Design for
Emerging Technology
Being a studio about applying our design skills in new contexts; comprising two longer projects, sundry small ones, & a great deal of noticing
New tech arrives all the time. You'll need to figure out how to design with it. This course practices exploring a new technology, finding its grain, and figuring out how our universal design tools apply to this new material.
Every technology in this class will be replaced within our careers. That's fine! What doesn't get replaced is the sequence you run when you meet something unfamiliar: figure out what it can do, then aim your existing toolkit at it — inputs and affordances, output and feedback, the constraints of the medium, and then ideation, prototyping, testing, refining.
We'll run that sequence twice this semester on two larger problems, and some smaller ones.
Two long projects
Several Ongoing Projects
I don't like how easy it is to drift into an open laptop. It starts with taking a note or googling a reference, and then you're distracted. So we're going to distinguish between Laptop Open time and Laptop Closed time, and I'll tell you which one we're in.
Here's my consolation prize for you: your own shiny composition book for this class. Bring a pen.
We're going to learn some new tech-y tools; they are the lingua franca of modern software and they unlock a lot of capability when you're not scared of them.
- The terminal
- Git and GitHub
- Markdown
- A code editor
- Claude and Claude Code this isn't the only option, but it's a good default
We'll go over these tools together, and then we'll use them in the bigger projects!
The best way to practice thinking about design and emerging technology is to think about design and emerging technology. Stuff is happening all the time, it's a fast-moving torrent. So we're going to sit down in the middle of that rushing stream and notice things as they go by.
Each week you'll read two sources and bring one thing to class to tell us about.
- Hacker Newsletter — a weekly roundup of the most popular posts on Hacker News, the de facto message board of the startup world.
- Web Curios — a weekly roundup of weird, interesting, and new things on the internet, written by a jaded Londoner in advertising. Occasionally NSFW and very British about swearing; please use good judgement.
Don't read every word or click every link. Just find something that sparks your interest. Scan for something that resonates and then go learn about it. Every week in class we'll ask you to tell us about something you saw. What is it? Who made it? What's it for? What did you learn?
Importantly: write this down in a notebook. I'm going to ask you to do this with your laptops closed, and you'll need to tell us about what you saw.
You're going to be giving presentations all through your career. Saying "PowerPoint is an emerging technology" is a joke, of course, but I want you to be able to design and deliver a compelling presentation, and I think you're not good enough at it yet.
The assigned text is Russell Davies' Everything I Know about Life I Learned from PowerPoint. One person presents per week, on a rolling basis, and you claim your own slot.
The theme for your presentation is hear me out. Tell us about a conspiracy theory you believe, or could plausibly believe, and can explain. Or tell us about a thing that sounds boring but is actually fascinating. Convince us to think differently than we did ten minutes ago.
Your presentation will be between five minutes minimum, and ten max. Anybody can riff and hold our attention for two minutes; five takes a plan. The deck is not the deliverable, it only exists to support you, a person standing in a room with us other people. The deliverable is your presentation.
We'll deliver these on a rolling basis, and we can share access to the book if we need to. We'll make a plan together, and we'll go over this in more detail in week 1 or 2.
Maybe. I've got ideas for small projects if we've got time.
Schedule
This is tentative but likely.