Course Description:
This course will focus on advanced content strategy, in two senses of “advanced”: both as the next level of the skills taught in the intro courses, and as next wave content strategy as it relates to the advancement of emerging technologies. We will therefore build off of skills learned in the foundational content strategy courses, while looking simultaneously toward the future of the discipline and the hypothetical technologies of tomorrow.
For the advanced skills, we will take deeper dives into some of the core content strategy skills, including journey mapping, information architecture, and teardowns. Our goal with these tools will be to focus on the strategy which informs how we build products that solve real user problems.
We will also look “beyond the screen” to apply these content strategy tools to the Internet of Things, VR, AR, and more future technologies. But to understand the opportunities and challenges these new technologies bring, we will peer into to the future through the lens of science fiction. Science fiction both predicts and influences future technology; for example, in the 1960s Star Trek communicators foreshadowed the flip phones of the 1990s, and video chat existed in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey long before Skype in the 2000s. Because sci-fi explores the human side of technological advancements—especially how people live and interact with these technologies—looking at several science fiction examples will help us think through tomorrow’s user challenges today.
This course will assume you have a basic understanding and familiarity with content strategy principles, so previous experience with content strategy, such as the completion of either COM 585: Multi-platform Content Strategy: A Practical Approach to Immersive & Responsive Content or COM 597: Design + Content: Introduction to UX Content Strategy is recommended (but not required).
University of Washington
Department of Communication