User experience (UX) is concerned with the iterative modeling of complex relationships among four primary elements: people, organizational goals, content, and interaction. This course covers a series of methods to represent UX in each of the four elements mentioned above. Methods and tools for modelling people may include user journey/experience maps, personas, affinity diagrams, and user flow. Methods and tools for capturing organizational goals may include stakeholder interviews, organizational research, discovery workshops, and competitive analysis. Methods and tools for designing content and interactions may include information architecture schemas, content mapping, prototyping, design principles, and usability and user experience goals. Throughout the course, students will work on a major design project and will represent a user’s total experience when interacting with a digital system, including measurement of user experience through different metrics (e.g., performance, comparison, self-reporting) and evaluation techniques (usability testing, experimental design, non-parametric tests).

This full course provides a student with the opportunity to carry out a medium-scale independent information systems design project under the supervision of a faculty member culminating in a substantial written report, demonstration, and/or oral presentation. The student must secure the consent of a supervisor who is a full-time faculty member affiliated with the Information Systems and Design (IS&D) path in the Masters of Information program. The design project may be identified by the student or the supervisor. The student and instructor must both be available on campus. The Information Systems Design Project course involves regular frequent meetings with work comparable to that of other full year elective courses.

The proposed course will compare the traditions, theories, and perspectives of LAMs, focusing on: • the evolution of LAMS from the early modern period to the present day; • key concepts of library science, archival studies and museum studies; • professional ethics and values across LAMs; • representation and interpretation across LAMs • user engagement and meaning-making across LAMs; • LAMs as physical and virtual spaces; • collaboration and convergence across LAMs; • the repositioning of LAMs as agents of social change in general and in response to the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in particular.

Discussion of archival theories and methods of acquiring, appraising, arranging, describing, making accessible, and promoting the records of individuals and communities. Analysis of traditional and innovative archival theory and methodology will be grounded in an examination of the unique nature of personal records by studying personal recordkeeping practices, engaging with theories of self-representation, and considering how personal records are used by archival researchers.

Information for and about those considered to be on the margins of the “mainstream” is (and is not) made accessible based on certain assumptions. Such perspectives reinforce difference, “disability”, and further disempowerment of an individual or group.

From Tinder to Task Rabbit, students will come to understand the co-constitutive relationship between gender and technology. Students will be introduced to a wide array of texts that fall under the category of Feminist Technology Studies. The course focuses explicitly on how the materiality of technology intersects with and structures gendered power dynamics.

In a fast-moving business world, User Experience (UX) leadership and influence are necessary skills for UX professionals to be successful. UX leaders advocate for user-centered design practices, infuse this into the culture of an organization, and drive business by user needs and design mandates. In addition to cultural leadership, the UX leader needs to work closely with other stakeholders – including users, product owners, managers, engineers, and experts/specialists in other disciplines – to set up best UX delivery practices, design operations, and agile methodologies to ensure effective design and delivery of excellent end-to-end user experiences.

This course introduces students to essential UX leadership skills, provides opportunities to develop and hone those skills, and builds awareness of the expectations for exemplary UX leadership. Studio-based learning and discussions of strategies for understanding the tenets of UX leadership will be employed. Each student will examine and demonstrate the applications of UX leadership via lectures, individual assignments, and a major group design project. Students will then learn how to communicate the value of UX to executives, as well as how to recognize business challenges that can be turned into UX opportunities and successes. An emphasis will be placed on the application of both UX best practices – including design thinking, user research, and agile development – and personal skills relating to influence, like empathy, awareness, storytelling, and persuasion.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Managerial" Professional Requirement.

The course is designed to help students understand the opportunities and tensions in designing for individuals and communities in different cultures and geographies. In recent times, technology companies are looking to push their products to new markets as well as design new products for communities around the globe. There have also been discussions on the ethical responsibilities of technology companies as well as the values built into designed technologies. This course will critically examine the social impact of technologies around the world, especially in developing contexts. It will provide students with necessary exposure to historical and contemporary issues in global development, and how they relate to the design of technologies. The course will prepare the students for a work environment that increasingly demands an awareness of the cultural, social, and political issues related to designing and implementing technologies in different parts of the world. The course will draw from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including Human-Computer Interaction, Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD), Science and Technology Studies (STS), and development studies.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Critical Perspectives" Professional Requirement.

Modern information systems leverage distributed architecture to enhance scalability, reliability, and availability. These systems distribute components across multiple interconnected computers, while appearing as a single coherent system to end users. This course provides an in-depth understanding and insights into the evolving landscape of digital connectivity and distributed systems. The course will focus on the foundation of computer networks and the design of distributed systems including computer networks terminology, protocols, architectures, technologies, and the main principles behind designing reliable distributed systems.

Information systems need to evolve continuously to cope with the rapid changes in our society. In recent years, DevOps has gained popularity as a practice that combines development and operation teams to reduce the time needed to build and deliver high-quality systems. This course provides an overview of DevOps concepts and best practices. Concepts to be covered include the challenges of adopting DevOps for large-scale information systems, the application of Configuration Management (CM) concepts, and infrastructure management using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices. In addition, the course, (INF2206H: Adopting DevOps for Large-Scale Information Systems), will address the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to manage IT Operations (i.e., AIOps) of information systems.

Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) is about ensuring that socioenvironmental responsibility is a fundamental and permeating consideration in all stages (conception, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, etc.) of AI development and governance. This is necessary to address and prevent harms and injustices, setting the course of AI development in a direction of sustainable benefit to our interconnected world. RAI requires a thoughtful and pragmatic synthesis of approaches from wide-ranging fields. The goal of this course is to equip students with the qualitative, quantitative, critical, reflective, and practical tools to bridge the gap between theory and practice, in order to make responsible AI a reality.

The course covers an evolving set of relevant topics such as user studies, participatory design, statistical significance testing, model comparison, generalization, randomized control trials, bias, interpretability and explainability, FAccT (fairness, accountability, transparency), equity, ethics, safety, alignment, robustness, scientific communication, stakeholder consultations, data governance, power and exploitation, digital labour, peer review, reliability engineering, information security, privacy, verification, auditing, reproducibility, red-teaming, unit-testing, sandboxing, scenario planning, risk, and impact analysis.

After the examination of many technical aspects of algorithms, from design to implementation, this course will examine principles that need to be followed in order to ensure that human values and ethics are preserved.

This trans-disciplinary course aims to provide students with a conceptual toolset to bridge disciplinary modes of thinking. It introduces systems thinking frameworks as mental devices to illuminate and critically interrogate key concepts, assumptions, frameworks, and modes of engagement. Through these frameworks, it explores the multi-faceted nature of sustainability and the role of information systems and technology design in addressing it. Students will explore and contrast so-called hard, soft, and critical systems thinking approaches and their historical evolution. We use systems thinking games, collaborative modelling, and case studies to explore the role of systems design in social, environmental, and economic sustainability and we discuss roles and responsibilities for information professionals in this space.

As an issue of public policy, the digital divide has evolved from its first appearance in the mid-1990s in an innocuous U.S. Department of Commerce report describing the divide between Americans with “access to a computer and a modem” and those without into an industry of global proportions. It has generated a significant body of research from a wide range of disciplines and grown to encompass an increasingly complex array of problem definitions. The digital divide now breaks along any number of fronts including, for instance, language, ethnicity, geo-political boundaries, training and education, literacy, health, motivation, gender, age, and physical abilities, to name just a few. Not surprisingly, the ambiguous nature of the term has generated no shortage of debate as various stakeholders (public, private, not-for-profit) operating at all levels (local, regional, national and international) struggle over its definition and, by extension, solutions for its amelioration. But what really is this thing called “the digital divide” and why does it matter? What was the analog world’s equivalent, if any? What issues has it displaced on our public policy radar or is the “digital divide” unique to our knowledge societies? What would it mean to bridge the divide?

This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writing addressing the nature of digital media and the role of technology in modern and contemporary culture. In doing so, this course will consider a range of critical pressure points that have been central to media studies, technology studies, digital humanities, art and performance, cinema studies, and archival studies. How have developments in digital culture and theory impacted the critical commonplaces of analogy, time, space, sound, motion, network, body, and narrative? In dialogue with critical paradigms that have been fundamental to the discourse of critical theory, including affect, power, constructionism, archives, colonialism, nationalism, and the politics of race, gender, and sexuality, this course will provide students with the opportunity to scrutinize the work of a wide spectrum of thinkers central to critical theory in digital discourse.

This course will explore how and why material objects, cultural artifacts, and artistic works relate to and are transformed through technological mediation. We will examine several case studies in which elements of the analogue or natural world are digitized and presented in new screen-based forms. Throughout the course we will combine theoretical readings on the nature of materiality, the politics of digitization, and the aesthetics of digital representation with case studies of specific digital archives, collections, and organizations. Topics will include the scanning of books by mass digitization organizations like the Internet Archive and Google Books; diverse practices of curation and remediation in the museum and library sectors; technologies for digitization and remediation including 3D scanning, photography, OCR and applications of machine learning for textual transcription; specialist imaging techniques including multi-spectral imaging and micro-CT scanning; the mediation and digitization of social processes; artistic and conceptual engagements with digitization; the relationship between digitization and conservation of historical materials; and the creation of digital archives and collections. We will conclude the course by considering the role of materiality and embodiment in a highly digitized culture and the significance of material craft and the handmade alongside digital surrogates.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Technical" Professional Requirement

This course will introduce students to the methods, tools, and workflows that archivists use to process born-digital archival materials for preservation and access. Through a combination of lectures, demonstrations, readings, activities for testing and exploration, and a cumulative set of assignments using example records, students will gain hands-on experience with a suite of open source software tools used to acquire, appraise, arrange, describe, make accessible, store, and preserve digital archival materials.

Students will attain an understanding of the fundamental aspects of digital records and computing systems, build experience with the systems and infrastructures that enable and support digital archives work, apply methods for documenting workflows, and engage in current issues and debates affecting the work of digital archivists. The focus of the course will be on born-digital archival records, though issues regarding digitized archival materials will also be discussed. The course will bridge the theories and methods for archival functions taught in the required courses of the ARM concentration with the opportunities and challenges presented by working with digital records, including identifying how core principles apply or require rethinking in digital environments.

The purpose of this course is to provide an introduction to concepts and considerations of epistemic injustice and knowledge equity in the context of GLAM organizations. The course examines theories of epistemic injustice, particularly as it touches on the circulation of information through information spaces such as libraries and explores and teaches practices that bring knowledge equity. Theorist Miranda Fricker has described epistemic injustice as “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” Students will critically examine the ways dominant information organization (infra)structures are sites of epistemic injustice, where frameworks of description, digital encoding, and standardized naming are used as methods of domination and oppression. Students will also engage and explore theories and mechanisms to work toward knowledge equity within GLAM organizations.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Critical Perspectives" Professional Requirement.

Explores the institutionalized production and management of the economic value in information in relation to the production of lived culture. Includes critical examinations of globalization, the knowledge economy, media ownership, indigenous knowledge, and the commodification of culture, information, and knowledge.

The focus of this class in on evaluating and exploring current critical themes in Information Studies through both literature and hands-on work.

This is a seminar-style course that engages critical theories of knowledge-making practices and methodological approaches to their study. The focus is methodological and extends from the foundational themes and topics in information and knowledge. The emphasis is on how to study these issues, rather than merely on what the issues are. Approaches include ethnographic field studies, laboratory studies, critical discourse analysis, feminist science studies, social construction of technology, actor-network theory, activity theory, and distributed cognition.

This seminar approaches information and communication technologies from critical and historical perspectives. We will investigate theories of the relations among technology, information, ideology, culture, and social structure, as well as methods for studying those relations.

We are told that now we are living in a platform society because digital platforms, from Amazon and Flipkart to Instagram and WeChat, shape the social life of a great majority of the global population. This course is designed to advance the knowledge about the global origin and development of the platform-turn in the intersecting fields of information studies, studies of science and technologies, management studies, and political economy of communication and media. The course provides an intellectual voyage of the global experience and expression of platform from the geography outside Anglophone where the term was first theorized in the manufacturing industry, and from the days when the concerning experiences were not yet understood through the perspective platforms as we know today to the contemporary era when we can hardly imagine an internet without digital platforms.

The course explores the global histories and practices of the platform, as well as the implications of the increasing penetration of digital platforms into the social fabric of our life on a global scale. The course will guide the students to pay special attention to how local conditions, globalization, and the geo-politics of information and knowledge production intertwine to shape and be shaped by the intellectual undertaking to theorize platform as a discourse, business model, mediation device, power relation, and organizational revolution. Students will engage with key concepts, theories, and approaches in the emerging field of platform studies, but also with some overlooked histories and local articulations of what platform is and how platform works. The course will be a discussion-oriented seminar. Discussions will revolve around history, theorization, and politics of platform through examples of different platforms beyond the digital realm and from a variety of geographies.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Critical Perspectives" Professional Requirement.

This course examines the particular roles of User Experience Design (UXD) and User Experience Research (UXR) in video games and the video games industry. The course specializes in video games as interactive interfaces, introduces core video game concepts, discusses the role of UX in the video game development process, and highlights how and when core UX research methods are applicable to this unique domain. Key trends in the video game industry will be illustrated with current examples. Throughout the course, students will practice video game analysis, heuristic evaluation of video games, as well as usability, appreciation, and challenge testing using industry-standard user research tools. Inclusivity, accessibility, and making video games for everyone will be a recurring theme that reflects the current state of the industry.

As we increasingly live in a networked world, studying data that is shaped in the form of networks becomes an essential part of the toolkit of information researchers and data scientists. Social network analysis is a structural perspective to study the social world that focuses on the relationships between actors rather than the characteristics of the individuals themselves. It can be applied to a wide variety of social questions, and is used as a powerful method of research across various disciplines. The course offers a broader view of theory and applications of social network analysis, including applications to online and social media networks. We will learn how to identify influential actors within social networks, investigate community structure within networks, and test hypotheses to analyze how networked data can explain the social world. The course includes a practical component and provides hands on experience on network data collection and analysis using social network analysis existing tools.

Business processes are pervasive in our lives: in banks, telecommunication centers, web-services, and healthcare. Processes in organizations are there to make sure that the business goals are achieved in an efficient way with the highest quality of products and/or services. Business Process Management (BPM) is a research field that focuses on improving company’s performance by managing, analyzing and improving its processes. The BPM lifecycle includes (Re)Design, Modeling, Executing, Monitoring and Optimizing business processes. We shall cover the components of the lifecycle, emphasizing the data-driven aspects of BPM. The field of Business Process Management (BPM) focuses on improving an organization’s performance by managing, analyzing and improving its processes.

This course addresses issues of data and the city, looking at intersecting frameworks such as smart technology, civic engagement, and municipal policy. The aim of this course is to introduce students to a range analytical methodologies, such as Science and Technology Studies, Critical Data Studies, Critical Policy Studies, as well as applied work in Interaction Design, in order to produce a critical understanding of the complex domain called “the city.” Students will use the city of Toronto as a living lab for the course, engaging case studies, urban data, and site visits. Throughout the course, students will produce analytical writing and prototype interaction and experience design. Students are expected to participate in class discussion and produce a final project. No prior experience in the course methodologies or design technique required.

This course examines the applications of user experience design (UXD) to the disciplines of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM). The course introduces the UXD toolbox, a series of user experience (UX) methods and tools that are applicable in GLAM workplaces. This may include UX research methods, UX evaluation methods, design thinking approaches, UX strategy techniques, user journey/experience maps, and service blueprints. The course will emphasize studio-based learning and discussions of strategies for understanding and responding to the needs of GLAM users. Each student will examine and demonstrate the applications of UXD in one GLAM discipline of their choice; students will work on two major assignments. First, an individual literature review outlining the UX applications in a GLAM discipline of their choice (e.g., a LIS student may want to conduct a literature review on UX in Libraries). These literature reviews will form the basis for class discussions. Second, a major design project in which students will work (in a group) to solve a UX related challenge in a GLAM discipline. The project will be executed with GLAM organizations across the GTA (community-engaged learning approach).

The Joy of Information introduces students to a positive Information Science by focusing upon information in contexts that are perceived as joyful, sublime, upbeat, creative, interesting, pleasurable, and fun. In doing so, it intentionally brackets and places aside information experiences associated with negative or quotidian states such as work, problems, pain, conflict, boredom, everyday routines, and unconsciousness. Participants will explore the idea that positive information phenomena have distinct qualities and are important to what Plato called eudaimonia—a flourishing life. Practically speaking, enrollees will discover how information institutions and their stakeholders may mediate and champion a positive approach to their information resources, systems, and services. The first offering of this course during Fall 2019 will be centered upon leisure, an information-rich, heterogeneous, and joyful domain. Over the course of the semester, casual leisure, serious leisure (including hobbies), project-based leisure, and devotee work (paid work that feels like leisure), will be examined for their informational patterns and distinctions.

From mobile apps to social media platforms, digital technologies are crucial factors in the evolution of contemporary work. In this course we will analyse their significance in contexts such as creative labour, student and academic work, platform economy, start-up culture, peer production, automation and work refusal, and prosumerism. The course will have a specific focus on the Italian and continental school of autonomist Marxism, including feminist political economy and grassroots approaches to precarious labour. Among others, we will read Federici, Gramsci, Lazzarato, Negri, Tronti, and Virno, as well as a number of empirical studies of digital labour. We will also watch and read relevant fiction. The main goal is to sharpen critical tools to analyse the material and ideological configurations of work in the social factory of digital capitalism.