FAQs

Creative Technologies (CT) is an online interdisciplinary arts and design major, with contributions from faculty across the Arts Division.

Digital arts/design environments are powerful and exciting spaces for the pursuit of justice, freedom of inquiry and imagination, and for the cultivation of knowledge, democracy, and stronger communities.

CT courses cover many arts genres and media, allowing you to pursue arts and design training without being stuck “in the box” of traditional disciplines. Moving freely between diverse practices allows CT students to gain more contemporary, collaborative, and multimedia arts experience.

Artists and designers are primary curators of knowledge, dialogue, and cultural representation in our contemporary world, and with that role comes a responsibility to cultivate community agency, democracy, and justice: including environmental justice, climate action, and broad access to knowledge and social dialogue.

Creative Technologies arose from a community need here at UCSC to comprehend how new media and new technology can be sites where we bring society’s best futures into reality: futures in which justice, democracy, and sustainability arise from truly participatory works of art and design. The Arts Division also strives to envisage UC Santa Cruz as a truly accessible public university, and we believe that online education is one of the most promising paths toward that aim.

Creative Technologies aims to build literacy in tools for creative expression, cultivate justice-focused and critical perspectives on histories and cultures of media technology, and help students establish innovative practices for arts and design collaboration and production. Please see our What Will I Learn? page for more information.

The Creative Technologies degree is for students who won’t be satisfied with traditionally categorized arts courses, and who want to take risks in porous, lively work that crosses the boundaries of traditional arts skills and practices. This program is for students who want to work with the best of contemporary media, and our best imaginations, to upend social hierarchies and norms to invite the most vulnerable among us into our best and most fulfilled futures.

Creative Technologies students will create work that — beyond mere experiences and information — turns audiences’ attention toward their own creativity, and toward the stories, questions, assumptions, and experiences that they bring to the work. In the best new technologies of arts and design, a listener, a viewer, a reader, a player becomes a new kind of creative worker. Our faculty — environmental artists, game designers, filmmakers, and musicians — specialize in participatory and collaborative creativity, and we emphasize critical resistance against a status quo that so often robs communities of the agency and voice that can be an artist’s best material.

At UCSC, we know that the creative work we do as designers and artists is inseparable from the world in which that work occurs: in our case, a world that faces perilous crises in democracy and social and environmental justice. That same world also promises horizons of technological possibility that are almost beyond imagination. Creative Technologies is a program that meets both the perils and promises of our future with equal courage.

Successful Creative Technologies students will not just be effective users of arts technology; they will be gifted in the art of working and expressing between disciplines and skills. We want you to be able to help people from varied backgrounds and experiences to be in genuine dialogue with one another. We expect our students to “show up” in the best senses of the word — bringing their full lives and worlds to a table where difference in background and perspective is not a problem, but a profound asset.

As of Fall 2025, all Creative Technologies courses will be taught online, via Zoom. However, students may choose to take their non-CT courses in person, creating for themselves a “hybrid” campus experience. For example, there are many in-person major qualification and Breadth of Arts elective options.

Currently, all Creative Technologies courses are taught synchronously. In the future, some courses may be offered “asynchronously,” allowing students to navigate all materials at paces that suit their needs and interests.