Book Contents Now Available

Here is the Table of Contents for the my in-progress book:

Title: Boundary-Spanning Design: How Information Systems Evolve Through Improvisation

Contents (liable to change as book evolves)

Chapter 1. THE DESIGN PROBLEM

• Change Management and Organizational Design
• How designers think: the problem of the problem
• Waterfalls and out-of-control speedboats
• Scaling up: a group is not a coherent set of individuals, working together
• Bibliography for Chapter 1

Chapter 2. DESIGN AS IMPROVISATION

• Need for adaptation in dynamic situations
• Design as workplace rationales: frames and framing
• Adapting distributed schema & scripts
• Agreeing distributed knowledge: generic subjectivity & routines

Chapter 3. DESIGN AS PROBLEM-SOLVING

• Organizational design problems are wicked problems
• Problem-solving as collaborative learning
• Integrating in-group and out-group knowledge
• Design as emergent understanding

Chapter 4. DESIGN AS SENSITIZATION TO PATTERNS

• Design approaches of novices vs experts
• Mental models: schema vs.scripts
• Method as map: important for acquiring “how-to” (design process) knowledge
• Exemplars as paradigms: important for acquiring “what and why” (design product and rationale) knowledge
• What a design is.

Chapter 5. SITUATED DESIGN

• Importance of domain knowledge
• Knowledge internalization/externalization cycles
• Legitimizing reflective learning in design
• Avoiding premature closure: complicating design
• Iterating opening-up & closing-down cycles of design.

Chapter 6. BREAKDOWNS & BOUNDARY OBJECTS IN DESIGN

• Distributed knowledge vs shared knowledge
• Breakdowns & progress in design
• Role of boundary objects
• Trust & distribution of cognitive labor.

Chapter 7. HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN

• User-centered vs. human-centered design
• Defining requirements to differentiate what humans are good at, vs. what machines are good at
• Method as filter: what is inside or outside the boundary; what is emphasized
• Selecting design methods to emphasize human-centeredness
• Human-centered vs. user-centered design.

Chapter 8. IMPROVISING BOUNDARY-SPANNING DESIGN

• Why boundary-spanning design is different (and why most design is boundary-spanning)
• So What? Implications for the design of organizational information systems.
• Distributed cognition and improvisational design creating boundary-spanning designs.

Contents are liable to change, but I feel a sense of achievement, having defined what the book is about … 😉

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