24 July 2026
See also: Syllabus · Grading One 2hour session per week. Dates may shift — treat the week numbers as canonical. Lecture 1 Hello, Internet Week 1 — 3 August 2026 — Ship a personal webpage before ...
03 August 2026
Hello, Internet The premise of this course, stated out loud: you can build and ship real things on the web today, and we will spend the rest of the semester understanding what you did. Hour 1 — W...
10 August 2026
Anatomy of a Web Page Last week you shipped a page. This week we open the hood. Hour 1 — The three languages View Source: what the AI actually wrote for you HTML — structure and meaning (hea...
17 August 2026
Talking to Servers Your page lives somewhere. What happens when someone types your URL? Hour 1 — The journey of a request Clientserver architecture — the fundamental shape of the web What ha...
24 August 2026
FrontEnd in Practice From "a page that works" to "an interface that's designed." Hour 1 — The frontend as a design material Responsive design: one design, every screen ...
31 August 2026
BackEnds and Databases Everything before this week disappeared when you refreshed. Let's fix that. Hour 1 — Where data lives What a backend is: code that runs on someone else's compute...
07 September 2026
APIs How software talks to software — and why every product you design is really a bundle of APIs. Hour 1 — The contract What an API is: a menu of things you can ask another program to do RE...
14 September 2026
AI in the Stack You've been using AI to build all semester. Now: AI as an ingredient inside the products you design. Hour 1 — Models as materials LLMs demystified: prediction machines, not...
21 September 2026
Mobile Ecosystems Why the app on your phone is a different animal from the site in your browser. Hour 1 — The two kingdoms iOS vs Android: platforms, philosophies, and what it means for design...
28 September 2026
Cloud Computing "The cloud" is someone else's computer — but which one, and what are you paying for? Hour 1 — Layers of someone else's computer IaaS, PaaS, SaaS explained wit...
05 October 2026
How Software Gets Built The people part: how ideas become products, and how teams avoid chaos. Hour 1 — The lifecycle The SDLC: idea → requirements → design → build → test → ship → maintain ...
12 October 2026
Studio 1 — Build Sprint Full working session for Project Final Project. Format First 15 min — standup: each team states what's built, what's next, what's blocked Working time — ...
19 October 2026
Studio 2 — ShipReady Second working session for Project Final Project — from "works on my machine" to "works for everyone." Hour 1 — What "done" means (short lectur...
26 October 2026
Demo Day Final presentations for Project Final Project. Format Each team: 7 minutes — live demo of the deployed product (no slides for the demo itself), followed by the story: problem, proces...
Build and deploy a personal webpage — today, in class You will use an AI tool to generate a personal webpage and put it on the real internet with a URL you can send to anyone. Steps Pick a to...
Dissect a complex web page Pick a rich, realworld web page (a news homepage, an ecommerce product page, a streaming service) and analyze it: identify its HTML structure, CSS styling, and JavaScrip...
Watch your website load, piece by piece Use the browser's Network tab to observe everything that happens between typing your URL and seeing your page. Steps Open your own site (from Exerc...
Get an AI to build your design — then judge it Take a screen you have designed in Figma (from any past project) and use an AI tool to turn it into a working web page. Document faithfully where the...
Make something that remembers Everything you've built so far forgets on refresh. Build a small app where data persists — a guestbook, a class poll, an RSVP page, a tiny leaderboard. Steps ...
Build a page powered by someone else's data Use a public API to make a small, welldesigned page that displays live data — and understand the request/response loop underneath it. Ideas Wea...
Put a model inside your product Add one genuinely useful AI feature to something you've already built this semester. The bar: it must be better because it's AI, not AI for its own sake. I...
iOS vs Android, from a product team's chair Compare and contrast the iOS and Android ecosystems for app development and distribution, highlighting the differences that would actually change a ...
Walk a feature through the lifecycle Map a hypothetical product feature through the stages of a chosen software development lifecycle (e.g., Agile Scrum), and locate the designer's role at eac...
See also: Lectures · Grading · AI Policy Course Title: Tech 1 — Web & Mobile Ecosystem Fundamentals Course Objective: Gain a foundational understanding of the core technologies, platforms...
See also: Syllabus · Lectures Tech 1 Grading Plan Assessment and Grading Breakdown # Component Weightage (%) 1 Attendance and Class Partici...
Similar courses at other universities, and places to go deeper. Vibe Coding (T564A) Harvard Graduate School of Education — Karen Brennan. Creative building with AI code generation. CS50's Un...
About this Website This website documents the material I am sharing with students as part of Tech 1: Web & Mobile Ecosystem Fundamentals, a course for design students. The course takes a ...
See also: Grading · Syllabus In most courses, an AI policy is a list of things you can't do. This course is different: using AI to generate code is the expected way of working here. The skill ...
Keep feedback respectful and focused on the work, not the person. We’re all here to learn. If you liked something, call it out! If you don’t, try and explain why. You can use “I wonder…” or “Ha...
Course material Prof. Venkatesh Rajamanickamat the Information Design Lab at IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay. I based a lot of the structure and exercises for this course on what I learnt duri...
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