Course Overview

Data, Design and Society is a new sort of course that combines interdisciplinary teamwork with practice-based challenges. It is a collaboration between the School of Informatics, Social and Political Studies, and Design Informatics.

In today’s economy, students need the skills to work together with people across different disciplines, and are likely to be confronted by multi-dimensional challenges with complex social, legal, political and technological dimensions. This learning-by-developing course will introduce you to ways of combining modern tools for data analysis with design-based approaches. It will encourage you to develop innovative ideas and communicate them effectively in different social arenas.

In the Data strand of the course, you will learn to collect, assess and present data as social and scientific evidence, and to use it as a resource for design. The Design element asks you to challenge existing practices by creating prototype social interventions. The Society strand introduces the ‘social life of data’ and shows how data and design can be used to shape society for the better within the framework of existing social and political processes. The course will give you the opportunity to take your learning out of the classroom into the University community.

Data, Design and Society (INFR08024) is a 20pt Level 8 course. There are no prerequisites, but you should be prepared to ask lots of questions, to go out and talk to people, to work with simple data analysis tools, and to experiment with change.

Course Handbook

The information contained in these webpages constitutes the DDS course handbook. However, you can also get this information as a single PDF file. Note that the week-by-week syllabus is only available online, since details may change or be added as we go through the semester.