You will need to give your readers a vivid, detailed sense of:

1) What the innovation is (representation);

2) How it works (technical elucidation);

3) When, how, and why it came into being (historical analysis);

4) Why your readers should care about and be interested in it (revealing significance).

5) What it shows us about the nature of innovation, and/or other larger issues it is connected to.

It is in answering 3, 4, and 5 that contexts should enter into the discussion.

A useful breakdown for thinking about contexts is the five C’s: circumstances, causes, consequences, connections, concepts. In order to understand why your innovation came into being when it did, you will need to think about circumstances and causes; in order to account for why your readers should care, you will need to think about consequences, connections, and concepts (and maybe circumstances and causes). Contexts will help you answer the “so what?” question. A more interesting analysis will reveal less obvious contexts. For example, a boring, predictable analysis of the rise of the automobile would argue that it offered a way to get around more quickly and flexibly. A more interesting analysis might detail how, for example, the car’s success relied on the prior popularity of bicycles, or on the unrelated expansion of the oil industry. The contexts that are less obvious will yield more insights and discoveries.

Let me also map out some examples so you can see what contexts are present in them:

Text: Stephenson, “Space Stasis”

Innovation: space rockets

Contexts: prior history of rockets (cause), political motivations (cause), military history (circumstance), nuclear weapon technology (connection), satellites (consequence), lock-in/path dependency (concept)

Text: Gould, “The Panda’s Thumb of Technology”

Innovation: QWERTY keyboard

Contexts: technical history of typewriter (cause), evolution by natural selection (connection), computer keyboard format (consequence), “panda principle” (concept)

The final version of your essay should be 6-8 pages long. It should discuss a minimum of 4 sources drawn from your independent research. These sources should be a mix of factual/informational articles, and idea-and argument-driven sources. Some of the sources may not be directly about the innovation, but relevant in a more oblique way.

You must also include discussion of at least two of the following assigned texts:

Gladwell, “Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Truth about Innovation”

Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”

Harari, excerpt from Sapiens (BR 415)

Johnson, “Platforms” (BR 109)

Kubrick, 2001 (movie)

Kuhn, “The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery” (BR 327)

Lepartito, “Picturephone and the Information Age” (BR 131)

Sacasas, “Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology, a Metaphor, and a Story“

Solnit, “The Annihilation of Time and Space” (BR 77)

Stephenson, “Space Stasis”

Why? Because, as stated above, your essay needs to show us something about innovation itself – i.e. it needs to develop one or more Ideas About Innovation (IAIs) – and all of these texts propose interesting IAIs that you can engage productively in developing your argument.

*Represent and elucidate an interesting innovation (technology, theory, discovery, design) for a non-specialist reader; you must explain efficiently and vividly what it is and how it works.

*Reveal the larger significance of the innovation by situating it in 2+ contexts (see “5 C’s”).

*Arrive at an idea about the innovation’s larger implications, perhaps for innovation itself.

*Make a clear, coherent argument that leads the reader through a development of thought.

*Accurately represent 6 + sources, at least two of from the list above. The others should be a mixture of factual/background and argument sources about your innovation and its contexts.

*Avoid typos and follow all MLA and additional formatting requirements.

You will also prepare a multimodal presentation that will distill your main insights about the innovation into a brief, vivid, portable form.