MSc Design Innovation degree

With a multi-talented group of students you will work on a brief from a real company looking to solve a real social or business problem.

Together with your student team, you will research and build solutions to a business problem, supported by our project tutors, clients and staff. Previous clients include Foster + Partners, Speedo, The London Legacy Development Corporation as well as many other companies, start-ups and charities.

The Collaborative Project provides a means for you to engage in critical enquiry and to be exposed to project-based teamwork in multicultural and interdisciplinary settings. By undertaking this module, you will strengthen your cooperative and collaborative working skills and competencies, whilst raising your awareness and appreciation of cultural and disciplinary diversity and differences.

The Collaborative Project aims to provide you with a hands-on experience of identifying, framing and resolving practice-oriented and real-world based challenges and problems, using creativity and appropriate tools to achieve valuable and relevant solutions. Alongside the collaborative elements of the module, you will be provided with opportunities to network with stakeholders, organisations and corporations, which will give you the experience and skills needed to connect to relevant parties and potentially develop future employment opportunities.

This module focuses on developing skilled communication strategies and principles for working in cross-cultural contexts. Key theoretical concepts of 'identity', 'otherisation' and 'representation' will be introduced through lectures and seminars in order to explore the complex interrelationships between identity, culture and communication. You will bee expected to collect and analyse data from the Interdisciplinary Project module to be used for the case study assignment.

The module aims to answer the following important questions: What is culture? How are cultural identities constructed? How do cultural stereotypes impact on communication? How are meanings negotiated? And how are these questions related to working as a contemporary designer?

Topics studied as part of this module may include:

• The interplay between identity and culture 
• How culture and power relations work to produce particular meanings 
• The concepts of identity and culture 
• How to use concepts from the module to inform professional practice

The aim of this module is to enhance your ability to use design approaches and tools for identifying and implementing human centred innovation opportunities. You will be expected to deploy knowledge learned in this module into parallel running Collaborative Project module.

The module will include teaching on the following topics: visualization, using imagery to envision possible future conditions; journey mapping, assessing the existing experience through the customer's eyes, using customer oriented data collection techniques; value chain analysis, assessing the current value chain that supports the customer's journey; mind mapping, generating insights from exploration activities and using those to create; design criteria; brainstorming, generating ideas; rapid concept development, assembling innovative elements into a coherent proposition that can be explored and evaluated; rapid ‘prototyping', expressing a new concept in a tangible form for exploration, consumer testing, and refinement; consumer testing and storytelling.

In addition, the module will introduce you to a systematic design-based approach aimed at identifying and implementing user centred innovation opportunities.

This module will enable you to start planning for your major project by focusing first on generating a suitable topic to be explored. The goal is for you to arrive at a feasible, agreed major project plan. You will consolidate your prior learning and use it to develop a learning plan to complete their chosen study pathway.

The aim of the Reflection and Action module is to facilitate your reflection on your individual practices and values, and the shifts impacting on design discipline. You will gain a broad understanding of design theories and research in order to inform and shape their dissertation proposal to be developed in the dissertation module.

Topics studied as part of this module may include:

• How to focus your research ideas
• Understanding reflective practice and its role in design research
• Developing a feasible research direction
• Planning and piloting a research method 
• Understanding participatory and action research methodologies
• How to reflect, identify and agree on a dissertation direction
• Engagement in a sustained piece of individual, academic research on a chosen research method
• How to articulate, carry out and reflect on a feasible pilot project
• Pilot study planning

The module will locate design within broader cultural issues and practices of creativity and innovation. This module will use the Circuit of Culture and its five interrelated categories (i.e. Identity, Representation, Regulation, Production and Consumption) as framework to explore processes of meaning making.

The aims of this module are to build on concepts introduced in the Identity, Culture and Communication module and the Meaning Making in Design module. It aims to answer the question: ‘What is culture?’, as well as identify its meanings and practices. We will discuss the production and representation of culture, and explore the idea of designers as cultural intermediaries.

Topics studied as part of this module may include:

• How designers' practices combine elements of production and consumption of culture
• Cultural processes which form the culture of circuit
• The interplay of elements within the culture of circuit in construction of meaning
• The relationship between design and culture
• The key concepts of culture, cultural formation and production in relation design
• Complex cultural issues and the evaluation of design processes and products
• Collecting and analysing data
• Peer feedback
• The interplay of elements in construction of meaning

As part of the introduction to Foresight and Forecasting module, you will research methods for trends in forecasting, create scenarios and personas, create speculative designs, explore science fiction in film and literature, and understand making films to 'sell' concepts.

The aim of this module is to broaden your experience and skills as a designer to include knowledge of, and competence with, the deployment of foresight, forecasting and scenario writing to inform future design and business strategy.

Topics studied as part of this module may include:

• Engaging in research and analysis to gather key insights appropriate to the future strategy of a business
• Proposing design solutions which complement, inform and challenge the future strategy of a business
• Researching techniques for future forecasting
• Persona and scenario development as techniques for generating insights
• Persona and scenario development as techniques for generating stakeholder buy-in
• Creating speculative and/or conceptual design solutions
• The role(s) of speculative design concepts with a business
• Techniques for generating key insights;
• Applying key insights to speculative and/or conceptual design solutions
• Presentation techniques such as storyboarding, video, UX simulation, rendering and animation, as appropriate to the design concept
• How to present and document insights gained from research in a credible and convincing manner
• How to present 'hard-to-grasp' concepts in a compelling and convincing manner
• How to critique the work of others
• Presenting concepts in a manner which is understandable to non-designer stakeholders

The aim of the Design Innovation Project is to provide you with the skills to work in design innovation work teams.

The module is designed to help you develop and use key skills that will enable you to work successfully with various organisational project team members in the face-to-face and distributed product development process. It will prepare you to develop as a culturally competent project leader.

Topics covered may include:

• Using digital communication platforms
• Information/knowledge transfer
• Design innovation development and communication (eg. analysing service cases, visualizing maps using design tools, describing analysed content, exploring strategic innovation opportunities, presenting an innovation process through the use of effective design methodologies)
• Awareness of social innovation and co-creation of value

The Dissertation module will equip you with the relevant skills, knowledge and understanding to embark on your own research project.

Dissertation pathways may include:

1. A desk-based research project that could be set by an organisation or a subject of your choice
2. A project that involves collection of primary data from within an organisation or based on lab and/or field experiments
3. A professional placement within an organisation during which time you will complete a project as part of your role, in agreement with the organisation (subject to a suitable placement position being obtained)

By undertaking a dissertation at master's level, you should achieve a high level of understanding in your chosen subject area and produce a written thesis or project report which will discuss your research in depth and with rigour.

This module will introduce to the latest digital technologies used in personal and professional domains.

Topics covered may include:

1. Image, video and audio capturing, processing, and delivery techniques, and their specific needs and challenges
2. Digital media applications, transmission methods, quality of service and quality of experience
3. Cloud technologies and applications and their benefits and challenges
4. Internet of Things system and applications

The module aims to provide students with an overview of the digital technologies and their associated challenges. Students will be introduced to the digital media processing concepts (image, video, audio), media applications, networks and quality measurement, cloud technologies and Internet of Things (IoT). As such, it is suitable for students to study this module to broaden their general knowledge of the latest technological advances in various segments of digital technologies.

The module will ask the important question: what are Political Risks?

Together we will explore the lure of emerging markets; the political and economic geography of emerging markets; varieties of geopolitical risks; international political risks in the emerging markets; governance structures in emerging markets; lobbying; regulatory risks; and emerging markets as nodes in the global market.

This exciting module will outline the various dimensions of political risks that affect the business climate in emerging markets. On completion of the module, it is expected that you will be able to demonstrate an appreciation of the various political risks in emerging markets; and be attuned to the politics of 'doing business' in emerging markets.

Topics studied as part of this module may include:

• Political risks within emerging markets
• The various factors that make emerging markets important nodes in international business activities
• How to evaluate existing literature and understandings of emerging markets
• Constructing reasoned arguments by synthesizing and analysing relevant information 
• Reflecting on your own learning and making use of constructive feedback
• Analysing current events and taking part in group discussions as part of an editorial meeting
• Reviewing essay questions and planning possible outlines
• Using communication and information technology for the retrieval and presentation of information
• Explaining events as they are reported in media coverage, and examining their contents

This module draws on the sociology of work to provide a systematic explanation of these and other important questions regarding the types, content, and contexts of work as well as broader issues regarding employment relations and the labour market within the economy. The approach will be historical and comparative, providing a sociological, critical and labour-oriented approach to work, markets, corporations and capitalism. Topics include an introduction to sociological theory, the history of capitalist work and employment, gender and race in the labour market, deskilling, upskilling, and skill polarization, the roles of unions, Fordism and post-Fordism, professions, low-wage occupations and non-standard work and bad jobs.

The module will familiarise students with key concepts in sociology and the sociological study of work and employment, provide a historical and comparative perspective on the development of work and labour markets since the industrial revolution, explore the various economic, political and cultural forces shaping the organisation of work and labour markets and understand the factors contributing to job quality.