Interested in a New Media Major or Minor?
Find Out More About New Media
The world is changing, and smartphones, websites, and other digital technologies are accelerating that change or helping people cope with it. Established businesses like Bank of America or Mass General Hospital may just hope to weather these disruptions. Younger startups like Tesla and Uber try to be the disrupters themselves. Whether they hope to ride out or lead the digital revolution, organizations will need employees with the abilities New Media tries to instill in its graduates.
Wield a variety of skills, from conceptual to perceptual to technical, to build and share creative digital projects.
New Media graduates are a triple threat, capable of contributing ideas, designs, and applications to their workplace. Thanks to courses like Intro to New Media, they’re up on the pressing issues of the day. Thanks to courses like New Media Design and User Experience, they can design striking imagery and appealing interfaces. Thanks to courses like Interaction Design and Mobile Applications, they can build apps that connect people online and devices that engage the body and its surroundings.
Conceive innovative and relevant applications for cutting-edge technologies.
What’s a hot-button issue for you? Staying healthy? The environment? Privacy? Security? In our introductory class, you’ll find out how technological advances are driving changes in these areas, for good or ill. In service learning courses like Digital Storytelling or Project Design, you’ll envision applications that could make a dent in these problems, and apply a prototype of your solutions to the real world by working with Maine communities and clients, whether blueberry farmers or science museums.
Adapt to new digital tools and media in a quickly moving technological environment.
What do Hypertext, Flash, and MySpace have in common? They were all the dominant media of their day, yet each was toast after barely five years. As hard as it may be to imagine a world without Photoshop, Facebook, or Minecraft, it’s likely that at least one of these will lose out to a younger rival by the time you graduate from college.
That’s why New Media professors rewrite their syllabi every couple years, incorporating industry standards like the Adobe suite as well as experimental technologies from augmented reality to the latest JavaScript frameworks. Gone are the jobs where you merely applied what you already know; now more and more positions require you to learn on the job, and re-train yourself every few years. So classes like Creative Coding force you to work in unfamiliar languages and environments, so you’ll learn how to adapt and grow in a rapidly changing technical landscape.
Make design choices based on critical reflection about their social, economic, and ecological impact.
Technologies are not neutral; it’s hard to find a good purpose for nerve gas or a bad one for band-aids. Courses like Designing Humane Tech will help you spot the difference between design choices that help or hurt the communities they affect. And working with actual communities and clients will help you see first-hand the benefits and drawbacks of your decisions.
Collaborate on complex, long-term projects.
Actual jobs aren’t like college classes. Instead of problem sets or essays due each week, a typical employee has to sustain effort every day toward a goal that may take months or years to achieve. That’s why New Media assignments almost always take the form of projects, from the simple animations you’ll make in Creative Coding as a first year, to the year-long, self-determined project you’ll build as a senior.
Having practiced teamwork in courses like Project Design, in your final year you and potential collaborators will embark on an ambitious and original capstone that applies cutting-edge ideas or technologies to real-world problems. To prepare you for life in an actual workplace, you’ll assemble a realistic budget and a timeline that includes designing, building, and sharing your application with actual users.
By the time your capstone has been deployed and tested, you will graduate with a rich media portfolio and a culminating project that will surprise potential employers with its level of creativity and accomplishment.
