Over the course of ten weeks, you will write a paper that synthesizes your understanding of technological design, the core course concepts, and your own critical perspectives on these topics. This paper involves envisioning and/or discovering a way that IT may help provide for a particular aspect of human well-being in a sustainable way, and documenting plans for enacting that intervention on or around one or more UC campuses.

You will need to learn about the environmental issues at your campus, and the role that IT plays in those issues. What could you do to improve things? Improving things could mean inventing new technology, intervening to make practices already in place better, or reducing or simplifying the technology that is already being used. You will have to think about which type of project suits both the issues facing your campus and your skill set.

What should the paper be about? Almost anything, as long as it deals with global disruption, IT, and well-being. It could focus on climate change, pollution, population, biodiversity loss, water, food, energy, well-being of non-human species, health care & sustainability, or a topic not included in the present classification. It could be a well-researched description of a particular kind of intervention. It could be plans for a deployment of an intervention on a particular campus, and documentation of a series of meetings with university officials laying the groundwork for that deployment in the future. It could be the evaluation of a system currently in place. You may find other projects on your campus, on the internet, or in your communities that you may wish to build on.

Your paper should present your work clearly and accurately, but otherwise, may take whatever form you see fit.

Here are paper-related deadlines. There are three of them:

Week 3:

This week you must finalize your project topic and submit a title, 200-300 word abstract, and list of at least 12 scholarly sources (academic articles, books, data sets, etc., but not wikipedia articles, Facebook pages, etc.) that relate to your project. You may include a few items from mainstream media such as the New York Times, but in general your sources should be from scholarly literature. Good places to find scholarly sources include Google Scholar and your university library. Please visit the library if you are having trouble. The librarians will help you.

* The topic has to be related to course topics. The paper has to be around the themes of IT, sustainability, and environmental changes.

* An academic honesty reminder: Do not submit work you have submitted to another class, or will submit to another class.

* You don’t have to conduct empirical research for the paper. You can make your arguments based on existing literature (research papers, articles, videos). But if you would like to do some interviews or observations, that’s great.