Designing for Human-AI Teaming and Collaborative Technologies

Catalog description

New technologies have always disrupted how we work, from personal computers to (more recently) generative AI. To ensure these disruptions augment workers and not burden them, we need to understand how new applications shape not just tasks, but the entire socio-technical setting of collaborative work. Why do advanced sophisticated technologies sometimes make work worse? How do humans coordinate with each other through digital tools? What are ways humans will appropriate AI agents to work better and not work more? This course will prepare students to differentiate themselves in tomorrow's workforce by teaching you to design paradigms for workers to use technology in a human-centered way. Through the course project and readings, students will develop the ability to critically reflect on the interplay between human organization and technologies, and subsequently innovate alternative settings to improve work.