Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 session / week, 2 hours / session

Overview

We live in an increasingly virtual world. We interact over email and IM; we meet new people and keep up with friends via their online profiles. We are continuously building a vast record of our various transactions, a personal portrait in clicks, words and video. And our communications are becoming integrated into the walls of our homes and offices, a ubiquitous blanket of connectivity.

This virtual world is wholly synthetic: the design of the underlying system shapes how you appear, what you can see and hear, and who has access to what. As designers, we are responsible for thinking about the impact of our creations: we can envision a future in which technology expands our sociability, making an extraordinarily creative, communicative and cooperative world, but we can also envision a dystopic future where friendship has become a conduit for marketing and awareness of universal surveillance choreographs our every move.

Requirements

Requirements include weekly readings followed by short writing assignments, three design projects, active class participation and a final project.

Grading

Approximately:

Calendar