Become a social design advocate—someone who can see consequences of social designs that others might miss: especially negative consequences for individuals or societies. Advocates in our training program learn about human values, the evolution of social norms in a system, and the structural features which make it easier or harder for participants in a system to live and interact in the ways they value.

<aside> 🔥 Apply here. 👉Deluxe costs $2000. Your money back if you don't love the first session. 👉We process applications within 7 days. 👉You can email us, and we can answer questions.

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What's in the Box?

HS101 Deluxe takes about 26h of your time: 7h of one-on-one training with our teachers, mostly playing games together, and another 12h in small groups, playing games and training together, plus some homework. In class and with customized support, you will:

• Learn to precisely articulate values—yours and those of others— and see when and how they are crowded out by other motivations and situational factors.
• Make rituals, games, group practices, organizational policies, institutions, or social technologies around values that are important to your community but lack space for full expression.
• Redesign systems (workplaces, schools, family structures, social apps, etc) so as to support meaningful lives, interactions, and work. Monitor and address negative social consequences of products, institutions or organizations. Avoid the soul-crushing, the meaningless, and the performative.
• Join a vibrant and diverse network of meaning-first designers, and collaborate on your designs.

<aside> 🌈 We've been improving the Human Systems trainings for the last 3 years. Our school has trained 300+ well-positioned product people in our design methods and metrics. Our alumni have applied our methods at Facebook, Github and Apple; they've changed product direction at startups, and redesigned smaller systems like schools, co-living settlements, and families.

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Curriculum

1. Social Systems

HS101 is for designers of social systems: ****systems made of people, where there are codified and mutually understood roles and responsibilities. These designs can range from dinner table conversation games to social networks and global governance structures.

Examples of Social Systems

We teach a method for designing social systems that focuses on human values (by which we mean, how people want to live and treat each other inside these systems), on the evolution of social norms in a system, and on the structural features which make it easier or harder for participants in a system to live and interact in the ways they value.

2. Structural Features

Without a strong background in sociology, few designers can map out the full design space of a social feature. In our classes, you'll learn to analyze the structural features of social environments and see what conditions will support users and values best.

Structural Features

3. Redesign Method

We focus on redesigning social systems in order to make more room for people to practice values they already have.

For instance, imagine redesigning...

• [Facebook New Feed] around the suppressed value of [open-minded political debate]
• [family dinners] around the suppressed value of [free expression of feelings and desires]
• [classroom workgroups] around the suppressed value of [learner self-direction]

<aside> 👉 For more about how hard it is to make software which supports our values, see Can Software Be Good for Us?

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4. Articulated Values

As part of this work, we learn to name values more specifically. Even in the dictionary, a value like honesty has multiple meanings. And in practice, personal approaches to being honest can look quite different. Here are four thinks being honest could mean for different people:

• straight talk: explore the complexity (and often absurdity) of how you and others view the situation. accept that it's just how things happen to be