Studio 4: Harvest

Studio brief 

Creative people are alchemists who turn ordinary things into gold. But the valuable material we have is mostly in our minds and not in our hands.

Over the year, the studio will be working on a series of briefs that address this understanding. At each stage the studio team of tutors and students will question the received ideas and values attaching to material, process and standard typologies of products to discover if they are preventing better solutions. What is the most cost effective way to do something? Is there a way to do it better with less energy and material? Can you devise a simple twist that applies the material or process to a different function, or uses it in an unexpected way? How can either first use or recovered materials be most intelligently and appropriately used (apart or together) to be valuable for their inherent properties? This is a new modernism. 

We will be working with companies such as SCP and 1882ltd, responding to, adding to, or challenging their designs, processes and collections. The studio may propose advanced industrial production or traditional craft responses to design challenges or hybrids, so long as the value stems from our creative and intellectual identity, method and process, and not from the simple application of labour to rare and valuable raw materials. 

We will have the ambition to launch real products to market using the most suitable platforms for seeking investment where necessary, for example; community, peer or crowdfunding opportunities. There is no need to wait until graduation to launch careers.