Textile Design

The preliminary and intensive Integrated Foundation in Art and Design is designed to develop your ideas, skills and confidence in readiness for progressing to year one of your degree programme.

This year provides you with the opportunity to identify, apply for, and secure professional experience, normally comprising one to three placements over a minimum of nine months. Successful completion of this module will demonstrate your ability to secure and sustain graduate-level employment.

By completing the module, you'll be entitled to the addition of 'with Professional Placement Year' to your degree title.

Before your Professional Placement Year, you'll work to secure your placement, constructing a development plan with your module leader and your placement coordinator from our Careers and Employability team.

On your return to University for your final year, you'll submit your Placement Portfolio, detailing your development on your placement, for assessment.

We offer a strong studio culture in which students are inspired to express their design direction, exercising initiative and personal responsibility.

Individually negotiated student-led lines of enquiry are encouraged and supported by a wide range of thorough contextual underpinning and professional practice, which includes live industry briefs, competitions, forecasting and external exhibition opportunities. Students demonstrate self-direction in extending networks for creating work-based learning opportunities and gaining internships.

We intend to equip students with the necessary research, practical, technical, aesthetic and problem solving skills to develop and adapt their emerging practice for their future careers, which include team working, an appreciation of diversity, reflection and self-evaluation and the capacity to work independently to determine personal future learning needs.

Year one
In Year One you start to cultivate your observation, thinking and drawing skills into your individual style. You begin to explore the field of textile design and its contextual framework. You learn skills in understanding colour, fabric, yarns, materials and dyeing. Taught techniques in embroidery, print, knit and construction provide the foundation to your design development.

Year two
In Year Two you start to explore your potential focus engaging with modules as a textile designer for either fashion or interiors, and begin committing to areas of textile specialisms. Your facility for thinking, writing and analysing is expanded through professional and contextual studies. To establish an understanding of your style and direction, you tackle a combination of projects looking at advancing textile techniques and understanding your career options, these include competitions, live briefs and exhibitions.

Year three
In Year Three you undertake a dissertation and state your identity as a textile designer through an initial exploratory personal studio module. The professional context module leads all students up to midway through the academic year, and at this point as a BA (Hons) student you undertake the final 60-credit module leading to a degree show and graduation.

The module assessments demonstrate how well students have performed in tackling the intended learning outcomes, and is measured against grade criteria.

Throughout the module students will receive formative feedback through individual and/or group tutorials, peer seminar sessions and group critiques.  In many cases this feedback is received both verbally and in a written format.

Students are informed about the ways that marks/grades and feedback are provided by the marking tutor(s), and they receive written feedback on learning achievements against the assessment criteria for a module assignment.

The feedback aims to enable students to see how to improve or develop particular aspects of their work, and students receive the summative feedback along with the marks within three weeks of the completed module submission date.

As you progress through the course, teaching methods will change to deliver the intended learning outcomes. In general, Textile Design teaching involves methods such as:

• Studio engagement
• Technical demonstrations
• Practical workshop introductions
• Taught practical sessions
• Directed or self-directed projects
• Active participation through seminars, group work and directed learning
• Engagement in using both hand and digital processes
• Lecture series
• Individual and group tutorials
• Study trips and gallery visits
• Personal presentation, display and documentation of work
• Self-directed research and study activities.

As a Textile Design student, you'll benefit from:

• Extensive personal support from a friendly and caring staff
• A good practical and theoretical education
• Extensive Art and Design facilities
• Availability of careers advice and support.

To find out more about how we teach and how you'll learn, please read our Learning and Teaching Delivery Statement.

As part of your degree, you could study abroad on a placement at one of Bath Spa’s partner universities.

The course is globally aware and enriched by the opportunity to attend international trips. There are visits to specialist studios, trade fairs, exhibitions and museums. Please note that you may have to pay for some of these study visits.

Professionals engage with the students setting ‘live’ external briefs, through the visiting lecture programme, and by leading master-classes or workshop activities.

We expect our students to be active in gaining work-based experience in addition to the learning opportunities relating to employability throughout the course. Generally, paid-internships are to be undertaken in the final weeks of your second year or during the summer academic break between your second and final years.

Past opportunities have included the following: Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Bay & Brown, Michael Angove, Calvin Klein,Ted Baker, Nina Ricci, Paperclip, Tracy Kendall, Sam Pickard, Clarissa Hulse, Jenny King, Whiston and Wright, Karen Nicol, Milena, Chloé, Nicole Farhi, Jessica Ogden, Zandra Rhodes, Dewhurst, Philip Treacy, Ling Design, Hallmark and Tiger Print, Mary Katrantzou, Holly Fulton, Selvedge Tent London, and/or solo exhibitions.

Textile Design graduates have secured employment in a range of career directions, worked for design studios and design companies, set up their own businesses or developed related careers within retail and the broader fashion and interior industries. Our graduates have also continued with their studies, undertaking MAs, PGCEs or PhDs.

Employers of graduates from the BA (Hons) Textile Design include:

• Liberty
• The White Company
• Bay & Brown
• Lyle & Scott
• Keeler Gordon
• Debenhams
• G.M Syntex
• Relish Clothing
• IVO Prints
• Selfridges
• Boden
• Joules
• Marks & Spencer
• Hand and Lock
• Hallmark
• Anthropologie.

We’ll encourage you to participate in competitions. Here are some of our students' successes:

• Shortlisted for the Lewis and Wood Wide Width Wallpaper Competition
• Silk Bureau Competition
• The Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters Award in recognition of the high standard achieved in a project related to the knitting industry
• Shortlisted for the national Whittard Tea Caddy Design competition
• The Porthleven Prize
• Our graduates have won:
  • The Sanderson Award at New Designers
  • John Lewis Loves at New Designers
  • Crafts Council Hothouse Award
  • Festival of Quilts Award
  • Maker Award at SITselect Showcase Exhibition, Cheltenham

If you’re a full-time undergraduate student starting your first year at Bath Spa University, you can apply for the Certificate in Global Citizenship, which you’ll study alongside your degree.

You’ll gain global awareness and add an international dimension to your student experience, and funding is available. On successful completion of the programme, you’ll be awarded a Certificate in Global Citizenship. This is in addition to your degree; it doesn’t change your degree title or results.

As a Textile Design student, you’ll benefit from access to comprehensive digital workshops and specialist art and design facilities, including:

• Our student service point at Locksbrook where you can purchase subsidised art and design materials, hire out equipment for free and collect Library resources
• Access to our well-stocked Library at Newton Park
• Specialist technical workshops across all of art and design
• Access to studio space where you can work on projects and refine your practice

The philosophy of the department is to provide, where possible, the opportunity for you to explore hand techniques, domestic machine processes, industrial machine processes and digital CAD/CAM equipment. The textile equipment in specialist workshops or available to take into the studios include:

• Traditional textile screen printing for fabric and wallpapers
• Fabric and yarn dye range
• Embroidery machines (Juki)
• Knit machines (Brother, Silver Reed, Dubied)
• Laser Cutter (large bed)