Instructor: Alvin Ashiatey
Course Assistant: Siri Lee [Office Hours: (https://calendly.com/siri-lee/office-hours)]
Douglas C. Engelbart. Tying a Brick to a Pencil to "De-Augment" the Individual
This course explores the digital toolsets pivotal to graphic design, urging students to transcend the conventional confines of industry-standard software. It is an exploration aimed at harnessing and possibly redefining current technologies, including the integration and potential creation of bespoke digital tools. The course's structure weaves through a series of lectures, group discussions, hands-on workshops, and culminates in a comprehensive project. Designed for those who are eager to innovate within new media, it requires no background in software development. The workshops will cover a variety of tools such as p5.js, Processing, Drawbot, InDesign Scripting, Web Scraping, OpenCV, and natural language processing, crafted to enhance digital proficiency and inspire a more expansive approach to design.
- Meets Thursday, 10:00-1:00 pm.
- Class will meet in-person on campus at least once early in the semester.
- The class will periodically meet as a whole group, but most of the four hours will be spent cycling small discussion/presentation groups made up of 2-4 students.
“A tool is not produced to carry out a defined utilitarian task. Tools are born as challenges to existing concepts of utility. They open up new understanding of what could be useful. Utility is not a given unambiguous need. Ambiguity about utility is what drives new forms of utility.”
Beatriz Colomina & Mark Wigley, are we human?: notes on an archaeology of design.
In an experiment to demonstrate how the design and ergonomics of a tool can enhance and augment the human experience, Douglas Engelbart had participants use a pencil taped to a brick. He described it as "de-augmenting" the human, deliberately hindering the "user" and introducing difficulty to emphasize the importance of a well-designed tool. By experiencing the clumsiness of this de-augmented tool, the experiment highlights the effectiveness of well-designed tools and their influence on society.
Our contemporary landscape is saturated with tools and interfaces that are intricately woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Often, their integration is so seamless that their presence goes unnoticed, despite their complexity. This course challenges the traditionally held view, especially by major tech companies, that tools and technologies are neutral. Drawing on Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory, we examine these entities as active agents that significantly influence societal structures and professional disciplines.
Through Anthony Huberman’s text "Make it Thick," which accompanied the 2017 "Mechanisms" exhibition at the CCA Wattis in San Francisco, we will explore the notion of introducing complexity into established systems. Huberman's advocacy for employing 'impossible tools,' purposeful inefficiencies, and complex protocols invites students to dissect the relationship between tool design and output.
This course encourages a critical reevaluation of the impact and role of tools and interfaces within design practices. It questions conventional usage, explores the potential of misuse or 'de-augmentation,' and seeks to 'thicken' our understanding and application of these tools. By intentionally disrupting and challenging their intended utility, students will uncover novel utilities and approaches, revealing the inner workings and potential of these tools.
Throughout this course, we will be engaging with existing tools and making our own, pushing their boundaries and misusing them to discover novel outcomes. By challenging their intended utility, we aim to come up with new utilities and share our findings in a workshop format.
The prompt for this course requires students to complicate an existing tool by either extending its use through scripting, devising ways to misuse it for a desired end, or conceiving of a new tool to be shared. Each student will run a workshop on their project and create documentation to be presented during the final critique of the course. Students are encouraged to approach this prompt with ideas they are already working on from other classes they are taking or ideas they are currently developing for their thesis.
Weekly assigned readings and participation in group discussions are required. Please refer to the schedule for more details. All readings and references will be made available on the course are.na channel.
The primary focus of this course is to collaboratively develop a repository of new tools. Each student will lead a workshop on the tool they have developed. Throughout the semester, in conjunction with our discussions on readings, you will be tasked with creating prompts relevant to your project.
Attendance is crucial. Accumulating three or more absences will lead to a failing grade. Additionally, being late three times (over 10 minutes late) will be counted as one absence. If you must miss a class, please email me in advance and include Siri in the correspondence.
| wk | date | topic | reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1/18 |
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| 2 | 1/25 | Demo:
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Anthony Huberman - Make it Thick: Introductory text for the exhibition "Mechanisms." |
| 3 | 2/1 |
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Bruno Latour - "The Berlin Key: How to Do Words with Things.” |
| 4 | 2/8 |
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Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley - Are We Human?: The Invention of the Human (pp. 51-57) |
| 5 | 2/15 |
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David Reinfurt - Soft Copy (1974–1994) |
| 6 | 2/22 |
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Design Noir - The Secret life of Electric Objects |
| 7 | 2/29 |
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Jorge Luis Borges - The Garden of Forking Paths |
| 8 | 3/7 |
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| 9 | 3/28 |
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| 10 | 4/4 |
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| 11 | 4/11 |
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| 12 | 4/18 |
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| 13 | 4/25 | One on One meetings | |
| 14 | 5/2 |
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- Terminal/Shell Scripting - 01.25.2023
- Adobe scripting
- DrawBot
- Chrome Extensions
- ComfyUI
- Web Scraping
This course is heavily inspired and influenced by courses taught by Mindy Seu (On-gathering), Ayham Ghraowi (Fictive Interfaces), and Rosa McElheny (Software for people). A big thank you to Avery Youngblood for all the feedback while developing this syllabus and Siri Lee for being the TA for this class.