Interactive Media, M.F.A.
Graduate Program
About the Program
Explore technology, design, and human behavior
The University of Miami’s Master of Fine Arts in Interactive Media is a STEM graduate program that prepares students to innovate through understanding and experiencing the business, social, academic, and cultural contexts of emerging technologies.
The program prepares a new generation of innovators and leaders in the field of interaction design. Its mission is to explore the use of technology, design, human behavior, and their impact on communication. The multidisciplinary curriculum brings together students from different backgrounds to learn about game design, web design, mobile, data visualization, interaction design, and other emerging technologies. The program trains students to research, prototype, design, and build projects in business, social, academic, and cultural contexts.
For a complete list of courses, please visit the UM Bulletin website at http://bulletin.miami.edu
Advanced Systems: Designing Playful Experiences
Building on their systems foundation from the Intro to Systems course, students will continue to play and analyze games along with designing games in order to build a more extensive vocabulary and toolkit to both understand and design interactive systems. Students will be exposed to a range of popular game prototyping technologies (for example: Twine, GameSalad, ARIS) and will create several mini projects as well as one final game project created using the platform of their choice. Students will explore a different core game mechanic with each prototyping tool thus broadening their ability to create targeted meaning within a playful experience.
Building Interfaces
This course covers the production concepts and techniques to design and develop dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for web applications. Students will develop competency with several key technologies used in web development and providing them with the skills and principles needed to make effective use of these technologies.
Dynamic Data
This course focuses on speaking through computer programming and data. Students will learn to build stories using numerical data or databases as a primary material and explore data as content. For this course students will be required to build custom software solutions through web programming languages that utilize third party APIs to interpret, analyze and manipulate data.
Game Development Studio
This course is a project-based course devoted to developing a game. In groups, students will start with a concept and create prototypes that will be refined through multiple iterations and playtests. Your final game will either be a well-polished non-digital game or digital game.
Programming for Designers
This course will teach students the basics of programming using Processing. Processing is a language created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas of MIT. It was created to make computer programming accessible to people who might imagine it but do not always have the skills to execute it, thus making it an excellent tool to teach programing concepts to designers. Processing gives students immediate results allowing them to easily create beautiful, interactive graphics.
Resources
Showcase Your Talents
Students studying Interactive Media at the School of Communication have endless opportunities to showcase their talents to the world. From design competitions to creating virtual worlds to showcase at conferences, the avenues of experience are endless.
Featured Projects
A few of our interactive media projects, all done by our very own students and faculty.
- Clean Gear as the New Badge of Honor: Cancer Prevention Campaign for Firefightersbrackman2019-12-10T15:48:10-05:00
Clean Gear as the New Badge of Honor: Cancer Prevention Campaign for Firefighters
- Perceptions of Drinking Water Quality in Cubabrackman2019-12-10T16:08:37-05:00
Perceptions of Drinking Water Quality in Cuba
- Echo Earth Experience: A VR Simulation of Echolocationbrackman2019-12-10T15:30:39-05:00
Echo Earth Experience: A VR Simulation of Echolocation
- An Evaluation of Games for Advocacy: A qualitative research study conducted in South Africabrackman2019-12-19T13:03:50-05:00
An Evaluation of Games for Advocacy: A qualitative research study conducted in South Africa