Philosophy of Technology

PHIL 383T Syllabus

Course Information

PHIL 383T: Philosophy of Technology and Innovation
(Prototype of PHIL 447T: Responsible Innovation and Inclusive Design)
Spring 2025

Dr. D.E. Wittkower (he/him)
Professor of Philosophy
Chaotic Neutral

PHIL 383T is our general course in Philosophy of Technology; PHIL 447T is a new, more specific course that starts from foundational ideas from the overlapping fields of Philosophy of Technology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and continues on into practical and active training in the use of those ideas in organizational and interdisciplinary research settings. Since the more specific contents of PHIL 447T fall under the more general umbrella of PHIL 383T, I’m using this offering of PHIL 383T as a way to prototype PHIL 447T, which will be offered under that designation for the first time in Spring 2026. 

Course Description

PHIL 383T description:

This course engages in a critical exploration of what technology is as a human practice and how it develops over time in ways that influence and are influenced by society, culture, and human values. Students will also learn responsible, inclusive, and creative design and development practices through an understanding of how social structures are embedded in technology.

Prerequisites: ENGL 110C 

PHIL 447T description:

Provides training in inclusive and social-critical technology development and product design methodologies intended to directly transfer to use in industrial and organizational settings. The course’s work-based learning is grounded in foundational work in philosophy of technology. Topics covered include SCOT (social construction of technology), ANT (actor-network theory), VSD (value-sensitive design), CBPR (community-based participatory research), and postphenomenological methodologies.

Prerequisites: ENGL 211C, ENGL 221C, or ENGL 231C and 3 credit-hours in PHIL or REL.   

Student Learning Objectives and Course Outline

Student outcomes for this version of this course are

• Understand foundational orientations and perspectives in the fields of Philosophy of Technology, Sociology of Technology, and Science and Technology Studies
• Develop competency in design and development methodologies for responsible and inclusive technology design, development, and innovation
• Acquire direct experience participating in and leading teams in design and development activities that utilize these methodologies
• Gain a foundation in research about and practical resources for these methodologies in order to enable, support, and facilitate development of expertise as a practitioner through future independent learning and future practical experience

The course begins with a grounding in Phenomenology and American Pragmatism. These are two of the three major foundations of contemporary philosophy of technology. (The third is Frankfurt School Critical Theory, represented in this course through Andrew Feenberg.) These two theoretical foundations are crucial to the application of philosophy of technology to responsible and inclusive tech development and implementation—Phenomenology, because of the resources it provides to explore and articulate the detail and texture of everyday lived experience in its regularities, its specificity, and its diversity; American Pragmatism because of the framework it provides for understanding how communities of common cause organize around shared experiences, by understanding technologies as artifacts of social epistemology.

Before turning to social-critical and values-based design and development methodologies, we need to introduce additional resources from Science and Technology Studies (STS)—specifically from Sociology of Technology. Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) provides insight on how social, political, and economic forces determine the functions, meaning, and purpose of technologies; Actor-Network Theory (ANT) demonstrates how intentionality and normativity are embedded within artifacts and architectures and provides analytical tools to understand the complex networks of mutual interdetermination between persons and things.

With these grounding resources in place, the remainder of the course—slightly more than half the semester—will provide direct training and practical experience in design and development methodologies focusing on responsible and inclusive technology design, development, and innovation. These will be covered in three sections, the first on Design Justice and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) methodologies; the second on Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) and Design for Values (DfV) methodologies; the third on Postphenomenological methodologies. In each section, you will work on mock projects in groups, mirroring the collaborative processes of design and development teams. Each of you will take a leadership role in at least one aspect of each project, providing everyone with concrete hands-on experience both participating in and leading these activities.

At the end of the semester, we will hold a poster session where the working groups will present their projects’ processes and findings.

Required Materials

All materials will be provided on or through Canvas.

Basic Needs Policy

If you experience homelessness, domestic abuse, mental illness, or onset of mental or physical disability, and feel comfortable approaching me for support, please know it would not be the first time I’ve helped students with these issues. If you experience these or other problems, such as injury or hunger, I’d be glad to help and will do my best to offer support and connect you with appropriate resources. If you prefer not to talk to me about problems like these, write ODUCares@odu.edu and they will help you to get support and to navigate administrative hurdles. Please be aware that with the exception of Counseling and Student Health Services and counselors in the Women’s Center, all ODU employees are Title IX mandated reporters—I want help in whatever way I can, and I want to be sure that you know the limits of what I can promise to keep in confidence.

Educational Accessibility

I am committed to supporting students who have disabilities, and encourage any student who stands to benefit from accommodations to discuss the matter with me and with the Office of Educational Accessibility. Accommodations are intended to allow all students equal ability to succeed based on their talent and effort, and are not special treatment or something to be used only if necessary. Please feel free to discuss the matter with me either formally or informally at any time.

The ODU policy reads: “Students are encouraged to self-disclose disabilities that have been verified by the Office of Educational Accessibility by providing Accommodation Letters to their instructors early in the semester in order to start receiving accommodations. Accommodations will not be made until the Accommodation Letters are provided to instructors each semester.”

However, whether or not you have registered with the OEA or can or want to have your disabilities officially recognized, I’d like to work with you to allow you to participate fully and succeed. If you feel that you will experience barriers to your ability to learn and/or complete assignments in my class and do not have an accommodation letter, please let me know, and consider scheduling an appointment with OEA to get official Accommodations. Additional information is available at the OEA website.

Neuroinclusive Instruction

I’m committed to inclusive and accessible instruction and assessment, and I’m mindful of the specific accessibility issues that sometimes come with neurodivergence. Hyperfixation cycles, executive dysfunction, pathological demand avoidance, and special interests are some examples of aspects of neurodivergence that may be better supported through modified assignments or schedules. For example, if you’re stuck on an assignment due to PDA, it may be best to remove that demand and just move on to other work; hopefully you can come back to it later on your own terms. Or if you have a special interest in a topic appropriate to the course, but which we don’t have a plan to address, we may be able to work in an alternate approach or pathway. Or if your attention regulation is interest-directed rather than subject to executive function, your focus and motivation may be best served by going through materials according to your interest rather than on our predetermined set schedule. I’d be glad to talk with you about these or other accommodations to best support your learning and quality of life.

A medical diagnosis is not required for us to discuss accommodations. I recognize that access to diagnosis may be subject to social, economic, and circumstantial barriers, and accordingly I treat self-diagnosis as valid.

Free Accessibility Resources

I hope that all our materials are accessible to you. If there is anything you’re having accessibility issues with, please let me know so I can fix it! The resources below may be useful in making some materials more accessible to you.  

BionicReading Links to an external site.(can improve reading speed and attention)

HelperBird Links to an external site.(includes Text to Speech, color overlays, and fonts that interact better with Dyslexia)

Beeline Reader Links to an external site.(can improve reading speed and attention)

OpenDyslexicLinks to an external site. (includes specific font types that interact better with Dyslexia)

AlphaText Links to an external site.(text customizer for font size, style, line height, and color)

Children in Class 

Ideally, you will all be able to be present and focused in every class session, and having children with you diminishes this attention, but things don’t always work out. Illnesses, school closings, and other circumstances are likely to, at some point, create problems for students who are parents. In these circumstances, I invite you to bring your children to class at your discretion.

AI Use Policy

For several reasons, I don’t recommend use of AI tools in this course unless AI is the subject of the project you’re working on. If you do want to use AI tools, talk with me about it ahead of time. If I know what you’re doing and we’ve had a chance to talk about concerns and expectations, then it’s not a problem, but if we haven’t talked about it and your work looks like it’s AI generated in whole or in part, and gets flagged as AI, then that’s more of a concern.

One reason why I don’t recommend use of generative AI in this course is that we’re asking you to read and respond to specific texts from particular theoretical perspectives, and when you ask AI to do this kind of task, it tends to make up quotes and sometimes hallucinate entire sources that don’t exist.

Another reason is that I’ll be asking you to take a position on the interpretation of texts, and generative AI isn’t great at this. Its design pressures have to do with not screwing up in the view of human readers. (This is also why it ‘hallucinates’ sources instead of admitting it doesn’t know things!) Since it’s more concerned with not screwing up than it is with what’s right or true, AI tends to “both sides” every issue and avoid taking a strong (or clear) stance. In other words, generative AI tries to bullshit you.

A third reason I don’t recommend use of AI tools is that the writing process is a learning process, and you typically learn an awful lot trying to figure out how to organize your thoughts and what to say and how to say it and all that. It’s like how talking something upsetting through with a friend helps you to make sense of what you’re feeling and why, and how much (and whether) it matters in the end—in a similar way, writing is a process that we learn from; we learn about the topic, but also about how to organize thoughts well and clearly, and how to provide good and convincing reasons for our claims.

A final and in some ways most important reason why I don’t want you using AI tools—even in outlines and brainstorming and other preparatory stages—is that LLMs want to choose the most plausible and likely pathway in order to best meet user needs, and this is exactly what we don’t want in this class! We are developing skills for thinking in new and different ways, starting from a different basis and following a different through-line.

But you may have your own legitimate reasons why you want to use AI tools. Just let me know and we can come to a mutual agreement!

Course Expectations, including Participation, Assessment Structure, and Grading System

I expect you to be an active in our work together. I don’t teach by dumping information on you and expecting you to memorize it, but by working through texts and ideas with you, because mastering information isn’t learning—at least not the sort of learning we’re aiming at here. What makes sense to you and what you can do something with is what you learn, and that means you’re the only teacher you really learn from. And, if I’m here to help you to teach yourself, then you have a lot of responsibility for your own learning.

Given that my concern is mostly about process, and given that the learning outcomes I care about have more to do with conceptual, analytic, and practical aptitudes rather than informational content mastery, our assessments are (1) small day-to-day low-stakes exercises to incentivize and recognize steady engagement with our materials, (2) project-based work products, and (3) an ePortfolio directed toward an external audience.

(1). Reading-related class sessions and their assessments

In most class meetings we’ll be working on or working with a text or part of a text. You should read that text carefully before class. I’ll also give you a prompt for each reading, which you should have responded to before class. That prompt might be a question about the reading, or a task, such as to summarize a section of the reading or to explain a given sentence from the reading. I’ll figure that out based on the text and based on what seems to best support the particular in-class dynamics and focus of our group.

Every class session I will also give you an index card. If there’s something you wanted to ask or something you wanted to share that we didn’t get to, you should write it on the card. If nothing else comes up, before the end of class, please write at least one question about either the text we’ve been discussing or about where we’re going from there, or provide some other feedback to give me some additional information about what you’re thinking about or interested in, other than what I’ve already heard from you in class.

I’ll assign 10 points to each reading response and 10 points to each class notecard.

Reading responses will be graded on whether they are complete, on topic, show a good faith effort, and are submitted before class. These will be about material that we haven’t discussed yet, so they will not be graded on correctness. If you can’t make it to class, it is still best to have these done before class. These assignments inform me of where you are in your understanding of the text so that I can best assess how I can provide support. This will also help to make sure that things don’t pile up and become overwhelming.

Class notecards will be graded on whether they show that you were engaged in class and thinking through things, so those are supposed to be an easy 10 points.

If you aren’t in class, you can’t complete the class notecards. An alternate assignment can be completed by meeting with me to go over missed materials. This might be in office hours or over the phone on Fridays, or at other times.

(2). Project-based class sessions and their assessments

We will also have several “lab sessions.” On these days, there will be no assigned readings. Class time will be spent in collaborative design and development activities in project-based working groups. There will be three lab sessions for each of the three projects (the first using Design Justice and Community-Based Participatory Research methodologies; the second using Value-Sensitive Design and Design for Values methodologies; the third using Postphenomenological methodologies).

If class size is too large to effectively conduct these activities all together, working groups will be formed based on a survey of enrolled students’ interests in (a) topics and issues, e.g. environmental concerns, gendered violence, racial equity, and (b) areas of application, e.g. transportation, IoT, UX, critical infrastructure. Working groups will be different for each of the three projects.

Each of the three projects will be worth 300 points. The working group will collaboratively determine which work products will be completed before class and during class for each of the three lab sessions. The final poster presentation will be worth 100 points. Students may individually allocate the remaining 200 points among the group-determined three work products completed before class and the three work products completed during class, with each being assigned between 10 and 100 points, and with the requirement that each student should assign one work product at least 80 points. This is intended to allow the group to distribute work and responsibility and to require every student to play a leadership role in at least one aspect of the working group’s activity.

(3). ePortfolio

This course aims to develop job-ready skills in leading design and development processes. To ensure that the practical and concrete nature of this training is communicated clearly and in a way that is to your greatest advantage, you will put together an ePortfolio showing the training and work process undertaken in one or more of the course projects. The ePortfolio will be worth 100 points.

Overall this results in the following:

18 reading-response prompts @ 10pts each = 180
18 reading-related class index cards @ 10pts each = 180
3 projects @ 300pts each = 900
1 ePortfolio @ 100 points = 100

Total: 1360 points possible.

Course Schedule

This schedule is tentative. The content is subject to change as well.

T 14 Jan.          Course introduction

Grounding in Phenomenology and Lived Experience

R 16 Jan.          Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The ‘Sensation’ as a Unit of Experience,” from Phenomenology of Perception (pp. 3–14).

                        Optional: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Preface,” from Phenomenology of Perception (pp. vii–xxiv).

T 21 Jan.          Franz Fanon, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” from Black Skin, White Masks.

R 23 Jan.          Paulo Freire, “Dialogics,” from Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pragmatist Social Instrumentalism

T 28 Jan.          John Dewey, “Nature, Means, and Knowledge,” from Experience and Nature

                        Optional: Larry Hickman, “John Dewey as a Philosopher of Technology”

R 30 Jan.          John Dewey, “Search for the Great Community,” from The Public and Its Problems

                        Optional: John Dewey, “The Problem of Method,” from The Public and Its Problems

SCOT (Social Construction of Technology) and ANT (Actor-Network Theory)

T 4 Feb.           Andrew Feenberg, “Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom.”

R 6 Feb.           Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other,” from The Social Construction of Technological Systems

T 11 Feb.         Bruno Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses?: The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.”

R 13 Feb.         (ANT/CTT Field Work)

T 18 Feb.         (ANT/CTT Field Work)

Design Justice, PD (Participatory Design), and CBPR (Community-Based Participatory Research)

R 20 Feb.         Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Design Values,” from Design Justice

T 25 Feb.         Ashley Shew, “Technological Knowledge in Disability Design,” from Feedback Loops, Andrew Garnar & Ashley Shew (Eds.), pp. 71–88).

               Optional: Ashley Shew, “Scripts and Crips,” from Against Technoableism

R 27 Feb.        (lab session for DJ/CBPR project)

T 4 March      (lab session for DJ/CBPR project)

R 6 March      (lab session for DJ/CBPR project)

Spring Break

T 11 March    10 out of 10, does what it says on the box.

R 13 March    Five stars, would break again. 

VSD (Value-Sensitive Design) and DfV (Design for Values)

T 18 March   Albert Borgmann, selections from Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life on focal things and focal practices

R 20 March   Peter-Paul Verbeek, “The Acts of Artifacts,” from What Things Do

T 25 March   TUDelft Design for Values procedure materials

R 27 March   (lab session for DfV project)

T 1 April        (lab session for DfV project)

R 3 April        (lab session for DfV project)

Postphenomenology

T 8 April        Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Don Ihde: The Technological Lifeworld,” from American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn.

R 10 April     Don Ihde, “Program One: A Phenomenology of Technics,” from  Technology and the Lifeworld

T 15 April     Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek, “A Field Guide to Postphenomenology,” from Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations

R 17 April    (lab session for Postphenomenology project)

T 22 April     (lab session for Postphenomenology project)

R 24 April     (lab session for Postphenomenology project)

Final Exam period: Poster Presentation Session