MA in Information Experience Design Featured Image

Universities United Kingdom Royal College of Art Courses MA in Information Experience Design

MA in Information Experience Design
at Royal College of Art

London, United Kingdom

Tuition Fee £ 32,000
Country Rank#123
Duration12 Months
Score IELTS: 6.5

Program Overview

Information Experience Design is the creative practice of intervening in, designing and generating experiences of complexity, that communicate human, nonhuman and more-than-human perspectives and realities. Our medium of practice includes ‘warm’ data – information about interrelationship – as well as ‘cold’ data points, and we work actively with living, computational and speculative systems. The pieces we make include large-scale installations, immersive digital experiences, radical performances, and living artefacts and ecosystems. Our purpose on the MA in Information Experience Design (IED) is to inspire experimental works that generate transformation, seek better futures through the generation of compelling experiences, compose better questions and new ways of relating to and being in the world.

The intellectual content of the programme is cutting-edge and challenging, with our staff and students continually working in ways that are research-led and self-critical, never content with superficial responses or easy answers. Complexity and deep structure often feature in IED approaches, as these lend themselves to interrogations of media-cultural interchange and processes of modelling futures. Students of IED engage deeply with society and the environment, where rigorous experimentation is integrated with forms of activism, empathy, and good ancestry. Our approach to theory is wide-ranging and transdisciplinary, involving technologists, ecologists and quantum physicists alongside those working in the arts, and IED practices have a wide range. Throughout, the programme aims for a criticality that does not take an objective or purist tone, but rather situates the artist and thinker as always already complicit in ongoing social and environmental processes, and we frequently leave the ivory tower and test ideas in the wild. Your work will be evaluated on technical construction as well as logical and ethical soundness, aesthetic dimensions as well as critical and philosophical ones.

In IED you might design a large-scale light installation in a forest, a distributed museum spanning the globe, a serial podcast fiction, a chair that breathes, a VR adventure in a microbiome, an emotionally responsive game for dogs, or a wearable that senses deep time. IED projects are human(e) but not only for humans, and move beyond the personal and individual, reaching toward perspectives and approaches that are collective, transindividual, superpersonal, and have more-than-human value.

Technical instruction in IED is based on a plan that you design and our technicians support, thus you leave the programme with a composite technical skill set generated by and unique to your body of work. This may involve technical skills as diverse as ceramics and VR, botany and blockchain. You’ll have a core aim of experimenting with a diversity of 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 providing guidance as you stretch your abilities and explore the multisensory, material and immaterial, digital and analogue, “high” and “low” art forms.

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

Term 1

In Form & Method, you’ll 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, playful and undirected, with the guiding aim of building understanding of the affordances of many conceptual and technical tools and reflecting on outcomes. Alongside practical experiments, through the unit, you will be working in and out of sessions on a description of emphasis and drafts of a Technical Plan and Conceptual Framework that will support you in developing your practice.

Across Terms 1 and 2, you will participate in the College-wide unit. This unit aims to support students to meet the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing them together to work collaboratively on a series of themed projects informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to 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 Systemic Phenomena, you’ll 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 Exchange and Engage School-wide unit allows you to work alongside students within and across the School.

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.
Entry Requirement
Candidates are selected entirely on merit and applications are welcomed from all over the world. The selection process will consider creativity, imagination and innovation as demonstrated in your portfolio, as well as your potential to benefit from the programme and to achieve high MA standards overall.

Students come from a wide range of backgrounds. While you may come directly from first-degree programmes across art and design, you may have also joined the programme with professional experience in industry, or from a background such as science, technology and the humanities.

Portfolio requirements

Your portfolio is a showcase of your work as an artist or designer and can be made up of images, videos or writing examples. Your portfolio helps us to better understand your application and allows you to show evidence of your ability and motivation to undertake a given programme.

Generally, we’re looking for you to demonstrate your:
- Creativity, imagination and innovation
- Ability to articulate the intentions of the work
- Intellectual engagement in areas relevant to the work
- Technical skills appropriate to the work
- Potential to benefit from the programme
English-language requirements

If you are not a national of a majority English-speaking country you will need the equivalent of an IELTS Academic score of 6.5 with a 6.0 in the Test of Written English (TWE) and at least 5.5 in other skills. Students achieving a grade of at least 6.0, with a grade of 5.5 in the Test of Written English, may be eligible to take the College’s English for Academic Purposes course to enable them to reach the required standard.

You are exempt from this requirement if you have received a 2.1 degree or above from a university in a majority English-speaking nation within the last two years.
Fees & Scholarships
Overseas and EU - £32,000*

Cost Of Studying At Royal College of Art

Interest rates as low as 8.9% ^*

250K+

Students Assisted

800Cr+

Loan Amount Disbursed

5000+

Loans Sanctioned

Check Loan Eligibility

MA in Information Experience Design at Royal College of Art