The concept of an Anomaly as something that is different, abnormal, peculiar, or difficult to classify, that the students from this years Masters in Critical Practice have chosen to describe their work, is in many ways a perfect description of what we have been endeavouring to develop and describe within this course. Working between the twin poles of a now substantially discredited model of conventional critical analysis or theory, and the still as yet largely misunderstood or underdeveloped model of a truly “practically” based form of critical research, we have attempted to both investigate, develop, and describe a form of critical practice that not only emerges out of an analysis of the very processes of “design” itself, but the simultaneous recognition – as many of the students have found out for themselves throughout the year – of the relationship between these processes, both socially, critically, and materially, and the processes of fabrication of life itself.

Indeed as you look around the work in this exhibition you can't help but be struck by the enormous significance of the question of the ontogenetic or “emergent” possibilities of life itself. Whether it be in the question of the “hybrid” nature of our contemporary biological existence inspired by Donna Haraway's work, and her question of our coevolutionary or “interspecies” relationship to those animals that we have chosen to share our environment with in particular, or the question of the telecommunicative and phenomenological dematerialisation, or “virtualisation” of our life-world, or indeed the very question of the imaginative possibilities of creation itself, the question of life's “designed” nature resounds.

This is an approach to the question of design that not only recognises the incredible diversity of backgrounds of the students enrolled in this degree, the ever increasing