Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: MA 2 years full-time
Based within CSM’s Spatial Practices Programme, MA Narrative Environments is a two-year course focused on the research and development of environments in which narratives unfold. Narrative environments are platforms, scenarios, and interfaces for communicating information, researching and testing possibilities, hosting events and experiences, and/ or generating diverse forms of intelligences. Narratives include not only stories, but rhetoric, discourse, and programs related to human and non-human communication, including non-human languages, biosemiotics, artificial intelligences/machine learning and large language models. Environments include interior and exterior, physical and digital spaces and temporalities, and synthetic-natural ecological systems across scales. The course researches and develops narrative environments as immersive and interactive systems and hybrid spaces that propose, model, simulate, plan, construct, and/or perform alternative infrastructures, ideologies and worlds.
MA Narrative Environments explores the interplay between situational and speculative knowledge about narratives and environments as they are, have been, and what they might become. We start by charting and understanding the narrative environments that we find ourselves within today, critically demythologising, deconstructing, decolonising, and decommodifying the dominant narratives that we are told and sold about who we are and what the rest of the world is. Observational analysis and systems mapping practice is then developed through counterfactuals and speculative histories, incorporating critical analysis into future propositions for infrastructures, ideologies, and immersive worlds.
Key research questions include: How are narrative environments transmitted and distributed across space and time? How do technologies shape narrative environments and how do narrative environments shape technologies? How do narrative environments change in the shift from screen-based narratives to spatial narratives embedded throughout cities, landscapes, virtual interfaces, and model worlds? What kinds of places can and should be narrated that aren’t, and what ideologies are reinforced by narratives that shouldn’t be? How do the tools and understandings of narrative environments reshape architecture, infrastructure, science, technology, and planning? How do narrative environments mobilize and complexify facts and fictions, models and simulations, needs and desires?
The standard entry requirements for this course are as follows:
For further advice on entry requirements contact Stephanie Sherman, Course Leader s.sherman@csm.arts.ac.uk. For further advice on fees, financing and scholarships please contact study@csm.arts.ac.uk.
APEL - Accreditation of Prior (Experiential) Learning
Exceptionally applicants who do not meet these course entry requirements may still be considered. The course team will consider each application that demonstrates additional strengths and alternative evidence. This might, for example, be demonstrated by:
Each application will be considered on its own merit but cannot guarantee an offer in each case.
For fees and funding information, please see website
MA Narrative Environments extends and enhances your employment opportunities in sectors such as exhibition, event, retail and interpretive design, visitor centre development, curating, scripting and creative direction, film and TV production, architecture, new media and interaction design, brand development and design for corporate environments.
The postgraduate course also addresses the need for advanced research in spatial practices. It provides a grounding in design research and intellectual, scholarly debate that can lead you to MPhil and PhD research degrees.
MA Narrative Environments has excellent links with renowned practitioners across the spectrum of narrative design. Professional fields include: interpretive design; production; architecture; interaction, media, graphic and communication design; brand communications; museums and galleries; planning and management.
Companies and institutions that are affiliates and sponsors of MA Narrative Environments include:
Unit 1: Foundations
This Unit develops foundations for the design of narrative environments through a series of rapid intensive projects that introduce philosophical, social, and technological propositions, narrative devices, and environmental research and development. These projects introduce design strategies and techniques that shape narrative environments and explore tools and frameworks for understanding constructions of space and time. Methods include systems mapping and analysis, speculative scenarios, and strategic design communications.
Unit 2: Collaborative Practices for Common Good
This Unit is focused on cross-college collaborations and collaborative practice. MA Narrative Environments students collaborate with students from another CSM course on a project brief with partners from industry, government, or academia. The design briefs in this unit typically explore the social impact of emerging technologies, scientific research, or alternative architectures. Key insights include interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, ethical practice, and feedback.
Unit 3: Major Project Research
This Unit focuses on narrative environment research, helping students explore foundational ideas and practices that will help them develop their own Major Project.
Part 1: Fieldwork (Summer Term YR1)
Students work on a design brief that draws inspiration from site research, focused on the ways of integrating local and planetary knowledges to shape creative storytelling.
Part 2: Industry Study (Summer Term YR1)
Students develop their professional network through placements, interviews with partners or surveys of the field, or participation on special projects or events.
Part 3: Design Research (Autumn Term YR2)
Students engage a specific site, scenario, or environment that provides foundational research for their Major Project. Working individually or collectively, students develop a Research Study that traces their topic, charting theoretical influences and identifying possible interventions. The study can be delivered in various written modalities – from anthropological to fictional, with visual or auditory supports welcome and includes design prototypes that test early experiments with a variety of design directions.
Unit 4: Major Project Development & Presentation
This Unit focuses on the design, realisation and communication of a major design project or a written philosophical study of a historical or theoretical aspect of narrative environments. Students focus on designing, prototyping, producing and presenting a major project that engages the environments identified in their site research, often in-situ. Students then present representations of that project through media assets in the final Showcase.
Important note concerning academic progression through your course:
If you are required to retake a unit you will need to cease further study on the course until you have passed the unit concerned. Once you have successfully passed this unit, you will be able to proceed onto the next unit. Retaking a unit might require you to take time out of study, which could affect other things such as student loans or the visa status for international students.
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