Andrew Slatter is a designer, writer and educator and has recently published The Everyday Experiment, an academic zine on 'the design, the queer and the politics in the everyday.' He graduated with an MA in Design Writing Criticism in 2010 and was keen to reveal how the course changed his career.

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I graduated from Ravensbourne in 1995 with a first class BA (Hons) in Visual Communication Design. I spent two years at CDT Design and one year at Lloyd Northover. I created my own design consultancy, Unleaded Design, in 1998 with Henrik Bodilsen a fellow Ravensbourne graduate. We were in business until 2008 when we decided that we would concentrate on our own projects. At this time I started the MA Design Writing Criticism course at LCC, part-time. I also moved into part-time teaching at Colchester Institute on the Foundation programme and this year I have begun teaching contextual studies on the BA Graphic Media course.

Why did you choose the MA course?

The MA Design Writing Criticism acting course director, Teal Triggs, was the course leader and my dissertation tutor at Ravensbourne in the early 1990s. The enthusiasm and level of engagement she brought to the course left me with an ongoing fascination and interest in the historical and theoretical context surrounding design. When I heard about the brand new MA Design Writing Criticism I jumped at the chance to reconnect with writing about design. In the thirteen years that I had been working I never considered doing a Masters degree, probably because the course I wanted to do never existed. MA Design Writing Criticism is groundbreaking and I feel immensely lucky.

How did you develop professionally throughout the course?

There is no question that the course has changed me, I am more confident in speaking and writing, it has provided a fundamental set of skills that will help me in my approach to teaching, and in professional practice. I never knew what rigorous academic research entailed, I do now! I have started a magazine that unites my passion for modernism with gender and sexuality, something I'm not sure I would have been able to achieve were it not for the course. The teaching team of Teal Triggs, Anna Gerber and Ian Horton are rigorous and demanding. They know their subjects and have enthusiasm and passion to make the course and its learners succeed. I have found it a challenge to study part-time and work, but then every student these days is faced with this proposition. I now call myself a 'radical modernist' a moniker coined by the late Dan Friedman, thanks to the course I have an understanding of what this means, and I have managed to put it into practice.

What opportunities has it given you that you wouldn't have had otherwise?

To teach, and to conceive and put into production a magazine. A friend gave me some sound advice which I followed: "use the MA to make as many contacts as possible". In taking this advice I was fortunate to meet academics, designers and educators, some of who contributed to The Everyday Experiment.

Was the course very industry-orientated?

There are two elective units as part of the PG Dip phase of the course, I selected Approaches to Teaching and gave a real insight into the profession. We have had opportunities to write for commercial publications, again this is very much up to the individual. Opportunities are there, it's whether you choose to pursue them. I invested as much as I could in the course, I enrolled on a bolt-on ABC Award programme in Writing Skills for Journalism which provided an explicit commercial experience that complemented the academic aims of the course. This year as part of the London Design Festival, we had the opportunity to write for their festival blog, I wrote a piece about the textile prints Cristian Zuzunaga and Kvadrat, and am currently writing about how to entangle design and social science, based on a conference at Goldsmiths College in September.

Can you tell us about your latest project, The Everyday Experiment?

The outcome of the research culminated in me producing an academic zine. The Everyday Experiment: sampling the design, the queer and the politics in the everyday. This first issue was conceived as the final major project and it is my intention for it to continue on a bi-annual basis. It provides a space for alternative voices: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender men and women to comment on and critique design. Up until now my sexuality has been divorced from my practise as a designer, in a commercial context it doesn't have any significance, as the client and the client's audience are focussed on the designed outcome, not the designer. Sheena Calvert, a friend and associate lecturer of the course who helped me in my initial research, asked Andy Chen, a sociologist graduate from Princeton, why he thinks there's no gay/queer design discourse. He said "it's because design is obsessed with form, not content, and that it largely denies the role of human agency". This set me on the road to creating the magazine where human agency becomes essential in creating an alternative approach to design writing and criticism through different modes of writing. Queer theory has been used to critique architectural space, fashion, product design, but for visual communication the level on engagement or enquiry is muted. I wanted to echo Teal Trigg's call in the late 1990s for history of design to become more democratic, so that a range of voices can be heard. So far the magazine has been well received, but I have yet to start on its promotion, it will have a presence at the degree show in December. The website where copies can be purchased will soon be live at: theeverydayexperiment.net

And lastly, for you, are design and writing both part of the same creative process? Are they symbiotic?

Yes. We had two options for our final major project, to write a thesis or produce a practical outcome with an accompanying report. I chose the latter because I could not divorce the visual from the writing. My personal life and working life centres around the visual, in the context of reading both text and images. The Everyday Experiment has a social science theoretical framework, which is focussed on writing about design, incorporates the visual and is in itself a designed object. In this respect it represents the essence of what constitutes the creative process.

Visit Andrew Slatter's website for more information on his projects