Parsons Designers Engage with the Promise and Challenge of a Future Shaped by Data

by Lilit Markosian

The New School
8 min readJan 16, 2020

Originally published in the 2019 issue of re:D, the Alumni magazine of Parsons School of Design. Access the full issue here.

In an 11th-floor classroom at Parsons School of Design, students discuss the week’s tech headlines. Work tables speckled with paint have been pulled together in a large square, and the New York skyline — a reminder that we are situated in a global hub of commerce and creativity — rises through broad windows in the background. Informed by the digital activism of professor David Carroll ’00, the subject of Netflix’s recent documentary The Great Hack, the conversation covers a spectrum of topics. Are algorithms firing Amazon warehouse workers? What happens if Instagram removes the “like” function? Will YouTube’s crackdown on toxic content affect shareholder profits? “The future is private,” one student says, quoting Mark Zuckerberg, and his peers chuckle at the irony. The debate is energetic. Beyond their connections to coursework, these questions frame students’ lived experience as digital natives and budding designers.

Earlier this year, David Carroll, MFA Design and Technology ’00, was prominently featured in the critically acclaimed Netflix documentary The Great Hack, which explores Cambridge Analytica’s data hacking scandal.

Co-taught by Carroll and Melanie Crean — associate professors at Parsons’ School of Art, Media, and Technology — Dark Data is a seminar that invites students to study digital tracking infrastructures created around the world, along with the broader possibilities of mass data collection. Questions posed in the classroom each week reflect a larger undertaking at Parsons. From data ethics and machine learning workshops to research conducted by professors, students, and alumni, the design school is pioneering a new approach to data. In keeping with its tradition of blurring disciplinary lines, Parsons is teaching young creators to think critically about the designer’s role in shaping the data-driven future.

Back in 2014, Carroll was simultaneously launching the Dark Data course (then called Surveillance Design) and trying to get his content start-up off the ground. While integrating Facebook into his app, he discovered that the platform was offering developers unfiltered access to huge amounts of user data. “I started to feel the pressure of invading people’s privacy to make money,” says Carroll. “The default setting in the industry was maximum data collection.”

“Our students are working in the industry, building the infrastructure of commercial surveillance whether they realize it or not.” —DAVID CARROLL

The realization that anonymity on the Internet is a myth took Carroll’s career and the Dark Data curriculum in a new direction. Within five years, the professor has emerged as a prominent digital privacy activist, and the seminar has evolved to encompass Silicon Valley’s most pressing ethical controversies. Last year, its focus was Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm that mined data from millions of Facebook users and allegedly used that information to target U.S. voters with political ads. Carroll became personally involved when he sued Cambridge Analytica for access to his voter file from the 2016 election. He says that this nationwide scandal was another “oil-spill moment” — an event that changed attitudes toward social media and digital privacy both in and outside of the classroom.

Last spring, Carroll’s students explored data-driven platforms created in the United States and abroad. Case studies ranged from Silicon Valley’s infringement on user rights and European models that emphasize regulation to India’s biometric citizen registry and China’s omnipresent digital surveillance. The students — graduates and undergraduates in Parsons’ Design and Technology programs — brought their research into the classroom each week and developed an online publication that presents their investigative journalism and data visualizations. Also called Dark Data, the website thoughtfully explores every facet of the modern digital experience. The website’s masthead states that Dark Data “needs no privacy policy” — it does not store cookies or use tracking codes.

Beyond encouraging young designers to educate themselves about the Internet platforms they use daily, Carroll says the ultimate purpose of Dark Data is to prepare students for the creative economy they will soon step into. Alumni of the course have been recruited by influential global players such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, and the CIA.

“Our students are working in the industry, building the infrastructure of commercial surveillance, whether they realize it or not,” Carroll explains. “Even as user interface or experience designers, they will have to confront ethical and social justice dilemmas in their work.” He hopes students’ Parsons education will prepare them to ask difficult questions and create technologies that serve rather than exploit users.

Ellie Frymire presents her thesis work at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa.

One doesn’t have to look far to see that Carroll’s hopes are not in vain. His students are actively engaged in developing a new ethic of data collection and management. For example, Ellie Frymire ’19 — an MS Data Visualization and Dark Data alumna — used her thesis project as an opportunity to illuminate prevalent attitudes toward the “me too” movement. Frymire harvested more than one million tweets posted with the #MeToo hashtag and employed machine learning methods to identify trends in the data set. She then created an interactive visualization that makes it easy to browse through the tweets for common themes and words.

“Parsons taught me that data is powerful. Understanding that power and how it’s used in a designer role was what changed my worldview.” —ELLIE FRYMIRE

According to Frymire, her #MeToo project presents information in an agnostic way, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions. “I think how we direct the communication of data is pivotal for designers,” she says. In her view, it’s important to consider what the most ethical method of telling a story and sharing information is. Frymire’s thesis does more than reveal subnarratives in a global movement. It represents an ethical application of user information that social media companies usually funnel into invasive advertising channels. Her work shows that data-driven programs are not necessarily synonymous with privacy invasion and surveillance — they can also be tools for social research and empowerment.

Students in the Dark Data course edit their digital publication. See their work here.

Frymire, who came to Parsons after several years working as a tech consultant in a business setting, describes herself as a “data optimist.” Recognizing that technologists can get caught in silos, she chose Parsons for her graduate studies in order to challenge her thinking. “I was thrilled that there were these classes that would advance my career but also broaden my perspective,” she says. After her experience in Carroll’s Dark Data course and with other learning opportunities — such as working with the United Nations to analyze data on global gender inequalities — Frymire began to consider the complications related to data collection and analysis. “Parsons taught me that data is powerful. Understanding that power and how it’s used in a designer role was what changed my worldview.”

Frymire’s #MeToo project, which she presented at the Design Indaba conference in South Africa this year, embodies the kind of methodology she has gone on to master and transform into a career with Two-N, a leading data visualization firm in New York City. Today her clients include prominent news and advertising agencies. And despite requests to mold information in a certain way, Frymire is steadfast in her commitment to presenting data intentionally and ethically.

She feels empowered to push for transparency. Because everything in a data visualization — including color, font, and type size — can be interpreted as information, Frymire says, design can be a powerful “mediator between message and audience.” Clients often fail to see the gaps in the data and concepts they want to present. The designer’s job is to identify and eliminate discrepancies. For example, there is a difference between stating that “80 percent of people like strawberries” and “Of those people that eat fruit, 80 percent like strawberries.” By monitoring such details, she explains, designers can do their part to make data representations unambiguous and more accurate. “If the message is clear and ethical, the design should reflect that.”

Making the transition from data optimist to data realist is a common experience throughout the industry. Carroll has noticed a growing awareness and culture shift at Parsons as well. “Five years ago, many of us were unquestioning and in the exuberant throes of thinking, ‘What can go wrong?’ The deflation of that euphoria has translated into a deeper criticality.” But a more critical approach does not preclude hope for better industry standards or the possibility of employing data science in beneficial ways.

“I don’t ever see data as the problem as much as I see interpretation as the problem,” says Aaron Hill, assistant professor of data visualization, who leads several machine learning and data visualization classes at Parsons. In his mind, data is an abstraction that is neither good nor bad. “It’s one of many ways to understand the world, the basis for most scientific inquiry, but it can be misleading.”

Hill encourages his students to explore the potential of machine learning and the 21st century’s unprecedented computing power. Much can be achieved as long as aspiration is coupled with critical thought. Awareness is key. Whether they are designers or coders or both, students must be aware that every data-driven program is susceptible to critical errors. A facial recognition algorithm that is fed a data set biased in favor of white people, for example, may fail to recognize the faces of people of color. “It’s very important to stay connected to the ways in which it can go wrong,” says Hill, “and then work with optimism but also with the knowledge of those vulnerabilities.”

Nuanced and humane data models will undoubtedly be developed as the industry advances. According to Hill, ethical data cultivation and analysis call for diverse professional backgrounds. Most data visualizations are built from scratch and require in-depth knowledge of computing and database systems. Designers must be able to grapple with rigorous quantitative challenges while searching for the most effective visual communication methods. “It takes interfacing with very complex data that have to be aggregated, augmented, cleaned, and interpreted,” explains the professor. “These are very different skill sets, and someone in this discipline has to be able to traverse all of them.”

Parsons’ ongoing engagement with interdisciplinary practice makes the school an ideal place to foster new perspectives on data. Throughout their academic careers, students combine design and technical expertise with the critical outlook developed in seminars like Dark Data, finding new ways to make data mining and amalgamation more transparent. “I look at the way that fashion has been introspective and tried to deal with the moral issues of the industry,” says Carroll. “It’s inspiring to think about what we can do in our own fields to support that impulse to be questioning and critical.”

Engaging with data ethics is merely a first step. Significant change in the data-driven economy requires more than an adjustment in attitude — it calls for a new kind of designer. The creative and tech industries are converging as they evolve, and designers trained in data analytics and machine learning can occupy an influential space in that world.

Lilit Markosian is New-York based and writes about the effects of new technologies on culture and community. She is currently pursuing a degree in creative writing.

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The New School
The New School

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