During my Graphic Design degree, I gained a breadth of skills and expertise by engaging with a range of specialist Graphic Communication Design practices and disciplinary areas. The course encouraged a blend of generalist, hybrid, and specialist practices by crossing traditional discipline boundaries.

I was able to contextualize my practice by using Graphic Communication Design to explore and address current environmental, cultural, and social complexities. The course encouraged a renewed consideration of consumerism, ethics, and design for social good.

The course had a strong emphasis on "thinking through making" where conventions of the discipline were challenged through rigorous experimentation of ideas, processes, and techniques. This supported the development of my critical and reflective thinking, making me responsive and influential in shifts within the discipline.

Additionally, the course fostered a sense of community and collaboration by encouraging learning strategies that were based on the diverse backgrounds and cultural experiences of the international student and staff community. The course adopted an integrated approach to researching, writing, and making, which was enriched by collaboration as students shared their ideas and interests and constructed knowledge together.

As a student of MA Graphic Communication Design, I had the opportunity to explore how the production of knowledge is intertwined with its form, context, and circulation. The course took an expanded approach to the idea of research, combining studio and writing practice to engage critically with graphic design as both a creative practice and a subject of study.

Through iterative and open-ended experimentation with visual media and tools of communication, I developed work that investigated existing knowledge, activated positions, and projected new forms of knowledge within and beyond the discipline.

The course engaged with studio and writing practice as a form of rigorous enquiry, allowing me and my fellow students and staff to explore how graphic design is a situated and relational discipline that both reflects and reconfigures its cultural, social, and environmental conditions.

Our community of practitioners critically interrogated the academic and professional contexts for practice, as well as the very nature of the discipline itself, continually co-defining and re-defining the expanding field of graphic design.

MA Graphic Communication Design is part of the Graphic Communication Design program, which in addition to sharing an academic team and studio spaces, offers a range of extracurricular events, lectures, live briefs, and other activities.