Look around almost any workplace and you'll see texts everywhere: printouts, forms, sticky notes, receipts, and dozens of others. And as more of our time is devoted to manipulating symbols and information, and as digital technologies allow us to connect more easily and broadly across time, space, organizations, and disciplines, we do more and more of our work through texts. These texts form complex ecologies - they are more than the sum of their parts. Such text ecologies tend to grow organically, through the layering of individual workers' innovations and more formal interventions. And they're a big part of what gives knowledge work its flexibility.

But text ecologies tend not to be designed. They accrete through tactical reactions, but rarely do they represent a coherent strategic stance. That is, they're not planned, and thus they often don't scale well; transfer well; lend themselves to being taught; or lend themselves to directed change.

So how do we solve this problem? How do we design text ecologies that are

• strategically, tactically, and operationally coherent?

• stable enough to be shared, but flexible enough to be adaptable?

• oriented toward internal work activities, but well connected with external work?

That's what this class is about.