The MDP’s curriculum is designed to foster three key concepts that can lead to great design: discovery, hybridity, and emergence. Graduates learn to take design in new directions by following their curiosity, refining their expertise, and inventing new practices within a context of cultural and technological change. To navigate the flux, students are guided by a faculty comprised of thought leaders and design visionaries who bring knowledge, experience, and rigor to their critique of student work. Upon graduation, our students find positions as media designers, interaction designers, graphic designers, design researchers, experience designers, broadcast designers, information designers, futurists, entrepreneurs, inventors and more.

Each student takes a combination of required and elective courses based upon their interests, course offerings, and degree path or concentration (see paths + concentrations). The Media Design Program Masters can be achieved by either a 2-year or 3-year path designed to meet the educational needs of both aspiring and experienced designers. You can download the curriculum pdf to see the course distribution and degree requirements.

Curriculum Structure

Students on the 3-year path (see paths + concentrations) enroll in the foundation year which is comprised of Media Design core courses and select Graphic Design Department courses that build skills and knowledge in communication and interaction design.

Media Design Core Studios
Every Media Design student must complete core courses according to the requirements of their degree path. The core courses expose students to the MDP approach that values media designers who can:

• design productive interactions that enable meaningful exchanges between people and people or people and things
• design communications that are media-specific: i.e. they combine the medium and the message to the greatest effect
• use creative visualization and narrative strategies to imagine people as more than simply users in futures that are anything but dystopic
• intelligently articulate their expertise and critical position within interdisciplinary contexts
• ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice
• use design as a method for discovery

Media Design Elective Studios
The elective studios represent an array of issues, practices, and subject areas that intersect with Media Design. The range of options allows students to go deep within their interest areas while also bumping into surprising new perspectives. Each student works with an MDP advisor to craft their own mix of courses.

Sample course titles include: Materials and Spaces as Media; Visualizing Dynamic Systems; The New Ecology of Things; The Ubiquitous Moving Image.

In the summer between the Concept Year and the Thesis Year, students are required to take a 6-unit “lite” term. Students can choose between three options designed to provide exposure to ways of working within Media Design.

Specialized Study – Art Center Lite Term
Students take a minimum of 2 courses within another department at Art Center. This option allows students to go deep within a particular field, such as Environmental Design, Product Design, or Film. Courses are selected with an MDP advisor and the appropriate Department Chair or Director.

Field Exposure – Off-campus Internship
Students can apply for internships with partners of the Media Design Program or other companies or non-profits with approval. MDP partners include companies such as BMW DesignWorks, Nokia, or Iconmobile; research facilities such as Intel Research, Yahoo! Research, Kaiser Permanente, Idea Lab; and non-profits such as the U.N. or UNESCO Fellowships, Good Magazine, and current.tv.

Collaborative Research Project
Students work in teams on research projects conducted on campus. These projects give students the opportunity to gain experience working side-by-side with MDP faculty on creative research ranging from the development of new modes of interaction to the Library of the Future to understanding a specific community in a human-centered study. The mix of projects varies from year-to-year.

The thesis year is spent creating an individual thesis project. To support students in developing a unique personal vision, students will be introduced to strategies for imagining the future and articulating their ideas in inventive ways.

Thesis Workshop
The thesis should be a design-driven investigation that leads to a project or set of projects that provide a unique contribution to the field. Examples of past thesis projects can be found in the MDP Gallery. Each student works with a thesis mentor who heads a thesis committee comprised of MDP faculty members and thesis advisors.

The MDP Thesis Advisors come from diverse fields such as Information Science, Architecture, Media Art, or Film. Advisors are chosen for their unique positions within their respective fields and are themselves frequently hybrid practitioners who bring multiple perspectives to bear on student work. The advisors change from time to time in response to shifts in student interests.

For students doing a Design Research concentration (DR students), the thesis year is spent working on a research project that must be situated within existing definitions of Design Research (from human-centered to project-based). Students are expected to develop their own knowledge-sharing strategies to disseminate the outcomes which can take any form such as an interactive exhibit, a short film, a printed publication, or a conference presentation.

Thesis Requirements
For all graduating students, the final deliverables include:

• Thesis project: a designed artifact or set of artifacts.
• Thesis publication: web-based documentation designed for knowledge-sharing with multiple communities of practice on the internet.
• Thesis exhibition + presentation: a physical installation demonstrating the project and providing context, designed for public presentation and critique.
  
  

Graduating students whose thesis projects exhibit exceptional potential will be invited to apply for a post-graduate fellowship. The fellowship will offer support for graduates to take their thesis projects to the next level with access to studio space, campus facilities and resources, and faculty guidance. Post-graduate fellows will be eligible to serve as teaching assistants, research associates, and instructors for projects and courses on campus. Fellowships may last from one term to a full year. Details to be announced in 2008.