Original project plan

We are about to launch a project to build a website. For this project, please check in with me about steps you think you should take, so I can confirm you should indeed take those steps.

Eventually, we will build a website for student and faculty use as a teaching tool for college-level psychology students, but I would like to move in steps. Please review this draft plan. After review, proceed with Step one below. Everything in this project should be saved and documented. Make a new CSV file that includes a row for each step in the process. Columns should be: date, a one or two word description of the step, a longer description of the step, a “phase” category, a file path to the relevant documentation in the folder if applicable. The first row should be today’s date, Project Introduction, Elissa shared her initial memo and Claude proofread it, Setup phase, and a path to this very memo saved in this project’s folder.

For this project, please imagine you and I are working on a design team that also includes a professor of psychology at a New York City university who has both a critical theory perspective and neuroscience background, and a New York City college student who has a growing online following of other young people due to posting a series of humorous online videos that often involve leftist political commentary, disability justice analysis and racial justice analysis of current events. Both are somewhat skeptical of using AI to build websites or using AI to engage in creative endeavors. Both are worried about AI for many reasons, including its environmental impact, the lack of privacy when it comes to user data, the impact on creative professionals and the workforce in general when corporate entities consider AI an alternative to human labor or expect workers to keep up with the speed and complexity of AI output, and the cost to creativity and diversity when humans rely on predictive models trained on biased data. You and I recognize the reasons for their concerns, and the full team agrees to move forward with this website in a thoughtful and transparent way, naming limitations as we go.

Please read this draft idea as an initial proposal from your design team partners. You are a creative web designer with decades of experience designing educational websites as well as experience working on creative, cool, artistic sites for social justice causes. You offer feedback based on your expertise for the design team, teaching the design team about web design by modeling the typical questions and strategy, but are careful to remain flexible with your design team partners and want to encourage their creativity. You will then build the website as the team asks.

Big Picture: The website we are trying to build uses imagined scans of zombie brains to teach introductory psychology students about regions and parts of the mammalian (with an emphasis on human) brain. The zombies we are exploring are characters and creatures from sources that would be well known to 17-23 year olds attending college in the United States. Such sources will likely be movies, video games, or TV shows, but also could be graphic novels, TV ads, song lyrics, or any kind of well-known materials with recognizable zombie characters. The site should use the playful premise that we have scans of zombie brains to explore for research purposes, and should have 3D graphics that show different views of the brain – cross-sections of the brain and the whole brain from different angles. The site should also be able to compare the zombie brain to a normal brain, highlighting theorized differences that would cause key zombie behavior.

Goals for visitors of the site: users (i.e., website visitors) learn about basic brain areas and functions in an interesting way. (It is also okay for them to learn that some zombie behavior does not have to do with abnormal brain structures if that seems scientifically sound.) Users learn how researchers study the brain (for example, we might show different kinds of scans and name their limitations). Users view and can identify different parts of the healthy human brain in a cool visual way.

Re principles for design of the site:

The website should attempt to be built so as to withstand critique from a neuroscientist, a media studies scholar, a critical AI studies expert, and a college senior living in NYC, as well as be generally high quality, but we, the design team, expect that problems will emerge as we engage with users. Those problems may be about the science, the way we characterize zombies, or something else we messed up. We will build the website to be easily edited and expect it to evolve over time. It should have a way for users to leave comments and feedback and encourage critical engagement. We will track major changes and leave an audit trail. We will be gracious when we realize we messed up.

The website should be accessible, inclusive, and user-friendly. The design team asks you to identify a few good guides for accessibility, especially those that come from a critical race theory and disability justice perspective, and follow recommended practices from those guides, citing which ones were relied upon.

In an effort for transparency, the website should include citations (in APA 7th edition format), documentation, and explanation. We should acknowledge on the site the contributors who made it possible for us to create the website, based on sources relied upon and information provided. The site should include a list of key decisions made – especially if there were trade-offs between different principles and goals of the site – and why those decisions were made the way they were.

The website should be designed on open-source principles. It should be transparent, shareable, licensed under Creative Commons licensure and otherwise made to be possible for people to take this idea, hold us accountable to our own intention and aims, and use the materials we created to build it better.

The website should disclose that it was built with AI. Describe the model used, the tokens it took, the limitations.

Placeholder idea for website design:

We will want a static site that lives on GitHub Pages.

To start, imagine a home page with pictures of zombies and links to their brain scans where a user can compare the zombie brain and a healthy human brain. I am not sure whether each zombie on the home page should link to its own scan results page or whether several different zombie scans are visible from one page (e.g., one page of scans), but – at least in this imagined version of the site – from the home page there should be a way to get to a page that compares the zombie brain to a healthy brain. For now, imagine that we have, on a scans page, a researcher’s notes for each scan that compare the zombie brain to a healthy brain and comment about what is different in size or shape. (This is later referred to as a brain report.) We might decide to make this part of the site more interactive so users can identify differences in the two brains and check theories as opposed to being told why/how the brains are different. For now, though, this is information provided to the user.

Thus, this plan describes three main pages:

• Home

  • Should have some brief intro text

  • Should have pictures of zombies with expandable text about their characteristics that will be featured later in a brain report

• Brain Scans

  • Should have scans of a healthy brain and the zombie brains

  • Should have a report based on brain scans of the issues in the zombie brain and how it might relate to their zombie behavior

  • This page should have brief descriptions of each highlighted part of the brain (perhaps as expandable text that follows the locations a user selects on the healthy brain). Use citations and quotes from reputable sources (more on sources described below).

• About

  • Should include content about this site – for now, that can just say the following:

    • This site is a work in progress. I am a graduate student taking a course on AI-assisted programming. This site is a way for me to explore AI-assisted programming while also, perhaps, creating something useful for students enrolled in a section of Introductory Psychology that I am teaching. One of my concerns with working with an LLM is that it is hard to know what portion of the final product is my contribution and what portion was generated by the predictive text of the LLM. In order to partially address this concern, I decided to document my process. You can read more about that here [link to Backend Details or whatever we call that page].

  • Should include general acknowledgments for sources relied upon

  • Should include detailed references based on footnotes elsewhere in the site

  • Link to a page titled Backend Details or Under the Hood or something (is there a standard name for that kind of page?) that includes much more detail.

    • We will later determine what goes here, but it may include excerpts of the chat transcript that got this website built.

Before we build, let’s identify the background research we will need for the site:

Research on using zombies to teach about the brain:

In searching for ideas for my Intro to Psych course, I came across this blog post: https://teachpsych.org/E-xcellence-in-Teaching-Blog/9655569, which led me to this book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173153/do-zombies-dream-of-undead-sheep. Those sources should be credited on this website, and perhaps highlighted so visitors can easily go to those sites.

I did a quick internet search to confirm that there are a number of sites that have written about using zombie brains for teaching students about actual brains. Please do your own search and find the sources that would be most helpful as we embark on this site creation. Use those sources as you start to build the content this site relies on. List these sources in the acknowledgments section of the site even if they are not directly cited, assuming they were valuable to you. Directly cite as appropriate.

Research on the brain:

There are lots of sites with information about the brain. Every claim about the brain should have a source accepted in the scientific community. Please keep a list of citations. We will have to discuss, from a design perspective, how best to include citations or references. In general, prioritize OER materials for more information so students can access them easily, such as: Brain and Behavior (https://pressbooks.cuny.edu/psy320/), Introduction to Psychology (A critical approach) (https://pressbooks.cuny.edu/jjcpsy101/), and Psychology 2e (https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology-2e). You can also refer to medically reviewed information from accessible and reputable sources like the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic because those are often written in accessible language. The Dana Foundation and BrainFacts.org might also have useful info. Sources outside the U.S. might be useful too, but I don’t have a reference list to use. Note there isn’t 100% consistency in how sources refer to regions of the brain. Prefer scientific literature over popular websites; nonprofit, open-access resources over for-profit and proprietary ones; and more recent scientific conclusions over older ones. Search for things the scientific community commonly suggests laypeople get wrong. If there is conflict in scientific literature (e.g., what is part of the brainstem or the limbic system), please note the conflict and rely on the OER text Psychology 2e as the reference for settling disputes. Make a note if Psychology 2e seems to have out-of-date material and the growing consensus points another way. If there is conflict but Psychology 2e does not address it or provide a clear resolution, please note it, and how and why that conflict was resolved, in the background section (content for the About page or the Backend Details page). If there is emerging recent research that changes the understanding of the brain, note it with a citation to the research.

On the zombies:

To build the broadest version of this website, we will need a database of zombies that are recognizable from popular movies, video games, books, graphic novels, TV shows, anime, etc. It doesn’t need to be comprehensive and could start with a small number (e.g., zombies from 5–7 different sources). Each zombie should have characteristics based on the stories they show up in. For example, stumbles, gets lost easily, walks slowly, bumps into things, does not move to avoid incoming projectiles, does not notice things to its sides, only sees what is directly ahead, etc. These zombies would be from content that would likely be known by a United States college student, and more specifically, by a CUNY college student living in NYC in the 2026-27 school year. “Well known” should not just be defined by market share or sales rate, but by popularity of references in on-line conversations and memes on social media. Other ways of evaluating popularity would be good to develop.

Any kind of well-known materials that include zombies would be fine to use for this project, but those with visuals (even if it is fan art as long as it is cited) would be best. The database should include a short description of a scene from the relevant source (e.g., a scene from a movie), written in terms of a researcher or doctor evaluating the behavior. The description should make clear what scene the “researcher” is observing to a website reader who has seen or read the original source, but should be written in the tone of a brain researcher observing unusual behavior, not a character in the source timeline.

The website should include that note from the researcher and an image of the zombie being described, but nothing particularly scary or gruesome. Funny if possible. The scene should not give away spoilers – so perhaps happening early in the story/narrative, or something somewhat inconsequential to the plot, or something visible from previews or a film’s promotional materials.

For now, though, we won’t start with the broadest version of the site and don’t need to build a full database. Let’s start with the zombies from the game Plants vs. Zombies as the entire universe. That means we will do research on the zombies from that game, what their characteristics are, and how that behavior might be explained by structure in their brains.

For the brain scan page, there should be:

1. An image (3D and interactive if possible) of a normal human brain – like a control brain for comparison – that is the same estimated age as the zombie brain. This should explain the key parts under examination for the problems in the zombie brain, and highlight the consequences that damage to certain regions of the brain might have.

2. An image (3D and interactive if possible) of the zombie character brain, displayed in a way that shows the differences between the human brain and the zombie brain. This should include accompanying text to explain the problem area in the zombie brain.

For brain graphics, one approach is to have interactive viewing like the online material associated with the textbook The Science of Psychology: An Appreciative View. That book developed a “3D immersive brain” tool that allows a user to click to see the parts of the brain and highlight certain regions or areas. There is a promotional video that shows the immersive brain on the McGraw Hill website. Your team asks you if something like that works for this site.

For animated characters, the brain should be illustrated in the same style as the source material’s artwork (for Plants vs. Zombies, the video game artwork), e.g., 3D visuals that allow for seeing cross-sections and locations in the brain. (Later, if we build a version beyond Plants vs. Zombies, for characters that are live-action, the brain should look like a human brain.)

Accompanying material

In addition to the website, let’s create a memo listing the areas of the brain that might influence or explain zombie behavior. This should be well cited. This memo can start as an internal guide for us, the design team, but may eventually be something we share on the website for people who want more information.

Now that you have read this,

Step one: Please proofread this proposed plan and list any typos or parts that are confusingly worded in a bulleted list. Do not make changes; just list possible errors and suggested fixes when relevant. Share that back before moving forward.

Then, once I have reviewed the typos you identify and made any edits, I will likely ask you to please move on to Step two, a written website proposal (still not building an actual website yet).

Step two: Use this description (updated with typos fixed and clarifications made from Step one) to create a new version of a website proposal back to the design team, using language and a format more typical to website building, but still readable and accessible to others on your design team who do not have professional website design experience.

1. If there are questions or suggestions you have about the vision or plan described above, you can choose whether it is better to ask them before you share a new website proposal or whether you want to incorporate all questions into the proposal. But no matter what, the proposal should include questions or decision points you think the design team should discuss and decide. Some will certainly be in the proposal you draft, even if you find a few questions or decisions need to be addressed before you start drafting.

2. Flag in separate chat the changes, additions, etc. you made when you took the above description of the project and turned it into your proposal.

3. The proposal should include your recommendations and suggestions:

   1. Principles to keep this website accessible and values-aligned – including if you have any additions to the ones I named above

   2. A proposal for aesthetics for the site

   3. A way to address the commitment to clarity, transparency, and proper citation with streamlined design and simplicity of experience. We want to track lots of info, but not make it overwhelming for the user. What best practices does the design world have for addressing this? Should we use footnotes? Clickable content? A separate list of references? A mix of approaches? For a list of references, should we group by area, not just sort by authors’ last names? Let’s consider readability, accountability, acknowledgment, and accessibility throughout the design of this site.

   4. A separate list of the guides for accessibility that you identify as useful, especially those that come from a critical race theory and disability justice perspective, and then practices you took away from those guides as you design this site. (These sources should be in the acknowledgments section of the website or in a reference list.)

   5. A brief analysis of whether this is a pedagogically useful site to build and what its closest analogues online are, with links to those other sites that are similar or useful models.

   6. Other kinds of expertise that should be on our design team as we move forward.

   7. Recommendations for creative ways to use AI for this kind of project given the concerns of your design team and recommendations for what might be better done without using AI.

   8. A proposed list of next steps. This should include not only website design steps but also substantive research that needs to be done and reviewed before site publication. Which things can happen in parallel and which things need to be sequenced?

   9. A list of skills and other plug-ins that would be helpful for you to have before pursuing this kind of project.

   10. Suggestions for design features that would be useful for a site like this that people unfamiliar with design might want to understand. This might be a list of vocabulary so that we can communicate about the build using the terms that make sense.

   11. A wireframe for the website build