Overview

SIAT Undergraduate Program

At the school of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), we design for the real world of products, environments, experience, and information. You will learn about the broad reach and extraordinary power of design, arts, sciences and information technologies, and apply your knowledge to tangible projects that are useful in all walks of life. You will master team management and human relations skills, technical skills and disciplines that are highly sought after by industry.

In SIAT we are bold, driven, inquisitive, creative, resourceful, open-minded, visionary, respectful of diversity—we are leaders.

Choose From Three Concentrations

SIAT offers three concentrations of study. All share a fundamental concern for how people use technology in their lives. Within each concentration of study there are theoretical and applied courses that students must complete. Each concentration progressively provides a wider range of elective courses to encourage individual interests and study paths. There is wide sharing of electives among concentrations, allowing a broad range of ideas to enliven classes. With required courses, we stress the ties among people, technology and culture that spark new ideas and invention.

In first year, students complete the TECHONE cohort program, prior to pursuing second-year studies in one of the following concentrations.

MEDIA ARTS takes the creation, analysis and understanding of digital media into new forms, such as computational artifacts and cultural experience. Games, exploratory digital videography, immersive virtual reality, and sound synthesis are essential parts of this concentration.

INFORMATICS studies technological systems used by people in work, learning and play situations. Its emphasis is on system-building with particular emphasis on how people use systems, how to design and program user-centered systems and how to represent and reason about the objects and environments that people use. Its graduates will be able to make systems that people find useful and engaging.

Our DESIGN concentration examines the relationship between people and technology and how thoughtful design practices improve it. Analyzing human-computer interaction (HCI) and developing exceptional information design practices improve a range of human experiences from web pages to museum experience, from cellular phones to everyday industrial products.

For more information visit www.siat.sfu.ca