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Degree Project

The project must be a significant, useful and executable work of application that demonstrates ability to apply professional skills of design and expression, to analyze a problem, to define an audience, and to integrate content, medium, and market. The work may be done in any of a number of media, e.g., print, digital interactive, audio, video.

Although the project will reflect a primary emphasis on application and problem solving, each project must include a well-developed, reflective written discussion which will include an audience and market analysis and a business or implementation plan, along with a rationale for the approach taken and a discussion of possible alternatives. In all cases the projects undertaken must have a direct application to the business community, to education, to government, or be easily translatable into a publishing, entrepreneurial, or service venture.

Each project will be judged by a panel of faculty and outside professionals.

Here are some sketches of potential projects that students might undertake, intended to make clear the great variety of opportunities:

1. Libraries are in need of integrated information systems that combine books and journals with vast amounts of information available on line. Such systems must be user-friendly, with transparent organization of information and interface designs that make them easy to use regardless of age, level of education, or degree of technical sophistication. They must be built to enhance the library's role as a community center -- a place where people converse and meet rather than simply exchanging or collecting information. Those working with libraries will need to create such environments -- ones that integrate physical and communal space with virtual and distant spaces. Those designing the information systems must organize the information so that it is easy to find, easy to use, and easy to recall.

2. As courses are offered using the distance technology of interactive video and the Internet, teachers will need both courseware and strategies for teaching that involve students even when they are not face-to-face with their classmates or their teachers. We will also need to learn how to integrate graphical, aural, and written material without losing the teaching role and without enforcing passivity in students. Those developing these courses will need to develop both the courseware and the strategies to use it.

3. There will be a need for new electronic equivalents of text books which incorporate interactive multimedia, Internet formats, and distance-learning technology while at the same time taking advantage of the conventional media of print, video and audio. In any number of content areas, faculty will need to find creative and educationally sound ways to create a narrative structure that is both open and focused.

4. The new medium will ultimately create a stage for new art forms and for the translation of old art forms into new ones. Poets, playwrights, novelists, designers and animators will find that digital formats provide opportunities to experiment, to create, and to reach new audiences in innovative or traditional ways. Those interested in exploiting the digital media as an expressive form will need to find the right balance between a private voice and vision on one side and a public environment on the other: one that includes the user/player/consumer in an active, participating role.

5. Digital technology promises new ways to distribute the information now published in newspapers, magazines and books. In addition to working on the economics of these new opportunities, we will need to develop design and writing strategies targeted to the specific audiences. Even now, mass- and niche-market publications are being invented and reinvented on the World Wide Web. Systematic study of this evolution could be profitable both in a practical and a cultural sense.

6. Government at all levels is now developing ways of communicating to the public and letting the public speak back. At the same time, various governmental agencies are packaging the information they now collect and >selling it to the public as a way of supplementing limited budgets. In addition to working through the policy implications of an electronic government, those working in the public sector will need to develop new ways to organize information so that it is easily accessible--while protecting rights of individual privacy.