This is a talk I gave at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) for their Masters of Fine Arts program in Collaborative Design (MFACD). In the talk I outlined how I would respond to so-called wicked problems using the tools and practices of an academic program in collaborative design.

The more interesting thing to come out of the talk for me was a brief introduction to the concept of a coefficient of art in the context of indirect reciprocity for cooperation in and among groups (see pg 4).

I recently visited Stanford University’s school of design.  They have put a lot of effort into uncovering how infrastructure affects collaborative spaces for design use and practice, or rather, what design groups need to really succeed.  Click the image for a pdf (1mb) of insights they turned into enabling resources for collaborative and design activities.

Thanks to Scott Witthoft for his great tour! There’s also an article here from FastCompany outlining heuristics for generating better collaborative infrastructure.

Service design is the practice of translating insights from social research into enabling resources.  Using tools from cognitive psychology, sociology, and  behavioral economics, service design organizes the cognitive, social, and physical infrastructure to help people better serve each other.  The goal of service design is to improve service outcomes, procedures, and communication by enabling highly coordinated cooperation among participants and stakeholders. Service design is different from, say, interaction design because instead of focusing on the narrative and form of specific forms of artifacts that users engage with, service design turns its attention to a range of artifacts and narratives all with the goal of organizational change to meet the needs of participants and users.

As the community of service design practice expands, tools are needed that will help people make sense of the formal elements and purposes of service design. Organization and classification are common practices within any emerging discipline.  Service design is no different with its formative history marked by rich discussions over definitions, core practices and procedures, value to society, and relationships with other disciplines.  Genre is one technique for managing the diversity of elements in service experiences.  Meaning ‘type’ or ‘kind’, genre has a cognitive benefit that helps orient people towards the common bonds of a medium or work of art.

Service experiences are dematerialized, elusive, and open to different interpretations.  A genre approach can provide techniques for understanding the impact of different service elements while adding perspective across different experiences and tactics. In doing so, a service genre approach should able to describe the formal elements and narrative structure of service experiences, enable comparisons and historical accounts, help us understand how services change over time, and further elucidate the link between service production and consumption.

An Approach to Genre

Drawing on literary theory and film criticism, genre can be applied to service experiences as a way of understanding existing patterns and identifying new ones.  One of the most influential approaches to film genre was described by Rick Altman. Altman recognized that films are described semantically in terms of formal elements like costumes, locations, temporal setting, lighting, cinematography, sound, and props, and so on, while also being described as a syntax involving relationships of the story, plot, narrative structure, and interactions between formal elements. Altman described this as a semantic/syntactic approach to genre.

A common example of genre in film is the western, where semantic elements like a cowboy hat, horses, and gunfights provide the visual substrate for syntactic themes of conflict over honor and values, rebirth, and individual agency.  Similarly, sci-fi genres use alien creatures, spacesuits, distant planets, and novel technologies to advance themes about humans and their environment, exploration and discovery, and the conflicts that arise between society and technology.

Altman’s Approach to Genre

Genre helps make sense of stabilizing, creative and disruptive processes in service experiences, and this can help us anticipate and generate new trends.  Rick Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach resolved three contradictions that emerged when films were classified by existing genre definitions by highlighting the tension between semantic elements and syntactic themes. This approach demonstrated how semantic “things” and syntactic “arrangements” work together through conflict and synergies to generate emergent new genres and creative churning within existing ones.

Contradiction One: Classification of Form versus Structure

Altman identified the first contradiction as one that arises when films are organized by their formal elements, on one hand, and as canonical examples of a genre on the other. Genre classifications before Altman would pivot on a tautology where westerns, for example, were characterized by images of the American West from 1840-1900, or, alternatively, if taste and meaning made certain films more relevant than others for describing an overall generic structure.  This contradiction is evident in a movie like Star Wars, which is a western based on its narrative themes, but because it takes place in space, it would be excluded from some lists of westerns.

Contradiction Two: Divergent Communities of Practice

The second contradiction is the difference in discourse between critics and consumers.  On one hand, film interpretation by critics and industry channels sets out certain expectations of genre for audiences.  However, audiences also construct their descriptions and uses, providing an entirely separate set of interpretations.  The difference is what many would call an expert-layperson divergence, but this does not necessarily indicate superiority of one or another.  It is specifically because of their different approaches and social relationships that each group is able to bring forth different sets of interpretations.  The implication of this separation is that genre definitions are highly dependent on temporal interactions within groups, such as previous scholarship or significant local events, where historical processes influence the emergence and disappearance of narrative structure and formal elements.

Contradiction Three: Degree of User-Focus

In the third contradiction, Altman described relationships to genre as either ritual or ideological, or bottom-up and top-down, respectively.  The ritual approach to genre centers on the audience whose use of film genre is an indicator of their preferences and beliefs.  Participation through film spectatorship is an act of authorship by the audience, and their expectations and desires are reinforced in the process of consumption.  In ritual, genre is created by the audience.  The ideological approach views genre as an organized attempt of business and political interests to shape discourse and use-practice.  In contrast to the ritual approach, the ideological approach would focus on Hollywood’s interest in scripting audience behavior to serve its own preferences, rather than responding to social pressure from “below”.

In service design, these three conflicts are evident to varying degrees.  However, classification based on form and/or structure is often more a question of good versus bad outcomes, processes, and communication.  This often depends on how well the experience was able to bridge divergent communities of practice and focus on the needs of the users.

Design is a sticky practice.  It is looped with contradictions, uncertainties, and material constraints.  Bringing something new into the world, be it an artifact or service raises challenges that few individuals can surmount – if at all.  Despite the dominant view that geniuses, visionaries, and otherwise crafty individuals are solely responsible for designed creations, organizations play a far greater and often unattributed role.  Perhaps it is because of the aesthetic flair worked into the surface of the object or experience, or maybe it’s the personality of the driving individual that points us in the direction of these myths.  And they are myths, because even the most brilliant designer owes their success at the end of the day to at least one group – their participants, their users.  More likely is “rock-star” designers owe the production of a product or service to many more who inhabit a long chain in the process of design, implementation, and distribution.

Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry, South Wall"

Somewhere along the chain of causation between creative individuals and their users there exists a group of people, places, ideas, and things that operate synchronistically and synergistically to develop ideas into concepts, concepts into prototypes, prototypes into experiences, experiences into practices, and practices into lessons.  These sets of translations encompass different skill sets and relationships, few of which are possible without deep and varied interactions across different environments.

Taking stock of an emerging design practice is something we do often these days.  I think it springs from places that have recognized and internalized failures for what they are – opportunities – and from people who embrace reflection as positive forces for learning and adaptive change.

Our environments are changing.  And they will continue to do so.  Even if we find pathways to design static landscapes that include fixed social interactions, the resources and habitat available to us and other species will remain in flux.  Consider that in 2008, we reached the threshold where 50% of the world’s human population resides in urban dwellings (and possibly also 50% of the world’s population of cockroaches, starlings, street dogs, and sewer rats).

It’s also true that the biosphere can no longer be considered ‘natural’ in the same terms that 18th century Romantics did, as something pure, something to be conserved, something separate.  The landscapes of our contemporary experience are human enmeshed – neither dominated nor resistant to our desires to interact, to use, and to understand.  They show our preferences for stable communities supported by agriculture that reinforce a growing feedback loop between population growth and energy consumption.  The Anthropocene, as this epoch is now commonly referred to, places a point on some linear timeline where people demonstrated their best applications of the idea of progress. Perhaps it is only our external concept of the sublime that are disappearing from the human range of experience.

There is much greater landscape diversity than has ever existed, but certainly it is less inhabitable by the majority of the world biological diversity.  Landscape diversity is created not only by people and their continued interpretations of “safe” and “prosperous”, but also by animals and plants that push and get pushed into their own new and divergent niches.  Patches of materials are being collected and redistributed to form wild hybrids and pure spaces– bacteria-resistant surfaces, show rose gardens, crude oil-slicked sandy beaches, tourist-friendly rainforest, wildlife mobility solutions, skyscraper concrete pillars, semiconductors, and extra-terrestrial orbiting robots – to name just a few.

Each time new patches are created, they exemplify the desires and possibilities available for their inhabitants.  They provide food, space for living, courses for exercise, obstacles for navigation, challenges and threats between groups that aim to occupy more patches, places to hide, and places to trade. Evolutionary history has demonstrated that cooperation confers a significant strategic advantage to those who choose to communicate, share, and build together.  In human terms, one need only look at the migratory patterns of individuals from rural to urban settlements to understand that there is a direct and perceived economic advantage from sharing land, resources, infrastructure, and culture on people’s livelihoods – not to mention social mobility.

Detail from wall illustration at the Golden Temple, Namdroling Monastery, India

Design practices are widening. They are gaining breadth proportional to their influence on economic productivity, their ability to expand social engagement and political empowerment, and perhaps because of the impact that social studies of science and technology has provided to our appreciation of artifacts as catalysts for knowledge.  Scientists and technologists are viewed as inventors, individual carries of the modern ideal of progress.  We now recognize that images, laboratory spaces, institutions, public media, and mechanical parts play as significant a role in chance events, innovation, and the acquisition of scientific and technological dogma by civil society.

One of the implications of an expanded design practice is the gradual inclusion of organizations as ‘objects’ for design.  Organizations were once the purview of managers, business executives, policy makers, and human resources consultants, but they can now be confidently lumped together with paint, plaster, and photo emulsion.

I’m sure this is raising red flags for some who read this, and it should.  It’s a scary proposition for some to think that individual behaviors can and should be designed and organized. But it is a fact that individual and group behaviors are already structured by the designed and so-called natural environment along with normalized social interactions and perceptions of social agency.  The only thing we gain by ignoring the structures that are already in place (albeit unconsciously) is the freedom from self-awareness, individual and collective agency to solve more challenging and complex problems.  The more we ignore these unconscious behaviors (eating habits for example) that already exist, the more they leads us into deep patterns and habits that can be difficult to get out of for reasons of fear, inexperience, ability, or just a lack of awareness.

This is not to say it is all negative.  If we had to pay attention to everything we did, we would fall apart from exhaustion while trying to make complicated decisions.  Many of our biases may have developed because they habituate us into safe spaces for interaction.  Unfortunately, as our societies and environments change, those safe spaces may be retreating, and it’s worth reflecting on our biases and how our individual and group dynamics promote infrastructures for flourishing.

Organizational management has become a major discipline of the 20th century with the adoption of increasingly complicated tasks and industrial processes.  It stands to become more integrated into our systems and psyche, but will management theories dominate – or will design envelop management in favor more distributed processes of self-organization consistent with cybernetics and decision theory?

Groups change, and so do their goals.  It is a part of life and society, and it always will be.  The questions that we ought to be asking is how, where, through whom, and when do they change?

There is ample evidence that organizational behavior is at the root of innovation and robustness across enterprises.  The shape and tenor of a group of people, each with different tasks, and working towards a common goal varies widely – not to mention the tasks, people and goals – and that’s assuming those goals are shared among the group members!  Without going into the theory and practice of organizational behavior for which there is a massive literature, I simply want to raise the point that organizational design may be a more recent practice and one that plays a role in or strategies for adaptation, sustainability, and inclusive growth.

In part II, I’ll look at some examples where designers are tackling organizational design as project and process.

Diego Rivera's "Man at the Crossroads"

On Tuesday evening I had the pleasure of meeting up with some fellow UM alums during an information session for the Ross Business School. I didn’t graduate with an MBA; I did my MFA in the School of Art & Design. Nonetheless, I was welcomed and had the opportunity to share my perspectives on what makes Michigan different from other universities and experiences. Actually, I think it is becoming increasingly relevant that students in art and design connect with business students and vice versa.

The highlight of the evening was a lecture by Venkat Ramaswamy, Hallman Fellow of Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. During his visit to India he was launching his new book, “The Power of Co-Creation”, and he gave a very nice explanation of co-creation to the audience of prospective MBAs and Alums.

For me, the lecture was especially timely. I have been diving deep into the theory and practice of service design for the last eight months. My goal is to use knowledge of complex systems and dematerialized practices as options for thinking, teaching, and solving problems that can benefit from the engagement of multiple stakeholders. Some of these problems range from the provision of water resources, delivery of health services, discovery of patterns in public health, the maintenance and design of infrastructure, or even how learning is measured and fed back into teaching and course content.

Prof. Ramaswamy’s talk focused on examples that demonstrated co-creation as a paradigm for value creation. He provided a sample of instances where the design of platforms focuses on interactions between enterprise providers (supply chain, enterprise planning, customer relationship) on one hand – and stakeholders on the other. The key part of the value creation lies in the assembly of a platform through which the process of engagement and co-creation can take place. In this way, engagement happens first, enterprise second.

Seoul OASIS co-creation & planning includes the use of images to illustrate the suggestions.

Seoul OASIS co-creation & planning includes the use of images to illustrate the suggestions.

Venkat’s first example came from civic planning in Seoul, South Korea. OASIS is a platform for engagement with public services. It facilitates citizen engagement with the city council using a combination of online, video, and face-to-face platforms. To make it an effective platform, complaints are not allowed – only suggestions. The facilitators also ask/keep the suggestions limited to the goals that have already been determined. So the question civic participants have to ask themselves is, “How do we achieve our goals?”

Civic Participation in Seoul OASIS

Civic Participation in Seoul OASIS

The participation process begin with (1) suggestions which get tagged by the participants. The tags allow people to start structured (2) discussions of the ideas. About 12% then get taken for (3) off-line examinations. Eventually there are (4) Seoul OASIS meetings which are filmed live and where stakeholders and civic service providers get to interact. Finally, a handful of suggestions make it to (5) implementation where the project gets documented along with benchmarks and other accountability checks.

Delhi-Traffic-Police-get-social

Caja Navarra (Spain) is pioneering civic banking using engagement platforms to make an impact in the social sector. It shows customers how much it makes from their savings and provides them with the ability to choose from an array of eight or so recipients of their social contributions. The recipient organizations are further pushed to present how they use the money as a result of the participation. The benefits also feed back to the bank’s ability to attract new customers. By providing “gift cards” with preset amounts, new participants can log on and get involved with their donations. Meanwhile, the bank is then able to show potential customers how their money would be used by Caja Navarra as opposed to the customer’s current bank.

The Gameful Leaderboard

The Gameful Leaderboard

All of this reminded me of some other platforms that tie emerging enterprises with potential stakeholders. Kickstarter is a new platform for ideas that need capital to get their projects off the ground. Anyone can contribute, and it only depends on the project’s ability to pitch their idea – and maybe some well-placed social capital (here’s some tips on managing a kickstarter project). One hugely successful project pitch that was launched is Gameful (exceeding their funding goal by over 3000%). It’s an online Secret HQ for gamers and game developers who want to help change the world and make our real lives better. The project’s developers did a really nice thing in pitching the project. They set of levels of giving, that mimicked some game tropes like secret entry points and awards.

Co-creation and service design are largely about the engagement that happens in the development of product and service offerings. Later as we ate dinner, I asked Prof. Ramaswamy what it might mean to go beyond products and services. What would happen, for example, if co-creation impacted the evolution of the core business model and plan? Eric Beinhocker explores some of the conditions for how this might happen in his book, The Origin of Wealth. One of the central themes of the book revolves around how businesses themselves are a form of design. The design of businesses encompasses how to understand the market and connected institutions, product and service offerings, operations, marketing and sales, strategy, and the organization itself. If, as Beinhocker argues, business designs evolve over time through differentiation, selection, and amplification, then it stands to reason that co-creative platforms for engagement can distribute that work as well as just the product and service offerings. The only question is where will it happen?

OpenIDEO recently launched with a few beta projects aimed to promote social entrepreneurship – first for helping kids make healthy food choices and then for affordable teaching and learning services (in India).  The OpenIDEO web platform is a good use of social media to gather up precedents, promote participation, and organize preferences.  People are free to contribute as much or as little as they can, but as with any project, there are clearly different levels of participation.  Somewhere I read [from the EVOKE people I think] that there are usually five or so levels of participation in crowdsourcing or social media projects: 1) look around, 2) create an account, 3) some participation, 4) active involvement, and 5) hardcore.

Because I have an interest in teaching and learning, I decided to commit and follow through to the end – contributing as earnestly as possible with my available time.  I probably ended up somewhere around “active contributor”, but by no means was I “hardcore”.

I came in a little after the start of the project and didn’t have much time to contribute to the precedents phase.  Precedents is where people share examples of things that are relevant to the project brief. Here the brief was to increase the availability and affordability of teaching and learning tools and services in the developing world.

The brief is often where the closest attention should be paid. It’s usually where conflicts and misunderstanding originate. As with any project, the real challenge is to first define the problem – and then to demonstrate how the solutions posed solve that problem.  It sounds easier than it is.  I think crowdsourcing succeeds and fails in the ways people perceive and interpret the problem, and how they subsequently map their solutions to the problems as posed.  The challenge for any crowdsourcing project to embrace is how to support the interpreting and mapping more effectively.

This post is meant for me to reflect and assess what I thought was fun and what I thought was less fun about OpenIDEO’s process – as a user and participant.  Perhaps because the focus of the challenge was teaching + learning, I viewed it a little like being a student-participant.

What was fun.
The challenge was relevant and broad enough that I was able to easily focus my efforts into developing a few concepts. In most cases, I had the education settings and use-cases in front of me while I was doing my other work on rural agriculture and livelihoods. In all I added three concepts.  It was mainly a way for me think through problems, and I did it as much for myself as I did for the challenge.

In Share the Seed, Not the Tree, I collected data about the costs of materials and services in use at a typical school in a large town in Andra Pradesh, India. I wanted to use collected data and observations of kids at school because I thought this seemed to be missing from the brief, and because unsubstantiated assumptions about people and contexts are too common.  Among the many context submissions, there were a wide range of assumptions about context, affordability, meaning, and culture, and I didn’t really understand where they were coming from. But that’s okay. 

On the formal side, I think the developers should have made the formatting a little easier for the user.  As it was I couldn’t present anything in tabular or list format.

Untitled was a information tool for library services we’ve been working in at CSTEP which provides a simple to implement way of tracking library books and other assets.  Common resources like libraries and parks are REALLY difficult to maintain in India – unless you have a guard and locks.

Fig1

One take-away lesson from the concept I sent in (and for OpenIDEO) was that I think teaching and learning will benefit more when the resources that are present are made visible with the rules and users clearly shown to all.  We need information technologies that simultaneously support different modes of interaction – from centralized to decentralized and everything in-between.

Fig2

News Ecologies Remix Design (Figs 1 & 2) was as much an experiment with graphic design as it was thinking through the hovel industrial ecology of newspaper recycling and aggregation AND journalistic content creation.

What I really like in hindsight was the eventual use of the concepts – something that wasn’t made quite clear up front.  The ‘winners’ were all compiled into a resource guide that provided a series of steps and questions to help move subsequent innovators through the design process themselves.  The winning concepts were not projected as projects to be implemented – they were positioned more as catalysts for teaching and imagining.

So in the end, the brief ended up more like a rapidly prototyped workbook – filled out with design ideas.  The OpenIDEO platform was a quick way to generate relevant content that could be used to support people’s thinking as well as a process for local actors working on a similar design brief.

What was less Fun.
I have way more to say about what was fun and less fun, but because of time, I only want to focus on a few things that seemed consistent or inconsistent with the aims of the challenge.

On the less fun side, the social aspects of the platform were not as enriching as I expected.  There were ‘winners’ in a collaborative process, and this raises multiple issues as part of a larger discussion about framing, education and collaboration.

I also didn’t get a stable sense of interaction with other participants.  Keep in mind the platform is still in beta, and they are (I assume) working on additional “features”.  Inter-participant interactions consisted of comments on posts and “applaud” recognition.  I really wished I could have been notified by email of updates to comments and other interactions between participants.

I also got the sense it was a popularity contest.  This was reinforced in the evaluation phase where, after an intense round of concepting, forty concepts were shortlisted.  If I were a student in a classroom, this would have been really discouraging.  It was a like working to satisfy a set of criteria and then finding out afterwards that you were actually being evaluated against a different set of rules.

We’ve now got 40 concepts based on popularity and those which have the most potential, as chosen by GMC. In order to get down to 30, and help these ideas move forwards, please evaluate them against the criteria.

I think this is where OpenIDEO really failed with this challenge.  Most students at a certain age are not disappointed by not winning.  It’s not knowing how to improve that kills your motivation.  This is exactly the challenge for India.  Many teachers – especially at the college level – are themselves unable or unwilling to distinguish relevant knowledge and its applications from less effective ones.  What they do know, they stick with – leaving innovating educational models in the dust (quite literally sometimes). 

Experienced teachers also know that if students are uninformed about why they got a certain grade, they get upset and frustrated and will loose motivation quickly.  This is probably why standardized curricula and testing are used so much in schools – and why ‘progressive educationists’ react so strongly to any mention of evaluation or standards.  When no one has to be responsible for facilitating that map between problems and solutions, there are simple, correct and incorrect answers.

It would have been better to do the detailed evaluation first – giving feedback to all the concepts – and the “applause” round second – with the detailed evaluations available as evidence of the mapping between solution and problem. Yes, it would have been more tedious perhaps, but so what.

If I had know it was all about popularity, I probably wouldn’t have invested the effort. There was no way to ‘see’ the mapping between the problem statement and ‘winning’, making it appear as though arbitrary because it wasn’t made visible.  What I wanted was the opportunity to see if my perspectives matched the challenge problem and where it needed improvement.  So in the end, I didn’t learn much. 

But hey, it’s a beta test and failing is good.  Hopefully it becomes an opportunity for better implementation.

The second round of evaluation was more detailed and asked respondents to rate the solution on a few different criteria – along with detailed comments to further their effectiveness.  I don’t want to get too much into the feasibility of many of the ideas for India, but I will say that there could have been better alignment between the concepting phase and what schools and education are like in India.  I don’t want to be a downer on brainstorming, but I did feel like some of the social interactions were too encouraging, without providing any real interpretation of the costs, benefits, or obstacles that the solutions presented.  But then maybe that is ENTIRELY appropriate give the India-based context.  Perhaps providing a more detailed design brief along with supporting materials would be one way to provide such a diverse array of participants with more meaningful context.

In summary, it was fun, challenging, enriching, and I’d do it again.  However, because the social and evaluative aspects value certain actions over others, I am less inclined to contribute as fully as I might otherwise.  Nonetheless in it’s successes and failures, it’s a powerful example with lessons for the design of teaching and learning tools, values, and services.

This post from frog design reminded me of a short presentation I attended a couple of year’s back on Maslow’s Hierarchy. I have to admit that I forgot what the main point was that was being made, but I think it had something to do with design and how attention to this classification could help designers with the “important” things. There is something about Maslow’s pyramid that fits quite nicely with Indian social philosophy. Perhaps it is the hierarchy part – or maybe the path to enlightenment.

A Simple Model of Attachment

The image above was the first draft. This is the second. Thanks to Aliya for good, perceptive comments.

attachmentModel_v2

Premises:

Culture as the processes that allow the uptake of processes, procedures, information, beliefs, values and social norms.

Cultural affiliations are attachments.

Attachments and reattachments are limited (quantity) and constrained (quality) by pressures.

Aspiration is a cultural step in creating capability.