Personal Making Assignment 5: Design Noir

Film noir: a genre categorized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity

As designers and engineers, we are actively building a new future. Much of this class (and to be honest, your liberal arts education) focuses on how to build a future responsibly and ethically. But behind every “happily-ever-after” veneer of technology lurks a dark and strange world driven by different human needs, values, desires, and vices. By brainstorming and designing only “good” ideas, we constrain ourselves from the full range of potential designs. (Mostly for “good reason.”) But in this assignment, challenge yourself and give yourself license to explore a different range of design. You’ll come up with three ideas in the domain of design noir.

  1. Design a tool or object that facilitates emotions of loss, abandonment, and loneliness. Potential intended users include someone who just got dumped, someone who is greiving death, or someone being left behind.

  2. Design a tool or object that encourages users to be as wasteful as possible. Potential sites of waste include garbage, energy, time, other’s time, money, the environment, natural resources, clothing. Your design can be for collectives (for instance, maybe a pro-waste game) or for individuals.

  3. Design a tool or object that purposefuly instills a sense of guilt in the user. Consider how the design can encourage users to obsess over trivial missteps, increase their sense of self-hatred and anxiety, or remind them of how they fail to meet expectations.

The learning goal of these exercises is to stretch your design skills into explicitly “anti-social” domains. What kinds of things can you envision now that we have relaxed “design for good” constraints? Be creative and have fun!

Note that I am not looking for finished, real objects, but rather good ideas. As such, all you need to turn in for each piece is a title, written description, and at least one image to communicate the idea (such as a storyboard or sketch).

Grading & Submission

On Canvas, a PDF that contains:

  • For each prompt, a (1) title of your piece, (2) at least one image of your piece—can be a storyboard or sketch, (3) a brief written explanation of how your piece works ( ~250 words), and (4) how you would react to this piece if it actually existed.
  • Also include the usual feedback paragraph: How long did you spend on this assignment? What felt challenging or easy? How is the workload of the class matching to your expectations? I know this assignment was due at the same time as reading responses, which I apologize for – same for next week’s PM.
  • Please bring printouts/physical copies of your 3 designs to class on Monday, November 11 for our crit.

Estimated/expected time: It is my hope you spend no more than 4 hours on this assignment. One hour generally brainstorming (try taking a walk), and then an hour each on writing up each of the prompts.

Rubric

  • ✓+ : Students put substantial thought into every prompt and brainstormed tool/object ideas that were unexpected, creative, and deep
  • ✓ : Students addressed all the prompts thoughtfully
  • ✓- : Students missed a prompt or brainstormed relatively generic or “safe” ideas, or didn’t turn in a reflection/feedback paragraph