Readings & Schedule

You’ll find readings either linked from below or as PDFs on Google Drive (CMU login required). If you can’t access readings, contact Molly or Nandini. Please note that this page will be updated with more information, so check back as you prepare for class. We will make announcements on the home page and on Slack.

Week 1 (8/31): Introduction and gathering

Monday, 8/31:

Welcome! We’ll talk about the class, Carnegie Mellon, the world, and ourselves. You’ll have a chance to talk and to introduce each other.

To do for 9/2:

Based on your own experiences and your own values, answer the following: what is interaction design? In a discussion board response (located on Canvas), write no more than 300 words.

Then, you will upload a 8 1/2″ x 11″ (or A4) sketch, diagram, or image to support your definition. You may do it in the digital program of your choice, or on a whiteboard, or on paper, with items on your desk or in your home…however you would like to bring it to life. Just keep it to letter or A4 size and post to Canvas by Tuesday night at 7 pm (EDT). We will then put them on Miro so we can walk through them together. Throughout the semester, we will return to these statements to see how they —and you—change.

Bill Moggridge’s famous story about designing the Grid computer and discovering that it was the inside—the interaction—that interested him more than the form factor of the outside.

Reading strategies

There’s a lot of reading in this class, and you’ll be reading differently than you do for pleasure. You should be reading to capture the main arguments and summarizing them in your own terms. Please take a look at Paul Edwards, “How to Read a Book.” Try this method for the readings you’ll do in this class– page 5 is the key. Start by deciding how much time you have to read. Then use your time as follows:

  • Overview: 5-10% of total time
  • Detail/understanding: 70-80% of total time
  • Notes: recall & note-taking: 10-20% of time

Recommended readings:

  • Ed Yong, “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” The Atlantic, September 2020. This is a dire article, and yet it has hope in the closing paragraph. What role can designers play in a pandemic and an eventually post-pandemic world?

Week 2 (9/7 & 9)Antiracism & design justice

Monday, 9/7: NO CLASS (Labor Day)

Wednesday, 9/9

To read:

  • Ibrahim X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, Chapter 2 [CMU Library]. Use this CMU Libraries link (using proxy) to access this book. If you have issues getting it, use the chat function to ask for help from a librarian.
  • Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice, “Design Practices: ‘Nothing about Us without Us” [PDF]

Week 3 (9/14): Race & technology

NOTE: We’ve made changes to this week in order to incorporate Claire Jean Kim’s paper in our discussion about Asian & Asian American experience and race. I will be doing a short, asynchronous lecture on the “Critical Race Theory for HCI” reading that you can view/listen to outside of class.

Monday, 9/14:

To read:

  • Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology [PDF]. Benjamin writes that “race itself is a kind of technology.” We’re going to be looking at the ways that it functions as a technology. We’ll also do some reading aloud of her text.
  • Yolanda Rankin, Jakita Thomas, “Straighten Up and Fly Right: Rethinking Intersectionality in HCI Research,” interactions, November-December 2019.

Wednesday, 9/16

Optional but highly recommended:

  • Ihudiya Finda Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, Angela D.R. Smith, Alexandra To, Kentaro Toyama, “Critical Race Theory for HCI,” CHI’20 Proceedings, 2020. Please see the lecture from 16 September.

Week 4 (9/21): Inclusive design & affordances

Monday, 9/21: Inclusive Design

  • Sara Hendren, What a Body Does: How We Meet the Built World. Excerpts: introduction, “Chair,” 2020. [PDF]
  • Kat Holmes, Mismatch, 2018. Chapter 4, “Inclusive Designers,” and Chapter 7, “There’s No Such Thing as Normal.” Available through the CMU Library.
  • Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit (this is a booklet and is a visual and quick read)

To peruse and watch (optional):

Sara Hendren at CMU School of Design in 2017.

Wednesday, 9/23: Affordances

  • Donald Norman, Design of Everyday Things, Preface, Chapter 1, 2, 4 & 5. Move quickly through this text to capture the main ideas. I’ve chosen to assign more rather than less for a few reasons: it’s a classic, and the ideas here are ones that you’ll see referenced in other places. Read strategically and pay attention to what interests you.

Week 5: Speculative design and futuring 

Monday, 9/28: Speculative & critical design 

To watch:

Deepa Butoliya, PhD (CMU Design PhD 2018), Assistant Professor, University of Michigan gave a TEDxCMU talk in 2019 about “jugaad,” a practice of ingenuity and making do that she argues is a form of speculative design.

To read:

  • Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything, excerpts (ch. 1–3). [Google Drive]
  • Elizabeth Chin, Bauhaus Futures, “People without a Design HIstory, 2019”

For further reading (optional)

  • Shaowen Bardzell, “Utopias of Participation,” ACMU Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, February 2018. 
  • Tim Parsons & Jessica Charlesworth, “From the Bauhaus to Speculative Design: A Lineage of Socially Motivated Practice,” Bauhaus Futures, 2019.

9/30: Futuring

Week 6: Humans, histories & beyond

10/5: Posthumanism

  • Tega Brain, “The Environment is Not a System,” A Peer-Reviewed Journal about Research Values, 2018. She is a professor at NYU, an artist and environmental engineer.
  • Laura Forlano, “Posthumanism & Design,” She-Ji (3:1, Spring 2017). (PDF)

10/7: Histories aren’t a given.

  • Tara McPherson, “Operating Systems at Midcentury,” The Visual Culture Reader 3rd ed. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2013. 591-604. [PDF]
  • Charlton McIlwain, Black Software: the internet and racial justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, London: Oxford English Press, 2020. Chapter 1, p. 11–27. [PDF]
  • Talking about the Bauhaus Futures book and project

Week 7 (10/12): Papers and catch up

M, 10/12: Draft 1 paper due

  • How are we doing?
  • Guidelines for peer review

W, 10/14: Peer review, in class

  • Homework: complete peer review before class discussion (your comments are due by 10 pm Tuesday 10/13)

Week 8 (10/19): Metaphors

M, 10/19: Paper 1 final due

To read:

  • Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (New York: Viking, 1994). How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand, Chapters 1 (“Flow”), 2 (“Shearing Layers”), 11 (“The Scenario-Buffered Building”) 11 and 12 (“Built for Change”). If this is a book you like, there are many inexpensive used versions on Amazon. [PDF]

W, 10/21:

  • George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Excerpts. UPDATE: p. 3-51 (Chapters 1–10, each chapter is short.) [PDF]

Week 9 (10/26): Quiet week

Since you had studio presentations for CD and IxD studio, we may choose to cancel class and use this time for conversations and office hours. Get a head start on reading for the following week.

Week 10, 11/2 & 11/4: Decolonizing & Decentering

11/2 & 4: Decolonizing Design

Guest lecturer: Hajira Qazi, CMU Design PhD Researcher

  • Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Chapter 1. [PDF]
  • Otto Von Busch & Karl Palmås, “Social Means Do Not Justify Corruptible Ends: A Realist Perspective of Social Innovation and Design,” She-Ji, 2016. [PDF]
  • Danah Abdulla, Ahmed Ansari, Ece Canli, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Matthew Kiem, Pedro Oliveira, Luiza Prado, Tristan Schultz, A Manifesto for Decolonizing Design, 2016.

11/4: Decolonizing design and discussion and conversation about Election Night

Week 11, 11/9: Data

The final weeks of the class will draw on your data project in Communication Design Studio. We will be using the readings here for reflection and a critical stance on your studio work.

We’re going to frame our discussion this week around the book Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio & Lauren F. Klein. It introduces 7 core principles about data. You’ll find that they pick up many conversations we’ve had throughout the class about bias, intersectionality, fairness, interpretation, and context — all of which are the endeavor of a designer. After all, designers work in datafied and algorithmic worlds, and how we design for them matters. The 7 principles from D’Ignazio & Klein:

  1. “Examine power. Data feminism begins by analyzing how power operates in the world.
  2. Challenge power. Data feminism commits to challenging unequal power structures and working toward justice.
  3. Elevate emotion and embodiment. Data feminism teaches us to value multiple forms of knowledge, including the knowledge that comes from.
  4. Rethink binaries and hierarchies. Data feminism requires us to challenge the gender binary, along with other systems of counting and classification that perpetuate oppression.
  5. Embrace pluralism. Data feminism insists that the most complete knowledge comes from synthesizing multiple perspectives, with priority given to local, Indigenous, and experiential ways of knowing.
  6. Consider context. Data feminism asserts that data are not neutral or objective. They are the products of unequal social relations, and this context is essential for conducting accurate, ethical analysis.
  7. Make labor visible. The work of data science, like all work in the world, is the work of many hands. Data feminism makes this labor visible so that it can be recognized and valued.“

Readings

This week, there are things to read for class, others for your own research & interest), and a video of Giorgia Lupi’s TED Talk.

Required readings

  • Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020): read both the Introduction & Chapter 1
    • Skim through the rest of the book website to follow the principles and see examples — there’s a lot of great stuff there. (For example, if you were following data from the elections, you might want to take a look at Chapter 3: “On Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints.” The whole book is available online, but the physical book is also lovely if you can get a copy. D’Ignazio and Klein also refer to the work of others I’ve included in the syllabus and have placed below for your further reading and research for your final project.
  • Mimi Onuoha, “The Point of Collection,” Points, Data & Society, February 10, 2016. You’ll see her Uncollected Datasets project referenced in Data Feminism. Below (in the Labor), there’s a short interview with Onuoha, a visiting professor at NYU Tisch.
  • W.E.B. Du Bois’ Visionary Infographics Come Together for the First Time in Full Color, The Smithsonian, 2018
    W.E.B. Dubois, the scholar and civil rights leader, produced an exhibition of infographics for the Expositions des Nègres d’Amérique (American Negro Exhibit) in Paris in 1900 with a team of sociologists. In 2019, Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert published W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America in 2018. If the subject interests you, seek out a copy of the book.

For further reading and reference.

I’ll be talking about these works in class, and you’ll be reading about these authors. You might want to return to them as you put together your final assignments for this class.

  • Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York: New York University Press, 2018). [PDF]
  • Mimi Onuoha, “When Proof is not Enough,” FiveThirtyEight, July 1, 2020.

To watch:

Week 12, 11/16: AI is the new…? 

We’re going to look at what AI is and isn’t. On Wednesday, we will have Nik Martelaro visiting us from HCII and CMU.

To watch:

Janelle Shane keeps a blog called AIWeirdness.com and is the author of You Are a Thing & I Love You.
  • Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, Chapter 4 & 6.
  • Janelle Shane, You are a Thing and I Love You (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2019), Chapter 4: “It’s Trying!”
  • (Optional but useful to orient yourself, so give it a look) Mimi Onuoha & Mother Cyborg, A People’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence, 2018. It’s a zine about AI–a quick and easy read.

Optional readings

  • Cathy O’Neill, Weapons of Math Destruction (New York: Crown Publishing, 2016).

Week 13, 11/23 Thanksgiving

  • We’ll use Monday to workshop your data storytelling projects and to catch up with how things are going
  • Wednesday: NO CLASS. Happy Thanksgiving! Be safe.

Week 14, 11/30–12/2: Values and ethics

  • Batya Friedman & David Hendry, Value Sensitive Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).

Week 15, 12/7: Labor

Everybody will read Mary Gray and one other piece of your choice.

  • Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, intro & chapter 1 (if you’re really motivated, Chapter 3 [Google Drive]
  • One additional text on content moderation, Mechanical Turk, or trucking. Choose one of the following.
Artist, designer and critic Mimi Onuoha, whose work we read in the Data week. She’s talking here about the relations between data and labor that her artwork brings to light.

Week 16: What is (interaction) (design)?

Our final class meeting features your 3-minute presentation. From your perspective, what is interaction design? If you would like to present in your native language, feel free! You do not have to provide a translation.