AANB11040U Urban Media and Interfaces - Experimental Tactics between Design and Ethnography

Volume 2013/2014
Content

People’s use of various media and technology while dwelling in and moving about the city is the topic of this course. Use of portable media devices has rendered the contemporary urban setting increasingly multi-layered, as people interact with physically absent persons and visit online places while being on the move in the city. Through their smart gadgets, people are integrated with the software-supported urban infrastructure, which grows out from an equally invisible but nevertheless material global techno-rhizome. Public space, public encounters, dialogues and performances take on new aspects and potentialities. Together, we question how technologically mediated places in the city are created through the uses of portable devices and everyday practices of web-based social media: How do we research new uses of media in people’s everyday life, and the impact on understandings and appropriations of the city, where physical places and virtual space become profoundly entangled? How do we analyze and theorize our findings? And how do we design for people in this setting?

 

We will work with partners with particular stakes in the topic (eg. citizens, clients, politicians, consultants, companies or non-government organizations etc), and develop relevant responses to the particular challenges and opportunities of this new urban media landscape for the partners. The goal is not to solve a narrowly defined problem, but to challenge assumptions, redefine the problem, and imagine new directions for the problem field. Within the frame of the partner collaborations, students will actively formulate success criteria for the outcomes.

Learning Outcome

By bringing together students and faculty with competencies in ethnography and design, this course will develop and employ hybrid methods to explore the topic of urban media and interfaces. The students will work in teams across disciplines: Social science students will share and develop their skills in interview, observation, and cultural analysis; while design students will share and develop their skills in articulating new opportunities through objects, spaces and visualizations. Through an iterative process the exploration of urban media and interfaces will take the form of back and forth movements between the field and the studio, as an ongoing dialogue where problems and solutions emerge in parallel. We will develop and deploy methods such as cultural probes, research prompts, design games, experience prototypes, and speculative scenarios. These methods intentionally cross over conventional borders between ‘the real’ and ‘the fictitious’, and they lie somewhere between the conventional methods of ethnographic fieldwork and design prototypes. Questioning ‘what could be’ is, in this course, inseparably connected to understanding ‘what is already there’. Staging and experiencing field situations, carrying out live experiments and creating tentative solutions are thus considered occasions for producing new knowledge as much as they are occasions for trying out new solutions.

By the end of this course the successful student will be able to:

  • demonstrate insight in the specific thematic cluster
  • carry out field observations, interviews and interventions
  • analyze empirical material and generate insights in a way which combines theoretical and methodological aspects together in a reflective way
  • identify and formulate new opportunities for understanding and/or solving problems in the field
  • formulate a relevant research/design challenge and related success criteria
  • reflect upon how analysis and design processes can enhance and enrich discussions or change praxis among the relevant stakeholders
  • present the research and design process in terms of what was learned
  • apply personal competencies and interests in collaboration across different disciplines
  • discuss and reflect on challenges and opportunities in combining ethnographic fieldwork and design, drawing on research literature and on project experience.
Literature

600 pages required reading of which the student chooses 100 thematically relevant pages.

The course is structured as a combination of introductory lectures, group work, individual readings and a series of practicums, which will introduce the students to new tools and methods while establishing the project. The outcome of the team projects should communicate to the partners and related stakeholders new concepts and the value (in the broadest sense) they propose, including the process and the insights that led to these particular concepts. During research we will use video to document findings, and the outcome of the team projects will likely be communicated through the medium of video for online platforms.
There will be a common project demonstration in the evening, 6.11.2013, which is not formally part of the exam.
  • Category
  • Hours
  • Exam
  • 35
  • Guidance
  • 8
  • Lectures
  • 32
  • Preparation
  • 121
  • Seminar
  • 48
  • Study Groups
  • 168
  • Total
  • 412
Credit
15 ECTS
Type of assessment
Portfolio
The course lecturer determines the number and length of portfolio assignments. A minimum of 75% thereof will be assessed as the exam. At the end of the course, the lecturer will announce upon which portfolio assignments the assessment will be based.
Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
External censorship
Criteria for exam assesment
See description of learning outcome. Formalities for Written Works must be fulfilled, read more: MSc Students