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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.
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 ‘’’
