MA Culture, Materials & Design

Our Core Vision: The material world is a world of social potential. Social scientists should be better equipped to engage with materials and objects through ethnographic, critical, analytical, presentational and collaborative skills. Designers, artists, engineers, architects and curators should be better equipped to work with people using similar skills.

The MA in Culture, Materials and Design is for people who are interested in developing their people-skills, and ways of thinking about culture and society, to work alongside, and with, designers, engineers, heritage professionals, environmentalists, materials scientists, and others with a pragmatic interest in materials and design.

The course is about anthropological analytical skills and ethnographic methods, with some presentational and studio group-work skills. We mainly apply these skills to exploring the cultural and social implications of materials and design. We do social science in ways which have an affinity with design and related fields.

You should consider our MA if:

• You have a cultural interest in a particular Material, in Design, or in Crafts.
• You have a Professional background which uses materials and objects (design, art, heritage, engineering, architecture).
• You are interested in learning and researching through Doing and Making using materials and objects, as well as texts.
• The questions you are asking in your work are two-fold: firstly about Communities, and secondarily about institutional Audiences and Agendas (companies, museums, NGOs, Governments).



For more information on the programme's structure and content click here.