Group Project
You’ll work as part of a multidisciplinary team to design and deliver a creative response to a simulated or live shared brief. Through collaboration, idea development and problem-solving, you’ll explore how different perspectives, skills and roles come together to produce a coherent outcome, including entrepreneurship and self-employment opportunity. This assessment focuses on teamwork, co-design and creative decision-making, helping you develop professional collaborative skills that are essential across creative industries and your wider qualification.

Individual Reflection
You’ll independently reflect on your experiences of collaboration, creativity and teamwork throughout the project. Creating a written report, you’ll critically evaluate your contributions, learning processes and development over time. This assessment helps you build reflective practice, self-awareness and critical thinking skills, supporting your growth as an adaptable creative practitioner and strengthening your readiness for future study or professional contexts.

Formative Assessment:
Midway formative feedback will be embedded within practical sessions, providing structured opportunities for feedback on work-in-progress to support student development and progression.

- This module gives you the opportunity to engage in a team-based collaborative and interdisciplinary project, testing out different approaches to creatively consider a themed and problem-based exploration.
- Themed explorations may be society and community based, dealing with areas around health and wellbeing, globalisation, inequalities, environmental, LGBTQ+ rights, human rights and social injustices.
- The project may involve engaging with external organisations, such as a charity or voluntary organisations, to identify a problem-solving creative brief, or it may be more through simulation-based teamwork.
- You will build a range of collaborative skills by closely working with students from across our creative industry courses and with varied contribution modes to engage with reflective opportunities to document and curate your experiences, insights, inspirations and influences.
- Teams will work together to build rapport, negotiate roles, inclusively co-design, motivate each other, define responsibilities and explore troubleshooting adjustment opportunities fairly and consistently.
- The module will adopt a cycle of reflection to identify your creative learning and collaborative processes in relation to your brief.
- You will also explore ‘real world’ professional interdisciplinary perspectives to consider the effectiveness of different collaborative contexts and to develop an understanding of your own skills-based contributions to a team.
- You will work in multi-disciplinary teams from across discipline clusters based on the needs of your identified project brief.

1. Collaborate across creative disciplines using critical reasoning strategies to address a problem or brief.

Programme Learning Outcome: Critical Reasoning & Collaboration

2. Apply interdisciplinary and digital tools to co-design and produce a shared creative output.

Programme Learning Outcome: Digital Literacy

3. Communicate research-informed ideas, processes, and outcomes effectively to specialist and non-specialist audiences.

Programme Learning Outcome: Research skills, Communication

4. Reflect critically on teamwork, leadership, and your contribution within interdisciplinary collaboration.

Programme Learning Outcome: Reflection

A mixed mode delivery is promoted across this module offering an interactive approach to bring ideas around different collaborative approaches. Workshops will be based around the different themes and activities designed to develop your collaborative skills. Independent Study should be used to complete research tasks, preparation activities and wider research. Group meetings with discipline teams/supervisors will support your project-based outputs.

- Student Life: https://www.youtube.com/@uniofstaffsstudentlife/videos
- University Careers: https://staffs.careercentre.me/Members
- University Library: https://libguides.staffs.ac.uk/library
- Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment will support this module where relevant
- Specialist Spaces and Workshops
- Smart Zone
- CAD Labs
- Print Bureau

Candy, L. (2019) The creative reflective practitioner. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Grimsgaard, W. (2023) Design and strategy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Kerr, J. (2023) The art of co-design: Solving problems through creative collaboration. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

Treffinger, D. et al. (2021) Creative problem solving. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Where older texts are included, they are retained as foundational texts within the discipline, remaining relevant where no more recent equivalent texts are available.

How do creative teams tackle real-world problems together?
In this module, you’ll collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to explore themed, problem-based projects that respond to contemporary social and cultural challenges. You’ll develop collaborative, reflective and creative thinking skills through teamwork, co-design and professional-style project processes. By engaging with diverse perspectives and working across creative disciplines, you’ll gain insight into your own strengths and contributions, supporting your development as a confident, adaptable creative practitioner within your overall qualification and future career.