MA Experience Design
Teaching Archive from MA Experience Design, University of Plymouth, 2023-2025At the University of Plymouth, I led the MA in Experience Design. The programme centred on creating bespoke experiences for specific audiences to allow them to engage with real-world issues.
Design Lab
The two core modules of the course, Design Lab 1 and Design Lab 2 focused on theory and practical workshops connected to storytelling, immersion, interaction and using experimental research methods to bring a deep connection with these three areas to the intended audience of the artwork being created.
In order to begin the idea of asking students to think about what an “experience” can be, I decided to produce hand-stitched module guides and reading lists that would encourage reading, playing and watching in relation to the key theories being taught on the course. It was intended to demonstrate that Experience Design can be seen also be seen as a philosophical approach and applied to anything.
Later, as a way of critically engaging with Higher Education’s desire to make all courses standardised and industry facing, I created an official course stamp for use when returning written feedback. It was made as a prompt to allow students to question, what an art education is for, what it should look like, and again what is an “experience” and how can we use an experience design approach to alter the mundane and critique current systems.
Theory was taught as a lecture followed by a practical workshop. Topics covered included areas such as:
- The connection between Virtual Reality and histories of magic.
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The politics behind Big Tech and the impact of virtual, digital and analogue materials on the natural world.
Alternative Futures, for example students used Fraser’s (2016) “Four Futures: Life After Capitalism” to imagine alternative futures in Roblox.
Alongside theory I taught practical sessions on experimental research methods. These have been documented in detail elsewhere on my website but included topics such as serendipity, sensory and performance ethnography, multimodality, cultural probes and more.
Situated Practice
Situated practice was a module that asked Experience Design students to collaborate with those on other MAs to work on live briefs. For this module I ran two live briefs.
The first was to use the co-design work produced by children for the Future Treescapes Videogame project to produced something that could be used within the game or its design.
Brandon Barnard in exploring the masks and narratives the children had created came up with the idea of turning them into comics that could then be hidden amongst trees in the videogame. He used paper prototyping to test the idea in the real world. In the final game this concept was used as in-game geocaching.
Events/ Trips & Guest Speakers
In 2023 we took part in the Future Undokai Project. This was a collaboration between the Future Undokai Project in Japan, The Barbican Theatre and i-DAT at the University of Plymouth. The project explored the future of intergenerational community sports, and how communities might combine tech and physical materials to design new team games.
We used the fulldome spaces in the Market Hall and the Immersive Vision Theatre to host scratch nights where students were free to experiment with work in progress:
We visited exhibitions at The Box, Mirror and Karst in Plymouth.
And took trips to the theatre:
Student Work
Student Work: 2024-25
Watch Out!/ Xuefei Yang
There is No Alternative/ Xuefei Yang
This project critically engaged with the notion of good action being associated with working hard and explored the possibility of lives beyond a neoliberal economy. This manifested as an interactive installation in which the audience uses the voice command of “stop” or “start” to control whether the mannequin works their repetitive job of removing liquid or not. Yet, if the audience chooses to free the mannequin from their labour they will drown.
Student Work: 2023-24
Dada & Broodiest Flunkey/ Brandon Barnard
During Design Lab 1, Brandon focused on Dada and how this art movement might also relate to current issues. In response to this, Brandon created a series of tools to motivate others to draw on the Dada movement in their own artistic practice, such as creating an animated video to showcase a variety of Dada techniques and informing the audience of the meanings behind these.
Brandon undertook a great deal of practical experimentation that included a production of an animatic, the use of social media to distribute glimpses of his work in order to build up a sense of anticipation/suspense, an online interactive exhibition, and combining Unity software with hand-drawings to create a multifaceted experience by which the audience could engage with Dadaism in a contemporary context.
Image: Storyboard by Brandon Barnard
Brandon drew on some of the research methods studied in class, such as Cultural Probes and Performance Ethnography to inform his work.
Taking a Cultural Probe approach, he handed out prints of the Mona Lisa to his peers and asked them to try to contradict what they saw in the image. He stated that he was influenced by one of the participants ripping the piece up, mirroring Arp’s (1920) work. Then, he noted the themes that arose from everyone’s alteration of the Mona Lisa which included femininity v. masculinity; value communication; art importance and preservation; contemporary/digital; perceived social status/class; emotions visible in the piece; and beauty. He went on to explore these concepts as he continued to develop his own experience design work.
Image: Cultural Probe by Brandon Barnard
Image: Mindmap connecting aspects of learning during Design Lab 1 & 2 to the prodution of Broodiest Flunkey by Brandon Barnard
Throughout both Design Lab modules, Tu maintained a focus on exploring ways of engaging the audience in understanding the perspectives of single parent families, specifically the mother and daughter dynamic. She did this through the creation of an interactive digital comic.
The comic is designed to allow the user to experience the story through the two different but connected perspectives of the mother and daughter. In order to avoid making assumptions about the experiences of single parent families, Tu undertook secondary research looking at how they are portrayed in other media. She also undertook primary research in the form of a survey and regular user testing. The findings were used to develop the branching narrative for the comic design.
Image: branching narrative design by Tu JiananIn the image above, the yellow box represents the plot development of the story, the pink box- all the options that the player may encounter in the comics, the green box-the impact on the plot after the player selects the option, and the purple box represents the impact of the choice on the daughter in the story.
The Journey of a Tomato/ Catherine Chendi Liu
Catherine began by researching food waste. From a literature review she discovered food is wasted at three different stages: growing, transportation and consumption. She also undertook informal interviews to find out about commonly wasted food types. From this she began exploring the production of a gravity game using Unity. She drew inspiration from games such as “Give me Toilet Paper” and “I am bread”. Finally, she decided to centre her game on looking after tomatoes. She modelled her concepts with paper prototyping, three mini games that represented the three stages of food waste. Fail a mini game and you must throw a tomato in the bin.
JoyFeel Labs/ Marina Reinhardt
Marina’s interactive performance asked the audience to answer a questionnaire about what makes them feel sad with a promise to banish that emotion forever through a performative tea ceremony with an AI bot.
