Over the past few months we have been working with Manchester Metropolitan University to develop, ‘Unit X’, a collaborative module across the School of Art.

For 13 weeks, 500 first year students are working in venues across Manchester with the aim of interrogating the city. Hotspur House has become a major hub for this project, with the enitre basement turned over to the MMU students.

We are working alongside Ultimate Holding Company and Manchester Municipal Design Corporation to facilitate this module, helping MMU staff deliver their curriculum as well as introducing our projects to the students.

Our aim is to foster collaboration between Hotspur residents and the MMU students and staff. The first project we have set is to develop a cafe in the space, which so far the students have taken and run with, creating a wonderful atmosphere in the space as you enter. We have also moved our Fourth Floor Film Night down to the basement, so that MMU staff and students can take part.

You will be able to see our documentation of Unit X’s progression on our Flickr and on twitter with the tags #UnitX & #HotspurHouse.

On Tuesday we were invited to go over to the University of Derby to deliver a lecture and 3 hour workshop to the Level 5 Graphic Design students.

We’d been asked to talk about ‘doing things differently’. We decided that talking about how we’ve gotten to where we are now would be a good way to do that, as our path hasn’t necessarily been the most conventional. It meant that we would be talking about something we have experienced and are still doing, so it would be more about experiences than just a big show and tell. Any work we showed was there as an example of an experience we’ve had, whether that was about getting funding for something you’re really passionate about (POP), finding premises (Winter Studio) or doing free work for people who are doing something because they love it and not for any money or fame (DNW, Paper Girl).

We then spent time figuring out what else they’re passionate about other than design and talking about how that can feed you creatively. Not necessarily doing something because you think it’ll get you a job, but because you just really love doing it.

We also took an A0 map of Derby we’d made and got them to research as many interesting creative places as they could, whether that’s design studios, bars, galleries, or studio spaces. Someone even put a rundown mental hospital on there, which we thought was pretty interesting. Since we moved into Hotspur the network of people we know has become so much richer, so if they could find somewhere that does the same for them it would be amazing — hopefully this workshop is the start of that process.

Thanks to everyone at Derby for having us, hopefully you all got a lot out of the day.
Get in touch if you want to talk about anything we mentioned.

Our first job of 2012 was a fun one — working with Lower-Sixth Aquinas College students to deliver some workshops that would spark their interest in typography and enable them to generate better ideas for their projects.

We took a big stack of books from the studio along with us to provide a bit of inspiration and encouraged them to create with their hands and heads instead of computer mice. Though a bit uncomfortable at first, the typographic brief prompted students to produce beautiful and considered responses, improvised with found materials. The ideas generation brief was a surprise for us, as it usually takes a little longer to understand fully, but the students took to it quickly and energetically sketched out nearly triple the amount of ideas we asked for.

The newly built, state of the art campus was a lovely environment to spend time in and we really enjoyed working with the staff and students there. Hopefully we will be able to go back and visit sometime in the near future.