Latest Interviews
Mike Seignior – ‘Looking For A Few Good Design Students’
Posted: Thursday 3rd Jul 2008
Mike Seignior [pictured right] is a man on a mission. He heads two courses at the University of Winchester – Design for Digital Media (BA) and Design for Digital Media (BSc) – both pertaining to art and design in an IT context. And he wants more students. Now.
It wasn’t always like this though, as Mike told us: “My background is actually in stage and theatre design, funnily enough. I have a design background. Increasingly though there’s an increasing convergence with computers, visual technologies and lighting, so I got into digital media in that way. I went from lighting designer to lighting director- educator, and it was while I was doing that that I got interested in video and film technology, using that in lighting the stage. It is a rather convoluted means of getting into it!”
Indeed. And Mike found himself diverging even more. “So I’d been working in Higher Education for quite some time in the area for design in theatre, but the University of Winchester is very keen on getting me to help them develop programmes in the design area, and what they were interested in was digital media.”
Which brings us to your new degree courses – and an unfulfilled need. “Well, we spent a long time before starting it, communicating with industry and looking at other programmes in the country. The main thing seemed to be that the industry was quite happy with the people they were getting, but they tended to get either pure designers – as in, graphics designers who weren’t particularly technology savvy – or they were getting people who came out of computer science programmes who were very tech savvy but didn’t really have a feeling for the design process. This meant that these two kinds of people had problems talking to each other. So we decided to come up with two programmes – a BA and a BSc – where the BA was looking at creating design technology-savvy designers, and the BSc was looking at ‘creative technologies’, and that’s a term I’ve seen being used about the industry for quite a while.”
Do tell. “The idea is that you’re not just a programmer, but you also have some creative connection with the work that you’re producing and you’re giving feedback to the designer. About things that might work better, like applied technologies that might make their work better. So that was the starting point – to create a programme that gets those two groups of people understanding each other’s problems and needs.
As it happens, the courses have already begun and made an impression with the first intake. “Well, we’ve actually had our first year with a fairly small group of students, as the courses were quite late to press, as it were, for the UCAS selection process. We’ve worked through a year and we’ve had a very good response from students as they’re very happy wiith the programme. We’ve done great work with the Cathedral in Winchester where students worked with it to come up with an interactive tour guide, and though it didn’t go through to a complete project, what they were working with is ideas that the Cathedral might employ to develop its interactive strategy for visitors. It proved very successful.”
But let’s pause a moment. Say I was a wannabe student – how would you sell these courses to me? “Well, first of all, you’ll need an arts and design background, or a technology background, but you’ll also have an interest in new media, so it’s really the output of your design, which will be quite different – through the medium of the Internet or games or even mobile technology, which we deal with as well. And what I’m interested in is the programme’s flexibility: you really can guide your own way through it, making choices as you go. So by the time you’re in the third year, because it’s such a big area, you can really use the third year to promote yourself in a particular area of digital media, to practice it with industry, with industry partners, and make it your first step into your career, so really you start your career before you leave the programme.”
The next step of course is getting more punters in. “Well, we are keen to recruit more students, and there’s been much more interest this year, since it’s now in the UCAS handbook, but design is a new product or area for the university, so I do say to applicants that one of the great things that we have at Winchester is that there’s no baggage.”
And by that, Mike means no dusty old academics nursing their dogmas. “We don’t have a computer science department and we’ve not got an Art & Design department – we don’t have any of the baggage that a lot of those departments can have. Computer departments that run multimedia courses have problems sometimes with design, whereas art and design-run programmes often have problems with technology.
“But we don’t have any of those problems because we don’t have that history. I think that’s an advantage, really…”, he says, in an understated sort of way.
If you’re interested in either or both degrees, e-mail course.enquiries@winchester.ac.uk or ring 01962 827234 for more details!