Primer (30 credits)

This unit will engage you in the exploration and synthesis of the principles and methods of critical ideas in interior space. It introduces you to ideas and the processes that will enable participants to synthesise thinking and research in the design of interior spaces. The work in this unit will be based on a focused exploration that affords you the possibilities to challenge your thinking through research, design, exploration in order to generate new meanings for buildings, objects, spaces and the elements within them.

Media Studies (15 credits)

Situated in the School of Architecture and welcoming a student cohort from across multiple spatial design disciplines, Media Studies provides a rigorous and granular examination of historical and contemporary methodologies of media practice and research. Our collective goal is to increase critical engagement with media. We achieve this through lectures, tutorials, and workshops in which new approaches to media are conceptualised, refined, and implemented in innovative proposals and projects.

Platforms (30 credits)

This unit engages you in the origination and development of your own project in relation to the thematic concerns of the programme Platforms. Each platform in this unit is designed to emphasise a particular way of thinking or aspect of the design of the interior.

Platforms themes are the provocations or generators of ideas that you will utilise in the development of your own research and projects. It is anticipated that you will use the Platforms interests to assist in the determination of your own practice interests and ultimately your professional identities.

School-wide elective (15 credits)

You choose one elective from the options given below.

AcrossRCA (College-wide unit) (30 credits)

Across terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA. This unit aims to support you to meet the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing you together to work collaboratively in cross-programme interdisciplinary teams. In your team you will develop a self-initiated themed project, informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to collectively use your intellect and imagination to address key cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges. In doing so, you will develop and reflect on the abilities required to translate knowledge into action, and help demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

Independent Research Project (60 credits)

The purpose of the Independent Research Project is to enable you to apply the intellectual, technical and professional skills that you have developed throughout the programme to a challenging self-set brief. The project will normally be advanced from the work previously undertaken in the Platforms.

Working within the thematic concerns of the Platforms, you are expected to have agreed a research and project proposal, a brief, with your tutor that identifies the parameters of your project, including its aims, rationale, approaches and methodologies and possible resource implications.

The majority of this unit will involve independent study in the platform system.

The provocations provided by the Platforms should be utilised in order to assist in the determination of your own practice interests and ultimately your professional ambitions and responsibilities and identities as a practising designer. The IRP will contain an externally-facing element, for instance an exhibition of work. This is in order to enable participants to benchmark their work in a professional context.