Tasks Due Today from Week 13

  • Review Week 13 Agenda
  • Complete your Research Project Presentation and come prepared to present!
  • Completed the Art of Noticing task
  • Submit Week 13 Homework Checklist

Check-in (5 min)

Fall 2024 Playlist

Only one class left!

To honor your classmates and let’s all try to attend these final classes, please. 🙂

THINGS TO KNOW

  • All coursework (see Assignments list), including comments on your classmates’ presentations, Reading Responses, Discussion comments, Designer’s Cookbook posts, your final grade survey, and any additional work you’d like to submit or revise, should be posted by Sunday Dec 22nd.
  • Any work you’d like feedback on should be submitted by Week 15. Please notify me if you’d like feedback.
  • Your Grade Survey is due in class Week 15. Your learning reflection and the grade you believe you have earned for this course will be factored into your final grade.
  • If you want to schedule any last-minute meetings about your final grade or anything else, contact me to set up a meeting or with any questions or concerns.
  • Please submit your Stereotype essay for consideration in Many Voices.

Not sure if you are missing assignments or discussion posts? Take a look all of the coursework for this semester on the Schedule page and the Assignments list and look at Student Posts to see your work.

Freewrite – The Art of Noticing (15 min)

Prompt: In your language of choice, write continuously in your notebook for 10 minutes about what you noticed this week when completing the task. Don’t edit, or correct, don’t stop, just write. Feel free to share or not.

This week’s task brought to you by Morgan:

Donate Time

Feeling crunched for time? “[in a study] those who spent time on others reported feeling like they had more time than those who spent time on themselves.” Why would this be? Helping your neighbor clear out his garage is a self-contained accomplishment – something… that has “a specific, tangible impact.” What time donation (however small) can you make this week? Notice how it affects your personal “time famine” or feelings of not having enough time.

ART OF NOTICING

Next Week’s Prompt by Luis:

Follow the Quiet

Go for a walk, but make a point to head out in the direction that seems the most quiet (or least noisy). Keep going until you find the quietest spot in your vicinity that you can. Then stop and be in that place. Absorb it. NOTICE. What do you hear – or don’t hear?

ART OF NOTICING

Activities

Below, find the information covered in this session. Complete all of the following activities, videos, and assignments.

1. Research Project Presentations!

Those who signed up last week will be presenting your Research Projects. Remember, this is a friendly review. The goal is to get feedback from your peers and improve your work.

As your classmates share their presentations, write down some comments and then add them to your classmates’ posts before the end of class – if possible.

View all the Presentation posts by navigating to Student Posts > Research Project.

Give at least 1 comment per presentation. Your comment should be supportive AND helpful!

This is NOT a helpful comment:

“Great presentation, I like it”

A helpful comment offers support, a critique of the content and delivery of the research material, as well as suggestions for improvement:

“Great presentation, NAME. I enjoyed your exploration of XXXX and XXXX. I was especially excited to learn about XXXX and XXXX. I was intrigued by your discussion of XXXX because you presented it by exploring XXXX and contrasted it with XXXX. However, I would have liked to have learned more about XXXXX. Have you considered expanding on XXXX and XXXX? Here are some links about XXXX that I think would be helpful for your future research.”

If we have extra time… Or if you want to learn more!

AI is positioned to alter the future of design. and consumer culture. But if you don’t understand the media, you don’t understand the message

In the first part of this course we looked at Marshall McLuhan’s theories about media and how they relate to and in some cases predicted our contemporary concerns with social media and AI.

Tristan Harris, the founder of the Center for Humane Technology, believes technology “is a simultaneous utopia and dystopia.” The utopia the user experiences = the dopamine hits and efficiency of on-demand everything, and the dystopia = the giant manipulative matrix that we are living in.

Ledger of Harms caused by social media:

  • Today’s youth face unprecedented physical, mental, and social challenges exacerbated by fast-changing tech.
    • Why It Matters: Exposure to unrestrained levels of digital technology can have serious long term consequences for children’s development, creating permanent changes in brain structure that impact how children will think, feel, and act throughout their lives.
  • Technology is extracting our attention, weakening our memory, and driving addiction, loneliness, and depression.
    • Why It Matters: Technology’s constant interruptions and precisely-targeted distractions are taking a toll on our ability to think, to focus, to solve problems, and to be present with each other.
    • Why It Matters: While social networks claim to connect us, all too often they distract us from connecting with those directly in front of us, leaving many feeling both connected and socially isolated.
  • Synthetic media (deep fakes), misinformation, sensationalism, bad actors, and coordinated bots are destroying our information ecosystem.
    • Why It Matters: A broken information ecology undermines our ability to understand and act on complex global challenges from climate change to COVID-19.
  • Maximizing engagement amplifies outrage, deepens divisions, and reduces empathy, which is eroding shared consensus.
    • Why It Matters: Social media platforms are incentivized to amplify the most engaging content, tilting public attention towards polarizing and often misleading content. By selling micro targeting to the highest bidder, they enable manipulative practices that undermine democracies around the world.
    • Why It Matters: Technology integrates and often amplifies racism, sexism, ableism and homophobia, creating an attention economy that works against marginalized communities.
  • Our data is exploited by an industry that extracts our attention, shapes our thoughts and behaviors, and makes us vulnerable to risks – all for profit.
    • Why It Matters: Many tech leaders don’t allow their own children to use the products they build — which implies they’re keenly aware that the products from which they make so much money from pose risks, especially for young users.

Let’s take a look at the state of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE through the lens of design theory and culture.

Artificial intelligence offers massive increases in productivity, expression, and problem-solving. But these capabilities can easily lead to a world with bot-manipulated democracies, massive unemployment, exploitation of children and other vulnerable populations, and a world where no one can tell synthetic media from reality.

Center for Humane Technology
The AI Dilemma: Navigating the road ahead with Tristan Harris

Resources from Human Tech

Don’t forget to check out your colleagues’ Designer’s Cookbook posts! Some really great work here. Thanks to all who contributed!

Week 14 Agenda Checklist

Below are all of the tasks, big and small, for this week. The due date is Wednesday, 11:59 pm before our next Thursday class. Timely completion of these tasks will contribute to your success in this course.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Tasks from the Week 14 Agenda
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