Our friends over at Sprout are holding a class that looks at community based technology and design.
Crowd-sourcing, social media, and open source tools are all becoming a part of collaborative and community based social technology projects. “Design for Empowerment” explores these communities and tools with the question: How can we create tools which foster healthy communities? How can you identify and describe a healthy community?
Through readings and discussion the goal of the class is to understand, contribute to, and support the creative communities of everyday people who design, build, and hack their own devices. It will focus on tools that enable non-experts to design and build computational and electronic artifacts as well as investigate software toolkits, hardware toolkits, open-source technologies, fabrication processes, and new manufacturing and distribution models.
Cost of the three month course is $75. Significant financial aid is available, and trades are acceptable. With exception to the first class, the courses will be on Wednesdays from 6-9pm at location TBA (MIT classroom).
If you are interested in the course, or have questions, the first session takes place during sprout’s project night on September 30 from 7:30-9 at 339R Summer St. For more information on how to prepare for Thursday, see http://whichlight.com/DFE/.
The course is led by Kawandeep Virdee, a complex systems researcher, maker, and multimedia artist excited by the possibility of cultivating interactions to create joyful communities. Please direct questions to him at whichlight (at) gmail (dot) com.
