The MA Worldbuilding with Creature Design course will assist you to advance, widen and deepen
your existing design practices. It will help you to define your career aspirations through a series of
modules designed to enable progress through practice research. Dialogic exchange is an important
element of this course of study, which utilises dynamic group work supported by individual tuition.
MA Worldbuilding with Creature Design brings together practitioners that want to create narratives,
concept art and immersive worlds, across a range of professional contexts, production methods, and
industries, and you will have the opportunity to develop design skills, alongside research skills.
You will explore cultural, historical and futuristic worlds and creatures through drawing, iterative
design, and 3D prototyping. This course uses a wide range of theoretical and practice led conceptual
frameworks to consider the role of the imagination, the viewer, user engagement and the interface
and experience which may extend for example, from realism through to speculative archaeology and
zoology.
You will be encouraged to critically evaluate current advanced scholarship within your subject and
you will be introduced to approaches which reflect on and evaluate critical debate. You will be
encouraged to develop a practice research methodology that builds on and re-interprets theoretical
concepts embracing ethical, moral, sustainable and global themes. These may bring together crossdisciplinary contemporary influences from architectural visualisation, psychogeography, animal
anatomy and behaviour in fields, zooarchaeology and ethnography, for example.
You will have the opportunity to research, develop and demonstrate advanced knowledge,
understanding, and high-level practice research skills. You will also be able to exercise initiative
and personal responsibility, as you undertake complex decision-making, sometimes within the
context of independent learning.
Design work may contain paleo reconstruction (visualising prehistoric life) or speculative biology
(visualising possible future evolution or life on other planets), archaeological architecture or
contemporary cityscapes, environs ranging from the savannah to the metropolis, outer space or
deep-sea vistas.
The course aims to help you to visualise projects and explore and test narrative iterations of your
ideas and concepts, to explore character/ creature interactions and behaviours within created
worlds.
It encourages you to explore your individual creative ambitions in the context of employability,
developing strong practitioner research in both knowledge and market-led fields.
