The B.A. in Communication Arts and Design Practice aims to integrate critically informed creative design practices with theoretical analysis of multimodal forms of representation and public processes of meaning-making. The Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo offers an ideal site for the analysis, investigation, and interrogation of the relationship between embodied theories of communication and different forms of creative production. Our faculty pursue distinct and overlapping areas of research and creative activity in the areas of digital arts communication, performance theory and practice, and communication as a process of communal and public meaning-making. Existing faculty expertise in related research, creative work, and pedagogical practices support this plan through foregrounding the demands and possibilities of designing communication texts, visual representations, as well as embodied and mediated performances in a variety of public settings. The plan understands “Communication Arts” as studying modes of digital media production, performance, and personal as well as public communication; while “design practice” refers to the making of experimental, working models of ideas, objects, systems, and processes that help us imagine and achieve more productive forms of relationality among people, places, and things. As a communication arts program, students will work in the full range of material, digital, and performative media. This academic plan is committed to rigorous theoretically-informed practice; project-based, interdisciplinary and collaborative pedagogy; and experiential learning.