University College Falmouth's students shortlisted for Royal Society of Arts awards scheme

Students from University College Falmouth's BA(Hons) Graphic Design course have been singled out for success in this year's prestigious Royal Society of Arts (RSA) Design Directions awards.

For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has built up a well-deserved reputation for generating new and imaginative ideas to promote social progress. The RSA's aims are delivered through a portfolio of projects and a lecture programme consisting of well over one hundred events a year.

RSA Design Directions encourage emerging young designers to engage with the broader social and environmental context in which they will work after graduation. The award scheme invites entrants to create work in response to a broad range of projects with this year's themes including Working Late, Body and Mind, The Resourceful Supermarket, Later Life Wellbeing, Postage Stamps and Sustainable Metals. Four UCF students have been shortlisted for RSA Design Directions awards this year.

Chris Brown and Gus Cook have both been shortlisted for The Resourceful Supermarket category. The brief for this invited entrants to consider how supermarkets could demonstrate commitment to their locality and create bonds of reciprocity between themselves, their customers and the greater community.

Two further students, Rory Pickering and Chris Kamis, have also been shortlisted for the Postage Stamp category. They each answered the brief of celebrating biodiversity which asked participants to create and heighten awareness around the importance of the subject within their postage stamp designs.

This announcement of the shortlist continues the ongoing success of UCF in this leading competition with students from the University College's BA(Hons) Graphic Design course not only having been shortlisted, but also having  won the top prizes in the Postage Stamp category almost every year for the past 10 years.

BA(Hons) Graphic Design Course Leader, Jon Unwin,  commented: "It is a huge achievement for our students to be singled out in the RSA Design Directions scheme and one that further builds upon our course's strong reputation as one of the leading graphic design courses in the UK."

The final awards will be judged by international industry professionals from the worlds of graphic design, advertising, architecture, textile and product design.

"Awards schemes like the RSA's provide students with invaluable experience of the professional world," added UCF's Director of Design, Patrick Gottelier. "Such high profile successes are a tribute not only to the hard work and commitment of the students themselves, but also to our staff."

For further information about BA(Hons) Graphic Design at UCF, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/graphicdesign, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 214352.

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name. It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing. The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2013/2014 that will be unique to the South West.

The University College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One and Convergence), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

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For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby Dip CIPR MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email:  jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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