Had an interesting discussion with a friend working at a start up today. He’s a programmer at a company looking to change how colleagues within an organization capture and share knowledge with one another. I was explaining my thesis ideas to him, since he’s done work on education platforms before. 

So there we were, an interaction designer and an application programmer, and all we were talking about were culture, habit, and social engineering. We were talking about books like Thinking Fast and Slow and Switch. We’re talking about the interactions between psychology and culture. We were talking about theories of conversation, about overcoming the cold start problem, about motivating people to do what they know to be good.

As I biked home, I thought about what it is that I am trying to design. How wide is the scope of what we need to redesign? If we want to make education better (seeing as that’s one of my thesis ideas) the redesign of the user interface doesn’t seem sufficient. Redesigning the user experience doesn’t seem sufficient. Even the redesign of group dynamics doesn’t seem sufficient. If we want to create habits, realign incentives, change minds, shape conversations, incite action, it seems that our task is no less than the redesign of entire institutions.

What would an institution designer think about?

Here’s my hypothesis: 

An institution designer considers human nature, its strengths, flaws, and motivation. Their design would harness psychology research to create habits and change mindsets. 

An institution designer considers social dynamics. How do people behave in small groups versus large groups? How is social order kept and destroyed? How does incentive structures shape human tendencies? What kinds of culture and environment foster collaboration? or competition?

An institution designer considers mediums of communication. How does a particular medium shape communication in it? How does the medium extend or limit a particular human tendency or social dynamic?

An institution designer considers system dynamics. Is an institution’s design self sustaining financially, socially, and politically? What kinds of pressures act upon it, and how does it respond? Does the institution have mechanisms for self-renewal and course correction?

How does one even begin to wrap their head around all this? What would a discipline of institution design even look like?