Launched in 2004, the Integrated Design & Media (IDM) Program— formerly called Integrated Digital Media— is a place that fosters creative practice, design research and multidisciplinary experimentation with emerging media technologies. Located within Tandon School of Engineering, in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society (TCS), IDM is a ‘STEAM‘ program combining artistic inquiry with scientific research and technological practice to explore the social, cultural and ethical potentials of emerging technologies. We focus on how to create new experiences with technologies but also on what is worth making and why.
The IDM curriculum combines project-based learning with the study of historical, cultural, legal and philosophical aspects of digital media. We emphasize the development of skills applicable to a broad spectrum of media through individual and collaborative work. Guest lectures and conferences supplement our curriculum and maximize students’ personal contact with leaders in various sectors of the following fields: business, advocacy, service, entertainment, and education. The program culminates in a thesis that combines theory and practice to showcase students’ creative and technical abilities.
IDM offers a four-year BS degree, a 30-credit MS degree, a cross-school minor available to all NYU students, and an accelerated 5-year BS/MS. The IDM curriculum integrates topics typically found in an arts context – creative expression and design within both fixed and interactive media – with engineering topics such as signal processing and human-computer interaction. As a program within TCS, this curriculum embraces the department’s core focus on the intersection of engineering and society, encouraging students to engage with technology in a creative, critical, sustainable, and ethical manner; IDM courses feature strong emphasis on human-centered, outward-facing work that integrates values of self-expression, equity, and social justice into engineering. The IDM program articulates these goals through a number of initiatives, many of which, such as the Ability Project, are done in close collaboration with other departments in the University.
IDM is the only program at NYU Tandon in which the majority of faculty and students are women. As with all Tandon programs, we strive to excel in diversity, inclusion, and equity, with a high proportion of first-in-family students, students of color, and students receiving significant federal aid for college. We firmly believe in the role engineering and creativity can play in affecting social change, and have proudly developed and hosted conferences, hackathons, and days of action around diversity in games, inclusion and equity in creative technology, better experiences for users of mass transit, safer streets, design for disability, and immigrant rights. We partner with Brooklyn-based non-profit arts and advocacy organizations for much of this programming, including the ISSUE Project Room, Eyebeam, Tech Kids Unlimited, and Code Liberation.