Winter School

This year saw the first ever Faculty Winter School: a chance for students from different programmes in the Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design to swap courses for a week and work alongside students from different disciplines. Architects working with Animators? Advertisers working with Fashion students? Absolutely! Mechanics working with biologists to create a mouse with wheels? No, that almost certainly didn't happen. But one day, it will... mark our words!

Over the week the lucky students who graced the Creative Advertising studio collaborated to tackle a single project. Split into teams they shared different points of view across different disciplines to best utilise the resources of each group.

But what did everyone learn? The students learned about effective, engaging communication, working in groups and, as ever, coping with tight deadlines. And the staff? Well we also learned things about the different skills and extra potential brought to a project when collaborating across disciplines.

The best results came from the teams whose projects had a simple, strong concept and invited the audience to interact with the piece.

And the winning result? This RUBIK'S CUBE, which represented, on the outside, a puzzle, waiting to be solved. And on the inside the group had produced a series of sensory experiences hidden within each cube which gave those lucky enough to play with it a new adventure with each exploration.

The judges comments? They loved it. In fact it was a clear favourite with one Winter School judge commenting that it offered the chance for discovery.

Which brings us back nicely to the experience as a whole. The Winter School gave everyone a great opportunity to discover other student's very different disciplines and the huge increase in creative potential that emerges when working as a team.