SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL | DSN 100: Artful Design

A Stanford Continuing Studies Course | instructor: Ge Wang | Fall 2020

Syllabus
Fall 2020 Course syllabus (pdf)

Textbook
Wang, Ge. Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime.
Stanford University Press. 2018. (ISBN: 978-1503600522) | order book

Week 1 — "Why Do We Design?" | Supplementary Material

• Ocarina mobile app (web, videos)
• Ocarina: Designing the iPhone's Magic Flute (pdf)
• ChucK: a music programming language
• The Pi-Shaped Person
• Reading: Artful Design, Chapter 1 "Design Is _______" and Chapter 2 "Desiging Expressive Toys"
• Viewing: "Artful Design" (video, 15 min.)

Week 2 — "Design for Flourishing" | Supplementary Material

• Design of Nations, additional contexts
  • History of Passports
  • Defenestration of Prague • The Thirty Years' War • Peace of Westphalia
  • Seven Years' War • Washington resigning commission • Constitutional Convention of 1787 • slave trade • voting rights in US
• Whole Earth Catelog (wikipedia) • "The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s 'Whole Earth Catalog'" (New Yorker)
• Telos • Aristotle on Causality
• Stanford Laptop Orchestra • selected works • the laptop accordion
• Artful Design TV: Games, Gaming, Game Design
• Reading: Artful Design, Chapter 6 "Game Design"
• Viewing: "Aaru: The Idyllic Video Game Sublime" (video, 11 min.)

Week 3 — "The Medium and the Message" | Supplementary Material

• Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab
• "How a Gutenberg press works" (video, 7 min.)
• Internet visions: World Brain, Memex, "On the Internet...",
• Data Never Sleeps (by Domo): 2011 • 2013 • 2014 • 2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 • 2020
• (article) "How Long Is Long-term Data Storage?" by Barry M. Lunt
• Reading: Artful Design, Chapter 7 "Social Design"

Week 4 — "The Ethics of Design" | Supplementary Material

• "Virtue Ethics", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • #17: Barry Sanders | The Top 100: NFL's Greatest Players; (video) on virtue, virtuoso, functional excellence, arete.
• "Kant's Moral Philosophy", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• (study) "The Welfare Effect of Social Media" American Economic Review 2020, 110(3):629–676.
• (tech column) "What If Facebook Is the Real 'Silent Majority'?", August 27, 2020.
• (tech column) "Roiled by Election, Facebook Struggles to Balance Civility and Growth", November 24, 2020. (tweet)
• (video) "Regulating Big Tech"Stanford HAI 2019 Fall Conference Keynote (note difference in ethos between Marietje Schaake and Eric Schmidt)
• Reading: Artful Design, Chapter 8 "Manifesto: A Philosophy of Artful Design"

Week 5 — "The Design of Artificial Intelligence" | Supplementary Material

• (article) "U.S. Army Worries Humanity is Biased Against Deadly Cyborg Soldiers Because of Movies Like Terminator", Gizmodo
• word2vec: Vectorized Words •  amusing word2vec results
• (paper) "Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings"
• Rebecca Fiebrink • Wekinator (by-example interactive ML system)
• ISSE: Interactive Source Separation Editor by Nick Bryan
• Reading: Humans in the Loop: The Design of Interactive AI Systems"
• Viewing: "Experimental Creative Writing with the Vectorized Word" by Allison Parrish (video, 39 min.)

Week 6 — "The Design of You" | Supplementary Material

• (article) "These Influencers Aren’t Flesh and Blood, Yet Millions Follow Them"
• (article) "Virtual Influencers Make Real Money While Covid Locks Down Human Stars"
• (music video) "Virtual Insanity" by Jamiroquai • lyrics
• The Pi-Shaped Person
• Amanda Coffman, teacher, resigns (video)
  • "One Shawnee Mission Teacher's Resignation Has Made A Big Statement In A Viral Way"
• Stanford CCRMA VR Design Lab • Doing vs. Being
• Felt Sound: A Shared Musical Experience for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing • paper
• Further readings:
  • Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor (2nd Edition, 2020)
  • Cathy O'Neill, Weapons of Math Destruction (2016)
  • Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (2020)