Block Seminar Design Theory 2nd semester

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The module takes place over 1 week, from 7h to 11th of February 20212022, from Monday to Friday, 9.00-17.00, hybrid mode.

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You may have first read the description of this course on an intranet service or on an email. You have been learning mostly online at least for the past six-eight months You have spent the last two years of the pandemic discussing, learning, engaging with the world online, likely on Zoom and may have even used a co-working platform such as a Miro board. You are using WhatsApp or Instagram or Facebook and many other communication apps on a daily basis. This is how you are in touch with your friends, lovers, sexual partners, family… Maybe you even consider yourself “addicted”.

How did we get here? Over the past twenty years, the tech industry has built an infrastructure of communicating at distance and of sharing the most intimate parts of ourselves (even the ones we’re not aware of).

Yet, distant communication interfaces are not new: mail - via horse, train, air and more recently, the telephone have played essential roles in the construction of our interactions. And just as the emergence of the phone and the networks in the 19th century enhanced our communication models, the Internet and its palette of services accommodate distance in our daily relations. Each of these systems have set a range of social behaviours that frame our expectations and boundaries. And with every service, we discover how they can allow us to be in a greater mode of intimacy with each other.

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This course will address:

• the affordance of distance for relationships

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• (sexual/non-sexual)
• the field of human connectedness in human-computer

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• interaction

• the ways communities build up around

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• networks 

• the data that is generated and that commodify our conversations

Deliverables

• Assignment 1 (for Tuesday 8.2):
  • Reading response notes: short remarks should be written on the papers provided that capture learning points and possible critiques. See Literature section for the papers.
  • Postcard 
  • Watch S. Turkle Ted Talk (see below in references)
• Assignment 2 (for Wednesday 9.2): 
  • Reading response notes: short remarks should be written on the papers provided that capture learning points and possible critiques. See Literature section for the papers.
  • Pick 3-4 examples of distant communication project or situation (in art, design, game, pop culture, politics, etc) and prepare to present them

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