News Releases

Caribbean Entrepreneurs Designing National Solutions

For Release Upon Receipt - December 14, 2010

St. Augustine


St Augustine Campus launches MA in Creative Design

A new programme from The University of the West Indies (UWI) aims to teach students to identify, challenge, analyse, innovate and think critically of opportunities in design and innovation across all disciplines.

The UWI is now inviting applications for the MA Creative Design: Entrepreneurship. The cross-curricular programme is expected to be of interest to graduates of BA programmes and practitioners from a range of design and creative disciplines: from Carnival to jewellery, from graphics to products, and from systems to services. This Design Entrepreneurship programme targets persons who are engaged in, or who desire to pursue, creative and entrepreneurial design activities that produce smart, interactive, ambient and innovative human-centered systems and structures. 

“Our new programme welcomes and encourages applications from creative practitioners across the spectrum of the arts, media and sciences,” said Steve Ouditt, programme coordinator.

Graduates are expected to be able to develop, implement and evaluate entrepreneurial projects and programmes in creative areas of several disciplines. Students completing this programme should also be able to engage in professional and academic communication with others in the field of design entrepreneurship across disciplines. Graduates of the programme may also continue to PhD research.

“We began with the idea to create a programme of exciting courses focused on highly intelligent design entrepreneurship. We wanted to custom-build a programme sturdy enough to face up to a wide range of design and entrepreneurial challenges,” Ouditt said.

While there are other UWI programmes that study entrepreneurship and design, this one embraces a cross-disciplinary approach and centralises design in the discourse of entrepreneurship and management of industry.

“The contemporary context requires people to work together to create sustainable futures across social, cultural, economic and political spheres. So we wanted to develop a programme that would enable artists, engineers, social scientists and many more practitioners in various disciplines to work creatively together in an entrepreneurially stimulating environment,” Ouditt said.

An important element of the programme is the intended cross-faculty supervision of Creative Design Projects, which will enable an interdisciplinary dynamic that can stimulate entrepreneurship.

“We know about the omnipotence of design aesthetics but we didn’t want our programme to stop at that. We want to develop great products, but not at the expense of depleting the world’s limited resources and, certainly not aligned to any system of unfair trade practice,” Ouditt said.

The basis of developing the programme, Ouditt said, was a consideration of the big questions about the most urgent concerns of global society in the coming decades.

“Crucial social issues, such as issues of health and wellbeing, climate control and environmental management, adequate food production and distribution, education, alternative energy production, and democratic politics and government are being brought to the forefront. Researchers in wealthy, developed nations have produced immeasurably beneficial solutions, but governments and citizens across the developing world have long been searching for sustainable programmes across a wide spectrum of human activity. So there is still an urgent requirement for more and better solutions for wider global communities,” Ouditt said.

The Design Entrepreneurship programme will concentrate on social innovation and entrepreneurship that will focus primarily on human welfare experiences, systems and services, for the advancement of social, political and environmental welfare.

To achieve these goals, the programme will include lecturers drawn from the private sector, and the creative and cultural industries. The UWI has also partnered with De Montfort University in Leicester, England. An important over-arching objective is to build capacity through staff exchanges in the long-term and to encourage student-exchanges between De Montfort University and The UWI in the short- to medium-term.

For the latest UWI News, click http://sta.uwi.edu/news.

Application Procedure

The programme will be offered full-time only, over three semesters, starting in September 2011 and ending in December 2012. Applicants will be required to submit a preliminary design concept of not more than 300 words. Applicants should normally have a lower second-class honours degree or its equivalent in a field appropriate to his/her area of study. Applicants with other qualifications or experience will also be considered. The programme costs $30,000 per year, and is GATE-approved.

Postgrad Options

The University of the West Indies, Department of Creative and Festival Arts offers a postgraduate diploma in Arts and Cultural Enterprise Management (ACEM), and a Diploma in Education (Dip Ed) in Visual and Performing Arts. For more information on courses available at the UWI DCFA, please visit the official website at http://sta.uwi.edu/fhe/ccfa .

About The Programme Leader

Steve Ouditt is an artist and curator. He has been lecturing at the University of the West Indies [UWI] in St. Augustine, Trinidad since 2003. He has exhibited in Cuba, China, New York, London, Manchester, Glasgow, Iceland, Dominican Republic, Germany, Guadeloupe and Trinidad. Prior to coming to UWI, Ouditt was Curator of Research and Education at the Institute of International Visual Arts [inIVA] in London. In the late 1990’s He taught for two years at the Caribbean School of Architecture in Kingston, Jamaica and was also a visiting lecturer in the Masters Programme in Tropical Architecture at the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henrique Urena in the Dominican Republic.  Ouditt studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City; Goldsmiths College in London; and was a Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Holland. His book ‘Creole in-site’ was published in 1998 by inIVA [Institute of International Visual Arts] London.

About UWI

Over the last six decades, The University of the West Indies (UWI) has evolved from a fledgling college in Jamaica with 33 students to a full-fledged University with over 40,000 students. Today, UWI is the largest and most longstanding higher education provider in the English-speaking Caribbean, with main campuses in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, and Centres in Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St Christopher (St Kitts) & Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent & the Grenadines. UWI recently launched its Open Campus, a virtual campus with over 50 physical site locations across the region, serving over 20 countries in the English-speaking Caribbean. UWI is an international university with faculty and students from over 40 countries and collaborative links with over 60 universities around the world. Through its seven Faculties, UWI offers undergraduate and postgraduate degree options in Engineering, Humanities & Education, Law, Medical Sciences, Pure & Applied Sciences, Science and Agriculture, and Social Sciences.

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