Information Arts and Information Design Practices
VISION
The Information Arts and Information Design Practices (IAIDP) program blends art and design, focusing on a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to this information age. We go beyond information communication to challenging, repositioning, and reframing information through the personal, cultural, contextual, and creative frames. We see design as a frame embedded in the acts of deep learning, meaning making, and reflective engagement with life to as the fundamental question – what does it take to be human?
In this light our program, locates successful Information Artists and Designers as those who can emerge new gestalts of perceiving and understanding information before they respond through art and design for a human need entwined with the environment. They also need to bring vision and leadership in their perception and attitude to information art and design. At its core, the program deepens storytelling and pushes our imagination to create narratives that matter.
The program emphasizes self-reflection and deep engagement with society, the environment, and oneself, viewing design as an immersive, visionary, and relationship-building process. By integrating arts and philosophy, IAIDP expands the field of design, addressing complex inquiries and reimagining the role of art and design in shaping our world. IAIDP encourages immersive experiences, artistic inquiry, self-reflection, leadership, environmental stewardship and worldmaking, positioning itself as an inquiry-based program at the intersection of art and design.
Our inquiries are located in the following questions.
- How can art, design and technology be used to push the boundaries of information and create points for action?
- What can traditional practices from different cultures offer to interpretation of contemporary data?
- Where can art and science meet to activate alternative research?
- How does one train at a reflective self in relation to the world to be a storyteller who mines diverse data to arrive at deeper truths?
These and more questions serve as a guide map to engaging with and creating within this program. This course is an attempt to explore how to dissolve discipline-based perceptions of data to engage with real life in its nuanced stories allowing for new discourses to emerge.
From a knowledge-based society, the challenge is to move to a wisdom-based society. To this end, we seek to find ways to seamlessly draw from the essence and spirit of the jester, the bard and the wandering minstrels in our modern guises. In that, the Information Arts and Information Design program is about crafting oneself as a storyteller, a behroopiya, whose stories are crafted through the fine lenses of time and space, cultures and contexts, information, knowledge and the extraction of wisdom. The axis of the course revolves around Self & Contemplation, Context Sensitivity and Leadership.
LEARNING APPROACH
Learning in at the postgraduate level is driven by published lines of inquiries that is enacted through studio-based learning, workshops, theoretical reflections and field work. This approach cultivates a creative practice through engagement in diverse contexts, collaborative and participatory approaches leading to knowledge development.
Program learning approaches includes:
- Participation in integrated multidisciplinary learning
- Exploration of hands on ways of crafting, design and development for traditional and digital platforms
- Strengthening our learning with critical perspectives and purposefulness
- Research into communities and contexts using participatory approaches
- Building multiple modes of expression for engagement in diverse disciplines
- Use of narrative structures and technologies to create communication
- Embodied approaches to investigate, interpret, engage with and translate narratives
- Lively debates, dialogue, sensitive and ethical questioning on a range of issues
- Independent and self-motivated learning
CAPABILITY SETS
This course will enable students in their capability:
- to inform and communicate through narrative
- to interact and work with communities, contexts and limitations and sensitively negotiate boundaries
- to transact meaning with audiences and build context-sensitive practices
- to perceive gestalts, navigate complexity and negotiate intelligences through transdisciplinary engagement.
- for leadership as action in art, design and/or technology praxis
- for responsible creativity that emerges from social, ecological, ethical and learning design
- to emerge transdisciplinary practice with reflections on interdependence and co-existence
- to strategically work with emergent systems and chaos
OPPORTUNITIES
The above mentioned capability sets could lead to opportunities such as:
- Employment in Design Studios, Advertising Agencies and the Publishing Industry
- Employment in New Media and Software industry
- Employment in Media and Television Industry
- Employment in startups, small and medium enterprises, NGOs, social and educational enterprises.
- You can become a contemporary art practitioner, entrepreneur, design consultant
- You can have an active involvement in emerging domains such as digital arts and new technology, storytelling in new formats.
- Pursue your research and continue to do a PhD.
- Develop your own projects and apply for grants.
- Some jobs profiles could be
Design Strategist, Project Manager – Community Programme Services, Entrepreneur- Visual Designer. Artist. Arts Manager, Design consultant, Educator, Social justice Coordinator, Multicultural program coordinator, Cultural Design Practitioner, Creative Director, Program Manager, Creative and Cultural Researcher, Storyteller, Systems designer/ Consultant, Design Consultant, Educational designer, Eco-artist/ Eco –Designer
FAQs
What is Information Arts and Information Design Practices?
Information Arts and Information Design Practices is an exploration on how to present and communicate complex information in a meaningful manner to support discovery and communicate information across a range of socially relevant issues. IAIDP as a course allows students to grapple with diverse media and data that range from the artistic, informative to the technological; to find their own forms for communication and curating experiences. The core of this field lies in perception and interpretation of information in order to communicate. Communication can be personal, artistic and creative, it can also move into the space of a designer and expand into social communication and advocacy. Contemporary, exploratory and evocative, IAIDP offers space for crafting creativity and communication for a new era in human history.
What do people in this field do?
People in this field are cross pollinators. They can seamlessly walk through media, arts and design. Driven by a desire to connect and evoke, they are willing explorers of simple and complex contexts alike. From environmental issues to human rights, from civic media to sonic art, from puppetry to web-design, their breadth and range of work are varied and experimental. They take communication to a new level in their ability to work across diverse fields through varied visualizations and technical explorations.
By opting for this course, students can evolve highly independent practice; ideate with far-reaching insights in whatever positions they choose to work in. From advertising to social communication, creative arts and design to technology based fields, graduates of this program have a wide and diverse playground to explore and find their niche.
Who can become an Information Arts and Design practitioner? How do I know whether a career in Information Arts and Information Design is for me?
Anyone who is willing to embrace diverse kinds of media, willing to engage with communities, analyze, evaluate and deepen their practice with relevant to contexts can become an IAIDP practitioner. If you are someone who is not completely satisfied with the idea of being an artist or a designer but feel that you want to bridge these two worlds, this could be very relevant course for you. Further if you are someone who is excited by technology and want to be at the cutting edge of contemporary approaches to art and communication, this course could help you build your practice.
At Srishti Manipal, we particularly focus on issues, contexts and communities that have social and environmental relevance. If you are someone who is looking to make a difference in these areas and have a strong passion to tackle wicked problems, this would be a good fit for you.
What does an Information Arts and Information Design practitioner need to know?
An IAIDP practitioner would benefit from the natural curiosity to explore different media and modes of representation. These could range from drawing and painting media to performing arts, technology and softwares, writing and graphic design. An IAIDP practitioner essentially plays with diverse forms of representation to create new ways to engage people. Their strength lies in this diversity. Storytelling is an essential skill that cuts across all the diversity in this program and becomes the core essence of communication. A willingness to traverse from science to arts, philosophy to literature are attitudes that will hold the IAIDP practitioner in good stead.
What is the focus of the course?
Leadership, Context-sensitivity and Self-Reflexivity form the axis of the course. Communication, interpretation of information, engaging with the politics of information and pushing the boundaries of how information is gathered, interpreted and communicated using diverse media, formats and methods is the essential focus of the course. We work with art, design and technology to deal with wicked problems, contexts, issues and communities on social, educational, environmental, economic and political issues.
Students graduating from the program will be able to:
1. Will be able to work with Information and Cultural Leadership
2. Will be able to work with systems thinking and strategy in diverse contexts and with appropriate media decisions
3. Will be a decision maker and a catalyst in social and environmental change
4. Will be able to build meaningful narratives that emerge from participatory, collaborative approaches and engagement with communities, and other life forms
5. Will be able to provide direction and design interventions by understanding systems and programmatic requirements
6. Will be able to bring integrity, ethics, empathy and compassion to social design and action
7. Will understand leadership from the frames of
a. Taking Initiative
b. Being Involved
c. Being inspired and providing inspiration
8. Will be able to begin emerging a position/ stance as an information thinker and practitioner from a perspective of emotional, cultural, ecological and business intelligence as a cohesive whole.