Design + STS: Challenges and Opportunities for Pedagogy in a Post-Disciplinary Laboratory

• In Event: Alternative Pedagogies at the Crux of Interdisciplinarity: Promises and Pitfalls of “Innovating” Education - I

Abstract

This paper discusses our ongoing efforts to make STS perspectives an organizing principle of a design-based post-disciplinary graduate research and learning laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. Highlighting opportunities and challenges drawn from a recent curricular intervention, it identifies points of convergence as well as tensions between the intellectual and pedagogical projects of design, broadly understood, and STS. Central to design pedagogy is training learners’ sensibility and judgement through tangible engagements with material, technical, and cultural aspects of design situations. As important is nurturing a reflective mindset that enables learners to actively explore these situations while articulating —and critically engaging with— the impacts their design decisions have on their contexts. These pluralistic, exploratory, and reflective attitudes can contribute to and benefit from STS understandings of the crucial role social actors and material contexts play in technology design, deployment, and use. Further, they have the capacity to emphasize situated understandings and responses to local contexts rather than general solutions to abstract or pre-defined problems. Finally, they open the door to cultivating speculative, exploratory, and critical approaches which can unlock otherwise hidden opportunities for creativity and reflection. These intellectual vectors suggest ways in which the pedagogical projects of design and STS might be productively aligned, and mutually enriched. Offering details about the ongoing implementation and outputs of this pedagogical vision in a post-disciplinary laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, the paper discusses curricular, intellectual, and practical aspects of this project, as well as challenges we have encountered.

Authors

• Daniel Cardoso Llach, Carnegie Mellon University

• Daragh Byrne, Carnegie Mellon University

• Mine Ozkar, Istanbul Technical University