PCDSGCCS - PG Cert Design for Cultural Commons

The course has been designed in consultation with public and third-sector organisations to ensure that it addresses knowledge missing in those sectors, as well as including a project module that enables design of real-world policy delivery. This supports employers engaged in community organisation and engagement, where the benefit of using art and design practices supports addressing hard to reach communities.

The course aligns with the University’s strategy of giving back to the city where it offers capacity building and new knowledge for implementing and delivery of policies.

The course is a professional course for capacity building for the public sector (i.e local government, museums and health services), the third sector (i.e housing associations and charities) and community organisations (i.e friends groups, community interest companies (CICs), non-for-profits and resident organisations). The course is innovative, focusing on context-specific arts and design-based community engaged delivery and implementation of policies and programs. The aim of the course is to train designers and non-designers alike to understand design thinking, to design specific and contextualised delivery programmes and services. The course will use case studies and complementary theories to enable students to develop unique solutions and deliver empowering services, projects, organisational forms and communities. It uses the contemporary discourse of the ‘Commons’ as the holistic and inclusive framework.
The modules for the PG Diploma encompass:
• empowerment and best practice in social engagement;
• empowering governance and systems;
• case studies of artefacts and services that benefit locally specific needs and support planetary care.
The knowledge delivered through the modules will be on best practices in engagement, system design (i.e. localised industries of goods manufacture), collaborative governance and public services with a focus on delivery rather than policy-making. The project module provides a laboratory-type setting through which real-world examples of services and projects are designed ready for implementation post course completion.
The course touches on how our current solutions are still based on industrial and modernist systems, which may no longer be fit for purpose and which require a new understanding of our digitally-connected society as a ‘Network Society’ as described by Darin Barney and Jan Vandijk. The ‘New Commons’ that are man-made have been conceptualised as a model for the challenges we face in that Network Society. The course will also touch on emerging digital technologies that support efficient management of empowering projects, goods and services at scales that have never been conceived before.
This Postgraduate Certificate course offers a unique opportunity to benefit from the most recent thinking about social engagement, inclusive community development, system design, design intervention as prototyping projects and services, empowering methods and collaborative governance. It offers system-change thinking to create innovative solutions to complex contemporary problems. The course aligns with Education for Social Justice Framework and Student Partnership Agreement, as this professionally-focused course will have students from different disciplines whose expert voices will complement those of the course staff The course uses art and design as a methodology for creative socio-political change.
Unlike conventional university courses for the public and third sectors which tend to be delivered in schools of political and social sciences this course is in the creative fields of art and design. Although its modules engage with socio-political theories, their delivery uses practices found in socially engaged art, designing public and common goods and system design.

The aim of this course is to use the emerging discourse of the New Commons in a network society to address systems of inequality arisen from lack of access to resource, influence and social capital.

The aim is for students to test knowledge gained in the modules and map it against external real-life situations within the institutions and organisations they work for while always being aware of their own ethical position. The course will give students the knowledge and mentoring support to negotiate their position appropriately in a work situation.

As well as the above the course aims to:

• produce graduates who can negotiate complex, ambitious ideas, operate with agility in the face of problems and unexpected situations with confidence;
• enable students to become articulate and confident in communicating their projects to a wide audience;
• champion a supportive and dynamic learning environment that encourages postgraduate professional students from a broad range of backgrounds to engage in creative, critical enquiry and debate, and knowledge sharing;
• show the relevance of Network Society and Commons discourse as part of a contemporary paradigm for delivery of public good services and products.

Students are taught relational ethics of care, played out in the learning environment, supporting and supported by both the University’s social justice and inclusivity agenda and the practice of engaging with students as partners.

On completion of this course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

1. understand the role of creativity and design thinking in empowering projects, services and practices;
2. know how to interpret and analyse existing services, practices and projects using the strategies gained in the modules;

Cognitive Intellectual Abilities

3. critically appraise the existing services, practices and projects within a given social, political, commercial, and cultural context;
4. understand power structures at play within existing services, practices and projects and develop innovative solutions to deal with inequality using the commons;

Subject-Specific Practical Skills

5. know how to embed the power of design thinking for innovation in methods to measure impact on social change;

Transferable Skills

6. work effectively as a member of a team, recognising an individual’s potential for contribution and negotiating task allocation appropriately;

Professionalism and Values

7. engage with the values facing them in their place of work through a critical analysis of the existing systems, services and projects;
8. demonstrate confidence, resilience, ambition and creativity and act as inclusive, collaborative and socially responsible practitioners and professionals in their discipline.

QAA Master's Degree Characteristics Statement

https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/master's-degree-characteristics-statement.pdf

Assessment includes a combination of diagnostic, formative and summative methods. Assessment of knowledge and understanding is through coursework, essays, and actions, and is based on written submissions, portfolio diaries, and system and institutional design. This may include oral presentations, group reviews, practical outcomes, group work, analysis work, critical review, learning agreements, reports, mappings, verbal and visual informal and formal presentations. Group reviews are used to assess students’ ability to identify and communicate their intentions both verbally and through their system change projects.

Students are expected to participate reflectively in assessment. Self-evaluation involves students reflecting on their progress in relation to the learning outcomes, and mirrors the assessment process conducted by the course team, providing the basis for discussion at assessment feedback sessions after formal coursework assessment has taken place.
There will be formative assessment and feedback throughout the course, delivered in-class, through peer-to-peer group discussions. Feedback will be recorded and provided to students in line with approved University procedures and timelines. Feedback will follow the University policy of ‘feed -forward’ clearly identifying both strengths of the work reviewed as well as areas and ways to improve work for the future. Students are expected to maintain appropriate records of their work as it develops across their agreed programme of studies and to take part in seminar discussion of their own and others’ work.
The assessment strategy for the course has been designed holistically, to ensure fairness, accessibility and inclusivity as well as manageable timing, workloads and clarity of expectations for students, and to avoid duplication of assessment of learning outcomes. Where appropriate, students are engaged as partners in the design of their assessments.

The requirements of briefs and their components, the assessment criteria, grading scheme and descriptors are published and explained to students at the start of the year and are designed to be used as consistently as possible, to avoid unnecessary complication.

In every case, there is required formative assessment and feedback prior to summative assessment at set points. This is recorded so that it can be used by both students and staff to track further progress and engage support where it is required. Feedback follows good pedagogic practice in that it is constructed as ‘feed-forward’, with a focus on specific actions and strategies as to how to improve, not only on what requires improvement.

Students are informed of the procedures for first, second and parity marking, and external examiner scrutiny of the assessment process and marks, to ensure that they understand and have confidence in the probity of the process and security of the final marks. Additionally, the course engages in Subject and School parity exercises to ensure that assessment standards are consistent.

This is a professional course, which means those students applying are either in work or are in the process of career change. Practice-based learning is embedded within the course, through engagement with practitioners’ fields and interests. It allows students to critically analyse systems that prohibit empowered practices and find solutions through design and creative thinking. They will be encouraged to present to colleagues in their own organisations and places of work to ensure that knowledge is further disseminated, which in turn allows the students to progress change.

No changes to university regulations are required

The course places a high value on enabling professional students to engage in bold and innovative methods to make change in systems that prohibit empowerment, inclusion and planetary care; be it products, services or organisational and institutional forms. The course’s principal learning model is a practice-led curriculum that promotes ongoing reflection and personal development. Social engagement in any context is a skill that requires crafting through observational and hands-on learning. The course’s engagement with external partners and employers ensures that students’ ideas are tested in live contexts and analysed against the theories learnt in class. The ability to effect change is tested and discussed throughout the course which builds the culture of empowering and gives students confidence to be change-makers. The mentoring supports ongoing confidence building and independent thinking of the students as learners and practitioners.

The course has developed four reflective learning strategies including:

• peer-to-peer review (discussion platforms within the student body giving them agency and confidence to share knowledge across sectors);
• external peer reviewers made up of experts, practitioners and citizens;
• self-evaluation as part of the tutorial structure;
• SWOT analysis of the existing structures students work in to find new and innovative solutions.

Localism Act (2011)
Levelling up the United Kingdom (UK Government 2022)
Islington Community Engagement Report (Islington Council 2022)

This unique professional course offers the knowledge to enable students to become entrepreneurs in existing institutions or while designing their own socially-purposed organisations as part of a career change. They will gain expertise in understanding about creative design thinking to apply in the future to empowering methods such as community asset sharing, mutual resource management, and peer-to-peer models of sharing assets. These skills will enable the students to undertake consultancy for public and third sector organisations and/or innovate within their own organisations.

This course can help you to gain a new or higher position in an existing job or help you set up an organisation if you want to start your own practice. You’ll rigorously and factually develop your future career with confidence and support from the expertise of the lecturers, practitioners and academics who teach on the course.

You’ll generally be required to have one or a combination of the following:

• an honours degree classification of 2.1/2.2 (or equivalent) in any subject discipline
• practice experience in any field, with some understanding of working within NGOs or other third sector organisations.
• an up-to-date CV and copies of award certificates

If your qualifications don’t meet the requirements above but you have a portfolio of substantial relevant experience in the field of Commons or a similar discourse, you’ll be invited to an interview to demonstrate your abilities for a postgraduate course on the Commons.

As well as the above, you’ll need to present a portfolio of work or a clear proposal for postgraduate study within the subject area.