OBUS 3300 - Research and Design for Critical Innovation
“Those services kill”, said Tim Kendall in The Social Dilemma, a documentary released two years ago on Netflix. Former president of Pinterest and director of monetization at Facebook, he has since deserted the digital industry. This sector revolves around oligopolies that define market rules according to their own interests, and it is clear that non-GAMAM actors (other than Google, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Apple, Microsoft), even big ones, have no choice but to comply. The widespread adoption of digital solutions led to many issues: threats to democracy, to information, to privacy, to cognitive attention, to inclusion, to autonomy, to human rights, and to the environment. The underlying economic drivers of those symptoms and their technical implications are now well known: expansionist logic, capture of data and its value, advertising and prediction, capture of users' attention, creation of needs justifying a technological headlong rush... Regulatory initiatives, increasingly numerous and ambitious at least in the EU, have yet to change the trend. While the mainstream discourse of innovation makes simplification its founding value, scientific observations as well as individual perceptions describe the opposite. Based on these findings, this course proposes to explore, in theory and in practice, how to combine research and design methods in order to innovate in a critical manner. This course aims to take students beyond the commonly accepted innovation methods in order for them to be able to create solutions that do not harm societies, but help them heal and head towards resilience.
Florian GUILLANTON
English
Level of English : B2. Open only to students in Master.
Minimal knowledge of design and innovation methods.