Course units
On the course you'll learn how to create digital and physical interactive experiences, across three pathways. You’ll explore all three pathways in your first year through a series of design briefs that encourage and hone your skills, interests and curiosity. For your second year, you'll choose one specific pathway (see below) from within the Interaction Design Course: Creative Technologies, User Experience, or Systems and Services, with each pathway offering subject specific skills, tools and interaction design methods unique to each specialism.
All course units are common across the First Year and Block 1 of the Second Year. In Block 2 of your second year, you will be on the unit for your chosen pathway: Creative Technology, User experience or Systems and Services, positioning you for a final year in which you’ll focus your studies more specifically.
On Interaction Design we are committed to ensuring that your skills are set within an ethical framework, and we have worked to embed UAL’s Principles for Climate, Racial and Social Justice Principles into the curriculum regarding everything we think and do in the field of Interaction Design.
As part of this initiative, we’ve shaped our courses around social and environmental sustainability principles that ensure learning outcomes reflect the urgent need to equip you with the understanding, skills, and values to foster a more sustainable and equitable future for the planet and its occupants.
The first half of the course will guide your studies via a series of unique and topic-specific creative briefs, you'll be introduced to, and experiment with, critical and contemporary design practices and ideas. Theses foundational elements will be explored in more depth within the Creative Technology, User Experience, and Systems and Services pathways, on the second half of the course.
Your final year will be a dedicated and focused application of your chosen pathway utilizing the skills learned in years One and Two of the course. In your final year you will develop and realise a final major project where you will continue to develop and apply a uniquely personal practice and perspective to answer complex design problems, embracing approaches such as critical design and design for social change. In common with all courses at the University of the Arts London, this course is credit rated. The course is 3 years, levels 4-6. Each year requires you to achieve 120 credit points. To be awarded the BA (Hons) Interaction Design qualification, you need to accumulate a total of 360 credits.
Year 1
Unit 1A: Introduction to Interaction Design (20 Credits)
Through academic reflection, writing and practical workshops, this unit will equip you with essential academic and design skills that will give you the confidence to navigate through the course and College, and to help you develop a personal approach to your Interaction Design practice.
Unit 1B: Exploration and Play (40 Credits)
Focuses on learning and discovery through practice-based activities and projects. It introduces core design principles from across the three course pathways and explores play as a catalytic method of research, experimentation, decision making and design thinking.
Unit 2A: High Tech, Low Tech, No Tech (40 credits)
Introduces you to design through various media, materials, rapid prototyping, narrative approaches and diegetic scenarios. This media-agnostic focused unit invites you to consider technologically and materially appropriate design solutions to set studio briefs. You will situate your work within a wider theoretical and practical context, and consideration to the symbiosis between ideation, experimentation, materials and materialisation.
Unit 2B: Responsible Design (20 Credits)
The Unit introduces core principles in ‘responsible’ design where you will explore the role of environmental and social responsibility across multiple design subject specialisms to inform and further develop your own creative practice. You will engage in contemporary debates and explore approaches, tools and frameworks for understanding and practising how social and environmental responsibility is enacted across visual communication practices from within organisational structures, to the design of digital and analogue products, services and images.
Year 2
Unit 3A: Desire Lines and Affordance (40 Credits)
This unit is intensive and designed to introduce you to subject specific processes and techniques involved in interaction and design. It deals with design in the lived environment; exploring how people, designers and users interact with one another in the world around them and encourages you to reach beyond the studio for research, inspiration and practical everyday experience.
Unit 3B: Professional Practices (20 Credits)
This unit seeks to extend your knowledge of the creative, cultural and design industries, providing you with opportunities to work on live project as you continue to develop your design practice in mixed-discipline and collaborative teams.
Pathway Units (40 credits) (Unit 4A)
This unit is designed to further develop and focus specific work and concepts introduced in previous units, by offering you three specifically pathway focused options. Each pathway choice will form the basis of your subsequent study program for the remainder of the course.
Unit 4A: ID: Creative Technology – Pathway Unit
This unit pathway is designed to further aid and develop specific work and concepts introduced in previous units, with a particular focus on Creative Technologies. The unit encourages you to experiment with traditional and new media technologies. The unit is highly spatial and technical, looking at programming, sensors and computing in a real-world context.
Unit 4A: ID: UX - Pathway Unit
In this unit pathway you will develop individual communication strategies for articulating and visualising complex thinking and processes. Building on your previous work and research, you will refine your unique design identity and voice as a creative practitioner to inform your communications skills for materialising applied creative thinking, problem solving, and processes within your chosen fields of user experience design.
Unit 4A: ID: Systems and Services – Pathway Unit
In this unit pathway, you will explore project management and innovation strategies for service design and collaborate with partners from local communities and organisations to develop a service before testing and evaluating impact and effectiveness for the identified users. Design Cultures (20 credits) (Unit 4B) In this unit, you will explore a thematic area of your choice within Design Cultures, questioning established narratives and developing your critical voice. You will explore knowledge at the boundary of your design discipline, evaluating diverse ideas and practices in in relation to your chosen thematic area.
Unit 4B: Design Cultures (20 Credits)
In this unit, you will explore a thematic area of your choice within Design Cultures, questioning established narratives and developing your critical voice. You will explore knowledge at the boundary of your design discipline, evaluating diverse ideas and practices in in relation to your chosen thematic area.
Year 3
Unit 5A: Self-Initiated Research Project (40 credits) - All Pathways
This unit gives you an opportunity to engage with an in-depth research project on a topic of your choice. You will bring together the skills, knowledge and experience you have developed during your study to carry out an extended research project that connects theory and practice.
Unit 5B: Minor Studio Project (20 credits) (Unit 5B) - All Pathways
The Minor Studio Project is self-initiated, emphasising research and the identification of appropriate intellectual and practical methodologies to support your outcomes.
Unit 6A: Major Studio Project (60 credits) (Unit 6) - All Pathways
The Major Studio Project is undertaken by all third-year students and generally consists of three individual briefs, which you can chose from a menu of project briefs (agreed with your tutor). It is the culmination of the course and provides you with the opportunity to utilise your practical, critical and analytical skills in the realisation of interaction design that comprise your individual portfolio.
Optional Diploma between Years 2 and 3
Between Years 2 and 3 of the course, you’ll also have the opportunity to undertake one of the following additional UAL qualifications:
Diploma in Professional Studies (DPS) (Optional)
An optional, year-long learning opportunity which enables you to develop your professional skills by undertaking time out for industry experience. Supported throughout the year by academics, you’ll build on the knowledge gained on your course in a range of national or international locations, and graduate with an additional qualification of Diploma in Professional Studies.
Diploma in Creative Computing (Optional)
Between Years 2 and 3, you can undertake the year-long Diploma in Creative Computing. This will develop your skills in creative computing alongside your degree. After successfully completing the diploma and your undergraduate degree, you’ll graduate with an enhanced degree: BA (Hons) Interaction Design: Pathway Title (with Creative Computing).
Diploma in Storytelling (Optional)
Between years 2 and 3, you can undertake the year-long Diploma in Storytelling. Enhance your creative voice and discover how to engage audiences and enact change through compelling storytelling - a skill that's in demand across a range of creative industries. After successfully completing the diploma and your undergraduate course, you’ll graduate with an enhanced degree: BA (Hons) Interaction Design: Pathway Title (with Storytelling).
