Directed Group Study: New Perspectives on Organizing Systems

Directed group study (reading group or “book club”). Will meet approximately every other week.

The concept of “organizing system” that is presented in The Discipline of Organizing is proving to be a useful and generative framework for analyzing existing resource collections and designing novel ones.  But the multidisciplinary breadth of TDO and its new abstractions can make it challenging as a textbook. 

The plan for this seminar is to read three (or more) books on organizing that take widely different perspectives — cognitive, policy/procedural, even spiritual — on the ubiquitous problems of how to select, arrange, interact with, and maintain resources.  The goal is to find new insights that can be incorporated into The Discipline of Organizing to improve its future editions for general readers and students alike.

We start the semester by all reading these two books:

• The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (Daniel Levitin) 2014
• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Marie Kondo) 2014

and we end the semester by reading one or more of these (students choose one; the professor will read them all):

• Things Great and Small: Collections Management Policies (John Simmons) 2006
• GLUT: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Alex Wright ) National Academies Press, July 2007
• A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder (Eric Abrahamson, David H. Freedman ) 2007
• or some other book on organizing.