What Does "Important" Mean in Art and Design Study?

In art and design study, "important" usually means what develops your practice and judgement, not what scores highest on a single test. Arts University Plymouth states that it is "home to a dynamic, cross-disciplinary community of makers and thinkers for whom making is as important as reading and writing." That sentence is a useful definition: in this context, important work is the work that connects thinking, making, and the community you make it with. This applies if you are choosing a course, planning a project, or deciding what to prioritise in a studio-based degree.

How "important" is used differently in art school

In everyday use, "important" often means urgent, compulsory, or high-stakes — the thing you cannot skip. In art and design education, it more often means formative: the thing that changes how you see and make.

So when a tutor says a project is important, they usually mean it will shift your practice — not that it carries the most marks.

Why making counts as equal to reading and writing

Arts University Plymouth describes its community as one "for whom making is as important as reading and writing." The practical consequence is that a sketchbook, prototype, or failed experiment can carry as much intellectual weight as an essay.

This matters when you decide how to spend your time. If you treat writing as the "real" academic work and making as secondary, you will misread what the course values. The reverse is also true: making without reflection produces objects without argument.

A useful test for any task: does this help me think through making, or make through thinking? If neither, it is probably not important in this sense, however urgent it feels.

What cross-disciplinary community adds

The same source frames the university as "a dynamic, cross-disciplinary community of makers and thinkers." In practice, that means importance is partly social: work becomes important when it is tested against people outside your discipline.

For example, a ceramics student showing work to a graphic design peer may get feedback about sequence, contrast, or audience that a ceramics-only critique would not produce. The work did not change; what counts as important about it did.

This is also why facilities and student support appear alongside teaching in the university's own messaging — it reports being ranked 1st in the South West for both facilities and student support at the Whatuni Student Choice Awards 2026, and 6th in the UK for student satisfaction in the Complete University Guide 2027. Those are the conditions under which cross-disciplinary making is actually possible, not decoration around it.

How to judge what is worth prioritising

Use these questions rather than a generic to-do list:

• Does it move the work forward? A technique you will reuse beats a one-off effect.
• Does it generate evidence of thinking? Notes, tests, and iterations count.
• Does it expose the work to other disciplines? Feedback from outside your subject is often the most useful.
• Does it build a habit you can sustain? Regular studio time usually outperforms occasional bursts.
• Would you defend it in a critique? If you cannot explain why it mattered, it probably did not.

A quick comparison

• Important: learning to document process, testing materials, seeking cross-disciplinary critique, showing up to studio.
• Urgent but not necessarily important: chasing a trend, perfecting presentation before the idea works, comparing your output to a different discipline's standards.

How this differs from a general university

A general university often defines importance by assessment weighting and subject-specific canon. A specialist arts university adds two things: making as a form of knowledge, and a cross-disciplinary community as the test of that knowledge.

That does not make reading and writing unimportant — the source explicitly pairs them with making. It means the balance is different, and your priorities should reflect it.

If you want to see how this plays out in practice, Arts University Plymouth runs on-campus open days (for example, Saturday 26 September) where you can tour facilities and talk to staff, and it publishes a prospectus and course listings. Visiting is the most direct way to check whether the way a place defines "important" matches the way you want to work.