Postgraduate Course: Making External Connections (DESI11203)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Craft making serves as a vital means of fostering connection and engagement, making it an essential form of participatory outreach. This course will teach you to how to further explore your collaborative craft practice through an external engagement and/or outreach project. You will make external connections beyond the MA Craft programme to create an external collaboration project. This course follows directly on from the Making Internal Connections course and will further advance and develop your collaborative skills, building upon and developing your craft practice externally. You will make external connections outwith the course through independent projects set up externally with a chosen partner, stakeholder, user, or maker who is local to the UK. |
| Course description |
On this course you will work together with an external collaborator to create an external engagement project that will significantly expand your collaborative skillset. To achieve this, the course will help you to foster and drive participatory engagement and outreach projects that focus on collaborative research methods. It will encourage you to contribute to meaningful debates about the position and perception of collaboration through craft, and the importance of safeguarding and sharing craft skills through collaborative craft practice. This will be led through in course discussions, group critique and open studio debate, you will actively seek input and feedback at all stages of your external project and will present and work in small groups throughout this course. On this course you will be asked to work as a maker with an external collaborator to complete an external collaborative project. Research methods such as a collaborative research journal, sketchbooks and technical notebooks will record your collaborative process. You will gather invaluable feedback by presenting your collaborative project to both staff and students. You will use their insights and feedback as a crucial way to refine and enhance your collaborative project.
You will take part in a series of themed collaboration workshops and events (4 hours per week in weeks 1-6). You will engage with the creative possibilities of collaboration through idea generation, scenario building, story boarding, and case study examples, and a planned networking event to connect with external collaborators. Leading on from this you will develop a draft project brief for an external collaboration project (submitted in week 7), which will set out your study plan and the research approach you will employ to realise your external project. You will develop and explore the creative possibilities of your external project through external participatory engagement and outreach activities (weeks 7-10), which will include a day of fieldwork with your chosen collaborator to scope out your project. Teaching sessions will include a dedicated pre-recorded short lecture series (2 hours per week - in weeks 1-6) which will explore and contextualise the field of collaborative craft theory and practice, which will be delivered as a flipped classroom. This will be supported through group crits, peer feedback and weekly group tutorials and/or seminars (1-2 hours per week). Note: You may be expected to travel in the UK to visit your collaborator in person. Remote online sessions may be required if travel is not possible.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | The nature of this studio course is that materials will be consumed and used in the development of your prototypes, models, and visualisations (including printing). For this course, it is expected that you might spend an average of £50, but these costs fluctuate significantly depending upon individual projects and your choice of materials involved with the project. At ECA we promote the reuse and recycling of materials, students are actively encouraged to access the free-use hub where possible or appropriate to their projects. We also would like to note that success in the course is not linked to expenditure; novel or sustainable approaches to material use will be commended. You may incur costs for travel and accommodation within the UK for a one-day visit to your external collaborator. However, local collaborators will be available, and remote online working sessions and workshops can be organised if required. |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Establish and conduct an independent research inquiry into collaborative making that generates innovative concepts in craft practice.
- Communicate and present their external collaboration project, using appropriate methods, to show a contextual understanding of their collaborative practice.
- Review and reflect upon their research, by exploring and constructing an external collaboration project that assesses the impact of their external engagement and outreach.
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Reading List
Charny, Daniel (2011) Power of Making: the Importance of Being Skilled. London: V&A Publishing
Felcey, Helen, Kettle, Alice & Ravetz, Amanada (2017) Craft through Collaboration. London: Bloomsbury.
Gauntlett, David (2018) Making is Connecting: The Social Power of Creativity, from Craft and Knitting to Digital Everything. Second expanded edition, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kester, Grant (2011) The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. North Carolina, Duke University Press. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Aspiration and personal development: Draw upon their own initiative and previous experience of craft practice to expand and fulfil their potential as future craft collaborators. Develop a confident and critically reflective approach, taking personal responsibility for pursuing their goals and seeking out opportunities to help them grow their own professional craft practice through external engagement and outreach.
Outlook & Engagement: Become engaged with the context of external engagement and outreach through their craft practice, working with both local and national communities, whilst also connecting and situating their craft practice within the wider international craft context. This mindset will influence and lead them to explore, develop and finally resolve an outlook that positively and critically engages with new contexts and communities out with ECA. Whilst encouraging them to consider the impact of their work, and to carefully consider the implications of their external engagement and outreach on others.
Research and Enquiry: Use their highly developed skills of collaboration in an external engagement and outreach project, they will apply collaborative craft research and enquiry to identify and creatively tackle problems and they will seek out opportunities for their own learning that enhances this approach.
Communication: Synthesise and share complex ideas around their work through a broad range of communication methods and selected platforms. They will find ways to disseminate their external engagements and outreach work that are appropriate to reach a variety of audiences, communities, and constituencies. |
| Keywords | Collaboration,craft practice,external engagement,outreach |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Maria MacLennan
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | |
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