Rapid and ongoing global changes are forcing educators to consider how students can be supported to navigate these events successfully. Reports from the World Economic Forum (WEF 2018) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2018) highlight the need for developing learner and worker agency and for embedding curricula with projects that develop problem-solving skills; enable deep thinking and reflection; and focus on transferable skills, knowledge, attitudes and values. There is an ever-increasing need for knowledge-based practice in the design industry, and the value of design research in addressing cross-disciplinary challenges has been noted by several government agencies.

Communication design for documentaries is changing with online distribution through global platforms like Netflix. Actuality and entertainment are increasingly often elided in a single program, which confuses the genre categories that tend to underpin the scholarship of documentary as a field of study distinct to that of entertainment. Certain programs are marketed as documentary/docu-series alongside fictional ‘based on real events’ stories and fiction but are constructed as much through significations used in pure entertainment as through those associated with informational and educational media.

Decolonising digital media design education requires an investigation of possible techniques that can be taught to designers as a way of approaching interactive design with an emancipatory agenda. Traditionally, interactive-media studies have been taught from a positivist or psychological stance focusing predominantly on theories of human activity and cognition. In this paper I argue that the humanities offer an additional social and ethnographic lens with which to focus on the socio-historic, political and economic context of interactive media artefacts.