Technology is increasingly shaped and developed by everyday people who design, build, and hack their own devices, and the goal of this class is to understand, contribute to, and support these creative communities. We will focus on tools that enable non-experts to design and build computational and electronic artifacts. Along the way we will investigate software toolkits, hardware toolkits, open-source technologies, fabrication processes, and new manufacturing and distribution models.

from Design for Empowerment

With crowd-sourcing, social media, and open source tools we are all becoming a part of collaborative and community based social technology projects.  We will explore these communities and tools with the question: How can we create tools which foster healthy communities? How can you identify and describe a healthy community?

DFE:X is an extension of the Design for Empowerment class offered at the MIT Media Lab that is open to anyone.  We will share course materials, discussion points, documents, guest lectures, etc with the MIT course, but will meet and discuss on our own.

Over the duration of the course, participants will work to develop a design idea of their own with a critical eye toward the material explored in the course and will employ resources around the Boston area to realize the physical or digital prototypes (e.g. Boston FabLab, sprout, MIT Media Lab, etc.).

Here is the website for the course.