Computational Media
Mission Statement
The Computational Media Department (CM) engages in boundary-pushing research and education that integrates technical, interpretive, and design work to create human-centered media that address complex problems for societal impact.
These are the core values we hold, which form the foundation on which we perform work and conduct ourselves as scholars, researchers, and members of communities:
• Impactful: We create media, experiences and ways of understanding that have an impact in the world we live in.
• Socially responsible: We actively perform research and education that benefit society at large and advance social goals.
• Open: We embrace diverse ideas, disciplines, approaches, concepts, and methods in our work and community.
• Boundary-pushing: We are forward facing while being reflective of the past.
• Collegial: We engage in partnership across our communities in a respectful manner.
• Address “messy” problems: We are unafraid of handling real-world problems that are naturally messy.
CM hosts the Expressive Intelligence Studio, Social and Emotional Technology Lab, Assistive Sociotechnical Systems for Individuals with Special needs, Creative Coding Lab, Alternative Learning Technologies and Games Lab, Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Human-Robot Interaction Lab, Tech4Good Lab, Augmented Design Lab, Software Introspection Lab, and the Design Reasoning Lab.
CM also hosts the Center for Computational Experiences, a cross-disciplinary center that is home to games and HCI researchers across UC Santa Cruz.
Contact Us
For questions/comments regarding the undergraduate program: cm-ugrad@soe.ucsc.edu
For questions/comments regarding the graduate program: cm-grad@soe.ucsc.edu
For general questions about the Computational Media department: cm-questions@soe.ucsc.edu
News
Games and Playable Media faculty to discuss future trends at IndieCade Festival
Many videogames are designed to draw the player ever deeper into the world of the game. At Katherine Isbister's Social Emotional Technology Lab at UC Santa Cruz, however, researchers are interested in games that draw players' attention to the world around them and create different ways of engaging... Read More
UC Santa Cruz students to show VR projects and videogames in public showcase
UC Santa Cruz invites the public to experience the future of games and virtual reality at one of the country’s largest student game festivals: the annual Sammy Showcase. The event includes opportunities for the public to play videogames created by graduate and undergraduate students from both... Read More
GameSpace offers a playable visualization of 16,000 videogames
Finding information about videogames can now be a game in itself, thanks to researchers at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media. They created GameSpace, a playable visualization of 16,000 videogames grouped according to common features and displayed in 3-dimensional space like a... Read More
