Media, Interaction & Design (MID)
The working domain Media, Interaction and Design (MID) within the MA multi-LEARN programme stresses interactional processes and products emerging at the crossroads of multimodal communication, interactive multimedia spaces, digital culture, new media and adaptive technologies design, with special regard to the field of learning and development in education and more generally within knowledge societies.
1. Processes of developing media and signifying practices
Culturally valued practices such as speaking, writing, dancing, drawing, making music, pictures or movies illustrate the vital role of the human potential in creating and using mediational artifacts. As part of their material, linguistic, discursive, or performative modes of acting, humans are inventing material tools (such as instruments) to actively shape the conditions of their existence on the one hand and abstract artifacts (such as signifying systems) to co-construct meaning about whatever exists in the world or in between the individual and her environment on the other hand. Both kinds of artifacts are continuously developed over time to allow and to regulate interactions on behalf of the material and social world.
The MA multi-LEARN interrogates this ongoing media development through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework by exploring, in a diachronic and synchronic perspective, how the creation and propagation of cultural artifacts and the related cultural practices shifted historically from material to analog and to digital modes. Groundbreaking examples include the Gutenberg revolution, the cheap mass printing in the nineteenth century; the rise of sound, photography, film and video recording during the twentieth century; the proliferation of computation, mobile communicating and interacting within networks in the last decades.
2. Multimodal practices of semiotics
Along the same lines, specific canons, i.e. in the domain of art and literature, lost their hegemonic supremacy to split up and blur into a variety of interlocking and border-blurring modes of cultural expression with regard to specific purposes, new meanings and changing audiences.
The MA multi-LEARN places great emphasis on cultural productions in the form of materialized externalizations of individual or collective reflections and the related dissemination and appropriation processes with specific regard to their continuous economically, technologically and socially determined shifts.
Nowadays and due to the rise of interactive multimedia devices, digital storage technologies and instantaneous accessibility of data on a worldwide scale, any multimedia-skilled person can for example easily combine language, images and sound into a multimodal “text” to be published on a world wide scale by using only one electronic device.
The MID modules stress these semiotic practices by analysing how meaning arises from and is expressed through the deliberate merging of various semiotic resources such as languages, visual images, sound, texture, gesture, but also space and architecture.
Students are encouraged to construct semiotic frameworks for analysing how any of these resources as well as their systematic interplay is used for the meaning-making process with regard to the specific medium of discourse, i.e. three-dimensional objects in space (museums and exhibitions, theaters and performances, buildings and activities), dynamic and static digital media (hypertext, film, video games), or print media (magazines, schoolbooks).
3. Interacting through media
The MID domain puts specific emphasis on the mediational dynamics of artifacts such as tools, signs, languages, roles, norms and ongoing transformations within a community. Artifacts shape and are shaped by customary practices, hence transforming their designers as well as those putting the device to use. Inevitably, these ongoing dynamics – of externalization and internalization – are co-developing both the mental and the social planes within a mutual socio-mental interrelationship.