This Creative Futures Academy (CFA) module has been developed to enable year 3 BA Hum students to broaden their horizons and enrich their academic experience.
It offers UCD students the opportunity to take electives at our partner institution the National College of Art & Design (NCAD), allowing students to acquire creative and professional skills adjacent to their disciplinary specialisms at UCD. It offers applied learning in a variety of contexts that will enhance students’ abilities to think and create, including studio and production environments.
Students will be asked to reflect on their experience of the ‘host’ institution (NCAD) and its teaching methods, providing a critical framework for their applied learning.
NCAD operates a different calendar to UCD. Classes begin on Friday 2 October and students will be required to attend sessions in NCAD until 4 December after the UCD term has ended. Your coursework will be submitted 11 December. Please do not register for this module if these dates are not possible for you.
***NB*** Due to a limited number of places available, students *must be manually registered to this module* by the CFA academic lead by contacting Dr Nicolas Pillai nicolas.pillai@ucd.ie
Students must apply within the first 7 days of online registration opening for Stage 3 BA Humanities students [Monday 17 August–Monday 31 August] and specify their first, second and third preferences of NCAD electives from the list below.
Places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis after online registration opens on 18 August. Due to limited place numbers, please note that your first choice may not be available.
Students who have secured a place on the module will be contacted by the CFA directly to confirm their registration to the module and choice of elective no later than Friday 4 September.
Students will choose from the following list of NCAD electives, none of which have prerequisites. All electives contain some blended learning (i.e. a mix of in-person and online teaching). Please indicate your first, second and third preferences when contacting CFA.
ALL CLASSES RUN ON FRIDAYS (TIMINGS TBC)
[Courses marked * denote students will work with industry partners]
1. Narrative Environments *
with Claire Healy
Every environment has the potential to tell a story; they are spatial platforms, scenarios, and interfaces for sharing information, hosting events, making installations, and staging experiences. Curating and designing environments to communicate and encompass stories, rhetoric, and discourse in a specific way, and to convey a particularly distinct narrative, has always been a core challenge of creative practice. Learners will be supported to use a variety of media to map, curate, and interpret a designated creative space, to tell stories and engage with the cultural contexts that frame the practices of creating spaces and built environments.
2. Artist Moving Image
with Sarah Durcan
Artists’ Moving Image is a distinctive and thriving field of contemporary art practice with curators and collections of time-based media in every major art and design institution. This course is for artists, filmmakers, curators and art and design professionals who want to develop their practices in relation to Artists’ Moving Image. It looks at multiple approaches from experimental film to essay films, eco film and immersive video installations and considers how artists approach themes like time, memory, narrative, materiality, space and place in film. The course is taught through seminars, screenings, workshops and visits with specialists in the field.
3. Climate Action*
with Neassa Horrigan
Climate Action imagines real, positive, and impactful change, generating dynamic and creative concepts to address complex environmental and social challenges resulting from climate change.
This course looks to equip emerging learners with an awareness and understanding of climate change issues and the urgency for meaningful action, while also providing tools, methods, and platforms to influence behavioural, personal, professional, and sectoral change.
Supporting a culture that promotes agency and a shared community ethos that substantively transforms perspective and behaviour towards climate action and responsibility. Learners will undertake a topical, thematic design project with colleagues and creative peers, developed through teamwork, negotiation and collaboration, which leads them to an understanding of how they might shape sustainable collaboration cultures.
4. Circular by Design
with Hugh Finnerty
How Might I Reimagine My Practice through Circular Principles?
The current modus operandi of creative industries is a linear one, largely following a ‘take-make-use-waste’ model. It is crucial that we as artists & designers radically reimagine our practices to be more circular, whereby work is made sustainably, used longer and then re-used or recycled at end-of-use. This Circular by Design (CbD) elective will equip students with the knowledge base and practical, adaptable skills required to apply circular principles & strategies to their design and art production and processes.
5. Creative Diversity
with Greg Osborne, Mic Chikanda
This course looks to equip learners with an awareness of the issues surrounding designing diversity and equality, such as the need to decolonise the discipline, while also providing the tools, methods and platforms to enact personal change.
Art and Design have far-reaching capacities for generating shared language and connecting people and communities. Today we see those forms resonate more than ever before in the multilingual, culturally heterogeneous, digitally interconnected spaces around the globe.
Students will gain an understanding of race, racism and stereotyping and how it manifested in graphic design. Students will look at decolonising art; what it means and also steps needed to create change.
The course aims to foster a culture of inclusion that welcomes difference, promotes agency and facilitates shared voices, within an expansive spectrum of creative cultures, practices, and competencies.
6. Creative Hospitality
with Jennie Moran
In this module, students will learn to create shared experiences, welcome others into our work, and cause connections to form moments that bring richness, colour, and poetry to our lives. They will look at the culture, philosophy and infrastructure of hospitality, and at ways of using elements such as food, shelter, storytelling as our tools in a nurturing and supportive atmosphere.
7. Design for Transformation*
with Lydia Stewart
This programme enables learners to explore the capacity of design as a critical and collaborative agent of social, cultural and economic change.
It asks the learner to consider the potential impact of design on a range of contemporary commercial, social and cultural issues.
Equal emphasis is placed on critical thinking. Learners explore speculative, fictional, discursive, and impact-led design methodologies, equipping them with the skills required to provoke meaningful change.
8. Creative Entrepreneurship
with Hugh Finnerty
If you’re looking to establish yourself as an artist, media producer or designer now or in the future, and are looking to create your own products/portfolio in order to sell your work, then this Module could be perfect for you.
The Module will be very focused on developing the tools and mindsets that will be helpful when transforming a creative practice into an enterprise. We work on the basics such as defining creative enterprise and building business marketing and sales plans while building your confidence and business pitching skills. This module will include a series of conversations and field trips to engage with successful entrepreneurs.
Please note that Generative AI technologies may not be used on this module in line with the UCD College of Arts and Humanities guidelines.