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Sociology of Technology

Regular discipline – 24 hours – post-graduate program in Interaction Design – Faber-Ludens Interaction Design Institute.

Technology can be used for social control or for social freedom. The main goal of this discipline was to demonstrate the social impact of technology and to inspire designers to be conscious of it´s accountability. Adopting the Social Design approach, students had to understand and develop products for minorities, in the context of the action research project Digital Literacy. The aim of this project is to integrate traditional language acquiring process with mastering digital tools.

An insightful exercise was sending and receiving Cultural Probes about the affective side of education in poor communities. A doll head with an “open mind” was sent to teachers and parents for collecting things that they would want children to learn. After that, children could read their wishes and put inside whatever she would want to learn. Teachers asked for knowledge and discipline, parents for enthusiasm to work and children for questions that adults doesn’t like to answer like: “what is sex?”, “why is the sky blue?”, “what is the matter of the moon?”.

One of the projects inspired by the research was The Tongos, a series of interactive puppets that recognize special cards that are put on their mouth in order to teach children how to read and write phonemes.

Familia Tongo from Cassiano Azevedo on Vimeo.

Categories: Teaching.