D&AD New Blood

As part of a small team of MA Communication Design students at Falmouth University, our creative director designed and typeset the walls to the course’s New blood Exhibition stand.

How can we establish dialogues across disciplines and fields of research when it comes to addressing the critical matters of environmental deterioration, social injustice and political unrest that plague the contemporary world? Falmouth University’s MA Communication Design course responds to the urgent need for meaningful conversations around these issues to incite real change: “We live in complex times. Our rapidly advancing technological capabilities are complicit in the challenges we are facing today: global warming; shadow wars; nationalism; a widening of inequalities, and so on. We need to understand the interrelationship between systems – political, social and economic – and challenge the inherent limitations of single solutions from siloed disciplines.”

The course’s most recent graduates recently took part in the annual D&AD New Blood Festival at London’s Old Truman Brewery, a design industry showcase that Falmouth University’s MA Communication Design treats as an annual live brief for its students. As Robyn tells us: “We use the project as a way of engaging with and, more importantly, challenging, the design industry and design education. As an MA, we want to lead the debate in the field, and we use the festival as a means to stimulate dialogue and discourse. Sometimes, this is necessarily provocative and adversarial.”

This year’s budding provocateurs responded to the perpetual flux of media that dominates our world by holding live “confessions” – complete with an appropriately “provocative” confessional – that prompted the festival’s visitors to reflect on their apprehensions and aspirations for the design industry and for our lives more generally. To facilitate discussion and urge the flow of ideas, the walls surrounding the confession box were printed with industry concerns, such as “Should freelance designers unionise?”, “Are universities failing young designers?”, “Why are design schools so much more diverse than the profession at large?”, and “Current ideology has encouraged us to think of competition as natural and emphasise growth at all costs. What damage has this done to creativity?”

Although the ornate, two-compartment wooden box might have seemed somewhat incongruous in the context of the modern creative industry, the repurposing of a religious setting to provide a forum for addressing students’ and practitioners’ concerns certainly made for a conspiratorial atmosphere and provoked necessary debate angled towards improving the industry. Confessions continue to be uploaded to confessnewblood.com. The installation went onto receive the award for “best stand in show” at this globally recognised student showcase. Beyond the festival, the project forms the basis of “ongoing action research” into the key challenges facing the design industry.

Excerpts taken from the corresponding article on Its Nice That, full article available here: https://bit.ly/3hCXm2I
Written by Rebecca Irvin.