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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.