Individual assignments

• Design Workbook
• Miniproject 1: Persuasive technology OR Political Visualization
• Miniproject 2: Infrastructural design
• Miniproject 3: Participatory design
• Miniproject 4: Critical design

Assignments Overview

Reading

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.

Lecture

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.

Design workbooks

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!

Design mini-projects

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.

Class participation

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.

Final exam

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.

Grade breakdown

• 5%: Lecture Quizzes
• 40%: Design workbook
• 40%: Design mini-projects
• 15%: Final exam

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.

Academic Integrity

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:

• Not knowing how to properly cite or use non-academic on-line sources, informal sources such as another student’s comments in class, or another person’s ideas (as opposed to their words)
• Not being aware when doing literature reviews that close paraphrasing of someone else’s text is considered a form of plagiarism, even when the original text is cited
• Coming from cultural or disciplinary contexts where it is considered more appropriate to use an expert’s words to express an idea rather than one’s own
• Not being aware that commonly available design ideas (e.g., that come up immediately with a Google search of terms related to the topic or that have been highlighted recently in the news) are not appropriate to submit as one’s own work; they must be directly cited as others’.

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).