A School of Missing Studies

In 1956 The Whitechapel Gallery, London, hosted the exhibition This is Tomorrow led by the Independent Group, who challenged visitors to enter into an environment which refl ected the future realties of the external space they were yet to encounter. “These are powerful precedents for placing art in a time-‐perspective that relies on a future to complete it” Lawerence Alloway A paradigm was born which saw Art and Design practices within Schools extending its position away from serving the everyday to, interrupting our encounter with the future. Beyond techniques of forecasting and the mannerisms of the speculative, the educational environment particularly at Masters level, now encourages complex making and unmaking of concepts and ideas, which in turn disrupts subject specific traditions, histories and common trajectories of discourse. Drawing from the Masters level teaching practice at University of the Arts, London (Digital Media and Graphic Communication Design) I propose to explore, in addition to the above, how the radically diff erent social and cultural experiences of an international cohort has also given further impetus to create a Site for Inquiry, wherein the external world is deconstructed, re arranged and eventually re conceived for and by the individual learner. This affirms the role of the Art/Design School as one which encourages the mutual relationship of the creative individual to bodies of knowledge in dynamic and stable/unstable ways