The way we construct, access and interpret information is changing beyond recognition from real world wayfinding to augmented environments and the navigation of digital systems. A thorough understanding of the new landscape has never been more essential. A designer’s audience now receives information and brand communication through multiple touchpoints (sometimes simultaneously).

How we experience the world around us, inform ourselves, make choices and navigate uncharted territories is increasingly about the use and experience of multi-platform information delivery systems. The new communications designer must be able to create and curate these experiences across time and space.

The Information Experience Design MA programme will provide its graduating students with the transferable skills to work in collaborative, interdisciplinary ways with a range of emerging practices in digital and transmedia design. It is grounded in three core principles:

• simplicity
• complexity
• experimentation

The IED programme is rooted in research, with a cultural and independent creative outlook, supporting practice that is not restricted by industry expectations. This is not a programme for students whose primary practice is limited to predictable patterns of styling information delivery, nor is it designed to promote ambitions that are overtly commercially prescribed or autobiographical. The ambition of the programme is that it becomes a global focal point for research and the place where the key ideas and future forms at the intersection of information design and experience design are imagined.

Projects will encourage students to work closely with news and current affairs exploring political, environmental and inclusive design agendas by engaging in areas such as:

• data analytics and visualisation
• visual ethnography and digital curation
• exhibition and media design for museums and galleries
• physical computing and computational thinking
• rapid prototyping of ideas, things and experiences
• technology-enhanced learning in the post-digital age
• research methods from journalism, design research and the sciences
• practice-based research in thinking through making
• a theoretical grounding in cognitive science, social science and information theory

The first year will ground students in core theories and methods, and students will choose from one of the six school-wide elective projects, which run for the first two terms. One of the primary functions of these elective projects is to enable students who wish to focus on a comparatively narrow area of communications to do so. Students should also be developing ideas for personal projects supported by their personal tutor; the final term of the first year is entirely given over to self-directed projects. During the second year students will continue to work on self-authored projects. Students can also choose to work on the competitions and commissions that the programme attracts from industry or take advantage of cross-College interdisciplinary collaborative projects.

Download IED Programme Information Pack (PDF).

Open Days are held at the College between October and January of each academic year, to enable applicants to explore teaching programmes and meet staff and students.

Each student accepted into the programme should have already engaged in some form of new media design, information design/experience design or related activity, and should express an interest to work with data and to ground their work in research and critical theory. The quality of the student will be demonstrated by the standard of their portfolio of work and qualified by the award of an Honours degree in the subject or appropriate associated subjects.

Applications are welcomed from:

• graduates from a diversity of communications backgrounds: students will be carefully selected from undergraduate programmes that span graphic design, information design, exhibition design, digital design and typographic design
• graduates seeking to develop their design capabilities from the social sciences, humanities or design journalism, and locate their expertise within an information design discipline
• experienced designers including mid-career to senior professionals looking to re-engage with study, change their working practices, expose themselves to new challenges and be part of an exciting multicultural creative community

+44 (0)20 7590 4304
ied@rca.ac.uk
Programme microsite