In-Betweeness

Since 2015 MA Interiors has explored the notion of In-Betweenness and how it is revealed and interpreted within the city and it’s architecture. Students produce three publications that enable them to create a continually developing and accumulating record of their investigations and experiments, each volume informing the next, and together acting as a navigational guide for both student and reader.

Each publication acts as a physical record that communicates an exploratory narrative, where creative investigation informs speculation, design development encourages experimentation and critical evaluation results in the generation of innovative design strategies.

Book 1: Field Book asks students to become detective, design developer and maker, recording thisness and evaluating each expedition undertaken. Their reflections, of evidence found, are used to inform speculative yet innovative design interventions through drawing and making that disrupt and challenge social relationships, encourage new methods of encounters that create new common space and exemplify new forms of social relations.

Book 2: Design Development Manual promotes the importance of learning through production, developing and collating evidence to establish a design strategy and inspire an initial proposal.

Book 3: Detail challenges each student to deconstruct their developed proposals, reflect on the consequences of what they have designed and generate, in detail, a series of outputs appropriate to each individual proposal.

This year we have seen an array of heterogeneous project proposals and approaches, all unique in both ambition and application, that have challenged conventional understandings of the interior. Key areas of research have included isolation within communities; mental health; food banks; memory; disability; squatting; re-use; alternative retail experiences; religious spaces and how COVID-19 has effected social spaces, to name a few. 

Alongside their studio work, students are required to participate in theoretical and critical thinking culminating in mandatory pieces of writing. This integrated approach to theory and practice is common to all MA Art and Design courses at Middlesex, and on the MA Interiors this year, to support the studio theme of In-Betweeness, the group responded to two critical project briefs.

Encounters (ART4001) centred on introducing the students to different critical approaches to space. These included notions of heterotopic space, place and non-place, public-private, transculturation,and work-home. All students had to evidence their understanding of the given theme/texts by writing a weekly blog and each was given the opportunity to present to the class, which led to invigorating class discussions that often went off on a tangent yoking design specific issues to wider discussions of technology, social media, gender and cultural memory.

Connect (ART4002) focused on students leading their own research having identified – through a process
of constant rigour and elimination – their own specific research interests, which were particular to current trends in critical spatial research. A range of research topics developed from discussions of interior urbanism in living on water to establishing whether nature acts as an antidote to technology and how technology can complement nature. Each student was required to submit a fully annotated scholarly report demonstrating their research journey as well as the outcomes and discoveries.