School of Communication and Media
Undergraduate

Term: Fall 2025
Session: Full Term (Aug 25 - Dec 12)
Start Date: Monday, Aug 25, 2025
End Date: Friday, Dec 12, 2025
Availability: On Campus
Day(s): Wed.
Time: 09:00 AM to 11:50 AM

This course introduces students to the critical study of interactive digital experiences as emergent media with a particular focus on media technologies and their formal social and economic as well as philosophical and strategic implications for users organizations and human cultures. Beginning with basic concepts of Experience Design (XD) and progressing to Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) collaborative authorship the Internet of Things (IoT) and other features of contemporary cyberculture students engage with readings audio and film that illustrate the evolution of media as defined by technological interfaces between humans later between humans and algorithms and increasingly between Artificial Intelligences (AIs) themselves. At the same time students will examine interactive structures - digital games and smart objects as well as their analog precursors - that exemplify principles of XD. Finally students will engage and apply theoretical discourses around interactive media as they address issues of access agency identity and human centrality to human-created media systems.This course is not a history of interactive media. Instead its emphasis is on continuing cycles of disruptive technological innovation design adaptation and cultural normalization. Interactive media has become synonymous with so-called new media. However this course recognizes that all media are by degree interactive and likewise every medium once was new. Accordingly we ask what purposes does this discourse of novelty serve? How will unsettled media forms be domesticated? Likewise is today?s participatory culture - with its proclivity towards end-user agency and authorability - essential to digital media or an unsustainable anomaly? By engaging these discourses students gain an overview of past present and near-future developments in interactive media literacy in the uses of these technologies in XD and a critical understanding of yet unresolved challenges that d