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Spring 2022 ︎︎︎ SUNY Purchase College ︎︎︎ (DES4100) Community Design

What is Community? (pt.1)



This class will primarily be centered on the question, what is community? We’ll examine, through work and discussion, what this question means, to us as individuals and as a class. 

What do communities look like?


picture of the Rajneeshpuram cult/commune A picture of the Aum Shinrikyo cult picture from the infamous "Grand Prix Richmond Crackstyle" reddit thread Still from The Florida Project (2017) still from Midsommar (2019) a Purchase Zoom session near the end of the year. Still from Kids (1995) gif from the "I'd like to teach the world to sing" Coca-Cola commercial.

Self-examination

  • What communities are you are part of?
  • What works for you about them?
  • How big are those communities?
  • What does “membership” mean in these communities?
  • What other names would they go by? 
  • What aspect of these groups are socially constructed and culturally fed back to you?

Background

For this one we’ll be talking about online communities. I’m not sure if these overlapped with your time on the internet (a student a couple of semesters ago mentioned Poptropica), but they were all a bit after my time; so all the videos below are super interesting historical explorations made by people doing what I consider the lord’s work (though which “lord” I’ll leave up to you).

Please feel free to bring your own experiences and related websites/games to the table but let’s make sure to keep the overarching discussion relevant.

(~60 min.)

(~20 minutes, content warning RAID: Shadow Legends ad). This video is generally good but focuses quite a bit on Poptropica as a video game (ie the platforming).

(just watch the first chapter, or ~7 minutes of this as it gives a bit more context for the creator of Poptropica)

Some not-100% related, and not required content that may help contextualize things

(The history of hacking and people learning to retro-engineer technology which resulted in things like “phone phreaking” with which, people could illicitly talk on long distance chat lines)
(The relationship between large companies, Adobe in this case, and the communities that emerge from their technology)

(Social media and mental health)

Questions to think about

    • How does technology effect these communities? That is to say how do platforms like Flash making programming more accessible make different possibilities real? How much do graphics play a part in this? For example are Poptropica characters still appealing? Is Oldschool Runescape nostalgic? Archaic?
    • Were or are you a part of any of these communities? Are these videos accurate? Do they reflect the tenor of the community? What does it mean for some of these experiences to be inaccessible?
    • What can these kinds of websites/communities offer that “reality” can or cannot? How might they differ from a sports team? A LAN party? Your IRL friend group?

Please take notes and upload them.
Our discussion will be on 02/15/2022



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