Launched 10 years ago, our one year Masters in Heritage Visualisation has now been joined by the MDes in Design Innovation & Future Heritage.
Heritage, in all its forms, plays an important role in people’s sense of place, well-being, cultural and economic lives. Fundamental to how heritage is received are the strategies and technologies deployed in its representation and dissemination and how this can be tailored for multiple audiences and multiple uses. The MSc reflects on wide-ranging and current critical debates in heritage, including intangible and natural heritage. These debates are considered through the lens of emergent digital technologies and their uses in the engagement, understanding and documentation of the heritage. These digital technologies include documentation techniques such as laser scanning, photogrammetry and more specialist approaches, for example, reflectance transformation imaging. Students will also learn post-processing and dissemination skills including 3D modeling, Games Engine technologies, VR and AR, in order to explore the ways in which digital representations of the heritage can be made both meaningful and engaging. This work is supported by leading experts in such fields as digital narrative, sound design and games development as well as the enjoying input of professional heritage practitioners. Students on this course will be taught by leading international heritage researchers and will engage directly with the SIT’s research activities focusing on heritage theory, community co-design and co-production, the use of creative response and the ways in which heritage visualisation aligns with broader social well-being, environmental and sustainability agendas nationally and internationally.
MDes Design Innovation & Future Heritage
Heritage informs our identity, enhances our wellbeing and is vital to the attainment of sustainable futures. Design with, and for, heritage offers opportunities to propose solutions to intractable challenges presented by a globalised world. The MDes Design Innovation and Future Heritage with the School of Innovation and Technology explores currents debates in the domains of material, intangible and natural heritage to challenge pre-existing authoritative regimes and hierarchical power structures. The programme encourages students to reinterpret the past and the present in ways that are culturally relevant to the future. Collaborating with diverse stakeholders, students gain the requisite skills and knowledge to develop user-led, human-centred, and co-created design innovations that safeguard and promote heritage in ways that are meaningful to contemporary society. The programme, delivered by a team of world-leading academics, encourages students to identify novel or nascent areas in which design innovation can address the complexities that threaten to overwhelm existing systems or services. Through the deployment of creative thinking, students reflexively and sympathetically respond to present-day demands, constraints, and opportunities to design artefacts, services and experiences that enhance the experience of modern life.