Program Overview

This research-led Textile Design MA addresses the needs of graduates from textile design and related discipline backgrounds, or those who wish to collaborate with professionals in the field. Our Textile Design MA is one of several postgraduate design courses that co-exist at our School of Art, Architecture and Design, offering rich opportunities for the collaborative multidisciplinary approach that is a feature of the current and future design sector and a requirement for success in the field.

The course is grounded in the understanding that design is a key driver for change in society and the environment. However, traditional roles in design are increasingly blurred and designers need to be able to negotiate complex and ambiguous problems. This means that the challenges and opportunities for design and designers are being constantly reimagined, as the unpredictability of the future tests our capacity to adapt, invent and apply creative design solutions to emerging needs.

Graduates of this course will challenge conventional ideas of what textiles are, and design textiles and textile products that have not yet been conceptualised.

Knowing that the future is largely shaped by design decisions implies a responsibility for designers to act in a manner that combines experimentation and radical thinking with care, effective research and collaboration with those who will be affected by the outcomes of designers' work. The work of a designer is not, however, limited to ensuring that any design outcomes, including textiles, are safe and function as intended.

You'll want to imbue your work with meaning, to use it to communicate, to engage emotions and inspire response. Textile design proposals also need to be designed to be attractive and desirable in the marketplace and relevant to consumers, meaning that you'll need an exhaustive overview of current and forthcoming trends and developments in order to be competitive.

To ensure that designs have validity, design and research for design occupies a large proportion of the course; the research and development process of design is rehearsed through the vehicle of your project work. In parallel with theoretical research, you will generate, communicate and evaluate all kinds of innovative ideas and concepts for textiles. You will discover what design research methods will reveal the widest range of proposals for testing, how best to inform the user and producer of what you have in mind and how best to evaluate concepts that exist in virtual form only.

TheSchool of Art, Architecture and Design is a community that shares a commitment to contemporary design and its global and local contexts, a passion for design in all its forms, and desire to test the premises of the field, theoretically as well as practically. We aspire to effect real, meaningful and beneficial change through our design work and our Textile Design MA is a part of that vision.