Welcome!

In this class, you’ll learn to wear two hats that mirrors research in the field of social computing: a Studier 👩🏽‍🔬 and a Builder 👷. Social computing is a scholarly subfield of human–computer interaction (HCI) that is focused on supporting and evaluating large-scale social interactions between people, mediated through computational systems. Our focus will be to learn how to understand and critically analyze existing social computing systems followed by envisioning and building entirely new ones. How can we use technology to imagine and build a better social future? How can we encourage prosocial behavior and discourage antisocial behavior in the social technologies that we build? How do we know whether a system will be effective or even adopted in the first place?