Information Experience Design

This programme is subject to validation

Through the programme, you’ll gain a working knowledge of experimental postdigital and cultural systems theory and practice, and its influence in society at a variety of scales, and from a variety of perspectives. You’ll use this context to build your own conceptual tools and framings, illustrate and test these tools through creative practice. You’ll 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 that has conceptual depth as well as technical skill.

You’ll 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 postdigital and systems theory and practice, with emphasis in a chosen area. Throughout the programme you’ll be discouraged from looking for a ‘correct’ way of thinking about or generating meaningful work, or of doing the course, but rather you’ll be encouraged to cross boundaries and design your own way. Likewise, your intellectual work will not draw from textbook’ readings, as this programme does not have a disciplinary boundary. Instead, with the input of your tutors and Field Collective, you’ll select many of your core texts yourself, and you might draw on readings and approaches from games, interaction design, critical theory, anthropology, speculative design, posthumanities, 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 in relation to social justice and change.

This programme is subject to validation

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

Term 1

In Form & Method, you’ll be immersed in foundational and state-of-the-art practice and theory in experience design and intervention. This unit launches you into the programme with an outward-looking orientation, where understanding of cultural needs, social challenges, and technological possibilities are central. Experimentation in this unit should be bold, playful and undirected, with the guiding aim of building understanding of the affordances of many conceptual and technical tools and reflecting on outcomes. Alongside practical experiments, through the unit, you will be working in and out of sessions on a description of emphasis and drafts of a Technical Plan and Conceptual Framework that will support you in developing your practice.

Across Terms 1 and 2, you will participate in the College-wide unit. This unit aims to support students to meet the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing them together to work collaboratively on a series of themed projects informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to 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 arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

Term 2

In Systemic Phenomena, you’ll be challenged to situate your practice conceptually and culturally, focusing on 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, Systemic Phenomena is more inward-facing, requiring you to apply continuous critical analysis to your processes, to evaluate them with the support of your tutors, and to refine your practice and conceptual framing so that these taken together are stable, coherent, and distinctive.

In Term 2, the Exchange and Engage School-wide unit allows you to work alongside students within and across the School.

Term 3

Your Independent Research Project will enable you to integrate your practice into a larger critical discourse, to reflect on its significance and to generate knowledge through a research piece and presentation. This unit challenges you to integrate your technical and conceptual processes into a single research project. It also requires you to reflect on the outcomes of your work in the first two terms, to trace its trajectory and 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 wider relevance of your practice, drawing out its strengths, and exploring how it can generate evolution or revolution in the world.