THE UK ARTSCIENCE
PRIZE
A catalyst for student learning through the passionate pursuit of innovative art and design ideas at the cutting edge of science.
The UK ArtScience Prize was launched in 2013 and managed by Ignite!, working with Ravensbourne in London and Landau Forte College in Derby. At Ravensbourne the programme is run in-school as part of the Further Education class final major project, with 25 students taking part. In Derby, we partnered with the Derby Silk Mill to deliver the UK ArtScience Prize as an in-school model for 30 year 9 students.
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Throughout the UK ArtScience Prize programme, students were mentored by artists and scientists and guided through the Ideas Translation process. They collaborated with experts and took part in workshops and cultural and cross-site field trips. In May, the students from both sites presented their ideas to a panel of judges.
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The winning teams – one from Ravensbourne and one from Derby – were then selected to travel to Paris for the annual Idea Translation Workshop at Le Laboratoire, where over the course of a week they met with the other international winning teams, collaborated with designers, developed their ideas further and transformed them into reality.
THE ARTSCIENCE PRIZE
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The ArtScience Prize fused a decade of experience working with Boston teens in the arts at the Cloud Foundation with an innovative “Idea Translation Lab” model of experience-based education developed at Harvard University by David A. Edwards: Cloud Foundation founder, Harvard professor, and author of ArtScience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (2008) and The Lab: Experiments in ArtScience (2010). It has received international media and institutional attention as a model for innovation education.
ArtScience Prizes around the globe engage students in the arts, design, sciences, and idea development to cultivate creativity and the ability to realize innovative project ideas generated in the classroom. Student projects focus on concepts in the arts and design fused with cutting-edge areas of study in the sciences. These project concepts start as “seed ideas” proposed by artists, designers, scientists, and entrepreneurs that evolve in collaborative classes lead by skilled adult Program Mentors into innovative project ideas.
Through this groundbreaking curriculum that builds social skills, knowledge of project development techniques, and a basic foundation in creativity and the artistic process, students develop both the confidence to project a dream into concrete and realisable steps, and the ability to convince others to invest in dream realisation.