MA Interaction Design

University of the Arts London

Course overview

MA Interaction Design provides an opportunity for experimental practice in an area of design that increasingly explores the intersection of digital and networked technologies with the world.

What to expect?

This course immerses you in critical, speculative, and experimental practice to engage and provoke audiences with contemporary issues around topics such as new technologies, ecological concerns, politics - and how these all impact social world.

You will develop your skills and thinking through new combinations of research and practice to develop responsive, evocative, and complex design projects. We define interaction design as the practice of making objects, spaces, and experiences that instigate new relations with humans, environments, and the systems that revolve around them – and through this, finding new ways to provoke imagination, discussion, and critique.

Through the course, you will develop practical skills in interaction design, design prototyping and physical computing, alongside research skills in human and post-human centred design, forecasting/futures, and critical and speculative design, combining these methodologies and ideas into new and unique forms of practice.

The course's integrated approach to critical thinking provides you with the opportunity to work with critical ideas in an applied design context (such as the impact of artificial intelligence technologies on human relationships), ensuring that designers take on both macro and micro opportunities for innovation, speculation and creativity crucial to building a portfolio of highly engaged work.

Career paths

Graduates of the course are equipped to work in an increasingly technologically informed and interdisciplinary design world with real skills in areas such as: interaction design, user experience, design prototyping, physical computing, open source digital platforms, future casting, design research, experience design, communication design, value engineering, thought leadership and digital arts.