Community College: Designing for Policy, Ethics, AI/ML tech, Culture, the Environment

Let's design the world we want for ourselves and the next generation. Let's make space for a variety of Black & Brown voices with diverse expertise to imagine this future. Let's design, build, and test solutions to our world's most pressing problems - together. In this course, your attendance will be alongside Black and Brown community members that live, work, and play outside of the Stanford University experience. You will learn about the implications of Policy, Ethics, AI/ML tech, Culture, the Environment and their impacts on all facets of your agency as an individual as well as on our society as a whole. You will hear from subject matter experts across many fields, dig into historical societal struggles, identify challenges, prototype solutions, and present your ideas to a special panel of industry and community rock stars at the culmination of this experimental class. Each week, learners will be led in a series of participatory lectures and active provocations by Black and Brown creative misfits, leaders, and voices in policy, the arts, design, activism, technology, education, and entrepreneurship (amongst other things). They'll share their work, passions, and insights on how they've navigated and advocated for the inclusion of diverse voices as we look to solve some of the challenges of our generation. Each week, lecturers and guest speakers will challenge learners with an actionable provocation that will be worked out in the weekly on-campus design studio time. At the end of the 10-week course, learners will be armed with the design fundamentals, growth mindset, and community. They will pitch a prototype of a solution that they have worked on to address one of the issues we have touched on in previous lectures. They will present this prototype in a Demo Day format to a panel of special guests as a capstone activity. If you want to be part of a movement towards building access, opportunity, equity, and space for historically marginalized groups then you've come to the right place. Join us! ** Students of all backgrounds are welcome, and Black and Brown students are highly encouraged to apply. The class will be comprised of Stanford students as well as underrepresented members of the community, non-traditional students, and working-class adults.