Merging Art and Technology at ETC
The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh had to be pretty spectacular to lure The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses author, Jesse Schell away from Disney’s Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio in 2002. The renowned ETC program offers an interdisciplinary Masters of Entertainment Technology degree, co-sponsored by the University’s College of Fine Arts and School of Computer Science.
ETC Program Background
A number of precipitous events spurred the creation of this unique program; most significantly, late Professor Randy Pausch’s (you may have seen his viral video, Last Lecture) creation of a groundbreaking computer science course, Building Virtual Worlds, and, at the same time, the Drama Department’s interest in the convergence of technology and the arts. Together, these two departments joined forces to expand their “interdisciplinary friendship,” creating the ETC. Each year, the background of the incoming class is equally split along those lines – half from art and design, half from engineering and computer science. The goal of the program isn’t to turn the geeks into artists or the other way around. The program emphasizes each student emerging from the program with a broad toolkit of interdisciplinary knowledge and awareness.
ETC Master’s Program
In the two-year program, ETC students study topics ranging from game design, technology, storytelling, and improvisational acting. According to their program website, project work forms the core of the curriculum, “bringing together interdisciplinary student teams that must produce working artifacts; in the tradition of Carnegie Mellon, this emphasis is on making real things that work.” Browse a examples of current student projects and the video gallery of past projects. WOW.
More information:
Complete list of courses
List of similar programs
Interview with Jesse Schell about the program
September 17th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
[...] Interview with Jesse Schell about the program. Read the original post on the San Diego State University Blog. [...]
September 18th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Great find. Nice to know more about our textbook’s author.
September 19th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
The ETC program at Carnegie Mellon sounds like a great program.
As someone who comes from a performing arts background and now sits at a desk for a living, I can definitely attest to the value of an interdisciplinary education. Blending the fields of entertainment and technology brings more to the table. The world is changing and so is the toolkit needed to fill the job descriptions of tomorrow. Computer geeks, for example, will also need creativity and people skills.
In fact, Katherine Bell, senior editor at HarvardBusiness.org, writes that the MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) is the new MBA ( http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2008/04/the_mfa_is_the_new_mba.html ).