Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: MA 1 year full-time
MA Applied Imagination is a non-disciplinary, student-centred course directing your development as a confident and responsible creative practitioner capable of achieving change.
We are an active course community who recognise the cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary global challenges. Students engage in original, self-directed research journeys, forming their own external networks and experimenting with new forms of knowledge production. Starting from problem solving and provocation, the course asks you to pose questions that spring from your individual concerns and sit across or outside traditional disciplinary boundaries. These may be questions that challenge the dominant parameters of our cultural, economic and political landscape. In forming new connections and networks and applying your skills and knowledges, you will gain an enhanced sense of agency over your creative and professional future.
We are committed to developing ethical applied imagination practices. To achieve this, we are working to embed UAL's Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice into the course.
AP(E)L – Accreditation of Prior (Experiential) Learning
Exceptionally applicants who do not meet these course entry requirements may still be considered. The course team will consider each application that demonstrates additional strengths and alternative evidence. This might, for example, be demonstrated by:
Each application will be considered on its own merit but cannot guarantee an offer in each case.
For fees and funding information, please see website
Students graduating from MA Applied Imagination have taken up employment in almost every part of the creative sector in the world economy. Our alumni have diversified to become actors, architects, broadcasters, creative managers, entrepreneurs, film-makers, inventors, journalists, musicians, social innovators, web designers – and academics. Many have also moved on to PhD programmes. Others have returned to – or entered for the first time – fields such as advertising, curation, exhibition and museum design, film and television, fashion design and retailing, graphic design, marketing, product design, public relations, publishing (both print and digital), and web design.
The course has links with outstanding practitioners across the spectrum of the creative sector. These include: architecture and interior design; advertising and branding; design against crime; film; fashion design; furniture and textile design; graphic and communication design; the music business; photography; product design; museums and galleries; television.
Unit 1: Imagination
In Unit 1, you will be immersed in a series of short, individual and team-based projects, designed to interrogate contemporary global agendas. Your peers will act as primary sources of knowledge and you will develop your skills through interaction with external experts and other collaborations. The projects in this unit pose questions that defy predictable answers – for example, we might ask you to construct and test a fully operational time machine. The projects are intended to take you outside of the familiar conventions of creativity and to investigate your potential for changemaking through the lenses of social justice, climate crisis, health and wellbeing, identity and technology. This “unpacking” process helps to locate resistance to change, often established through specific disciplinary backgrounds and cultural conditioning. We build awareness of personal and collective resistances which may inhibit the creation of new paradigms. The unit concludes with your drafting of a research proposal, to be further developed into your personal project during Units Three and Four.
Unit 2: Collaborative Practices for Common Good
This unit is nested within Unit One and addresses the theme of collaboration through co-operation with other postgraduate courses within the University. By working co-operatively with fellow students from parallel and contrasting courses, you will experience at first hand the value of cross-disciplinary thinking and problem-solving that is central to the MA Applied Imagination learning journey.
Unit 3: Application
In Unit 3, you will start to develop your research proposal into a viable project. You will also be required to establish networks for stakeholder engagement and external verification. You will be expected to demonstrate an understanding of the methodologies of action research and testing via intervention, in order to embody your research question and obtain new knowledge. You will plan and carry out your research in an ethical and inclusive way and be responsive to questions of social justice. In this unit, the course team will support you in finding your way forward, without predicting or prescribing your next steps.
Unit 4: Applied Imagination
Unit 4 requires you to complete the external verification of your research question. The unit comprises the completion of, and reflection on, your research outcomes as well as their presentation for assessment.
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