DTEM, Fall, 2021

DTMC, Spring 2021

DTEM, Fall 2020

DTMC, Spring 2020

DESIGN THINKING, MEDIA, AND COMMUNITY

Wed RCK 102 12:25 – 2:20 • Fri KEN 213 12:25 – 2:20
Prof. Jon McKenzie • jvm62@cornell.edu • Office: W 2:40-4:00
ZOOM LINK    CLASS GOOGLE FOLDER    CLASS VIDEO ON DEMAND RECORDINGS 

This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, activists, and community stakeholders. Practicing methods of transmedia knowledge, design thinking, and participatory action research, students collaborate on projects through the Cornell Law School, Cornell Cooperative Extension, and community organizations in the US and Africa:

• NYS 4H Career Explorations: Like kids worldwide, New York state youth face disruptions in school and after school programs: can civic storytelling and youth media clubs help them find career and life paths?

• Health Access Connect: A small successful non-profit in Uganda, HAC has for years used “boda-boda” or motorcycle taxis to help Ugandans access low-cost healthcare: how to share their experience as the staff helps scale up their work across Africa? 

• Her Whole Truth: Survivors of violence are especially vulnerable to being punished with a living death sentence or even state execution: can sensitive, holistic storytelling help save those on death row?

• SOOFA Ranch: A small start-up non-profit outside Atlantan uses equine therapy to build confidence and well-being in BIPOC youths: how might “storytellling up” and targeted fund-raising help it achieve its vision of an holistic summer camp?

• PAR–ARC: Participatory Action Research has a proud history at Cornell: with the creation of Action Research Collaborative, how best to build on its legacies, resources, and networks?

Consulting on partners’ ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO’s Design Thinking  and Stanford’s Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as tactical media and organizational developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

Part of a multi-year Civic Storytelling project to translate StudioLab into practices, policies, and infrastructures of different disciplines and institutions, the class and workshops are supported by the Society for the Humanities’ Mellon Rural Humanities Initiative, Einhorn Center, and a Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, with support from the Department of English and the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research. 

Design thinking, transmedia knowledge, and artist activism overlap and all focus on engaging multiple stakeholders. Our partners’ interests include issues of social justice, rights of the incarcerated and dispossessed, economic development, and public health and well-being. 

This course serves Cornell’s long-standing mission of public engagement, as embodied in Cornell Cooperative Extension, Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, Engaged Cornell, and the Mellon Rural Humanities Initiative. 

Course Process and Projects

Over the semester, Cornell students develop design, media, and community engagement skills through seminar, lab, studio, and field activities: conceptualizing projects, learning technical skills, creating media, and consulting with school students and educators. 

Critical design teams will work with their partners, using design thinking to share their knowledge of transmedia forms, to learn from them about project-based learning, and to reflect together to generate insights and recommendations regarding the viability and scaleability of civic storytelling. 

Teams complete three projects, focusing on the theory and practice of design thinking, transmedia knowledge, and strategic storytelling while reporting on their work with partners. Over the semester, students create reports, info comics, Pecha Kuchas, and a portfolio project site.  

Traditional and emerging scholarly media genres often seek to inform, enlighten, convince, persuade, and sometimes entertain and move readers. We will learn critical and creative skills for sharing research, consulting on community projects, and creating impact with different audiences, including specialists, community members, and the general public.

Evaluation

Each of the three projects is worth 20% of the class grade; participation (including attendance, discussion, and exercises) is also worth 40%. Two absences may result in final grade reduction; three in failure. 

Learning outcomes

Conceptual analysis and synthesis Argumentation and narrative Individual and collaborative problem-solving Divergent and convergent thinking

Hands-on knowledge of transmedia genres Hands-on knowledge of DT, UX, and CAT frames Hands-on experience working with community Portfolio of engaged media and design

Academic Integrity: Each student in this course is expected to abide by the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Any work submitted by a student in this course for academic credit will be the student’s own work. 

Inclusivity: The English department is committed to providing an atmosphere for learning that respects diversity. While working together to build this community we ask all members to:

Share their unique experiences, values and beliefs Be open to the views of others Honor the uniqueness of their colleagues

Appreciate the opportunity to learn from each other Keep confidential discussions of a personal (or professional) nature Discuss ways we can create an inclusive environment

Accommodations for students with disabilities: In compliance with the Cornell University policy and equal access laws, I am available to discuss appropriate academic accommodations that may be required for student with disabilities. Requests for academic accommodations are to be made during the first three weeks of the semester, except for unusual circumstances, so arrangements can be made. Students are encouraged to register with Student Disability Services to verify their eligibility for appropriate accommodations. 

Schedule

	Wed 12:40-2:35p	Friday 12:40-1:30
Week 1	1/26 Introduction Zoom video Class, partners, teams Watch before class: Brown, “Designers—Think Big!,” TED talk McKenzie, “StudioLab Pedagogy,” Pecha Kucha Tsoa, “Crippled Confrontations,” Pecha Kucha	1/28 Orientations This week’s readings and videos give a microcosm of StudioLab, brief overviews of transmedia knowledge production (making), sociopoetic collaboration (building) and critical design thinking (cosmography).  Our style is technocratic and Zen, a mix of Western and Eastern approaches to design: we’ll develop patterns of control and letting be. Method is connected to mastery and control, play to flow and letting be. For now, be open to rigorous play with one of several teams, tuning in desires of many. Research all partner sites above, read “Sociopoetics” and Yuk Hui interview. Do NOT apply UX frame rigorously: look at partner sites in terms of their media, stories, and stakeholders and relation between design and world they seek to create. McKenzie, “Towards a Sociopoetics” 121-138 On Technodiversity: A Conversation with Yuk Hui Assign Project 1
Week 2	2/2  DT: Meet partners We will learn critical design thinking through hands-on fieldwork and DT theory and exercises, all of which we reflectively turn back into shared praxis with partners and other stakeholders.  Read Brown, Change by Design, 1-62 Read IDEO, Human Centered Design, Intro p 4-13,  Hear p 21-68, IDEO, Process Guide: focus on empathize and define	2/4 Transmedia Knowledge and Plato’s Fight Club. Teams are helping with translational research/knowledge translation/action research: we are transmediating research between data-based disciplines and our partners’ knowledge platforms in the field. Transmedia knowledge combines formal, epistemic knowledge with experiential, common knowledges of different stakeholders. We wrestle with the “pharmakon” that Plato described in The Phaedrus as the dangerous, even deadly writing/techne, and in The Republic as the writing of psyche, soul/life/mind. We’re using media pharmaka to co-design different worlds. Read McKenzie, Transmedia Knowledge, Ch 1: Wrestling with Plato’s Fight Club Ch 2 Becoming Maker Explore  DTMC Make Media!, various resources
Week 3	2/9 Work with partners Design Frames and Media Genres  Finish TK book, note that each chapter’s tutor texts offer case studies for how teams make media, build platforms, and co-design worlds: you want to be able to talk that talk and walk that walk by term’s end. For now, focus on making media for Proj 1 and for continuing partner work started last term.	2/11 McKenzie, Transmedia Knowledge and Co-design Worlds View PK video and documentary film using CAT and UX frames: describe their formal properties and what they reveal of UX of multiple stakeholders (both w/i and outside frame of videos); continue exploring Make Media resources to learn TK ecology.  Read Ch 3: Becoming Builder Ch 4 Becoming Cosmographer Tsoa, “Crippled Confrontations,” Pecha Kucha York, A Force More Powerful (Nashville or Chile episode), documentary film
Week 4	2/16  Work with partners   Use UX and CAT frames to describe partner’s org and mission (eg, what’s UX of SOOFA?, CAT of HWT?). Then use these to analyze YPP and existing media ecology (their TK and that of stakeholders and similar orgs). Begin drafting conceptual frame of report and presentation.	2/18 Read   Borges, Story of the Warrior and the Captive Cosmogram exercise Gift-giving exercise
Week 5	2/23 Work with partners	2/25 Presentation/Feedback Read Edelman, et al, “Hidden in Plain View” Watch Victor, “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”
Week 6	3/2 Work with partners Prototyping Transmedia Knowledge and Co-Design with partners Assign Project 2 To kick 0ff Proj 2, Teams read DT theory and view works for discussion. Seminar: Read IDEO, Human Centered Design, Create 81-111 IDEO, Process Guide: focus on ideate and prototype Studio: View works by Dima Saladi from al-Marsad and Kevin from Health Access Connect Saladi, Thesis Presentation Nowhere  and linked video Gibbons, America’s Dairyland and Latino Farm Workers: An Interview with Kevin Gibbons	3/4  Thought-Action Figuration and UX Comics Teams 1) use Victor and Madden to explore how different cognitive channels and info designs shape the “same” content to produce different XD; 2) study Edelman and Haraway on how cascades and figurations arrange different media elements for different effects/affects; and 3) write up comparative analysis of global experiences/feeling produced by transmediated invasion of Ukraine.  Overview video Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story Haraway, SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far McKenzie, Global Feelings Wash Post: What to know about Volodymyr Zelensky AP PHOTOS: War doesn’t spare Ukraine’s children Google image search: ukraine flag buildings lights nations Misinformation on Social Media in the Ukraine War Lab Comic Life download Comic Life demo video WhyWhatHow Sparkline Guide Dialogue and storyboard Sample storyboard 1 Sample storyboard 2
Week 7	3/9 Work with partners	3/11 Experiential Architectures and Co-designing Worlds Co-design involves sharing of methods and perspectives, platforms and worlds. As a metamodel (recursive mix of different of methods), DT raises issues around hierarchies of knowledge and power associated with any fieldwork. All designers: Read texts and produce a 10-point manifesto or poetics of pluri- or multi-versal design. Use calls to adventure and action, and whywhathow structure as desired. Otto & Smith, Design Anthropology Tunstall, Decolonizing Design Innovation Moore, STS and Design Thinking Katoppoa & Sudradjat, Participatory Action Research and Design Thinking Noel, Envisioning a Pluriversal Design Education Flowers, Experimenting with Comics
Week 8	3/16 Work with partners	3/18 Experiential Architectures and Intimate Bureaucracies Collaboration unfolds in different ways across multiple platforms, times and places, and its participants likewise bring diverse perspectives and capacities to act. Infrastructures and modes of organization evolve at scale, and entire worlds can emerge, collide, and disappear, while the intimate experiences that compose them enter into recursive, iterative shapes or figures. Team members: read these text and draw 2-3 diagrams depicting how experiential architectures can scale and morph from personal to social to environmental—and back. These diagrams should resonate with your work on manifestos. Deleuze, “Societies of Control” Critical Art Ensemble  (CAE), “Observations on Collective Cultural Action,” 59-73 Greenberg, et al, “ACT-UP Explained” and other documents djreadies, Intimate Bureaucracies, 1-16 Dokumaci, People as Affordances: Building Disability Worlds through Care Intimacy  The Guardian, ‘It’s the right thing to do’: the 300,000 volunteer hackers coming together to fight Russia
Week 9	3/23 Work with partners	3/25 Civic Storytelling, Just Tech Teens, and The Shed
Week 10	3/30 Work with partners Draft report, comics due	4/1  Presentation/Feedback Assign Project 3
Week 11	4/6 BREAK	4/8 BREAK
Week 12	4/13 Work with partners	4/15 Guest presentation   Read IDEO, Human Centered Design, Deliver 113-151 IDEO, Process Guide: focus on prototype and test
Week 13	4/20 Work with partners	4/22 Studio
Week 14	4/27 Work with partners	4/28 Pop field trip
Week 15	5/4 Presentation and final partner deliverable	5/6 Evaluations, cosmograms
Finals		Sat 5/21 Report and project site due

Bibliography

deVuono-powell, Saneta, Chris Schweidler, Alicia Walters, and Azadeh Zohrabi. 2015. Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families. Oakland, CA: Ella Baker Center, Forward Together, Research Action Design. 

EL Education. 2018. Core Practices: A Vision for Improving Schools. New York: EL Education.

Hanney, Roy. 2018. “Doing, Being, Becoming: A Historical Appraisal of the Modalities of Project-Based Learning.” Teaching in Higher Education 23(6): 769-783. 

IDEO. 2011. Human-Centered Design Toolkit: An Open-Source Toolkit To Inspire New Solutions in the Developing World.  <http://www.ideo.com/images/uploads/hcd_toolkit/IDEO_HCD_ToolKit.pdf>

IDEO, n.d. Process Guide: An Introduction to Design Thinking. <https://dschool-old.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/wiki/36873/attachments/74b3d/ModeGuideBOOTCAMP2010L.pdf>. Accessed 1/10/19.

Larmer, John, John R. Mergendoller, and Suzie Boss. 2015. Setting The Standard For Project Based Learning. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. 

McKenzie, Jon. 2019. Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement: A StudioLab Manifesto. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Scolari CA, editor. 2018. Teens, Media and Collaborative Cultures: Exploiting Teens’ Transmedia Skills in the Classroom. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Scolari CA, 2018. Transmedia Literacy in the New Media Ecology: White Paper. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.