Communication Design MDes at Masters Showcase

Communication Design has the power to inform, inspire and drive positive change. Our students tackle project-led briefs that address real-world social and environmental challenges, creating compelling visual communication grounded in research, critical thinking and personal experience. 

By considering audience, context and materials, they develop impactful outcomes across digital and physical media. As storytellers, problem-solvers and agents of change, our students use design to inspire action, challenge perspectives and respond creatively to social and environmental issues. 

Showcase Spotlight: An Introduction to Alienation

DJCAD graduate Scott Smith's ‘An Introduction to Alienation’ examines the social element of sustainability, and what the collapse of Scottish industry did to those left behind. 

In 1972, Jimmy Reid, a trade unionist from the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, gave a speech at Glasgow University about the concept of ‘Alienation’. He described it as what happens to people who feel they are the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. Drink, drugs, and other harmful behaviours follow from that, and Reid argued that a great deal of Britain’s social damage starts there. 

Developed in response to those claims, Scott’s work introduces a modern audience to de-industrialisation and the alienation that followed it. 

His printed media charts four main manufacturing trades that pumped blood through Scotland from 1970-2000 alongside the estimated number of redundancies and site closures throughout these decades. He used risography to convey how the process of de-industrialisation compounded over the four decades, printing in-house at DJCAD. 

The outcome is a hand bound book and four semiotic representative prints, anchored in a visual language which references the monolithic cranes on the Upper Clyde.