Tasks Due Today from Week 13
- Complete your Research Project Presentation and come prepared to present!
- Completed the Art of Noticing task
Check-in (5 min)
Only one class left!
To honor your classmates and let’s all try to attend these final classes, please. π
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 β 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? β[in a study] those who spent time on others reported feeling like they had more time than those who spent time on themselves.β Why would this be? Helping your neighbor clear out his garage is a self-contained accomplishment β somethingβ¦ that has βa specific, tangible impact.β What time donation (however small) can you make this week? Notice how it affects your personal βtime famineβ 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!
2. The Digital Revolution
The late 90s to early 2000s marked the transition from hand-crafted graphic design to digital design. The Internet boom at the dawn of the millennium welcomed millions of online users. Computer-aided design was no longer just an option; it became a necessity. The 2000s were a decade of great political and social change. Designers were called to respond to the excesses of capitalism and consumerism in design and focus on ‘pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills.’
Below, review the videos and text to explore the digital revolution, the impacts of technology, and the push for social responsibility in the field of design.
As one millennium ended and another began, digital technology fundamentally transformed graphic design. Old avant-garde issues of authorship, universality, and social responsibility were reborn within societyβs newly decentralized networked structure.
Helen Armstrong
Tech Tranformation – 1990’s
In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer. It would revolutionize the entire design industry, but it took a while for the industry to change. I was in art school in the early 1990s, and we used the first release of Photoshop 1.0. It was slow, clunky, and honestly painful to use (we would run a filter and go out for coffee!), but the results were nothing like we had ever seen before. What kind of revolutionary tech have you experienced recently?
Let’s watch The Digital Revolution from Graphic Design History on LinkedIn Learning to gain an overview of the time period, the advent of the personal computer, and its effects on the design industry. Watch from 1:57:58 – 2:01:49 on LinkedIn Learning via your Library Card.
Activity: As you watch, take note of the dates and designers who experimented with these new tools. Also, note how once again changes in technology radically altered the field of design and the role of a designer.
The Internet – 2000’s
At the turn of the 20th Century, photography and printing revolutionalized communications. At the turn of the 21st Century, the new digital technologies of the computer and the internet change the field of communication design again.
In the early years of the internet, graphics were limited and the design standards that we know and use today were often ignored. It was the wild west. After many years, designers began to see the importance of user experience. A focus on universality, the grid, visual/information hierarchy, and minimalism drove much of the design aesthetic in web design because it allowed designers to put content and the user experience first. Today anyone anywhere can author a website and this has changed the role of the designer once again.
Activity: As you watch this video, note that it’s from 2012. What has happened to mobile/app development in the last 15 years since this video was produced? And at the effects of social media on society, how has the optimistic utopian vision of the internet changed?
Consider your own experience as a consumer and a creator. Most of you grew up with the internet. How has your use of the web changed in your lifetime? Do you have nostalgia for the “old days”?
3. New Paradigms – AI is the Message
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 McLuhanβs 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:
- Todayβs 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 childrenβs 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 β all for profit.
- Why It Matters: Many tech leaders donβt allow their own children to use the products they build β which implies theyβre 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
Resources from Human Tech
- Ledger of Harms – List of hidden harms caused by social media
- The Dark Side of Social Media – Infographic showing hidden harms
- Tech Experts speak about the existential threat of social media (Video)
- A New Agenda For Tech Presentation (video)
- AI Town Hall (video)
- The AI Dilemma (video)
4. Designer’s Cookbook
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.
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