It unpacks a range of terminology, contexts and methods associated with both contemporary communication practice and notions of complexity.
The starting point for this course is to prioritise the design of more inclusive and accessible discourses around complex matters, beginning with what may be difficult to understand – and therefore to communicate – while questioning the impulse to simplify for the sake of communication.
This unit addresses the theme of collaboration through co-operation with other postgraduate courses in the College. By working co-operatively with fellow students from other courses, you will experience at first hand the value of diverse cross-disciplinary thinking and problem-solving that is central to communicating complexity.
This unit features a sequence of context-specific and collaborative projects which experiment creatively and purposefully with contemporary local and global challenges. The ambition to challenge Eurocentric defaults and approaches to communication, information and data runs through all projects in this unit.
Knowledges explores the accessibility, interpretation, and dissemination of knowledge. It asks you to engage with the relationship between the form and circulation of knowledge. Publics explores how collaborative and participatory approaches to complex communication problems can achieve positive social, environmental, and economic change. Innovations focuses on how techniques, methods and approaches to communicating complexity can be applied to understand and re-imagine existing practices, technologies, networks and institutions.
At the end of the unit, students are supported to reflect on their practice and begin to define and scope their final major projects leading into Unit 4.
The course culminates in a self-directed design project which significantly elaborates on your learning in prior units and supports your future ambitions. You will demonstrate how communication design can be harnessed to positively impact individual, institutional and public understanding of and engagement in pressing complex issues. You are encouraged to bring your own prior experience, local context and positioning to defining and developing this project. You will also be asked to project the legacy of your project beyond the end of the course in a way that demonstrates you have considered its long-term impact.
Important note concerning academic progression through your course:
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