Course one · the attention economy
Media as Universe
Why were we never built for this — and what breaks first in a business that depends on us not noticing?
Media as Universe
Why were we never built for this — and what breaks first in a business that depends on us not noticing?
First the ground, assumed by nobody: what a medium is, what marketing is for, how influence works, and what Media as Universe names. Then name every weapon operating on you, and find the four places the model that uses them is structurally weak.
Stop writing to profiles. Write to the state someone is actually in when the message arrives.
Take a commercial claim apart, down to its economic, historical and cognitive roots.
Build one thing. Measure what it costs the people who receive it. Read the number out loud.
Students leave with
- One finished artifact
- A measured result, obtained under their own protocol
- A sourced causal analysis of a real claim
Suits
Advertising and communication, marketing and brand strategy, design, media studies, business. The strongest fit of the three for a communication faculty, and the easiest to justify commercially.
Course two · the designer's obligation
Human-Centric and Neuroethical Design
If every interface decision activates or suppresses a cognitive system, what is a designer responsible for?
Human-Centric and Neuroethical Design
If every interface decision activates or suppresses a cognitive system, what is a designer responsible for?
Design as a neurological decision, made daily, at scale, on an unconsenting population.
What behavioural data cannot know. Vulnerability as a state anyone enters, not a category of person.
Consent where there is no consent form, and what is now actionable rather than merely objectionable.
Defend your verdict to a room arguing in good faith for the product you condemned.
Students leave with
- A design review document on a real product
- A verdict they can hold, or amend honestly
- An account of what is actionable, not just wrong
Suits
Design and HCI, product and engineering, psychology, media law and policy. The most portable of the three — it needs a room and nothing else, and runs unchanged as professional training.
Course three · narrative and play
Alternative Storytelling
Why is a story retained when a fact is not — and when is a loop a gift rather than a trap?
Alternative Storytelling
Why is a story retained when a fact is not — and when is a loop a gift rather than a trap?
Disbelief suspended by consent. A fiction you have agreed to is not a lie — and what generative media did to that.
Who holds the goal. Are the mechanics disclosable. Does leaving cost nothing. Then find the one edit at which a mechanic flips.
The same mechanics made extractive, the biases they run on, and where the clinician's boundary sits.
Build it, measure it, then let the players say in their own words what they thought they agreed to.
Students leave with
- One playable or readable artifact
- A mechanic-by-mechanic justification, rejections included
- A measured result, and their players' account of it
Suits
Education and instructional design, serious games and interaction design, health communication, museum and cultural programming. Taught through three built projects: an XR escape room, a flow game, and a journal game on paper.
Why a faculty carries it
Three goals, one system
Your enrolment, their employment, and an attention economy that stops costing people. Three goals — or one result read at three distances?
Three goals, one system
Your enrolment, their employment, and an attention economy that stops costing people. Three goals — or one result read at three distances?
Three parties are looking at this programme, and on the face of it none of them wants the same thing.
Marketing that does not cost the person it reaches.
Work, and a network that outlasts the degree.
Students, and the income that follows them.
Put the three in a room and it reads as a negotiation: the ethics side wants restraint, the students want employability, the institution wants numbers, and somebody has to give something up. It is not a negotiation. All three are claims about one thing — a human nervous system, receiving something that was built to affect it. Three metrics, one substrate. Every view of it is subjective and observer-relative, and every one of them is taken from inside the same system.
So the metrics are not rivals. They are one result, read at three distances.
| Looking at it from | What gets measured | What actually produces that |
|---|---|---|
| The world | What a campaign costs the people it reaches | An offer stated plainly enough to be assessed. A clearer offer converts better — that is the mechanism, not a concession to ethics. |
| The student | A job, and someone who will take the call | One finished artifact, one measured result, and the ability to defend both to a room arguing back. That is a portfolio review, four weeks early. |
| The faculty | Applications, enrolment, income | Graduates who get hired and say where they trained. The slowest of the three, and the only one that compounds. |
The part to push back on. Enrolment volume is an engagement metric, and course one spends four weeks on why engagement metrics are fragile. Taleb's definition is exact: a system is fragile when it benefits from a counterparty's stability and suffers disproportionately from that counterparty's volatility. Run that test on a faculty recruiting on volume and it returns four dependencies, not one of them its own — reach rented from the platforms, a bid into the fixed pool of attention Simon named in 1971, exposure to the same compliance wave the dossier's chapter two documents, and credibility borrowed from rankings it does not set.
Reputation does not behave that way. A graduate who measured what their own work cost the people who received it, and who can show the number, is evidence that does not expire and cannot be outbid. Every trust collapse somewhere else makes it easier to read. That is the case for carrying this programme, and it is also the content of it: the argument and the curriculum are the same object.
Collaboration, and not as a sentiment
Attention is a fixed pool, so competing for it is zero-sum and bidding harder is the fragile move. Trust is not a fixed pool: given, it compounds; betrayed, it does not recover. Competition is the right strategy for a pool and the wrong one for an asset that grows. That is a claim about which asset you are playing for — not a claim about human nature, and not an argument about economics.
The student who did not choose this
Some of them are enrolled because a family insisted. That is not an irrelevant goal; it is a depleted one. Fast thinking, reaching for relief rather than information — the restoration-seeking state, which course one spends a week learning to read. A programme about reading the state of the person in front of you has to include the one in the seat.
Timetabling
Taking one, two or all three
No course requires another. Hours are stated so they map onto your own credit framework.
Taking one, two or all three
No course requires another. Hours are stated so they map onto your own credit framework.
| Taken as | Weeks | Hours | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Any one course | 4 | 48 | A complete short course with its own deliverable and defence. The usual entry. |
| Courses one and two | 8 | 96 | Diagnosis then obligation. For a faculty wanting an ethics strand with teeth. |
| Courses one and three | 8 | 96 | Critique then construction. For education, serious games, health communication. |
| All three | 12 | 144 | A sequence, suitable as a certificate or a semester specialisation. |
| Any course, extended | 16 | 32 | The same material as a conventional module at two hours a week. |
| Course | Deliverable | Needs | Ethics review |
|---|---|---|---|
| Media as Universe | Artifact, delta study, causal analysis, oral defence | A studio room and a wall. No laboratory, no equipment, no licences. | Not normally — adult peer volunteers, anonymous self-report, aggregate only |
| Neuroethical Design | Design review document and verdict, presented | Nothing beyond a room. | Not required — no human subjects |
| Alternative Storytelling | Playable artifact, justification, measured result | A studio room and basic prototyping materials. Paper is acceptable throughout. | Required only if a proposal involves minors or patients |
Delivery, in every case
Taught in English with bilingual slides. Four sessions a week of three hours, suitable for a summer session, a short semester or an international teaching week; or sixteen weeks at two hours. No prior design or marketing training assumed.
Documentation
Each course has a syllabus in outcome-based format, with objectives mapped to graduate attributes, hour allocation and assessment weighting tabulated, and a curriculum-ethics component stated.
What holds it together
Four shared instruments
Students use them on their own output in week four, not on a case study.
Four shared instruments
Students use them on their own output in week four, not on a case study.
| Instrument | What it does |
|---|---|
| The five-question gate | Five questions run before anything ships, two of them hard gates. A mechanic that cannot be disclosed does not pass, and softening the language is not a fix. |
| The restoration reading | Three questions before an interaction and three after, averaged. Measures the state the person is left in, indifferent to which mechanics produced it — the same wording and thresholds in all three courses, so results compare. |
| Three cognitive postures | Designed analytical categories describing what a person can receive at the moment of contact, used instead of demographic or psychographic segments. |
| The cost of leaving | Whether a person can stop without it costing them, counted in steps, in lost progress, and in how the design makes going feel. |