MFA/MSI

The School of Art & Design and the School of Information at the University of Michigan offer a dual degree program enabling a small number of qualified students to pursue concurrent work in art and design and information science leading to the MFA and MSI degrees. This dual degree program provides students with the opportunity to study information design and data visualization, and to understand the role of visual perception and human emotion in the interpretation and processing of visual information. The dual degree program offers a combined approach to these topics through scientific research and creative practice.

The program is arranged so that all requirements for both degrees are completed in four years of enrollment. The degrees are awarded simultaneously.

Although a sequential earning of the MFA and MSI is possible, this dual program is designed to maximize synergies, reduce time to graduation, and provide a model for preparing a new generation of graduates skilled in addressing information design problems while combining creative practices and scientific methods.

Intellectual and Societal Needs for this Program

Contemporary culture is dominated by visual stimuli. The pervasive presence of visual information—and visual noise—manifests itself in our cell phones with digital cameras, plasma displays in grocery stores, ultrasound images in family photo albums, handheld electronic games, GPS units on automobile dashboards, building-sized digital billboards, personal blood glucose monitors, instant replay scoreboards, virtual social networks, telemedicine terminals, digital books, neighborhood-level weather radar, and ever-present surveillance cameras, T.V. signals, and movie screens.

Extracting, discovering, recognizing, and discerning the often-nuanced differences between information, emotion, and noise from this blizzard of visual stimulation presents both challenges and potential benefits for individuals and society. Indeed, recent dramatic increases in the ability to collect data—e.g., through ubiquitous remote sensing or the capture of millions of digital transactions—threaten to overwhelm our capacity to meaningfully interpret and analyze incoming data. In response, fields as diverse as astrophysics and stock trading, athletic performance and seismology, have turned to information visualization as a solution for handling the rising volume and finer resolution of data. This confusion of signal-to-noise is the territory that the MFA/MSI dual degree program will prepare students to confront and resolve.

Visit the School of Information website to learn about the MSI curriculum. Visit the MFA in Art & Design: Curriculum page to learn about the MFA curriculum.

Admissions information for the MSI program can be found at http://www.si.umich.edu/applying/

Tuition, Fees, and Financial Support

Students will register in the School of Art & Design for 4 semesters and in the School of Information for 4 semesters. For example, a student could register in the School of Art & Design for Years 1 & 3, and in the School of Information for Years 2 & 4. Current full term tuition costs and fees can be found at the Office of the Registrar.

For additional information about fees and payments see: http://www.umich.edu/~regoff/tuition.

Art & Design graduate students receive substantial and competitive financial support during the semesters they register for Art & Design through Rackham. For students who meet the standards for normal progress in the program, this includes full tuition, graduate assistantships, and discretionary funds for four semesters. Please see Graduate Admissions : Tuition/Fees and Academic Support for a full description of financial aid received by A&D Students.