Information Experience Design

Through the programme, you will gain a working knowledge of experimental post-digital and cultural systems theory and practice, and its influence in society at various scales and from multiple perspectives. You will use this context to build your own conceptual tools and frameworks and illustrate and test these tools through creative practice. You will continually refine your approach and select technical skills to develop that suit the precise pieces and experiences you wish to create. This will allow you to generate a body of work with conceptual depth and technical skill.

You will develop a rich transdisciplinary knowledge base, including language and terminologies for engaging with critical intellectual and practical discussions, leading-edge theory, and influential and foundational works in post-digital and systems theory and practice, with emphasis on a chosen area. Throughout the programme, you will be discouraged from looking for a ‘correct’ way of thinking about or generating meaningful work or doing the programme. Instead, you will be encouraged to cross boundaries and design your own way. Likewise, your intellectual work will not draw from textbook readings, as this programme has no disciplinary boundary. Instead, with the input from your tutors and Field Collective, you will select many of your core texts yourself, and you might draw on readings and approaches from games, interaction design, critical theory, anthropology, speculative design, post-humanities, philosophy, ecology, literary studies, environmental communication, and more. You will also be encouraged to engage with relevant contexts such as emergent technologies and platforms, media convergence, play, emerging forms of and views on intelligence, and experimentation concerning social justice and change.

There will be several opportunities to collaborate with others, but at a minimum, your programme will include 275.5 contact hours and 1524.5 independent study hours. Contact hours can consist of lectures, seminars, tutorials, critical forums and workshops, among other types of teaching delivery.

Teaching types included in your programme can consist of briefings, projects, tutorials, seminars, lectures, critical forums, technical inductions, technical workshops, offsite visits and blended learning.

Technical instruction in IED is based on a plan that you design and our technicians' support, so you leave the programme with a composite technical skill set generated by and unique to your body of work. This may involve technical skills such as ceramics, VR, botany, and blockchain. You’ll have a core aim of experimenting with various methods and approaches that cross boundaries between digital and analogue toward composing a distinctive body of work that coheres by intention: what you aim to achieve in the world. You’ll be encouraged to work playfully, with experts guiding you as you stretch your abilities and explore the multisensory, material and immaterial, digital and analogue, and “high” and “low” art forms.

The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College units.

Term 1

In Form & Method (45 credits), you will be immersed in foundational and state-of-the-art practice and theory in experience design and intervention, and you will launch into a series of experiments in rapid making. Experimentation in this unit should be bold and playful, with the guiding aim of building an understanding of the affordances of many conceptual and technical tools and reflecting on outcomes. Alongside practical experiments, by the end of this unit you will have proposed your aims and drafted your concept and technical summary. These three things constitute the critical proposition of your degree: what you wish to study and hope to create, why this is worth doing, and how you will do it.

Across terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA (30 credits).

Term 2

In Situated Practice (30 credits), you will refine and develop your signature practice through more refined and focused making while developing a more in-depth understanding of how it fits into the landscape of contemporary art. During this term, you hone skills related to analysis, audience awareness and collaboration. Your focus in this unit will be experimentation that is more specific and directed than in the previous term, now adapting what you have learned from broad experimentation to develop your practice in intentional ways. Where Form & Method was outward-oriented, Situated Practice is more inward-focused, requiring you to apply continuous critical analysis to your processes, evaluate them with your tutors' support, and refine your technical and conceptual approaches so that these taken together are stable, coherent, and distinctive.

The School-wide unit Making Worlds with Others (15 credits) will allow you to work alongside students within and across the School. Working from the perspective of your individual practices and disciplines, you will develop a project that engages with others and creates mutual exchanges of ideas and understandings to create critically engaged situations and outcomes resulting in convivial knowledge exchange. Through collaborative learning and making, the unit will support you in understanding knowledge exchange and public engagement and how you are to situate your practice in these territories. The unit will also ask you to question how socially engaged practice can contribute to cultural understanding, co-researching and co-creating methods for knowing with, not knowing about.

Term 3

Your Independent Research Project (60 credits) will enable you to integrate your practice into a larger critical discourse, reflect on its significance, and generate knowledge through a research piece and presentation. This unit challenges you to integrate your technical and conceptual processes into a research project. It also requires you to reflect on the outcomes of your work in the first two terms, to trace its trajectory and to consider the direction of your work in the future. Where earlier programme units focused on exploration and experimentation, this unit focuses on transformation: emphasising the broader relevance of your practice, drawing out its strengths, and exploring how it can generate evolution or revolution in the world.

You will engage with various exhibition design and production elements in Exhibition Practice sessions. These are mainly practical and hands-on, concentrated especially around a public presentation of work in an interactive festival in term 3, led and curated by students.

AcrossRCA is a compulsory 30-credit unit which is delivered as part of all MA programmes.

Situated at the core of your RCA experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide unit supports you in responding to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds. Developed in response to student feedback, AcrossRCA creates an exciting opportunity for you to collaborate meaningfully across programmes.

Challenging you to use your imagination and intellect to respond to urgent contemporary themes, this ambitious unit will provide you with the opportunity to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations and panel discussions from acclaimed speakers who will introduce the themes and act as inspirational starting points for your collaborative team response.

Delivered online and in-person across two terms, the unit has been designed to complement your disciplinary studies and to provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.