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The business world is changing. There is a new age coming and there will be a new type of professional at the forefront. Most evident of this shift is the need to bring together the disciplines of design and engineering. Through this collaboration new, innovative and world changing products services and systems will be developed.

The Centre for Competitive Creative Design, C4D, brings together two of the world’s leading academic establishments to develop this next generation of creative, design literate engineers, scientists, managers and designers.

Industry craves greater creativity and innovation through the partnership between The University of the Arts London (UAL) and Cranfield University C4D will utilise its unique position to seriously approach this integration of disciplines and different industry sectors.

The partnership will develop a novel and exciting education programme, an industry service, an incubation support function and research into competitive creative design. The Masters in design (MDes) will be the first example of this new approach, a postgraduate degree designed for a different world.

At C4D, we believe that engineering is creative, that creativity should be seen at all ends of the industry and that creativity is the key to unlocking the solutions to many of today’s problems.

About Us: -

The aim of C4D is to become a ‘hot-house’ that will become widely influential and distil creativity and innovation into the leadership of industry. Through education, research and consultancy that brings designers, scientists, engineers and managers together in a multi-disciplinary and culturally diverse, interactive environment.

We have seen that the world of commerce and business is changing and C4D is acting to address the demands of the future. The ‘global village’ means that in today’s business world operations which would have traditionally taken place in the same environment are now spread across the world. The very role of Western business is changing. There will be positions in industry which have been established for years which will not exist in the future.

Because we recognise these facts we also recognise that a new attitude and more importantly a new kind of professional are needed to fill new roles and rise to new challenges.

Essentially, the mission is this: “Change the way that enterprises innovate by driving creative design capability into the heart of their processes.”

The two educational establishments behind C4D are world leading specialist establishments. UAL is one of Europe’s leading creative educational establishments and has a strong track record in working at the interface between academic, creative design and commercial and industry enterprises. Meanwhile Cranfield is a world leader in post-graduate education and has extensive experience of undertaking innovative research and education programmes and offering consultancy services to a wide range of industry sectors. C4D will bring them together in a whole which is much more than their constitutive parts.

C4D will work with enterprises of all sizes and from all sectors of the industry from local businesses to blue chip companies. Through research, knowledge and by developing pragmatic frameworks that exploit creative design, C4D will give engineering, science and business professionals the tools to be able to better exploit the creative potential of the design process to solve problems at any level.

Enterprise & Industry: -

Innovation, design and creativity are the key factors underpinning competitiveness. If businesses are to successfully integrate these factors into their organisations then a clear understanding of the strategies, processes, tools and methods are critical.

C4D will provide these services to enterprises of all scales and from all sectors. But, what makes C4D unique is that we combine disciplines that integrate academic knowledge drawn from design, management and manufacturing with an understanding of professional practice made available to us through our extensive collaborations with industry of various specialised areas.

C4D are actively in the process of delivering a range of educational and consultative packages. This range covers the whole spectrum of business and industry and includes but is by no means limited to:

• Executive networks targeted at senior management level focusing on the key issues of use and integration of design capability to increase organisational performance.

• Professional workshops and senior management ‘master-classes’ delivered at both of C4D’s sites.

• Special initiatives to engage small and medium size enterprises and to promote a further understanding of the business and competitive potential of creative design practices.

• ‘Stepping stone’ academic research which would offer participating companies a direct route to C4D’s resources and researchers.

As a two centre enterprise, C4D can offer a great amount of resources to their collaborators. We have both the London based creative resources of UAL alongside the management and technological resources of Cranfield, where C4D’s operational centre is based.

The creative environment cultivated by C4D will embody the key characteristics of a design agency but with the unique atmosphere and understanding which leaves engineers and managers equally as at home as their creative counterparts. The MDes students also provide an energy, interest and perspective which can not be matched by any other industry centre.

We firmly believe that here at C4D we are setting out a blueprint of how creative and industry hubs will operate and connect in the future.

But C4D isn’t just providing opportunities and support for established businesses and industry sectors, we also have extensive support networks for creative enterprises and start-ups.

Once again C4D’s dual establishment base means that those wishing to pursue creative business careers can benefit from not just the intellectual property advice and support of UAL’s Ownit Initiative (www.own-it.org) and the Enterprise Centre for the Creative Arts (www.ecca-london.org) but also the Cranfield University Business Incubator Centre (CUBIC). CUBIC (www.cubic.org.uk) itself is funded through a £1million grant from the East of England Development Agency which provides cutting edge facilities and equipment and a vast range of business services and preferential use of Cranfield’s Innovation Centre.

Education:-

The Masters of Design, Innovation and Creativity in Industry is the crux of C4D. It is this course which utilises the fantastic resources which have been provided by UAL and Cranfield, both in an educational sense and also in a supportive sense, which will develop the next generation of industry leaders.

The course runs for one year as a full time undertaking or up to three years part time. It combines the three most crucial threads of C4D’s aims. That is, creativity, science and technology. Students will learn across disciplines and will have opportunities to work with leading industrial companies and leading design agencies across the business environment.

The course comprises three central phases, a teaching phase, a group project and an individual thesis. During each of these phases, students will tackle modules covering the creative aspects of design, strategy and branding on one hand and practical technology and manufacturing and relevant branches of management.

The modules which will be studied are as follows:

Creative modules:

• Creative design practice.

• Intergrated strategy, communication and branding.

• Customer lifestyle requirement engineering.

Applied science modules:

• Use of Novel materials and manufacturing techniques.

• Concept evaluation and prototyping.

Management school modules:

• Innovation and technology management.

• Programme and project management.

Elective modules:

• Creative design management and leadership.

• Creative enterprise and entrepreneurship.

• Design innovation for sustainability.

Though the course will run from Cranfield, the students will still benefit from the resources and support of both of the universities and though they are significantly different they also compliment each other very well and through this help to offer something even more unique to C4D.

UAL is Europe’s largest centre for education in art, design fashion and communication. It comprises many of London’s leading arts establishments including Central St. Martin’s and Chelsea College of Art alongside London College of Communication which has more than 100 years of creative media tradition and has produced such notable alumni as Charles Saatchi, Anish Kapoor, Terence Conran and James Dyson amongst many others.

Cranfield, on the other hand, specialises in post-graduate education often focusing on research. Based in pleasant, rural, surroundings Cranfield can even boast to be the only university in the UK with its own airfield. The university is one of the world leaders in research fields and was ranked last year as 11th best in the world by the Economist in 2007.

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Research: -

One of C4D’s key goals is to further expand its scope as a world leading research base. Cranfield already has a long history for practical engineering research and development but one aspect C4D will bring to the table is the artistic and creative influences of UAL.

Using creativity to drive competition and influence wealth creation is central to the C4D philosophy and already research themes are being developed to look at everything from building digital brand platforms to collaborative innovation enabled by design-centric pedagogy.

It will be this mix of creative and practical research across all aspects of business which will allow C4D to break new ground and drive industry and individuals to new levels and new goals.

Our Industrial Collaborators:-

Both UAL and Cranfield have wide reaching and long standing ties with various industries, institutions and corporate interests.

Cranfield itself as established itself on the corporate landscape to such a degree that a number of multi-national organisations and start-up companies have gone as far as locating offices and bases at the university’s site.

Here they benefit from the development and research services already available at Cranfield and under C4D they will also, further, benefit from the creative influence of UAL and the competitive surge provided by the sector leading students taking part in the MDes.

Some of the companies and concerns based there include Nissan, who design and develop vehicles there for the European market, Trafficmaster, who operate their European headquarters from the site and Io Systems who supply warehouse management systems to clients in the UK, Europe and the USA. The Nissan commitment alone represents an investment of £46 million.

All of these links and the simple proximity of highly established global brands and businesses are a huge boon to both the universities involved in C4D as well as the many small scale enterprises which operate from Cranfield’s Innovation Centre and have access to the rapid prototyping facility.

The services provided here by C4D centre around the concept of enabling these business and other industry sectors developing and exploiting creative design and using it to increase competitiveness and innovation. Spread across consultative support and vocationally based short courses that are capable of delivering creative design knowledge at an organisational, team and individual level.

UAL’s strongest industry links and collaborations centre around the many, extremely, high profile alumni who now hold many of the highest level positions in the world’s creative industries ranging from advertising to fashion design.

Students and staff at UAL regularly achieve recognition through a wide variety of pries and awards including The Saatchi Scholarship, British Fashion Designer of the Year and even the Turner Prize. The university as a whole was recognised in 2006 as ‘the UK’s best modern university’ by the Sunday Times University Guide.

To further expand on this philosophy of collaboration and innovation, C4D have initiated a forum to allow the three stakeholder communities; Cranfield, UAL and industry as a whole. The forum provides and environment where industry, academics and creative elements can exchange ideas, communicate and challenge research outputs and drive innovative research initiatives.

The Team:-

Ian Ferris –

Ian Ferris comes from a background as a design and innovation consultant. He has worked across a wide array of sectors and is currently a design associate for the Design Council’s Designing Demand scheme.

Currently Ian is involved in research into the development and exploitation of creative design capability in the servitisation process in manufacturing enterprises which is being funded by Cranfield’s Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre.

Prof. Rajkumar Roy –

Professor Roy is leading the competitive design research currently taking place at Cranfield and has been heavily involved in numerous aspects of industrial research for a number of years including; understanding creativity and innovation in virtual environments, improving enterprise creativity at individual, project and organisational levels, concept evaluation and structured innovation.