0.0 NATURAL SELECTION
0.1 T hematic over vie w
MA Architecture // MA Interior Design
Evolution through natural selection exists as a series of prototypes, the principle of the survival of the fittest following the phenomena of genetic mutation affecting behavior and morphology. This is the principle of the year of design making and critical understanding you are embarking on, and as with genetic diversity, you will find a niche in which to flourish. Make this niche your home and adapt to it. Research develops expertise in a certain field, and the initial thinking is often identifying gaps in knowledge and practice which will enable you to make something new in a field of thought and making. You might start to think carefully about perception and future casting, how we as a species might develop in the future, how we adapt to our particular environments as individuals. What about a post-human evolution? You will start to question how our relationship to our environment might be mediated and augmented by technology. You might think about how spaces itself might go through an evolutionary process, adapting to external pressures to responsively change form, shape, colour or other physical attribute, as the fundamental principle of interactive space. You will engage with thinking in specialist fields such as neuroscience, cybernetics, robotics, interactive art and architecture, biochemistry, material science, behavioral science and particular aspects of engineering.
Your design work will slowly increase in scale and ambition as the year progresses in tandem with the independent nature of your studies, you will work from observation to drawing to model and to 1:1 immersive space, all the while challenging your own thinking to achieve the most ambitious outcome. Your greatest surprises and achievements may come in unexpected fields and create new and surprising phenomena, new species of space, let us say. . [continued...] UCA Canterbury School of Architecture // MA Architecture // MA Interior Design // 2016-17