Colors of the Boston Common, detail. (Viégas and Wattenberg)
The course will be letter-graded. Grades will be based on:
  • 50% - weekly compositions
  • 30% - final project
  • 20% - class participation in critiques and discussions

Class participation will be graded; a key goal of the course is for students to learn how to engage in rigorous design criticism. Homework compositions and final projects will be graded using the following rubric:

  • Does it respond to the prompt?
  • Originality
  • Does the form fit the content?
  • Execution: lack of bugs, loose ends, or other distractions

Although this is a coding-intensive course, students in the class will likely have widely varying degrees of initial proficiency. Grading will not be based on sophistication of underlying software engineering.

Attendance

Class attendance is important! Group critique and class discussion play a major role in this course. We also ask that you bring a laptop to class, to be used only for classroom activities.

Missing a class doesn't just affect your own learning, but it deprives the other students of your unique perspective. We understand, however, that certain factors may occasionally interfere with your ability to attend these in-person sessions. You can miss class up to four times during the semester without any negative consequences. After that, it will affect your participation grade. Please let us know as soon as possible if you have reoccurring extenuating circumstances that affect your ability to attend class or labs. We will ask you for an email confirmation from your resident dean and will try to work out an agreeable solution with you and your team.

Late Policy

Each student is given two late days for homework assignments at the beginning of the semester. A ‘late day’ extends the individual homework deadline by 24 hours without penalty.

No more than two late days may be used on any assignment. If you have already used all of your late days for the semester, we will deduct points for each day you submit your homework late. You can only use late days for homework deadlines – all other deadlines (e.g., the final project) are hard.

If you have a medical condition or other special circumstances that interferes with your coursework please let us know as soon as possible, by emailing us and copying copying your Resident Dean.

Collaboration and Credits

We expect you to adhere to the Harvard Honor Code at all times. Failure to adhere to the honor code and our policies may result in serious penalties, up to and including automatic failure in the course and reference to the ad board.

Collaboration:

You may discuss your homework and final project with other students, but you are expected to be intellectually honest and give credit where credit is due. In some cases, collaboration is part of the assignment. For example, the basic structure of the class includes group critiques, and you'll be expected to extend your work in response to these critiques. In all cases, your grade will depend on the strength of your own original contribution.

  • You can discuss your code with other students and help each other with debugging, but the implementation should be your own. For example, if a friend suggests using a random number seed to avoid an annoying flicker, that's fine. If that same friend gives you a paragraph of code that you paste into your program, that's not OK.
  • You may not submit the same or similar work to this course that you have submitted or will submit to another.
Acknowledging sources:

Using sources responsibly is an essential part of your Harvard education. For data-oriented portions of the course, using third-party material is expected. Please adhere to the following guidelines.

  • Any content you use for projects (data, images, etc.) must be used in accordance with their licenses, and must be credited appropriately.
  • The artistic themes and ideas in your homework should represent an original contribution. If you were inspired by existing work, explain the connection in your artist statement, e.g., "I was inspired by Mark Rothko's paintings, but wanted to combine color work with animation" is fine.
  • You may use third-party libraries and example code, so long as the material is available to all students in the class and you give proper attribution. Do not remove any original copyright notices and headers. Caution: The biggest risk in using other code in an artistic context is that you might end up "living in someone else's dream"—that is, you won't be speaking with your own voice.
  • Finally (and welcome to the future!) there are now tools that use artificial intelligence to write substantial portions of code. You may use such tools, as long as you credit them. Although these systems can be impressive, and often produce correct code, they currently seem to do poorly at creating artistic output. However, the pace of change is fast, so who knows what things will look like by the end of the course. If you incorporate AI into your artistic practice, that is fine—but to reiterate, please do credit appropriately, and decribe how you used it.

Accessibility

Any student receiving accommodations through the Accessible Education Office should email their AEO letter to wattenberg@g.harvard.edu as soon as possible. Failure to do so may prevent us from making appropriate arrangements.