Stage 1: Explore
Stage 1 commences with a two-day summit, consisting of reading seminars, guest expert lectures, and group discussions. The summit will provide the conceptual and theoretical foundation for the course and kick starts the stage’s key themes for the practice-led units that follow.
Unit 1: Collaborative Challenge (20 credits) *
This unit is designed to enable you to innovate, engage in developmental processes and participate in collaborative working practices. You will be encouraged to develop the professional negotiating and networking skills that will be needed to be successful in the cultural and creative industries. The nature of this collaboration may be within the course, with students on other courses, with research centres such as the Digital Anthropology Lab, or with industry.
Unit 2: Prototyping Practices (20 credits)
Led by the key conceptual themes developed in the Stage 1 ‘Explore’ summit, and with a focus on the body, this unit will explore current design making methods, present-day digital media and communication discourse, and sensory-based technologies within the context of contemporary fashion media and communication practices. The unit is structured around a set of short ‘sprint’ assignments undertaken both collaboratively and independently in class and through independent creative practice. You will initiate a series of iterative and process-led prototypes that will investigate the potential use of emerging ‘extended reality’ technologies within a fashion media and communication context.
Unit 3: Experiential Ecologies (20 credits)
With a focus on the convergence of digital and physical environments, this unit will explore the transdisciplinary development of hybrid fashion experiences. The unit will introduce you to contemporary co-design methods and processes, as well as essential ideation, organisational and community management skills that are necessary for building complex omnichannel experiences. Over the course of the unit, you will develop a hands-on and reflective understanding of the dynamics of working within a multidisciplinary creative team as you explore how community-driven platforms, multi-player gaming environments, and physical interactions can be used to create richly textured fashion experiences. Working in small groups, you will develop a design concept for a hybrid fashion experience as well as critically situate it within a broader socio-technological context.
Stage 2: Situate
Stage 2 commences with a two-day summit, consisting of reading seminars, guest expert lectures, and group discussions. The summit will build on the conceptual and theoretical foundation established in stage 1 by situating it within a broader socio-technological and climate context that will define stage 2’s research and practice-based units.
Unit 4: Research Proposal (20 credits) *
This unit introduces you to a range of research methods, approaches and tools that are available to you in order to conduct your post graduate project. The unit will cover philosophy and ethics in research, primary and secondary research methods, including quantitative, qualitative, visual and practice research methods. The unit will consider research in a range of contexts relevant to the cultural and creative industries and enable you to understand the relationship between theory and practice.
Unit 5: Emergent Futures (40 credits)
Led by the key conceptual themes developed in the Stage 2 ‘Situate’ summit, this unit focuses on systemic transformation and thought leadership. On this unit you will explore the potential roles fashion media and communication could play in response to present and near future planetary scale environmental, social, and technological challenges.
You will be introduced to insight generation, strategic thinking, and speculative design as well as system technologies such as machine learning, the blockchain and biotech. Through a series of rapid sprints, and working in small groups, you will develop and present an insight report that addresses a real-world issue by responding to the potential implications of social, technological and environmental drivers. You will then produce and present a speculative design outcome that offers a compelling vison of an alternative future and will operate as a projective model of how to conceive and initiate systemic transformation within a fashion media and communication context.
Stage 3: Integrate
Unit 6: The Masters’ Project (60 credits)*
The Masters’ Project is the final stage of your Masters’ course and is the is the culmination of your studies and provides you with a space to synthesise all the knowledge and skills you have gained on the course so far. Your project will be self-directed and you will negotiate the shape and direction of your project at the outset with your supervisor. This important final phase of your studies is where you will effectively communicate your work along with your ability to critically interrogate your practice with robust approaches to research and theoretical analysis. Upon completion of your project, you will have generated a high-level Masters’ quality piece of work that will showcase your practice, academic literacy and the professional standards that will act as a platform for your future career and professional development.
* Three cross-college units that are common to all LCF MA courses – Collaborative Challenge (20 credits), Research Proposal (20 credits) and Masters’ Project (60 credits) – have been validated separately.
