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February 28, 2005

Competition

Stanford's new design school website is up. Very slick, although the content is pretty shallow. I was hoping to find out more about their courses and projects.

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February 27, 2005

First Picked

Elizabeth has accepted a job as a designer at Google. She's the first one of us to accept an offer. Congrats to her!

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February 26, 2005

Karaoke

In honor of my and Jeff's birthday (and Chung's thesis paper on karaoke), we went out for karaoke during an ice storm last weekend at a local establishment to experience Joanie Karaoke. Chung brought his own karaoke music, and, it being my birthday and all, I was forced to perform my rendition of "Sympathy for the Devil" for the crowd.

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Typographers with Balls

A group of us play in a graduate student intramural league. If you don't take it too seriously, it's a good way to blow off some steam.

(By the way, the title of this post is our team name. I had nothing to do with it.)

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Group Conceptual Model

Our group for conceptual models (me, Phi-Hong Ha, Harlan Weber, and Purin Phanichphant) came up with this model of CMU's Blackboard System (404k pdf).

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Stress

In the last week, I

Anyway, this is what I've been dealing with. In this last semester, the schoolwork has gotten lighter, but the stress is still high.

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February 24, 2005

Organizational Culture Readings

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Power and Games in Organizations

Power is one way of examining organizations: who has it and where does it come from and how it is used. As a designer, understanding they types of power you face in an organization is critical. You need to know how to play the power game (the rules) and who the players are (the roles). Power is a harsh reality in organizations; it's part of survival.

Power has to do with relationships between people: people have power and with it make organizations and can choose to exercise their power or not, for good or ill. Using power nakedly is probably a losing scenario; to play the power game, you need to have skill.

You can think of systems such as organizations like a game, and "players" "win" by getting more power. This is game thinking/theory, and it is a powerful tool, especially in strategy. Game theory in organizations is a tricky thing though. In the past, organizational theory used to think there was one goal to the game: to make profit. But in the last half century, this was overturned as the goals of the individuals in the organization were added in. Now we realize that people play their own games within organizations, that there are often multiple games going on where the rules aren't disclosed and you can lose without even knowing it. (Contradictions in behavior can sometimes be explained by people playing their own games.) Additionally, the formal and informal structures within organizations create different games with different rules.

Deep down, it is all about power.

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February 23, 2005

Career Dazed

The past two days have been the annual ritual known as Career Days, during which the School of Design is like a crazed bear half-shot full of tranquilizers, lurching around madly pawing at itself. I exaggerate, but only a little. For graduating students, it's a time of dressing up and subjecting yourself to a speed-dating style of job interviews in 20-minute blocks. Studios are cleaned, portfolios put together, interview clothes bought.

This year, like last, a reasonably impressive spread of companies came by with jobs to offer: Apple, Microsoft, GE, Google, Motorola, Sapient, Razorfish, and Siegel + Gale to name a few. A number of the interviewers were CMU alumni returning to rescue more of us and give us hope.

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February 20, 2005

General System Theory

In the past, there was a school of management thought called Administration Science, made up Operations Research and Decision Sciences. Operations Research gave managers quantitative information about the resources (or parts) of an organization, then the managers used decision science to make decisions based on those parts/resources. ("If we have three tons of steel, we should make some cars.") System theory rose an an alternative to this.

General System Theory says that there are properties common to all systems, regardless of specifics in a particular subject matter (biology, chemistry, sociology, etc.). It is a comprehensive notion of a system ("The Meaning of General System Theory" by Ludwig von Bertallanffy). Others (such as Fremont E. Kast and James E. Rosenzweig) refute this idea, saying there are different types of systems, not one general system, that different phenomena need to be discussed in different ways.

There are two types of systems: closed and open. Closed systems will gradually decay if left alone. Open systems are affected by outside environments. It's hard to tell the boundary of a system; you need wisdom to do it, lest you exclude data based on personal preferences and prejudices. But for the purpose of analysis (and design) you have to treat open systems as closed.

It's important to remember that however broad system theory seems to be, it remains in the context of resource usage; individuals and groups (except as resources) play little part in systems thinking. It's a distinct type of thinking about organizations, rooted in materials. However, systems thinking and chaos theory are growing in importance to Design.

But although system theory has significance, Dick Buchanan says it is a stretch of imagination to see how some of it applies to the problems designers face. It takes us out of the things we experience day-to-day and gives a high-level view of the situation--sometimes too high-level. It can be too big; it's often more helpful to find and understand the pathways through the system on a human scale because you can easier design for those. Go to the human experience and let design thinking restructure the system as a whole.

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February 18, 2005

Power and Politics Readings

Two readings about power and politics in organizations: "The Power Game and Its Players" by Henry Mintzberg and "The Bases of Social Power" by John R.P. French Jr. and Bertram Raven.

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February 17, 2005

Communication Conceptual Model

In conceptual modeling, our first project was to listen to one of our classmates tell a story about an important communication, then build a conceptual model based off the data that we gathered during the session. My group's storyteller was fighting with her identical twin, and her story involved lots of twists and turns and was very complicated. I tried to strip out most of the "details" and get down to essence of what the story was about. Thus, this conceptual model (13k pdf).

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System Theory Readings

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February 16, 2005

The Structure of Organizations

The hardest thing to deal with in organizations is that other people think differently than you do and that that is ok. Different perceptions are useful. In fact, to fail to grasp The Other (in the form of the client or end user or other teammates) is a major problem of Design. Designers need to detach their egos to design well. Great designers, with maturity and discipline, have the ability to both express themselves and understand others in the things they create.

A designer needs to understand where she fits in an organization and how that organization works as a social system. Otherwise, as Dick Buchanan warned us, you can "be bitten in the ass" by organizations. Designers need to know there are informal relationships that are created and fostered by the formal structure of organizations ("The Concept of Formal Organization" by Peter Blau and W. Richard Scott). These informal organizations (personal relationships) are what make formal organizations go.

Designers need to know that there are mechanistic and organic systems, and the reality is that most organizations are a mix of the organic and the mechanistic ("Mechanistic and Organic Systems" by Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker). Designers need to find ways to accommodate different ways of thinking within the same organization.

Designers need to know the basic parts of the organization ("The Five Basic Parts of the Organization" by Henry Mintzberg) because the parts of an organization don't work in isolation, but only in relationship to each other. If you understand the structural relationships of organizations, you can use them (or else be used by them).

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February 8, 2005

Structural Analysis Readings

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Organizational Behavior Readings

Readings post-1957:

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February 7, 2005

Year of the Rooster Patriots

One of the great side benefits of my program is that it attracts a fair number of international students and people of fairly diverse backgrounds, so you learn about lots of different cultures and their traditions and celebrations. Yesterday, some of the Asian students who celebrate Chinese/Vietnamese New Year--Phi-Hong Ha, Yuan-Chou Chung, Pen-Fan Sun, and Chun-Yi Chen--threw a New Year's Party, complete with traditional Chinese and Vietnamese foods and candies.

Adding to the party was the fact that it was also Super Bowl Sunday, so the game was projected onto a wall, six feet high. Football and spring rolls...tasty!

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Interpreting Systems

Organizations are a type of social form and are systems. The system/organization is composed of four things: ideas, materials, people, and the environment. These four things vary greatly depending on the interpretation of "system" that is used to view them. Dick Buchanan has come up with four "places" from which to examine systems:

You can use these four interpretations throughout to examine theories and views of organizations and their parts. How people design organizations comes out of how they think of organizations (systems). Organizations argue with each other about what an organization is.

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Neoclassical Organizational Theorists Readings

Readings from post-WWII through the 1950s.

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February 2, 2005

Pre-WWII Readings in Classical Management Theory

Readings from the beginnings of management and organizational studies.

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