Overview and learning objectives

The course will be collaborative and interdisciplinary. Students from all lots of different departments will be involved. So, let’s get to know each other, and our backgrounds, and the skills and interests each of us have. This project will invite you to:

• Playfully introduce your skills and interests to other participants of the course;
• Develop an understanding the perspectives of potential collaborators in the course and how they might compliment your skills.
• Develop an understanding of the range of disciplines and interests in the class, as well as how they contribute to exploring Spooky Technoloy!
• make sense of and interpet the theme of ‘spooky tech’ for yourself, and for others.

The goal of this exercise will be introduce yourself to the other students in the course _with a quickly assembled creative composition

Learning Objectives

As part of this exercise, you will:

• Develop your domain understanding of explainability, everyday systems and ubiquitous computing.

• Investigate technologies which can be, could be or are hidden, opaque, complex or veiled either in operation and functionality, explainabiltiy and interpretability, infrastructures supporting them, economies and labor driving them, etc.

• Creatively experiment with approaches to revealing the hidden qualities of everyday systems from the practical to the outlandish (strongly encouraged);

• Tease-out the broader considerations and opportunities for building spooky-technologies

• Work individually to highlight your existing skillsets, expertise, and perspective within the context of this course and understand how they might contribute to an interdisciplinary investigation by making work.

Brief:

“That Which is Hidden”

In not more than 2 hours, prepare a digital artifact that interprets this prompt.

You might explore what is hidden about systems and everyday intelligences. Alternatively, you might also speculate on how you could make (an aspect of) a system that is hidden visible, tangible, perceivable, or discussable. In this, you might ask: What are the everyday systems that are hard to explain? What is spooky or unsettling about our encounters with tech and systems today? How do you materialize and reveal hidden parts of systems in ways that are compelling and invite conversation? How do you trigger/craft an experience with a system or process that might challenge explainability? How can you remix or build on an existing project or system to add a critical layer to it?

This can take any format or medium you like, so long as it can be shared with the group on slack.

For example you could:

• A diagram, rendering or map
• A design proposal, conceptual design or experience simulator
• A critical design/design fiction rendering
• Make a collage of news articles or personal experiences
• prepare a short video
• write an essay, poem, fable or short story
• engage a social media platform creatively
• dig into your own data (Google search history, Fitbit logs or tweets)
• use a tool like DataSelfie.it or Floodwatch to reveal how technologies interpret you.
• write a poem / short story
• A performance
• etc

Unusual approaches, left-of-center thinking and impracticality is encouraged!

Submitting your work:

Say Hi to everyone and post the output to the #introductions channel on slack.

Include a 100-150 word statement that explains your composition interprets “That Which is Hidden” and/or briefly introduces you to the rest of the class, your background, your skills, etc.

Constraint

• Must be something you can produce in 2 hours.

Considerations

When preparing your responses, below are some questions you might think about:

1. Who are you and what’s your background? How might this be different or similar to others in the class? What digital content might embody or represent that to the class?

2. What’s an example of something you’ve made/analyzed/explored that relates to this class?

3. What are your unique skills that will help you prototyping spooky technology: smart objects, intelligent spaces or mobile tools that could help support digital memory?

4. What are the images/ideas/concepts about spookiness that resonate with you?

5. Have you had a spooky encounter with technology? Maybe you could tell us about it!