Master in Screen Media and Innovation

Who are we looking for?

You are a good fit if you’ve previously studied or worked in the fields of media, technology, culture, or social studies, possess an independent and analytical mind and are driven by a desire to innovate.

Good command of English is needed.

Course Outline

Screen Media and Innovation follows the process of project/problem-based learning developed at the Harvard Teaching and Learning Lab, Stanford d.school, and Aalborg University. This means that each group of students is faced with a broad challenge, which they turn into projects solving specific problems based on their interests, ambitions, and experience.

This year’s challenge is “Brave New Web - Let's get meta about the future of the Internet.”

You’ve heard about the metaverse, right? No, not the Facebook version of Second Life, we mean the broad conversations about the future of the internet going on between technology evangelists, the screen media industry, researchers, policymakers, game designers, and internet users. Metaverse is an old sci-fi metaphor that broadly applied ideas about the technologies, governance, design, and affordances of the next iteration of the internet (sometimes referred to via notions of Web3 or geospatial web). While the metaverse as a decentralized, technologically innovative, VR / AR-saturated immersive experience does not yet exist, and many ask if it ever will, existing platform companies, hardware and software firms, and game engines have been investing huge amounts of money to realize 3D virtual environments, VR and AR services, 5 and 6G connectivity, while activists contemplate the ethics of decentralization and digital twins, and researchers explore the implications of all of the above. This is a chaotic mess, you could say. This is an excellent opportunity for innovation, we say. We invite students to analyze, critique, imagine, innovate and design toward a better future for the internet.

Process: Students will work in teams to pinpoint a specific problem they are fascinated by within the broad realm of the “Future of the Internet” and create a project to solve it. This means that one team might work on policy recommendations for regulating blockchain-based solutions in privacy management, another team on imagining an avatar-based learning app to help combat school bullying via empathy and compassion training, while a third team might experiment with models of content moderation suited for geospatial virtual environments. Or, you could do something entirely different, it depends on the interests and skills of your team.

Your project can focus on research, activist intervention, or imagining things for a better future. You and your team will have the luxury of two semesters, a mentor, and specifically catered micro-courses to help you through the steps of exploring, interpreting, ideating, prototyping, and evolving.

The MA program lasts for four semesters (two years).

• 1st semester: introduction, lectures, and seminars. Introduction to project/problem-based learning and to topics necessary for understanding screen media - media innovation, media management and media economies, social media, transmedia storytelling, and intercultural communication.
• 2 and 3 semesters: teams work on their projects with mentors. This work happens in five steps (exploring, interpreting, ideating, prototyping, and evolving). Every phase consists of teamwork and mentor meetings as well as micro-courses on specific topics relevant to the particular phase (e.g. methods of prototyping, entrepreneurial thinking, project management, critical thinking, practical innovation, methods for gathering or analyzing data, media regulation, and media policies, social theory, professional communication, however, this is not a programming/coding MA program). The final semester is for thesis work.

We prepare innovators. You will understand key trends and dynamics of the screen media ecosystem, have the analytical prowess to pinpoint problems, and have the ability to turn them into opportunities. You will have extended experience with project management, teamwork, design thinking, and practical innovation. This is a profile of someone with a successful international career as an innovator, developer, consultant, analyst, specialist, manager, or an entrepreneur within media-, and creative economies, or an expert consultant within the public or NGO sector.