The Institute for the Future’s (IFTF) 2010 Map of the Decade is part of their annual Ten-Year Forecast which uses foresight and scenario planning to help organizations navigate change. Entitled “The Future is a High-Resolution Game”, the research materials demonstrate the re-emergence of games as a systematic process for positive change.
Map of the Future
IFTF uses a variety of strategies to help groups understand and interpret macro-level trends across several functional areas including carbon, water, power, cities, and identity. The long term goal is to use these sensemaking activities to meet diverse economic, technological, social, political, and ecological challenges. For organizations it is often the case that the interpretation and implementation can be difficult to connect. As foresight and sensemaking tactics become better honed to organizations of different sizes, structures, and cultures, so will the tools that help dedicated individuals in organizations recognize emerging landscapes AND translate those insights into priorities.
One key in making these translations is the ability to connect macro level processes to micro level behaviors – and everything in between. IFTF took a different tactic towards games as a tool for their 2010 map of the decade, and I think it helps move us in that direction of positive change.
IFTF has been at the forefront of what some call gamification – the systematic use of game mechanics for the development of positive psychology, practice, action, and cooperative dynamics. As IFTF’s Director of Game Development describes, games are put together with a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation. So it’s pretty easy to see how game mechanics can connect with operational challenges such as problem solving, productivity, and personal growth within organizations.
Critics argue that in most organizations and real-world situations things are pretty fuzzy, conflicted, and confusing. Agreeing on goals, rules, feedback systems, and participation can be difficult obstacles to begin with. But I think that is why games are tools that help us move in positive directions. We don’t often want to spend too much of our time arguing over goals; we’d rather just get on with it, play/work hard, and feel good about what we accomplish.
Th polling organization Gallup conducts surveys among employees every year across thousands of organizations worldwide asking hundreds of questions. THREE of those questions where employees responded positively turn out to be the largest human factors for organizations that are successful.
I have a commitment to quality.
I know what my job and/or role is, and
I trust my leadership.
Organizations are set up to accomplish a wide array of highly-complex tasks. No one person can keep track of everything. So in order to get things done, people have to simplify their overall cognitive load. They have to eliminate many conflicts and sources of confusion to deal with what they know and how it relates to new challenges. Game mechanics (goals, rules, feedback, participation) can be vectors for the above three factors, and more importantly they systematize them within organizational processes – something good human resource departments struggle to do everyday.
Think about it. I trust my leadership so I don’t always need to reevaluate the goals. Check. I know what my role is so the rules are clear. Check. I have a commitment to quality which means that I show up to participate and when I get feedback I self-correct to improve what I’m doing. Check.
I think the differences there have a lot to do with focus – of setting priorities and knowing what to spend one’s time on – especially when things go awry. We often get distracted, but even when we don’t human, social, and technological systems are always out of sync. Sometimes they connect and we may even experience periods of intense connectivity, creativity, and productivity. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi calls these bursts. So I suppose one of the benefits of the scenario platform IFTF uses is its ability to concentrate social interactions to achieve these bursts. We always need some latent time to process, connect, and search further. Maybe that’s why IFTF does the Map just once a year
One element of IFTF’s Map of the Decade is “The Happiness Kit”. It’s a platform for helping people ruminate on the kinds of transitions that could lead to more happiness in the world. There are a few standard tools of the foresight practice included like writing headlines from the future to identifying events that might shape or be shaped by the trends. There are also points where participants can identify new services, communities, and practices.
In science and technology sociologist Bruno Latour’s book Reassembling the Social, he looks specifically at groups, actions, objects, and facts as sources of uncertainty in the emergence of new technologies or innovation paradigms. These highly social elements tend to reveal themselves when controversies emerge. They help shape our future when, for example, a nuclear plant melts down and new groups, objects or facts insert themselves into society. Most recently at the Fukushima nuclear plant, it was formerly an established fact that the leaked radiation was 10% of Chernobyl disaster. Now as a society we are learning much more about nuclear radiation leakage models and their diversity when it is revealed that two different groups used two different models. The fact has been revised to 20%. We also know much more now about the safety mechanisms at nuclear facilities, especially the roles of strange monsters like emergency generators, vents, and containment vessels. Groups we never really paid attention to, methods of establishing facts, and objects with strange names all the sudden appear as important factors for how we think about the future. Kits like the IFTF Happiness Kit help us by working through some of them before they emerge from other events.
The kit also works to identify the actors involved in these transitions – as well as the distribution of those that are happy and those that are not. Understanding the distribution and abundance of elements in a system is important when we consider that rare things may become more prevalent and ubiquitous things sometimes disappear. William Gibson is famously quoted, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” As we consider technological diffusion, development, and knowledge-networking, one of the questions we have to ask is how the future can be more evenly distributed. I’m not sure I know the answer, but I think that getting more explicit about the social-technological-ecological networks that individuals live in can help. This graph of system elements in a rural farmer’s immediate grasp might be one step towards understanding, for example, the diffusion of organic farming methods and how they interlink with new sources of income and time for alternative activities.
Overall the thing I like the best about the map of the decade is its ability to use foresight methods while leaving open space for individual interpretations. Some scenario techniques can lead to overarching narratives which create sources of bias. In IFTF’s platform, it appears that participants are encouraged to apply the trends to their immediate organizations and processes (although I cannot be sure since I’m reading the product and not the use-context). My sense is that it’s more of a constructionist approach than the methods used by Royal Dutch Shell or the Global Business Network (for a critique see: Wright 2004; pdf) which define opposing axes and use those for story generation. The way IFTF does it is to throw out a variety of results, new ideas, patterns, and processes – allowing users to pick and choose where to apply them. It’s a more humble approach (if I may say so) that stems from the simple proposition that we can’t really predict what is going to happen and neither can we take everything into account. The point is attenuate our mental models towards things that we think will matter – so that when they become relevant – we notice them.
Still I think there are opportunities to bring greater resolution and hence greater relevance to the process. While the Map of the Future helps deal with actors and events, I think it gets less explicit in areas that matter a lot. More important than who or what is why. The goals that actors have lays out different sets of procedures for attaining those goals. So it’s important to demonstrate how goals and the ways that actors achieve those goals converge on other elements. For example, resources and boundaries are areas that can undergo rapid restructuring or remain relatively stable over time. Helping people make explicit predictions about the direction and magnitude of these changes is helpful for understand the complex dynamics of interacting systems.
Similarly, rules, conflicts, and the outcomes of conflicts are specific pivot points for change. What helps us navigate change well is being able to understand the implications on all side of those transformations. Whiles rules, conflicts, and outcomes are somewhat embedded in the IFTF process, how can we support thinking about how they would change and what changes they would bring in turn to the procedures or boundaries shared by different actors?
I think these additional elements can be added to these types of foresight exercises with little additional cost. And they yield a huge benefit of allowing the results and products of foresight exercises – namely the knowledge generated – to be transferred to the engineers that develop computational simulations. Actors, Goals, Procedures, Boundaries, Rules, Resources, Conflicts and Outcomes are all the basics of putting together agent-based simulation models that allow us to look at the interactions and assumptions of our exercises and turn it into sustained practice.
After all, wouldn’t it be really cool if the Future WAS a High Resolution Game?
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
Another great example for India is how the Delhi Traffic Police have been using Facebook as a platform for accountability and peer pressure on Delhi’s citizens to follow the rules. In some cases, the platform has even allowed citizens to establish some accountability on the part of the police as well.
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?
In the 1930s, evolutionary geneticist Sewall Wright pulled together research strands in the biology of inbreeding, the genetics of coat color in guinea pigs, statistical methods (including path analysis), and mathematics that codified the changes in gene frequencies in populations as a result of natural selection, mutation, and migration.
His resulting description of these threads set the stage for qualitatively different perspective on the evolutionary process. Wright described his perspective as a “shifting balance” model of evolutionary change, and it highlighted the role of small populations in the transitions between periods of high and low fitness. This pattern, which followed from his use of the term “drift”, describes the fluctuations of gene frequencies that result from the random sampling of small populations. This random sampling comes from mating in small populations that, because of chance, produces small deviations from the numbers of genes originally represented in the population.
Wright’s Shifting Balance perspective coincided with his introduction of the adaptive landscape as a term to describe the space in which random fluctuations of gene frequencies in small populations could push the populations away from adaptive peaks or periods in which they were reproductively successful, and which would in turn allow natural selection to push them towards new adaptive peaks – areas of differential reproductive success.
Though Wright’s perspective on evolution is controversial (in a generative way), the perspectives and tools that emerged from his ideas have endured. For example, Wright’s work preceded algorithmic approaches to optimization problems in mathematics, networks (traveling salesman), metallurgy (simulated annealing), and artificial intelligence – to name a few
The process of Shifting Balance is described as a series of three dynamic phases:
Phase 1, the exploratory phase, the action of small groups explores new combinations. Most stay on the suboptimal fitness peak (reasonably successful), but some get caught in adaptive valleys (unsuccessful).
In Phase 2, selection causes the groups that are in the adaptive valleys to move toward new, higher-fitness peaks.
Finally, in phase 3, groups at higher fitness peaks send off migrants helping other groups move to higher fitness peaks.
Phase 1: The Exploratory Phase
Phase 2: The Selection Phase
Phase 3: The Migration Phase
While Wright’s process was intended for population genetic systems, an increasing convergence between social processes, cognitive psychology, technology, ecology, and creative practice suggests that the concepts apply well to the exploratory, form-finding processes that precede the design and production of materials and services. The implementation of the Shifting Balance process as a analog for social and creative strategy is useful for the production of highly original and robust creative solutions – or, at least it’s a testable hypothesis.
For some, analogies between biological and social processes are difficult to comprehend. However, the design of services and interactions is dependent on the ordering and reordering of processes, materials, people, and ideas. Combinations and recombinations of these things, when developed thoroughly and communicated, can impact the delivery and relational aspects of individuals working in cooperation or separately.
We could envision this process as a sort of charette (period of intense design in collaborative groups) activity where:
The exploratory phase initiates adaptive schema (creative combinations) which are driven by the interactions, specializations, and diverse perspectives of small groups;
Intergroup selection resulting from evaluation, the inherent heterogeneity among groups, and intended service platforms begins the iterative process of amplification of good combinations;
Export and translation of valuable forms/schema to other groups in order to test them against different problems, social contexts for cooperation, and consumptive patterns.
The immediate benefit of this strategy is the demonstration of expertise in practice, the role of discourse, and the chance events that can drive innovation. Participants from different disciplines will have to opportunity to observe and engage in creative problem solving within highly diverse communities. Here the focus is on collaborative ideation followed by problem-solving across disciplinary and expertise-based boundaries and ultimately an exercise in cooperative translation, storytelling, and communication.
There is enough social scientific research to at least point to the benefit of diverse groups, although it would be worthwhile to have a better handle on an ideal number – i.e. what counts as a small population. Plus, how do we go about choosing? What is the process of selection…or should we instead be saying, “What is the process of attachment?” And finally, are there specific patterns of translation or dissemination that we should aim for? For if migrants endowed with the most successful schema do disperse and link up with others, they have an opportunity to cooperate and raise the capacity the other groups elsewhere. But through which mechanisms to we initiate and implement these processes?
There are a few other ideas that seem uniquely coupled to the Phases of Shifting Balance. An example is the goal of participation as a unique form of empowerment in community planning exercises. One particular model of participatory engagement provided by Conde et al. (2004) is used in the context of climate change planning (below).
The Landscape of Participation
This example shows transitional categories in participation. When viewed through a model of culture which emphasizes process over characteristics, these are skills acquisition categories that indicate differences with an impact on fitness – i.e. reproductive success.
Each category represents a different level of engagement, a level that itself suggests a tighter relationship between participants and the tools of participation or cooperation.
Informative participation is an exchange of information, which may or may not be meaningful.
Consultation requires that participants begin asking questions as well as providing information.
Functional engagement means that different participants identify and agree to share goals, thus ordering their actions in accordance with each other.
Interaction means the initiation of feedback, where signals and shifts in the participation is met with responsiveness and dialog with the others.
Self-motivated participation is demonstrated by the points at which processes are acquired and reorganized by the participants themselves.
Migration ultimately expands the instances of participation which have been successful, sharing them with other communities, and finding cooperative allies elsewhere.
References:
Conde, C., Lonsdale, K., Nyong, A., & Aguilar, I. (2004). Engaging stakeholders in the adaptation process. Adaptation policy frameworks for climate change: Developing strategies, policies and measures, 47–66.
Wright, S. (1977) Evolution and the Genetics of Populations. Vol. 3: Experimental Results and Evolutionary Deductions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
This is short presentation I gave to the Melton Foundation’s Symposium on Innovation which was held in Bangalore in August, 2009. I spoke on Innovation in Education, coming from the perspective of someone with the aim of bridging disciplines and interpretations.
The first day was organized to enumerate problems and the criteria by which to evaluate responses to those problems. The second day focused on our responses as ‘designers’ and the methods that we could use to find tactical responses to the difficult problems posed by water (and the lack thereof).
We began by discussing what it is that designers do. I asked students what is is that artists and designers do? I asked the students to describe what they felt was their strongest characteristic as an artist/ designer. Surprisingly, almost all of them described characteristics that were domain-free and overwhelmingly social. I showed them Burt’s (2002) concept from sociology of a network entrepreneur, and we used his assessment tool to see how individual personalities and the class as a whole tended towards network entrepreneurship.
We continued by discussing Bowker and Star’s (1999) article about classifications an boundary objects. I expanded the initial discussion by showing them examples according to Star and Griesemer’s four types of boundary objects. We came to realize that boundary objects do and could play an important role in mediating different groups, particularly those that might have conflicting goals.
We concluded the morning session by sharing candidate solutions to the difficult problems posed by water. A couple of these dealt with making groundwater (and its hidden concerns) visible ‘above the ground’. This would be a metaphor to build on later that day.
In the afternoon, I showed them Paris: Invisible City and navigated through the multimedia map- a demonstration of all that helps to construct Paris as a city. With this in hand, we questioned how we come to describe the components of a city and how existing ways of seeing are, perhaps, constrained by existing representations. We discussed sex differences in navigation as one example relating to how maps are rendered and what it means for cognitive justice. We started to see that all of the components of a city- its water systems, street systems, entertainment systems- are constructed in numerous places and not just at the sites of consumption.
As the afternoon waned, we adjourned to the water cooler in the corner of the room where we were able to have a refreshing drink and a new perspective on the networks that supported our taking that sip. We reflected and surmised deeply all of the actions and passing of signs, documents, and behaviors that are needed to make sure that the water cooler is there when we need it, that it tells a particular story, and what we miss when we take is existence for granted. WE connected it to the electricity plant, to the staff that keep it clean and full of water, to a history associating the color blue with water, to the friendliness of ‘eco friendly’ technology, to the construction people who built the building, to the architects and the central planning board whose permits probably had something to do with the fact that it was in the southwest corner and very near the bathrooms whose water systems run all alongside the building there.
We all shared what technical skills we had after that…from illustration, film shooting and editing, writing, 3-D rendering, and so on. We decided that we would make boundary objects as our designs and solutions for creating awareness and solving problems associated with water’s future. We decided we would make films to share our scenarios because they carry stories and build empathy. We decided that we would be like the tide, starting from shore and moving out to sea, returning to shore with our collections and documentation, moving back out again during the interim, and then back again…to sea what we can see.
We started by looking at the neologism ‘watercasting’, coined for the purposing of re-imagining what it is that we would be doing in the class. Casting for the purpose of making a mold, a cast that one would find in theatre or film, to broadcast, and even futurecasting were brought up by some of the participants.
We discussed difficult and wicked problems by comparing them to tame ones such as one would find in science and engineering. We formed groups based on complementary zodiac signs (in part to introduce forms of classification and grouping). Students were asked to develop symbols or logos for each of the characteristics of difficult problems as described in Horst and Rittel (1973). This required them not only to have read but to work toward synthesizing that information in the form of a visual response.
We ended the morning session by brainstorming and expanding a list of difficult problems associated with water. Pairs of students articulated the problems and then as a class we grouped them according to the themes they seemed to be suggesting.
After lunch I introduced the students to twitter and kluster, software platforms for 1) assembling a symphony of interactions around water in the case of twitter, and 2) choosing among proposed solutions in the case of kluster.
I asked students to come to the class with examples of good and bad design from around Srishti. They described many instances, and for a minute it seemed as if it would be a ‘crib’ session about the things the students didn’t like. Instead, we found out that things we might perceive as being ‘designed’ were often vestigial or happenstance. We also used examples of so-called bad design to recognize was it is that we value that seemed to be missing. In this way we turned these examples into opportunities as we transitioned into finding a list of criteria that we could use to evaluate or responses to difficult problems over the course of the semester.
We ended the afternoon session by compiling a list of these criteria as a first step towards understanding what kinds of traits our designs should have if they were going to be progressive responses.
This is a nice compilation of resources assembled for a course entitled MAPPING CONTROVERSIES in MIT’s STS program. The course focuses “…on developing aptitudes for combining multiple ways of knowing: textual interpretation, intensive search in heterogeneous databases, and design tasks; all of which point to the invention of new tools of representation for an increasingly complex environment.
At the end of last year Innocentive had one of their many competitions for innovative solutions to difficult problems. Innocentive was developed by an Eli Lilly employee as a way to essentially find the essential skills needed to solve difficult problems, mostly in the area of life science.
Keep in mind that Innocentive’s approach is markedly different from a systems like Kluster which engages a collaborative process that depends on their ability to assemble a diverse group. Innocentive relies only on a large pool of potential solvers to get the expertise they need to solve problems. There is no overt collaborative process in Innocentive’s system.
The Rockefeller Foundation has also supported the initiative and has been using it to find solutions to problems for so-called bottom of the pyramid users, primarily around novel technology for basic living situations.
I submitted a solution to the problem of viral marketing for the purpose of building users of these resources. Because I believe strongly in the ability of diverse groups to engage in creative problem solving (perhaps because of my formative involvement in Future Problem Solvers), I crafted a proposal that I thought might be a difference for them. For these ideas, I drew on the work of Scott Page and Ronald Burt. I share the text of the proposal here:
Many people have the expertise to solve difficult problems, yet they and the organizations that seek their skills lack the ability to sense these opportunities. This is the core service that Innocentive provides. By transforming human capital into social capital, Innocentive can increase its brand awareness and turn post-niche strategy into new market segments. Here are six heuristics:
1. Transform human capital into social capital. This means engaging the contradictions of diverse constituents. For difficult problems, diversity trumps ability (Page 2006). Some (but not all) of Innocentive’s clients and problems require diversity to solve key problems. Find ways for people with alternative expertise to contribute to the problems at hand. Diversity creates opportunities to broaden Innocentive’s solver base.
Innocentive’s current strategy revolves around commercial enterprises, state and local governments, and not-for-profit entities. Why not engage individuals that represent constituencies beyond these boundaries? These solvers could come from all walks of life, not just “highly qualified and creative Solvers recruited from the best research and educational institutions.”
Viral marketing encourages people to pass along a message voluntarily. This need not depend on any particular medium like video or games. Providing ways for people to enhance their own opportunities and leverage their own expertise will transmit the message. Google’s blank page provided enormous opportunity in this respect.
2. Provide social capital solutions for individuals and organizations. Creative problem solving, opportunity sensing, and implementation all rely on the ability of an organization or individual to access social capital. Without clear way to build and leverage social capital they are limited in their opportunities. Innocentive is poised to provide mechanism for individuals and organization to access and assemble diverse social capital with minimal obstacles. For an individual or a small organization, this can provide significant value.
3. Provide social captial solutions for Innocentive by providing ways for individuals to exploit their own existing social capital. For example, many individuals are already seeking solutions to their own problems via their social network. This is cumbersome in some respects and could be improved greatly using Innocentive’s model. With Innocentive providing this free service, individuals can then turn to Innocentive when no opportunity is found within their personal social network. Innocentive becomes the solution. “Innocentive helped me find a solution so maybe they can help me now.” Partnering with a social networking service (especially LinkedIn; see #6) can provide the social networking capabilities while Innocentive provides the opportunities and arrangements.
4. Create microtransactions for bottom-of-the-pyramid expertise. People already have skills. Sometimes someone just needs a simple piece of code written and doesn’t have the skills or someone in their network that can do it. While this may seem overly simple for some, for others it may as well amount to curing cancer. Allowing individuals and organizations the opportunity to offer everyday problems will make up in volume for what it may loose in overall value. Even if a task is small, there are many that could solve it and possibly add to the social capital of Innocentive.
5. Identify network-entrepreneurs. These are individuals that position themselves as hubs within social networks (Burt 2005). They tend to identify opportunities and create social capital. They also have the ability to identify potential problems that could be served by Solvers. Identifying network entrepreneurs may take work, but they tend to use positive and negative words to express ideas, use more words to express ideas, have greater number of days between key contacts, have outstanding evaluations, and have job descriptions other than those commonly listed.
6. Identify and work with a strategic partner. LinkedIn would be an excellent choice. Given their large social network size, emphasis on business and opportunity contacts, and upcoming API availability, they could possibly provide the network through which to leverage the above heuristics. Other partners could be identified as well, but they should provide insight and opportunity that Innocentive does not currently have. Diversity should be the first goal.
Last week I was given the opportunity to participate in a workshop sponsored by the AIDI (Association of Industrial Designers of India). The deliberations of the event were intended to inform the implementation of India’s national design policy. It was a sort of pre-conference workshop held just before the Leadership Through Design conference here in Bangalore (more on that later). Many design professionals and educators came together from across India and the world to develop strategies and actionable recommendations.
There were a handful of breakout groups, each dealing with a different focus area. These were: Education (Srishti was a partner), Design Parks (these are intended to be urban design “hubs”), Branding and Communication of Indian Design (ahh, identity politics), Culture, Environment, Social Development & Effective Public Spending (the ‘everything else’ category), and Competitive Advantage by Design (my group).
All in all, it was interesting to gain a sense of how this is being approached. India is, after all, partially concerned with having a dialogue about such things. Could you even imagine a national design policy in the United States, much less a dialogue about it?!! So in that respect, I have to give those that have put in heir time and energy a LOT of credit. Mind you that this policy is seen as a partial solution to India’s competitiveness on the global scene. My impression is that by having a national design policy, India can put it’s financial, intellectual, and social capital resources into creating better solutions and opportunities…at least that’s what one would hope.
Designing for Competitiveness Our group was fairly well mixed with Indian-based designers, design managers, and even two professionals from major U.S. design firms. Needless to say there was a lot of expertise willing to put their heads together and try to identify how India could become more competitive in design and design thinking. I hate to say it, but I do think we were hampered a bit by our group facilitator. Given the combined problem-solving techniques that the group had at its disposal, it was a bit disheartening that we took as long as we did to develop heuristics to accomplish the task. Every time we got something going, our facilitator would step in and question the approach, needlessly diverting our efforts. Nonetheless, we took it on and made a lot of progress in the end.
We started by brainstorming challenges and ways to build India’s competitiveness in design. Each of these was placed on a post-it and then one of the group members got the process going by verbally grouping them into common themes (my favorite which got lost in the end was ‘Design for Corruption’). That seemed to work because it got us to the next stage which was to develop further those ideas into specific strategies. We decided to split up into two groups because we were short on time and we had ten themes to work through. At the end of the day, each of the main groups got up and presented their deliberations. I’ll list them at the end, but before I do I want to address two things that really bothered me and that I want to avoid in future interactions like these.
Group Dynamics The first was that one of the other groups (Design Parks) spent a lot of time deliberating around the issues. I am close friends with on of the participants from that group and he told me that the recommendations that were presented were not actually the ones discussed! It seems that the leader had actually prepared a powerpoint before the day even started with his recommendations and then presented that to the entire assembly. I do remember that the presentation looked way too good, but I didn’t ask. I guess the lesson is that we have to aim and ensure that the deliberations around these kinds of things are genuine. I’m not saying that his were bad ideas. I just don’t know why people’s time was wasted if their work wasn’t going to be represented. I didn’t participate in the group so I really don;t know what happened, but it certainly sends the wrong kind of message.
The second was that we “americans” really did create an imbalance in the conversation. I don’t know if it had to do with language (I doubt it) or what, but our Indian colleagues really backed off. This bothered me. I couldn’t tell if they were following our lead or that they just felt uncomfortable. Not all did of course. When we split into two groups though, one of the groups was entirely composed on people who either were from or worked in the U.S. I don’t think it was intentional, but it certainly was cultural in the sense that I wanted to just get to work and the group that just started doing it seemed to nucleate. Then again, I can’t really say how the other group formed. In any case, I was disappointed because group level diversity is something I try to implement, especially when approaching roblems like these. I don’t know how important it was in the end; you can judge by the recommendations. Can you guess which is which? I’ll give you a hint. One group did five themes; another did four.
Networked Design I am convinced that two of the themes our group proposed are critical. ‘Human Power’ (or social capital) and ‘Designers and Opportunities’ seem to be the key distinction in terms of what it is that designers actually do. By bringing together concerns, ideas, methods, and interactions from all over, designers leverage their own social capital to bring something into existence. Designers (like artists) do this because they can sense opportunity, much like entrepreneurs. How we develop our abilities to sense these opportunities is what will make new innovation possible. Bringing that innovation into existence only happens when good ideas are encouraged and allowed to form from the opportunities that social capital provides.
Here is an example of how new opportunities could be realized. Hidalgo, et al. (see below) argue that “The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations”. The authors use a network analysis of the relatedness among products to show that more sophisticated products (such as those exported by industrial, developed nations) are more closely connected. Their assumption is that “the ability of a country to produce a product depends on its ability to produce other ones.” They measure this in part by using the overlap among markets (read: concerns) for exported products. This has definite implications for the artist-designer that seeks to build relationships between people, services, and things as a design strategy. By creating and making dense connections, designers have a greater chance of developing new hybrids or artifacts that satisfy multiple concerns (cute and cuddly, for example). This is the essence of interdisciplinary strategy and approach.
Take a look at these graphs from the Hidalgo, et al. article*. On the far left are all nations combined along with a key. India is in the middle and the US is on the right. The thing to notice from this comparison is the distribution of the squares versus circles. Circles are the overall network. Squares denote the “revealed competitive advantage” for the product for that country. Thus, squares are where the country has an advantage. As you can see products which are more closely related (such as those that form dense clusters) are those that give the U.S. a competitive advantage. In India, the square tend to be at the periphery (in textiles and garments, for instance). The point is that so-called innovation is happening in these dense clusters. If designers begin to form networks and social capital among these disconnected hubs of innovation and expertise, then they may be able to leverage these as opportunities for innovation. Maybe that small metal cluster between garments and textiles needs to be remixed. Bronze kurtas anyone? Better yet, take a look at the electronics cluster and maybe we’ve got electric saris on the way!
*The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations. C. A. Hidalgo. R. B. Klinger, A.-L. Barabasi, R. Hausmann. Science 317, 482-487 (2007)
We started by looking at the neologism ‘watercasting’, coined for the purposing of re-imagining what it is that we would be doing in the class. Casting for the purpose of making a mold, a cast that one would find in theatre or film, to broadcast, and even futurecasting were brought up by some of the participants.
