MA Digital and Interactive Storytelling LAB

The Digital and Interactive Storytelling LAB MA is an innovative course, designed for digital storytellers and shaped like a media LAB. This means that during the course you'll be able to produce a wide range of digital-first work for multi-platform formats. Your work will be underpinned with academic research, theories and expertise on mobile platforms, and digital interactive communication.

The course delivers industry-level professional expertise in visual communication from photography to video content creation, interactive narratives and apps for change.

You’ll be involved in creating content that extends beyond current ideas in multimedia and online productions – as our aim is to advance storytelling as a format of communication and as a practice.

We recognise how competitive the job market currently is, therefore this Master's has been created to develop your skills and knowledge in a way that will enhance your career development.

The Digital and Interactive Storytelling LAB MA prepares you for a range of industries, present and future, as entrepreneurial content creators, mobile and platform producers, photo and video journalists, interactive factual narrators, social marketers, and project managers.

The content is structured around a knowledge of platforms and communication practices, which are seamlessly knitted together into five modules.

The rethinking of photographic digital communication both in terms of media and content is what drives the notion of "The Image As Storytelling". By engaging the quickly evolving worlds of photography and photojournalism within a digital-first approach, in the LAB you'll learn how to engage visual communication to its full potential, and incorporate storytelling as a digital practice for interactive platforms. Through a hands-on, experimental and practice-led approach, you'll reconsider today’s shifting visual vocabulary specifically for digital and interactive communication frameworks.

The course’s focus on interactive factual narratives gives you the opportunity to explore and assess everything ranging from web-documentary, to games for change, VR and social mobile apps. You'll be given an exhaustive overview of the field to be able to map the territory and position your practice in it. You'll be guided through your creative journey with a user-centred workflow that mixes design and software methodologies to prototype and design interactive storytelling. You'll be challenged by a “what’s next” approach and will be pushed to think beyond current trends.

Westminster is a leading provider in this academic discipline and is ranked top 10 among UK institutions for Communication and Media Studies in the QS World University Rankings 2021. The University is also ranked 4th in the UK in the Complete University Guide 2022 for Research Quality in Communication and Media Studies.