O Danny Boy

No snowflake ever falls
   in the wrong place. —Zen proverb

Bio  °  Blog  °  Contact  °  D School  °  Extras  °  Portfolio  °  Resumé

D SCHOOL BLOG ARCHIVES

An archived post from the 2004-05 school year.

 

Tuesday, March 1, 2005

Organizational Culture

How do people come together and do things? It's too rich an area to be contained by any one idea. You need a gene pool of different ideas to explain how that happens and that's what the theory of organizational culture is. Culture is a condition, contained within people, yet bigger than than individuals. But also not in a systemic manner. It's how organizations learn new things but retain old things. It's also this concept that leads directly to designing organizations.

Edgar Schein ("Defining Organizational Culture") posits that culture is something used to give structural stability through repeating patterns that organizations have in order to achieve things over a sustained period of time. In "Culture and Organizational Learning," Scott Cook and Dvora Yanow examine how organizations, not individuals, learn. Or, in other words, how an organization constitutes and reconstitutes itself. For them, it's about the interaction of people with their things. Culture is an environment--an interactive environment. The artifacts of an organization are transmitters of meanings that are shared between people. The learning is about the making of things. Which brings us to Design.

Designers make stuff. We design the things that people live with: objects, information and how it's shared, activities, processes. The more subtle and rich we make things, the more we can affect people and thus the culture of organizations.

Posted in Organizational Design

 


Search Entries

 

Greatest Hits
A Definition of Design
Adaptive Worlds
Design Awareness
Ethics in Design
Ethnography and Models
Having an Experience
Participatory Design
Systems Design
What is an Art?
What is a Product?

 

2004-05 Categories
After School (8)
Alumni (3)
Assistantships (1)
Big Ideas (4)
CMU (12)
Classes (6)
Classmates (7)
Design 101 (4)
Extracurricular (10)
Meta (3)
Money (3)
Organizational Design (32)
Papers (1)
Programming (7)
Projects (14)
Reading (20)
Service Design (6)
Special Guest Stars (10)
Student Life (28)
Teaching (3)
Techniques (6)
Thesis Paper (14)
Thesis Project (11)
Typography (11)

 

2003-04 Categories
3D (2)
Alumni (8)
Assistantships (3)
Big Ideas (28)
Classes (20)
Classmates (26)
CMU (25)
Cognition (1)
CPID Program (4)
Design 101 (30)
Design Theory (21)
Extracurricular (15)
Faculty (13)
Field Trips (5)
HCI Program (4)
Info Design (3)
Interface Design (6)
Meta (8)
Money (8)
Papers (5)
Photography (5)
Preparation (6)
Projects (49)
Readings (33)
Software (8)
Special Guest Stars (15)
Student Life (21)
Teaching (3)
Techniques (12)
Thesis Paper (10)
Thesis Project (6)
Typography (9)
Visualization (8)

 

Coursework
Computing in Design
Design Seminar I
Design Seminar II
Design Studio I
Design Studio II
Graduate Typography
Interaction & Interface Design
Interactive Graphics
Mapping & Diagramming
Sketching & Modeling

 

Classmates and Alumni
Andy Cramer
Chad Thornton
Ben Fineman
Brian Haven
Elizabeth Windram
Jeong Kim
Hong Ha
Ian Hargraves
Jeff Howard
Kenneth Berger
Kerry Bodine
Kevin Fox
Mathilde Pignol
Micah Alpern
Neema Moraveji
Rob Adams

 

RSS Feeds
Excerpts
Full Entries

 

Subscribe
Want more spam? Sign up to receive this blog via email: