Media Design Practices/Lab+Field at Art Center is an interdisciplinary design MFA grounded in media and technology. The curriculum, redesigned in 2011, features two intentionally divergent tracks.

Each track—Lab and Field—prepares students to work in emerging roles and contexts for design. Lab students explore the cultural impact of new ideas from science, technology, and culture. Field students tackle social issues in international settings.

The curriculum provides immersive experiential learning through projects and knowledge partnerships distinct to each track. Coursework is punctuated by formal exchanges timed to maximize cross-pollination between tracks; a shared studio provides casual, daily interaction amongst students.

In the MDP, the faculty consider the curriculum to be a living entity created in dialogue with a perpetually changing context. Like many, we approach curriculum design as a critical, creative, iterative process within a given set of constraints, such as space, budget, and institutional imperatives.

In January 2011, Art Center released its new Strategic Master Plan, which included a mandate to expand graduate education. This served as the catalyst for us to undertake a more ambitious, comprehensive re-envisioning than our annual iterations had allowed.

We undertook this institutional challenge with the aims of:
1/ maintaining our commitment to bringing new practices to design;
2/ retaining the intimacy of the curated educational experience of our prior program while pursuing an expanded scale; and
3/ intensifying our core experimental philosophy of: hybridity (cultivating productive friction through the juxtaposition of mixed perspectives), emergence (crafting conditions that give rise to the new), and discovery (investigating the world through design), while challenging ourselves and our students to think anew.

Building upon our core philosophy, we sought to bring forth new practices of design by sharpening our work in two distinct areas: future-oriented speculative design and social impact design. We recognized in the context-specific challenges and new roles of each an opportunity to push the field in directions of increasing relevance to a complex and dynamic world—while providing the grounds for expanding faculty expertise and broadening the spectrum of applicants.

By turning each area into its own track, called Lab and Field, the department could be restructured to support two focused learning communities. Each track would be designed with its own combination of core, shared, and adjunct faculty as well as similarly-structured though experientially-distinct curricula. We would essentially create two programs of equal intensity and depth in one degree. The productive dissonance would be amplified through the co-existence of the two tracks, enabled by the co-location of students in a shared studio.

A common pedagogical approach—team-teaching, project-based learning, inquiry-led design—would be complemented by contextually-specific differences enabled through the curricular integration of firsthand experience with sites, situations and expertise brought about through strategic partnerships.

For the Field track, strengthening our ongoing collaboration with Designmatters, Art Center’s social impact program, would allow us to build international fieldwork into that track's coursework through a knowledge-exchange partnership with UNICEF's Innovation Unit. For the Lab track, building upon and expanding faculty relationships with scientists, offbeat cultural institutions, and tech industry R&D would provide a carefully crafted mix of knowledge partners suited to Lab.

We relied upon a combination of standard program review assessment measures combined with our own design approach—posing questions, mixing perspectives, engaging with people (users), and working the material to see what emerges.

In the first phase, we met with students past and present, convened experts from disparate fields, held workshops and retreats, designed pre- and post-graduate personas, and wrote learning outcomes.

The second phase included iterating models and conducting strategic hires to build out the faculty. In the first year, Dr. Elizabeth Chin, an anthropologist, and Sean Donahue, a design researcher, joined the existing core faculty—media designer Anne Burdick, architect Tim Durfee, media artist and designer Ben Hooker, and interaction designer and technologist Phil van Allen. We then began building and testing courses through workshops or short-term projects and a phased rollout of the new curriculum, after which the core faculty was rounded out with the addition of Chris Csikzentmihalyi, an artist and activist working in civic media.

The last phase included the design of ancillary aspects of the program that were integral to the curriculum and pedagogy:

• The academic calendar would pace the moments for track-focused work and cross-track exchange between the two;
• The travel schedule would integrate the fieldwork into the curriculum;
• The studios and workspaces would create the right balance between casual co-existence and structured confrontation between students and projects in the two tracks;
• The project partners would develop out of long-nurtured collaborative relationships and finely-tuned agreements that support knowledge exchanges appropriately structured for each track;
• The "Summer X-Term" would provide opportunities for diverse extra-curricular experiences to complement and amplify the coursework or deepen a research trajectory;
• The Summer Research Projects, led by both faculty and visiting researchers, would model project-based research methods and inquiry-led design and provide students with hands-on experience as research interns;
• The post-graduate fellowships would provide students an opportunity to bring their thesis work into fruition.

Cumulatively, the projects, discourse, and practices that the MDP's redesigned curriculum fosters amongst its students and faculty contribute new thinking about design's role in a world of cultural and technological change—in addition to preparing its graduates for relevant and impactful careers.

Although we are only just beginning to graduate students from this curriculum, we already see evidence of how the experience of working in the Lab and Field contexts has prepared students to articulate their expertise, advocate for new roles, and contribute to domains in which design is nascent.

• Field students Morgan Marzec, Cayla McCrae, and Tina Zeng presented their work with youth from Jovenes Inc., an LA-based shelter, to the Applied Anthropology conference in March 2014.

• Lab student Andrew Nagata brought his interest in data, haptic feedback, and materiality to his work with CalTech seismologists in creating an interactive earthquake sensor station suited for the home.

• Field graduate Jeff Hall's design-based fieldwork experience qualified him to lead UNICEF's newest Innovation Lab in Jakarta, a position typically reserved for an engineer or development specialist.

• Lab students, in discussion with Stanford Biochemistry professor Dr. Rhiju Das, influenced his decision to create a Summer 2014 MDP internship at the Bio-X Games Center, his crowdsourced RNA sequencing project.

• Field alum Elizabeth Gin's approach to design, ethnography, and ICT, developed through her thesis work, convinced LinkedIn to create a new field research position specifically for her.

The design brief was informed by our belief that graduate design education is a context uniquely suited to the reflection, experimentation, and research that is necessary to develop new approaches to critical issues. As previously stated, we aimed to do so by pushing our core philosophy of hybridity, emergence, and discovery to its fullest potential.

The revised curriculum would need to continue to build upon our inquiry-led approach to design, positioning students as researchers motivated by curiosity and leading with questions—with the aim of generating new knowledge about themselves, design, and the world. The new curriculum would need to nurture an openness to discovery and new insights together with a rigorous criticality as students engage with new technologies, global institutions, or individual people, leveraging the diverse disciplines of our faculty to provide frameworks appropriate to each new situation.

In order to sharpen the critical dimension of both the discourse and student projects, it would be important to structure situations that would allow work created for distinctly different contexts to engage in constructive dialogue. Specifically, we expected the Field projects to challenge the first world narratives that tend to dominate design futures while the Lab projects would challenge social design to connect local issues with global developments in science, technology, and industry. The exposure to a mix of perspectives would enable students in both tracks to learn to look beyond their immediate points of reference with the aim of creating work that is both grounded and innovative.

The curriculum's beneficial impacts include both student and project-partner learning, as well as direct contributions to communities and other fields—demonstrated here by student work unfolding at the time of this submission:

Inspired by Uganda's VJ culture, Field student Tina Zeng is collaborating with youth at the Treasure Life Center (TLC) in Kampala to design a VJ station that allows kids to “talk back” and appropriate one-way broadcast media, whether Hollywood films or educational animations. Tina taught simple electronics to the TLC kids and created the VJ station from a juice carton—it is cheap and durable because it can be easily rebuilt. Tina’s approach stands in contrast to UNICEF’s Mobi Station, a rugged, self-contained “classroom in a box.” Tina's inquiry-led design process in the context of a knowledge-exchange partnership with UNICEF has allowed her to challenge the assumptions of the Mobi team and to bring a more interactive learning model to both TLC and UNICEF.

In Spring 2014, MDP faculty Ben Hooker with external partner/co-faculty Dr. Christina Agapakis, a UCLA synthetic biologist, ran a Lab Project called Bacterial Cultures, using design to explore the cultural implications of the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. Lab students worked out of the LA Biohackers space, together with young scientists, learning to approach design as a collaborative, inquiry-led endeavor and learning to communicate across disciplinary boundaries through direct experience. As a result, MDP students are teaming up with LA Biohacker scientists to create a new project for the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM).