MSA Events

Collaborative Live Projects, 2013, 2014 and Beyond

Manchester School of Architecture has had a long tradition of running an annual collaborative live project programme, and in 2013 and 2014 I had the great privilege to lead it. Known then as MSA Events and more recently as MSA LIVE, the programme brings together around 400 students each year across multiple levels of study to work on real-world projects with local and international partners.

The programme has brought to life vast and varied collaborations, including the 2013 project Guerrilla Tactics which saw students working with the National Football Museum on guerrilla marketing proposals, the 2014 project You Can Leave Your Hat On where students collaborated with KHBT and the Making Headway project to design and build a spectacular paper-hat backdrop for a hat catwalk show, and the 2016 project Make White Nancy Fancy where students transformed children’s drawings celebrating what they loved about their village into individual kites which they then flew from a local hilltop.

In 2017, my colleague Victoria Jolley and I authored the paper ‘Events // A Decade of Student Led Collaborative Projects’, published by the AAE. The paper reflected on the programme’s evolution over ten years, highlighting shifts from staff-led to student-led activities, the integration of digital media for reflection, and the increasing emphasis on employability and job-running skills through student-chosen collaborations.

MSA LIVE remains a key part of my practice and passion, and I continue to contribute to and draw inspiration from this incredible initiative.