Multimedia studies is an interdisciplinary field of academics nowadays, which focuses on the understanding of technologies and cultural dimensions of linking traditional media sources with the newer versions of the same. Its scopes can be explained better if the term communication is blended with the visual part of it, or through the concept of communication design. This is because if communication refers to the need and practice of interaction with people around us so as to make sense of the world and to position ourselves in the widespread socio-cultural reality, designing is a science as well to create a plan or a norm, criteria or a custom, for the construction of an object, system or measurable human interaction in business and in society at large. In the complex digital environment around us today, such designing can be thus applied to all transactions that are possible between an individual and their environment and has become a powerful means of reaching out to the target audience. Also, it is such a learning which seeks to attract, inspire, create desires and motivate people to respond to messages, with the objective of creating an impact for the initiator, which can be either to build a brand, move sales, or for general humanitarian purposes.
Considering communication and designing together is a modern systems-based approach, a mixed discipline between design and information-development, concerned with media intervention such as printed, crafted, electronic media or presentations to communicate with people. Thus, the stream of multimedia studies involve a broad spectrum of visual communication, involving editing, typography, illustration, web design, animation, advertising, visual identity design, performing arts, copywriting and professional writing skills applied in the creative industries. Students of this stream learn to create visual messages and how well they could be broadcast to the world in new and meaningful ways. Students learn how to combine communication with art and technology through the disciplines involving how to design web pages, video games, animation, motion graphics and more. The various mediums to get a message across are advertising, graphic designing, industrial designing, information architecture, marketing, technical writing and so on, to become illustrators, graphic designers, web designers, advertising artists, animators, video editors or motion graphic artists, or even printmakers and conceptual artists.
In West Bengal the ‘Brainware University’ is the one of its kind, offering extremely job-oriented full-time undergraduate and postgraduate courses in multimedia studies, and thus leading students of this generation to blend their imaginative thinking and their creative faculty to the technology of the day to meet the growing needs of the mass and media in multiple aspects.
