39 What would you say are the challenges that you face? We try to bring new concepts; the novelty is something that needs to be understood. We teach an approach, a design method, more than anything else. It is not necessarily connected to a style or to an aesthetic output, but it’s more to do with thinking systematically. We understand design as the organisation of matter. Could you draw your unit?
How is it going so far? Things are going well so far. Students bring new ideas to the table. We try to help them developing their own ideas and we enhance them through our design methodology.
For more information on the new units in the undergraduate school please visit: www.aaschool.ac.uk/study/undergraduate
What is your agenda? The agenda focuses on 1:1 – real prototyping. We think that in the context of cross-fertilisation between academia and practice, prototypes can really help to unlock innovation for the design industry. How do you work? We divide the year into three phases. The first term is more to do with learning the tools and opening up to new possibilities by playing with computation and digital and physical form-finding. In the second term we will look into a real scenario – our site is Hudson Yards in New York: it presents a great dichotomy between a privately owned piece of land with the will to transform it into a public space. In the third term we will work on full-scale prototypes. What are you looking for in a student? We are looking for keen, open-minded and ambitious individuals; students who are interested in getting their hands dirty with material and have the ambition to go to real practices tomorrow and incorporate the knowledge they gained at school.
25m3 just won’t do.