13–31 July 2015
Application deadline: Monday 1 June
National College of Art and Design (NCAD)
100, Thomas Street
Dublin
Hosted jointly by University College Dublin (UCD) and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), the inaugural City Life summer school will launch in July this year. Places are still available for the school, which will offer expert-led teaching and unprecedented access to the leaders of Dublin’s current transformation.
The City Life summer school is being organised as part of the NCAD+UCD venture, a HEA-funded project to develop the institutional relationship between NCAD and UCD, and it will be based at NCAD’s Thomas Street campus, in the heart of the historic centre of Dublin.
The summer school will give participants from diverse disciplinary backgrounds the opportunity to observe and engage with the ongoing development of Dublin today. Because of the compact scale of the city and its cultural and political structures, and the embedded positions of the school’s faculty in connection to key institutions, the school will offer participants unparalleled access to the stakeholders currently negotiating Dublin’s response to global urban conditions.
Working in both single-discipline and interdisciplinary groups located in one of the most vibrant and mutable parts of Dublin’s inner city, participants will observe the complex web of cultural, social and economic factors currently shaping metropolitan spaces across the world. While “in situ” in the college’s immediate environs, participants will research and realise projects which narrate new stories of Dublin as an urban space.
Progressing through a varied and intensive series of workshops, studio sessions, plenary lectures and seminars, programme participants will take part in tours of key institutions and special events in Dublin’s summer festival calendar. They will work with leaders in the cultural and creative sectors, consulting with leading practitioners, artists, museum directors, urban government officials, and critical thinkers, and will avail of the studio and practice facilities of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD).
The summer school offers particular disciplinary tracks which will allow for the development of specialized skills:
Architecture
Designing urban interventions guided by faculty from UCD Architecture, key figures in architectural practice and high-profile researchers.
Culture, Memory and the City
Investigating the relationship between memory and the city, through psycho-geographic and critical writing practices.
Interaction Design
A project-focused track to design, prototype and evaluate the interaction of the human and the digital in a real-world setting, while acquiring skills in physical computing.
Spatial Arts and Visualisation (In collaboration with IADT)
Pursuing temporal, spatial and critical visualization and representation of “Unseen Dublin” through project-based work with expert support.
Urban Design and Material Culture
Utilising design analysis, architectural history and material culture methods to explore the development, planning, architecture and everyday experience of Dublin.
The programme will unfold over three weeks in July, moving from an early research and review stage through studio and workshop work, finally bringing ideas to fruition for dissemination though exhibition, presentation, and potential publication.
City Life is targeted at participants from a wide range of academic disciplines, including architecture, art, design, planning, geography, archaeology, media studies, computer science, humanities, business and engineering. Cost for the three-week summer school programme is 2,500 EUR. Please contact [email protected] with any application enquiries, and see further details of the summer school here.
NCAD+UCD is a Higher Education Authority funded project to develop the institutional relationship between University College Dublin (UCD) and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), up to and including a full merger, is taking place between June 2014 and September 2015. UCD is one of Europe’s leading research-intensive universities, and Ireland’s largest and most diverse university. NCAD offers the largest range of Art and Design degrees, and is the only institution specialising in Art and Design within university education in Ireland. Further to funding received under the HEA’s Strategic Innovation and Development Fund (SDIF) 2013 in October 2013, NCAD+UCD will develop and produce a detailed strategy plan for the future relationship between the two institutions.
