Overview
The Centre for Design and the Creative Industries (CDCI) covers a broad spectrum of research and provides the overarching structure for five distinct research subject groupings:
- Design Innovation
- Jewellery
- Landscape and Environment
- Urban Transformation
- Visual Communication
All of these groups represent the operational level of research activity with their own distinctive areas of research focus. Research-active staff are encouraged to work across groups where appropriate, and much of our research activity is cross disciplinary and links with research staff in other faculties of the University, and external colleagues in outside institutions.
Design Innovation
Design Innovation is concerned with a range of applied, strategic and scholarly research, consultancy and speculative design projects that involve human factors in the configuration, technology and manufacture of consumer and capital products. The approach is interdisciplinary and user-focused; its audiences are consumers, manufacturers, service industries, designers and academics. Additionally, we are beginning to explore the role of design in a low carbon future, in collaboration with colleagues in other faculties of the university.
Jewellery
The School of Jewellery contains and facilitates the most vibrant, diverse and ambitious research and professional practice activities in the subject area, unmatched in the UK and recognised at an international level. Activities include: critical and scholarly dissemination published in books, journals and catalogues; creative practice, exhibited at high-profile galleries, museums and public venues; curatorial practice and the instigation and facilitation of new creative projects; innovative strategies for learning and teaching, directly informed by research activities; and knowledge transfer. The Jewellery Industry Innovation Centre (JIIC) represents a major initiative in the area, and provides a focus for research and knowledge transfer activities.
Landscape and Environment
Research in this area is concerned with perception of the landscape, particularly the development and refinement of individuals and how they interact with the environment. Key aspects of research include:
- Mental restorative potential of interaction between the individual and the environment
- Positive association with the environment and its contributing factors
- Structure of the landscape
- Concept of a supportive environment as well as modelling the interface between access
- Quality of the environment and its ability to support individual personal social requirements.
We currently hold a major EPSRC grant and an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award in this area.
Urban Transformation
The Centre for Urban Transformation aims to define a new discourse between research, teaching and practice, one that is highly philosophical and deeply practical, esoteric and day to day, political, theoretical and pedagogical. This programme of research deals with conceptions of language, intelligence, meaning, the senses, emotions and subjectivity. It moves debate away from the arcane and unknowable realm of metaphysics into the real world, informed by knowledge and ideas and emphasising the point that theory and philosophy need not necessarily be metaphysical by nature and setting a fresh agenda for pedagogy, the professions, research and practice.
Visual Communication
Visual communication represents a number of discrete areas of subject specialist research – animation, graphic design, illustration, photography, typography – developing academic and knowledge transfer outputs. Research in photography, for example, has been supported by awards from the AHRC, and the editorship of the international journal Visual Studies is currently held by a member of staff in this area. Over the next few years we will be developing an internationally recognised hub of typographic activity based on the work of UKTYPE from which we anticipate both academic outputs and collaboration with businesses in the creative sector.
As part of Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (BIAD), postgraduate activity benefits from the support of the Research Training Initiative (RTI), an innovative research training development project and website based in the faculty. Support also comes from extra funding following the award of an AHRC Block Grant Partnership Award, which provides an allocation of Masters and Doctoral Studentships for the period 2009-2013.
For more information, please contact: darren.newbury@bcu.ac.uk or CDCI-research@bcu.ac.uk