Note:

Now that the semester is over... if you are looking for more information about Sociable Media research, please see the main page of the Sociable Media Group and Professor Judith Donath's homepage.

Designing Sociable Media

We live in an increasingly virtual world. We interact over email and IM; we meet new people and keep up with friends via their online profiles. We are continuously building a vast record of our various transactions, a personal portrait in clicks, words and video. And our communications are becoming integrated into the walls of our homes and offices, a ubiquitous blanket of connectivity.

This virtual world is wholly synthetic: the design of the underlying system shapes how you appear, what you can see and hear, and who has access to what. As designers, we are responsible for thinking about the impact of our creations: we can envision a future in which technology expands our sociability, making an extraordinarily creative, communicative and cooperative world, but we can also envision a dystopic future where friendship has become a conduit for marketing and awareness of universal surveillance choreographs our every move.

This course examines public space and social interaction in the computer mediated world. Through weekly readings and design assignments we will explore such topics as:

Identity, pseudonymity, and privacy
Visual representations of people
Environments for real-time interaction
Visualizing conversations
Designs for the connected city

Readings include works on graphic design and visual perception (Tufte, Gombrich, Arnheim), social psychology (Milgram, Goffman), urban design (Whyte, Lynch), social networks (Wellman, Feld), social interface design (Donath), and technological futures (Ballard, Sterling).

requirements

Requirements include weekly reading and design projects, active class participation and a final project. (For examples of readings and assignments, please see the 2003 and 2001 syllabi, though the class does change significantly from year to year).

syllabus

Feb 08	introduction: design inpact

Feb 15	text conversations
	visualizing the social patterns found among the words Assignment Reading (Saville-Troike, Donath, Small, Turner et al, Whitaker et al), observations and sketches
Feb 22	cognitive mapping (Dietmar)

Mar 01	graphical social spaces
	Beginning a taxonomy of graphical social spaces Assignment reading about and exploring graphical worlds
Mar 08	information landscapes
	Navigation in information space Assignment zooming, scaling, translating
Mar 15	mediated faces & portraits
	What might/ought you look like online? Assignment faces in the interface
Mar 22	presence and the representation of people
	Abstract representations of people
Mar 29	spring break

Apr 05	Listening instead of seeing
	Sonification and auditory interfaces
Apr 12	Public speaking
	Interfaces for speech across public spaces Assignment: talking in space
Apr 19	social networks
	Overlaying depictions of social network structure on face to face encounters Assignment: Network display in everyday life
Apr 26	ubiquitous connections
	Dealing with issues of privacy in a ubiquitously connected world.
May 03	new architectures
	Transforming the built environment with information displays and communication media.
May 10	future visions: dystopia and utopia
	The good, the bad, and the ugly...
May 17	Final presentations

MAS 963 · Special Topics in Media Technology · Spring 2007

Note:

Designing Sociable Media

requirements

syllabus