What is this course?

This course is a half-semester elective, taught in the Carnegie Mellon School of Design but open to students from any degree. The curriculum framework of the CMU School of Design describes four areas of focus: design for the built world, for service, social innovation, and transition. (For details, see design.cmu.edu/content/program-framework.)

Broadly…
The course gives a broad overview of key concepts and practices related to systemic, participatory, and emergent work in communities, institutions and organizations. The material is drawn from the professors’ studies and practice in design, organizational culture, community work, technology, theater and the arts, personal and family development, and facilitation.

More deeply…
In order to give students some practical skills in this short time, the course goes more deeply into planning and facilitating inclusive, participatory group sessions. Grounded in the belief that “small groups are the unit of work” for systemic shifts, students will have the opportunity to learn and apply a facilitation style rooted in the practices of co-design, dialogue facilitation, and participatory decision-making.

As a rule of thumb, Wednesdays (even numbered the sessions) are reserved for ideas and Mondays (odd numbered sessions) for practice.

A look at the sessions

Session 1. Introduction to the course and each other
Session 2. How people and systems shift

Session 3. How do we work?
Session 4. Conversation: at the heart of “social”

Session 5. The creative process: Listen, Reflect, Make
Session 6. The necessary conditions for group creativity

Session 7. Listen: In theory and practice
Session 8. Listen: How systems and groups listen

Session 9. Reflect: Theory and methods for reflection
Session 10. Reflect: Experience group and individual reflection

Session 11. Make: How groups explore for better futures
Session 12. Make: Acting for change

Session 13. Conversations for maintaining connection
Session 14. Summery and notes on the long haul

Session 15. Final presentations

So what?

We see this course and the rest of the program that is being developed in CMU Design as a conversation at the moving edge of design practice. Because of the challenges being faced and initiatives being launched by companies, institutions, governments and communities all over the world, designers increasingly find themselves involved with situations for which the commercial and industrial practices of the last few decades are insufficient by themselves. These situations…

• deal with networks and network effects
• involve complex systems, most often socially complex systems
• are not best framed as problems that need solving, but as situations with a certain set of dynamics, relations and patterns, full of people who desire better dynamics, relations and patterns
• are such that technologies, products and services succeed only to the degree to which they contribute positively to the health of the network, system, dynamics, relations, and patterns
• can only affected indirectly (there’s no Photoshop for good relationships, no recipe for shifting social patterns), and require the full participation of the people who are living out the situation

While no single course can prepare students for such challenging work, we hope to open many doors through which students may choose to travel. And we expect many students will find themselves looking at the world, their work, and their own contributions in new ways.