Online syllabus: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/sengers/Teaching/INFO4240/index.php
Instructors: Vera Khovanskaya and Phoebe Sengers
Lecture: Tu, Th 1:25-2:15 in Klarmann Hall KG70
Sections: Fridays, various times and locations
The social impact of technologies is typically thought about fairly late, if ever, in the design process. Indeed, it can be difficult at design time to predict what effects technologies will have. Nevertheless, design decisions can inadvertently "lock in" particular 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 to promote positive social impact. What social and cultural values do technology designs consciously or unconsciously promote? To what degree can social impact be "built into" a technology? How can we take social and cultural values into account in design?
Technical background is not needed for this course, but may be drawn on if you have it.
Course Philosophy
In the modern world, technologies are an intimate part of everyone's daily lives. The act of designing technologies does not simply create functionality; it also offers possibilities for and constraints on action, ways of looking at the world, and modes through which we can relate to one another. Designs thus, intentionally or not, embody values—ones we as a community of users sometimes accept, sometimes reject, sometimes build on, and sometimes alter.
This course will equip students to find their own answers to two key questions:
- What values do specific technology designs embody, and how and to what extent do they do so?
We will look at current and historical case studies of design interventions to identify ways in which technologies can, intentionally or unintentionally, promote specific values and to analyze how those values play out in practice in the complex worlds of everyday life. - How and to what extent is it possible to design technologies to reflect specific values?
We will examine and practice a variety of design methods intended to incorporate values in design, and analyze their benefits and drawbacks.
These questions cross between two domains which are not often brought into conversation in undergraduate education: technology design and the social, cultural, and political analysis of technologies. In these course, we will develop a facility to think, speak, and act across these domains using techniques from critically-informed technology design and analysis. These techniques draw on and blend ideas from human-computer interaction, engineering, product design, science & technology studies, and the arts. This course is open to all students from engineering, the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts and design who are interested in reflecting on and improving the role of technology in society. No technical background is required or expected.
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.
Learning objectives
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Articulate how and to what extent values are built into designed artifacts in early stages of the design process
- Identify relevant values issues that arise in a particular technology design
- Use the design workbook method to explore social implications of design and to ideate new design possibilities
- Appropriately deploy a variety of design strategies that aim to address values issues
- Weigh the possibilities and limits of different strategies for considering values in design, and identify values commitments inherent in these design strategies themselves
- Create technology designs which reflect varying value commitments in response to a design brief
- Recognize and comment on issues in values and design in everyday life
- Construct a compelling argument that builds on documented evidence and the arguments of others
For further information
If you have questions, please contact instructor Vera Khovanskaya, at vdk9 at cornell.edu.
You can download the full syllabus with all information from this website in print-friendly format.
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.
How have values been thought about as part of design? We'll look at key perspectives from technology and product design.
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.
We'll continue honing our skills at speculative design as a way to explore conceptual issues related to design.
What does it mean to say that a technology design has a certain social 'impact'? How can we understand the consequences of design?
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.
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.
How can - and should - we use information visualization to make a point?
A nice example of political visualization is the Data Viz Challenge, a contest to generate visualizations of where your tax dollars go.
Using game design to communicate political points of view..
Reflecting on the politics and experience of persuasion
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?
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?
What is infrastructure exactly, what are its effects, and what should we consider when designing it?
How do algorithms 'build in' societal biases, and what can we do about it?
How are work infrastructures shaping how we will work in the future? What kinds of voices can workers have in them?
Intervening in work infrastructures to shape new outcomes
Until now, 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.
Art practices intended to engage communities and develop their abilities to comment on issues that matter to them
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?
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.
Everyone needs a break sometimes. Take one today.
Critical design as a strategy for reflecting on the social implications of technology and the design process itself.
Refining design techniques to express and question values and futures in design
Imagining alternative technological worlds and histories which start from experiences of the African diaspora.
How do IT developers in Silicon Valley frame how they are making a difference? What kind of a difference are they making?
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.
Assignments Overview
All homework assignments will be submitted through the on-line Course Management System. If you log in and do not see our course listed, please email Palashi at send a private message to the course instructors on piazza and request to be added to CMS.
Reading
Design responses
Over the course of the semester, you will document your thoughts and ideas in response to the readings in the form of design responses. A design response is an informal document which identifies a specific idea from the reading that caught your attention, and explores its implications through a rough design sketch, annotated with thoughts about how the design relates to, extends, challenges, or otherwise explores the idea you chose to respond to. Every Monday starting Sept 16, you will submit 2 design responses to readings from the week. One will respond to a reading of your choice for the upcoming Tuesday, the other to a reading of your choice for the upcoming Thursday. For days when there are no readings assigned, there are no corresponding design responses due. You should expect each design response to take about 20-30 minutes to execute. If you find it taking significantly longer, please visit office hours for aid in tuning up your strategies for writing responses.
In the first unit of the course, we will build up to full design responses through writing responses, in which you identify an idea of your choice from the text and briefly explain its role in the overall argument in simple written form. You will also hand in writing responses rather than full design responses on the Monday after you have a miniproject due.
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. If you miss class, you are strongly recommended to review not only the class slides (which are often minimalist) but also notes from one of your co-students, and take advantage of our office hours to ask any clarifying questions that remain.
We assess your participation qualitatively, incorporating our knowledge of your attendance and engagement in both lecture and section.
In class, we have frequent, brief in-class writing assignments. The primary purpose of these assignments is to (a) give you a chance to develop your course understanding by applying it immediately, (b) seed course discussion with your ideas without having to necessarily speak in front of others, and (c) evaluate how well the class as a whole is understanding specific aspects of course content. These assignments are not directly calculated into your grade but will influence your participation grade. At their discretion, the TAs reading these assignments will also award extra credit for superlative answers, things that make them say "wow!" and really show engagement with the class. Extra credit from lecture activities will boost your participation grade.
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, and our baseline for good attendance allows for missing up to 2 sections and 4 lectures. If you have a serious situation that will potentially force you to miss a significant number of classes, please contact instructor Vera Khovanskaya at vdk9 @ cornell.edu to make an alternative plan for covering course material.
Design mini-projects
Over the course of the semester, you will have 5 design mini-projects which will help you develop facility in the design methods we are learning about in the course. For example, you may develop a design activity, try it out in class on your classmates, and then document the results.
Final exam
The final exam will be a written exam involving a critically engaged design analysis and exploration on an assigned topic in current events. The exam questions, minus the topic, will be released in November so that you can prepare for it.
Grade breakdown
- 10%: Participation
- 5%: Writing responses
- 30%: Design responses
- 40%: Design mini-projects
- 15%: Final exam
Grading is not just a matter of numbers, but also of 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
My 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 my courses in the past have been frequently due to students being 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 I have 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'.
Late policy
Written and design responses may be handed in up to 3 days after the assignment is due, and miniprojects may be handed in up to 5 days after the assignment is due. In either case, the assignment will incur a late penalty. The late penalty is 1/2 letter grade (5 points out of 100) per 24 hours late, starting immediately after the assignment is due (i.e. an assignment which is one hour late will incur a full 1/2 letter grade penalty).
The final exam carries a late penalty of 1 full letter grade (10 points out of 100) per 3 hours 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 homeworks may be (very) delayed in grading, as they fall outside our regular course rhythm. Late final exams may result in a temporary grade of incomplete for the course.
Extension policy
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:
- You may hand in 1 of your design mini-projects up to 5 days late without penalty. We will apply this credit automatically to the first late mini-project.
- You may skip 1 writing response entirely without penalty.
- You may skip 1 design response entirely without penalty.
Additional homework extensions can only be granted by the professor and are only granted under truly exceptional circumstances.It is wise to save your late pass and skipped responses for illness or family emergencies and unexpected events such as interviews.
Addressing special circumstances
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 in this course. Reaching out early, before things get out of hand, makes it easier for us to help you effectively, but do not let being late deter you from reaching out. Some resources that might be of use include:
- Office of Student Disability Services
- Cornell Health CAPS (Counseling & Psychological Services)
- Undocumented/DACA Student support: In the Dean of Students office, contact Kevin Graham ( Kevin.Graham @ cornell.edu ) and see this list of campus resources
Regrade policy and grading explanations
Questions about why you got a grade may be answered by any TA. You may also ask any TA whether they think it would be a good idea to ask for a regrade. However, no one on the TA team is actually allowed to change a grade once released, even if it is obviously, egregiously wrong. This power is reserved for Vera Khovanskaya.
It is our aim in this class to grade fairly and clearly. If there has been a serious error in grading, we want to know about this and fix it. You can let us know about a potential issue by requesting your assignment to be regraded.
There are two kinds of regrade requests in this course:
- The first kind is a mechanical regrade. These are clear, indisputable problems such as: the TA added my points up wrong; the TA took off a late fee but I had gotten an extension; I got someone else's comments on my assignment. These regrade requests are handled by sending an email to Vera at vdk9 @ cornell.edu or by private note to Vera on piazza. You can also approach Vera in person in class or at her office hours.
- The second kind is a regrade that requires some judgement. These include issues such as: the TA may have misinterpreted the rubric; I got graded one way but my friend got graded another; I don't think the number of points I got for this is really fair, given what I did. These kind of regrade requests generally require some discussion, so that we can fully understand your point of view. You can submit this kind of regrade request in person by attending Vera's's office hours. If you cannot make the office hours, please contact her by email to make an appointment for a regrade request.
Please note:
- Regrade requests must be submitted within 2 weeks of receiving your grade.
- Changes in grade that are based on differing interpretations will be registered if they are at least 3 points different from the originally assigned grade. Smaller changes are within normal intergrader variance, not a sign of a serious grading error.
Textbook
The course uses a course reader, which you can purchase at the Cornell Store. Please purchase this reader immediately; it is printed on demand so you may find that there are no copies available for instant purchase.
The rest of the course readings are available on-line or will be handed out in class or via piazza. 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.
Bibliography of course readings
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Arieff, Allison, 2016. Solving All the Wrong Problems. The New York Times, July 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/solving-all-the-wrong-problems.html?_r=1.
Avle, Seyram and Silvia Lindtner. 2016. Design(ing) 'Here' and 'There': Tech Entrepreneurs, Global Markets, and Reflexivity in Design Processes. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 2233-2245. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858509
Bleecker, Julian, 2009. Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction. http://drbfw5wfjlxon.cloudfront.net/writing/DesignFiction_WebEdition.pdf.
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Blume, Kathryn. Principle: Enable, Don't Command. In Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell, eds., 2012. Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. OR Books. http://beautifultrouble.org/principle/enable-dont-command/
Bogost, Ian, 2006. Playing Politics: Videogames for Politics, Activism, and Advocacy. First Monday, Special Issue Number 7: Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace. http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1617/1532.
Boyd, Andrew. Tactic: Prefigurative Intervention. Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell, eds., 2012. Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. OR Books. http://beautifultrouble.org/tactic/prefigurative-intervention/
Brandt, Eva, 2006. Designing Exploratory Design Games: A Framework for Participation in Participatory Design? In Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Participatory Design: Expanding Boundaries in Design Pp. 57-66. ACM. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1147261.1147271.
Brynjarsdottir, Hronn, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce, Eric Baumer, Carl DiSalvo, and Phoebe Sengers, 2012. Sustainably Unpersuaded: How Persuasion Narrows Our Vision of Sustainability. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 947-956. ACM. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2208539.
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