- Arts & Media
- B.A.
- Arts
- Arts Division
Program Overview
Creative Technologies (CT) is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in the Arts Division, with participating faculty in Art, Music, and PPD (Performance, Play, and Design).
Students in Creative Technologies obtain a degree that emphasizes emerging arts and design technologies, learning to use a variety of design and art practices in digital environments. Our curriculum aims to serve as a nurturing nexus for justice, community, imagination, humor, activism, and joy. The program combines online and in-person modalities to allow UCSC Arts students to transcend departments and genres, transcend the physical space of the campus, and bridge geographically and economically remote communities.
Creative Technologies, whose first students will be enrolling in the fall of 2024, is the first online undergraduate major program in the University of California system.
Learning Experience
The Creative Technologies major focuses on the following areas of study -- students interested in the major should expect courses and curriculum centered around these topics:
- Developing fluency in the languages and tools of contemporary media, arts, and design technologies
- Learning arts and design skills, including their ethical pursuit in cultural, social, historical, and political context
- Gaining critical literacy in contemporary media cultures in which arts and design workers act and collaborate—including those that struggle for decolonization, racial justice, environmental justice, justice against misogyny, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, and oligarchy.
- Learning effective production practices—including improvisation, dialogue, research skills, and styles of collaboration—that bring complex, impactful projects to meet their potential: how to communicate to get good work done together.
- Learning 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.
- Learning to connect online and traditional communities with creative vitality, critical inquiry, and fun.
Creative Technologies Colloquium: Join our community of faculty, students, and staff, in a unique, hybrid-modality, three-quarter colloquium, bringing in-person learning together with distinguished local and remote voices—visiting artists representing some of the most exciting achievements in the global landscape of creativity and technology.
First-Year (Freshman) Requirements
First-Year students interested in Creative Technologies are urged to pursue a variety of arts courses in high school. Although not required, we also encourage students to strive to make interactive artwork in courses: this would include anything from a paper game prototype, to a conventional video game, to a User Experience design project, to a text-based choose-your-own-adventure story. Developing your own arts practice in any medium is also helpful, including acting, drawing or other visual media, writing, music composition or production, sculpture, filmmaking, and others. Finally, you might consider taking courses on digital design, that can help you connect your arts practice to an emerging technology.
Third-year/Junior Transfer Requirements
In preparation for transfer to CT, students are required to express purpose and vision in a statement of intent. Transfer CT majors entering in their junior year who have not yet fulfilled a residency requirement* at another UC campus, should take CT 1A (fall, winter, and spring, in-person). Students who have fulfilled that requirement, either at another UC campus, or as freshmen or sophomores at UCSC, may take either CT 1A (fall, winter, and spring, in-person) or CT 1B (fall, winter, and spring, remote; only available to those who have fulfilled the residency requirement). All CT majors should have taken the following courses by the end of the junior year:
- Offered in fall quarter: CT 10 (Understanding Digital Design) and CT 11 (Issues in Digital Expression)
- Offered in winter quarter: CT 80A (Introduction to Creative Coding
- Offered in spring quarter: CT 85 (Understanding Digital Platforms), and CT 101 (Persuasion and Resistance)
*UC regulation that requires a minimum total of 18 credits of in-person courses over a period of 3 quarters
Internships and Career Opportunities
This interdisciplinary major will prepare students well for graduate education in arts and design. In addition, there are many careers that this major can prepare students for, including:
- Digital Artist
- Board Game Designer
- Media Activist
- Fine Artist
- VR/AR Artist
- 2D / 3D Artist
- Game Designer
- Game Writer
- Producer
- User Interface (UI) Designer
- User Experience (UX) Designer
Students have gone on to careers in games research, science, academia, marketing, graphic design, fine art, illustration, and other types of media and entertainment.