Some feedback can be seen as daunting, unpredictable, too long, too dominating and a little bit too nice. But it is up to you how you want to direct it; you have ownership and drive it in a way which suits you. What do students want from feedback sessions? Critique, direction, progress, ruthlessness, compliments?
Read More
The important point is our brains are wired in a certain way and we invent and build the world in our heads as much as perceive it as ‘truth’. This is important for anyone attempting to represent three dimensions in two. The world is indeed out there but perhaps capturing it requires more intervention than we might initially think.
Read More
Now a lot of times, when we say the word ergonomics, we might think of funky looking desk chairs or computer equipment belonging to someone who takes their job very seriously. But for an interior designer, ergonomics needs to mean so much more than that.
Read More
When people think of interior design or architecture drawings, usually floor plans come to everyone’s mind first. However, a designer will quickly understand that a section drawing, that is a vertical slice through a building, space, object, etc., is the one that allows you to understand and test the experience of a design more effectively. […]
Read More
I was delighted to attend a Google hangout recently and meet our Rest of World group of students at OCA. Students attended from Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Zambia, USA, Hungary and most impressive of all – Japan (Calling in from Japan impressed me the most, simply because it was 4am there at the time of […]
Read More
In the last blog post we looked at how strict processes can be used in composition, taking examples mostly from minimalist composers. In this post we’ll be looking at a more open-ended type of process: probabilistic decision making. In the process music we looked at last time, each rule had a single possible interpretation, exactly […]
Read More
I critique as I read so you get my thoughts as I go. (Big smiley emoji). Excitement welled in my chest. I’d spent years writing my novel, and I was so proud of it. I’d found a critique group, posted my first chapter, and here it was: my very first critique. I could see it […]
Read More
I’m a tutor on OCA’s Interior Design courses. I was sent images of a model made by one of my students. It represented a pavilion design and was well made and interesting to look at. Trouble is, I had no idea how big it was supposed to be. The dictionary definition of scale is “The […]
Read More
I am sure as a distance learner, you’ll likely be used to incorporating different technologies into your learning experience – I was certainly Zooming ‘before it was cool’ thanks to OCA meetings and I can’t help but notice how many learning tools we seem to be early adopters of. We’re also lucky to have […]
Read More
Those of you who follow our OCA Creative Writing social media – in particular, the @ocawriters Twitter account – may have spotted a few celebratory posts earlier in the year. When we learned the course had achieved 100% student satisfaction in the 2020 NSS survey, we were all absolutely thrilled. ‘NSS’ stands for National Student […]
Read More
