Hey! Serge here. You're a few dojos away from finishing HS101 !
This week things get exciting. We begin to apply a lot of our concepts to real parts of your life. We'll be taking the space jams you just made and improving them by introducing our last key concept — Structural Features — before going on to the full redesign.
To make the most of our time together next week, I've prepared some reading and exercises for you to go through before class. It will take about 2 hours to read and run through. The class will build on this material. Please take this time to prepare so you can follow in class.
Reading the material and running through the exercise will most likely bring up a lot of questions. That's good! Collect them in the grey boxes at the end of each section and bring them to our session. We'll have answers for you.
Let's get to it!
Serge
PS: all these materials are in constant development — if you have feedback to any of this I'd love for you to leave feedback in a comment in the text.
Check your progress as you go: [ca. 2 hours]
📚 What's a Structural Feature?
💁🏽♀️ Agents, 🏙 Structures, and 🌳 Personal Values
People who design systems often refer to humans as "users" or "participants". In HS101, we call them 💁🏽♀️ Agents, pointing out that people are thinking, reasoning decision-makers. In our terminology, agents make choices within 🏙 Structures—environments that impose physical and social constraints.
As we discussed in Four Social Worlds 🕵️♂️🌳💍📈, the structure of a situation may lead an agent to prioritize 📈 strategic goals or 💍social expectations. This can crowd out 🌳 personal values in her decision making. When an agent makes a choice that doesn't align with her personal values, she might end up with mixed feelings — even if the decision was a good response to the strategic considerations and social expectations which dominated the situation. On the other hand, if the agent chooses according to her values, it might end up feeling like time well spent, even if things don't turn out exactly as she had hoped.
But what makes the difference in her choices? Why do desired outcomes and social expectations sometimes crowd out someone's personal values?
⚙️ Structural Features
When we look closely at a structure, we can see what we'll call its ⚙️Structural Features, the specific aspects of the environment in which an agent is about to make a choice.
Structural features influence and limit the choices that seem available to an agent. Certain features shape an agent's choices differently than others because the ⚙️Structural Features of the situation make different things relevant — they change what we pay attention to and believe to be important in a given context.
Here is a short list of some common structural features. You won't know what all of these mean just yet and that's okay. Just take five minutes to scan through them.
For an example of how ⚙️Structural Features change what seems possible in a social context, read . It's a good read!
How do ⚙️Structural Features fit into the redesign process? For more clarity review 🔄Human + Structure. It's short and helpful!
Questions?
In your own words, what are structural features? What structural features stand out to you? If you think we've missed some structural features, make a note of it in the questions box below.
Your trainer will be available to answer them in the dojo. Write everything down that you don't quite understand, so you don't forget to ask.
⚙️ Field-trip of Structural Features
Let's think about a few situations you might have been in and name the structural features of those contexts.
Take ten minutes to think through the four situations beneath. For each situation, try to list all of the structural features you notice. Afterward, click the toggle below each photo and look at the filled-in sheet.
Some of these situations can take on many forms. We made a judgment call of what we think is right. Don't worry if some of your answers are slightly different to ours.
What structural features characterise a dinner with friends?
What structural features characterise a team meeting?
What structural features characterise a poetry reading?
What structural features characterise facebook newsfeed?
Structural Features of a Recent Time
Think back to a context you were recently in and write it here.
What structural features did you notice?
Questions?
Your trainer will be available to answer them in the dojo. Write everything down that you don't quite understand, so you don't forget to ask.
Do any of our answers to the filled-in structural features sheets surprise you? Which of these are you least clear on?
👮 Structural Features and Expectations
You just identified structural features of different scenarios from memory (or live)! Now we'll build your intuition for when structural features generate Expectation or Goals.
To understand this, look at the diagram beneath. If you look at step 2 in our redesign method, structural features interact with values in two ways:
- They make hard steps harder (or easier)
- They drive the evolution of Expectation and goals which crowd out values
Questions?
I am a box you can type into to remember your questions.
🖥 Tracing Expectations from Structural Features
Structural Features generate norms
Let's look at the Social System of the Ted X Stage. Here, two Structural Features create the Expectation of Polished work:
- Audience Size: Big
- Durability: Permanent