Digital Direction

Term 1

During Critical Stories (45 credits), we will explore the foundational approaches of the programme, focusing on critical, co-operative and experimental storytelling methods, media ecologies and artefacts. During the unit you will be introduced to diverse concepts and practices relevant to contemporary storytelling, media and communication. Working with others, you will be asked to assemble a project that proposes, tests and evaluates inclusive forms of digital storytelling practice, using responsive methods to explore contexts and/or raise the visibility of urgent concerns in contemporary culture.

Across terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA (30 credits). This unit aims to support you to meet the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing you together to work collaboratively in cross-programme interdisciplinary teams. In your team you will develop a self- initiated themed project, informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to collectively use your intellect and imagination to address key cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges. In doing so, you will develop and reflect on the abilities required to translate knowledge into action, and help demonstrate the contribution that the creative practices can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

Term 2

The Making Worlds with Others (15 credits) School-wide unit 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/or creates mutual exchanges of ideas and understandings, with the intention to create critically engaged situations and/or 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 own 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.

Immersive Enquiries (30 credits), focuses on working critically and experimentally with immersive environments, mobile platforms, and emerging areas of media practice to conceptualise, test and evaluate future directions. During the unit you will be asked to produce a prototype for an immersive storytelling environment and/or mobile platform that looks critically and collectively at real-world concerns, and to collaborate with others to explore the changing effects of interactive time-based media on human communication, behaviour and experience.

Term 3

In the Independent Research Project (IRP) (60 credits), you will have the opportunity to work independently to develop a comprehensive programme of research-led practice, critically exploring a topic of your own choosing through individual or collaborative approaches. The unit provides scope for you to bring together the core competencies, methods and processes you have developed during the programme and to define, contextualise, produce and evaluate a substantial body of creative and critical research. During the unit you will be asked to engage responsibly with storytelling perspectives and research methods, and to address real-world concerns inclusively within your work. You will also be encouraged to hone your research, professional and leadership skills, articulate your future direction, and show how your practice contributes to debates that are at the forefront of the field.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

AcrossRCA

At the RCA we are working – as artists, designers, architects, historians, writers and curators – within physical and digital worlds that are undergoing constant change, and defined by shifting complexities and interconnections. The 15-credit AcrossRCA unit supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

The unit revolves around a set of thematic pillars that reflect key areas of flux, uncertainty and complexity that cut across local, global, individual and collective contexts today. Working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups, you will develop your thinking and reflections on a key issue, question or tension under the umbrella of a larger theme as you generate a creative response. The focus is on learning through the process of the collaborative development of an idea. Rather than aiming for a completed product, solution or concrete answer, AcrossRCA is about an openness to what is generated through experimentation, dialogue and reflexivity. What happens when we move across disciplinary borders and put the kinds of knowledge, experience and skills we each bring to the RCA into conversation with others?

This provides you with opportunities to:

• share and adapt approaches from your personal practices and/or discipline;
• collaborate with peers outside your programme;
• interrogate collaboration through experimenting with and reflecting on collaborative models and approaches, and thinking about what your practice means in relation to others;
• critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and the role of creative practice in making our understanding and experience of the world;
• position your practice and skills and what you bring to a team and larger context.

This engagement with perspectives and practices from across disciplines and across the College is designed to complement your disciplinary studies, feed back into your individual work, and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Core Skills

The Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career. The unit also supports you in moving from Term 1 to the independent work you will undertake in your IRP in Term 3, as an opportunity to more deeply and systematically develop and deploy select core skills related to your practice. The transferable academic and professional skills covered in this unit reflect those required of a postgraduate student, and are adapted by Schools and programmes according to specific disciplinary perspectives and requirements. The Core Skills complement the work you are undertaking in your programme units and underpins and elevates the development of your future direction. The Core Skills will focus on specific skills most relevant to your expanded discipline, which may come under areas including inclusive, critical, sustainable and ethical approaches, the networks of knowledge, practice and communication within which your work sits, and the positioning of your practice. Throughout, the unit emphasises how these skills are situated not only disciplinarily within art, design, architecture, communication and humanities practices, but also within larger contexts, inside and in the world beyond.

The unit is informed by the following three themes:

• Making Meaning: How does questioning and contextualising inform the development of your practice? This theme builds on skills in critical and creative thinking, reflective practice, navigating complexity and research.
• Making Together: How do we think and make in dialogue and collaboration with others? This theme encompasses skills such as inclusive, ethical and sustainable practice, and peer learning and building networks.
• Making Public: How is your work and practice positioned within larger ecologies? Exploration of this theme may include developing skills in engagement, communication, entrepreneurship and leadership.