In this seminar, we analyze how technological artifacts have worked—or not—in a cultural context. How have the accidents of production processes, politics of bias and accessibility, and institutional ecosystems shaped the everyday use and social power of technology in specific historical moments and spaces? Learning from historical case studies and methods of historical research and social analysis, students will engage major issues in contemporary design and technology through in-class discussions, field trips, regular writing exercises, and research projects.

Chris Dingwall is a historian of American and African American design from the age of slavery to now. Currently he is completing two book-length research projects. “Selling Slavery: Race and the Industry of American Culture” is a study of commercial plantation iconography in a variety of forms — theatrical spectacles, decorated books, postcards, mechanical toys. By analyzing how images of slavery were manufactured, exchanged, and used in everyday life, Dingwall narrates how cultural workers and entrepreneurs built racial ideology into American mass culture during the long wake of slave emancipation.