Civic media codesign studio

Sessions: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

One subject in Comparative Media Studies / Writing or Media Arts and Sciences, or permission of the instructors.

This project-based studio course focuses on collaborative design of civic media. In 2016, we'll partner with worker-owned cooperatives. There's growing interest in worker cooperatives as a powerful form of re-organizing the economy. Our aim is to build a stronger, more democratic, more just, and more sustainable economy! (For more info about worker cooperatives, see The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC).

The Civic Media Co-design Studio provides an opportunity for students interested in working with community-based organizations to develop civic media projects that connect to grounded strategies for social transformation. We will build teams with diverse skillsets, including (for example) developers, designers, media-makers, researchers, members of existing worker co-ops, and community organizers, and support the teams through an iterative lean startup product development process. We provide design teams with template working agreements, to ensure that the products will be free and open source and that they'll be run by triple bottom line cooperatives, and connect successful projects to the support networks they'll need to grow and thrive. The studio is also a space for shared inquiry into the theory, history, best practices, and critiques of various approaches to community inclusion in iterative stages of project ideation, design, implementation, testing, and evaluation.

Civic Media Co-design Studio approaches communities not as (solely) consumers, test subjects, 'test beds,' or objects of study, and instead imagines them as co-designers and coauthors of shared knowledge, technologies, narratives, and social practices. Our goal is twofold: To develop an understanding of the ways that technology design processes often replicate existing power inequalities, while at the same time, moving beyond critique to travel as far down the path of community co-creation as possible, within the constraints of any given project. In the current version of the course, we want to help create a pipeline for triple-bottom-line startups, built on free and open source software, cooperatively owned by their workers, to disrupt exploitative models of work in current low-wage sectors.

Students who take this course will be able to:

Grading for this course is organized as follows:

All participants in the course are expected to post regular blog entries on a publicly accessible site (the course blog). You may, however, choose to remain anonymous (actually, pseudonymous) by publishing under a pseudonym not easily linkable to your real name.

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