About

Introduction

The Arts Division’s multi-departmental undergraduate program in Creative Technologies (CT) explores powerful contemporary approaches to creative expression, with special emphasis on conscientious design, interaction, visual and aural experience, critical interdisciplinary engagement with web-based media, and collaborative creativity in digital environments. Creative Technologies arose from a community need identified at UC Santa Cruz to comprehend how new media and new technology can be sites where we realize and enact society’s best futures: futures in which justice, democracy, and sustainability arise from truly participatory works of art and design. Majors in Creative Technologies learn that digital arts/design environments hold excitement, and distinctive promise, for the pursuit of justice, freedom of inquiry, and imagination, as well as for the cultivation of knowledge, democracy, and stronger communities.

Creative Technologies is the University of California’s first online undergraduate major. Its curriculum combines online-modality courses from numerous disciplines, allowing its students to pursue arts and design training without being confined to traditional arts genres or methods—instead, they move freely between those practices to gain more contemporary, collaborative, and multimedia arts experience.

Creative Technologies graduates will possess skills and technology experience for an economy and society that increasingly regards creativity and creative labor among its most essential and driving forces—labor that is transformative not only in the arts but in fields like law, healthcare, politics, non-profit organizations, schools, and in traditional businesses. As emerging artist-scholars in that contemporary environment, CT majors may imagine diverse career paths as user-experience designers, journalists, teachers, and other cultivators and curators of human knowledge.

Students in creative technologies develop fluency in the languages and tools of contemporary media, arts, and design technologies, including technologies for creativity in sound, image, and animation; games and playable media; documentary and knowledge-curation media; web-based and participatory media; and creative interactions with machine learning and AI. At the core of the creative technologies ethos is a conviction that technology literacy is inseparable from technology ethics. Artists and designers are primary curators of knowledge, dialogue, and cultural representation; with those roles we hold a responsibility to cultivate community agency, democracy, environmental justice including climate action, and broad access to knowledge and social dialogue. To support that crucial work, the creative technologies program aims to prepare students for a lifetime of relevant, meaningful, and impactful creative engagement—while instilling capacity for work and play, activism and education, self-expression, self-efficacy, and even fun.

This program is delivered in lab-based online environments, operating both synchronously and asynchronously. The majority of its first-year curriculum, and some of its second, involve real-time interactions with teachers and classmates, via video and other live remote learning technologies. Courses will sometimes be offered “asynchronously,” allowing students to navigate all materials at paces that suit their needs and interests. In both types of learning, creative technologies generates a robust community in which students learn through their collaborative journeys of art-making, engaging in critical inquiry, and critique. We aim to inspire collaborative art and design that connect online and traditional communities with creative vitality, critical inquiry, improvisation, and lasting meaning. You will learn how to navigate the platforms and venues in which sound and image, story and play, character and action, can be brought effectively to a wide and inquisitive public. And you will learn effective production practices—including improvisation, dialogue, research skills, and styles of collaboration—that bring complex, impactful projects to fruition.