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NewSchool of Architecture & Design

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Concentrations

Design Your Future

A concentration is a program of study that supplements the standard program, providing you with additional opportunities to broaden and enrich your education experience at NewSchool. A concentration may be taken as a way to give a coherent pattern to elective credits to expand career options or simply to explore an area of expertise in greater depth.

Digital Products & Experiences

To complement their degree, students enrolled in the Product Design program at NewSchool may choose a concentration in Digital Products and Experiences.

What are Digital Products & Experiences?

Modern life is now marked by myriad digital experiences from an array of devices and interfaces. According to Don Norman, “god-father” of User Experience and author of The Design of Everyday Things, these experiences are everything. They are the way we see the world, experience life, and interact with the products and services we use. Impactful experience design is often small and simple interventions working within a system that solves the right problem for the user.

As the profession of product design continues to expand in the realm of digital products, the challenge is to use the principles of human-centered design to develop successful products that customers love. The concentration on Digital Products and experiences offers students enrolled in the Product Design program the opportunity to further develop the knowledge and skills in digital products, media and service industries, customer experience and interactive media and interfaces.

woman using ActiveShadow, a mouse-shaped massage device connected to a smart app, shown on the left.
ActivShadow: app and product design by Brian Rinker
a 3d design of a spider-monster on the matrix script background
modeling and rendering by Martin Avelar

3D Modeling for Game and Animation

This concentration offers the students enrolled in the Graphic Design & Interactive Media program the opportunity to expand their knowledge and skills in 3D Modeling, particularly as it is applied to the world of game, animation, entertainment, and virtual/meta reality.

NewSchool of Architecture & Design is the only College in San Diego to offer this exciting and future-forward concentration, preparing students for the exciting field of 3D modeling, Virtual Reality and Gaming.

The concentration offers classes in both the Hard Surfacing and the Organic Modeling skills required by the industries.

Hard surface modeling skills are crucial for creating detailed and realistic objects used in the entertainment and film industry, as well as the intricate environments, vehicles, weapons, and various props within the game world.

Organic modeling skills are essential for creating characters, creatures, and other organic elements needed for movies, animations, and video games. Additionally, both hard surfacing and organic modeling are widely used in product manufacturing and prototyping, advertising, and marketing and virtual and augmented reality applications.

3D modeling plays a significant role in keeping up with advancing technologies like the Metaverse, Apple Vision Pro, Non- Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

About the concentrations

To earn a concentration in Digital Products & Experiences, students must take a minimum 9 credits of Tier 2 Electives and receive a C or higher.

Students interested in the 3D Modeling for Games and Animation concentration would have to complete a minimum of additional 12 credits among the classes listed and receive a grade of C or better.

For more information and to enroll, please contact the admission office.

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