The MA/MSc Interactive Digital Media enables participants to develop software, hardware, design, and research skills. These practical elements are synthesised with the processes of critical thinking, analysis, and reflection that are necessary to create the dynamic, engaging, digital user experiences that today’s connected and technology aware clients and audiences demand.
Making things talk to each other
Ravensbourne’s MA/MSc Interactive Digital Media gives recent graduates and professionals working in the creative industries the means to start making previously separate and unconnected forms of media, information, and objects start communicating with, and altering each other. This digital creativity and connectivity is a distinctive and highly employable characteristic.
What, why, and how much?
The MA/MSc Interactive Digital Media has been developed to address practitioner demand for courses which provide a balanced approach to the practice, theory and business of interaction.
Creating digital artists and designers
This MA/MSc is designed to provide a balanced means of enhancing your capabilities, both technically and contextually, as you develop products, services and experiences that will help you move towards a career as an autonomous digital creative, or as a member of an agency, studio, company or corporation.
The course builds understanding of the approaches and techniques necessary for projects that can be virtualised. It focuses on on-screen interaction across different platforms and physical objects with outcomes based on the use of sensor technologies.
Previous student projects have included:
- phone and tablet apps to help understand the process of under-painting and drawing in works hung on gallery walls
- augmented reality scavenger hunts to promote interaction with museum collections
- the design of ambient intelligent environments to help support the interaction of parents with autistic children
- automatic drawing machines; and Twitter responsive light displays.
This innovative and diverse range of output is something that lies at the very centre of the course’s aspirations for its students.
Who’s it for?
The MA/MSC Interactive Digital Media is for digital creatives who may already have a well-developed skillset in one particular medium, and are looking to expand the ways in which that medium connects with other media. It is also for those digital creatives who are interested in expanding their opportunities to work with other creative individuals in a collaborative endeavour.
The course is for you if you want to make work that has a dynamic changing state, which responds to inputs from data sources or from users, and which communicates with others.
The course is for you if you want to use technology in a way that surprises people.
It’s probably also for you if you want to make robots make art.
What you will study
Research Process (30 credits)
The unit develops your skills in self-reflection and in planning your learning necessary to undertake an advanced degree in the creative disciplines.
Technology Issues (30 credits)
Its primary purpose is the analysis and evaluation of technologies that have been prevalent, technologies that are current, and technologies that are emergent.
Business and Innovation (30 credits)
This unit provides you with the commercial skills vital for sustaining advanced creative practice and which are necessary to turn design innovation into viable product development or sustainable enterprise.
Concept and Prototyping (30 credits)
You will develop innovative approaches in creative production and problem solving; and advanced skills in the conceptualisation and planning of a creative project in interactive digital media.
Major Project (60 credits)
This represents a consolidation of your learning, and comprises a sustained and intensive period of independent creative practice and research.
Assessment
In addition to feedback from tutors and peers at the end of each learning cycle, you will be assessed through essays, reports and individual and group presentations.
Laptops
You are required to own or have access to a laptop from the beginning of your studies. Laptops are an essential tool to support personalised learning and give you access, when and where you want it, to many of the creative tools and educational resources you will encounter during your studies.
Laptops are used extensively in all of our courses. You will need one to access our network, and to research, communicate and collaborate during your studies.
Teaching
Learning is facilitated by permanent teaching staff and by sessional staff who are recognised experts in their respective fields who maintain strong links with the sector, channelling rich experiences and up-to-date professional development to the institution.
This teaching is complemented by a range of visiting professionals who conduct intensive workshops and by a continual stream of collaborative group work by students with output channels to the real world such as an online magazine and exhibitions.
Where will it take you?
The MA/MSC Interactive Digital Media will enable you to be certain about what knowledge you possess, and what knowledge you can access through fellow practitioners and other subject experts.
Your MA/MSC from Ravensbourne will allow you to benefit from the creative industry’s acknowledgement of our technical currency and our creative innovation. This will be of singular and undoubted benefit whether you move towards a career as an autonomous digital creative, as an employee in an agency, studio or corporation, or as a part of a connected cooperative community of people doing the sort of strange and wonderful things with technology that makes the rest of the world sit up and pay attention.
Click here for the full programme specification.
