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Exploring concerns ranging from death and rebirth to the preservation of urban bees, from the 1-4 December students from our MA Interaction Design course will present their final work in the St James Hatcham Building, New Cross.

On Tuesday 1 December , followed by a public opening from 2-4 December between 10am and 6pm.

The exhibition is a platform for students to document and present their unique approach to interaction design through practice-based research methods.

Nadia Barbu, Communications and Social Media Coordinator in the Department of Design, asked three of our students for a peek at the work they鈥檒l be exhibiting at this year鈥檚 show:

You may have heard that honeybees are in trouble and dying out at an alarming rate. But have you thought about what our world would look like if they were to disappear altogether? This is the (very real) possibility that MA Interaction Design student Tom Hoare is exploring in his graduation project.

Facing a future without bees, Tom wanted to approach the issue from a different angle rather than jump on the bandwagon of already-existing initiatives such as urban beekeeping. So he faced his phobia of syringes and set about making honey himself, in order to find out what it would mean for humans to take on the work of honey bees.

Three hours later, he鈥檇 made less than 5ml, concluding: "We're just not good enough at emulating nature鈥�.

Unfortunately, it seems that we're not very good at appreciating all that bees are doing for us, either, since we insist in using pesticides that are not friendly to them. Tom鈥檚 wider project looks at how bee extinction would trigger larger scale changes in our way of life.

You'll have a chance to take a look at these honey-making tools and human-made honey samples at the MA Interaction Design exhibition.

Karen Barrett鈥檚 work offers a twist on the dominant neoliberal perspective of our current times, which urges us to pursue constant happiness at all cost.

鈥淚nstead I propose that misery and suffering are inevitable in the human experience and therefore should be embraced rather than shunned. My project seeks to develop alternative emotional narratives that allow for acceptance and celebration of misery,鈥� Karen 鈥� who has a background in Psychology - explains.

She began her project with extensive desk-based researched, including an interview with Dr Will Davies from our Department of Politics, the author of the recently published book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being.

Using 鈥榗ultural probes鈥� and public space interventions 鈥� including 鈥榤isery zones鈥� put together on campus and elsewhere in Lewisham - Karen gathered a diverse range of insights which influenced her final project.

For Shih-Yuan Huang鈥檚 final project she鈥檚 made items that reinterpret death and funeral rituals through the idea of re-birth. Working with yew wood 鈥� which has a long history as a cemetery tree - Yuan鈥檚 work spans cultures and religions, including her family鈥檚 Taoist Buddhist faith, with its important concepts of reincarnation and rebirth.

Want to know more?

Read Nadia鈥檚 interviews with  and  on the  blog and keep an eye on the blog for more interviews to come.

Check out the

And visit the show at St James Hatcham from 2-4 December.

Find out more about MA Interaction Design and the Department of Design at 牛牛资源.