Course Syllabus

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Key Information

Links and core resources:

Teaching staff:

  • Krzysztof Gajos -- Office hours: I plan to be available immediately after the class for an extended conversation (if your question can be asked in front of others). You can also sign up for private office hours. I post new OH slots roughly once a week. If there is nothing on the calendar, check again a few days later. If you contact me by Slack or email, I will generally respond within one business day. I typically turn off my professional communication channels on nights and weekends.
  • Hongjin Lin -- Office hours: Tuesdays 230 - 4 pm, Thursdays 1 - 230 pm. In person (at SEC 2.347) or over zoom. For private 1-1 meetings, use this link to schedule. If none of these options work for you, slack or email me (hongjin_lin@g.harvard.edu), and we will figure something out. Happy to discuss anything, including class materials, class projects, or life in general!
  • Al (Alexandra) Weiner -- Office hours: I follow the same guidelines as Krzysztof, but you can use this sign up for private office hours with me using this link. I am happy to talk about any topics within or outside of class content and projects.

How to Join the Course

The course is now full. We are not able to bring in any new people.

Recommended background

  • Be ready to engage with questions, ideas, and ways of knowing from disciplines such as Science, Technology and Society, Critical Theory, Sociology, Women and Gender Studies, Ethics, and more.
  • Be fluent in some technique for prototyping technical ideas. This may include writing code, building interactive prototypes with Figma, building hardware, etc.
  • Have some design-related experience (a course like CS 79/179, CS 279, ES 21, ES 22 or a relevant internship) -or- have some experience using critical theories to analyze technological innovations.

Learning Goals and Objectives

The motivation for this course is twofold. First, it is to broaden what is discussed in our Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) curriculum to include the design not just for individuals but also for communities, organizations and societies. Second, as more and more technologists become innovators who design and deploy their innovations in the real world, it makes sense for us (the technologists) to develop the basic skills for reasoning about the broader societal effects (both desired and undesired) of technical interventions.

In this class, we will rely on the concept of sociotechnical systems. Such systems are comprised of technology, people, communities, organizations, policies, norms, and interactions among all of these components. 

After taking this class you will have the foundational concepts and skills to:

  • Design and evaluate sociotechnical solutions for complex problems
    • Model and analyze communities, organizations, or societies as sociotechnical systems to identify impactful leverage points for new interventions given desired outcomes
    • Design interventions comprising of technical, social, and organizational elements
    • Generate and test formal hypotheses about the impacts of the intervention on the individuals, communities, and organizations directly targeted by the intervention
  • Engineer real-world sociotechnical solutions for complex problems
    • Secure cooperation of individual, communities, and organizations whose practices and behavior would need to alter as part of the solution implementation.
    • Create high fidelity implementations of the interventions comprising of technical, social, and organizational elements
    • Deploy interventions comprising of technical, social, and organizational elements in communities or organizations
  • Be intentional about and accountable for broader societal impacts of (socio)technical innovations
    • Analyze the causes of the disparities between promised and actual broader societal impacts of prior technological interventions (e.g., COVID tracing apps, one laptop per child)
    • With reference to relevant formal ethical frameworks, develop and explain own ethical stance to help you decide what broader societal impacts of your innovation would or would not be desirable
    • Analyze your own designs for likely broader societal impacts and evaluate them with respect to the desired societal impacts as implied by your ethical stance (use techniques such as scenario methods, Delphi method)
  • Contribute novel, valuable, valid and generalizable knowledge related to any of the above areas (i.e., conduct novel research at the intersection of design, technology, and social impact)

Course Structure and Expected Workload

I expect that the course will take ~12 hrs per week on average. At first, most of our time will go into reading and discussing papers. Later, we will lighten the reading load (and you will also become more efficient at reading papers) and you will shift your efforts toward the course projects.

Here are the major course activities:

Lectures

We will spend most lectures discussing papers. Prior to a typical lecture, you will read and submit a written reflection on 2-3 papers. We will read broadly and you should expect to spend 1.5hrs per paper at first.

We will set aside a few class times for more traditional lectures and project-related activities.

Course project

A major component of the course will be a substantial team-based project. The projects can address a specific problem or can be more academic in style. However, each project will have to engage both the critical and generative perspective (i.e., you will have to engage in an analysis of technology-society interaction and design/build something). The teams are expected to be 3-4 people.

Sections

First half of the semester: 

  1. One mandatory section on class project ideas (the week of 02/20): Each group is required to present their initial project ideas in one of these section (a write-up of your initial project ideas is due on 02/20, Tuesday). Each presentation should take about 20 mins (10 mins for presentation and 10 mins for discussion). Each section will have 3 - 4 presentations. This is a great opportunity to get peer feedback about your initial project ideas!
    1. Sign-ups will be available after project teams are formed on 02/13 (Tue). You will be asked to rank the time slots and assigned a slot according to preferences and availability. If none work for you, please contact the TFs, and we will figure something out. 
  2. Optional (but highly recommended) sections: Other special sections will be hosted to go deeper into some topics. Section topics include 1) quantitative research methods (the week of 02/13), 2) qualitative research methods (the week of 02/27), and 3) community engagement (the week of 03/05). Additional sections will be scheduled based on demand.
    1. Students may select any topics and specify questions they would like to see covered in a section in the class survey form at the end of class. If there is enough demand for a given topic (more than three students), we will host focused sections. Otherwise, students may come to office hours to ask specific questions. 
    2. We will announce the special sections on Canvas and Slack. Tentatively, they will be hosted during TFs’ regular office hours. We will do our best to accommodate students’ schedules. 

Section timeline:

  • Week of 02/13: optional quantitative methods
  • Week of 02/20: mandatory peer review of project ideas
  • Week of 02/27: optional qualitative methods
  • Week of 03/05: optional community engagement
  • Future weeks: TBD

Open Studios - Second half of the semester: 

We will have reoccurring optional open studios for project teams to discuss progress and receive feedback from teaching staff and other teams. Food will be provided by Krzysztof. Open studios assignment, time, and locations:

  • Hongjin: Team 1, 2, 4 (+Cabybilities), 5 (Mamita), 8 (Dinosaurs)
    • SEC 2.330, Mondays (starting March 18), 1230pm - 2pm
  • Al: 3, 6 (LOADing...), 7 (Wavelength), 9, 10
    • 42 Kirkland st Room 1G, Mondays (starting March 18), 6 - 7pm

(Maybe) Leading class discussions

It is possible but not yet certain that some of the class discussions will be prepared and led by small groups of students. If so, any one person will be involved in leading no more than one class. This would be in addition to the book-related presentations.

Policies and Expectations

This will be a seminar-style discussion-heavy course. During our class-time discussions we will create and clarify knowledge (and not merely transmit it). Therefore:

  • On-time attendance is mandatory. Your participation in knowledge creation affects everyone in the class so you need to be there.
  • If you need to miss a class, you have to notify the entire class of your upcoming absence by posting a note on Slack. Use the #attendance channel. You do not need to reveal any confidential information relating to the reason for your absence, but you need to give the rest of the class a heads up that they will not have the benefit of your participation. You can send the reason for your absence to a TF.
  • The class is in-person only. Because the class will rely so heavily on discussion, there will be no option to participate remotely.
  • This said, if you are not feeling well, stay home. Keep yourself and others safe. Ideally, you will have friends, teammates or acquaintances in the class and you will be able to learn what we have discussed.
  • No auditors. The class relies on small(-ish) size and long-term relationship building for creating an environment in which people have the opportunity and feel safe to speak up. Therefore, we cannot accommodate auditors.

What to Do If Some Piece of Class Technology Breaks

In general, if something breaks (e.g., paper link does not work, discussion is not set up, etc), do the following:

  • Check Slack to see if anyone has already found this issue and started working on it.
  • See if you can fix it. For example, use the Harvard libraries bookmarklet to access a paper behind a paywall, start a missing discussion, etc.
  • Contribute your findings to the Slack.
  • Don't worry. If you cannot complete something on time because of circumstances beyond your control, you won't get penalized for it.

Grading

Final grades will be based on the project, the assignments, in-class contributions, attendance, team performance, etc. The general expectations are the following:

  • A: Mastery of the concepts demonstrated through intellectual initiative and creativity -- course work (lecture preparation posts, discussion contributions, final project) generally include novel ideas and observations.
  • A-: Proficiency with the concepts demonstrated through work that shows good understanding of the course material without necessarily contributing novel ideas or observations.
  • B+: Honest effort (most of the time) but the work is inconsistent or shows mostly superficial engagement with the concepts.

Throughout the semester, you will get a lot of formative feedback, i.e., feedback on what you are doing well and where you could try something different. I will not grade individual assignments. But I will let you know if I think you are dropping to the B+ level. This said, this is a graduate course, we will assume that everyone is reasonably self-directed, and I will focus my efforts on helping you learn. You will not receive points for every assignment and no complaints will be considered about A- grades in the course.

Diversity and Inclusion

In an ideal world, science would be objective. However, much of what we know about design, technology, and society is subjective, reflects the behaviors and preferences of a non-representative sample of the world's population, and is historically built on a small subset of privileged voices. In this class, we will make an effort to read contributions from a diverse group of scientists and practitioners, but limits still exist on this diversity. I acknowledge that it is possible that there may be both overt and covert biases in the material due to the lens with which it was written or because of how the participants contributing to the research were chosen. Integrating a diverse set of values, abilities, cultures, etc. is important for creating design and engineering solutions that have carefully planned and intentional societal impacts. Therefore, I would like to discuss issues of diversity in design and engineering research and practice as part of the course from time to time.

Please contact me if you have any suggestions to improve the quality and diversity of the course materials.

Furthermore, I would like to create a learning environment in our class that supports a diversity of perspectives and experiences, and that honors your identities. Like many people I am still in the process of learning about diverse perspectives and identities. If something was said in class (by anyone) that made you feel uncomfortable, please talk to me about it.

If you feel like your performance in the class is being impacted by your experiences outside of class, please don’t hesitate to come and talk with me.

As a participant in course discussions, you should also strive to honor the diversity of perspectives, experiences and identities among your classmates.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Elena Glassman, Katharina Reinecke, Phoebe Sengers, Jock Herron, and the members of the Intelligent Interactive Systems Group at Harvard for feedback, materials and advice that informed the design of this course. The diversity statement was inspired by Monica Linden.  

Course Summary:

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