How the course works
Class time combines seminar discussion with hands-on studio work. Mondays generally emphasize concepts and discussion; Wednesdays generally emphasize studio activities, workshops, and project work. The course turns on a question asked in Week 4: what is social media? Until then, we study the platforms you already know. After that, we widen the frame. The last three weeks are yours to build, audit, and present a platform of your own.
The Social Media Design Assembly
Each student joins a standing group of four: typically two UW students and two university students from outside the United States, all of whom are pursuing UX design coursework. All members participate as equal peers; there are no mentor–mentee roles. Groups form in Week 1 and the collective inquiry begins immediately; Week 3 is your group's first sustained attempt at synchronous connection.
The Assembly has two graded threads. In the reading exchange, members take turns preparing and leading discussion of the week's material, so that each of you repeatedly learns by teaching. In the collective inquiry, the group works through open questions that no reading settles: what would better social media actually feel like? How would you know a design was working? What are the unwritten rules of posting where you live, and do they hold where your groupmates live? Discussion questions accompany each week's readings below, and the inquiry is cumulative — later questions ask you to look back at what your own group has become. More about the Assembly.
Communication
Use Discord for Assembly activity and general course conversation, Canvas for assignment submission, and email for private matters. The instructor aims to respond to email within 48 hours on weekdays.
Schedule
Topics and readings below are tentative. The definitive schedule, with links to all readings, lives on Canvas. Depending on the academic calendar, Week 1 may begin midweek and one session may fall on a University holiday.
| Week | Topic | Due |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Youth, social media, and the wellbeing debate | — |
| 2 | Inside the mainstream platform | M1: platform critique |
| 3 | Synchronous connection across technologies | — |
| 4 | What is social media? Alternatives, speculative and value-sensitive design | — |
| 5 | Identity, self-presentation, and relational needs | M2: concept & design values |
| 6 | Community, belonging, and governance | — |
| 7 | Privacy, safety, and risk | M3: design specification |
| 8 | Studio: build | — |
| 9 | Studio: build and audit | M4: working prototype |
| 10 | Audit, synthesis, and presentations | M5: CodesignStudio safety audit |
| Finals | Final presentations | Final deliverable |
Weekly reflections are due at the end of each week, and daily reflections (three or more per week) throughout.
Weekly topics, readings, and Assembly questions
Week 1 — Youth, social media, and the wellbeing debate
Where the public conversation stands; what the evidence does and does not show; how social media actually feels from the inside. Course overview; Assembly groups form and the collective inquiry opens.
Read: boyd (2014), It's Complicated, Introduction; Haidt (2024), The Anxious Generation, excerpt, paired with Odgers (2024), “The Great Rewiring” review, Nature.
Optional: Orben & Przybylski (2019), Nature Human Behaviour; Landesman et al. (2024), IDC.
Assembly questions: What were you actually hoping for when you joined the platforms you use? Did you get it? Does the public story about social media and young people match what social media has done to you — and does it match what it has done to your groupmates, in their countries?
Week 2 — Inside the mainstream platform
Affordances and defaults; dark and deceptive patterns; the attention economy; algorithmic feeds, engagement metrics, and user agency. What Instagram and TikTok are built to do.
Read: Gray et al. (2018), “The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design,” CHI; Seaver (2019), “Captivating Algorithms,” Journal of Material Culture.
Optional: Lukoff et al. (2021), “How the Design of YouTube Influences User Sense of Agency,” CHI.
Assembly questions: Name one feature on a platform you use daily that you believe was designed against your interests. How would you prove it? Which platforms do your groupmates see as thriving, and do you agree on what “thriving” means?
Due: M1 — platform critique.
Week 3 — Synchronous connection across technologies
No lecture this week. Your Assembly group has been in asynchronous inquiry for two weeks; now it attempts sustained real-time connection across three countries, using a rotating set of platforms — Discord, Zoom, Gather.town, and others of your choosing — and documents what each afforded, what each made impossible, and where connection actually happened.
Read: Kim et al. (2025), “Discord's Design Encourages ‘Third Place’ Social Media Experiences,” preprint; Oldenburg (1999), The Great Good Place, Ch. 1.
Assembly questions: You have known each other asynchronously for two weeks. What did the first live call give you that Discord did not? What did it cost? Which platform made silence comfortable? Where did the time zones stop being a logistics problem and start being a fact about the relationship?
Week 4 — What is social media?
The pivot. Fictional inquiry as a method for escaping the design templates of platforms we already know; alternative platforms and social technologies; speculative and value-sensitive design as ways of imagining otherwise.
Read: Kim et al. (2026), “Social Media Should Feel Like Minecraft, Not Instagram,” preprint; Kim et al. (2024), “Envisioning New Futures of Positive Social Technology,” CSCW Companion; Friedman & Hendry (2019), Value Sensitive Design, Ch. 1.
Optional: Dunne & Raby (2013), Speculative Everything, Ch. 1; Costanza-Chock (2020), Design Justice, Introduction.
Assembly questions: If you could connect with a distant friend using any magic you wished, what would you do — and why is it not a feed? Now: whose values are embedded in the answer you just gave? Compare across your group. Where do three cultures disagree about what a good connection feels like?
Week 5 — Identity, self-presentation, and relational needs
Imagined audiences and context collapse; authenticity as a design outcome; what adolescents developmentally need from social technology, and how platform structures shape who we are able to be.
Read: Marwick & boyd (2011), “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately,” New Media & Society; Kim et al. (2024), “Sharing, Not Showing Off”: How BeReal Approaches Authentic Self-Presentation on Social Media Through Its Design, CSCW.
Optional: Davis (2023), Technology's Child, selected chapters.
Assembly questions: BeReal tried to design authenticity into a platform and partly succeeded. What did it get wrong? Describe an unwritten rule about posting that everyone where you live understands and no one states. Does it hold in your groupmates' countries?
Due: M2 — concept & design values statement.
Week 6 — Community, belonging, and governance
What makes online communities work; third places online; moderation, norms, and governance as design problems rather than afterthoughts.
Read: Kraut & Resnick (2012), Building Successful Online Communities, Ch. 1; Gillespie (2018), Custodians of the Internet, Ch. 1.
Optional: Zhang et al. (2020), “PolicyKit,” UIST.
Assembly questions: Your Assembly group has been running for five weeks. What norms did you establish without discussing them? Who enforces them? What would you have to build into a platform to make those norms hold among strangers?
Week 7 — Privacy, safety, and risk
Boundary regulation and trust; interpersonal versus institutional privacy; harassment in games and spatial platforms; age-appropriate design; what safety means when the risk comes from peers rather than strangers.
Read: Kim et al. (2025), “Trust-Enabled Privacy,” SOUPS; Kim et al. (2025), “Privacy as Social Norm,” CSCW.
Optional: Blackwell et al. (2019), “Harassment in Social Virtual Reality: Challenges for Platform Governance,” CSCW; Freeman et al. (2022), “Disturbing the Peace: Experiencing and Mitigating Emerging Harassment in Social Virtual Reality,” CSCW; Schulenberg et al. (2023), “‘Creepy Towards My Avatar Body, Creepy Towards My Body’: How Women Experience and Manage Harassment Risks in Social Virtual Reality,” CSCW; Kou (2020), “Toxic Behaviors in Team-Based Competitive Gaming: The Case of League of Legends,” CHI PLAY; Fiani et al. (2024), “Exploring the Perspectives of Social VR-Aware Non-Parent Adults and Parents on Children’s Use of Social Virtual Reality,” CSCW.
Assembly questions: Describe something you decided not to post, and why. Was the risk the platform's or a person's? What would have had to be different for you to post it? What could go wrong on the platform you are designing — and who would it happen to first?
Due: M3 — design specification.
Week 8 — Studio: build
Prototyping workshop; peer design review; individual consultations. No new readings. Your Assembly group continues its collective inquiry.
Assembly questions: Show your group the thing you are building. What are they worried about that you were not?
Week 9 — Studio: build and audit
Prototype completion; introduction to CodesignStudio; setting up your simulation and choosing what to test.
Read: Connor & Irizarry (2015), Discussing Design, excerpt; Nielsen (1994), “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.”
Assembly questions: What is the worst plausible thing a user could do on your platform? Design the simulation that would surface it.
Due: M4 — working prototype.
Week 10 — Audit, synthesis, and presentations
Running and interpreting your CodesignStudio audit; final presentations; manifestos for social media futures; closing the Assembly well.
Read: no new readings.
Assembly questions: What did the simulation reveal that you did not want to know? Has the Assembly changed what you think “better” social media means — and if so, when?
Due: M5 — CodesignStudio safety audit; final weekly reflection. Final deliverable due in finals week.
Assignments and grading
| Component | Weight | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Reflections | 20% | Daily and weekly |
| Social Media Design Assembly | 35% | Weekly |
| Final project & milestones | 45% | Milestones across the quarter |
| Community building (extra credit) | up to 5% | Ongoing |
Reflections (20%)
Two cadences, one component. Daily reflections (8%) are short entries of roughly 100–150 words, at least three per week on different days, on your own social media use and on your experience building community with your Assembly group. Graded credit/no-credit; lowest week dropped. Weekly reflections (12%) are longer structured responses of roughly 400–600 words connecting course concepts to your experience — for example, analyzing one platform that works well and one that does not. The final weekly reflection asks you to trace how your perspective changed over the quarter.
Social Media Design Assembly (35%)
Your work in the standing Assembly group, across both threads.
- Reading exchange (20%). When you lead, you prepare a short teaching summary of the week's material and three to five discussion questions, facilitate the exchange, and afterward submit your materials plus a brief synthesis of what the discussion surfaced. Each member leads twice across the quarter. When you are not leading, you are assessed on the quality of your preparation and contributions.
- Collective inquiry (15%). Sustained, substantive contribution to the group's ongoing discussion of the week's open questions and of the implicit norms, goals, and disagreements those questions surface. Assessed on the quality of reasoning, on engagement with what groupmates have already said, and on the specificity with which you draw on your own experience rather than restating the reading.
Final project and milestones (45%)
You will critique existing platforms, design and build your own, audit it with CodesignStudio, and present what you learned. Projects are individual by default; pairs may be approved by the instructor.
- M1 — Platform critique (end of Week 2, 6%): a structured critique of an existing mainstream platform, identifying the design choices responsible for a specific behavioral or relational outcome.
- M2 — Concept & design values statement (end of Week 5, 7%): the community you are designing for, the problem you are responding to, and the explicit values your design will embody.
- M3 — Design specification (end of Week 7, 8%): core interactions, information architecture, and sketches or wireframes, with rationale tying each major choice to your stated values.
- M4 — Working prototype (end of Week 9, 10%): an interactive prototype implementing your core interactions.
- M5 — CodesignStudio safety audit (Week 10, 9%): results of simulating your platform in CodesignStudio, an LLM-agent sandbox for evaluating how a design behaves under realistic social dynamics. Report where the design honors your values, where it fails under pressure, and what the simulation surfaced that you had not anticipated.
- Final deliverable (finals week, 5%): revised prototype, a short in-class presentation, and an insights report.
Community building (up to 5% extra credit)
Rather than a participation grade, extra credit is awarded for the work of making our three-country Discord into an actual community. Across the quarter the instructor will post shared milestones and lightweight missions: rituals to try, channels to design, ways of welcoming someone new. Credit is earned by attempting them, by documenting what happened in your daily reflections, and by whatever you invent that no one asked for. The question is not whether you posted. It is whether the community was more alive because you were in it.
Grading scale
Final course percentages convert to grades on the University of Washington's numerical grading system, in which instructors report grades from 4.0 to 0.7 in 0.1 increments, with 0.0 for failing work. The percentage-to-grade conversion table for this course will be posted on Canvas.
Course policies
Attendance and engagement
This is a studio course; much of the learning happens in the room and in your Assembly group, and it cannot be fully reconstructed afterward. If you must miss a session, let the instructor know in advance when possible and coordinate with your Assembly group so their work is not disrupted.
Late work
You have four grace days to use across the quarter on weekly reflections and project milestones, in any combination, no questions asked. Beyond grace days, late submissions lose 10% per day up to three days. Daily reflections cannot be submitted late, since their value is in the moment, but your lowest week is dropped. Reading exchange leading cannot be rescheduled except by swapping with a groupmate in advance. If circumstances beyond your control interfere with your coursework, contact the instructor early.
Use of AI tools
AI tools, including large language models, are permitted as design and development aids for your final project — generating code, exploring visual directions, debugging — provided you include a brief disclosure of how you used them in each milestone. AI tools may not be used to generate your daily reflections, weekly reflections, Assembly contributions, or reading exchange materials: those assignments assess your personal experience and thinking, and outsourcing them defeats their purpose. When in doubt, ask.
Assembly conduct
The Assembly asks you to build relationships across cultures and time zones. Approach it with patience, curiosity, and generosity: assume good intent across language and cultural differences, honor your commitments to your group, and treat your partners' time as valuable. Concerns about group dynamics should come to the instructor early, before they compound.
University policies
The syllabus PDF carries the complete, verbatim university policy statements. The summaries below point to the same resources.
Religious accommodations
Washington state law requires the University to reasonably accommodate students' religious beliefs, practices, and observances. Students request accommodations within the first two weeks of the course via the Religious Accommodations Request form. The University's required statement appears verbatim in the syllabus PDF; see the Registrar's Religious Accommodations Policy.
Access and accommodations
If you have already established accommodations with Disability Resources for Students (DRS), please share your approved accommodations with the instructor at your earliest convenience. If you have a temporary health condition or a permanent disability that requires accommodations but have not yet set up services, contact DRS at 206-543-8924, uwdrs@uw.edu, or disability.uw.edu. Conditions requiring accommodation include, among others, mental health, attention-related, learning, vision, hearing, physical, and health impacts.
Academic integrity
The University of Washington Student Conduct Code (WAC 478-121) defines prohibited academic and behavioral conduct. Collaboration boundaries are set per assignment above; representing another person's — or an AI system's — work as your own reflective writing is a violation. See washington.edu/cssc.
Safety
Call SafeCampus at 206-685-7233 anytime, no matter where you work or study, to anonymously discuss safety and wellbeing concerns for yourself or others.
Sexual misconduct and Title IX
University policy, together with federal and state law, gives you the right to participate in UW programs and activities free from sex- or gender-based discrimination and harassment. For reporting options and supportive resources, see washington.edu/titleix.
Beyond the course
Students who engage actively and thoughtfully in this course will have the opportunity to develop their final project further and to co-author research growing out of the course. A second path is also open: running a version of this program with teenagers aged 13–17, as members of a youth advisory board. The course teaches you to design social media with young people rather than for them; the advisory board is where that becomes practice, and where the youth whose experience this research concerns get to set the terms. If either interests you, say so early — the course itself is good preparation, and the instructor is glad to talk about pathways into research.