March 2014 – School of Architecture & Design

March 25, 2014Catherine Chibnall No Comments

Fred Talks

Fancy reading about an exciting new series of talks set up by some of our own exciting students? Good. Here’s Creative Advertising 3rd year Emma Thomas to tell you more.

Everybody loves tradition so we thought it was about time the Creative Advertising Society started one of their own. The Fred talks. A delightful mixture of live talks, live music and weird and wonderful TED talks for a little bit of creative ignition. An event that all members of the society could enjoy and benefit from.

Held in a lecture theatre in the Art, Architecture and Design building, our first Fred talks gave a wide variety of topics. Starting with Dr Emile van der Zee, Principal Lecturer at the School of Psychology here at Lincoln, talking about dog psychology. How are dogs able to recognise words and phrases? He spoke about his own research into the topic, showed some incredibly intelligent dogs and left us all amazed by the findings from his research. Days later and the attendees are still talking about those dogs.

Next up was a short and probably unintentionally humorous TED talk informing us on the correct way to dry you hands. Shake and fold everybody, shake and fold..

Our next act was brought to us the in form of our very own talented Creative Advertising students, Jack Snell and Joe Lovett. The duo performed their renditions of Awolnation’s Sail, Stereophonics Dakota and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Good. All three crowd pleasers.

A change of pace came from our next TED talk Neil Harbisson ‘I listen to color’. An incredible story of a colour blind male who, with the help from a device on this head, was able to listen to the colours around him and turn his grey scale world into colour.

Ending the evenings Fred talks was Creative Advertising’s own Justin Tagg. Justin has recently finished filming a short film ‘Mouse-X’ and told the incredible journey of the film from script to screen and showcasing his hard work and determination. Covering crowd funding, set production and even his time at the Cannes film festival earlier on in the year, he left us all with the lasting sentiment of don’t just dream, do. We’re now nearing the time of the year to pass the society over to a new committee and wait with anticipation to see next year’s Fred talks line up.

March 20, 2014Catherine Chibnall No Comments

The Daily Doodle

Every day is an opportunity to show off your talents, but sometimes it can be hard to find out where to do it. Fortunately for illustrators a window has opened to help them do just that.

Mark Chambers, illustrator and University of Lincoln alumni, has set up the Daily Doodle, a Twitter account with the intention to get people drawing. The account will post a different topic every day and ask people to submit their responses so it can show them off to the wider public, including a number of top publishers and nationally known illustrators.

Mark says, “It’ll be great fun to get people drawing, inspired and interacting. A lot of publishers and art directors will get to see this and that kind of exposure will be great for the illustrators and designers of the future. I hope as many people get involved with this as possible and that they have a lot of fun with it.”

It’s always great to see opportunities like this spring up, so we’d urge you all to get following on Twitter and have a go!

March 20, 2014Catherine Chibnall 1 Comment

Product Design student highly commended

Product Design level 2 student Jonathan Hutchinson has been “Highly Commended” in the recent Alexander RoseOutdoor Furniture Design competition.

To celebrate his success, Jonathan has been invited down to the company’s headquarters to talk about his ideas and the possibility of them being put into production as part of the Alexander Rose range.

His work has been inspired by the control of contours and the creation of precision objects free from hard edges. Taking ideas from the likes of Henry Moore, the sculptor and artist, and Ron Arad, an Israeli industrial designer, he created a ‘Mobius strip’ piece which is constructed from a tubular alloy frame covered in rattan weave. These concepts attracted the attention of the Alexander Rose Managing Director who invited Jonathan down to discuss them in more detail.

We love to see student success and this is just another example of the great range of work our creative minds produce. Top stuff, Jonathan.

March 19, 2014Catherine Chibnall No Comments

Invisible Cities

Saturday 15^th March saw forty applicants for BA (Hons) Architecture taking part in an intensive studio session. They worked with twelve student tutors from second third and fifth years to create fantastic models based on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The book is a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan describing the cities the explorer has visited in his travels around the Khan’s empire.

Each group of four applicants was given a fragment of text and, working very quickly, produced 2D representations of the city they imagined. With their student tutor, the group decided on the most promising aspects to bring together to make their 3D representation. They could choose to model the whole city at Lilliputian scale or to model a representative fragment of the city at close to full scale.

The three-hour project engaged us in multi-disciplinary teamwork of the kind that we can expect all designers to experience in contemporary practice. The project also tested ingenuity in spotting the potential in materials and adapting proposals to accommodate evolving ideas generated by the group.

This project demonstrated that a great deal can be achieved in a short time by imaginative people exploring architecture in a creative environment. The buzz and the energy generated and the beautiful work produced made this a great experience for everyone involved. We can’t wait to start work for real with this group of applicants as the core of our first year in September 2014.

March 5, 2014Catherine Chibnall No Comments

MAIDE went to Philadelphia

Some of our MA International Design Enterprise (MAIDE) students visited their design counterparts at Philadelphia University to present their ideas to the design director of Canadian company UMBRA. Umbra, meaning ‘shade’ in Latin, are a world leader in modern, original, casual and affordable design for the home and are therefore a terrific company for developing designers to get involved with.

The MAIDE students worked with their Philadelphia colleagues to develop a range of ideas ready for pitching. After all the presentations, a total of four were taken back to the UMBRA design team for their consideration.

Relationships like this, with other universities and leading design firms, are great for our students and are a good footing for further similar opportunities to arise in the future.