The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) are working with a number of museums and galleries, including National Glass Centre, to deliver a school’s programme called DesignLab Nation. The programme aims to inspire the next generation of designers and support design education in secondary schools across the UK.
Now in the second year of the project, students are responding to a lighting design brief in which they must identify a space within the Centre that they feel would benefit from a renewed lighting scheme. To date students from Gosforth Academy have participated in seven glass and ceramic workshops. They have experimented with techniques that manipulate how light is diffused through the surface of these different materials and the resulting sample pieces will allow them to develop their initial ideas into a final design.
In the academic year 2019/20 National Glass Centre worked with students attending Castle View Enterprise Academy, Oxclose Community Academy and Sandhill View Academy. The young people took part in workshops at National Glass Centre making desk sculptures inspired by the Memphis design movement. The images show the young people using a range of glass and ceramic making techniques to create their sculptures.
The programme was supported by freelance artists and members of the University of Sunderland’s Glass and Ceramics department. The young people also visited the V&A and sought inspiration from an exhibition at National Glass Centre presenting objects loaned from the V&A and work from National Glass Centre’s collection.
