CSCI1951-C

Designing Humanity Centered Robots

Offered this year and occasionally

Fall 2023

We live in a world that is saturated with a dazzling array of interconnected, automated things. This semester, we will explore how emerging technologies might shape our lives in the near future, as we design and build working prototypes. We will proceed from a set of questions that will complement a deep immersion in design process and creative practice. We will explore the “how” and “why” of designing new technologies.

The “how” will establish a technical foundation for developing our designs iteratively, as we build and test prototypes with microcontrollers, 3D printing, laser cutting, and other modes of fabrication. The “why” will emerge from our exploration of design strategies that will give us the conceptual framework to translate our ideas into concrete prototypes, and establish space for a critical interrogation of how good design might shape the ways we will behave and think in the years to come. Some of these strategies will be speculative in nature, drawing on Critical Design, Discursive Design, and Design Fictions. Others will be human centered, drawing on Human Centered Design strategies that place an emphasis on empathy with the user’s experience, iterative prototyping, and participatory critique.

We will ask: What does the object do? For whom? Where does it do it? When? How does the object do it? And why?

Students interested in registering should sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdvo0o4ICpj55ZubZQTXdVRfBmnbCHbT8egriwPOcWcbRiy6A/viewform