Designing Humane Tech
NMD 200: Designing Humane Tech is a project-based course about becoming a more skilled, thoughtful, and adaptable New Media designer. Students build on foundational skills in areas such as graphics, photography, video, web media, creative coding, and digital storytelling while learning to make stronger design decisions for real people, communities, and environments.
Digital technologies are never neutral: choices about interfaces, platforms, media, data, accessibility, attention, and AI shape how people behave, who has agency, who benefits, and what resources are used. Through creative projects, design critiques, and hands-on experimentation, students learn to recognize these impacts and design alternatives.
We use Permaculture Ethics—People Care, Fair Share, and Earth Care—as a practical design framework. The 12 Permaculture Design Principles provide additional tools for thinking about feedback, diversity, limits, resilience, waste, relationships, and change.
The goal is to evaluate technology in order to become better at making it. Students leave the course with stronger creative and technical skills, experience explaining and defending design decisions, and an ethical framework they can carry into careers in design, media, technology, communication, and related fields.
Tech Resources
Center for Humane Tech
The Center for Humane Technology examines how digital systems affect attention, behavior, democracy, social relationships, and human well-being. Its work—including The Social Dilemma and its research and advocacy around persuasive technology and AI—helps us examine how seemingly small design decisions can produce large social consequences.
Eco Resources
Permaculture Design
Permaculture Ethics and Principles provide the course's central framework of People Care, Fair Share, and Earth Care. The 12 design principles extend this framework into practical strategies for creating resilient systems that make better use of resources, relationships, feedback, and change.
Tech Design for Life
Digital and ecological design survive through relationships, feedback, adaptation, diversity, cycles, and limits. Permaculture gives us a vocabulary for applying this kind of systems thinking to technology. Principles such as observe and interact, produce no waste, use and value diversity, integrate rather than segregate, use small and slow solutions, and creatively respond to change can inspire both practical improvements and unexpected creative possibilities.
Students use these principles as design guides to generate ideas, diagnose problems, test assumptions, and create solutions.