Design Informatics and Advanced Design Informatics MSc
An overview of these degrees and advice on selecting your courses.
Overview of the degree
Our Design Informatics programmes are advanced, full-time courses for professionals and recent graduates. They are extremely hands-on, progressive and designed with industry at their heart. As a student, you’ll combine cutting-edge design with information hacking to develop products and services that will transform lives. The MSc programmes are for people from a computer science or social science background. You will learn design methods, working alongside designers, and apply your computational skills to cutting edge creative projects.
There are two programmes:
- A one-year Masters programme that consists of two semesters of teaching, followed by three months of dissertation work. It is equivalent to 90 ECTS in the European Bologna system.
- A two-year (21 month) Masters programme that consists of three semesters of teaching, a summer internship, and three months of dissertation work. The 21 month masters programme fully conforms to the Bologna standard of 120 ECTS credits.
Compulsory Courses
The following courses are compulsory:
- Histories and Futures of Technology: Cultural and technical context for Design Informatics. Covers Digital Media, Critical Perspectives, Introduction to Arduino
- Case Studies in Design Informatics 1: Analysing Design Informatics case studies and learning research methodology
- Data Science for Design: Introduction to data wrangling, data visualisation and Python programming with a design perspective
- Design with Data: Creating interactive pieces in small groups, working with an external organisation’s data
It is possible to test out of Data Science for Design for MSc students.
Optional courses
Electives can be chosen from across the University, but typical choices include: Analysing Qualitative Data, Dynamic Web Design, Design, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, Image and Vision Computing, and The Human Factor: Working with Users. In 2022/23, you can choose 20 points worth of Electives in semester 2, and if you are on the two year programme, you can choose 40 points worth of Electives in Semester 1.
Advice on Choosing Courses
The Design Informatics MSc is very heavily structured. We recommend that you take electives that will help you develop the skills you need for the future career you envisage. These can be from machine learning, data science, technology and entrepreneurship, digital media, games, art, or product design.
We do not recommend taking the courses Machine Learning Practical or Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition. Both courses are extremely demanding and typically require excellent mathematical and programming skills.
Courses that are not provided by the School of Informatics are often capped. You will need the Course Organiser's permission to enrol in them.
Advanced Design Informatics students in their second year can only take courses for which results are checked in the January Exam Boards, to ensure you are clear to progress to dissertation. This means that you cannot take courses such as MLP or TTDS that span Semester 1 and Semester 2, or Semester 1 courses such as IRR where the main assessment is in January.