MDP Core: Media History and Theory
Knowing the history of a medium offers designers inspiration, and saves them from reinventing the wheel. Crafting a timeline of media development from the medieval manuscript to ubiquitous computing, this seminar will ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. History and theory will become powerful tools to create meaningful and engaged work.

MDP Core: Design Research History and Theory
Design Research is an emerging and greatly contested set of practices. The goals of research (the generation of new knowledge) combined with the skills of the designer (making things) can reorient design practice away from problem-solving and toward design for discovery – whether about people, materials, methods, practice, or forms. This seminar will introduce students to a broad array of research traditions as well as recent developments in both project-based and human-centered work.

MDP Core: Transmedia Principles
Students will learn to design in a “media-specific” manner that makes the most of the affordances of various mediatypes from print to interaction. Students will be introduced to core concepts within media design.

MDP Core: Productive Interaction
Whether getting things done, biding time, following serendipity, or being entertained, users are readers, viewers, thinkers, and—in well-designed interactions—active participants who build their own experiences and meaning spaces. This is what is meant by Productive Interaction and it requires that interaction designers considers themselves to be co-creators of meaning. Students will learn various approaches to Interaction Design and explore design strategies for achieving these goals through readings, discussion, design projects and critique.

MDP Core: Visual Narrative
Students will explore a range of linear and non-linear story forms – such as comic books, telenovellas, panoramic murals, and experimental animation – to discover unique ways to tell stories. Students will learn to combine filmic and graphic narrative strategies to create scenarios and tell stories about media in people’s lives.

People-Knowing: using + reading
The goal of this course will be to discover unexpected user interactions and creative abuses that allow designers to cast aside their assumptions about users and engage creatively in the process of designing interactions. Students will create paper and working prototypes to test applied and speculative outcomes in a series of experimental designer/user engagements. Students will be encouraged to think of people as readers, viewers, and thinkers, in addition to users.

People-Knowing: values + behaviors
Beginning with a set of questions, students will solicit responses from people that will provoke, inspire, and inform design. Students will conduct primary research that uses the qualities unique to design including cultural probes, interviews, and audits. Students will also learn how to interpret and share their insights appropriate to their findings.

People-Knowing: empathic design
Working with insights from People-Knowing: values + behaviors, students will build on their interpretations and create interventions that are sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the population they studied. Emphasis will be placed on making as a tool for inspiration.

The New Ecology of Things
Starting with a deep dive into the design implications of pervasive networks, embedded and embodied technologies, and a world where every object and space has a life of its own, this class will explore The New Ecology of Things. Students will build working prototypes in the physical world, using sensors, effectors and computation to create objects and spaces that take advantage of this new ecology. In particular, students will work beyond the efficiencies of task-oriented applications, and explore meaning-making through productive, mythological and embodied interactions.

Materials and Spaces as Media
Beginning with the affordances and tangible qualities of different materials and environments, students will create projects that turn material and space into a media platform. Students will learn to work at various scales in relation to the human body as well as work with a broad range of materials—old, new, and emerging—in collaboration with our Colors, Materials, and Trends Laboratory. The emphasis will be on new approaches to the circulation of communication in the world around us.

New Modes of Reading and Writing
Text-based communications take place in diverse situations and across different devices. Working at the intersection of technology, culture, design, and language, students will be encouraged to develop rich new modes of engagement between writers and readers across space and time. Students will learn transmedia typography and methods for “content-diving”—deep interpretation that gets inside the structure of texts from the literary to the ordinary—to develop inventive approaches to the navigation and display of text-based content across media.

Visualizing Dynamic Systems
The social, technological, data, and information networks of today and tomorrow require robust visualizations capable of capturing the complexity and interplay between their consituent parts. Students will explore systems theories and the history of representations of flow along with contemporary issues around data visualization at the same time that they will be asked to experiment with formal languages specific to this challenge. Students will work with database structures, interface designs, and information displays for both static and interactive media.

Social Media
Wikis, blogs, networking sites, and meta-tagging create affordances for an ever-expanding number of people to share their experiences, perceptions, and productions. This studio will explore ways to produce robust architectures of participation and interrogate the “design degree zero” approach to aesthetics and form that evolve out of “amateur production.”

The Ubiquitous Moving Image
This course will expose students to the newest innovations in moving image culture and offer a series of investigations and experiments in the form, function, and fit of ubiquitous visual media. Students will explore behavior and movement in the non-narrative context of the interface as well as design time-based graphical narratives for screens, devices, and environments from the macro to the micro. The emphasis will be on developing new cinematic languages that exploit the relationship between media affordance, cultural context, and viewer/user experience.

Bespoke Futures
Beginning with methods appropriated and subverted from corporate global strategists and science fiction, students will create scenarios to envision a new kind of future – one that they themselves would want to live in. Combining visual rhetoric with demo skills, the bespoke futures process will become a way of speaking with and through media to shift the conversation towards a future of plural utopias.

Knowledge-Sharing Workshop
This course will examine an array of strategies for the production and dissemination of  “knowledge,” from the Wunderkammers to YouTube videos. Students will be encouraged to develop their own approach to contextualizing, analyzing, reflecting, and sharing the work of their master’s project/s in their final exhibition, presentation, and web publication.

Thesis Workshop 1
In the Fall term, faculty mentors will guide small groups of students in the development of their thesis projects in weeks 1-7. From weeks 8-14, students will meet with a team of thesis advisors individually and as a group.

Thesis Workshop 2
In the Spring term, students will work independently on the development of their thesis project/s with guidance from their team of thesis advisors. Students will engage in individual and group meetings with thesis advisors throughout the term.

Colloquium 1A – 3B
Colloquium is a steady flow of people, ideas, methods, and provocations. As the sole space and time that the entire MDP community gathers together, Colloquium will be one of the prime program-wide knowledge sharing opportunities. All program business will be discussed here, announcements are made, and faculty and students give reports from the field. Design Dialogues with distinguished guests and off-site visits will be interspersed with MDP pecha kuchas (a 6:40 performance lecture format limited to 20 slides, at 20 seconds each) and alumni updates. Students will continue the dialogue online in the departmental website that tracks this activity through images and blogs and will serve to provoke knowledge transfer, engagement, and community far beyond the walls of the MDP studio. The grades for Colloquium will be based on attendance, contribution, and web presence (including a personal site) for each individual student.

Making Lab
The MDP Making Lab is open during scheduled hours on a weekly basis to help students figure out how to make the things they wish to make. The Lab will include scheduled workshops on a range of construction tools, materials, and techniques for activities such as bookbinding, electronics, sewing, rapid prototyping, and programming. T.A.’s, experts, and vendors will be brought in from time to time to work with students individually on their projects. The Lab is not a class but a resource.

N.E.T. Lab
The NET Lab is a space for doing electronics work, programming, and building and testing prototypes.

Media Design Research Studio
The Media Design Research Studio is a dedicated space for faculty-led research projects within the field of Media Design. Located on the second floor mezzanine of the South Campus, the studio is reconfigured for each new project.