Chris Rust Academic Pages

Chris Rust's teaching

last updated 26 Nov 2006

My main teaching role is in the MA Design Programme at Sheffield Hallam University, I was leader of this programme until May 2004 (Steve Bort has taken over the job). Within the MA I take particular responsible for students specialising in Design Strategy and Interactive Media. Each student in the MA undertakes a major research and design project as the main vehicle for study and there is a strong focus on research methods, supported principally by my colleague Tom Fisher.

I contribute to the weekly Project Support lecture/seminar programme dealing with theories of designing as well as the practicalities of running a 16 month research/design project. I also deliver two specialist modules:

Managing Innovation is a short course module which deals with the various ways that creativity and innovation can be fostered and supported in organisations.

Creative Professionalism is a programme of lectures and practical exercises to develop postgraduates' ideas about their professional futures.

Since 1988 I have delivered an annual lecture to the Cambridge University Advanced Course in Design, Manufacture and Management. This is a one-year course preparing graduates for leading positions in industry and I am its longest serving regular contributor. When I started it was very much a question of introducing engineers to strange ideas about aesthetics, these days they don't need telling (quite a few of them are design graduates anyway) and we concentrate on the practicalities of innovation.

At the moment I am also doing quite a lot of work on practice-based research methods, which I prefer to think of as Investigative Designing, and I have given talks about this subject to groups of postgraduates and academics in a number of universities, including our own Research Supervisors Training Programme.