Knowledge management, resilience engineering, certification, product integration, complexity research, organizational automation, computer-supported meeting environments.
This research area is associated with the HCD 6850 course (also given as SWE 5900) that is usually given during the Fall term, and covers the following topics:
Fall 2012: Tuesdays, 5pm-7:45pm, HCDi conference room, Commons (3rd floor)
For more information, please send an email to dcaballe@fit.edu.
Course Description
This course will cover the history and current thinking on job design and organizational design and give an introduction into socio-technical system design and its developments into recent work on the relationship between organization and technology. It will develop: organizational automation (the issues of computer-supported cooperative work, quality assurance and reporting, flaws in such approaches and repercussions on the people at work); product integration in a large organization (especially in life-critical systems, problems of time pressure, delivery on time, competition, etc.); socio-technical leadership (effects on product maturity, maturity of practice, human-centered design cannot happen if people are not motivated and involved, etc.); change management and work evolution from technology and organizational innovation, emergence of new practices; system design in view of increasing complexity and uncertainty in organizations and systems, issues of balancing stability and flexibility in organizations (e.g. cloud computing and/or smart grids). Students will have a project from the beginning to the end of the course.
Teaching Media and Delivery Methods
Each live session will be either a lecture or a discussion on a subject prepared in advance. It may include quizzes of 15 minutes at the beginning of the live session. The results of these quizzes may be included in the final score of the course for each student.
Lectures on a specific life-critical system domain, i.e., aeronautics, space, nuclear, medicine, will be given by an expert in this domain. Experts may come from outside of FIT.
It is required that each student read the handouts prepared one week before each live session. This is a very important requirement since live session should be interactive as much as possible.
Lectures will be formally given using slides (video projection) and black/white board text and graphic presentations. Movies may be projected. At the end of each live session a small exercise will be given to make theoretical concepts more concrete and applicable.
Grading Weights by Course Element
All live session have the same weight, i.e., students are required to be present for all live sessions (the list of participant students will be made at the beginning of each session).
Evaluation will be conducted as follows:
Laboratory Use
No specific laboratory will be used. The Human-Centered Design Institute may be used for some demonstrations.
Teamwork Applications in the Course
Each student will be asked to apply each lecture to his or her own project.
Texts and References
Student Materials Beyond Texts, References, and Common Student Materials
Course handouts will be distributed before each live session (typically one week before).
A Web site will be maintained where students will find appropriate information required for each live session and the whole course.