Due: Part A: due week 5, Part B: due week 12
Description: You are to document and reflect on the social interventions, exercises and tutorial work conducted throughout the term. You will make weekly reflective posts to this blog, exploring your work each week. These posts might reflect and analyze your experience undertaking each of weekly class exercises, how these experiments relate to the readings and/or a discussion of the readings in relation to your own personal research. Your posts should be between 250-500 words each and each post should be tagging with the week number #week1, #week2, #week3 etc (all lower case and one word). Please write and edit these posts in a word processing program before posting to this blog – this will enable you to pick up spelling and grammatical errors more easily.
Due: Week 10
Description: In this project you will develop a prototype for an experimental social prosthetic, this will be a data driven object/device/wearable performs for or communicates with its user in some way. Your object will help, hinder or provoke its user, aiming to shift behavior.
Read Dunne and Raby’s, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects to kick off your thinking. Dunne and Raby remind us that your prototype will act on the perception and psychology of the user. Think also about the technological narratives you use in order to explain and relate to your prototype. Also read Sara Hendren’s article – "All Technology Is Assistive: Six Design Rules on ‘Disability.'”
Your project should be a prototype, a proof of concept realization of your idea.
Due: Assessment 3 due Week 14
Work as individual or pairs
Description: This assignment requires you to propose and make a social media bot that explores a particular issue, character, idea, emotion or source text. You can run it either from your computer or from a server or from an service like IFTTT. Your bot should explore online social conventions and our expectations of online interactions and/or platforms in some way. Your bot might deliberately breach social conventions, creatively explore a selected text, animate or anthropomorphize a data set or bring a character/narrative/argument/emotion to life. This task requires you to prepare a proposal, and do some basic programming or prototyping (or equivalent) and deploy a bot in public.