Processes
Certificate

Imagine you are a student enrolled in a prestigious design school in 2007. On your desk sits Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions, just published. Before you make anything, the institution is already a framing device. It shapes what you make before you make it.

This is the time capsule frame of MC1. The course is frozen at 2006 — just before three ruptures reshaped cultural production: platform-mediated podcast identity, algorithmic social media feeds, and generative AI. This freeze is not nostalgic. It is methodological. By bracketing the present, students experience voice, persona, and identity before algorithmic optimization and AI-assisted reframing became ambient conditions.

The First Lesson

The course opens with a provocation: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." The quote is widely attributed to Marshall McLuhan. It is not his. It was written by John Culkin, a Jesuit priest who was summarizing McLuhan's ideas in 1967. The myth has more cultural currency than the fact — McLuhan's brand name confers exhibition value on the idea; Culkin's name has at best cult value among specialists.

When an AI confidently attributes the Culkin quote to McLuhan, it does not merely make an error. It reproduces and accelerates cultural mythology. This is what AI does with tertiary artifacts: it generates frames and interpretive lenses at scale, amplifying existing mythologies as readily as creating new ones. AI is a tertiary artifact that produces tertiary artifacts — a framing machine built from framing.

Theoretical Foundation: Wartofsky & RPV

Wartofsky Level	In MC1 Practice	RPV Equivalent
Primary Artifact	The audio file; Soundtrap as production tool	Resources
Secondary Artifact	Podcasting conventions; production workflows	Processes
Tertiary Artifact	The persona frame; brand as framing system	Values

Branding operates at the tertiary level. A brand is not a logo — it is a framing structure that organizes meaning and produces value. The YOU® audio essay is not autobiography. It is the deliberate construction of a market-facing identity expressed through a cultural product.

The Comparative Case Study

The comparison reveals how journalist personas worked before podcasting, what changes when literal voice becomes the primary medium, and why mythology formation follows different logics pre- and post-platform. This comparative logic continues in Stack 2: Cameron Crowe (Rolling Stone journalist turned filmmaker) vs. Adam Curtis (BBC archival essayist).

From Oil Painting to Personal Brand

In 1973, Berger's Ways of Seeing examined how oil paintings functioned as markers of wealth and ritual authority. With photography, reproduction altered the cultural function of the image — oil paintings lost their singular aura (Benjamin). In their place emerged the publicity image, which frames aspiration and constructs value through projection. Branding is the modern continuation of the publicity image.

MC2 introduces ARIES — the certificate's foundational methodology — and the four-framework convergence table that is the theoretical core of the entire program.

This microcredential centers on culture as a system: spatialization of meaning, curatorial authority, and experiential design as cultural argument. Students analyze cultural icons not as isolated objects but as networks of meanings, then design spatial or experiential environments that translate cultural theory into coordinated encounters.

The Four-Framework Convergence

Four independently developed frameworks from different disciplines converge on the same underlying three-lens structure. Their structural homology points toward something real — a deep grammar of how human systems organize resources, practices, and meaning.

Christensen RPV	Wartofsky	ARIES	IDEO (reformulated)	Urban Informatics
Resources	Primary artifacts	Cultural Reservoir	Viability	Technology
Processes	Secondary artifacts	Experiential Assembly	Feasibility	People
Values	Tertiary artifacts	Value Objectification	Desirability	Place

The frameworks are not merely analogous. They are the same three-lens structure seen from different disciplinary vantage points. The IDEO framework required deliberate reformulation to align — and that reformulation is itself an instance of ARIES methodology: identifying a framework's deep structure, reframing its terms, and integrating the result into a synthetic instrument.

ARIES as Methodology

ARIES is not a workflow or checklist. It is a synthetic theoretical instrument for coordinating cultural production across three analytical layers:

Cultural Reservoir (Intertextual Inputs) — the available cultural materials, icons, texts, and references. The primary lens: what is in the tackle box?

Experiential Assembly (Remix Operations) — spatial, temporal, and atmospheric orchestration. The secondary lens: can the people involved actually deploy those resources? This is where the designable gap between digital representation and embodied presence lives.

Value Objectification (Authorization Layer) — licences, permissions, revenue models, cultural capital. The tertiary lens: is the value proposition compelling enough to sustain this, and whose governance determines the outcome?

Pre-Visualization as Tertiary Artifact

Pre-visualization tools are not neutral documentation methods — they are Wartofsky tertiary artifacts that shape design thinking itself. Different tools make different design possibilities visible or invisible. Spatial platforms make systems thinking visible; presentation software makes sequential narrative visible; 3D rendering makes atmospheric immersion visible; spreadsheets make financial viability visible.

The tool is the framing device. This is MC1's lesson operating at the design methodology level.

Required Viewing

Berger's Ways of Seeing Episode 1 (BBC, 1972): Berger's direct application of Benjamin's mechanical reproduction argument to the history of painting. How photography changed not just what we see but how we see — how reproduction strips the original of its aura and context, and how market value fills the gap left by cult value.

Building on MC1 (persona as artifact) and MC2 (experiential systems via ARIES), students now design strategies for how their own presence and work move, adapt, and create value over time across cities, platforms, and communities.

Distribution is not a marketing function. It is a design problem. MC3 introduces the S/E/E/D method — synthesizing Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions (MIT Press, 2007) with the SEEDFEED framework (Flynn, SFU MBA Applied Project, 2010). Students design a multi-city promotional tour for themselves as cultural creators.

The S/E/E/D Method

Moggridge identifies ten interacting elements in the design process — not sequential steps but interacting forces where the ball can go anywhere. SEEDFEED gives this pinball machine a navigable four-phase structure without collapsing it into a linear pipeline.

Phase	Interrogative	Wartofsky Level	What It Does
Study	What / Where / Who	Primary artifact	Constraints, synthesis, framing — the objective inventory of what exists
Explore	When / How	Secondary artifact	Ideation, envisioning, visualization — constructing and testing relationships
Evaluate	Why	Tertiary artifact	Uncertainty, selection, evaluation — bringing values to bear on alternatives
Design	What If	Double stimulation	The circulation strategy package — the WHAT IF made tangible

S/E/E/D governs the macro-level circulation design (the full tour skeleton). ARIES governs the micro-level event design within a single stop. They are operating the same theoretical architecture at different scales.

The Black Box: You Are the Cultural Creator

In MC3, the student is positioned as a cultural creator — a musician, filmmaker, writer, game designer, podcaster, or designer — designing their own promotional tour. The work itself is the black box. You are not creating content. You are designing the system of your own circulation.

The specific nature of your work determines the circulation logic — the kinds of venues your presence requires, the audiences you serve, the rights and permissions involved. But from the point your creator identity is established, the content of the work fades into the background. The system of your circulation is what you are designing.

AI Integration: Building a Claude Skill

MC1 established AI as a mythology machine — a tertiary artifact that produces tertiary artifacts. MC3 moves from observing AI as mythology machine to building one.

Students configure a Claude Skill — a structured, reusable capability — targeted at a specific tour planning task (routing logic, venue shortlisting, cost modelling, risk matrix, or itinerary drafting). Then they evaluate that skill using S/E/E/D. Not "is this fact correct?" but "at which phase of the design process does this skill produce useful output — and where does it require human override?"

Wartofsky Level	AI Relationship	Module
Primary	Claude as a tool you use. Prompt → response. Largely opaque.	MC1
Secondary	Claude as a tool you build. Encode instructions, constraints, output format. Partially transparent.	MC3
Tertiary	Claude as a coordinated three-skill architecture governing the studio's production, process, and governance capacity.	MC7

MC3 is the transition from Primary to Secondary. You are not yet building a governance system. You are learning what it means to encode a frame — and discovering, through S/E/E/D evaluation, where the frame you built holds and where it breaks.

Miller's Law

George Miller's "Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" (1956) establishes that working memory can hold approximately 5–9 chunks of information. MC3 applies this as a routing constraint: a tour of 5–9 cities sits within the cognitive architecture's perceptual sweet spot. This constraint recurs in Stack 2 (how many institutional variables can a comparative analysis track?) and Stack 3 MC7 (how many sponsors and partners can an ecosystem coordinate before it loses coherence?).