SYSEN 5480

Human-Centered Design for Change in Complex Systems

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

Bringing about change in ourselves, our teams, our organizations and the complex systems we inhabit and interact with each day can be a challenging undertaking. This interdisciplinary course brings together conversations, theories, and methodologies from design, organizational behavior, human factors, and systems engineering to consider how we might approach change efforts in a manner that considers the complexity of the system and the individuals who affect and are affected by it. Individually and in small teams, students will critically examine stakeholders and systems at a range of scales, starting from a single person to large-scale systems with diverse stakeholder groups. A variety of large-scale systems will be explored, including but not limited to education, healthcare, and energy. Throughout the course, students will engage with methods for deeply understanding system stakeholders, approaches to systems analysis and modeling, change theories, and well-documented change processes.

When Offered Spring.

• Articulate the similarities and differences among diverse approaches and perspectives on change in complex systems.
• Analyze existing complex systems and identify system and stakeholder constraints that may support or inhibit change and identify insights about the complex system and stakeholder groups under consideration.
• Apply systems engineering, design, organizational change approaches that account for contextual characteristics of the system and appropriate theoretical understanding of the system to propose and enact a change within the system.
• Design, prototype, reflect on, and redesign a team experience to account for individual and collective growth and development and an overall positive team experience.
• Communicate the motivation for, approach to, and implications of a particular change effort through a diverse set of mediums and to a diverse set of interested groups.

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