A couple of years ago I was challenged to think about methods for understanding the long-term implications of climate-health interactions. I was asked by a colleague to sort out some methods that would help public health planners understand the complexity of climate-health relationships and transform them into priorities for action. Data from current health outcomes (e.g. malaria, dengue, malnutrition, heatstroke) can be rare, especially among health ministries that aren’t functioning as knowledge networks.  It is also common that methods supporting forecasting are viewed as impractical, confusing, and too complicated given that institutional systems are struggling to provide basic services – much less anticipation.  

Because data about the status and direction of health outcomes can be notably absent, we focused our attention on scenarios and the different methodologies. Scenarios are valuable for health and technology, in part, because they contain a certain narrative closure.  Clear winners and losers can emerge along with outcomes that measure conflict and contributions to the process.  On the flipside, that narrative certainty is a little too clean.  Real world interactions are messy.  However, the most importune implication is that scenarios make good design tools because they suggest future arrangements and demonstrate alternatives without interfering in current practice. Scenarios shift the context to an indefinite time in the future, an aliased set of actors, or a new place to make new propositions less personal.  This unbinds specific feelings of identity from new organizational arrangements and may leave participants free to experiment further.

Scenarios can be complicated to produce. They require focused study and time, and that seems too often in short supply.  Plus, you need hooks to get people engaged in finding and discovering the elements that ought to belong.  Scenarios should be plausible and internally consistent, but they also should be relevant to a broad range of stakeholders.  Some methods focus too narrowly on their own visions of the world, and can end up decidedly deterministic or expertly biased, as this critique of Royal Dutch Shell’s approach explains (opens pdf).  

Because the organization we were working with is committed to a open stakeholder process, we wanted a methodology that would accept diverse contributions and still be tied to one of the hallmarks of science: replicability.  So we kept some design criteria in mind while we explored:

Scalable

We wanted techniques that could allow us to look scenarios for specific contexts and regions, from hospital units to watersheds and beyond.

 

Participatory

Being able to use many perspectives was a definitive goal.  Not only are there differing accounts of actors and outcomes, participation does a much better job of revealing where goals might be in conflict in the system.  Participation is also critical for helping the results of the scenario process diffuse among different stockholder groups.

 

Translatable across domains

Public health and complex systems are increasing supported by people and things from a variety of disciplines.  We wanted insights from ethnographers to be as critical to the development of scenarios as live data streams of mechanical stress, if that’s what the scenario needed.  We also wanted the materials and insights generated by the process to be amenable to visual display, since many of the stakeholders may use different languages.  Visual formats also exploit the ambiguities of statements to reveal tensions that exist among interpretations.

 

Robust to diverse interpretations

Some of that tension is created when you get people from different backgrounds discussing what they think matters for interventions in particular health outcomes.  Different levels of expertise can expose the assumptions that people share.  The different elements of scenarios and how they emerge to affect long-term change often form the basis for many of this assumption.  Highlighting this ambiguity is critical later for negotiating strategies for action.

 

Accepting of qualitative and quantitative insight

Working across disciplines is critical.  One result of this is that the standards for evidence and data are different.  We also recognize that quantitative measurement provides a detailed description of the identity or behavior of system elements.  In particular, we wanted to be able to translate qualitative insights into format usable for compute modeling, simulation, and visualization.   

 

Fun and pleasurable

Despite many people’s paradoxical notion that fun things are bad for you, we see fun as enhanced participation.  When you forget that what you are doing is work, that’s a good thing. 

 

Readily usable and modular

Methods should move seamlessly between health outcomes and altogether different domains.  The process for malaria can be the same as heatstroke.  Understanding alternative energy futures may use the same process as malnutrition.  This enables practice and iteration.

As it turned out, scenarios techniques for climate-health interactions are not new, but they don’t deal well with uncertainty because they are explicitly aimed at extending interactions based on what the presence of domain knowledge and capable expertise.  How could you hope to understand possible priorities and act all while not knowing?  This was where we hoped to make a contribution.

Using Clamps to Build a Knowledge Network

Bob Johansen’s book, Get There Early outlines tools for dealing with dilemmas.  Dilemmas confound rationality-based problem solving because of the way they are structured (multiple stakeholders, goals, conflicts, and outcomes, diverse framings and interpretations) and because there is not a clear path to one or a few positive solutions.  Johansen outlines how Structure, Rules, Resources, Thresholds, Feedback, Memory, and Identity can be used as levers to help organizations attenuate themselves to the multi-textured shapes that dilemmas pose.  

I think this list is pretty right-on for at least three reasons. First, the metaphor of levers directly brings to mind the work of Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist concerned with sustainability.  Her work on leverage points for intervening in systems (pdf) is a great introduction and ordering of policy-based strategies and their efficacy for changing behavior.  Like Johansen, she articulates the role of rules and feedback in systems. Meadows goes on to explore ten other significant systems levers, ultimately tracing effectiveness to how we frame the “problem”.

Second, structure, feedback, memory, and identity point to second order, emergent characteristics.  Second order characteristics arise form the interactions of actors (e.g. people doing interesting things, wild coyotes, institutions, viruses), resources (e.g. coffee, water, land, low-interest loans, blood sugar), and their activities.  Kevin Kelly explores why we are seeing more impossible events taking place. He connects it to an emergence of second order behaviors made possible through the development of new actors, new infrastructure, and new rules.  Carl Simon, a Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, has studied the characteristics of complexity in biological and economic system and often differentiates complex behavior from simpler behavior by looking for heterogeneity, non-randomness, feedback, heterarchy, and emergence.  Eric Berlow’s still great TED talk demonstrates how taking the broad, messy, and networked of complexity can in fact allow us to isolate clear paths for action. 

The third reason I think Bob Johansen’s tuning levers are great is that they overlap with basic elements in game design.  This should come as no surprise for most people associated with IFTF.  

When I was working on the climate-health scenario methods, we faced a challenge of providing some sort of suitable structure for participants to embed meaningful insight into the scenarios.  Sometime over morning coffee in a Swiss cafe, we stumbled across Tracy Fullerton’s rubric for the formal elements of games.  These formal elements complement narrative elements and give rise to the more emergent properties of complex systems.  Goals, procedures, actors, rules, resources, boundaries, conflicts, and outcomes also have a great synergy; they are exactly the elements used by computer programmers to construct agent-based models of complex adaptive systems! 

Creating Relevance for Participation

So now we had a structural backbone for the kind of content we felt we needed to gather during a scenario development process.  We could ask participants to engage in brainstorming activities that accounted for the different elements of these climate-health systems, and we would provide them with support, examples, and heuristics for doing just that.  We also wanted to find a way to make the process fluid.  In the back of our minds we always wanted to bring elements of game mechanics into the project to help support decision fatigue.

I’m still not sure we’ve cracked it, mostly because we haven’t been able to implement the process yet.  However, we have looked at different forms of turn-based play with clear, articulated goals for the players, not unlike the LEARN, ACT, IMAGINE rubric that worked so well for Urgent Evoke missions.  

One of the challenges is that we are introducing concepts about systems dynamics at the same time as concepts about the elements of the systems.  This sets up a lot of material to get through in a short amount of time.  

We also want to introduce experiences of empathy for others into the play and practice of scenario building.  In order to generate robust scenarios, the goals of different actors represented need to be recognized and incorporated as valid contributions.  One of the common experiences of public health service delivery is that managers, practitioners, patients, and others all have different views of the system.  These occluded perspectives mean that they have a difficult time in finding ways to enhance the social and ecological resilience of infrastructure.  I think if we had our choice, we would use experiences of empathy to reinforce principles along the lines of those championed by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom for designing long-enduring institutions.

Another significant outcome of clamps and elements for scenario development is that they clearly lend themselves to visual means of communication.  Boundaries, resources, timings, and rules are common opportunities for change. Precise and ambiguous definitions can take on increased relevance, especially when dealt with creatively. One of the functions of mapping and visualization is to demonstrate this inherent ambiguity, pointing to areas for finding common ground. When we try to represent them visually, we are forced to make choices about the precise meaning of those boundaries, and this can be a significant source of cognitive dissonance for participants.  But it’s exactly the form of dialogue that’s needed.  It sets the stage for tactical strategies when conflicts emerge.  Boundaries flow, and their meanings and borders can sometimes be adjusted to reach consensus or compromise.

Assembling Scenarios in Everyday Life

One of the questions designers (of scenarios, tools, artifacts, anything really) have to ask themselves is, “Where does this fit in everyday life?”  One of the most useful rubrics I’ve come across for design is Products and Practices: Selected Concepts from Science and Technology Studies and from Social Theories of Consumption and Practice. (sorry, paywall). The authors make a case for a social and infrastructure-based approach to design.  They identify acquisition (how we find it), scripting (how it shapes practice), appropriation (using it for something else), assembly (where we use it), normalization (sharing along with others), and finally practice (what activities it supports).  What is great about this list is that it helps designers imagine the contexts of use.  

In our scenario construction process we had to identify where this process existed along with a range of other activities that needed to be carried out by participants.  This assembly meant that our process had to connect to other activities in a meaningful way.

The current processes and guidelines for conducting Vulnerability and Adaptation assessments in vulnerable regions hinge on their level of stakeholder involvement.  Some processes are top-down, others bottom-up, and others a mix of expertise and engagement.  

One way to assemble scenarios into these processes is to:

1) Define the scope and focus which usually means identifying the health outcome of interest.

2) Work out a baseline for which information may not exist. This is where defining system elements can be helpful for laying out current distributions and burdens, strategies for coping, early prioritization of “drivers”, and the interactions between elements that affect their dynamics.

3) From this point on, forecasts can be made about future trends and conditions. For example, what happens if boundaries change? How about if an actor appears or disappears?

4) Once forecasts are made, the task is to frame and narrate the interactions as scenarios. This is a great opportunity to develop the scenario through the eyes of others. Games, agent-based models, visualizations, and mapping can demonstrate change over time and the differences in scales affected while uncovering an array of interesting and unexpected interactions.

5) Isolation and sequencing asks participants to step back from what they produced, to look at the areas of concern, and to select the most relevant links between scenario elements. By focusing attention on these links, the next task is to order the steps they will need to affect change by listing priorities for action.

6) Package and disseminate the scenarios and the priorities for broad communication and feedback.

7) Use the feedback and resulting statements to assess how the scenario process and how it enabled participants to identify and act on the priorities they generated.

As you can see, it’s a richly-textured process, highly-amenable for visual communication, and ripe for engagement. I think one of the most important functions is the ability to expand the number of elements that matter to long-term change.  One of the key decisions that participants have to make is to ask whether a resource, boundary, conflict, actor, rule, or procedure matters or makes a difference to the health outcome of interest.  Here Gregory Bateson’s statement about information as, “a difference that makes a difference” looms large.  More on that in the future.

Signals from Noise

One of the key endeavors of public health, infrastructure, and technology is the attempt to identify signals in noisy environments.  Signals are utilized in biology to communicate across chemical gradients, metabolic networks, neuronal synapses, visual spectra, haptic musculature, individual displays of affection, and as invitation for cooperation across groups and societies.  Technological systems stimulate behavior in new and exciting ways, but they can also script and normalize actions that may limit our abilities to find success. 

The biggest challenges in generating signals for any medium is to make them relevant enough to transcend noise and competition from similar signals elsewhere.  Synergistic timing with the individuals or groups receiving them is critical – as this will help them become meaningful in helping receivers revise their previous beliefs or come to new conclusions.

John Snow’s well-know map showing cholera cases in the London epidemic of 1854 clustering around the Broad Street well was an early success in distinguishing signals from noise using visualization and tight clamps that link actors (cholera, people, wells), boundaries (streets, houses), resources (water), and procedures (washing, drinking). These interactions clearly led to an understanding of a health outcome, and the relationships, once linked, could be used to forecast future scenarios.  

PETLAB and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center have been collaborating to help illuminate different, contradictory signals, that may become confusing to recipients during a weather-based crisis.  This game supports better decision-making to manage the damage of incorrect flooding predictions. 

Before the Storm is another game from the Parsons/Climate Centre collaboration that introduces forecasting to new audiences and uses the scenarios produced to help identify what the participants feel would be the most relevant and practical stapes to take during a flooding emergency.  

Climate Health Impact – a simulation based game designed to give biology students a better understanding of the health impacts of climate change.  It does do a great job of representing standard practices worldwide that contribute to the understanding and management of emerging vectors.  What I like here is the attention to new actors and their relationships with policy measures, research processes, and geography.  There’s a lot of detail about disease specifics as well, but narratively, it does reinforce a fairly top-down perspective. 

Agent-based models sometimes very effective for examining conflict among different actors.  This paper by [img_assist|nid=3955|title=Hailegiorgis et al. models a human-environment interaction|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=199|height=104]Hailegiorgis et al. models a human-environment interaction (pdf) and demonstrates how cyclical rainfall can reveal a pattern of punctuated conflict.  The pattern suggests that durable mechanisms for cooperation (e.g. clear boundaries, enforceable rules, mechanisms for redress, nested institutions) will be needed to traverse environmental change if the communities are going to maintain their resilience. 

The Future of Scenarios

What do scenarios look like when the are disseminated and opened up for engagement?  I think they look closer to everyday life.  To understand the impacts of alternative scenarios we have to look at out interpersonal relationships – at the things that are one or two degrees removed.  How will climate-health interaction affect our pets, our sex lives, how we eat dinner, getting to and from work, and our expectations when we encounter each other on the street?  I think the genre of climate-health scenarios and perhaps all scenarios is not one of horror, western drama, or even fantastical sci-fi; it has to be more subtle, more internally embedded in social values and individual goals.  It’s melodrama about how we live and how we live it everyday.  That’s the real scary, far-out stuff.  

Towards the last quarter of 2010, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) held an open contest to design its new logo. They constraints they articulated included dimensions and the need for it to show the work “evolution” or “SSE”.

Mock-up journal cover

I’ve been a member of SSE in the past, and I’ve also been interested in the dynamic between values, visual communication, and scientific advancement. SSE’s mission is to promote the scientific understanding of organic evolution, and that role has always occupied it with controversies around evolution as science and cultural currency.

For these reasons I was very excited to give it a shot. I was also very anxious to see how some of my current and former peers would respond to this sort of public engagement around something so central to communication of values – a logo. Designers and organizations that actively seek to build relationships with their customers and stakeholders know that branding and identity creation and co-creation is extremely important for a holistic engagement strategy. I count many of the stakeholders involved as friends, so I took on this project with a very deep sense of urgency and meaning. However, because it was a contest, all of the design work would be speculative. Still, I was excited to see how the SSE community and its stakeholders would react to the range of designs.

As a result of the contest, the competition generated more than 40 logos from more than 30 designers. However in the end, the kind of community discussion and open engagement never materialized. A letter about the results had this to say:

A slide show of the logos was sent to a panel consisting of the SSE council as well as a graphic artist and a publisher’s representative. Everyone was asked to explain what they liked about their favorite designs, and we took a poll. Originally, we had intended to send a selection of designs to our membership for a vote, but the council was unable to achieve consensus on which designs these could be. Neither was the council ready to adopt any particular submission as our logo. We did award the $1000 prize for the design that was most highly favored by the panel, but we will continue to work with to devise a logo that suits our needs.

As I read this I thought it was hugely interesting. A handful of things stand out:

1. Non-experts (except perhaps for the graphic artist) are being asked to make strategic decisions about branding, identity, and service design (somewhat ironic in my opinion).
2. Along with #1 is a tacit assumption that such expertise exists.
3. A formalized plan was scuttled because a non-expert group didn’t have a system for making clear choices.
4. It wasn’t made clear at the outset how the designs would be evaluated or how the visual characteristics and metaphors should map to the organization’s goals and mission.
5. It was stated in the end that there are needs, but these remain hidden or unarticulated.
6. A small number of people were involved in the selection process and were not ready to adopt any of the submissions.

As you can probably guess, it was likely a pretty lively discussion among the group. They acknowledged that the the diverse range of styles and content were useful for them to see. They also indicated that they would be more effective in working with a graphical artist to design a logo that expresses the identity of the society. That’s great for them, but has the community at large gained anything from the process, and will it embrace future designs any better than it has in the past?

Working with designers can be tough, but working with the right ones can be refreshing, especially when they are actively involved early in the process. It’s pretty clear from the context that the society was working under the archaic model of design, where logos are pretty things that don’t do much other than identify the organization – and also that everyone’s opinion is both valid and meaningful. Designers know their stuff, and they can make informed judgements about seemingly minor differences.

I do think that through the process the society gained a better understanding of how the quest for identity formation reveals unspoken values and commitments in some interesting ways. That’s one of the better things that design does: it makes things visible. Values becomes lines on paper. Assumptions get turned into letterforms. Goals become shades of color. What is really cool is how the design process can activate those discussions. Indeed it can lead to co-creation.

The value of design is to create a substrate for the vocalization of values that people are unable or unwilling to share. This is participatory design, and there are a variety of techniques for making this a more robust process. The first iteration in design is always just a starting point, with many examples to continue the process with. The design process is a continuous one with multiple rounds of iteration and feedback. Values (usually derived from mission statements) are what SSE is effectively selling to its members and society at large. With values, there is never an end point or product. A logo is simply an indicator of those values; it can be honest or something different altogether.

Given the public controversy that can sometimes follow a group like this, engaging in a forthright community discussion about the values it intends and how they are perceived can itself be valuable for opening up the process of doing science to the lay public. I agree that it can be dangerous, but then again, physics has been very good at doing this, perhaps because its outcomes are used by so many people in everyday life and because its concepts can also be so abstract.

In general, designers are discouraged from doing speculative work – i.e. work that contributed as a reasonably finished product in anticipation of future compensation. Contests are basically speculative work, but they usually trade off the probability of a financial award with other benefits – usually in the form of some public exposure. Most designers will agree that speculative work and competitions usually devalues the profession (see AIGA’s policy on spec work). Non-profits often exploit this kind of work, though I doubt other consulting services would receive similar treatment (imagine a contest for accounting services for example). So one part of a publicly engaging discussion is just that – publicizing the results, however satisfactory, so that it opens up additional communication that may not serve the direct interests of the SSE.

I do feel it was unfortunate that the committee wasn’t able send the preliminary designs to the wider SSE community. They indicated that they didn’t have an effective mechanism in place for responding to such input. If I had been able, I would have told them about this thing called Web 2.0 and gone on to demonstrate the variety of tools for collaboration (e.g. OpenIDEO, Kluster, or some of GOOD’s contests). I think it would have served as a fun and compelling way to engage in a discussion about science and society.

P.S. The visual identity system you see here is up for grabs;)

Condition, Made Visible

By the time he arrived at college he knew he didn’t like wearing the medic alert bracelets, and decided to get this tattoo to indicate that he has the condition. He says if he needs to, he can cover it with a watch (e.g. for job interviews). He also didn’t want it on his chest, which would have been another place that medics look at for indications of at-risk conditions.

Jonathan doesn’t personally know of anyone else who’s done this, but he thinks he may have heard about it elsewhere. Given Jonathan’s lifelong condition, it’s a compelling and durable solution to the need to communicate with health providers in any situation.

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?

GOOD is one of those publishing groups that’s sort of like a cross between WorldChanging and ISO50. They pull together interesting, relevant research and ideas from the web, but they bring it all together with a stunning array of infographics designed to present information meaningfully. It helps that they bring education, design, and health directly into the fold.  And the have a good twitter feed (whoops, no pun intended).

A couple weeks back I was spending some time on pyramids, and GOOD’s link to a double pyramid showing the relationship between diet and agricultural intensity (read: let’s get away from the amorphous “environmental impact”) got me interested in their Redesigning the Food Pyramid contest.

FoodNet

An early iteration of the food pyramid – turned – network paradigm.

Since I also happen to be doing some work on agricultural supply -and- what I would call attachment ecologies (these are links that create what we call health, wealth, concepts, diet, and technology), I started to wonder how the food pyramid might be implemented using the Indian version of a food pyramid and dietary requirements.

My first stop was to take a look at some of the nutritional guidelines designed by the U.S. (since this would be my main focus – for the contest at least).  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture issue new guidelines every 5 years.  I checked out guide for 2005 and the upcoming revisions for 2010 for inspiration.

At the same time I was attempting to find out what guidelines India uses.  This turned out to be trickier that I had anticipated.  The National Institute for Nutrition (NIN) issues the guidelines.  The last time they did this was in 1998.  NIN performed an array of information, education, and communication efforts.  However, despite these efforts, the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey found no significant improvement in the nutritional status of the Indian population in the seven years (1998-2005) since the guidelines were issued.

FoodBar

A second iteration - trying to make the network "list accessible".

As it happened, I lucked out with a news article describing how the NIN was looking for suggestions for revising the guidelines and their dissemination – specifically around how to create awareness of the guidelines.  This helped me uncover a few different documents and sources of information.  I tried calling of course, but that was unfortunately not productive as I kept getting passed to someone else.  The basic guidelines can be found at the India Development Portal, but they must be mail ordered from NIN here.  I was able to find specific daily nutritional requirements tables here, but the providence of the document is unclear (I’m guessing NIN).

In the meantime, I started formulating suggestions for how to improve the dissemination of the guidelines.  I sent these to NIN, and a follow-up call revealed that they had seen them, but hadn’t yet responded.  I’m actually optimistic that they might find them useful.

What initially interested me about the pyramid was the opportunity to represent the notion of a networked diet – one that ties into a variety of cultural and ecological options & constraints.  Etching through the design and layout process, I started arriving at some ‘solutions’.

weekly-food-choices

A decision support tool for making food choices.

The U.S.-based diet guide arrived first, and as I started wondering what to do with the leftover empty space (while trying to figure out how to make it less flat), I realized that food icons would do both.  Then as I started thinking about how the graphic “assembles” into everyday life, the concept of the food refrigerator magnets started to materialize.

fridgeMagnet

Using magnets to provide interactivity, daily, and weekly reminders of food goals and choices.

Turing out the Indian version is going to be a bit trickier.  For one thing, “My Weekly Food Choices” and “My Food Web” looses relevance in places where someone else makes decisions for you.  Plus, the collective aspects of eating means the choices are often negotiated within families or groups.  Thus, it will probably become something like “Our Food Web”.

In representing amounts, it’s interesting that Indian guidelines are purely in grams (except milk which is mL).  The U.S. system uses two types of volume (cups and ounces equivalent) and one weight (grams, for oils).  However, I think the next big challenge will be to get some food icons for Indian foods (north and south).  Any takers?

weekly-food-choices-INDIA

Dietary guidelines and decision aid for India

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.

Sketch of Electricity Consumption Time for Smart Meter

Three colors indicate each of the three phases.
Time is mapped by seconds (colored), minutes (grey), and hours (grey).
On the left, a linear scale shows the variation in consumption.

Service designers identify and order goals in service systems.  Service systems are a unit of analysis for an exchange of skills and capabilities which leads to the production of value in use (Vargo et al., 2008).  Service systems are developed though the creation of value, where reinvention can transform the relationships of use and practice. Service systems are characteristically intangible, heterogeneous, simultaneous in production and consumption, non-perishable, and grounded in times and places that maintain their meaning and value (Kimbell, in prep).

One of the ways that designers understand service systems is by using a variety of approaches and concepts that isolate or concentrate focus on the relevant aspects of a system so they can drive experimentation and change. An example of this is a touchpoint, which means the aspects of the service are visible and come in contact with the users of that service (but see this discussion of its origins). You may have suspected that in a relationship of co-creation, touchpoints multiply quickly when production and consumption are linked since users are creators and vice versa. Another example that designers use is the line of visibility. This is similar to the touchpoint, and it describes what users see and experience in their relationships with a service system. It helps in rendering a system so that its processes and organizational structure are visible.

A draft diagram of a business process showing the line of visibility between the user and the organization dedicated to providing a service.

Because touchpoints and lines of visibility exist not only as tools but in practice, service experiences are tightly bound to tied to the production of narrative. Suspense in particular is a common experience for users when parts of a process, system, or set of relationships are hidden from view.  Just imagine a time when you were the creator or recipient of a service.  Much of your uncertainty or satisfaction was probably driven by what you knew or could expect about the outcome as well as the communication process that was taking place while the service was being delivered.

Richard Allen discusses suspense in his book about [Alfred] “Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony”. Allen cites Meir Sternberg’s distinction that, “suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiosity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as such it often involves and interest in information for its own sake.”

So when working in service design we should decide if we desire to create curiosity or suspense and design our process accordingly. Allen also incorporates Ian Cameron’s view that suspense is a “channeling of emotions”. Clearly emotions can be powerful, but how and why? In Allen’s analysis, suspense is something that happens in us as we are forced to take up the prospect of narrative outcomes that are contrary to the ones we desire. Suspense is constructed out of moral uncertainty, balancing our expectations with potential outcomes.

Allen discusses Hitchcock and develops descriptions of two types of suspense: pure and impure. Pure suspense is broad and objective, prolonged by tension, delay, and narration that is unrestricted, moving between vantage points and locations. It leads to an anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as the deadline looms. Arbitrary delays segment time and increase the tension because a bad outcome seems close at hand. Often, the audience sees a threat before the protagonist and surprise happens through the manipulation of time. The outcome almost always favor of the moral victory, especially in popular media.

Impure suspense on the other hand is local and subjective. It is developed from points of view that provide different sources of knowledge often through the eyes of the protagonists and antagonists, keeping the audience informed while the characters remain unwitting. Deadlines are set early on and acceleration commonly heightens the alert attentiveness of the spectators who are active participants in the construction of the suspense. Knowledge is not made by the director. It is made by the audience in cooperation with the information provided to the characters. All too often, the audiences senses the outcome before the characters do by filling in blanks sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Impure suspense favors empathy for the character, as if we were living through them. The moral outcome is less certain and often unrealized.

In order to try to make the differences between pure suspense and impure suspense more tractable, I imagined what users in a service system might say if they were experience one or the other.  The result is in the chart below, and it adapts these distinctions and starts to resolve how one might go about implementing different narrative objectives for a service system.

References:
Vargo, S. L., Maglio, P. P., & Akaka, M. A. (2008). On value and value co-creation: A service systems and service logic perspective. European Management Journal, 26(3), 145-152. doi:10.1016/j.emj.2008.04.003