Outline
Design Informatics creates a meeting point between data, culture and design. We imagine alternate futures, disrupt thinking and play with data as a material.
Our practice is experimental, speculative and critical, informed through research and industry. We create inquisitive, professional and articulate problem solvers and entrepreneurs as graduates, leading applied data-driven futures with a global reach.
We play with making physical and digital artefacts and experimental data things. We build, test, hack and reinterpret what data means to society, and where design has the opportunity to shape future thinking for challenge lead enquiry.
Design Informatics sits within the Institute of Design Informatics and is informed by research practice and industry partnerships across Edinburgh College of Art and the School of Informatics.
Offered as a joint programme between Edinburgh College of Art and the School of Informatics, our ECA route offers the MA degree, and the School of Informatics offers the MSc degree. Students will work together and complete the same courses during their degrees, with a few areas of difference including the final dissertation timetable. Both schools have different application requirements.
Read more about the Design Informatics Masters on the programme website:
Programme structure
Please be aware that the structure of this programme may change.
You will work both individually and in collaborative teams of designers and computer scientists.
Distinct to Design Informatics MA, our students work in parallel to our MSc students who bring experience from a largely computing science background. Together, our students create a novel, compelling and supportive environment to blend and explore applications for data thinking in design, reflective of an industry setting and real-world team experience.
Within this collaborative framework, everyone will learn to write code, make physical objects and consider theoretical concepts during the programme.
Several courses, including the dissertation, will involve presenting an artefact, product, service, or interactive experience you have created to the public.
What you will study
- Histories and Futures of Technologies (20 credits)
- Data Science for Design (20 credits)
- Case Studies in Design Informatics (20 credits)
- Design with Data (20 credits)
- 40 credits of optional courses
MA students then complete their self-directed dissertation (60 credits).
Teaching
Design Informatics is taught in a studio environment with a focus on practice-based and experiential learning. Supported by lecture series, workshops and seminars, students will develop their own individual and group projects with one-to-one support from tutors.
The teachers and tutors that you will work with on the Design Informatics MA are a team of interdisciplinary design researchers and creative practitioners who will engage you in various forms of making, experimenting, reading, critiquing, evaluating and presenting novel technological and data-driven ideas and concepts.
Technical training is part of the core courses and forms the basis for developing expertise and knowledge in how to work with data, AI and physical computing to make new ideas a reality and engage various audiences with data.
Students across the Design Informatics MA and MSc cohorts will work together in a Design Informatics studio culture and will form interdisciplinary teams to learn from each others’ design or computing science expertise.
Assessment
Students are assessed through a combination of group work and individual activity.
Group work in the context of Design Informatics helps to support students working in multidisciplinary teams, and is an important part of our culture and professional practice. Learning with each other, and making use of each other’s skills in areas of design or data science adds to the student learning experience.
Independent work is required in some courses, particularly for your final major project which is self-directed based on your interest and career intentions.
Work is assessed through the completion of a range of activities including workbooks, presentations, video documentation, portfolios, critical essays and reflective reports, as well as peer assessment of group projects.
Learning outcomes
Each course in Design informatics has a range of course-specific learning outcomes which follow key areas such as research, theory, practice, evaluation and communication. These differ from course to course and might cover:
Investigate and apply critical theories through a practical interactive digital media project.
- Investigate and apply critical theories through a practical interactive digital media project.
- Demonstrate the initiation and evaluation of original creative concepts in response to research findings through critical assessment.
- Use digital media to design and develop, critical, conceptual and experimental approaches to problem solving.
- Select appropriate and innovative approaches for communicating the key findings, and development of products, systems or services developed during your taught postgraduate studies.
