In the spring of 2005, I taught "Introduction to Science, Technology, and Society." This year I divided the course into three segments:

• Segment I Seeing and Understanding: takes place inside the viewer's or users head. We studied information visualization and its relationship to user interface design.
• Segment II Making with Symbols: touches on the origins of writing, the computer, the PC, and user interface technologies. We build a Renaissance-era perspective machine, and devise a Turing machine from toilet paper and post-its.
• Segment III Interacting with the World: is an introduction to the "social life of information," with discussions about the unwritten rules that govern social situations, and how these rules inform the ways that people interact with computers.

Throughout each segment students maintained blogs that enabled them to share their work and learn from each other

During the Seeing and Understanding segment we built perspective machines similar to those used during the early Renaissance.

To get a sense of how to "make with symbols", we built a Turing machine and programmed it. In order to grasp the political power of the human-machine interface, we studied the results of the year 2000 election, and used some basic principles of information and interaction design to redesign the famous butterfly ballots.

These case studies helped us imagine the human and social effects of current and future technologies. The course ended with students applying the concepts they had learned by conceiving of and prototyping an application of their own invention. The goal was to invent applications that might improve the common good, if that's even possible.