Studios and Specialisations

Studios focus on the ongoing develop of practice in response to a creative challenge in a particular context

Specialisations are technique focused courses that extend skills initiated in core courses

Studio and Specialisation offerings - Semester 1, 2025

Digital Media Studios 3-5 Offerings

AI generated image of three men with dark skin standing in front of a pyramid gesturing and with computer vision ID boxes appearing over their faces
The Human Algorithm - Sarah Jane Woulahan

Resisting AI Automation: Critical collaboration with non-human intelligence

Background:

The transformations brought on by widespread artificial intelligence rival the seismic shifts brought by the invention of the printing press, disrupting not only the digital design industry but potentially human reality and creativity itself. This studio challenges students to confront the tension between automation and agency. How can design practitioners engage with alternative intelligence, like generative AI, for creative innovation in ways that challenge, rather than reinforce, existing power structures?

Project and Outcome:

Students will engage in playful, practice-based experiments across different design modes in generative AI, including text, image, video, sound, and music, to build tangible skills in generative AI design. The studio will culminate in a final work that is a collaboration between human and machine.

Outcome(s):

Multidisciplinary practice is encouraged, and the choice of final work, such as single and multi-channel sound and video, installation, or web-based outcomes, will be flexible to align with a student’s specialisation.

Key practices and areas of learning:

Creative collaboration with AI applications - Sora, Midjourney, Pika, Runway, Fire-Fly, Chat-Gpt, Co-pilot, Stable Diffusion, Eleven Labs, Suno, etc, critical theory on AI and society, surveillance, plagiarism, environmental impacts of generative AI, non-human intelligences, large language models, neural networks, algorithms, prompting, machine learning, generative AI processes

A jumble of old cassettes, VHS tapes, and video equipment on a wooden table with LED party lights on top

Resilient Video

Background:

Video as a medium is notoriously difficult to pin down or define: everywhere in contemporary life, and creative practice, it has become obscured because of this ubiquity. By focussing on the resilient qualities of video itself, rather than its art-historical functions, this studio will discover the countless hybrid conjunctions video sits in with other mediums and the commercial arts that continue to make it available and appealing across a spectrum of creative practices. The classes will be designed to be enriching for both video specialists, and those who use it amongst a range of other digital tools in a more generalist context.

Project:

Develop a video project across the semester embodying one of the resilient qualities of video.

Outcome(s):

A documentary/video essay, music video, narrative short or experimental short.

Key practices and areas of learning:

video/audiovisual history and theory, camera and tripod technique, video montage and editing, 3 point lighting, creative lighting, experimental techniques, audiovisual relationships, audiovisual literacy and critical appraisal

A UI with the text prompt 'please draw me a forgotten object that you most desire', a convoluted MS Paint style drawing and others interface elements
Image: Asher Elazary & Patrick Hase

Mediated Expression: Interaction design in creative tool making

Background

Professional creative software packages offer users expansive toolsets, aiming to be transparent enough to be deployed towards a wide range of purposes, but nevertheless shaping the way users express themselves. Smaller customised tools, with a more focused scope, are freed from the need to 'do everything' and so are able to prioritise different types of user expressions and experiences. The creative tools themselves can be weird, fantastical, silly, ambiguous or challenging, all of which lead to different expressive possibilities for their users.

Project:

Experiment with novel applications of interaction design principles to shape mediated expression.

Outcome(s):

Web browser based audio, visual and/or textual creative tools for user expression within a focused scope.

Key practices and areas of learning:

Interaction design, web browsers, experimental UI design, exploratory programming, expressive tools, creative instruments, Web Coding (HTML, CSS & JS), Fabric.js, Tone.js

A robotic cat character sitting on a carpet with a sign that reads 'Ai slop!', a lounge room scene behind
Image: Jay Rosenbaum

Critical AI: Fighting AI slop with creative thinking

Background:

Generative AI is taking over. In all spheres of computing, it feels like we are being inundated with AI systems. AI systems are known to be biased and unreliable, and generative AI in particular is devastating to the environment and to our creative communities. However, knowing how and why it works, knowing how to identify the problems and look for solutions, and even how to work with it in ethical ways can serve us well in the future.

Project:

Develop a creative work around for a chosen key area of AI concern, highlighting the problem or fighting against it.

Outcome(s):

An understanding of how and why AI works, how to identify generative AI, the key problems with AI, and how to use it ethically.

Key practices and areas of learning:

AI ethics, AI technology, generative AI, AI bias, training AI, 3D, sound, images, computer vision, video

A gridded visualisation like a Pantone chart, displaying 'Wikipedia's' lamest edit wars'
Image source: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/wikipedia-lamest-edit-wars/

UX for Meaningful Interactions

Background:

The filter bubbles and echo chambers of a post-truth world dominate online spaces, encouraged by confirmation bias and the disinhibition effect. It is therefore necessary to ask, how can user experience design contribute to creating meaningful open interactions, discourse, and communities online?

Projects:

There are two projects in this studio. Each project has a focus on different UX design processes and skill sets:

  1. People: Learning about people and designing a new product to help improve their experience
  2. Principles: Learning about usability and redesigning existing products to improve user experience.

Outcome(s):

Each project has three outcomes:

• Research: Visual report documenting user problems and user tests
• Design: High fidelity UI designs of your solutions and tests of your solutions
• Case study: A visual presentation of the project that can be used in your portfolio.

Key practices and areas of learning:

UX design methods and processes, UI design, User testing, UX research methods, Usability principles

A hydrophone sitting in a small pool of water surrounded by dead leaves and brickwork

Resonant Ecologies: Creativity for resilience and regeneration

Background:

Global temperature increases since the industrial revolution are currently passing the 1.5c tipping point, beyond which it is likely that climate instability and ecological polycrisis will worsen exponentially. Creative sonic practices are, however, increasingly being applied to ecological ends. For example, the sounds of healthy reefs are being used to lead fish and other species back to damaged reefs, contributing to their regeneration.

Project:

Develop creative sonic practices that contribute to the resilience and regeneration of more-than-human communities and ecologies

Outcome(s):

Prototype sonic investigations, compositions, and installations for specific ecological contexts

Key practices and areas of learning:

Listening, field recording, synthesis, sound design, composition, ambisonics, audiovisuals, creative technology, acoustic ecology, ecoacoustics, sound studies, posthumanities

In a warmly, dimly lit room walled by vertical strips and angled benches of timber, a bespectacled brown-skinned man looks pensively up at a large TV screen. On that screen, a white box floats in a bubblegum pink background, and bold black text reads 'prickly tingly inside my head’. As the eye follows a dangling cable falling from behind the screen, it lands on a half-folded laptop on which the same words and colours can be seen. Closer to the viewer, the backs of two other people’s heads are also turned toward the big TV, but one of these people’s fingertips rest on the keyboard of a laptop with an app open, showing a similar layout – coffee coloured background, pale blue text box and white text reading: just breathe.

Intersensory Digital Publishing: Access beyond compliance

Background:

This access-driven studio situates digital publishing and creative practice in relation to social contexts of disability, sensory experience, and technological change. How do everyday assumptions include, exclude or assume certain things about people who encounter digital texts, and how can we remake those assumptions in practice? How can we work with – and beyond – models of compliance, to make our work accessible to more people; and in ways that honour the complexity of subjective aesthetic experience?

Project:

Students will learn to share and develop their sensory interpretations through language and other communicative forms. We’ll explore adjacent strategies of authorship and invitation across different forms like video, broadcast and podcast, exhibition-making and interactive design. A major project will require students to apply an access-infused approach to a digitally-realised creative work.

Outcome(s)

Upon completion of this subject, students should expect to better understand different models of access, an applied knowledge of it in creative contexts, and a basis for embedding it at the heart of future works. Beyond what is simply required, students will be encouraged to learn how access – as a critical methodology – can also be a highly generative creative strategy.

Key practices and areas of learning:

Captioning, audiodescription, scores, transcripts, free and open source tools, Adobe Creative Suite, Reaper, the temporal and social dimensions of digital experiences, models of access

A 3D island of bizarre structures on a water like plane

Simulations and Worldbuilding

Background:

We live in an era where physical and digital realities blur, with AI-driven media seamlessly merging with human-authored content. As digital technologies have enabled the proliferation of self-contained worlds—shaped by their own rules, logics, and cultures—worldmaking becomes a critical act of navigating, understanding, and reimagining the frameworks that increasingly govern our lives. For artists and designers, the question is how to harness these technologies—and the deluge of content they produce—to summon a world to believe in.

Project:

Develop a creative world concept—through rigorous research, collecting, prototyping, and iteration—that can support diverse creative works and generate ongoing narrative potential.

Outcome(s):

Create a fully realized representation of a world using any combination of digital media (e.g., interactive 3D simulations, video essays, science fiction, video installations). Demonstrate thoughtful world design, articulate its internal logic, and show how new realities emerge from existing frameworks.

Key Practices and areas of learning:

World design theory, artistic research, remix culture, databases, and world modeling—drawing from shared fantasy, myth-making, internet art, generative art, simulation, systems thinking, environment design, Unity, C#, AI-assisted design and research methodology, creative technology workflows

A web browser showing a split screen with code and a pink square

Creative Coding as Mycelial Practice

Background

The ability to code is something of a creative superpower that everyone can unlock. It can help you understand the technical aspects of design problems better, employ algorithms to generate more elegant design solutions, and communicate technical details with your team more effectively. Code can further produce cute, chaotic, and interesting creative work, as Ngai describes and is demonstrated in the creative work of Rafaël Rozendaal, Rosa Menkman, and Lauren Lee McCarthy.

Project

Cultivating a javascript-based, mycelial creative practice capable of engaging communities using Ngai's prompts.

Outcome(s)

In this studio we start with creating a cute p5 sketch with sound and interaction, then move to a standalone piece of chaotic, post-digital online work, and finish by creating an interesting video that documents your journey to engage a community with some piece of coding repertoire.

Key practices and areas of learning

basic, intermediate, and full-stack javascript workflows, generative algorithms, designing with effective complexity, developing communities of practice, mycelial creativity

Digital Media Specialisation 1 + 2 Offerings

Sound Design

This course will help you develop your specialist skills in sound design, with a focus on the audio-visual. Using tools such as Reaper, Pro Tools, and Adobe Audition, you will create an entire soundtrack to a video, including all sound effects, foley, and an original musical score. 

UX

This course will guide you through the process and workflow of user experience design (UX) to create meaningful and relevant experiences for users, starting with a focus on your own experiences as a digital user. You will use Figma to design, test, and develop a high fidelity digital prototype for a single feature app.

Immersive Video

This course will help you develop techniques to design, produce, and present video-based immersive experiences. You will create a major video work across the semester using Premiere Pro and After Effects, and design for a single flat screen, a multi-screen installation/projection, or 360 video delivered on-screen or through a headset.

3D Modelling

This course will lead you through a cumulative 3D workflow to produce high quality 3D assets for use in a variety of digital media and tools, including Unity. You will use Autodesk Maya to implement basic and advanced polygonal modelling techniques, UV mapping, textures, materials, lighting, and animation in 3D.