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An up to date version of this syllabus may be found at https://courses.infosci.cornell.edu/info4240/2021fa/.
Instructors: Prof. Chris Csíkszentmihályi (with special guest Prof. Phoebe Sengers)
Lecture: Tu, Th 1:00pm - 2:15pm
Sections: Fridays, various times and locations
The social impact of technologies is typically thought about fairly late, if ever, in the design process. Indeed, it can be difficult at design time to predict what effects technologies will have. Nevertheless, design decisions always “lock in” particular social values early on. In this course, we will draw on science & technology studies, technology design, and the arts to analyze the values embodied in technology design, and to design technologies to promote positive social impact. How can we “read” what social and cultural values technology designs consciously or unconsciously promote? To what degree can social impact be “written into” a technology? How can we take social and cultural values into account in design?
Technical background is not needed for this course, but may be drawn upon if you have it.
Across the contemporary world, technologies are an intimate part of everyone’s daily lives. The act of designing technologies does not simply create efficiencies or functionality; it also offers possibilities for (and constraints on) on our possibile actions, ways of looking at the world, and modes through which we can relate to one another. Designs thus, intentionally or not, embody values—ones we as a community of users sometimes accept, sometimes reject, sometimes build on, and sometimes alter.
This course will equip students to find their own answers to two key questions:
These questions cross between two domains which are not often brought into conversation in undergraduate education: technology design and the social, cultural, and political analysis of technologies. In this course, we will develop a facility to think, speak, and act across these domains using techniques from critically-informed technology design and analysis. These techniques borrow and blend ideas from human-computer interaction, engineering, product design, science & technology studies, and the arts. This course is open to all students from engineering, the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts and design who are interested in reflecting on and improving the role of technology in society. No technical background is required or expected.
This course is oriented to an advanced undergraduate and master’s student audience. An ability to read critically and willingness to take intellectual risks are essential in this course.
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
Graduate students taking this course are registered in 5240, which covers everything in 4240 but adds a parallel layer to the course of 1) understanding the organizational aspect of design for social impact: who is making the design and why? What are the relationships between various entity models (e.g. individual, corporate, non-profit, F/LOSS) and the sorts of designs and impacts they can foster? And 2) extra assignments to codify and convey that understanding. For more details check the 5240 tab above.
You can explore the rest of the syllabus through the navbar at the top of this page by clicking on the other syllabus topics. If you have questions, please contact instructor Prof. Csikszentmihalyi, at cpc83 at cornell.edu.
You can download the full syllabus with all information in a print-friendly format.
Important Note: This syllabus is written in good faith to indicate as well as possible the arc of the course. Things may change, expecially in a pandemic semester.
In order to submit a regrade request, first wait 24 hours after you receive the grade. Requests must be made within two weeks of receiving an on-time grade, or one week of receiving a grade for a late submission. Please submit all regrade requests by filling out the survey below. We ask that you read it carefully, think carefully before requesting a regrade, and note that a regrade may result in a lower grade.
NB: We are working hard for quick, accurate, fair feedback. That said, Gradescope has been very challenging to work with, and there may be errors such as ungraded workbook assignments. In this case you will be granted extra slip days on the next workbook assignment. Please do actively check your assignment submission, and if it lacks a grade or comment, fill out the regrade form.
Please note:
In both lecture and section we aim for robust dialog in a mutually supportive environment. Over and above the campus code of student conduct linked from here we use a course code of conduct derived from the Mozilla and Ubuntu codes of conduct.
Students are expected to come to class on time, whether in person or remote, and to treat eachother and teaching staff respectfully.
You need to log in to Zoom using your Cornell netID to attend lecture/section- Please keep your microphone muted except when it is your turn to talk, and make sure that your screen name is set with your first and last name.
We appreciate that it can be uncomfortable to give the entire class a view into your personal life. In lecture you are not required to have your camera on. As lecturers, though, we have to admit that we love to see you, and to get feedback from you. We do ask you to turn your cameras on when we have small-group breakout sessions of 5 or fewer students; the quality of conversation and co-design improves greatly with a visual channel.
In section, to foster a personal, relational climate and collabroative design work, you are required to have camera on; to accommodate students in special circumstaces, exceptions are possible by contacting your section TA privately.
If you need to step out temporarily during lecture or section, please log out of the Zoom meeting and log back in when you return. This avoids other students having the unpleasant experience of getting into a breakout room to find the other “students” are zombie attenders.
Please treat our Zoom classes as you would in-person class in terms of dress and appearance. Your camera should not reveal anything potentially offensive.Of course, babies, little siblings, grandparents, pets, messy rooms, etc. are fine — we’re all working in unusual locations.
You may use the “Everyone” chat channel to share questions or comments about the lecture; we will also use chat at times for in-class exercises. Public and private chat channels should be used for course-related work. Personal comments or other non-section dialogues should not be sent in Zoom chat, even with friends. Flirting on chat channels is off-topic and may easily be experienced as sexual harrassment, even if this is not your intention. Please remember that anything said on a private chat channel in the Zoom meeting may potentially be seen by the course instructors, and keep your comments on appropriate topics.
It is possible to hand in design workbook submissions and mini-projects up to 7 days after the assignment is due. You will be charged “slip days” for late assignments. A slip day is accrued starting immediately after the assignment is due (i.e. an assignment which is one hour late will incur a full slip day).
Life happens. We believe you are the best judge of when you need a break in the course. Therefore, we allow you some flexibility in handing in your assignments, to use at your own judgement, for situations such as routine illness, minor injuries, interviews, competing workload in other courses, extra-curricular activities, or just the need to take a break. You will have 7 free slip days that you can use to hand homework assignments in late at any point over the semester. For example, you could hand one workbook assignment in 4 days late, and one mini-project 3 days late without penalty. Each slip day beyond the 7 allowed for the course will result in a deduction of 1/2 point from your final grade. Please note that free slip days cannot be applied to the final exam.
Additional homework extensions can only be granted by the professors and are only granted under truly exceptional circumstances. It is wise to save your slip days for illness, sudden personal emergencies, and other unexpected events. We strongly discourage using slip days on your first assignment. Indeed, we encourage you to try to hoard them as much as possible, as semesters rarely become more easy as they go along.
The final exam carries a late penalty of 1 full letter grade (10 points out of 100) per hour late, starting immediately after the final exam is due (i.e. a final exam which is 10 minutes late will incur a full letter grade penalty).
Please note late assignments may be (very) delayed in grading, as they fall outside our regular course rhythm. This means that you may not receive feedback in time to incorporate it into future assignments, which is another reason to avoid using slip days early!
We teach this course with the goal of reaching every student, no matter your circumstances. If you find that issues around ability, family commitments, health problems, religious commitments, legal issues, or other personal situations are impeding your ability to learn in this course, please reach out to the course instructors so we can make a personal plan to help you succeed. Reaching out early, before things get out of hand, makes it easier for us to help you effectively. Nevertheless, do not let being late deter you from reaching out.
Some other resources that might be of use include:
The teaching team owns copyright on all materials we produce. We make as much available publically as we can in order to aid others teaching or taking similar courses. When we cannot make materials public - for example, because it might violate someone else’s copyright - we provide them to course participants in print or through Canvas. These materials should therefore not be provided to any third-party site, even if your intention is to aid other students. To do so is a violation of our copyright. Please trust our judgement about what can be made public and what can’t.
Other instructors from anywhere in the world are welcome to reuse materials, texts, assignment descriptions, policies, or anything else you find useful on this publically available webpage. You do not need to ask permission, although we appreciate hearing it if it’s been useful to you!
The foundation for your work in this class are the course readings, which contain the core course content.
You are expected to 1) have thoughtfully read the day’s reading before coming to class, 2) taken notes on the author’s ideas and arguments, and 3) your thoughts in response. Course readings vary considerably in discipline and difficulty; be aware that a reading’s text length may not correlate to your reading time.
You are responsile for being attentive in lecture, and taking notes. You should be keeping an ear out for the main points of the lecture – often they will be said several times in slightly different ways. We will rarely if ever ask you to recount a date, specific fact, or name from a lecture, but if we mention a name or event you should be familiar with it. An example from the first lecture: You should have written down the main arguments that Nissenbaum and Papenek made, and have a good idea of why OLPC ran into trouble in the field.
After most lectures you’ll have until the following lecture to answer a short Canvas quiz. The quiz will ask some fairly simple questions that refer to the lecture. If you can answer all the questions without a problem, you’ve mastered the important points of the lecture. If you miss them, you’re going to want to either 1) take more careful notes, or 2) think a bit longer before answering; sometimes the question won’t be clear but if you think about individual parts of the story you’ll be able to derive it.
Over the course of the semester, you will document your thoughts and ideas in response to the readings in a design workbook. Each page in your workbook will identify a specific idea from the author’s arguments that caught your attention, and explore its implications through a rough design sketch, annotated with thoughts about how your design relates to, extends, challenges, or otherwise explores the author’s idea you chose to respond to. At the end of each module, you will submit the portion of your design workbook that responds to readings from that module. We strongly suggest that you write up each design response directly after finishing the corresponding reading, rather than waiting until the end of the module. You should expect each design response in your workbook to take about 20 minutes to execute. If you find it taking significantly longer, please visit office hours for aid in tuning up your strategies for crafting responses.
These workbooks are central to the course, and we encourage you to have fun with them. That said, the key to doing them successfully is to show that you understood the reading. At their core, they are like a book review that you can use as a springboard to synthesize something creative each week. But remember: show mastery of the reading first!
Over the course of the semester, you will have several design mini-projects which will help you develop facility in some of the design methods we are learning about in the course. These are each structured a bit differently, and one involves a partner. They are slightly more work than a module’s workbooks.
Your participation in class is essential to your success in the course. In class we will analyze, build on, and debate about the course readings; practice design skills; work on homeworks; and engage in other activities to aid your facility in the course material. We cover material in lecture and section that is not available through any other means.
Sections are not recorded to allow for the privacy of section participants and their contributions. Lectures are not recorded because we’ve found that students who watch videos of lectures retain far less than if they come in person. We’re trying to help you get a good grade. You may note that sections don’t formally affect your grade, but we strongly encourage you to attend unless you are ill, because sections help prepare you for every assignment in the course. How much does attending section help? In previous years, students who did not significantly engage in section received, on average, a full letter lower final grade compared to students who attended regularly!
We do not excuse individual absences in this course. We understand that people will sometimes have family conflicts, job interviews, religious commitments, illnesses, and other reasons why they cannot come to class. If you have a serious situation that will potentially force you to miss a significant number of classes, please contact Prof. Csíkszentmihályi at cpc83 @ cornell.edu or via Ed Discussions to make an alternative plan for covering course material.
The final exam will be a written exam where you craft a critically engaged design analysis and exploration on a topic in current events. You’ll be allowed to choose from several of the design strategies covered in the course. The exam questions (minus the topic and which strategies to use) will be released before exam period so that you can prepare for it.
Grading is not just a matter of numbers, but also of case-based judgment. The instructors reserve the right to adjust grades by up to half a letter grade based on knowledge of your performance not summed up in this tidy formula.
Our expectation is that you are generally aware of the need for academic integrity and self-motivated to achieve it. Issues with academic integrity that have come up in this course in the past have typically arisen because a student was unaware of the specific requirements of academic integrity at Cornell, rather than students trying to “game the system” for their own advantage. Some examples of situations encountered include:
Our teaching staff is required by the university to prosecute for such violations; doing so is particularly sad because they could have been avoided with a bit of pro-active education. We therefore strongly encourage you to take Cornell’s (brief) on-line tutorial on how to avoid unintentional plagiarism if you have not done so already. We particularly encourage taking this tutorial for students whose prior primary education was at a non-US institution, as well as students who come from a substantially different disciplinary orientation than the sciences, social sciences, and humanities (e.g. art, journalism, law). You are responsible for understanding what constitutes academic integrity violations in Arts and Sciences at Cornell. Please contact course staff if you have any questions about how to achieve academic integrity in the context of this class (e.g., proper use of citations).
The teaching team owns copyright on all materials we produce. We make as much available publically as we can in order to aid others teaching or taking similar courses. When we cannot make materials public - for example, because it might violate someone else’s copyright - we provide them to course participants in print or through Canvas. These materials should therefore not be provided to any third-party site, even if your intention is to aid other students. To do so is a violation of our copyright. Please trust our judgement about what can be made public and what can’t.
Other instructors from anywhere in the world are welcome to reuse materials, texts, assignment descriptions, policies, or anything else you find useful on this publically available webpage. You do not need to ask permission, although we appreciate hearing it if it’s been useful to you!
5240 builds on 4240 by focusing on the post-graduation possibilities for implementing social change at scale. In contrast to the 4240 syllabus, it focuses more on organization strategies and how they interact with public good questions. This means that in parallel with the work in the undergraduate version of the class, which aims to sharpen individual understanding of design strategies, graduate students will also be imagining organizational and entrepreneureal models of how to execute designs.
These readings are to be done in addition to the readings on the Schedule page.
Module 1:
Module 2:
Module 3:
Additional Material:
Module 4:
Module 5:
Based on these readings, graduate students will be asked to submit, in addition to each design workbook assignment required of the undergraduates, an additional workbook sketch (one more than the undergrads submit) describing a) a design related to a 5000-level reading and b) a hypothetical individual, group, or orgainzation which made that design.
This 5240 workbook sketch will be two related pages, one each for a) the design and b) the entity that creates that design, based on the constraints in the section below. Think about the relationship between designs you know and the organizations that make them: search/Google, environmental protest/EarthFirst!, cars/Ford, K-pop/BlackPink, racial justice/BLM, etc. Start with thinking about either the particular design, or an organization (see constraints below), and then reverse-engineering the other. This may take several iterative passes until you feel you have a good match, but remember as always that to succeed in a workbook assignment: iterating helps, and you also have to show a mastery of the readings.
Unlike the other workbook entries, neither half of the 5240 workbook entries have to be speculative. On the other hand, they should be novel; don’t make OLPC. Try to dig into the Social Impact side of things – the product should be changing society, not just putting a bandaid on it, or helping in a narrow way a disadvantaged group. Try to get to a core, systemic change that would actually rebalance aspects of society. Not easy! And don’t forget nuance: we are still hoping that you will recognize potential pitfalls of your design, or myopia of your organization.
Here are the organizational constraints required for each module’s single design workbook:
DW1: An individual approach: What’s something that would create a social impact which you desire that you could realistically achieve in the 1-2 year range, starting from the skills that you have now? Please note that for this workbook sketch only, you can use any reading from Module 1, not just the 5240 reading.
DW2: A startup / private company approach: What’s a scrappy for-profit tech company that you could imagine starting, that would be capable of 10x annual growth, but would still be making a positive social impact?
DW3: A F/LOSS or platform cooperative approach: Following the organizational models that Hess and Scholz describe of cooperatives, T+P-OMs, and free/libre approaches, what could you imagine making?
DW4: A Design Justice Network approach: What designs for social justice do you think would be best articulated through a Design Justice approach?
DW5: Propose a new approach: Invent a new type of organization to create a specific technology for social impact. This is the only response of the entire course that does not need to refer to a specific reading, but ideally you will cite various other sources to ground your proposal.
The final will also include an extra essay question on organization, allowing students to demonstrate their ability to synthesize their knowledge.
Readings will be due along with
In addition to the learning objectives outlined on this page, the 5240 version of the course aims to achieve these learning outcomes:
What does it mean to build a technology that has a good impact on society? Can “values” even be built into technology? If not, does this mean designers have no responsibilty? If so, what values do technologies already have? How do they impose these values? How can we start designing with values in mind?
An introduction to the class. We’ll review course mechanics, get a sense of the wide variety of approaches that have been used to design for a good social impact, and consider some of the possible social issues that come up in design.
Post-Lecture quiz.
Last week we started to review how values become integrated into a design. This week we’ll start to learn about Speculative Design, an approach that allows us to expand the framing of a design’s mandate.
Additional resources: A classic reading on how to bring values into the design process along the lines suggested by Nissenbaum: Flanagan, M., Howe, D. and Nissenbaum, H. Embodying Values in Technology. In Information Technology and Moral Philosophy. Jeroen van den Hoven and John Weckert (eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 322-353.
Nissenbaum: How Computer Systems Embody Values
Papanek: Do-it-Yourself Murder
McDonough and Braungart: Towards a sustaining architecture for the 21st century
We’ll adapt Gaver’s design workbook technique as a method to explore cultural and social issues in and through the early stages of design.
Additional resources: Note: these papers, like many on the syllabus, are available only if you are logged in on Cornell networks. An easy way to get access from off campus is to use the Cornell Library’s Passkey plug-in. Not feeling confident about sketching? For a great how-to, see Mike Rohde’s article on sketching as a design tool. Another awesome paper describing design work drawing on speculative design is Gaver and Dunne: Projected realities. For more on how we can think about designs as a form of conceptual reflection, see Bill Gaver and John Bowers. 2012. Gaver and Bowers: Annotated Portfolios interactions 19, 4 (July 2012), 40-49.
This is a practice run. You’ll create one single-page design workbook in response to one of the readings due before this date (your choice!), and submit it to gradescope.
You will be graded and receive feedback as if it were a regular assignment, but it’s graded pass/fail, with any reasonable submission passing.
We’ll continue honing our skills at speculative design as a way to explore conceptual issues related to design.
Pierce and Paulos: Some variations on a counterfunctional digital camera
Bleecker: “Part 1: Design Fiction”; pp 3-8 only of Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact, and fiction
What does it mean to say that a technology design has a certain social ‘impact’? How can we understand the consequences of design?
Edgerton: Significance chapter of Shock of the Old – available in the course reader
We’ll look at a detailed example of designers aiming for social impact with their design. In part, they achieved these aims; in others, they were wildly off. We’ll use this case to think through the complexities of how to approach social impact through design.
Scott: The High-Modernist City (in reader)
One way in which we might create a positive impact is by using technology to persuade people to think or act differently, by providing new forms of information or by suggesting different ways to see what is happening around them.
Designing software and hardware to persuade people to alter their ways of thinking or their behavior, and thereby contribute to solving social problems.
Additional resources: Another useful how-to for persuasive technology: Fogg: Creating persuasive technologies: An eight-step design process
Fogg: Persuasive computers: perspectives and research directions
Consolvo et al.: Designing for behavior change in everyday life
Froehlich et al: UbiGreen
Design workbook covering all readings in Unit 1, to be submitted in Gradescope by 10pm.
How can - and should - we use information visualization to make a point?
Additional resources: Here is a great overview on how to address accessibility in data visualizaion, in such a way that you make things more understandable for everybody. Some other useful tactics for designing compellingly persuasive information campaigns include the following: Principle: Make the invisible visible (by Nadine Bloch) (Beautiful Trouble, pp 152-153); Principle: Bring the issue home (by Rae Abileah and Jodie Evans) (Beautiful Trouble, pp 106-107); and Show, Don’t Tell (by Doyle Canning, Patrick Reinsborough and Kevin Buckland) (Beautiful Trouble, pp 174-175)). What to do with your visualization? How about Tactic: Guerilla Projection (by Samantha Corbin and Mark Read) (Beautiful Trouble, pp 52-53).
We’ll 1) look at using game design to communicate political points of view, and 2) do another in-class exercise around the miniproject. We’ll also be doing a 3) quick recap of the first and second module, and we’ll end with a 4) special 5240 catch-up session (undergrads can leave early!).
The goal of this project is to give you hands-on practice in designing technology to persuade or inform.
Reflecting on the politics and experience of persuasion. More readings than usual, if you’re short on time skip the Leslie.
Additional resources: In class, I’ll also be covering this argument: Brynjarsdottir et al: Sustainably unpersuaded. This is a good summary and might work for you, but is unloadable for some students: Leslie: The scientists who make apps addictive try passkey explained in the texts page!
Schull: Digital Gambling: The Coincidence of Desire and Design
Williams: An Anxious Alliance
How do you decide what the problem is you are trying to solve? How can we expand our imaginations about how technologies - or non-technologies - can make change?
Additional resources: What are some other options for making social change? Beautiful Trouble is full of them. How about organizing a strike (by Stephen Lerner) ? Or jury-rig some solutions (by Gui Bueno)?
Liboiron: How the Ocean Cleanup Array Fundamentally Misunderstands Marine Plastics and Causes Harm
Liboiron: Against Awareness, For Scale: Garbage Is Infrastructure not Behavior
Reinsborough and Canning: Theory: Points of intervention
Code and algorithms form a contemporary infrastructure for our organizations, work, and social life. What kinds of impacts do they have on how we behave, alone and together? How can or should technical infrastructure be designed for better social outcomes?
How do political issues become embodied in the details of how computer programs work? How could they become embodied in new ways?
Additional resources: An oldie but goodie - Introna and Nissenbaum: Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matter. This article explores the political consequences of search engine algorithms. It was the first landmark article to argue that search engines shape our political discourse, intentionally or unintentionally. While this article was written before the launch of Google (was there such a time?), its analysis is still relevant to search engines today.
Gillespie: The relevance of algorithms
Smucker: Principle: Seek common ground
What is infrastructure exactly, what are its effects, and what should we consider when designing it?
Additional resources: Another guide to infrastructure, with some suggestions for design: Star and Bowker: How to infrastructure.
Jackson, Edwards, Bowker and Knobel: Understanding infrastructure
Design workbook covering all readings in Unit 2, to be submitted in Gradescope by 11:59pm.
Full list of acceptable readings here.
Intervening in work infrastructures to shape new outcomes.
Irani and Silberman: Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk
The goal of MP2 is to think how you’d redesign infrastructure for a particular social impact.
How are work infrastructures shaping how we will work in the future? What kinds of voices can workers have in them?
Also: How do algorithms ‘build in’ societal biases, and what can we do about it?
Additional resources: A great article about how algorithms should be managed: Michael Luca, Jon Kleinberg, and Sendhil Mullainathan: Algorithms Need Managers, Too. Also, Kate Crawford: Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem
Karen E.C. Levy: The Contexts of Control: Information, Power, and Truck-Driving Work
Vera Khovanskaya and Phoebe Sengers: Data Rhetoric and Uneasy Alliances: Data Advocacy in US Labor History
Sweeney: Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery
Until now, marketers, engineers, and designers have mostly been in the driver’s seat. Here we expand beyond experts in technology - how can individuals and communities be involved in design decisions that affect them? Can we use this to improve the design of technology and its impact?
Developing methods and philosophies for designing technology directly with non-technically-trained participants.
Additional resources: Some concrete examples of participatory design exercises: Brandt: Designing exploratory design games; Kyng: Designing for cooperation: cooperating in design; Foverskov and Binder: Super Dots.
Design Workbook 3 is due Sunday, 10/24 by 11:59pm. Allowed readings from Module 3 are here.
4240: Three readings.
5240: Three readings + a fourth based on Module 3 5240 readings, comprising of 1 page design + 1 page entity.
How can technologies be used by citizens to have a say in how they are governed? What role can designers play to support such conversations?
Additional resources: If you’re interested in the Community Playbook, you can find more details here: Creating a Sociotechnical API.
Erete and Burrell: Empowered Participation
Asad and LeDantec: Creating the Atlanta Community Engagement Playbook
No lecture today. Meet with your participatory design partner to finalize your design. Course staff will be available in the lecture slot for zoom office hours to help if needed.
Please see this ED post for the link to the zoom meeting.
Art practices intended to engage communities and develop their abilities to comment on issues that matter to them.
Miranda: How the art of social practice is changing the world, one row house at a time
Davis: A critique of social practice art
Preemptive Media: AIR
Technologies act not only through what you can do with them but also through the ways they shape our imaginations of what technology could be, who it could be for, and what kind of lives it could fit into. In this section we’ll look at the social meanings of technology and how to design explicitly to use and reflect on this dimension.
Sometimes - perhaps much of the time -the primary impact of a technology is not what it does, but how it shapes our imaginations of what is possible or should happen.
Cancelled! Catch up with your life!
Everyone needs a break sometimes. Take one today.
Additional resources: Principle: Pace yourself (by Tracey Mitchell) (Beautiful Trouble, pp 158-159); and note Laurie Penny’s argument in Life-hacks of the poor and aimless that being critical of the idea of individual responsibility for wellness embodied in so many apps these days does not mean it’s not OK to take care of yourself
Critical design as a strategy for reflecting on the social implications of technology and the design process itself.
Additional resources: Just because it’s ‘critical’ doesn’t mean we don’t need to be critical about it - see e.g. Questioning the ‘critical’ in Speculative & Critical Design.
Dunne & Raby: Chapter 4, Design Noir (in reader)
Design Workbook 4 due 11:59pm. Allowed readings from Module 4 are here.
4240: Three readings.
5240: Three readings + a fourth based on Module 4 5240 readings, comprising of 1 page design + 1 page entity.
Imagining alternative technological worlds and histories which start from experiences of the African diaspora.
Additional resources: Black Panther is the most widely known recent example of Afrofuturism; read more about that connection here. Yaszek’s Race in science fiction: The case of Afrofuturism is a great overview and history of Afrofuturist science fiction and how it imagines new futures. Jasmine Weber describes a design lab dedicated to Afrofeminism: An Afrofeminist Project Uses Technology to Empower Marginalized Communities. Woodrow Winchester describes how to leverage Afrofuturism in interaction design: Afrofuturism, inclusion, and the design imagination.
Womack: Evolution of a space cadet (in the course reader)
Nelson: ‘Making the impossible possible:’ An interview with Nalo Hopkinson
Sargent: Afrofuturist museum mines artifacts from the future
Refining design techniques to express and question values and futures in design.
We’ll review where we’ve come and plot out paths moving forward.
Design workbook covering all readings in Unit 5 AND Unit 6 to be submitted in Gradescope by 11:59pm.
4240: Maximum of three readings, from a combination of Units 5&6.
5240: Maximum of three readings as above + a fourth proposing a new type of design on one page and an entity on another with a focus on diversity, comprising of 1 page design + 1 page entity.
Allowed readings from Module 5 are here.
In this final section of the course, we will look at how ideas we have looked at in the class are playing out in the world.
How do IT developers in Silicon Valley frame how they are making a difference? What kind of a difference are they making?
Additional resources: Issues about Silicon Valley’s take on how social change happens have been hitting the news a lot. See, for example, Arieff’s Solving all the wrong problems. Another take on who tech developers and designers are supposed to be, and the ideas of change embodied in them can be found in Lilly Irani: Hackathons and the Making of Entreprenuerial Citizenship.
Miniproject 4: Critical Design due 11:59pm.
A list of Critical Design Strategies.
What alternative framings of technology innovation exist if we stop assuming Silicon Valley is its center?
We’ll review where we’ve come and plot out paths moving forward.
2 hour take-home, open book, open internet, individually taken final to be completed in the 24 hour period starting at noon. You will receive the exam brief through email.
Study materials available here.
2 hour take-home, open book, open internet, individually taken final to be completed in the 24 hour period, starting at noon. You will receive the exam brief through email.
Study materials available here.
The course uses a “digital only” course reader, which you can purchase from the Cornell Store. We only include articles or chapters that cannot be shared any other (legal) way. There is no paper reader – once purchased you will be able to download it.
The rest of the course readings are available on-line. To access many of these readings through the links, you will need to be on the Cornell network, or logged in to the Cornell library through a proxy using your NetID. You can find out more about how to do this here.
Abileah, Rae, and Jodie Evans. “Principle: Bring the Issue Home.” Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, edited by Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell, OR Books, 2012. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/j.ctt1bkm5nd.
Arieff, Allison. “Opinion / Solving All the Wrong Problems.” The New York Times, 9 July 2016. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/solving-all-the-wrong-problems.html.
Aronoff, Kate, et al. “The Dark Side of Bill Gates’s Climate Techno-Optimism.” The New Republic, Mar. 2021. The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/161533/bill-gates-climate-vaccines.
Asad, Mariam, et al. “Creating a Sociotechnical API: Designing City-Scale Community Engagement.” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2017, pp. 2295–306. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/3025453.3025963.
Asad, Miriam, and Christopher A. Le Dantec. “Creating the Atlanta Community Engagement Playbook.” Atlanta Studies, 9 Nov. 2017. www.atlantastudies.org, https://www.atlantastudies.org/2017/11/09/mariam-asad-and-christopher-le-dantec-creating-the-atlanta-community-engagement-playbook/.
Avle, Seyram, and Silvia Lindtner. “Design(Ing) ‘Here’ and ‘There’: Tech Entrepreneurs, Global Markets, and Reflexivity in Design Processes.” Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2016, pp. 2233–45. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/2858036.2858509.
Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde. http://www.ayo.io/argus.html. Accessed 2 May 2021.
Baby Names at BabyNames.Com - The #1 Site for Names & Meanings. babynames.com, https://babynames.com/. Accessed 9 June 2020.
Bannon, Liam J. “From Human Factors to Human Actors: The Role of Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction Studies in System Design.” Readings in Human–Computer Interaction, edited by RONALD M. Baecker et al., Morgan Kaufmann, 1995, pp. 205–14. ScienceDirect, doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-051574-8.50024-8.
Bennett, Michael. “What Black Panther Could Mean for the Afrofuturism Movement.” Slate Magazine, 20 Feb. 2018. slate.com, https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/what-black-panther-could-mean-for-the-afrofuturism-movement.html.
Bleecker, Julian. “Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction.” Near Future Laboratory, vol. 29, 2009. nearfuturelaboratory, https://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/design-fiction-a-short-essay-on-design-science-fact-and-fiction/.
Bogost, Ian. “Playing Politics: Videogames for Politics, Activism, and Advocacy.” First Monday, Sept. 2006. journals.uic.edu, doi:10.5210/fm.v0i0.1617.
Boyd, Andrew. “Prefigurative Intervention.” Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, edited by Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell, OR Books, 2012. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/j.ctt1bkm5nd.
Boyd, Andrew, and Dave Oswald Mitchell. Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. OR Books, 2012. newcatalog.library.cornell.edu, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bkm5nd.
Brandt, Eva. “Designing Exploratory Design Games: A Framework for Participation in Participatory Design?” Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Participatory Design: Expanding Boundaries in Design - Volume 1, Association for Computing Machinery, 2006, pp. 57–66. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/1147261.1147271.
Brooks, David. “Opinion / A Really Good Thing Happening in America.” The New York Times, 8 Oct. 2018. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/opinion/collective-impact-community-civic-architecture.html.
Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. The MIT Press, 2018. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.7551/mitpress/11022.001.0001.
Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, et al. “Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2012, pp. 947–56. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/2207676.2208539.
Cairo, Alberto. Emotional Data Visualization: Periscopic’s “U.S. Gun Deaths” and the Challenge of Uncertainty / Peachpit. 2013, https://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2036558.
Consolvo, Sunny, et al. “Designing for Behavior Change in Everyday Life.” Computer, vol. 42, no. 6, June 2009, pp. 86–89. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1109/MC.2009.185.
Crawford, Kate. “Opinion / Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem.” The New York Times, 25 June 2016. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html.
“DataVizChallenge.Org: Visualize Your Taxes.” DataVizChallenge.Org. www.datavizchallenge.org, http://datavizchallenge.org/. Accessed 4 May 2020. Note: This resource may have been taken down by Google. See video about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N118ePe_uzk.
Davis, Ben. A Critique of Social Practice Art / International Socialist Review. isreview.org, https://isreview.org/issue/90/critique-social-practice-art. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Dörk, Marian, et al. “Critical InfoVis: Exploring the Politics of Visualization.” CHI ‘13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2013, pp. 2189–98. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/2468356.2468739.
Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. August, 2001.
Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Erete, Sheena, and Jennifer O. Burrell. “Empowered Participation: How Citizens Use Technology in Local Governance.” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2017, pp. 2307–19. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/3025453.3025996.
Ewing, John. Virtual Streetcorners / Beautiful Trouble. beautifultrouble.org, https://beautifultrouble.org/case/virtual-streetcorners/. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Flanagan, Mary, et al. “Embodying Values in Technology: Theory and Practice.” Information Technology and Moral Philosophy, edited by Jeroen van den Hoven and JohnEditors Weckert, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 322–53, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511498725.017.
Fogg, BJ. “Creating Persuasive Technologies: An Eight-Step Design Process.” Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, Association for Computing Machinery, 2009, pp. 1–6. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/1541948.1542005.
Foverskov, Maria, and Thomas Binder. “Super Dots: Making Social Media Tangible for Senior Citizens.” Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, Association for Computing Machinery, 2011, pp. 1–8. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/2347504.2347575.
Froehlich, Jon, et al. “UbiGreen: Investigating a Mobile Tool for Tracking and Supporting Green Transportation Habits.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2009, pp. 1043–52. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/1518701.1518861.
Gaver, Bill, and John Bowers. Annotated Portfolios / Interactions. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2212877.2212889. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Gaver, Bill, and Heather Martin. “Alternatives: Exploring Information Appliances through Conceptual Design Proposals.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2000, pp. 209–16. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/332040.332433.
Gaver, William. “Making Spaces: How Design Workbooks Work.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2011, pp. 1551–60. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/1978942.1979169.
Gaver, William, and Anthony Dunne. “Projected Realities: Conceptual Design for Cultural Effect.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 1999, pp. 600–07. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/302979.303168.
Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Relevance of Algorithms.” Media Technologies, The MIT Press. www.universitypressscholarship.com, https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.001.0001/upso-9780262525374-chapter-9. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Hancock, Jay. “They Pledged to Donate Rights to Their COVID Vaccine, Then Sold Them to Pharma.” Kaiser Health News, 25 Aug. 2020, https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/.
Hustwit, Gary. Objectified. 2009, https://www.hustwit.com/objectified.
“If We Want Design to Be a Tool for Liberation, We’ll Need More Than Good Intentions.” Eye on Design, 22 July 2020. eyeondesign.aiga.org, https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/for-design-to-truly-be-a-tool-for-liberation-were-going-to-need-more-than-just-good-intentions/.
Irani, Lilly. “Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, vol. 40, no. 5, SAGE Publications Inc, Sept. 2015, pp. 799–824. SAGE Journals, doi:10.1177/0162243915578486.
Irani, Lilly C., and M. Six Silberman. “Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2013, pp. 611–20. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/2470654.2470742.
Jackson, Steven J., et al. “Understanding Infrastructure: History, Heuristics and Cyberinfrastructure Policy.” First Monday, June 2007. firstmonday.org, doi:10.5210/fm.v12i6.1904.
Khovanskaya, Vera, and Phoebe Sengers. “Data Rhetoric and Uneasy Alliances: Data Advocacy in US Labor History.” Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, 2019, pp. 1391–403. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/3322276.3323691.
Kyng, Morten. “Designing for Cooperation: Cooperating in Design.” Communications of the ACM, vol. 34, no. 12, Dec. 1991, pp. 65–73. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/125319.125323.
Leslie, Ian. “The Scientists Who Make Apps Addictive.” 1843, Oct. 2016. www.1843magazine.com, https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-scientists-who-make-apps-addictive.
Levy, Karen E. C. “The Contexts of Control: Information, Power, and Truck-Driving Work.” The Information Society, vol. 31, no. 2, Routledge, Mar. 2015, pp. 160–74. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/01972243.2015.998105.
Liboiron, Max. “Against Awareness, For Scale: Garbage Is Infrastructure, Not Behavior.” Discard Studies, 23 Jan. 2014. discardstudies.com, https://discardstudies.com/2014/01/23/against-awareness-for-scale-garbage-is-infrastructure-not-behavior/.
—. “How the Ocean Cleanup Array Fundamentally Misunderstands Marine Plastics and Causes Harm.” Discard Studies, June 2015. discardstudies.com, https://discardstudies.com/2015/06/05/how-the-ocean-clean-up-array-fundamentally-misunderstands-marine-plastics-and-causes-harm/.
Lipartito, Kenneth. “Picturephone and the Information Age: The Social Meaning of Failure.” Technology and Culture, vol. 44, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, Mar. 2003, pp. 50–81. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tech.2003.0033.
Luca, Michael, et al. “Algorithms Need Managers, Too.” Harvard Business Review, no. January–February 2016, Jan. 2016. hbr.org, https://hbr.org/2016/01/algorithms-need-managers-too.
Lucas D. Introna, Helen Nissenbaum. “Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters.” The Information Society, vol. 16, no. 3, Routledge, July 2000, pp. 169–85. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/01972240050133634.
Maack, Már Másson. “Whether Technology Is Good or Bad Depends on the People That Create It.” The Next Web, 13 Dec. 2017. thenextweb.com, https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/12/13/whether-technology-is-good-or-bad-depends-on-the-people-that-create-it/.
Mazzucato, Mariana. Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Myths in Risk and Innovation. Anthem Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cornell/detail.action?docID=1076687.
McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. “Towards a Sustaining Architecture for the 21st Century: The Promise of Cradle-to-Cradle Design.” Industry and Environment, vol. 26, no. 2, 2003, pp. 13–16. c2c-centre, http://www.c2c-centre.com/sites/default/files/McDonough%20-%20Towards%20a%20sustaining%20architecture%20for%20the%2021st%20century-%20the%20promise%20of%20cradle-to-cradle%20design_0.pdf.
Miranda, Carolina A., and Carolina A. Miranda. “How the Art of Social Practice Is Changing the World, One Row House at a Time.” ARTnews.Com, 7 Apr. 2014. www.artnews.com, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/art-of-social-practice-is-changing-the-world-one-row-house-at-a-time-2415/.
Nelson, Alondra. “‘Making the Impossible Possible’AN INTERVIEW WITH NALO HOPKINSON.” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 2 (71), Duke University Press, June 2002, pp. 97–113. read.dukeupress.edu, doi:10.1215/01642472-20-2_71-97.
Nissenbaum, H. “How Computer Systems Embody Values.” Computer, vol. 34, no. 3, Mar. 2001, pp. 120–119. IEEE Xplore, doi:10.1109/2.910905.
Papanek, Victor J. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. [1st American ed.], [1st American ed.], Pantheon Books, 1972.
—. “Do-It-Yourself Murder.” Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, edited by Victor J Papanek, [1st American ed.], [1st American ed.], Pantheon Books, 1972, pp. 65–95.
Penny, Laurie. “Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless.” The Baffler, July 2016. thebaffler.com, https://thebaffler.com/war-of-nerves/laurie-penny-self-care.
“Persuasive Computers: Perspectives and Research Directions.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1998, pp. 225–32. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/274644.274677.
Pierce, James. Working by Not Quite Working: Resistance as a Technique for Alternative and Oppositional Designs. https://kilthub.cmu.edu/articles/thesis/Working_by_Not_Quite_Working_Resistance_as_a_Technique_for_Alternative_and_Oppositional_Designs/6724283.
Pierce, James, and Eric Paulos. “Some Variations on a Counterfunctional Digital Camera.” Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2014, pp. 131–40. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/2598510.2602968.
“Political Economics of Design: Funding Trumps Form or Function.” FuturePlaces, 10 Oct. 2015. futureplaces.org, http://futureplaces.org/2015-schedule/political-economics-of-design-funding-trumps-form-or-function/.
prado, luiza, and Pedro Oliveira. “Questioning the ‘Critical’ in Speculative & Critical Design.” Medium, 31 Aug. 2017. medium.com, https://medium.com/a-parede/questioning-the-critical-in-speculative-critical-design-5a355cac2ca4.
Preemptive Media :: AIR. http://www.pm-air.net/. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Pulliam-Moore, Charles. “Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Isn’t Just Another Black Superhero.” NPR, 16 Nov. 2014. NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/11/363413255/marvels-black-panther-isnt-just-another-black-superhero.
Reinsborough, Patrick, and Doyle Canning. Points of Intervention / Beautiful Trouble. pp. 250–53. beautifultrouble.org, https://beautifultrouble.org/theory/points-of-intervention/. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Rohde, Mike. “Sketching: The Visual Thinking Power Tool.” A List Apart, 25 Jan. 2011. alistapart.com, https://alistapart.com/article/sketching-the-visual-thinking-power-tool/.
Russell, Joshua Kahn. Take Leadership from the Most Impacted / Beautiful Trouble. beautifultrouble.org, https://beautifultrouble.org/principle/take-leadership-from-the-most-impacted/. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Sargent, Antwaun. “Afrofuturist Museum Mines Artifacts from the Future.” Vice, 22 May 2016. www.vice.com, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8qv34x/afrofuturist-museum-artifacts-from-the-future.
Schulz, Thomas. Tomorrowland: How Silicon Valley Shapes Our Future. www.spiegel.de, https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/spiegel-cover-story-how-silicon-valley-shapes-our-future-a-1021557.html. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Scott, James C. “The High Modernist City.” Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1998.
Smucker, Jonathan Matthew. Seek Common Ground / Beautiful Trouble. beautifultrouble.org, https://beautifultrouble.org/principle/seek-common-ground/. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Spinuzzi, Clay. “The Methodology of Participatory Design.” Technical Communication, vol. 52, no. 2, Society for Technical Communication, May 2005, pp. 163–75. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/28277/SpinuzziTheMethodologyOfParticipatoryDesign.pdf.
Star, Susan Leigh, and Geoffrey C. Bowker. “How to Infrastructure.” Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences of ICTs, Updated Student Edition, SAGE Publications Ltd, 2010, pp. 230–45. SAGE Knowledge, doi:10.4135/9781446211304.
Sweeney, Latanya. “Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery.” Communications of the ACM, vol. 56, no. 5, May 2013, pp. 44–54. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/2447976.2447990.
“The Infrastructural Power Beneath the Internet as We Know It.” The Reboot, 22 Apr. 2021, https://thereboot.com/the-infrastructural-power-beneath-the-internet-as-we-know-it/.
“The Valley and the ‘Swamp’: Big Government in the History of Silicon Valley.” CHM, 10 Oct. 2019. computerhistory.org, https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-valley-and-the-swamp-big-government-in-the-history-of-silicon-valley/.
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