GSA Degree Show 2025: The School of Innovation and Technology

Students in the School of Innovation and Technology develop self-directed, exploratory approaches to 21st century innovation. Investigating the intersection of human experience and emerging technologies, students embody the roles of visionaries, designers and innovators.

Lewis Davidson, a student of Sound for the Moving Image programme, is an audiovisual artist practising an experimental 'flow-state' approach. In his film Pairilis Anama (‘Soul Paralysis’ in Gaelic), Lewis begins with visual rendering, followed by the creation of his soundscapes. Basing audio on what can be seen, Davidson captures feelings of destruction and corruption through natural imagery. This allows Davidson to guide us through a digitalised journey, where audio choices enhance our emotional responses. Feelings of fear, shock, destruction and persistence transport the viewer into an ever-changing environment, where each visual transition leads us to a scene of rendered debris. The continual regeneration of natural scenery is suggested by Davidson to represent the human mind’s ability to grow out of control.

As a part of the Immersive Systems of Design programme, students can specialise in one of two distinct pathways – 3D Modelling or Games and Virtual Reality (VR). As a cartoon fanatic, Freya Stanley joined directly into 3D modelling in year two. Exploring facial animation through their creation of a female character; ‘Magik’ can present 66 micro-expressions. Transforming the possibility of characterisation, Stanley has enabled Magik to smile, frown, express disgust, lip-sync and overall evoke human-like feelings.

Speaking with Magik takes influence from the character Magik from X-Men and Anya Taylor-Joy’s facial structure. After watching cartoons over summer, Stanley wanted to give animated characters a more enhanced, memorable quality, in which they go beyond the conventional cartoon expression. Focusing on increased nuance, Stanley aims to move away from the over-simplified world of animated expression.

Using a combination of ZBrush and 3DSMax (3D-modelling software), Stanley sculpted the head shape and manipulated expression through digital ‘carving’. A combination of skills, creativity and resilience led Stanley to a developed, final female figure that challenges emotional capacities within digital design.

Games and VR student Rebecca Ward provides an insight into the extensive creativity involved within the course. Ward’s final project, The Tale of Flicker Wickworth, is an immersive puzzle that invites players into a cosy environment. Guided by Flicker, a little candle, players endure his grand ascent to the top of an abandoned wizard’s cabin. The goal is to reach ‘The Big Light’.

Designed at a time of personal loss and grieving, Ward’s intention is to represent the journey of life. Each phase of the game associated with the trials and tribulations we go through. Using digital drawing tools, and motivation from personal life events, Ward has created an engaging and mystical work of art for others to experience.

Freya Stanley, Immersive Systems Design for GSA Degree Show 2025

Awarded the Material Innovation prize, Product Design student Aisling Walsh explores regenerative textile practices. Unspun, a sustainable bio-based yarn, raises questions around the industrialisation of material and how local, adaptive and circular processes could be our future.

Composed of food waste and flax, Unspun demonstrates an exciting diversion from the globalisation of material production and its invisible and extractive nature. What makes Unspun unique is Walsh’s ‘mill meets lab’ approach; ‘mill’ becomes both a site of production and education for users to gain insight into textile practice and its life cycle.

Developing a ‘closed loop’ system, Unspun yarn can be traced across all stages (from soil to final textile), demonstrating a project sensitive to its current climate. Walsh poses a relevant creation in a world challenged by environmental, cultural and technological change.

Alcohol has the pub and caffeine has cafes. If all drugs were legalised, what spaces would need to exist to destigmatise and educate, rather than romanticise and encourage? Product Design student Luke Aitken turns to the public to find out. When asked “What if, in 2050, all drugs were legalised?” Aitken proposed the Ethical Consumption Garden – a project that raises questions around substance relationships.

Designing Glasgow’s first opium garden, Aitken creates dialogue and encourages decision-making regarding long-term drug policies. Gathering data from the original exhibit at Strange Field, Aitken generates proposals for policies concerning the future of drug use. Undeniably, the Ethical Consumption Garden uncovers uncomfortable truths and encourages provocative responses, ultimately working towards a change.

FLOK: The Wool 3D Printer transforms low-value sheep’s wool, often discarded or burned, into functional printed forms. Designed by Product Design student Iestyn Howorth, this speculative fabrication system offers a solution for farmers to make further use of ‘redundant’ wool. In Scotland today, it costs more to shear a sheep than to sell its fleece, reducing wool to a by-product of meat production.

Supporting the machine is a service platform designed to distribute making across rural communities, featuring open-source printer plans, hands-on onboarding for farmers, and access to a shared digital marketplace where wool-printed objects can be sold. FLOK proposes a circular, community-led alternative: a printer that doesn’t just fabricate products but reconfigures relationships between land, labour, and technology.

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School of Innovation and Technology Degree Show, Haldane Building, 30 May-8 Jun