TU4018 -- Design and communication in modern culture (3) -- SYLLABUS
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||| Syllabus (this page) | Calendar/Assignments | Online Resources | Projects |||
||| Literature of Design | Literature of Communication |||
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Introduction
In this course we will investigate how changes in design and communication affect modern culture. We will seek to understand the significance of these for the work of education. Current design issues in developing computer-mediated communication will provide us with a practical context for discussions. ILTweb - located at http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/text_version/ is a basic substantive location for work.
Participants should have a Columbia email account and will need regular access to the World Wide Web. We will expect you to arrange for access and to develop a working knowledge of the web on your own. The web itself provides access to extensive introductory and advanced how-to resources. (Pointers to many of the guides are available through the Online Resources guide for this class.) In addition, numerous books on the web and the Internet are appearing regularly -- browse and choose what suits your taste with a preference for something published in 1995 as the technology is changing continuously. Currently, How to Set Up and Maintain a World Wide Web Site: The Guide for Information Providers by Lincoln D. Stein (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995) is noteworthy because it explains working with the web clearly with little use of jargon.
Early in the term, we will organize into small workgroups and these will be the locus of a significant part of the work for the course. Each group will define and develop a web-based project that will contribute to our understanding of design and communication. These projects should be ready for presentation to the whole class in the sessions following the Thanksgiving break.
Here are some questions concerning both design and communication that we will explore through this course.
- To what degree is the world we inhabit a comprehensive, ubiquitous, emergent, designed cosmos, one shaped by human design to suit the designs of humans, with the sufficiency of that world for human needs dependent primarily on the sufficiency of the designs through which we have created it?
- As a form of human practice, what is the character and method of design? What distinguishes it from other forms of endeavor?
- What is the design of design, its controlling logos, if any, in theory and practice?
- What is the place of nature in design and the place of design in nature?
- How does design differ from art and from knowledge?
- Can we mount a Kantian-style critique of design, disclosing the categorical conditions of its possibility and clarifying the limits of its domain?
- What is the human, historical significance of the emerging system of digital communications?
- How long will the period of innovation last and how widely will it diffuse through geographic, cultural, and social space?
- Will computer technologies be simple amenities that will fit nicely into the given life-world by making information workers marginally more productive?
- Will they be powerful historical forces, reshaping the conditions and possibilities of human experience?
- Within what timescale should we contextualize their possible historical consequences?
- Are there qualitative choices open in implementing the emerging digital information infrastructure that can shape the historical meaning of the process, heightening or diminishing its humane import?
- If so, what can we do to ensure that the better choices become the dominant practices?
- Can we use the emerging resources to ensure purposeful continuity with our traditions, to achieve solutions to the recalcitrant difficulties in our present, and to anticipate future limits and not overreach them?
During class sessions and through readings we will introduce and discuss certain key concepts that may prove helpful in thinking about design and communications -- control, standard, information, address, desire, function, efficiency, and so on. A shared project for the whole class will be to develop an on-line glossary of key concepts and to work on definitions and examples of such concepts. We will also work out an overview of key design and communication movements in modern culture, historical instances that may help us understand our present juncture more insightfully. Thus, another shared project will be to organize resources on modern architecture, the telephone, the automobile, air travel, broadcasting, and the like, showing how design choices have consequences for the general culture.
It is still the case that resources in print far exceed in scope and depth those available on-line. We expect participants to do considerable on-line exploration and study. A fundamental result of the work for this course should be to map and organize the resources on the web relevant to our topics of concern. Nevertheless, participants should start developing command of the printed literature on design and communication as well. For that purpose we offer the following reference bibliographies --
Literature of Design and,
Literature of Communication.
We do not expect anyone to master these reading lists. Their main value to one should be in the future. They define an agenda of study for a full, unreserved involvement with the topic, should one decide to undertake it.