MA Interactive Media MA

About the course

In this award you develop a broad range of skills, knowledge and understanding of the ways in which interactive media can be made, and of the cultural significance of interactive media in the modern world. You can expect to develop authoring approaches and abilities in contemporary software packages, and to explore ways in which interactive media can be devised and created.

Within that broad range you will begin to specialise in areas that interest you most. You explore the many possibilities for innovative artefacts that combine elements of literature, cinema, computer games, installations and interactive toys, creating things that are more than simple hybrids of those forms. Things that include online text or image-based stories, web art and web comics, SoundToys, podcast spoken-voice narratives, txt stories, interactive cinema artefacts, narratives embedded in constructed objects, and new radio forms.

Above all, on this postgraduate degree, you exploit and experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of interactivity to create experiences that fascinate and are resonant with meanings, metaphors and rich emotional responses.

There are many areas that you can choose to work in such as: 

• Information Design, where interactive is a main form of communication for reporting factual information, for providing explanations, for sharing ideas, and for various social and economic transactions. The effective design of these types of interaction needs a detailed design understanding of visual and sonic elements, the ways users may behave and a body of technical knowledge and skills. It involves the careful design of interfaces that communicate clearly, accurately and effectively. It is concerned with understanding people, developing design heuristics and creating artefacts that work well. There is an emphasis on design-for-purpose, usability, legibility of text, image and interactivity itself.
• Interactive media for mobile devices where the inter-relation of place, space and content is the main concern. Building on increasingly powerful and readily available technologies such as mobile phones, personal music players and tablet computers, or looking to ways in which places can be invested with additional meanings through sound, image and movement, you would be inventing and developing new forms of content, applications and media pleasures. This might include artworks for consumption on mobile devices; site-specific installations or experiences mediated by technologies of place such as GPS; enriched information landscapes for the interpretation of geology, archaeology and architecture; mobile music and sound works; and place-dependent spoken-word narratives.
• Interactive media in education, creating serious games or structured multimedia learning or training.
• Other interactive media such as short duration casual games for an aging population and novel forms of interaction through motion, gesture, facial expression Interactive Media is a rapidly developing area with emergent technologies and a continually shifting forefront of ideas and practices. It is your response to those developments, your interests and aspirations that will shape your study.

Why choose this course?

• This MA Interactive Media degree allows you to explore and experiment with innovative interactive media applications in a range of areas and technologies.
• You will undertake project-based work where the emphasis is on the creative, informed application of new technologies and devices to produce compelling user experiences.
• On this master's degree you will develop commercial-level interactive media skills.
• Improve your enquiry, research, creative invention, project planning and management practices
• This postgraduate degree provides the opportunity to complete a substantial original interactive media project supported by excellent resources and expertise.
• Visit the MA Interactive Media Blog for news and details of previous graduates' work.

Study routes

• Part Time, 2 Years
• Full Time, 1 Years

Locations

• University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield

Careers

Particular emphasis is given to providing you with the skills necessary to further your career as an Interactive Media creative practitioner. The course is designed to help you understand and work within the contemporary media environment. Particular attention is given to helping you acquire enquiry and information handling skills, enterprise skills in the development and presentation of ideas, in communicating in the spoken and written word, and addressing particular audiences.

Teaching methods

On MA Interactive Media programme teaching and learning emphasises enquiry led project work, developing the kind of independence and autonomy that is appropriate for postgraduate education. Lectures, seminars and other discussions bring students together in multi-disciplinary groups where ideas are shared, challenged, developed. Workshops and other activities develop specific discipline centred skills and understandings while tutorials develop individual study trajectories and responses to assignment tasks and briefs. Much of the time students are engaged in self-managed independent study, undertaking enquiries and research, developing skills, inventing and developing ideas, realising project outcomes, exploring the cultural resonance of their work.

All students on the PG Media programme engage in an interdisciplinary project as a part of their MA study, giving them an opportunity to work with students from other disciplines in an experimental and creative way.

Work Placement

There are work related learning opportunities on this course.

Professional Accreditations

Structure

Year 1

Core Modules

• Creative Enterprise and Context

  This module emphasises the professional contexts of the student's work both in terms of its content and in terms of the kind of outcomes used for assessment. A series of lectures present ideas about key issues in the Creative Industries and Health and Social sectors. The lectures provide a broad context for ideas about the emergence and future of the Creative Industries and Health and Social sectors about Intellectual Property Rights, about the social conditions of the workplace and about the planning and management of projects. 'Break out' seminars lead to the student producing a piece of work that explores topics relevant to their award of study. Alongside these is the development of professional 'presentation of self' skills appropriate for the student's aspirations. This includes the development of portfolios, showreels and other material and skills in preparing and delivering a pitch or bid for funding as if for a Creative Industries or in the Health and Social sectors.

• Discourse / Reflection: Media Discourses

  The learning activities fall into two phases. The first reviews and introduces a range of critical and theoretical methodologies through which the experience of media artefacts may be examined and discussed; this phase coincides with the second half of Semester A. During the second phase which takes place during Semester B, the student follows a line of personal enquiry in which they deploy and apply a chosen approach to examine artefacts, techniques and processes in their own discipline area to discuss the ways in which meaning is made. The outcome of this enquiry includes a text equivalent to around 4,000 words which may take the form of an academic journal paper, a web site, a spoken word or video recording of a scripted or extemporised talk or a live performance, or a similarly demanding production of the student's devising. Along with this there are two other staged submissions which structure the beginning stages of the enquiry and a requirement that students use an open blog or wiki type environment to log and record their enquiry.

• Major Study: Interactive Media

  This module deals with the creative invention of Interactive Media artefacts. It considers the reception and consumption of interactivity and the cultural significance of Interactive Media. Students are encouraged to experiment with and exploit the aesthetic possibilities of interactivity to create experiences that fascinate, delight and inform and which are resonant with meanings, metaphors and rich emotional responses. Centred in the creative exploitation of interactive technologies, the module is concerned with the ways in which interactive digital media technologies reframe a cultural relationship with information and with narrative and storytelling activities and allow for a dynamic reworking of content. This includes using digital media processes that look to emergent practices such as mobile media, dynamic and user-contributed content, on-line text and image based stories, web art and web comics, soundtoys, podcast narratives, text stories, search engines, locative media, augmented reality, and other forms.

• Practice 1: Media

  The student develops their knowledge and understanding of current processes, techniques and the scope of their chosen award field in this module. They become aware of contemporary activities and of the forefront in terms of artefacts, figures, debates, technologies and ideas. The student develops the kind of self-managed autonomy that characterises post-graduate work in their field through a series of projects which develop their own voice or style, exploring the particular issues, processes and ideas that interest them.

• Practice 2: Media

  In this module students are required to relate their own practice and learning to developments and emergent activities in their chosen field. In particular, students are asked to challenge their preconceptions of what the field is about and to work innovatively in the field. The portfolio of projects used for assessment includes a 1000 word evaluative commentary which discusses how the student's work relates to the forefront of their field in terms of subject knowledge, the application of technology, or in terms of current enterprise activities and opportunities. This is likely to include such things as new artistic practices, emergent genre forms, alternative culture formations, the appropriation of technologies for unexpected ends, the furthering of existing knowledge structures, the reapplication of established processes to novel and inventive ends, the subversion of norms, expectations and conventions, popular culture trends in the consumption of media artefacts and funding council and other government initiatives.

• Research and Enquiry

  This module aims to provide students with a range of research skills suitable for postgraduate level study in art, art therapy, design, film, media and music. The module helps students locate their work within contemporary advance-level practice in their disciplines and to make a critical evaluation of the bodies of ideas that sustain them. Key skills addressed include those of data management, critical evaluation, communication skills, notions of creativity and a range of modes of contextual analysis. The skills gleaned on this module will provide students with a platform for research for the remainder of the programme and in their future careers.

Optional

Fees & funding

Fees 2013

UK/EU Students

Full time: £6,700 for the 2013 academic year

International Students

Full time: £11,000 for the 2013 academic year

Discounts are available for International students if payment is made in full at registration

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Other financial support

Find out more about other financial support available to UK and EU students

Living costs / accommodation

The University of Hertfordshire offers a great choice of student accommodation, on campus or nearby in the local area, to suit every student budget.

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How to apply