What Could Go Wrong: Historical Perspectives on Design and Technology in Society

3 units

What could go wrong? Apps crash. Databases are breached. Robots run amok. While technological failures are familiar headaches (or nightmares) for engineers and consumers alike, their social origins and effects can be harder to see. In this seminar, we analyze how technological artifacts have worked — or not — in a cultural context. How have the accidents of production processes, politics of bias and accessibility, and institutional ecosystems shaped the everyday use and social power of technology in specific historical moments and spaces? Learning from historical case studies and methods of historical research and social analysis, students will engage major issues in contemporary design and technology through in-class discussions, field trips, regular writing exercises, and research projects.