Program Overview

If you're passionate about interiors and the built environment, and you want to explore making with analogue and digital methods, this Master’s is for you.  

This course focuses on the interior and developing  an understanding of the built environment through sensory and affective engagement.  

You’ll study in an interdisciplinary environment with our other architecture courses as you learn to understand your strengths and disciplinary skills in the wider design environment. You'll be encouraged to engage with interior spaces through creative practice, experimentation, material engagement, and tangible and intangible matters, and learn to use advanced technologies and tools such as 3D printers and augmented and virtual reality in our Centre for Creative and Immersive Extended Reality (CCIXR), the UK’s first integrated facility to support innovation in virtual, augmented and extended realities.

On this course you'll explore the everyday lives of communities and their role in the environment, culture, economy, the political, and the aesthetic. You'll discover practices of care, and consider carefulness and communication as you engage with climate change by looking at city scale infrastructures among other things. You'll explore everyday detail and the relationship between our lived experience and the structures that impact how we live. You'll also explore strategies for reusing of buildings and work with local communities in socially engaged projects.

During the degree you’ll choose and develop your MA thesis by using a personal research project and building a personal manifesto.  You’ll explore your individual design practice and career trajectory in a self-reflective manifesto, which you’ll develop using an online blog and by working with peers.

The course will support you to engage with analogue methods of working that focus on the body, human and non-human, at the centre of your practice, and will also encourage digital working methods.  

You’ll learn to view your work in different social and cultural contexts and have opportunities to work with others, including communities, and explore your responsibilities relating to climate change and action, ready to graduate with all the tools you need for a career in interior architecture and interior design and associated creative industries.

Course highlights

• Build your professional network by meeting practising designers and architects, industry-experienced lecturers, and your peers
• Work on live projects in the community of Portsmouth  
• Benefit from the School of Architecture’s strong links with regional and national architectural and design practices
• Work at places such as Wymering Manor to engage with adaptive reuse strategies and community engagement
• Hear from industry experts including lecturers and guest speakers
• Exhibit at shows including our interim show, end of year show and the Interior Educators Exhibition
• Have the opportunity to go on visits to European cities, like Venice, or to join in with school visits taking place within the School of Architecture