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Whilst the switch to online teaching during lockdown was hugely challenging and frustrating for the staff and students in the BA Design Crafts and Glass department it opened up a wealth of opportunities and ideas around the concept of making. It drew our attention to how important our process-led teaching and learning are and how we use the ‘process of making’ as an intrinsic part of the design process. It also very quickly drew our attention to how creative and resourceful we can be with restricted materials and facilities. Makers are natural problem solvers and both staff and students have risen to the challenge of finding themselves working at home.
Being starved of our amazing workshops and equipment and being locked in our homes meant setting projects around ‘household’ objects and materials and forced both staff and students to think more creatively and focused our attentions on how restriction can force creativity. This theme became popular within the teaching sessions we frequented online. Whilst the students were unable to follow the usual ‘practical workshop’ curriculum, we enjoyed the challenge of working at home with limited materials and equipment.
From that grew a body of interesting and exciting responses to the design briefs and a very different and often resourceful approach to materials and making. Programme manager Catherine Brown states: “I believe that creative people get a buzz from making something from nothing. I use the analogy of ‘being creative in making a meal from whatever is left in your fridge’… In this way, the student responses were often sustainable responses. Making beautiful craft objects from waste or the disused or working with low cost and minimal basic materials such as junk mail or paper. One of our 3rd years started to make her own clay embedding natural and organic materials, this has given her many ideas for inclusions in clay when we came back to the ceramics workshop.”
Lecturer Anna Lewis has found ways to challenge the students to design from everyday household objects “Online teaching is difficult as you have to be really upbeat and inventive to recreate that buzz we have in the studio. I’ve had my first years creating jewellery from mundane objects around them and photographing them on the body. It has allowed them to think beyond the usual materials and redefine what art jewellery could be. We even had one student wearing a Henry hoover on the mountain! Making at an ideas stage should be fun and break the rules, this time has seen a growth in inventive making and taking more risks. Last week we built structures from spaghetti and kebab sticks, this led to beautiful drawn imagery and design options for structures that might be made in glass or metal.”
We hope to be back in the studio again very soon and we shall be ready with clever designs to push forward in an array of new ways in the workshop. Watch this space!
For more information on the BA Design Crafts course: https://uwtsd.ac.uk/art-design/design-crafts/