Arts and Design - your questions answered! video transcript

Hello, my name is Dave McGravie. I'm the Head of the School of Arts here at the University of Derby. So art and design encompasses of a broad area. It's a very traditional area of kind of the creative practice. So it's everything from fine art through all the design discipline, in terms of things like graphic design, illustration, fashion, textiles, interior design, and my own subject product design. Within the art design field, it feeds into a sector called the creative industries and the creative industry is a really important part of what we do in the UK. It's something like 7% of the gross domestic product of the UK, £110 billion. So it's a really important sector. There's lots of opportunities within art and design. It's very much about everything from feeding, the kind of the fashion industry, feeding into things like consumer goods, fast-moving goods industry.

There's lots of areas and what we're good at here is building those links, opening those doors, making those connections into the industry. Cause that's a really important part of what students need to get from their studies on a degree course. We're very focused on experimentation. We want students to try new things in their studies, in the first year. And we designed our courses to encourage that. So in our first year, all our courses are pass fail. So we don't grade you in the traditional sense, but we measure your engagement in the process through that pass fail process. What that does is takes away the fear of failure. So we encourage you to take risks in your work, and we want you to develop your practice through experimentation. And I think that's a key part and a key difference here at Derby. The second year is the really key year for a lot of our students. It's where they start to understand how they fit in within their practice. We support that in terms of industry engagement, through lots of live projects, we also offer 30 hours work experience through that year. And at the end of the second year, there's an option for all students to take part in essentially like a sandwich year, a year out in industry that can take many forms. It can be the whole year or it can be three months or six months, but we support our students very much in that transition from the study to the world of work. We are a traditional arts school here at Derby, but we are part of the wider University of Derby and what that enables and supports is access to a wider range of facilities. We're very proud of our library, which is in the Britania Mill Building and that's a bespoke art design library that supports and engages your learning in a more traditional sense in terms of reading. Choosing a course is a really challenging but exciting choice. It's not easy, you need to do your research.

Here at Derby, we're very much interested in you as an individual. We're very much interested in your practice as a creative practitioner, whether you're a fine artist, a graphic designer, a product designer, we're very much interested in you developing your practice. We will challenge you if you come here and we'll do that in a very supportive way, but we want to push you to make sure that you are the best and most creative artist or designer you can be.

Arts and Design - your questions answered! video

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