Master of Arts in Computer Animation with Professional Placement

at Kingston University London - Kingston School of Art, Knights Park United Kingdom

If you are interested in developing a career in the business of art, this masters level course will prepare you for the opportunities lying ahead. You will develop the key skills and gain the knowledge to understand global art markets within ever-changing artistic, cultural and economic environments.

Making the most of its location in Europe's art market capital in London, this Art Business MA degree draws on a high standard of interdisciplinary academic and practical teaching by recognised scholars. It also offers insights from art market professionals, both those with long-standing careers and those who are rising entrepreneurs of the millennial generation. In short, the curriculum balances skills training with academic rigor, as well as core business and legal concepts with industry-specific knowledge in order to reflect the diverse professional landscape students might wish to enter. Students benefit from frequent field trips to art business enterprises and partnership projects with industry.

This course allows you to experiment and explore your creative potential, preparing you for a career in the visual arts or creative industries. Students work with a range of traditional and new technologies, developing their ideas through sculpture, painting, printmaking, installation, film / photography, performance and sound.

Kingston is ranked No.9 in the UK for art (Guardian University Guide league tables 2020).

Key to the course is the professional skills modules, which will help you acquire strategic skills for planning, showing, recording and communicating your work.

You'll get to hear from visiting artists and take part in live external projects. Our industry links include the Tate, Stanley Picker Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Drawing Room and Auto Italia.

You'll be taught by practising artists, writers and curators in purpose built workshops and you'll have the option to go on field trips and study abroad. By the time you graduate you'll have gained real-life experience and skills and completed a portfolio that will help kick-start your career.

The MA Sustainable Design welcomes those who want to direct their existing creative practice towards ambitious and inclusive visions of sustainability.

We focus on the power of social innovation, systems thinking, and design for service to drive collective sustainable change. This established course will enable you to raise your sustainability literacy, to then design meaningful responses to the challenges of unsustainability that move you the most.

The course is open to designers from all backgrounds, who want to go beyond the boundaries of their existing disciplines rather than simply refine their existing practice. The cohort includes designers of communications, clothing, products, interiors, buildings, services, and digital environments, unified by a commitment to designing sustainability itself.

We collaborate with companies, public sector and community organisations to develop proposals rooted in opportunity and need. These collaborations often lead directly to student employment, in roles such as service design, social innovation and sustainability leadership.

Architecture is a profession, and this course is an integral part of a sequence of steps – RIBA parts 1, 2 and 3 - that leads to entry into it. Criteria for entry on to the UK Register of Architects are prescribed by the Architects Registration Board (ARB). The ARB and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) have agreed to hold the criteria in common and successful completion of this Honours Degree course gives Part 1 exemption. In addition to this, the RIBA has introduced new Themes and Values for Architectural Education, which includes further focus on climate literacy, health and life safety, ethical practice, and research literacy. The modules in the course work within this framework to provide a coherent balance of intellectual and practical skills, as well as facilitating various avenues to develop students' transferable and digital skills for a wide range of employment.

The course sits in the Department of Landscape and Architecture, one of four Departments in the School of Arts, which is one of three Schools (with the Design School and the School of Creative and Cultural Industries) in the Faculty of Kingston School of Art (KSA). It is located in the compact Knights Park campus, where it is directly adjacent to the range of other creative disciplines within KSA. It has immediate access to excellent and wide-ranging resources for physical making, an opportunity which sits at the heart of the pedagogy in each of the programmes and forms a key component of the BA Architecture programme. The Department's accommodation currently occupies the fourth and fifth floors of the New Extension Building at Knights Park, with the KSA workshops on the ground and first floors of the same building. This is a place in which to converse, to debate, to work and to learn from each other.

Kingston School of Art offers a stimulating environment for the postgraduate study of Illustration. Kingston University has some of the best fabrication and visual process workshops in the UK. This enables the most exciting innovations in ‘thinking through making'.

The Communication Design: Illustration MA course, offered through the highly-regarded Department of Illustration Animation, aims to develop creative professional understanding of Illustration in the context of communication design.

The course is structured to challenge you and your preconceptions about both illustration and design. It places an emphasis on the patterns of research you develop and the visual methods you employ to explore and unravel briefs. You will be expected to demonstrate how you research and develop your ideas. In this context, research is not only a working process it can also be considered an outcome in its own right.

This programme asks you to examine: what, how, why and who as key factors in design thinking. This represents a shift from the traditional definition of design and illustration as a problem solving activity to a placing the focus on problem finding. The course encourages the exploration and understanding of the methods and processes at work in contemporary illustration.

This course has been designed to enhance your long-term employment possibilities through an appreciation of the changing global, technological and social context of illustration and design. It includes the option of a one-year UK work placement, enhancing your experience and connections in industry. This type of assessed placement is not available on any other postgraduate courses.

The program sets out to affect systemic change in the fashion industry by offering alternatives to the mainstream fashion system. It focuses on developing a deep understanding of the multi-dimensionality of sustainability as it relates to fashion. Sustainable solutions are embedded in all coursework, using fashion as a medium to affect social change, resulting in innovative and ethical solutions, transformational systems, and organisations.

Based on critical thinking and problem solving, the program offers the opportunity to plot a new future for the fashion industry that challenges existing practices with practical and inspirational alternatives. Project work adheres to the four pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental, social, and cultural as an alternative to fashions unsustainable footprint.

This is a practice-based MA offering a multitude of tangible outcomes that make a positive contribution to society, culture, and ecology. Students can choose their area of focus with either a practice, business, or a systems-design outcome. The creative freedom offered by the program results in a variety of degree outputs, from websites and apps, services, new systems and models, exhibitions, installations, and product development, all based on design futuring. This is the business of design as a problem-solving tool, not a means to produce more stuff.

This innovative course is designed for qualified healthcare professionals, who are keen to learn more about leadership strategies and management techniques. It consists of taught modules, a work-based learning project and enables you to explore a leadership topic of interest in depth, with the aim to publish. You will learn how to lead and manage healthcare practice and implement research advances to enrich evidence-based practice. The course will help you to drive service improvement projects relevant to your practice, and research healthcare issues within your workplace. The course combines academic teaching with interactive learning and incorporates theories of leadership and change management. You will gain confidence to influence decision makers with your recommendations.

The structure of the course allows you to continue working while studying. The full time option has one classroom based day per week (Wednesdays) and the part time option is once per fortnight (Wednesdays). Many of our students have been promoted as a direct result of studying this course.

On this course you'll explore the medium of film, developing your own filmmaking practice while acquiring skills for working professionally.

You will engage with innovative, ambitious ideas, developing successful films in groups and individually, and gain a practical knowledge of filmmaking production. Your learning will be supported by technical inductions, workshops with industry professionals, guest lectures and field trips.

You'll produce films with high production value, through our moving image workshop and with specialist filming equipment. You will be able to experiment with digital and analogue formats, and shoot, process, telecine and edit on 8mm and 16mm gauges. You will also have access to our 3D workshops, photography darkrooms, printmaking and animation facilities.

You'll be taught by academics who are active practitioners in the film industry, working as directors, artists, editors and producers; they offer access to unique work experience opportunities. For example, a number of our students have participated in placements at Institute of Contemporary Arts, Film & Video Umbrella and Fly Film.

If you're considering a career in professional design, this course provides the skills, knowledge and practical experience you'll need. Design work covers domestic and commercial furniture, housewares and ceramics, industrial and technology products. Using our workshops, you'll have a platform for experimentation and discovery. You'll study key themes, such as sustainability, manufacturing and the roles that designers play in industry. The course collaborates and engages with industry at all levels, from live industry briefs to masterclasses and talks by industry professionals.

Your work will be promoted through international design competitions, major graduate shows and external exhibitions. You'll graduate with a professional portfolio of work, giving you a springboard to employment.

Do you want to become a professional within the specialist field of historic building conservation? On this course, you'll visit many of London's fascinating historic buildings to illustrate and inform your learning. Past and ongoing works at the Historic Royal Palaces, together with several national and local heritage organisations and practitioners, are used to support your project work.

The course is interdisciplinary and international. Current and former students include archaeologists, architects, architectural technologists, chartered surveyors, craftsmen, engineers, and project and construction managers.

You will have opportunities to work alongside other postgraduates in the Faculty and the wider university, including those studying architecture and landscape architecture.