Redesigning Everyday Organizations (308-0-20)
Instructors
Reed Stevens
Meeting Info
Annenberg Hall G02: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
How do people do things together? In our everyday lives, we learn and work within
particular arrangements of people, objects, tools, and information. All of these
arrangements have been ‘designed', either explicitly with intention or more
unintentionally, evolving over time. We will call these everyday organizations; they allow
us to solve problems, achieve our goals, and generally get things done. Except when they
don't. In this class, you'll learn to identify and analyze everyday organizations through
fieldwork, document what's working and what's not, and learn about creative ways to
redesign them.
The analysis of existing everyday organizations will draw on theoretical perspectives that
go by names such as distributed cognition and actor network theory. These perspectives
provide us language for talking about and analyzing everyday organizations
that are composed of both humans and "non-humans" (i.e., objects, tools, spaces,
technologies, and representations). In this literature, a near synonym for what we call
everyday organizations is "socio-technical systems". The argument of these theoretical
perspectives is that we must recognize the inextricability of the "socio" and the
"technical" parts of these systems, how they (humans and non-humans) work together (or
don't) to do what they do.
Another important aspect of the class is looking critically and creatively at the values that
inform existing designs of everyday organizations and the values that are guiding your
redesigns of these systems. In existing everyday organizations, these values are often
implicit, multiple, and even contradictory, but they are important to consider.
Overall, the course readings are varied and interdisciplinary; they include literature from
cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, design, and the learning sciences. Many of the
readings include case studies of field work and/or designs that can serve as models for
your own work.