School of Art and Design lecturers Duncan Baker Brown and Nick Gant and colleagues have had their application to become a member of the British Council Crafting Futures Network accepted.

They are now part of a small, exclusive group of institutions that will be taking the British Council’s new priority programmes to deliver development in new territories including South Africa, Indonesia and Sri-Lanka. Nick Gant will be heading to Manchester on the 18th for first network meeting.

They were also successful in winning £62,000 of funding from the very competitive British Council DICE funding call to further work around waste and community development in South Africa this year with the Dreamcatcher Foundation.

Duncan and Nick had a long but really successful week with their Waste Zone at FutureBuild last week – Duncan led and curated a fantastic programme of talks with an impressive 55 speakers over just three days. Leading thinkers from the area of circular economies from across Europe and presented an exhibition of staff and student work and from the Interreg project. The event led to numerous new leads for collaboration within a range of industrial and social enterprise settings for work with waste.

Find out more on the Architecture and Interior Architecture blog