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We are working on an office hours schedule, which will be posted here when finalized.
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, and to treat each other and teaching staff respectfully. Faking attendance, for oneself or another, is an academic integrity violation.
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 allow three missed lectures. If you miss a lecture, 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.
We have strong advice about where generative AI is best used in the course, if at all. The first point is that while there are countless marketers who are trying to scare you into thinking that you will miss out if you don’t use it, people have graduated from Cornell since 1869 without it. Like social media, mercury, and meth, the negative impacts can take a long time to understand, so for this class we’re “leaning out” from AI.
It could be that some of our highly-graded responses used LLMs, but we’re pretty sure that many of the workbooks that did poorly in prior years used AI. None of the AIs currently generate high quality speculative design on their own, and until you are good at speculative design, you won’t know what to ask them.
AI will no doubt give you a reasonable summary of articles. That said, it will be much worse at finding a single compelling quote that struck you. And the summary will be similar to what it gives other students – not great when our graders respond positively to novel takes. Finding a novel SPECULATIVE design from a text through AI is difficult and often wrong without significant investment. The LLM usually defaults to common marketing phrases that are useless in our assignments. We’ve done experiments to find good speculative designs using ChatGPT and its ilk, and in the end it requires so much back-and-forth to get the AI in the right zone for speculative design that it’s easier to do it with your own noggin. So workbooks are not a great place to use AI if you’re concerned about doing well, let alone actually developing a sense of the text.
Where we do actively encourage generative AI is for generating images for some of your workbooks. If your ability to “read” images is a lot better than your ability to make them, as is the case for most of us, you’re in a sweet spot for using AI to create prototypes of designs, show a design in use, etc. Beware that this can be a huuuuuuuuuuuge rabbit hole though, and we’re going to judge the image by what it communicates, not how good it looks. So if there’s weirdness and “chaff” like nonsense text or extra fingers, that is part of your submission. Some of the best workbooks we’ve seen use xkcd style drawings or stick figures, or clip art. Regardless, when we start grading for novelty mid-way through the semester, if you’ve been using generative AI for images, you’ll have to switch to other methods (the reverse is alright too) to get that extra credit.
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 of a percentage 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!
