In Human Systems classes, we focus on developing certain skills, all related to human values and social design. These aren't all the skills you need to redesign systems—we usually train people who are already expert designers in their domain, and teach them these values-related skills. We picked these skills, because we found they dramatically change the character of the designs people come up with, across many domains.
Games for Practicing...
Values Articulation
- 7h Practice Recognizing Your Own Values. Recognize values—their differences and relations to goals, feelings, social norms, ideological commitments, and so on. This is also a process of sorting out what's important to you. Out of Character, On My Own Terms, Emotions to Values, Sharing Circle
- 4h Practice Articulating Others' Values. Determine what's important for someone else—how they want to treat people, approach things, live, and so on. Emotions to Values, ‣
Social Analysis
- 10h Practice Identify Crowding Out, Structural Features, and Hard Steps. This is a bundle of analytical lenses which provide designers with an intuition about why it might be hard to live by one value or another within a system or social space, and what changes might be necessary to make the value easier to live by in that system or space. Guess Their Motive, Meaning Analysis, ‣, Hell Realm Remodeling, Field Tripping, ‣
Redesign
- 10h Practice Space Jamming. Here we practice a slightly less-limited sort of redesign—focusing on building custom social spaces for one anothers' values, but without taking on the challenges associated with larger systems. Space Jam, Field Tripping
- 4h Practice Changing the Game from Inside. Here we practice a limited sort of redesign—focusing just on the aspects of a social space which are changeable by the players themselves during play. Hell Realm Remodeling
- 20h Practice Systems Redesign and Monitoring. This is our full redesign practice, combining a design methodology with tools for monitoring the success or failure of your design w/r/t participants' values. Redesign Method, Space Jam, Field Tripping, Meaning Analysis
Readings...
Values Articulation
Social Analysis
Space Analysis an analytical lens for understanding why the dynamics within a social space or system might make it easier or harder for the people therein to live by their values. We cover three basic concepts — values, norms, structural features — as well as theories of how these are related and give rise to one another — the theory of the evolution of norms covers how structural features gives rise to norms, and the theory of hard steps covers how structural features undermine values directly, the theory of crowding out covers how norms might undermine or support values.
The goal is to develop an intuitive sense of how structural features affect people's ability to live by their values, so that you see values-related design issues as they come up in the design process.
