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 a variety of scales, and from a variety of perspectives. You will use this context to build your own conceptual tools and framings, 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 that has conceptual depth as well as 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 in a chosen area. Throughout the programme you will be discouraged from looking for a ‘correct’ way of thinking about or generating meaningful work, or of doing the programme, but rather 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 does not have a 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 in relation to social justice and change.

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

Term 1

In Form & Method, you will 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 and playful, with the guiding aim of building 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 emphasis, and drafted your Technical Plan and Conceptual Framework. These three things constitute the key 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, the College-wide unit. See below for more details.

Term 2

In Systemic Phenomena, you will 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 Making Worlds with Others 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.

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.

Situated at the core of your RCA student experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College- wide AcrossRCA unit supports how you respond to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds by engaging you in a global creative network that draws on expertise within and beyond the institution. It provides an extraordinary opportunity for you 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 from internationally acclaimed speakers that will encourage you to think beyond the discourses of art, architecture, communication, and design, and extend into other territories such as economics, ethics, science, engineering, medicine or astrophysics.

In interdisciplinary teams you will be challenged to use your intellect and imagination to respond to urgent contemporary themes, providing you with an opportunity to develop innovative and disruptive thinking, critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world. This engagement with interdisciplinary perspectives and practices is designed both to complement your disciplinary studies and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.