Interactive Media and Business

Introduction

The Interactive Media + Business (IMB) major is where innovation + business meets through emerging media technology. It teaches how innovative ideas combine with technology, creativity and business principles to yield viable products, services, and experiences.

Society today demands that recent graduates come equipped with broad interdisciplinary knowledge and skills, especially the ability to thoughtfully combine creative, quantitative and humanistic understanding. Students of Interactive Media + Business (IMB), will be challenged to imagine and implement interactive products and services that fearlessly investigate the recently possible in media, technology, and communication. IMB majors are also expected to think holistically about the impact of their work in society as well as the business value, whether it involves software or hardware, virtual or physical, product or experiment.

The IMB major welcomes interest in entrepreneurship in all forms — large organizations or startups, for-profit or not-for-profit — that bring about disruptive changes and create positive social impact.

Students of IMB will acquire a design-and-build mindset and gain experience by implementing creative solutions to real business problems in order to graduate well prepared for stimulating careers or future learning journeys in diverse organizations across the globe.

Curriculum

Students of IMB will begin their education in one of the world’s business and media capitals, Shanghai, in one of the most dynamic economies in the world, China. IMB majors and minors will take a unique blend of interactive media and business foundation courses, including Application Lab, which introduces theories of innovation, early-stage business concepts, creative coding, and user experience design. For their second emerging media foundation, IMB students will choose between Interaction Lab, which covers interaction design, electronics, computation, and digital fabrication, or Communications Lab, which covers digital media production methods, including imaging, audio, video, and Web development, or What is New Media? A course designed to give students a strong theoretical and historical background in new media arts.

Business foundations include Economics of Global Business, which prepares students with a systematic understanding of the international business environment, including macroeconomic theories, and the roles of international trade and finance. The second Business foundation, Principles of Financial Accounting, prepares students to evaluate the current condition of a business, and assess its likely future prospects.

Students also choose from a range of flexible core and elective categories across the disciplines of business, emerging media, art and design, the humanities, social and physical sciences, as well as computation and data. Students also have unique opportunities to pursue coursework and gain practical experience in other global business and media capitals, especially New York, Tel Aviv, London, and Berlin. Majors finish with a Capstone Studio course by synthesizing methods of research and practice to produce an interactive project and business plan.

In their senior year, IMB majors will finish with a year-long Capstone Studio course in their senior with a strong product focus combining the knowledge and skills they have gained over the course of the major. In Fall, they will be mentored in conducting background research to identify opportunities, needs, and tools, and to build and test initial prototypes with the aim of exploring and establishing the rationale for their final product. Once established, they will continue to develop additional prototypes over the course of the Spring, culminating with a complete product launch.