MA Narrative Environments

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 languages and communication, including non-human languages, biosemiotics, artificial intelligence/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, decommodifying etc. the dominant hegemonic narratives that we tell/are told/sold about who we are, what the rest of the world is etc. This observational and systems mapping practice is the first step towards deep design research and development based on incorporating critical analysis into alternative propositions for infrastructures, ideologies, and 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?   

 What to Expect 

• The course is particularly focused on narrative environments as shaping and shaped by technology and media. Through critical and speculative design projects, we research the integration of digital and analogue contexts through experiential and experimental interfaces, spatial computing, alternative infrastructures, and environments and discourses that frame and re-frame the possible worlds of humans and nonhumans alike. 

• The course teaches and deploys design methods from across disciplines relevant to narrative environments, including storyboarding and story matrices, user experience and user interaction, narrative devices, worlding and worldbuilding, improv/ performance, media, gaming, etc. We use multiple time-based media at various scope and scale—text, sound, video, projection AR/ VR, etc. 

• The course takes a highly philosophical and highly practical approach to narrative environment design. The course’s contextual studies seminars draw readings and references from disciplines as diverse as design, science and technology studies, spatial analysis, human-computer interaction, film, theatre, and performance, anthropology, and philosophy. The course also teaches practical skills in design production related to budgets, project management, IP, collaboration, negotiation, and proposal composition. The course offers introductions to and support for a variety of skills, tools, and techniques; students work independently to determine and develop which skills are important to support their individual practice and advance through project-driven tutorials with CSM’s robust media lab.   

• The course cohort is highly collaborative, interdisciplinary and international. Students come from global backgrounds and diverse disciplines. Students collaborate across the cohort to complement, develop, and enhance their skillsets and interests across design domains. 

Industry Experience and Opportunities 

In the first year of the course, students work on live projects with partners from across industry, academia, and government sectors. These briefs include the creation of new interfaces, experiences, interactions, and proposed scenarios. At the end of the first year, students undertake an industry case study that connects them within an organization or organizations across their field of interest. In the second year, students lead the research and development of their own narrative environment, leading and facilitating collaborations and partnerships throughout the process. MA Narrative Environments alumni go on to work in many diverse fields, bringing skills in both narrative and environment development to architecture and urban/ international development, foresight and futures, design strategy, UX/UI, sets and production design, and experience/ spatial design for culture, brands, and events/festivals. The course hosts lectures and workshops with speculative designers and thinkers on narrative and environments from across the world to complement the range of perspectives delivered through project briefs with industry partners.