MA Narrative Environments

Course overview

Based within CSM’s Spatial Practices Programme, MA Narrative Environments is a two-year course focused on the research and development of environments in which narratives unfold. Narrative environments are platforms, scenarios, and interfaces for communicating information, researching and testing possibilities, hosting events and experiences, and/or generating diverse forms of intelligences. Narratives include not only stories, but rhetoric, discourse, and programs related to human and non-human communication, including non-human languages, biosemiotics, artificial intelligences/machine learning and large language models. Environments include interior and exterior, physical and digital spaces and temporalities, and synthetic-natural ecological systems across scales – from the intimate to the urban and the planetary. The course researches and develops immersive and interactive systems and hybrid environments that propose, model, simulate, plan, construct, and/or perform alternative infrastructures, ideologies and worlds. The course advances a planetary perspective, with considerations of climate, social equity, racial justice and class core to project development. 

MA Narrative Environments explores the interplay between situational and speculative knowledge about narratives and environments as they are, have been, and what they might become. The course starts by charting and understanding  contemporary and historical narrative environments, critically demythologising, deconstructing, decolonising, and decommodifying dominant narratives about humans, society, machines and agency. Systems observation and mapping is then developed through counterfactuals and speculative histories, grounding future propositions for infrastructures, ideologies, and worlds.  
 
Key research questions include: How are narrative environments transmitted and distributed across space and time? How do technologies shape narrative environments and how do narrative environments shape technologies? How do narrative environments change in the shift from screen-based narratives to spatial narratives embedded throughout cities, landscapes, virtual interfaces, and model worlds? How do the tools and understandings of narrative environments reshape architecture, infrastructure, science, technology, and planning? How do narrative environments mobilise and complexify facts and fictions, models and simulations, needs and desires?    

 What to Expect  

• The course is particularly focused on narrative environments as shaping and shaped by technology and media. Through critical and speculative design projects, students and tutors research the integration of digital and analogue contexts through experiential and experimental interfaces, spatial computing, alternative infrastructures, and environments and discourses that frame and re-frame the possible worlds of humans and nonhumans alike.  

• The course teaches and deploys design methods from across disciplines relevant to narrative environments, including storyboarding and story matrices, user experience and user interaction, narrative devices, worlding and worldbuilding, improv/performance, media, and gaming.The course uses multiple time-based media at various scope and scale, including text, sound, video, projection and AR/VR. 

• The course takes a highly philosophical and highly practical approach to narrative environment design. The course’s seminars draw readings and references from disciplines as diverse as design, science and technology studies, spatial analysis, human-computer interaction, film, theatre, and performance, anthropology, and philosophy. The course also teaches practical skills in design production related to budgets, project management, IP, collaboration, negotiation, and proposal composition. The course offers introductions to a variety of techniques for developing narrative environments. Students work independently to determine and develop practical media tools relevant to their individual practice, advancing them through project-driven tutorials and workshops with CSM’s media lab.  

• The course cohort is collaborative, interdisciplinary and international. Students come from global backgrounds and diverse disciplines, and the course actively embraces and leverages the range of languages, experiences, and domains brought to each project. Students collaborate across the cohort to complement, develop, and enhance their skillsets and interests across design domains. This focus on collaboration mirrors the highly collaborative dynamics of design in applied contexts. 

Industry Experience and Opportunities  

In the first year of the course, students work on live projects with partners from across industry, academia, and government sectors. These briefs include the creation of new interfaces, experiences, interactions, platforms and scenarios. At the end of the first year, students undertake an industry study that connects them with an organisation or organisations across their field of interest and begin to chart their own research interests. In the second year, students lead the research and development of a narrative environment, facilitating collaborations and partnerships throughout the process. 

MA Narrative Environments alumni go on to work in many diverse fields, bringing skills in both narrative and environment development to architecture and urban/ international development, foresight and futures, design strategy, UX/UI, set and production design, tech, and experience/spatial design for culture, brands, and events/festivals. The course hosts lectures and workshops with speculative designers and thinkers on narrative and environments from across the world to complement the range of perspectives delivered through project briefs with industry, academic, and government partners.    

Home fee

£8,065 per year

International fee

£21,530 per year

This fee is correct for 2025/26 entry and is subject to change for 2026/27 entry.

Tuition fees may increase in future years for new and continuing students on courses lasting more than one year. For this course, you can pay tuition fees in instalments.

Students from countries outside of the UK will generally be charged international fees. The rules are complex so read more about tuition fees and determining your fee status.