The future of magazines / Magazines of the future

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I've written about the 5th year project course "The future of media" before. We choose a different theme for the course every year and last year's theme was "radio". We've bounced around some ideas for this year's theme and have now settled for "magazines", i.e. The future of magazines / Magazines of the future.

As an interesting aside, I've previously kept the theme a secret right up until the course starts, but have lately felt increasingly less "possessive" of the theme and of keeping it a secret. Now I instead think that it's a good idea for students to know about (and being able to ponder) the theme in advance. (Not that I expect many students to know about the choice of theme in advance as I presume that while some media technology students might read this blog, few will belong to the specific group that will take the course when it starts after the summer...)

Anyway, we have our Monday morning meetings with wildly varying topics at the department and I have written blog posts about some of them before (here and here for example). I claimed one of these meetings and presented the course and this year's theme - and then sat back and listened to my colleagues' suggestions for interesting topics and guests. Here is the invitation that went out by mail before the meeting:

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On Monday 16 April, Daniel Pargman and Åke Walldius will present the project course "The future of magazines / Magazines of the future":

The master's level (fifth year) project course "Future of media" is given for the 10th time during the autumn of 2012. Around 70 students take the course (primarily students from the media technology engineering program and students from the international masters in media management). The last two themes have been "The future of music" (2010) and "The future of radio" (2011) and this year's theme will be "The future of magazines / Magazines of the future".

Daniel and Åke will shortly present the course and this year's theme. Most of the time will be allocated to discussing our collective (magazine) reading habits, as well as to discuss literature and suggestions for interesting guest lecturers that we want to invite to KTH after the summer (the lectures are public and you will all receive invitations to them).

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The Monday morning crowd usually exclusively consists of employees at the department, but I had in fact invited a few others, and we were thus joined by guests from Tidningsutgivarna (TU, Swedish Media Publishers' Association), from Sveriges Tidskrifter (The Swedish Magazine Publishers' Association) and from Swedish media powerhouse Bonnier Tidskrifter (English). That was great and both my colleagues and the invited guests had many exciting suggestions for guests that we might want to invite to the course. Especially the external guests will be useful when I follow up on the proposals and I will for sure call them and ask for information, directions and references to different "roles" (topics) and persons who can fill these "roles".

In general we want to invite guest lecturers (generally around 15-20 or so!) from both academia and the business world. We also make sure to cover technology, economy and interface/use in the choice of guest lecturers we invite (and/or, production, distribution and consumption). We might add sustainability/sustainable development (ex. recycling, environmental footprint) to this list (due both to directions from "above", but also as something that I happen to think is important). I expect our students to divide into a dozen or so project groups and together cover traditional (analog, print) magazines, digital magazines (read on tablets etc.) and also different futuristic combinations and hybrids.

This course/theme is for sure a topic I will come back to on the blog several times during 2012, but perhaps not until after the summer.

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