Special Topics in Information Science: User Experience Research and Civic Engagement

People often struggle to talk with each other about civic issues and topics in the news. This course is about user experience research methods to explore ways of promoting more and better conversations, whether online, in person, or through digital-hybrid environments. The course begins with a broad overview of communication and political science research about deliberative democracy to offer ways of thinking about how public opinion bubbles up to civic action. Through in-class activities, you will gain practice with discussion facilitation and deliberation techniques, drawn from civic education and participatory decision-making practices. On a weekly basis, we will also read and discuss award-winning research from the fields of civic design, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and human-computer interaction (HCI).  

The instructional approach involves a combination of lectures and in-class discussion about civic design research and technology. The course will specifically focus on ways of promoting “sustained disagreement,” across a range of contexts, from public deliberation events to political organizing and protest movements. Throughout the semester we will work with a set of widely used frameworks, that span a broad range of civic engagement protocols and evaluation techniques. The course includes three major assignments and each iteratively leads toward a civic design portfolio piece that you will present at the end of the semester.