51419 & 51619: Design’s Reverberations: Ripple Effects of Innovative Ideas [Fall 2022]
Monday & Wednesday, 4:40pm to 6:00pm ET
October 24th — December 9th
Instructor: Esther Y. Kang → estherka@andrew.cmu.edu
TA: Annie Heyward → aheyward@andrew.cmu.edu
Office hours are by appointment only
Course Description
Design and technology are often associated with the notions of innovation and (societal and individual) progress. This course brings these close ties to the fore by complicating the way design and technology approach identifying the centers and edges of innovation — decisions that ultimately shape the ethos and practice of (emerging) practitioners. The aim of this class is to provide students with an intellectually stimulating and creatively experimental space to develop and articulate their ethos, and, thus, their analysis, and practice, detached from the existing, dominant market(-driven) logic.
For the purposes of re-writing their existing design ethos, students will be introduced to ways to read and analyze a context from multiple perspectives. Throughout the first half of the course, they lay a foundation informed by the critical reading of contexts by asking questions such as hidden for whom? visible from whose perspective? ghostly for whose lived experiences? Students will then draw upon an analytical framework that they develop to identify one quality of the dominant market-driven logic that they want to de-couple from, as they simultaneously identify one quality that is an alternative to exclusively bottomline thinking to incorporate into their practice. For example, a quality from a market-driven logic might be objectivism. An alternative to this might be plurality or placing an emphasis on accounts from lived experiences. The class walks through a carefully curated set of modules to provide students with the space to identify what they want to move away from as they move towards something else in their practice. This class is designed so that students are proactive in bridging any gap between theory and practice. It also aims to make changing one’s design practice accessible while curbing a sense of being overwhelmed by the notion of transformative change.
In this hybrid seminar & studio course, Mondays will be dedicated to short lectures, class discussions, and short in-class activities, and Wednesdays will be dedicated to deep-dive one-time micro-projects that provide students with the opportunity to apply Monday’s learnings with peers. Micro-projects may include visualizing the rhetoric used to convey technological innovation in mainstream journalism, mapping infrastructure from multiple perspectives, including senses, and designing a tour of a space highlighting areas where data is collected.
Students will incorporate their learnings through three assignments: (1) weekly reflective blog posts; (2) micro-projects that take place only during class time; and (3) final presentation of their revised design ethos.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Deconstruct high profile innovations in the fields of design and technology to identify their components and existing indexes of innovation
- Identify absences in the narrative of “innovative ideas” and what the absences indicate socially, culturally, politically, and ecologically
- Identify the underpinning logics that drive innovative ideas’ production and industry’s assessment deeming them ‘innovative’
- Develop artifacts reflecting a critical engagement with a current innovative idea through thick descriptions, storytelling, and multiple senses of what will be referred to as in-class micro-projects
- Develop a personal design (or making) ethos and practice that accounts for this new grammar
Course Structure
This class will be, for the most part, divided into two key parts: Mondays will be introduction to new material and light class discussion, and Wednesdays will be in-class activity where learnings are made tangible. The objective is that each week sheds light on a new dimension to both deconstructing an innovative idea and expanding ways to be innovative.
Assignments
There are three types of assignments: (1) Weekly blog posts, (2) In-class Micro-projects, and (3) Design Ethos. Students should approach each part as a building block that leads to the final product. Each part will receive a letter grade unless noted. In-class assignments will be conducted on Wednesdays and require only class time. Due to this course being a mini, late assignments and resubmissions will not be permitted with the exception of some circumstances.
01: Weekly Blog Posts
This assignment is meant to provide students with a tool to critically reflect on the course content while building out content for their final assignment (Design Ethos) throughout the course. The aim of this assignment is to support students on their learning journey so that seemingly tangential thoughts are captured before they’re forgotten. Students should reflect on the following: “Which concept resonated with me the most? Why?”, “Which concepts am I skeptical of? What does it remind me of?”, “How does this shift my reflections on my practice?” and the like.
02: Micro-projects
Students will be assigned a set of micro-projects to complete in class and present by the end of each class period on a weekly basis. The set includes four micro-project. Each project centers a tool that attempts to be at the convergence of theory and praxis providing designers (of all types) an opportunity to actively reflect on complex concepts through making. The set of micro-projects serves a dual purpose: to ground tangible applications of a cocktail of complex theories and to expand students’ imaginations of what’s possible (with regards to their practice and what may lie beyond their understanding of their disciplines to date). The instructor will assess them based on three core components: 1) presentation of the work at the end of each studio session; 2) legibility of the micro-project upon submission; and 3) application of core concepts from the previous Monday’s lecture. Detailed instructions regarding each micro-project will be shared weekly.
03: Milestone Assignment — Design Ethos
This assignment provides students with an opportunity to develop and articulate a design ethos that carefully and thoughtfully considers provocative claims that unsettle design and introductions to concepts that expand their understanding of instigating change. The goal of the Milestone Assignment is to be a point of critical reflection throughout the course and encourage students to forge deeper connections between theory and praxis. The central objective of this assignment is to address two questions “if I were to unsettle one of the core principles of the design canon, how would that reshape or reorient my design practice?” and “what does this mean for me, in practice, as an emerging designer/maker?” The milestone assignment includes a submission of a proposal and the final presentation.
Expected Schedule
Week 1: Introduction + what does it mean to solve a problem?
Description: Week one will focus on laying a firm theoretical foundation that complicates binary thinking and linear approaches to the current problem/solution design framework often used in social and public sectors (in the US) and in humanitarian work (US aid in non-US countries). This first week will introduce provocations through the works of design theorists and HCI scholars. Students will have an opportunity to critically engage with the texts in a reflexive manner to identify ways, if applicable, they would alter their current understandings and approaches to their making practices.
Monday (10/24) → Introduction + Critical Design Theory
No Readings
Wednesday (10/26) → Critical Reflexivity + Complicating Binaries (Problem/Solution and Designer/User)
Required Readings by Wednesday: Critical Fabulations by Daniela Rosner (pages 9–18) & Do Artifacts Have Politics? by Langdon Winner
Optional Readings: The Co-Constitutive Nature of Neoliberalism, Design, and Racism by Lauren Williams
Week 2: Systems and Assemblages + what makes something innovative?
Description: Week two will focus on making the theories and concepts reviewed the first week tangible and applicable. Through lecture and group discussion, students will be exposed to the distinctions and overlaps between systems thinking and assemblages, in addition to the critiques of both. Students will actively meditate on center-ing and de-centering practices to further investigate the affects of design and ideas that utilize design. Students will be able to conduct their own series of deconstructions through a Taxonomy of (Re)Order exercise.
Monday (10/31) → Contemplating Canonical Concepts
Required Readings by Monday: Telling Impossible Stories by Daniela Rosner, Humanity is Not a (Shopping) Center You Can Design For by Frederick van Amstel, What is the Rhizome? and The Rhizome — A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
Optional Readings: Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power by Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky (Ch. 4, There’s No Such Thing as We: A Theory of Difference)
Wednesday (11/2) → Systems + Assemblages
Required Readings by Wednesday: Can Assemblage Think Difference? A Feminist Critique of Assemblage Geographies by Eden Kinkaid and Systems Thinking 101 by Leyla Acaroglu
Optional Readings: Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown (Intentional Adaptation: How We Change pg. 58–70) and Ethics by Design, or the Ethos of Things by Cameron Tonkinwise
Week 3: Absences and Residue + what indicates omission, and what does omission indicate?
Description: Week three will focus on indications of absences in narratives that portray high profile innovative ideas. This might include aspects of history that have been erased, forms of labor that have been undercut, types of exploitation that have been minimized, environmental hazards that have been undermined, amongst others. Students will have an opportunity to uncover such absences and retell the stories of innovative ideas to then speculate what the results could have been and/or alternatives for the designer/technologist. Students will learn Thick Mapping techniques that draw from UCLA’s Urban Humanities Institute.
Monday (11/7) → Absences + Residue + Guest speaker Jacoub Reyes
Required Readings by Monday: Making Visible: Mediating the Material of Emerging Technology by Timo Arnall (Ch. 1.1 — The Visible and Invisible Landscape of Interfaces, pg. 6–9 and Ch. 1.3 — Making Invisible Materials Visible, pg. 12–16)
Optional Readings: Representation and Media — Definition of Representation by Stuart Hall (1997) and Mapping Abundance by Candace Fujikane (Introduction: Abundant Cartographies for a Planetary Future)
Wednesday (11/9) → [Activity]
Required Readings by Wednesday: HERE LIES DARBY VASSALL: Rendering the Obscured and Concealed History of Slavery at Christ Church Cambridge by Nicole Piepenbrink and For What It’s Worth by Dillon Marsh
Optional Readings: Are We Automating Racism? by Vox (with Ruha Benjamin) [time 10:06–22:53, Auditing Artificial Intelligence]
Week 4: Multi-senses and Mono-senses + what does it mean to understand a place through different senses?
Description: Week four will focus on auditory and olfactory senses as a means to add texture to the understanding, analysis, and articulation of place; these two senses will provide channels to unpacking the effects of climate change, racialized experiences, xenophobic undertones, and so on. This vocabulary provides students with a depth of field that breaks away from mono-senses when contextualizing what currently indexes innovation and what its alternative (or expansion) could be. Students will be able to apply this learning through a Reframing the Narrative exercise where they may create a digital archive through understanding the effects of an innovative idea through these two senses and/or writing two news articles that conducts an evaluation of the innovative idea using the two senses as lenses.
Monday (11/14) → Multi-Sensory, Time + Place with Guest Speaker: Petra Floyd
Required Readings by Monday: Environmental Enmeshments — Eco-olfactory Art: Addressing Pollution by Clara Muller and Does Race Have a Sound? by Nikki Rojas
Optional Readings: Scent and Speculative Futures by Deji Bryce Olukotun
Wednesday (11/16) → [Activity]
Required Readings by Wednesday: Macrophones by Brian House and The Sounds of CDMX by Aaron Reiss and Oscar Molina Palestina
Optional Readings: None
DEADLINE: Friday (11/18 @ 11:59pm ET) → Submit Milestone Assignment: Design Ethos — Proposal
Week 5: Makeshift Practices + who is a designer, and is everyone a designer?
Description: Week five will focus on how designers and non-designers alike adapt to constantly shifting contexts. This module poses the question if everyone is a designer, and, if that is the case, what does that mean with regards to how designers working in industry should approach makeshift practices? This module also reflects on what makeshift practices may indicate about a context and, in turn, approaches to praxis.
Monday (11/21) → Makeshift Practices
Required Readings by Monday: Bordering Designs, Contestation Designs by Silvia Mata-Marín (5.4 Materializing Informality: Affective Infrastructure, pg. 154–162)
Optional Readings: Open Source Sea Chair by Studio Swine
Wednesday (11/23) → NO CLASS
Week 6: Care, Maintenance and Repair + what would a care-centered design practice entail and require?
Description: Week six will focus on the ways care can manifest through designed objects, services, experiences, strategies, and so on. This module considers the micro to the meta with regards to the scale in which care practices, infrastructures, and frameworks may influence how change takes shape while expanding the ways designing can be approached. Week six will continue to introduce new ways of approaching and developing an ethos and practice; its primary objective is to push students to develop their voice within industries saturated with predetermined one world premises, standards, vocabulary, and tastes.
Monday (11/28) Care, Maintenance and Repair
Required Readings by Monday: Introduction by Anad Pandian and Maintenance and Care: Fixing a Broken World by Shannon Mattern
Optional Readings: Reimagining the Internet hosted by Ethan Zuckerman with Are.na Founders Charles Broskoski and Daniel Pianetti
Wednesday (11/30) [Activity] + Guest Speaker: Donna Maione
Week 7: Salon + what will we meditate on, and what will we immediately apply to our practice?
Description: Week seven will be the final event! Students will be allowed to invite up to three people to an invite-only salon event. At this event, each student will be presenting a pecha kucha style presentation on the innovative idea they developed an artifact for (e.g., thick map, taxonomy of order, digital archive), their findings, and the translation they’ve done to apply these findings, informed by the class content, to their design practice. Each presentation will end with meditations they will reflect on for the remainder of the calendar year (or academic year). The instructor will provide non-alcoholic beverages and light hors d’oeuvres for the class and guests.
- Monday (12/5) → NO CLASS
- Wednesday (12/7) → Invite-only Salon
DEADLINE: Wednesday (12/07 @ 11:59pm ET) → Submit Milestone Assignment: Design Ethos / Ethos Statement — Product + Slides from Final Presentation
Policies & Assignment Briefs
For class policies and detailed overview of the assignments, refer to the class Canvas account.
Dates and details may be subject to change.
