Creative and Cultural Industries: Events and Experiences Design BA (Hons)
Subject and course type
- Creative Industries
- Interaction and Experience Design
- Undergraduate
ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ’s Events and Experiences Design BA (Hons) will give you the skills you need to launch an exciting, vibrant career in the industry.
You’ll develop practical and analytical skills in everything from curation, conception and resourcing to marketing and budgeting – all with a focus on exhibitions and events.
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Create unforgettable experiences
Ready to design experiences that get everyone talking?
Studying this Events and Experiences Design BA with a focus on the Creative and Cultural Industries will give you strong foundations for a fast-paced professional future. Our graduates have gone on roles in exhibitions and creative events management at high-profile organisations including the Barbican, the V&A Museum and more.
During the course, you’ll explore topics such as design thinking, branding and strategy for creative organisations. You’ll have the creative freedom to shape your path, and be encouraged to grow through work on non-commercial projects too.
Through collaboration with other students and industry professionals on real-world projects, you’ll learn to visualise, experiment and project manage – all while accelerating your knowledge.
When you graduate, you’ll be fully equipped with the commercial, creative and organisational skills you need to stand out in the creative and cultural job market.
Why choose this course
While you study, you’ll benefit from top quality teaching at ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ. Not only are we ranked Gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework, we’re also No.2 in London and in the top 10 in the UK for Media & Film Studies (The Guardian University Guide 2024).
On this course, you’ll gain hands-on experience in ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ’s creative agency, . Through this student-powered collective, you’ll work with other students on paid live briefs for a range of creative companies and institutions.
Thanks to our Thinking Through Making ethos, you'll have the chance to experiment and learn in world-class 3D workshops, digital media labs, film, photography and printmaking facilities.
Kingston is No.2 in London for Media & Film Studies (The Guardian University Guide 2024).
Kingston is in the top 10 in the UK for Media & Film Studies (The Guardian University Guide 2024).
The Art School Experience
As part of Kingston School of Art, students on this course benefit from joining a creative community where we encourage collaborative working and critical practice.
Our workshops and studios are open to all disciplines, enabling students and staff to work together, share ideas and explore multi-disciplinary making.
Course content
You will learn the principles of curation and visitor experience. You will gain project management knowledge and experience to deliver effective exhibitions and events for an organisation or client. Through a combination of in-house and live briefs you will discover your creative self and your future role in industry.
Year 1
Year 1 is common to all our creative and cultural industries courses. You will explore visual communication techniques, use of design software, storytelling and design thinking. You will learn individually and as part of a team of creative partners and professionals. You will examine the management and strategy of creative enterprises, and the history and development of art and design practice.
Core modules
30 credits
This module builds the skills and understanding needed to create and deliver effective visual and verbal communications. Students will be introduced to theories on perception and communication and will apply them to the analysis of persuasive visuals used in visual communications. Students are simultaneously introduced to a fundamental set of conceptual and practical tools.
Practical project tasks will give students the opportunity to develop or enhance their industry standard software skills, supported by our technicians. Through the creation of visual concepts, video narratives, content creation for social and experimentation with emerging platforms, students will explain the possible visual identities of an event, campaign, or product. Students will learn to examine and redefine problems through close observation and investigate the use of empathy with users. User experience, interface design and prototyping are used to enhance the quality of communication and the explanation and sharing of ideas.
A basic understanding of image creation, editing and outputting via industry standard software students, supported by technicians in the Digital Media Workstation. Emphasis is not placed on the technical execution of visual outcomes (layout, designs, social media content, posters) but on the relevance to the brief, effectiveness and originality. Students will be encouraged to select appropriate media to support their visual stories so they could use a range of 2D/3D work (graphic, video, photo, illustration) or VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), XR (Mixed Reality) and other immersive and emerging technologies depending on the skill and interests of the student.
30 credits
This module will introduce you to Future Skills through engagement with Navigate. It will enable you to begin to develop your professional identity and global citizenship, by promoting your understanding of ethical issues and values, design thinking, and commercial awareness. These concepts and associated activities will support you to plan your own personal and professional development, as a means of developing your creative practice. This will be supported through active engagement with Navigate, and through personal development planning (supported by Personal Tutors), which will enable you to reflect upon your Future Skills graduate attributes. It will also enable you to reflect on and begin to evidence your understanding of the skills you are developing holistically; through all the work you are creating as part of your course.
You will learn to write in professional contexts (writing to industry figures via email or LinkedIn messaging), creating your own profile on networking sites. The module will focus on writing in number of professional contexts and you will practise using a range of techniques and strategies to produce professional documents.
Through the creation of a Podcast you will explore industry sectors and roles and issues around Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and begin engaging with industry figures and bodies, learn how to interview, record and create engaging audio stories and begin to define your own place in the Creative Industries.
30 credits
This module enables students to create a critical, historical, ethical and theoretical framework within which to investigate and understand practices of creativity in relation to art, design and culture.
The module explores the connections between creativity and social and cultural change by focusing on a variety of case studies both historical and contemporary. It will place emphasis on the ways in which significant moments in cultural history, and the creative products and solutions that emerge from them, have been shaped by the input of multiple stakeholders who inhabit a variety of positions from artists and designers to muses, theoreticians, patrons and engineers. The module will examine ethical issues that emerge around cultural and creative practices and theory.
With a close focus on analysis of key case studies, a series of lectures, seminars, workshops, and tutorials will support students' own emerging research interests and encourage the development of their historical knowledge, critical thinking and research skills.
The module thus helps students to make sense of the ethical concerns emerging in their own disciplines and to take a critical and analytical view of their own ideas, motivations and interests and how these views can translate into commercial project work.
The module will actively engage with visual and physical material. Seminars will also enable students to discuss key readings, and connect themes to their particular interests. Where possible, study visits, guest speakers, hacks, and screenings will be scheduled throughout the module.
As students progress they will be able to translate their concepts into outputs across video, music, social media content and reacting to theoretical content as and how their creative interests take them.
30 credits
This module explores different types of writing (academic, commercial, creative) and how the meaning and form is changed depending on the chosen audience. The mechanics of writing (drafting, editing) are paired with briefs that explore your ability to write reflectively about your creative work, to write commercially (copywriting, editorial), to bring writing into your creative practice (stories, poetry) and how to use prompts and conversational text to inform Artificially Intelligent creative tools. You will explore the ethics surrounding the use of these technologies and issues around copyright and plagiarism that arise from the use of these technologies.
This module is designed to familiarise students with a range of rhetorical strategies, aesthetic techniques, redrafting and editing skills, while also providing the opportunity to practise writing and editing in a number of commercial, creative and academic forms. You will be introduced to key techniques for writing effectively and will develop your ability to identify strengths and weaknesses in writing by reading and responding creatively to texts in each form.
This module focuses on writing techniques that will be explored through workshops and lectures. The impact that language choices make on the effectiveness of writing will lead on to the discussion of audience, social context, identity and voice.
Year 2
Years 2 examine Curation, Exhibition and Events in depth. You will learn the practices of display, collecting and exhibiting, and how meaning and message are created through exhibitions. You will learn branding, marketing and how to develop events for defined audiences. You will study conceptualisation and visualisation, visual narratives and storyboarding, artwork commission and project management.
You can choose to apply for a summer internship at the end of Year 2 to gain valuable experience and increase your employability.
Core modules
30 credits
This module introduces students to critical, practical and technical frameworks for exhibition and event management. Students are introduced to the practices of display, collecting and exhibiting, and encouraged to consider how meaning and message are created through exhibitions. A series of workshops will introduce key vocational tools including branding, social, marketing, and audience development. Students will devise their own projects, and in the process be introduced to conceptualisation and visualisation, the creation of visual narratives and storyboarding, and the commission and evaluation of work. Project management skills will be applied to individual projects, enabling students to manage budgets and schedules. They will also be tasked with producing a small digital and physical exhibition, learning the technical and conceptual skills required to achieve this.
30.00 credits
This module is intended to establish the importance of the customer or end user during the production of your creative work. This is not necessarily a given as when work includes aesthetic, craft or technical codes, values and stakeholders there can be powerful alternative interests and requirements. Creative producers need to balance, determine possible areas of trade-off and occasionally deny or defend against commercial or cultural considerations. This module therefore problematises the cultural consumer, investigates their needs and behaviours, and analyses and discovers how (interactive) communication can be established with them, including consideration of ethical practices within the sector. A multi-channel perspective will be adopted with particular emphasis on digital consumer decision journeys and the creation of social media brand advocates.
30.00 credits
This module introduces you to the principles and practices of project management. You will have had some limited experience of working in projects during the Design Thinking (HA4303) module and will be able to use this as recognition of the need and benefits to developing skills in this aspect of creative professional practice. Much work in the Creative Industries is organised in projects and many creatives work as freelancers or in small agencies operating in a project based manner. Project management involves the identification and organisation of resources, aligning them to milestones and objectives so that at the completion of the project the outcome is valued by the client and the project team generates a return on their effort. While it is the case that creative projects share similar characteristics to those intended to be run by methodologies such as Prince2, they are also different. The module explores this difference and aims at providing an approach and encouraging attitudes to their organisation that will enable creative projects to be better managed.
30 credits
This module provides you with an opportunity to apply your developing understanding of creative problem solving to real-world examples of problem conceptualisation, research and solution design. It will draw on the skills and problem solving techniques developed in the Visual Narrative and Design Thinking (HA4301) modules and the Creative Project Management (HA5305) module. Its main objective is to create a situation requiring professional level of interaction and the application of creative and design skills to the creation of a solution. This will prepare you for when you need to create and sell ideas into companies either for an agency or as a freelancer. Cases will be selected according to their relevance to each degree. Two scenarios are expected. One, the case will involve aspects of each degree and can be tackled by all students. Two, separate cases will be found to match each degree. Each organisation will bring a live or ‘as live', project for you to work on and produce a solution. The ‘liveness' of the project refers to the fact that it is a current issue that the organisation is currently experiencing and that you are working on a problem that therefore could contribute to, or change, how the organisation responds.
Optional year
You have the option to take an additional year to study abroad.
Year 3
Years 3 examine Curation, Exhibition and Events in depth. You will study cultural entrepreneurship and explore ways of building a sustainable independent career. You will further your knowledge and skills in the curation and execution of events.
The major project in your final year will be a visual project, business or marketing plan, or consultancy project for a company.
You will research and identify a current curatorial challenge and provide visual communication solutions that are tailored for the chosen audience. You will be challenged and guided by your supervisors to achieve your potential.
Core modules
30 credits
This module extends the critical and practical engagement with contemporary events design explored in Level 5, culminating in a physical and digital exhibition designed and fully realised by the students, located in a space outside of Kingston School of Art, using the knowledge and practical skills acquired.
Students will continue to develop a range of vocational skills – including pitching a brief, working with a client, developing a narrative, storyboarding, creating content for social and other platforms, event branding, exhibition design, audience development, market research, public programming, benchmarking and project management. A strong emphasis will be placed on working collaboratively: students will work in teams to realise the exhibition.
30.00 credits
This module explores what attitudes, skills and activities equip the entrepreneur in the Creative and Cultural Industries with the resources and decision-making skills to survive and thrive. It takes the term culturepreneur - originally one of derision, and problematises the distinctive features of enterprising people and teams that attempt to craft desirable value propositions for their users or customers while at the same time ensuring they capture sufficient revenue and build and deploy necessary reputational capital. The module is not intended to be a business planning module as though there maybe cases where enterprises are conceptualised and pitched it is also the case that entrepreneurship is a broader concept concerning the creation and execution of creative projects that involve enterprising or new formulations of value. In these cases ideas still need to be conceptualised, prototyped, resources identified and won.
60 credits
This is the programme's capstone module, a double weighted individual piece of work that provides an opportunity for you to consolidate and apply previous knowledge gained and skills acquired during your degree. It will be an opportunity to develop and express your creative self, demonstrated through the production of a major enquiry into and response to an issue experienced by people and organisations operating in the creative industries. The work will be theoretically informed and practically orientated and be relevant to the field of your degree; either Art Direction, Curation Exhibition and Events or Design Marketing.
Future Skills and career opportunities
You’ll complete this course fully equipped for a creative sector career in exhibitions and events. The programme will also give you the opportunity to showcase your work to fashion, art, media, broadcasting and publishing organisations.
Graduates from Kingston School of Art have gone on to work in organisations such as the Barbican, Foundling Museum, Hauser & Wirth, National Archives, Open-City, the London Transport Museum and the V&A Museum. Others have established their own consultancies and events companies, or even pursued careers in academia and research.
Every course at ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ teaches a range of Future Skills. From problem-solving and adaptability to digital competency, these are the attributes you’ll need to get the edge in the job market and a head start on your career.
At ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ, we're not just keeping up with change, we're creating it
For more information on how Kingston prepares you for the future job market, visit our Future Skills page.
Teaching and assessment
Scheduled learning and teaching on this course includes timetabled activities including lectures, seminars and small group tutorials. It may also include critiques, project work, studio practice and performance, digital labs, workshops, and placements.
Outside the scheduled learning and teaching hours, you will learn independently through self-study which will involve reading articles and books, working on projects, undertaking research, preparing for and completing your work for assessments. Some independent study work may need to be completed on-campus, as you may need to access campus-based facilities such as studios and labs.
Our academic support team here at ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ provides help in a range of areas.
When you arrive, we'll introduce you to your personal tutor. This is the member of academic staff who will provide academic guidance, be a support throughout your time at Kingston and show you how to make the best use of all the help and resources that we offer at ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ.
A course is made up of modules, and each module is worth a number of credits. You must pass a given number of credits in order to achieve the award you registered on, for example 360 credits for a typical undergraduate course or 180 credits for a typical postgraduate course. The number of credits you need for your award is detailed in the programme specification which you can access from the link at the bottom of this page.
One credit equates to 10 hours of study. Therefore 120 credits across a year (typical for an undergraduate course) would equate to 1,200 notional hours. These hours are split into scheduled and guided. On this course, the percentage of that time that will be scheduled learning and teaching activities is shown below for each year of study. The remainder is made up of guided independent study.
- Year 1: 22% scheduled learning and teaching
- Year 2: 23% scheduled learning and teaching
- Year 3: 18% scheduled learning and teaching
The exact balance between scheduled learning and teaching and guided independent study will be informed by the modules you take.
Your course will primarily be delivered in person. It may include delivery of some activities online, either in real time or recorded.
Types of assessment
- Year 1: Coursework 100%
- Year 2: Coursework 80%; practical 20%
- Year 3: Coursework 80%; practical 20%
Please note: the above breakdowns are a guide calculated on core modules only. If your course includes optional modules, this breakdown may change to reflect the modules chosen.
We aim to provide feedback on assessments within 20 working days.
Your individualised timetable is normally available to students within 48 hours of enrolment. Whilst we make every effort to ensure timetables are as student-friendly as possible, scheduled learning and teaching can take place on any day of the week between 9am and 6pm. For undergraduate students, Wednesday afternoons are normally reserved for sports and cultural activities, but there may be occasions when this is not possible. Timetables for part-time students will depend on the modules selected.
To give you an indication of class sizes, this course normally attracts 35 students and lecture sizes are normally 35. However this can vary by module and academic year.
Fees and funding
| Fee category | Fee |
|---|---|
| Home (UK students) | £9,535* |
| International | |
| Year 1 (2025/26): | £18,500 |
| Year 2 (2026/27): | £19,200 |
| Year 3 (2027/28): | £19,900 |
The tuition fee you pay depends on whether you are assessed as a 'Home' (UK), 'Islands' or 'International' student. In 2025/26 the fees for this course are above.
For courses with Professional Placement, the fee for the placement year can be viewed in our Fees and Funding section. The placement fee published is for the relevant academic year stated in the table. This fee is subject to annual increases but will not increase by more than the fee caps as prescribed by the Office for Students or such other replacing body.
* For full-time programmes of a duration of more than one academic year, the published fee is an annual fee, payable each year, for the duration of the programme. Your annual tuition fees cover your first attempt at all of the modules necessary to complete that academic year. A re-study of any modules will incur additional charges calculated by the number of credits. Home tuition fees may be subject to annual increases but will not increase by more than the fee caps as prescribed by the Office for Students or such other replacing body. Full-time taught International fees are subject to an annual increase and are published in advance for the full duration of the programme.
Eligible UK students can apply to the Government for a tuition loan, which is paid direct to the University. This has a low interest-rate which is charged from the time the first part of the loan is paid to the University until you have repaid it.
Scholarships and bursaries
For students interested in studying this course at Kingston, there are several opportunities to seek funding support.
Additional course costs
Some courses may require additional costs beyond tuition fees. When planning your studies, you’ll want to consider tuition fees, living costs, and any extra costs that might relate to your area of study.
Your tuition fees include costs for teaching, assessment and university facilities. So your access to libraries, shared IT resources and various student support services are all covered. Accommodation and general living expenses are not covered by these fees.
Where applicable, additional expenses for your course may include:
Our libraries have an extensive collection of books and journals, as well as open-access computers and laptops available to rent. However, you may want to buy your own computer or personal copies of key textbooks. Textbooks may range from £50 to £250 per year. And a personal computer can range from £100 to £3,000 depending on your course requirements.
While most coursework is submitted online, some modules may require printed copies. You may want to allocate up to £100 per year for hard-copies of your coursework. It’s worth noting that 3D printing is never compulsory. So if you choose to use our 3D printers, you’ll need to pay for the material. This ranges from 3p per gram to 40p per gram.
ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ will pay for all compulsory field trips. Fees for optional trips can range from £25 for local trips to various costs for international trips.
Your tuition fees don’t cover travel costs. To save on travel costs, you can use our free intersite bus service. This route links the campuses and halls of residence with local train stations - Surbiton, Kingston upon Thames, and Norbiton.
If you take part in external shows and exhibitions, you’ll need to cover your travel costs. These will vary according to the location.
Course changes and regulations
The information on this page reflects the currently intended course structure and module details. To improve your student experience and the quality of your degree, we may review and change the material information of this course. Find out more about course changes
for the course are published ahead of each academic year.
Regulations governing this course can be found on our website.
Key information
The scrolling banner below displays some key factual data about this course (including different course combinations or delivery modes of this course where relevant).
