Stories in Digital Media

This morning a friend of mine asked me the following questions:

What is it, that you are studying?

For what is it for?

What can you do with it after your graduation?

Honestly, I did not really know how to answer these questions efficiently let alone satisfyingly. I mean, of course I have a personal plan, but this is not digital media as a pure thing – as digital media is a mixture of different disciplines and backgrounds. There is not one intended final use case or scenario for what we are studying. There is no job called “Digital Media Guy or Girl”.

Anyhow, I struggled to give at least a small hint about what digital media is and for what it can or could be used for as I simply did not know where to start explaining. Most people just want to get a very short answer. Maybe it would be better to avoid these questions after all or to make up some fake job description.

How do you deal with these kind of encounters?

I think that I now saw everyone of our age group at the Master Presentations on Friday. Finally! I somehow feel much more connected to the other groups since I know now, what all fellow students are doing.

Here are the four projects in overview:

• Intelligent Room gesture/sensor based interactive room (Uni)
• T³H – The Tell Tale Heart personal experiencable installation (HfK)
• NoISE Sample Browser and Editor (HSB)
• Game-based learning system for the Schifffahrtsmuseum Bremerhaven (HSBhv)

I liked the presentation of the HSB the best. Because they actually demoed and it was a quite impressive one, regarding the early time of the project.

But what’s your opinion? Which one did you like the best and why? Tell us in the comments.