Designing Digital Media Products: Value Creation in Artificial Intelligence Production

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents new opportunities and challenges for anyone creating digital media products—from photographers and podcasters to application developers, user-experience (UX) designers, game creators, and learning experience professionals.

This course equips students with the frameworks, tools, and creative confidence to design digital media products that are not only compelling, but desirable, viable, and feasible in today's AI-powered landscape.

Drawing on product thinking, systems thinking, and design principles, students learn to identify user needs, map product ecosystems, and make strategic creative decisions grounded in evidence.

The course introduces key frameworks including jobs-to-be-done, feedback loop analysis, affordance theory, motivation and engagement design, and cognitive principles behind effective multimodal experiences.

Building on these foundations, students engage in a series of hands-on AI labs where they experiment with generative AI across the full creative production cycle, using AI to rapidly generate and explore concepts, personalize content for specific audiences, build interactive experiences, and design for sustained engagement.

Students work in their own chosen medium throughout, whether that is video, photography, audio, web, interactive media, or other learning or educational intervention.

The course culminates in a final product pitch in which students present an original digital media product concept—complete with a working prototype, user insight analysis, and a business case—to a live audience of peers and practitioners.