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An up to date version of this syllabus may be found at https://courses.infosci.cornell.edu/info4240/2023fa/.
Instructors: Prof. Chris Csíkszentmihályi (starring special guest Prof. Phoebe Sengers)
Lecture: Tu, Th 1:25pm-2:40pm Statler Hall 185
Credits 4, Letter Grade. Pre/Corequisites: None.
Sections: Fridays, various times and locations
The social impact of technologies is typically thought about fairly late, if ever, in the design process. Even though it can be difficult for designers to predict what effects technologies will have, 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 that promote positive social impact. We do this by learning how to develop arguments about technologies — hypotheses that can be discussed, prototyped, and proven or refuted. These arguments take different forms in different assignments, but most take the form of either text or a design.
Key questions we’ll address over the semester include:
Throughout the course, through readings and lectures, we’ll learn from a variety of arguments that others have made about technology and values. Each module contains one or two example “design strategies” that others have used and that you’ll be able to draw from in your future life and career. Throughout the course you’ll have the opportunity to create many conceptual designs, in dialog with the readings and lectures, in order to flex your creative and analytical skills.
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 our daily lives, and often frame one’s choices. The act of designing technologies does not simply create efficiencies or functionality; it also offers possibilities for (and constraints on) our possibile actions, ways of looking at the world, and modes through which we can relate to one another. Designs, intentionally or not, embody (and legislate) values -– ones our communities of users sometimes accept, sometimes reject, sometimes build on, and sometimes alter.
This course will equip students to find their own answers to three key questions:
These questions cross between two domains which are not often brought into conversation in undergraduate education: technology design and the social, cultural, historical, and political analysis of technologies. In this course, we will develop or improve a facility to think, make arguments, and design using techniques from critically-informed technology analysis. This hybrid approach borrows and blends ideas and techniques from human-computer interaction, engineering, product design, science & technology studies, and the arts. This course is expected to serve students from engineering, the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts and design. Even if a student doesn’t go into design, they are subject to countless design decisions, and the course serves to establish a form of literacy in understanding the values behind those decisions. If you are interested in reflecting on and improving the role of technology in society, you’re in the right place.
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.
DTSI facilitates expertise in one area of design: the connection between values and design. It offers an introduction to many design strategies, and dozens of chances to practice conceptual designs. It will undoubtedly transform your relationship to technology and design, but it won’t be the only class you need to become a good designer.
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 use our Ed Discussion channels.
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, especially at the beginning of the semester.
(Γ indicates graduate TA, able to give advice in 5240. α indicates a visual communication specialist)
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. We do a fair amount of work in this class to ensure inter-grader consistency. If you have questions about grading, we ask that you bring them up in private Ed Discussion posts.
Please note:
In both lecture and section we aim for robust dialog in a mutually supportive environment. At a minimum, we expect you to follow the campus code of student conduct linked from here.
Students are expected to come to class on time, whether in person or remote, and to treat eachother and teaching staff respectfully.
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. We expect you to contact other students for notes and to help you catch up on missed lectures or sections. 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.
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 course grade. Please note that free slip days cannot be applied to the final exam or to critiques.
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.
Most students opt to not take the final exam, but 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!
Passages beyond the stated word limits will not be counted toward the assignment. This can have a major impact, so please take word limits seriously.
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. We strongly suggest that you write up each design response directly after finishing the corresponding reading, rather than waiting until the end of the week. You should expect each design workbook response to take about 30 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 tiny book review, but one that you can use as a springboard to synthesize something creative each week. But remember: show mastery of the reading first!
Design Workbooks will be submitted through Canvas. Several times during the semester you’ll put up your workbooks in section and the class will look at and discuss them in a design critique. You must save paper copies of all your prior workbooks to take to critique!
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.
Design mini-projects will be submitted through Canvas.
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. Slip days should help you with these. 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. Otherwise, we expect you to contact other students for notes and to help you catch up on missed lectures or sections.
The optional 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.
If you don’t take the exam, your grade on it will be the same as the points you scored in the other activities divided by 85. IE, if you have received 80/85 (94.11%) points by the end of the semester, and choose not to take the final, you’ll receive (80/85)*15 on the final, making your final exam and your final course score 94.11.
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.
This class adheres to Cornell’s grading scale:
A+ | 98-100% | 4.3 |
A | 93-97% | 4.0 |
A- | 90-92% | 3.7 |
B+ | 88-89% | 3.3 |
B | 83-87% | 3.0 |
B- | 80-82% | 2.7 |
C+ | 78-79% | 2.3 |
C | 73-77% | 2.0 |
C- | 70-72% | 1.7 |
D | 60-69% | 1.3 |
F | Below 60% | 0.0 |
Our expectation is that you are generally aware of the need for academic integrity, and are 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 4240 readings on the Schedule page.
Module 1:
Module 2:
Module 3:
Additional Material:
Module 4:
Module 5:
Rather than separate workbooks, this year 5240 students will take small quizzes on the extra readings, opened on the last day of the module, due three days later. These quizzes are open-text and do not time out.
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.
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
Wiener: Taking Back Our Privacy
This week you’ll practice the first part of a design workbook. Please excerpt a passage (1-4 sentences) that you found especially compelling from ONE of [Nissenbaum, Papanek, OR Wiener] the readings. Write it out at the top of your paper, then write your own passage explaining their idea in your own words (4-5 sentences, usually). Please don’t simply replace words with their synonyms: take a moment, and think of another, clearer way of saying what the author said. This should take about a quarter of a page. Again, to be clear, your submission should 1. be a single page, PDF file (either typed or scanned-handwritten), 2. contain a quote from one of the three readings listed above, followed by a citation* and a summarization of the quote in your own words – example – in the context of the main points of the reading, 3. submitted on Canvas.
The goal of this first part of every design workbook is to demonstrate that you understood (a) major point(s) in the reading. You should be able to present the important (or evocative) passage of the reading you selected, then convince the grader that you have understood how it relates to those major points.
A reminder – all this should be 120 words maximum! This is the first of four important parts of a design workbook, all of which you’ll eventually need to fit on a page. You need to figure out how to be concise and pithy. The example I showed in lecture was only 73 words total. Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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 Access Anywhere 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.
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
Second Design Workbook, covering ONE OF [Gaver, Gaver and Martin, Pierce and Paulos, or Bleecker].
This week you’ll practice the first and second part of a design workbook. For part one, please excerpt a passage (1-4 sentences) that you found especially compelling from ONE of [Gaver, Gaver and Martin, Pierce and Paulos, or Bleecker] the readings. Write it out at the top of your paper, cite it, then write your own passage explaining their idea in your own words and linking it to one or more main points in the reading (4-5 sentences, usually). All this should be 120 words maximum! Please make sure to recapitulate and not simply reword! Take a moment to think of another, clearer way of saying what the author said. This should take about a quarter of a page. This is all just like your first submission.
NEXT, it’s time to try part two of the workbook – the design. Below part one, use about half the page to describe in some combination of text, collage, diagram, drawing, staged photo, or […], represent your design. The representation can (and perhaps should) be annotated – small phrases or sentences that explain parts of the design. Who uses it? What’s it for? What is its lifeworld? While the goal of this first part (Quote & Recap) of every design workbook is to demonstrate that you understood (a) major point(s) in the reading, the goal of the design is to use technology invention to explore the author’s ideas. What is a potential speculative technology that would be in dialogue with these ideas? This might mean accelerating a part of their argument to the logical extreme. It might mean designing something that’s an exception to the author’s points. It might mean shifting the context of the author’s argument to a radically different social, cultural, or psychological space. The design must be in the form of a speculative design… it’s optimized to think with, not to bring to market in a year. A reminder – this is the first half of a design workbook, all of which you’ll eventually need to fit on a single page. Your quote, recap, and design should not occupy more than 3/4 of a page – ideally it should be about 2/3, but you can also play around with formatting as long as it’s easy for a TA to know which parts are which. Due just before lecture, 12:01pm Tuesday Sept. 5 on Canvas.
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)
Third Design Workbook, covering ONE OF [Edgerton, Scott].
This week we add the third quarter of the DW, Two Other Designs. These one-sentence-each designs should, like your main design idea, spring from the quote (even if in an indirect way), and they should help you learn different things about the quote than the first idea. Altogether, the three designs you choose (one large, two small) will help you with the final quarter of the workbook: “What did I learn about the author’s ideas by designing around them?” So if the two other designs don’t help you to learn more than the first idea did, they aren’t contributing to your learning, and aren’t suitable for your workbook.
Friday’s sections are about how to use lifeworlds and “noun substitutions” to help generate the two other designs. What if the first design was made in a different time? A different place? What if users were imagined very differently? By forcing these changes to your design, you’ll probably find new ideas easily. Remember they should be one sentence each, the format of a model sentence is described here.
Together, the first three quarters of this workbook should take roughly 3/4 of a page. Don’t be afraid to choose a small font, so long as it is legible.
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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.
A Guide to Persuasive Affordances: Guide
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
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).
Fourth Design Workbook, ONE from one of [Fogg OR Consalvo OR Froehlich OR Cairo OR Dörk et al.].
ALL FOUR quarters of the design workbook are due for any of the readings above. Please make sure you have submitted:
Full description of how to do a design workbook here.
Due Monday, 9/18, 11:59pm on Canvas.
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!).
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! The FTC released a report last year on “Dark Patterns” in web sites that’s worth looking at if you want to make some quick cash, but hopefully you’ll take the high road. Some chapters of the book “Deceptive Patterns” are also available for free online.
Schull: Digital Gambling: The Coincidence of Desire and Design
Williams: An Anxious Alliance
Fifth Design Workbook, one response on [Bogost OR Schull OR Williams].
Going forward, all workbooks must have these sections:
Full description of how to do a design workbook here.
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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
This lecture will be combined with the lecture on Tuesday Oct. 3. Please do the readings, however!
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
The goal of this project is to give you hands-on practice in designing technology to persuade or inform.
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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?
Sixth Design workbook. Please submit a single one page workbook responding to ONE of [Liboiron, Liboiron, Reinsborough and Canning, Gillespie, OR Smucker].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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
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
Seventh Design Workbook, with a response to [Jackson et. al] OR [Irani and Silberman] OR [Sweeney].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
Intervening in work infrastructures to shape new outcomes.
Irani and Silberman: Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk
This is the first critique for your design workbooks.
Please bring a printout of your three (or more) favorite DWs that you’ve done this semester, ideally in color. We’ll bring tape.
Eigth Design Workbook. Please submit one design workbook with a response to ONE OF [Levy OR Khovanskaya & Sengers, OR Sweeney OR Irani & Silberman].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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.
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
Ninth Design Workbook, a response to ONE of [Spinuzzi OR Erete & Burrell].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
The goal of MP2 is to make an argument for how you’d redesign existing infrastructure (a platform) for a particular social impact.
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
In this lecture you’ll find a partner for your PD miniproject and we’ll workshop some elicitation techniques.
No lecture today. Meet with your participatory design partner to finalize your expert skill (orienting it socially) and elicitaion design. Course staff will be available in the lecture slot for zoom office hours to help if needed:
Join Zoom Meeting https://cornell.zoom.us/j/4094222286?pwd=TUs0RE51WFB6YWpZSzhHQk9wenIrZz09
Meeting ID: 409 422 2286 Passcode: 852317
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
Tenth submission, a response to one of [Miranda, Davis OR AIR].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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.
Why should designers care about history, when we’re trying to create something new? This article by Soden et. al offers important reasons from the perspective of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), a rich sub-discipline in Information Science.
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)
Eleventh dw submission, a response to [Lipartito].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
Lecture today is replaced with an opportunity to do MP3 PD elicitations or final designs. Lecture staff will be available in the lecture hall to help and give feedback.
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
The goal of MP3 is to use and evaluate your experience with participatory design.
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
Twelfth Design Workbook, a response to EITHER [Dunne & Raby] OR [Boyd].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
We’ll review the methods we’ve covered so far in the semester, I’ll distribute a mock exam, and talk through the exam shell.
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
Thirteenth Design Workbook, with an OPTIONAL response to ONE of [Womack, Nelson, Sargent].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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.
An early polemic that analyzed the incipient culture of big tech, Barbrook and Cameron’s The California Ideology hit on several key ideas, including big Tech’s relationship to slavery, and naming the origin of Silicon Valley in an “eclectic blend of conservative economics and hippie libertarianism.” The latter idea that has been further explored by Fred Turner in several books and this article in the phenomenal magazine Logic.
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.
Fourteenth Design Workbook, with an OPTIONAL response to [Schulz].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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.
Miniproject 4: Critical Design
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
A list of Critical Design Strategies
This is the second critique for your design workbooks.
Please bring a printout of your three (or more) favorite DWs that you’ve done since the last critique, ideally in color. We’ll bring tape.
The very last Design Workbook of the year, with an OPTIONAL response to [Avle & Lindtner].
Due 11:59pm on Canvas.
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.
’’’ INFO 4240 001 12/11/2023 2:00 PM Final Exam Online Issued DUE 12/12/2023 2:00 PM ‘’’
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.
Dow Schull, Natasha. 2005. Digital Gambling: The Coincidence of Desire and Design. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597, 1 (January 2005), 65–81. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716204270435
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/.
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