Tech and Society (New Structure)

Useless Machines

Blair Simmons | IMNY-UT 272 | Tues 2:00pm to 3:30pm in 370 Jay Street, Room 316C>Thur 2:00pm to 3:30pm in 370 Jay Street, Room 316C Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Spring 2026, Tech and Society (New Structure), Undergraduate
Last updated: October 30, 2025
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Useless Machines is about redefining “usefulness.” Through making, we will explore what it means, on an ideological, political and historical level, to create something ‘useful’ or ‘useless.’ We will play with these definitions and explore how these objects serve to be humorous, critical, disruptive and at times… useful. 

We will study ‘useless’ machines throughout history, which will provoke conversations and disagreements around the implications of existing and emerging technologies. The students will design ‘useless’ machines for their final project.  Examples of ‘useless’ machines are drawn from Kenji Kawakami’s The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, Dunne & Raby’s Speculative Everything, Stephanie Dinkins’ Conversations with Bina 48, esoteric.codes/, CW&T, Mimi Ọnụọha’s  Missing Data, Jacques Carelman’s Catalog of Impossible Objects, viral videos/objects and much more.

Instructor Blair Simmons Website: www.Blairsimmons.com

Design Skills for Responsible Media (Topics in Media Art)

Art Kleiner | Syllabus | IMNY-UT 260 | Tues and Thur 10:40am - 12:10pm Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Spring 2026, Tech and Society (New Structure), Undergraduate
Last updated: October 30, 2025
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Generative AI and other digital media affect people in unexpected ways. This is a course in the skills of responsible design and development of all forms of media covered by IMA and ITP. We will look critically at the belief systems that affect design, and will build skills for assessing the unexpected implications and consequences of any new digital project, including generative AI projects. Together, we will create personal and group processes to bring these issues safely to the surface, and create standards and guardrails (a “calculus of intentional risk”) that you can apply to your own work and to work you do in the future. This course is structured around three comprehensive group assignments:
1. Group project: Produce a case study of an ethical dilemma in a real-world tech company, based on news reports and other sources. How did this dilemma come about? How did the company respond? What could they have done differently? We will discuss these cases, and others, in class.
2. Group or solo project: Produce work in any format [not too elaborate] that brings an ethical issue to light.
3. Solo project: Propose a design practicum – a set of ethical standard – that would help you evaluate the impact of one or more pieces of your own work (or someone else’s you know well). Use this “calculus of intentional risk” to explore how you would change the design and use of these projects.
The class lectures will cover themes related to these three assignments, drawing on the instructors’ extensive research in the fields of organizational and technological ethics and responsibility. The recently published book, The AI Dilemma: The 7 Principles of Responsible Technology, will be one resource for the class. We will also draw on work on responsible technology going on elsewhere throughout NYU.

Big Ideas in the History and Future of Technology (Topics in Media Art)

Theodora Rivendale | Syllabus | IMNY-UT 260 | Mon, Wed 7:00pm to 8:30pm in Bldg:370 Jay, Room: 409 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, No Tags, Spring 2026, Tech and Society (New Structure), Undergraduate
Last updated: October 30, 2025
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This class will provide students with a critical perspective on contemporary issues in media technologies and discuss the history, controversies, consequences, and ethical questions in emerging media. The first half of the class charts a history of media technologies from the 1940s to the present, focusing on the idealogical and social conditions that led to the creation of the technologies that exist now. The second half examines possible futures, and the tools we can use to predict (and build) those futures.

Instructor Website: http://alden.website

 Histories and Critical Media Theories of the Digital (Topics in Media Art)

Rae Bruml Norton | IMNY-UT 281 | Tuesday 9am - 12pm
2 Point, Elective, New, No Tags, Spring 2026, Tech and Society (New Structure), Undergraduate
Last updated: October 30, 2025
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This course introduces students to the various ways scholars have discussed the “digital” and its associated phenomena, including computability, information, algorithms, and networks. Drawing on classic and contemporary texts in philosophy, political economy, and media studies, we will investigate how the categories of race, class, gender, and labor are necessary to any analysis involving the production of digital technologies. If algorithms, data, and the circulation of information help constitute the digital, what kinds of work are necessary? Who does the work? We will keep these questions in mind as we clarify and critique the ways that the digital has been defined. We will take note of our different interpretations and how our various definitions of the digital change over the course of the semester.