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, groups formed from a community of peers linked by a common area of focus, 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, 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.

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. 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 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 summary and technical summary. 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 (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 arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

Term 2

In Situated Practice (30 credits), you will refine and develop your signature practice through more refined and focused making, whilst 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, to evaluate them with the support of your tutors, and to refine your technical and conceptual approaches so that these taken together are stable, coherent, and distinctive.

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.

Term 3

Your Independent Research Project (60 credits) 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.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

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.