hi everybody uh welcome to our open day session for this year um it's really nice to uh see a good turnout from you all i'm really looking forward to hearing a bit more from you all i mean we're going to be taking questions at the end of this obviously and i'm sure you probably came into the session with a lot of questions um and you know at any point feel free to throw some questions into the chat um at the bottom there and uh i'll be delighted to answer them we'll either pick some up as we go or we'll hand them all at the end so welcome to the open day for ma interaction design um it's lovely to get the opportunity to give you a little bit of a deeper insight into what the course is what the course does what we look for in our students what students can look forward to doing with us so i'm really looking forward to seeing how you get on let me introduce myself to you so my name's wesley goatly i'm the course leader for emma interaction design um and i'm going to be guiding you through the next or 45 minutes or so of discussion about the course showing you a lot of student work giving you a heads up about lcc itself and about ual and uh just to give you a better insight and sense about the course and and what we do here okay so let's talk a little bit about lcc first i feel delighted kind of every day to get to teach at lcc um it's i've taught in a great number of places over my teaching career um including international um universities i'm quite a lot of kind of talks around and as well as run other uh mas and taurt bas and all the other things that come with uh having taught for as long as i have normally and i can honestly say that i really do feel lucky to be here at this time you know lcc is in a brilliant position in terms of uh the energy and enthusiasm of the way that all the courses are run um it's a kind of in many senses we're pushing at the kind of cutting edge i feel like of a lot of topics there's not really anything in lcc that's taught in the same way today as it was you know even 10 years ago i think a lot we're evolving um the topics constantly particularly in spaces such as the school of design where we're always thinking about where design is and where design is going and there is actually a really huge emphasis on that um within the school um you know on top of the fact that it's got this very diverse range of people that work in the school we also have a very diverse range of students we have a massive number of students from a massive number of countries that come through interaction design is no exception to that it's a very international course but the design school itself is a really exciting place to be right now i feel like you know the design school manifesto which is this very structural part that's been brought in to help guide the sense of where the school is going and what we want to do with it there's a really brilliant document and kind of mission statement for what we want to do in terms of pushing the courses and the school forward and really positioning our students in a way that you know they're not just responding to the way the world is today but they're kind of being prepared to respond to the next 15 25 years of how the world will probably be working and that's really our goal and you know alongside that is this very open very multi and interdisciplinary approach to the subject subjects we teach and interaction design is really no um no different in that sense we really do push through and think about where enter and interaction design can be as a field but also where us as the course interaction design can contribute to pushing the kind of boundaries of what the understanding of the field is so just to give you a little insight into what these kind of core principles of interaction design are for us so we see the interaction is far more than ux you know i'm sure all of you are well aware that there is an ma in ux at lcc and the nice thing about that is that means we don't have to be that right i mean for one thing a lot of people you know tend to either teach themselves uh ux sometimes or some ux skills and so there's people who normally have this kind of entry level amount of skills and the m a in ux is a really good way of it's actually a really brilliantly run course and that we we share a corridor with when we're back on campus and they do a great job of thinking about what ux is and what ux will be but it is within that discipline of user experience and that's not us and we are kind of very happy to for that notch to be us we're kind of uh we occupy this much broader space so the interaction doesn't mean the interaction between a quote-unquote user and an app that someone's make we're thinking about what the space of interaction is between us as people who make things and the audiences that we have for our works you know we don't use the word users when we talk about the people we want to be making work with and for because it's a very you know it makes them sound like they're drug addicts right that they're just a user somewhere and that's not the attitude we have to them we don't just see them as people whose only lives are useful to us by using our products when we think about interaction and making spaces objects experiences films however you want to think about it that people interact with we're talking about this two-way flow of interaction right there's the interaction of us making this thing in the world for somebody else and then what they do with that thing what they do in that space in that room with that object with that game or vr space or whatever it is you've made and we think about what deeper level of communication we can have of our audiences about the topics that we think are important crucial critical in the world that we want to be communicating so it's much more than what is generally seen as as ux and it's this whole other space and part of what we do here specifically to kind of push forward the future of what interaction design can be is that we're working explicitly in contexts that explore new technologies and new theories that push interaction design forward and i'll get onto a lot more of that in a second but the crucial thing is to think to remember with us as well is that we're actually as as much as we're engaging with very new technological concepts and the technologies themselves in the work that we do and we think about their impact on society individuals as well as communities we also are very open for people to explore it's a very experimental course you're allowed and encouraged to explore and experiment with your own practice to bring in different materials and different processes you know both analog and digital tools and technologies we welcome you to talking about ideas that range from the personal to the global and to engage with either objects or environments and anything in between any way that you can sort of dream that you want to be making within we will encourage and hope and help you kind of get to where you want to be and explore the things you want to explore and it's our jobs to help support encourage and kind of push you into making the best work possible also in this incredibly rigorous new context of interaction design so a part of that is that we see it's a very research oriented course um and by that i don't just mean that you know there's there are terms when all you do is read because in fact there's never a term where you're not making things um with us but there is always time for thinking and making in the same moment and we realize that whenever you're making things that are very you know are formulated upon your own research your own critical investigations or maybe some social or political elements in the world that you're really interested in and you want to bring through your practice we recognize that when you're then making art or design works in that moment you don't just switch off your your thinking researcher brain you know you're not you're never just researching or just making practice we recognize that it's a very sort of messy entangled process that happens in and we love that about it and we encourage and support people to develop both the rigor and depth of their research as well as the experimental element of their practice of making you know amazing new things it's a very creatively focused course in that way so we also focus upon both history and the present moment and also the future so we think about and we talk a lot about how um history and our understanding of it helps us to develop critical tools for understanding what is happening now and for how what the future might look like how that might unfold based on all of our knowledge of what's come before so through that we explore topics like myth and magic science fiction speculation foresight prediction a range of other approaches so some key features of the course for me and i'm you know i'm leaving these projects here uh you know in in these images uh on the left if at any point you want me to talk or especially at the end to go back and speak about any of these projects i'm really delighted to and these are just some projects that our students have been doing over the last couple of years so some key features of the course again we've got this very experimental approach to exploring new technologies their social effects and their hidden politics and we often invite people to bring those new technologies into collaboration with older technologies so we might be working in context that involves say fashion poetry or performance art while also combining them with things like machine learning big data analytics vr that sort of thing our graduate network is really strong you know we've got um this this great background of people who have studied on interaction design and i'm really glad to say stay engaged with us as a course we're also really lucky to see that there's a number of people who have graduated from our course and who then go on to work and teach at ual that's been three from last year who just started in the last 12 months which is a lovely thing to see and i see that as a particular benefit of the course so you know what we study in the course is really you know emerging social and technological changes at this very highly critical level we're not just looking at the surface we kind of dive underneath we really pull up expand and try to understand these very complex social political technological moments that we're in and where they kind of crash together and crucially how our practices can allow us to sort of help us think through what's happening but also communicate some of these deep research trajectories that we go on to our audience and bring them into this knowledge that that we've gained through doing this you know deep and fantastic um journey into uh the the topics we look at so a really great feature of the course is the advanced technical support that we offer so unlike some other courses who um you know maybe look at kind of similar ideas we've got this amazing um technical infrastructure at lcc um and an incredible amount of workshops and um guest lectures so the um but alongside the incredible facilities which we have here which i will get on to a bit in more depth later um we also have specific to our course we've got bespoke unique individual workshops in things like creative coding physical computing machine learning vr unity blender max msp p5.js so many different tools um including my audio um audio editing tools like ableton live for example we introduce our students we give them introductory workshops in a lot of in all of those that i've just mentioned plus others we also have some conceptual workshops in things like improvisation in creative writing in filmmaking that we give you all and and what we do is we give you i give everyone these introductory workshops so all the way throughout especially the first two terms you're doing so much new you're learning so many new skills and with with everyone else and then what we do is we say okay now you know the basics if you're really interested in one of these approaches like you really get into 3d rendering using blender for example and you really want to use it for one of your projects you come to us and the the big technical team that we have of dedicated and support technicians who who are experts in all of these things that we teach and you say right i want to make this i want to make this specific thing and then we help you get that point we say okay you've got the fundamental skills let's help you get the rest of the skills that will help you make this one project you really want to make and in that way everybody both learns a vast array of of kind of fundamentals in a range of different practices but they will also then get supported and encouraged to develop their own skills much more deeper in the things that they want so there will never be a term where we say right everybody this week or this term is doing a project using machine learning you know we'll offer you that option that you could do in machine learning but you could do it in dance or you could do it in vr or you could make a game or you could make a film your the medium is up to you you know it's our job then to listen to what you want to do and help get your skills to the point where you make something really great in that form and that's a massive part a massive thing that in my mind and from what i hear from the students who you know who do often do a lot of looking around at the rest of the courses available in the world or available in london you know that's one of the things that really makes us stand out is that um we are really focused around giving really high level support and teaching people a lot of skills while also supporting them one to one to be able to develop those practices to the places that they want to get them um so the course team is a massive part of that you know we've got myself the course leader in our tutor team we have um dr maria darda we've got rachel finney um who is just finishing up her phd so we'll probably be a doctor by the time that some of you start dr philippe page um caitlyn shepard who's also about to finish her phd and will also probably be a doctor by the time you will join um dr abraham and dr georgina voss and so we represent um you know we're all people who've got active practices and but also have been pushing ourselves that's what the doctor part does demonstrates that we've pushed ourselves to be looking at research at the kind of highest level that really we can get to of thinking about what's the deepest engagement with research and thinking and practice you know everybody on the course has got a um almost everybody on the course has got a practice based phd which means they had to work in both practice and research at very great levels in order to get to the point where they are and i feel really proud of our course team because of that because i think we represent a wide range of practices and a wide range of ideas i'll get onto more of that in a second but you also have dedicated language support in um in claire hiscock who is a brilliant addition and and that you know our students get a massive amount of time and energy from claire every week and we're really thankful for her you have academic support uh people like clem crosby who work specifically on helping your academic development in terms of your writing capacities and skills and we have this huge huge huge ever-increasing roster of famous artists designers curators researchers from around the world who give us visiting lectures everywhere every year at the moment we have a guest lecture um actually right now it's once a week we've been having guest lectures from really famous people in international design context you know we had sarah hendren um last week we'll have anab jain next week we've had hyphen labs natalie kane from the v a uh julian oliver daniel walk ingrid burrington the novelist tim mourne um the uh that there's a huge number of people that we have through and that's a massive part of what how we think we should be you know that this course should be run you should have more than one two or three voices around you you know we want you to feel like you've had this amazing experience with this huge and incredibly international range of experts who are continually practicing artists and designers that have helped you get to where you want to be and have given you the benefit of their expert advice and experience so to talk about that a little bit you know our phds in the group are in digital arts critical design curation science and technology studies philosophy of aesthetics and a bunch of things in between we all of our practices touch on things like installation art digital art experimental performance sound art critical design fine art vr design curation film now again one of the things that we do here is that all of us are continually active and practicing um people so we're people who ourselves are always learning and ourselves we're always pushing our practices and thinking about where our practice is and what it does in the world and that keeps us in a state where we're much like you and that we're always kind of grappling with these same questions and we bring that um drive that we all have as practitioners and as thinkers in the world we bring all that to the way that we teach and what we teach which is also why we mostly tweak or sometimes completely rewrite um the content every year to reflect changes in the world to reflect changes in what's been happening you know we weren't teaching the same thing two years ago as we did during the coronavirus lockdown because we had had thought about what we wanted how we wanted our students to feel supported and encouraged during that time and we changed what we were teaching to reflect that and we love that process you know that that for us is the exciting stuff about teaching and we're all really excited about what we do this is why we teach on this course you know we we're exhibited practitioners uk europe usa south america singapore mongolia these are all recent spaces where we as your course team have been exhibiting we're all active practitioners and researchers evolving the course constantly and on an average week you have three different one-to-one tutorials with these people so this is dedicated time it's just you and them can about whatever it is you want to talk about and you have those with generally two or three different people um in two or three different tutorials typically every single week throughout the course you know it's a really amazing capacity um that you will have to properly feel supported and build connections with the tutors with the practitioners and researchers and really feel the benefit of their support you know we're a very it's very you know i like to call it a very family oriented course in that way and i know a lot of our students refer to it as the interaction design family which just makes me very happy makes me feel like i'm doing something right so in terms of the interaction design research topics that we that we explore we do we explore things like racial and racial and gender bias in ai this very deep very pressing question about how these devices are being built and sort of who they serve and who they exclude we talk about topics like harroway and cyborg feminism we talk about ghosts spirits and machines we talk about data privacy surveillance software philosophy experimental digital aesthetics the notion of humans in and crisis which is obviously something that we've been talking about a lot more in the last two yeah 18 months um we talk about decolonizing machines and what a decolonized machine might look like in terms of the workshop topics we engage with like i said we do it creative coding physical computing projection mapping 3d rendering we do a phd proposal support workshop that we're starting this year which mostly based on the fact that we've had success we've now had the successful phd um applications come from students who are still on rma and through the ma have got to the point where they've been able to put in a phd application while they're still on the ma and be accepted for that phd application which i count as being a really great moment in the course's history because that's what i want for all of you too you know when i talk about the value of everyone on the course team being a doctor i will also be talking about the value of you all thinking about whether or not you want to be uh doctors too you know um and and how we can support you to get that point because that is one of the goals of the course is to give everybody the opportunity if they choose to evolve themselves into phd research after the ma we do workshops in sound improvisation and filmmaking and creative writing there's a huge range of stuff we cover so you know a little touch on um on the kind of learning experience here and much of you many of you i imagine are probably well aware of the fact that there's this kind of concept of blended learning that we're exploring right now and have been for the last 12 months um as a way to support students both online and offline when we get the chance and you know we all know that it's very hard to say oh yes you know there is definitely going to be no problems with coronavirus you know in september or in october obviously we none of us know that but the important thing i think from our perspective is that we've been working really hard to give students the best possible online experience that we can while also then when we've had the opportunity to open up and be in person like we did last term for example you know um from september to december we were back on campus one day a week in social distance and safe capacity and we had a great time and we got loads of great work done because i think one of the great really great things about ual is that it's not just deciding that everything goes digital uh from now on it's you know we everyone teaching here we all want to get back into studios we all want to be back into working you know getting our hands dirty but what's been great to me is to see students still make great work even when we couldn't get into the studios in the summer for example so we've still made a whole host of great stuff and last year that included having um exhibitions both for london design festival 2020 and the arts electronica festival in austria in 2020 featuring all that work that we made you know while being sheltering in place and i again this is a real testament really to the quality of students that we get in that they they saw that opportunity to push themselves and develop work that they just made online or through digital means and really made brilliant stuff out of it and i couldn't be prouder of them for it but you know to give you a little sense obviously we still um we still have nice times together again it's still a very family-oriented course and we still get to chat and do little social activities um even when working online but uh we've been doing things like and again this is what we did both when we were in person one day a week but also when we were working um online when there were lockdowns that we would still be doing things like workshops in machine learning such as you can see here and we were still doing and this is from uh about a month ago um still doing um guest lectures with people like audrey sampson who very kindly gave came to give us a a brilliant artist lecture about her practice so we're still really engaged as a community which again it goes is the testament to the students that we bring in and their commitment to their own learning um so it's really all down to them but you know people hang out with their cameras on and chat and exchange things and talk on our discord channels together and share recipes and share film recommendations you know we've the our students still keep that family attitude that community spirit of interaction designed together but you know we've had brilliant guest lectures from people like julian oliver from critical engineering um if you're somebody who knows who julian oliver is and who critical engineering are i'll just tell you now this is the course you're looking for so just to tip you off on that um the we were doing sound improvisation remotely all online which was a great great workshop a three sessions over three week workshop with rachel finney one of our our tutors um and it was and it was there was ensemble performances online it was a really really brilliant workshop that was done at the um start of this academic year in um in october so you know through all those that kind of blended like learning journey where obviously we're in we're on campus when we can be and then but when we're not we're still doing great stuff and we're still doing loads of of the kind of coolest end of what we do um alongside that i just want to show you some of the amazing student work we've had over the last couple of years and this stuff for me is just really emblematic of what interaction design is and does you know what rma does so this is a work uh called teresias by eleni zinologa and vincenz reinhart and they made this robot um that they developed that is constantly trying to touch itself to figure out what it is and it's on this kind of strange like tubular arm pulley thing that you can see here and um it's constantly trying to reach up and touch itself but because the limitations of its physical size it can never quite do that so it's this interesting strange poetic object that is trying to understand what it is um but i think one of my favorite parts of this project was they brought in a dancer to dance in a choreographed performance with the arm that's trying to explore what it is while the dancer herself explores what she is within that space it's a great project neither of these two people knew anything about robotics before they started this course they produced this entirely with the support of us and the technical team at lcc who are fantastic mitch size chronic suicider from 2019 um you know she reused actually some of the the black tubing that you can see from eleni's project she found bits of it and made her own project and mitch's work was a cyborg prosthetic spine that basically makes whoever wears it it gives him the sensation that mitch had mitch had this really a bad skeletal problem with her spine that gave her a lot of pain and made her very uncomfortable and so she made this device that basically helped people understand what it is to live in her body and again she wanted to she was very interested in dance but she wasn't a dancer but she worked with a dancer on this final project to have the dancer work with this strange new spine that mitch made and again mitch knew nothing about how to make robotics and she only knew a little bit about physical computing when she joined this course she made this entirely with the support of us and our technical teams this is a project i love to include because it's a nice reminder that interaction design does not have to be all computers and coding and in fact we always encourage people that if they don't want to do stuff with computers and coding they don't have to you know a project about the kind of politics and realities of technology or maybe about you know the anxieties of social media and things like that they don't need to have computers or digital technologies as part of the tools that make them you know that you can express those things in many ways lily who made this work in 2018 weaving the most so um she built this loom herself from wood that she found while um visiting with the moso people who are an indigenous peoples uh from china who weave these kind of beautiful works and lily was very interested in her relationship to their heritage and worked with them to produce this fully working loom and start sewing these traditional um textiles that they themselves are historical records of the most people it's a really lovely project she got an a for that didn't know anything about building a loom didn't know anything about weaving before she started the course she did this all with our support and the support the technical team and the last piece i'm going to show here we've got a magic video to show you on this so this is sorry anja wong's uh project the yo plotter this is another favorite project of mine um anya was very interested in how people were talking a lot online about whether or not ai was going to replace artists and her argument was that she really didn't think they were because ai are just another tool much like a paint brushes at all and so she made this big robot basically that draws picasso paintings on uh this canvas but there's also a part of it that's in the background is scanning the internet and looking for examples of people talking on platforms like twitter when people say oh i think that ai is going to replace artists or people saying i don't think ai is going to replace artists and basically whenever somebody said that they thought ai was going to replace artists the there was a spray would kick in like this kind of water spray that's hidden behind the mechanism would spray onto the painting and kind of ruin it as this kind of somewhat of a joke about this idea of ai replacing us but [Music] point out that we've used um digital tools in in our practice for a really really long time and we've used mechanical tools before that for a really really long time and then nothing really changes that i think another lovely side joke about this particular work is that picasso once said that computers would never be able to be used to make art and she made this really beautiful very compelling piece of art um using computers which i really like uh so um moving on from from there and the last work i'm going to show you is from this year this is mariana maranjoni's um work merciless entropy now mariana built this um quite big it's about a meter and a half tall sculpture out of cement with a fully functioning embedded computer within it and marianna's very interested in in much in the same way that people uh find a beauty in kind of broken down or ruined buildings particularly old buildings mariana found something beautiful about all the broken down and dead links as part that are kind of around on the internet and so she built this work that scrapes it's got sort of scans constantly for dead links for 404 pages paige is not found um and then injects using her own script her own poetry about loss and about sort of the the end of the internet in many ways into these pages so that this work is this kind of like sculptural um vehicle for her own poetry but also gets us thinking about the fragility of the internet that there are so many dead links and actually the internet degrades much quicker than a building does a wonderful project that mariana again knew nothing about web scraping when she started this course she knew nothing about embedding computers into cement or about cement and she made this all with our support and with the support of the technical team um and here's just a few little scraps of interaction design life again you know it is such a community and kind of family-oriented course i like to involve you know these things that we did some of which were done before the the coronavirus hit but some of them we kind of kept up since like for example you know the film nights we started those film nights back up again um last term so we were back in the studio watching films socially distance but we even got pizza in we just made sure that um the pizza was already pre-cut to avoid having to touch it we have you know picnics together we make dumplings together this of course was for chuanjia for chinese new year and we make food recipes how to make dumplings at home we have a podcast that's run by students talking about you know interesting things in their lives to do with the course the course itself is structured over um these units you start off with the the first term kind of gives you an introduction to some really pressing contemporary issues and concepts around networked and digital technologies but also brings you into the context of what the kind of most cutting edge and historical design theories and methodologies are that help can help you produce new work the second term in the spring we have our collaborative brief which i'll talk about in a second and we have our experimental methods and expanded practice terms which run over the whole spring and the summer helping you do really huge research journeys and produce substantial works including films and final projects for this term which can be something like a ranging from a video game to an installation to a performance um and then we have your final major project which you start at the end of the summer and you finish um in december and that is just what it sounds like you know a huge project with you know a really considerable amount of research it's really kind of like smart reflective well-considered projects that which again we will be supporting you through all the way through you know we have amazing facilities at lcc um i kind of wanted to draw attention to just a couple of them but we've got you know everything you see here especially printing print making photography studios which is where mariana took these lovely photos for example um kit room gallery spaces where we exhibit our works um we've got canteens and cafes on site which are really great but specifically for us the creative technology lab which is one of the two main um technical spaces we work from we actually do have our own studio space as well it's just for us and we feel with all of our crazy stuff um when i was googling for pictures of the creative technology lab to talk about it i was delighted to find these two photos on the left and right which were both there's all photos that the create technology lab and ual use to advertise it but they're both photos that are just full of interaction design students you see the person with the uh wearing the white jumper with the glasses being spoken to by delia one of our technicians that's anya who made the yo plotter the kind of picasso drawing machine project um so it's really nice that you know even when you're just trying to look for photos of ctl they're just full of interaction design students which is wonderful and shows how closely we work with the technicians there and also with all the materials the vr booths the soldering stations the huge room full of projectors iphones ipads mac minis extra screens speakers speaker stands all sorts vr equipment and the 3d workshop where all the kind of woodwork and vacuum forming and plastic work etc all goes on all the 3d printing happens here as well in in another room that you can see you can't see in this image but again this is a space that is normally full of interaction design students and the technicians are wonderful in this group and they work very closely with us again all the way through um the the year and they're really used to they're kind of excited both the the ctl and the 3d workshop technicians they're always excited to work with us because we come to them with the biggest most interesting ideas year on year and that so they love it and they give us loads of our their very precious time and loads of their expertise to help support us make these things that we're kind of building that are you know big in scope but also really deep in their connection to research and kind of politics and the social and everything else that we do collaborations we have or have had in the past with organizations like the v a museum uh where you could see a photo from the show we had in the v a uh in february this time almost exactly this time last year um in the top left here the design museum london ours electronica festival in austria probably the biggest digital arts um exhibition in the world so in our festival in barcelona we're currently working with bbc r d um as well the the very exciting create technology end of bbc on our current collaborative project i don't like to work with quote-unquote industry sources um because i don't think that students should have to do free labor for people who should be able to afford it i like working with organizations that are either charities or non-profits and that actually they will be doing a lot of work for the students you know having your work shown somewhere like the v a or the design museum or rs electronica looks great on your cv and it's not just like an internship you did for no money for a company that should have been paying you and that's one of the kind of core concepts behind how we run collaborations is that we want students to get the most out of it but we don't want them to be exploited their labor should be valued because it is really valuable you know during um during september last year when we were just generally coming out of lockdown in the uk our interaction design students volunteered their time in their normal summer break to make arrange like an entirely new exhibition of um of collaborative works with each other which again for me was this really beautiful moment where the students were had this incredibly hard summer of being scared and having to go home and shelter in place wherever they were but they still came together at the end of it and they still just wanted to make things and so we made sure we gave them a plat platform and it meant that there was a remote exhibition that was part of london design festival 2020 last year so with that i really wanted to we're coming right to the end here um and i just wanted to give you just five minutes of talk from um schwei so schwei is one of our outgoing graduates our 1920 graduates and i just wanted to give you an opportunity to hear schwei's story um as part of of this um this little open day try are you ready yeah thank you guys hi everyone my name is trey i'm graduating master interaction design at lcc i'm so excited to share with you guys my experience in this course my ba was in engineering and then i worked as an electronic engineer and a child programmer teacher so obviously i had no design background and because of this of the first term studying i still worry about the skills i've been doing for the past couple of years wooden very relatable are compatible with interaction design and can i be as good as my classmates who are natural designers or artists that may have been there since they were kids so to talk about this i must mention our course exhibition in the world famous vna museum and it was the first public show in my life this collaborative project called kleptoscope is a digital interpretation of the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for our relationship with the social media platforms and how these platforms can resemble and reinforce surveillance systems during the group work i define my role as technic support communicator so that i can use the skills i have to incorporate that into the project i worked on and i started understanding interaction design it is a multiple multi-disciplinary field a very open kind of course so i always expect someone to bring something special to the table and because of my previous skill side i could grasp an unique perspective and in this course we can do interactions with almost everything with people with machines with nature but my question was what i am interested in then the guest lectures and workshops provided me with several possibilities and finally helped me to figure out my curiosity about sound intimacy then i did my first experiment a project called waste sprinkles which was showing at electronic 2020. it is an interactive device that allows audiences to quickly build a close relationship with daily genderless machines through leap touch and trigger mixed sound including human body asmr and electromagnetic noise to think about the future human intimacy without binary genders another project that is very meaningful for me is consonants call teamwork from our exhibition at london design festival 2020 this project consists of a website and an audio video installation to convert all those audiences voice messages to a unique non-verbal sound and visual effects that manifest in the physical installation and share these online social connections between different voice to live stream in real time it's a reflection that virtual actions and dialogues have very real consequences and effects these two projects were produced during the lockdown but i was so lucky because some of our tutors are experienced some artists and to talk with people from the field i want to be in even just online i could get quite practical advice and gradually realize what i need to do to achieve my goal now i feel like okay it's time to invite the stomach intimacy as a carrier to talk about the new topic so here's my final major project women in the umbrellas this project was inspired by the umbrellas using shanghai blind day corner where parents chatting us to umbrellas to find a suitable partner for their unmarried adult children and in this installation the monologues from chinese and married professional women echo and reflect over the surface of the space giving the illusions of prices while highlighting the women's romantic idols and concepts of the gender equality i've got great creative freedom working on this project and that means i have to make every single decision by myself like building readiness with audiences and increasing their wideness to use other perception not only just vision but once i got my specific idea the tutors always come to provide me with as much support as possible so um this is my journey in mass interaction design course and i believe it's never too late to change over yourself and start something new you can become an interaction designer even though you have no design background if you really put your mind to it and then just keep learning keep designing and keep trying thank you good luck thank you for watching application and i saw that you know she was just from an engineering background i thought great let's get engineering this will be really interesting and it was one of those uh and it's one of the golden rules of the course is that people come from all over the world but also from all over different bas and different disciplines to join our course i mean this this term right now we've got two different landscape architects uh you know landscape gardeners as part of the course as well as a fine artist a media artist um somebody who worked in biosciences before they came to us you know it's not a course that sort of requires you to really know anything it's of course requires you to want to know more that's really what we do and so if you're wondering to yourself oh well you know i don't do any coding etc that's fine no most people don't join the course with really any technical skills that's what those all those workshops are for is to get you to the position where you've all got some technical skills and then you decide where you want to go from there so um you know schwei's series of projects is such a great um run through that because me and schwei had this conversation quite early on where schwei was talking about you know or maybe maybe this will be difficult for me because everybody else is a product designer or you know a lot of them have got different design backgrounds and you know and the work that shwai made was really great all the way through the course and she clearly learned so much shwai will get her final grade tomorrow um is the thing so i think you can let's all wish schwei good luck i'm not gonna obviously spoil what her grade was but put it this way you all would be very very happy to get the grade that shway got you would all be very happy to get that grade so moving on from that um the postgraduate hub you know is this really great aspect of what we do here at lcc as well um you know this is the stuff that's kind of outside the course that helps support you through what you do with us so it's people who are transitioning into their ma course who are coming onto mma life but also thinking about what happens next so the postgraduate hub are full of really great people working with ma students to think about you know employment advice both while you're on your ma to help support you as you learn but also what comes afterwards but again we talk about that with students a lot as well you know we give our experience as being people who have all done mas and all all have practices about what we did and how we made it work there's also the grad the graduate residency program where successful graduates can receive support from lcc including funding access to our creative community expert support use of an office meeting and technical spaces to help kind of continue on after the point that you graduate there's the industry mentoring scheme which i've actually been a part of in the past as well it connects postgraduate students of all disciplines with industry professionals to support their development as they enter the creative industry so the school does a lot to try to support people into whatever industries they want to be and then sometimes that's to go into design or maybe to go into being a professional artist or working in for a charity or a non-governmental organization um in terms of the applications for the course and this is obviously the key stuff you know we ask for your standard personal details you know the your your current or previous education and qualification details again do not worry if you think that you've got a weird background that doesn't sound like you know a normal background i'll tell you the truth i love seeing people who come from backgrounds that aren't traditional you know and i really enjoy having those people in the course and traditionally they are always the most successful um again to use anya as an example annie wong who made the picasso plotter ai machine um she was an architect very straightforward architect before she joined us so didn't do any coding you know just drew pictures of houses and thought it was really boring and decided that our course sounded better and anya finished on an a as well so it is a course that really it doesn't matter where you come from what your background is everybody is in a position where they can do really well um we look for things like employment history a cv we ask for a personal statement where i really want to see you talk about what you actually care about in the world a portfolio a study proposal and a personal video will come into it so a couple of notes on that so portfolio you know it's a collection of work showing how your creativity has developed show us the stuff that you're most excited about right show us show me the stuff that you don't think looks like everybody else's work because i have there is a an insane amount of applications for this course it is a huge it's a course that has a huge amount of applicants every year and i spend a lot of my time just looking at people who basically should be applying for maux because all they've got is just apps that look pretty boring and i just go no we're not we you know this isn't the course for you if you just want to make apps and nothing else this is not the course for you if you want to explore deeper than that you're not really actually sure what you want to do but you want to be exploring things this is the course for you so put in the stuff that you know the weird little experiments you've done put in the strange stuff putting the stuff that you're not quite sure what it is or where it's going that's what i love to see that's the spark that i look for when i'm scanning through the hundreds and hundreds of applications for this course um don't just show us please don't show me any more apps i look at so many apps it's no one's ever gotten onto the course with a portfolio full of apps show us the more exciting stuff you know you've seen this you know what we do show us the stuff that shows that you want to be kind of with us you want to be developing this sort of stuff it doesn't mean you you're already doing this work it means just show us that you want to be doing this work that's what i want to see and only do that you know if you do if you watch this and think yeah that's what i want then you know do it so the personal statement of video the personal statement i like to read because i want to see what kind of research you're interested in you know what thinking you've been doing what your interests are um what makes you want to make things you know i want to see what kind of makes you tick as a practitioner realistically but also i always want to know about what you care about in the world what are the politics or um or ideas concepts that are you're really passionate about in the world that's what i want to see i want to see passion in people the video prompts that we give our applicants are to please discuss how you feel your practice is situated in a wider political social or cultural context meaning that we ask you to show like that your work is engaged in the world that you care about the world and that you want your work to engage with that world in some way because that's the you know more than anything more than any qualifications more than any prior skills and more than any kind of specific background we want you to come from the most important thing about this course is you i want you to come into it because you've got something to say there's something you care about that you think you can achieve on this course because that's what we're here to help you do so relationship to scholarships and funding obviously this is a big question for a lot of people you know there are international postgraduate um scholarships there's um the bigger postgraduate scholarships the the questions for those it is really best to just go straight to the funding people for that um and also we have anissa on board here who can help with some of those things as well um but there is really good details on the ual website about those things so do do check out whether or not you're eligible for those loans because they do help okay we ran a little bit over time but just because i got excited about the course because i really love it you know i what i do is a great privilege and i feel really really lucky to both get to run the course that i want to run which is basically my my attitude towards running this ma is that i run the ma that i wish i did because i don't really understand why else you would how else you could run an ma other than to make the ma that you wish you did but it's also specifically because i feel incredibly privileged to work with the incredibly smart interesting funny strange folks who join the course and i really hope that some of you are some of those people okay any questions yes we do have a few questions and i just want to thank you so much for such an informative presentation we've got such a great bunch of people joining us today from you know we've got uh india ireland falmouth leeds and switzerland a really great diverse bunch so thank you everybody for joining us um and i now will go on to asking some of your questions um the first one being could you just explain where some of the students go after finishing the course absolutely so it's we've got a really good you know we often have a really good turnaround of students going into the design industries that they kind of wanted to get into in my experience so we've got a very high turnaround of graduates say for example our chinese graduates often go into work in tencent or alibaba or billy billy or you know some some other wing of one of those big tech companies so that's kind of like one strand that um from um from the the feedback that i get because i still like to keep in touch with with all of our ex students the feedback that i get is that the course has got really good visibility um around the world and but particularly in a number of those sorts of of industries and spaces and i'm sure some of you are familiar with that um but one thing that that also is opened up for a lot of our students is a lot of them go into being either independent professional artists um so people who are like who are artists and designers out in the world much like the rest of the um the course are who you know travel around making work and putting it in to um into galleries around the world or they start up their own studios or they get into teaching it's particularly nice for me when i see our students our graduates go into teaching and like i said we've got two graduates from last year who both started teaching at ual in the last um three months and that for me goes to show that you know at least i didn't put them off the idea of teaching clearly they must have thought oh this looks good where's and everybody else who teaches appears to have a good time i hope that's a good review of their experiences of being taught and um and i really like that so there are a number of um of uh different um places you go you know to be quite honest you know a lot of our students find it really easy to then go into to um things like ux jobs um the funniest thing for me is that um they always then find it really boring and they move on and do something much more interesting i see that a lot people saying i started a ux job after i left i did it for about three months and then thought it was really boring and now i do something better and more interesting you know and i'm like i'm really glad that you've got the experience through the course that there is more to life that you could be doing with your skills um so yeah that's always i i get that message a lot of people saying i got a job but actually what the course taught me was that i could do much better and now i'm doing much better which you know is again a great review i think of the course great thank you so much for that the next question asks it's not so much a question i think it's just needing you to confirm what um they think the course is so basically in the chat box we have so on this course you explore different fields and learn different stuff so it's not specific to anything um well i mean that is that's a pretty um stripped-down notion i would say that the course is really focused on technology and its politics you know that's our kind of starting point is that we're looking at the um the the emergent presence of technology in the world around us um but also thinking about how we um how we respond either with you know how we use those technological tools to sometimes critique the things that we are talking about but i mean a lot of our students are really they come to us because they're interested in these sorts of topics they're interested in digital culture digital technologies they've normally got already got some kind of critical um positions uh you know that they've they've got some ideas about the fact that you know they're really uncomfortable with surveillance or they're worried about you know the kind of things that governments are doing with ai or something similar so we do have a great deal of um of those sorts of topics that come in but you know through that we also talk about things like the power of myth and how myth influences how we understand the world including the designed world of technology so i would say that we generally are anchored to contemporary technologies and what they're doing but um through that we realize that that conversation takes us to a lot of really interesting places that isn't just talking about how phones work you know it's talking about how people use phones what their emotions passing through those phones do and what they are you know that's the really interesting stuff for me and i think that's what our students get out of it as well brilliant thank you now we've got someone here wanting some advice on whether um to take a break between completing a ba and an m.a whether it's more beneficial to go
out and get some real world experience or to jump in straight after finishing um their ba course which do you think is more beneficial i think that's a good it's a really good question um i think it really comes down to the individual person you know what they what they need if you really feel like you know you're not ready i would say or the or there or there's something you really want to get done outside of um of higher education then i would say yeah go for it like take a year out never in my experience it really hurts um to do that and certainly i took a big break before i came to to do my m.a quite late and i feel like i benefited from that in fact i started i started my ma when i was 30. so um it was quite quite a big break um and but i would say the other side of it is if there's not anything that you really want to get done there's not a pressing thing that you like i want to get this done now i would say that one of the things that gives you a different view on what that real world experience could be is a course like ours you know the interaction design it we we sort of teach you in a way to look at the world in a very different different very critical way and people often come out the course you know being much more focused about what they want to do and specifically what they don't want to be doing out in the world and that's really nice for me to see so yeah it comes down to to you and your um uh what how you feel about your life um but i would say you know if there's again if there's nothing that you want to get done come and join us brilliant thank you so the next question kind of follows on and slightly from the previous question we had about um career roles and um where people go on to next uh it's more about what kind of positions might you um obtain in tech companies for example um maybe art direction product design um i think we're looking for the kind of roles people might take sure so yeah people often go into various forms of interaction design roles that can range between more ux oriented roles but also thinking about you know experience in a number of ways within technology companies specifically you know we often have people who come in to work as creative technologists afterwards because the critical and creative approach to working with technology that you get through this course isn't something that everybody has and some of those some of those companies are really looking for those people who've got that spark who can see things in a different way and aren't and again aren't just like everybody else which is very much you know the kind of people we recruit from as well so it there's a there's a big range really and um you know within i think there's often more people who go off and start their own studios because they're like right i now know what i need to do and i don't want to just work for somebody else i want to be you know doing my own thing and kind of forging my own path so yeah within those tech companies that it and obviously it depends on what part of the world you're in and what sort of tech company is but people normally find some really interesting um spaces to go in my experience saying after submitting the application will there be an interview invitation um yes so um they're what i actually interview everyone um so if you've applied if you're applying through the school in the traditional way um i want to speak to everybody it's to be honest it's a massive amount of work for me and it's quite a painful process sometimes because it takes so much time and i'm very busy running the course um but it's really important for me to speak to you to get a sense of who you are and what you're interested in because like i said the course is so focused around people and us all working together and sharing these things and and you know we do a lot of collaborative work and group projects but also you know you work one-to-one on individual projects and you work with tutors quite closely so i kind of want to make sure that everybody is a really you know are on it for the right reasons and they they're on it because they you know they're it's really what they what's for them you know because there are a lot of people this might not be for for example and and that's fine um but like i said we've got so many applicants that not it's not for all of them but i interview everybody for that reason that i want to get a sense of who you are and you know are you sort of chatty are you quiet both of those things are good you know we have a mixture of both on the course it's not all just you know extroverts but it's more about i want to hear whether or not you care really you know whether or not you already sound bored with your own ideas or whether or not you're excited and are looking forward to doing more because that's the people that i want so i go quite laboriously through interviewing everybody so um there the invitation is normally um after about march you tend you tend to get an invitation the invitations start going out from them so um uh it's in you if you've already um applied and awaiting an interview it's just because we don't start offering interviews till march but after that point um it's generally every two or three weeks you start getting those interview um uh offers rolling out so if you've already um applied and you haven't heard yet that's don't worry i'm just waiting to start the interview process um so yeah we will get get around to it but it's normally like i said two to three weeks but everybody who applies will get an interview well just that it's
2021-03-18