OBUS 3390 - Studio for Better Problems: (Mis)information in Practice : Inquiries and Interventions

Fake news, information manipulation, post-truth, AI-generated images, propaganda, are said

to erode the quality of the news, the democratic debate and our sense of reality. Often

centered around the opposition between false/true content, these issues have not yet been

efficiently resolved.

The course is a hands-on conception studio to tackle misinformation issues. It is part of a

pre-innovation programme launched by the Center for Entrepreneurship to bridge the gap

between the identification of an overlooked problem and the conception of innovative

solutions to address it. There is a need to design “better” problems in order to solve them. To

do so, we invite students to inquire about practices of information, and to propose concrete

interventions that frame “misinformation” in novel ways.

Watch the video presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HrgINX-9P8KFQgnvzOV_Qk6f3CsUfI2x/view

Students applying for this course should be driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, have a taste

for DIY approaches, and a working knowledge of French.

Sessions will alternate between interventions by researchers whose expertise is relevant to broaden the understanding of information and its others (lies, fraud, tricks), collective exercises, and conduct an auto-ethnography of the students' own information practices. Each student will develop their proposal, prototype or experiment, that will be tested during the off-site intersemester workshop week. The course is taught by the founders of the Studio for Better Problems, a design-led initiative that reconsiders which problems are worth solving.

Validation will be based on the submission of the final project proposal.

Students should expect to carry out exercises and inquiries between the sessions, as well as

one reading per week.