Course summary

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 re-interpret what data means to society, and where design has opportunity to shape future thinking for challenge lead enquiry. Data Informatics sits within the Institute of Design Informatics and is informed by research practice and industry partnership across Edinburgh College of Art, and School of Informatics. What will I study? Within Design Informatics, we critically explore a world facilitated and experienced through data as a lens to being human. Our bodies, cities, architecture, and cultures are embedded with data. Both data and design are implicit to our approach to creating new experiences and artefacts. We explore these areas with data technologies as our material including Internet of Things, AI and Machine learning, blockchain, immersive experiences and physical computing. We ask questions, explore industry challenges, and interrogate ideas by hacking material and immaterial data things to create real-world, yet future facing speculative artefacts and experiences. Our graduates leave with an understanding of collaborative practice in data industries and a strong personal vision developed through self-directed projects. You will explore working with:

• the internet of things and physical computing

• machine learning and AI

• speech and language technology

• usable privacy and security

• data ethics

• block chain technologies

• Augmented and immersive technologies

• society

• health

• architecture

• fashion

• bio-design

• craft

• finance

• tourism

• other real-world contexts

• case studies

• individual and collaborative projects