Civic App Development Lab
This is a lab-based course. Students will learn to build accessible and transparent interfaces for civic data streams. These lab projects will address how data could operate in civic spaces to increase direct democratic agency in local lives. We will discuss examples from everyday life as well as from history and contemporary media art. We will pay particular attention to media objects that do not seem at first glance to have political charges, but in fact do, such as household budgets, entertainment choices, contact lists, and social calendars: political practice is broader than it may at first seem.
Lab work includes building wire-frame models and possibly the front and the back end of applications depending on student skills, as well as researching story concepts, implementing game dynamics, and developing collaborative development strategies. Specific lab roles for students will be assigned based on their interests, qualifications, and the app project:
All students will conduct research and make presentations on their proposed app projects using PowerPoint and wire-framing. They will also discuss related apps to understand the larger ecosystem of their work. Technically oriented students will build basic applications and therefore need to be proficient in programming languages and frameworks. Students in the social sciences and humanities will research thematic development, game dynamics, points of engagement, and location-based media resources. Arts-based students (including architecture) will collaborate with their colleagues to create unified design concepts, app assets, and interface designs, using such applications as Illustrator, Procreate, and wireframe programs.
Final lab projects will present new data streams to support direct civic engagement. These may include citizen science apps, civic AI systems, games, and even web comics or other forms of creative fiction that propose alternative social dynamics and collaboration.
Data Visualization Clinic
When Florence Nightingale observed that the hospitals of her time actually sickened rather than healed soldiers, she made a statistical observation for which there was no form. So she invented a new type of form for the new type of content—a type of pie chart. The UC Berkeley Data Visualization Clinic is a place where students and faculty convene to give form to data-driven observations. We do this as a service for research but also for organizations outside of UC Berkeley as a free public service. In many cases, the DVC will leverage existing approaches to data visualization, sonification, and animation; in others, it will pursue media innovation to develop new forms of knowing and new modes of sharing.
Situated within the College of Data Science and Society, the Clinic advances the College’s commitment to socially engaged, methodologically rigorous scholarship. It operates as both a pedagogical and research environment, integrating inquiry, design, and communication in the production of public-facing knowledge. Led by Greg Niemeyer as a teaching commitment, the Clinic will be staffed by graduate and undergraduate students who receive course credit for their contributions, cultivating a model in which education, research, and public service are mutually reinforcing.
