Information design: A curriculum for the 21st century

In Fall, 2007, Winthrop University began accepting students to a new degree program entitled information design. This is an intensely interdisciplinary program spanning four departments and three colleges. The four departments are computer science and marketing from the college of business, design from the college of visual and performing arts and mass communication from the college of arts and sciences. The program consists of four specialties and a set of core courses and seminars. The specialties are: Web application design, offered by computer science; interactive media, offered by design; digital commerce, offered by marketing; and digital mass media, offered by mass communications. Each student takes all the core courses and seminars, and selects a specialty. The core courses consist of one or two introductory courses from each specialty. In addition, a freshman seminar helps students understand the different specialties, a later seminar introduces cutting edge topics in the field, and a senior seminar requires synthesis across the disciplines. In the latter students will work in teams to solve a problem for a local company or nonprofit. The ideal team will be four students, one from each specialty. The core courses are highly integrated, with each (except the first, of course) requiring one or more of the others as prerequisites or corequisites. There is also substantial overlap among the specialties. We expect assessment criteria will ensure that this degree of integration is maintained over time. This paper includes a detailed description of the program, a summary of its origins (largely industry driven) and a description of the assessment criteria.