The MA Narrative Environments course at Central Saint Martins enables students to gain practical, theoretical and critical skills to create new environments.

MA Narrative Environments is a two-year course focused on the research and development of environments in which narratives unfold.

Narrative environments are platforms, scenarios and interfaces for communicating information, researching and testing possibilities, hosting events and experiences and/or generating diverse forms of intelligence.

Narratives include not only stories, but rhetoric, discourse and programmes related to human and non-human communication, including non-human languages, biosemiotics, artificial intelligences/machine learning and large language models.

Environments include interior and exterior, physical and digital spaces and temporalities and synthetic-natural ecological systems across scales – from the intimate to the urban and the planetary.

The course researches and develops immersive and interactive systems and hybrid environments that propose, model, simulate, plan, construct and/or perform alternative infrastructures, ideologies and worlds.

The course advances a planetary perspective, with considerations of climate, social equity, racial justice and class core to project development.

The course teaches and deploys design methods from across disciplines relevant to narrative environments, including storyboarding and story matrices, user experience and user interaction, narrative devices, worlding and worldbuilding, improv/performance, media and gaming. The course uses multiple time-based media at various scopes and scales, including text, sound, video, projection and AR/VR.

School: Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL)
Course: MA Narrative Environments
Type: Postgraduate
Location: London, UK
Course dates: September 2026 with a duration of two years (60 weeks), extended full-time
Application deadline: 18 March 2026

Applications to this course have now closed.

What will I learn during this course?

– Theoretical, practical and critical skills
– Design methodologies from speculative design, spatial design, graphics, systems design, experience design, social and participatory design and interaction design

What are the requirements?

– An honours degree in a relevant field: architecture, exhibitions, graphics, interiors, performance, retail, spatial, theatre, 3D, multimedia or interaction design, experience design, speculative design, design strategy, social or service design, gaming environments, science communications, museum studies or curatorship, writing, literature or design management
– Alternatively, an equivalent EU/international qualification
– At least one year of relevant professional experience
– English language requirements: IELTS level 6.5 or above, with at least 5.5 in reading, writing, listening and speaking (please check our main English language requirements webpage)

What facilities and resources are available?

– Term-time access to a range of open technical facilities, including the Loan Store, Digital Fabrication Bureau, Digital Labs, Digital Print, Paint/Surface, Photography Studios and 3D Capture Lab and Casting
– Term-time access to specialist facilities including Digital Make, 3D Make, Physical Computing Lab, Mixed Reality Lab, Media Studios (Video and Sound)

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