Courses on offer
Master of Cross-Disciplinary Art and Design
Courses on Offer
You can tailor your study to suit your own needs by choosing from a wide range of different art and design electives each semester.
Please see the Program overview page to understand how the core and elective courses relate to each other. As part of your study, you can select from our completely online postgraduate electives, and as an additional option, may also choose a number of face-to-face postgraduate electives offered by COFA to compliment your online study. The fully online courses available include:
Core Courses
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COFA0990 Cross-Disciplinary Art and DesignThis course is the foundation component of the core series of study in the Master of Cross-Disciplinary Art and Design. The course is divided into two areas: an introductory study into cross-disciplinary creative practices; and, approaches and advice on how best to study and learn within a solely online context. Throughout the course, you will be introduced to terminologies and definitions that will begin to establish, or further develop, your own understanding and appreciation of cross-disciplinary creative approaches. Following lectures and coursework activities, written and presented by academics and professional practitioners, you will be required to initiate development of a personal learning portfolio. This will not only document your progression through this core sequence of study, but aims to draw together aspects, issues and creative discoveries you make whilst studying your elective choices in the program to begin the process of working creatively in a cross-disciplinary nature.
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COFA0991 Cross-Disciplinary Art and Design 2Throughout this course, you will be presented a series of essays, written specifically by a variety of academics and creative practitioners worldwide, about approaches to cross-disciplinary art and design practice. Through differing perspectives, the essays aim to further extend your own knowledge of terminologies and definitions regarding cross-disciplinary creative approaches. You will be asked to demonstrate your level of understanding by beginning to form a rationale regarding relationships and potentials of contemporary cross-disciplinary approaches to your own creative practice.
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COFA0992 Cross-Disciplinary Art and Design 3This final core course aims to refine your critical thinking skills and your capacity for creative problem solving. You will reinforce your awareness and appreciation of the diversity of creative approaches across disciplines, giving you the flexibility to adapt to changes in industry by being able to integrate new cross-disciplinary creative connections, knowledge and skills within your own practice. This course will guide you in formulating your own cross-disciplinary creative process, that you will apply in the final project of your Creative Portfolio. Beginning with a rigorous critical reflection of the previous two stages of your Portfolio, you will examine your own creative strengths and weaknesses as revealed by past peer and lecturer critiques and analysis, and identify specific disciplinary strengths.
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Discipline-Specific Electives
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COFA0901 Graphics & Contemporary SocietyThis fully online course comprises a series of lectures, learning activities and assessment tasks introducing topical issues in contemporary graphic design and its significance in society. These issues include form and function in communication design, pictorial and narrative structures in visual communication, systems of icons and symbols as a global visual language, and the influence of technology on aesthetics and visual experience.
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COFA0902 Design, Interactivity and Emerging MediaThis fully online course comprises a series of lectures, learning activities and assessment tasks that seek to discover and understand the underlying language of interactivity. The content includes a broad history of interactive media, questions existing conventions of interactivity, and explores the notions of play and interactive design. The course aims to develop a set of ideas, approaches and practices that are essential to the creation of engaging interactive experiences.
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COFA0905 Curating Art and ExhibitionsToday’s contemporary art practice includes temporary and site-specific projects, screen-based, digital and online art. The role of the curator, whether museumbased or freelance, has changed dramatically with the emergence of these new art practices. This course investigates key exhibitions and art projects internationally, providing a range of approaches to curating art today. It focuses on new models of exhibition-making both in traditional and alternative art venues, including public art.
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COFA0907 Textiles: Technology and the BodyIn 20 years time, will clothes be intelligent, self cleansing, or grown from a living layer of tissue? This fully online course will look at the exciting possibilities of the future of textile design in relationship to the body including wearable fabrics, clothing, extensions and accessories. Developments in textile technology are evolving at a rapid pace, with innovations that will allow you to reassess what textiles for the body can be. The course will look at textile design in relationship to both the surface and structure of a ‘fabric’. By experimenting with your own individual projects you will examine the influence of traditional processes on technology and how traditional techniques utilise new technology.
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COFA0908 Fashion 1980 - NowWhy do high-heeled shoes feature in the television series Sex and the City? How are fashion, gender and sexuality linked? Why can women now wear a cheongsam dress and trainers? Fashion history and theory is one of the most rapidly developing areas of humanities research, drawing upon new theories of the body, social space, surfaces, ephemerality and popular culture. This course examines fashion as a vehicle of self-fashioning since the 1980s.
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COFA0909 Cross Cultural SculptureThis is a practical sculpture course that will introduce the student to ways of making culturally blended, contemporary sculpture and installation art through online projects. The influence of colonialism, migration, globalisation, mass media, cultural displacement, multi-culturalism, travel and tourism will be examined. Studio theory components will enhance awareness and understanding of how and why contemporary artists often blend and quote diverse cultural practices in their artwork.
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COFA0910 Visual Identity in the Built EnvironmentIt may seem obvious why a fashion boutique stamps a big logo on the front of its commercial premises, however, ask yourself: why do local councils label street signs in their municipality with a council emblem, or why do public parks nowadays have a logo designed to represent them? Most environments we encounter on a daily basis have been designed to carry a specific visual identity or brand. The course explores a range of commercial and non-commercial spaces. It examines how visual identity has been programmed into these spaces and how this affects the user-experience.
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COFA0911 Print Advertising for a World MarketThis course considers such issues when looking at cross-cultural representation and perception in graphic advertising design. It invites you to analyse some interesting advertising design case studies, with emphasis on print media advertising from magazine ads to billboard posters. Nowadays, with many companies trying to sell their goods in the global market, there is a claim that the developed world has evolved into a global monoculture. Nevertheless, designers and entrepreneurs still need to be aware of cultural nuances.
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COFA0912 Textiles for Interiors - Senses and SpacesExploring various dimensions of visual aesthetics, you will learn about contemporary trends in textile and interior design, and possible futures of textile design using new digital technologies. These will be placed in an overview of the context of an historical timeline. Through personal analysis, shared experiences and observation, you’ll understand more about how textiles affect your home and work environments. This online course offers you opportunities for both individual and collaborative learning activities. These will include problem solving, critical thinking and establishing design outcomes that support you in developing a heightened awareness of the sensory and spatial influences of textiles on interior settings.
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COFA0913 Contemporary Aesthetics in Digital ArchitectureHow will tomorrow’s built and landscaped environments look and feel? In these first few decades of the digital age, the planet’s leading architects have been discovering the creative potentials of on-screen design tools which behave very differently from pens, slide rules and paper. You will examine how emerging convergences of diverse technologies are influencing how architects aim to reinvent the way buildings look and feel - not only to answer humanity’s next challenges but to continue telling humanity’s stories through aesthetics.
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COFA0914 Creative Thinking ProcessesThis course introduces you to some of the many tools that can facilitate creative thinking. Visual, verbal and physical techniques will be used to help participants understand and apply creative thinking principles such as interconnectivity, non linear (associative) thinking, and use maps, models and metaphors.
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COFA0915 Society Through the LensThis course introduces participants to an emerging and rapidly growing discipline, Visual Sociology. As a field that is providing new methods with which to document, evaluate and consequently better understand society through the lens, it is of increasing importance worldwide.
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COFA0917 The Art of Scientific VisualisationHow have imaging and visualisation technologies changed our lives? This fully online course will offer a critical framework for examining the contemporary and historical crossovers and collaborations between art, science and medicine. It will highlight the problems and challenges involved in such collaborations, as well as investigating how relationships between these disciplines have evolved from the seventeenth century to the present time.
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COFA0918 Experiencing and Understanding ArtThis online course will help give you a better understanding and appreciation of art. You will learn how to observe and appreciate art from different perspectives, and will be asked to draw on experience and knowledge from your own area of study. Sharing your own perspective with others, and learning how to broaden and contextualise your understanding of artwork and exhibitions are key elements to this course.
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COFA0919 Digital Illustration for Concept ArtThis course aims to take you through the world of concept art with a focus in its digital pre-production process. The course will have both practical and theoretical aspects about how to use digital tools to produce concept art more effectively. This course will be useful for anyone who wants to experience the process of creating concept art using digital tools.
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COFA0920 Spatial Design - Retail, Exhibition & HospitalityWhen did trade fairs evolve into innovative exhibition design? Why did ‘flagship stores’ replace the importance of shopping centres? When did chain hotels give way to boutique resorts? What are signature restaurants and concept stores? The design of interiors, spaces or buildings relating to retail, hospitality and exhibition design has changed dramatically over the past 20 years.
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COFA0921 Draw Your WorldHave you ever wished you could draw something from your imagination or from the real world so other people could understand it? This fully online course will introduce you to techniques that will help you to accomplish this. You will learn how to use the key elements of drawing: line, tone, proportion and composition and to understand their expressive uses through experimentation with a broad variety of media including charcoal, pen, pencil, ink and chalk.
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COFA0922 Unraveling Urban DesignThis course will take you through a progressive series of lectures drawing on historical and contemporary examples of urban design so that you will be equipped with a strong skill in spatial literacy and urban design potential.
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COFA0923 Visualising the PastEvery time any of us walk into a museum, stroll about our neighbourhood, or browse thorough our city, we will inevitably be confronted by visual reconstructions of the past. It is paramount that we are fluent with knowing how integrated they are into our understanding of the past and essential to be able to analyse them from a standpoint that sees them more than pretty pictures. Our appreciation of our own culture and cultures earlier than ours depends on interpreting the images made to visualise the past.
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COFA0925 Creative Character DesignThis fully online course would suit anyone who wishes to explore characterisation for their own portfolio, the web, comic or 3D worlds. Through individual and collaborative exercises participants will explore considerations required for strong and visual and enduring characters for the screen, page and game environments.
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COFA0927 Performance ArtThis course introduces students to the practice of Performance Art by focusing on practical work. Performance Art is situated within broader shifts in Contemporary Fine Arts Practice of the Twentieth century. This course seeks to allow students to focus specifically on Performance Art creation and engaging in critical discussion informed by the History/Theory of such practices using the online environment. You will be introduced to key turning points in Performance Art and its emergence as a visual arts practice, independent of other dramatic or performative forms.
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COFA0928 Making Digital HologramsThis advanced digital hologram course will familiarise you with the workflow process and technical/aesthetic issues involved in creating and rendering computer graphic scenes for conversion into digital holograms. The course will begin by introducing you to the relevant aspects of 3D modelling, lighting and texturing in Maya necessary for the creation of a holographic scene. No previous knowledge of Maya or 3D is necessary. For your major project, you will work toward a final composition, render out its images, and send it via the Internet to an international holographic company. They will convert your files into a hologram and post the finished work to you. An extra cost of approximately AU $225 is necessary (depending on exchange rates) to cover the production cost, shipping and an optional viewing stand and lamp to optimally display the final work. Please click the link to the handbook entry to see the technical requirements for this course.
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COFA0930 Managing CreativityThis course will help you understand the processes required to develop a conceptually based project into one that can be practically realised. By applying management theories, you will understand how to take creative output from a restricted/idealised conceptual domain into the public domain of exhibitions, commissions, responses to design briefs etc. You will need a previously conceptually developed art or design project to use as the basis of your study.
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Other Courses of Interest
SDES0915 Creative Thinking Case Studies
Through analysis and critical discussion of various case studies of creative innovation, students will learn to understand more clearly what happens when the creative mind is at work.
