Futurising – As the dust settles
With the dust settling (quite literally!) on the old Nicholls & Clarke building and with the sight and sounds of the two day creative industries career festival still echoing through the abandoned tile warehouse its time to look back on all that was – Futurising.
Futurising, the first ever opportunities and recruitment festival specifically tailored to the needs of creative graduates, took place between Tuesday 29 – Wednesday 30 June in the heart of Shoreditch offering opportunities, advice, information and inspiration to all creative graduates from universities across the UK.
What resulted was one of the largest gatherings of young creatives and future leaders of the creative industries in the UK likely to take place for quite some time. Where else could you have your portfolio seen by graphic design monolith Pentagram shortly after dropping in to listen to vogue.com editor Dolly Jones, before rounding things off with a frozen margarita served from a black double-decker bus?
Futurising took the traditional career fair formula and gave it the necessary shake and application of imagination to make it fit the creative industry. The event, resulting from months of meticulous planning and preparation led on by LCC on behalf of UAL, took on a personality of it own with exhibitors, advisors and those giving talks all buying in to the common goal of helping provide ambitious creative graduates a platform on which to shine.
Amongst the 100s of exhibitions stands and talk spaces stood a group of LCC MA Publishing students doing their best to make sense of it all. Based in the interactive exhibitions space better know as ‘The Shack’ and operating under the guise of Knack In The Shack, they took on the unenviable task of documenting the goings on creating a dynamic live blog of the event.
As one of the many current students helping staff the event the most resounding endorsement of the event came from listening to visitors galvanized by their experience sharing their ‘Futurising moment’. Talk of internships, portfolio follow ups and collaboration filled the air in celebration as they emptied out into the east end only to return home and tweet about it all over again.
Words by Adam Hayes
