The introduction freshman seminar for DCC is taught by its Director. 

HDCC 105, Introduction to Design Cultures & Creativity, is the gateway course for students in the Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC) Living Learning Program, a partnership of the College of Arts & Humanities and the Honors College at the University of Maryland. Our motto is “Critical Thinkers and Makers Changing Society Through Digital Technology.” DCC's mission is not to prepare you for the world as it currently exists, but to equip and empower you to change it for the better—by utilizing, hacking, challenging, and innovating technology; by designing structures, systems, methods, and tools that make meaningful positive impact on human life and culture; by devising and reviving ways to care for the most vulnerable and threatened communities among us; and, by wielding your unique skills, passions, and talents with power, confidence, and joy.

This course jumpstarts your DCC experience. In this course, we will push on the always porous boundaries between art, humanities, and technology, open to creative interchange with other disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives. By examining keywords related to design, students will gain broad-based knowledge about the convergence between the arts, humanities, and technology.

This course was newly introduced to the program in Spring 2025 by its Associate Director. 

Humans are storytelling animals. Through literature, oral testimony, folklore, literature, memoir, film, and everyday utterance, we rely upon stories to make sense of our pasts, document our present, and imagine near and distant futures. This course therefore takes stories and storytelling seriously as both a creative practice and a theoretical framework for understanding and transforming our world. Together, we’ll traverse three modes of learning throughout the semester: conceptual (examining different critical approaches to studying narrative), critical (analyzing stories that circulate in cultural texts); and, craft (exploring structure, strategies, and methods for crafting compelling stories). This course is well-suited for story-lovers of all kinds, but especially students who wish to pursue storytelling in their artistic life and/or professional future—in fields such as filmmaking, creative writing, journalism, history, public humanities, political activism, brand strategy, public leadership, and more.

This recurring course was taught by Bill Evans in Spring 2024 and Spring 2025. 

 Music is a rich and diverse art form that can be analyzed and discussed using a wide variety of musical terms. These terms help musicians and listeners communicate effectively about the various aspects of music including its structure, performance, and emotional impact. This course will explore music of many styles and cultures using audio recordings, music videos, music software, print media, radio/streaming services, podcasts and social media. Students will analyze various styles using digital tools and present their findings as presentations and podcasts.

This course was last taught in Spring 2023 by Dr. Damien Pfister, now Director of DCC. 

This course is an exercise in imagining a different future by criticizing the infrastructures and sensibilities of contemporary digitality. Several questions will guide our collaborative work: What kinds of habits do digital technologies engender, and are we happy with them? What are the consequences for creativity and culture when people are "always on" and plugged into the attention economy? How might we imagine digital technologies, and our relationships to them, in ways that expand accessibility, justice, and dignity? Through careful readings of three books—How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,Your Computer is On Fire, and Viral Justice—we will survey contemporary criticisms of digitality while imagining how creativity and design offer alternative futures.

This new course was introduced to the program in Spring 2025 by Dr. Grant Bollmer. 

What are the creative potentials of misusing media and technology, of using software in a way unintended by its designers, of actively breaking something so it doesn’t work the way it was initially supposed to? Or, what might it look like to use something that may seem obsolete and dated in a new way? This class will explore misuse, mistakes, and the active subversion of intended design as a form of cultural and political intervention. Beginning with themes from an “anarchist” history of science that suggests innovations and discoveries happen when rules and norms are disregarded or actively broken, combined with methods in media studies that emphasize anachronism and refuse an uncritical notion of “progress” in technological development, this course will engage in a range of creative practices that imagine other ways of living with digital media and technology. How might it be possible to challenge the “surveillance capitalism” of social media platforms by actively engaging with these platforms? Or refusing the planned obsolescence of technology by making something out of what otherwise would become e-waste? By the end of this course, students will understand a range of conceptual and political arguments for resisting intended use of media, along with engaging in a range of projects that subvert the design of software and media.

This course was newly added as an option among HDCC106 courses for the Spring 2025 semester, taught by Alex Leitch.

How do we make screens into small worlds? This seminar introduces students to creative code through interface design. By focusing on the development of novel interfaces using P5.js and TouchDesigner, students in this class will learn how to approach contemporary web programming and visualization. Inspired by the work of Tega Brain and Golan Levin, this course bridges the gap between creative expression and technical implementation. This class has been developed for practical outcomes for people with a creative flair.

*Note: This course is designed for first and second-year university students. No
prior coding experience is required, but a curiosity for technology and design is essential.

This recurring course has been offered in Fall 2023 and Fall 2024, taught by Bill Evans, as a natural complement to HDCC106 Music Media.

This DCC course emphasizes learning concepts and techniques of music composition through the study of music theory and structure used in both classical and popular music forms. Students will compose music using computer assisted and composition tools. These tools include cloud based digital audio workstations and music notation programs. Compositions will be written in these musical styles but not limited to classical, jazz, and popular. Students will also explore methods of sharing their compositions on various digital platforms.

This course was last taught in Fall 2022 by Porter Olsen.

This course explores the significance of storytelling across a range of digital media, including video games, mobile media applications, social media, and more. We begin by situating digital storytelling within a pre-digital history of oral, textual, and visual storytelling. We will then study and create our own stories using a variety of digital platforms. In doing so, we will engage critical questions surrounding how stories are told in the digital age. What, for example, constitutes the fundamental elements of a story, regardless of the media through which it is told? How do different storytelling platforms open and foreclose possible narratives? Who has the power to construct and shape the stories of the digital era, and how can digital tools empower more voices to prevent what Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls, “the danger of a single story”? In this project-driven course, students will explore new digital technologies, create and produce their own stories across a range of digital platforms, and analyze stories in digital forms. The class activities will also help prepare students to choose and begin developing the proposal for their DCC Capstone project.

This course was last taught in Fall 2022 by former DCC undergraduate alumni and former Graduate Assistant Danielle Abe (ARCH).

What is “community,” or what should it be? In a world threatened by problems like housing segregation and environmental racism, how can we navigate the different answers to this question? In this class, we will learn about the complex relationships between planning, architecture, sustainability, and equity—including how to apply your knowledge of them toward solutions in real places. We will explore these ideas through reading, watching documentaries, participating in discussions, and creating visual representations that reflect our understanding of and positioning within these topics. We will explore case studies and then apply our knowledge by designing visual schemes and action plans for real-world sites. The course is designed to help you demonstrate and develop your skills in research while encouraging you to creatively express your ideas.

This recurring course has been offered since Fall 2021, taught by Anat Szendro Sevilla (iSchool).

As technology takes over our lives, there is one skill a machine cannot compete with… creativity. Moving. Talking. Writing. Using our hands. These are the building blocks of the creative process, and are the basis for innovation. In this class, we will be exploring creativity through visual design. Over the course of the semester, we will learn the fundamentals of visual design and tools for effective visual communication. How should we interact and form a connection with our viewers? We will use creative approaches to problem solving for the purpose of applying them in a broader context.

Some of the topics we will touch upon are: the history of visual design, composition, logo design, typography, image, color, grid, creative blocks, low vs high tech, and creativity as a platform for innovation.

The class will have a strong hands-on component, we will make mistakes and grow out of them. The class requires an open mind, a sketch book, and some raw materials TBD.

This course was offered in Fall 2023 and Fall 2024, taught by DCC's Associate Director, Dr. Jessica H. Lu. 

“Gaming is life.” More than a niche community of players and fans, games, gaming, and game fandom have drawn increased intellectual and public attention over past decades—for as many positive reasons as negative ones. Understanding the meaningful role that games—both analog and digital—already play in our lives (especially in art, education, self-development, pleasure, entertainment, business, marketing, socialization, and technological innovation) is only the beginning! This course will undertake serious inquiry into the design and play of different games; the game mechanics that structure them; and the cultural, social, and political contexts that impact designers, players, and the games themselves. We will work together to speculate the potential for games to envision radical new futures and societies through critical game design and critical play. Ultimately, students will draw from their experiences and course lessons to create an original game of their own by the semester’s end. 

This course is particularly well-suited for students who: are interested in creating 
a game for their Capstone project; are intrigued by the thought of being a game designer or developer in the future; are interested in the possibility of incorporating games and game mechanics into their existing interests or career plans; or, just love playing games of all kinds! 

This course was first offered in Fall 2024 by Cliff Bakalian (CS). 

Text is one of the primary ways to communicate with computer programs. We will explore how computers take in text, process it, and then spit back information. In particular, we will be looking through this lens in terms of text-based video games and chat bots. We will be examining their design and their internals to hopefully replicate this phenomenon. By the end of the semester, students will have created a text-based "adventure" program that dynamically responds to "player" input. Topics included will be the Chomsky hierarchy, Finite Automata, and semantic meaning. No prior coding experience is required, but coding will be part of the course.

This course was first offered in Fall 2024 by former DCC Graduate Assistant Jonathan Reyes (ENGL) and will be re-envisioned and offered again for Fall 2025 by DCC Associate Director Dr. Jessica H. Lu. 

Open your closet doors and be faced with a choice: What should I wear? But how did our clothes make it from cloth to closet in the first place? And how do we decide what’s appropriate or fashionable? What are we saying when we wear what we wear? In this course, we will take clothing and fashion seriously as prisms through which we can gain an understanding of the cultural, social, political, and economic contexts in which they are constructed, distributed, and worn. Together, we will examine fictional and non-fictional readings; films; and other visual media to learn how clothing and fashion intersect with such topics as consumerism, aesthetics, globalization, modernity, raced and gendered labor, and environmental justice, to name a few. Along the way, we will use visual design to explore how fashion tastes are cultivated and advertised and learn basic hand sewing techniques to make simple clothing repairs. Finally, students will collaborate in small groups to design and create an original garment that draws on the topics, techniques, and discussions from class.