Technoculture(s)

Sunday Quotation: When the artificial and the natural become the "machinic phylum"

Strange symmetries beyond the natural/artificial divide  

 

In strong theories of ALife these machines are understood not simply to simulate life but to realize it, by instantiating and actualizing its fundamental principles in another medium or material substrate. Consequently, these machines can be said to inhabit, or "live," in a strange, newly animated realm, where the biosphere and artifacts from the human world touch and pass into each other, in effect constituting a "machinic phylum."' The increasing number and variety of forms of machinic life suggest, moreover, that this new realm is steadily expanding and that we are poised on the brink of a new era in which nature and technology will no longer be distinctly opposed.

 

John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life

I have just been trying to catch up with recent developments in biomimicry applied to robotics and artificial intelligence. I also tried to read some references on biologically inspired computation, biologically inspired robotics and related subjects, such as the use of living cells to perform programmed tasks of computation. 

 

                            (from stelarc work here)

They made me go back to the classics and unearth and old characterization of “techné”:

 

Techne, or techné, as distinguished from episteme, is etymologically derived from the Greek word τέχνη (Ancient Greek: [tékʰnɛː]) which is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective. Techne resembles epistēmē in the implication of knowledge of principles, although techne differs in that its intent is making or doing, as opposed to "disinterested understanding."

(from Wikipedia)

 Just let us mention in passing that an intelligent robot may not fit with this definition since it can show a certain level of autonomy from its creator. But just let’s keep the definition to see what is happening now.

 On one hand, we are transforming our concept of living matter as well as its reality so that it shares features previously reserved to technical objects. We “program” matter and in its most simple understanding “programming” is just reduce the set of rules of autonomy to the set given by the programmer.  On the other hand, we strive to infuse technological objects not only with the procedural, adaptive, strategies of living organisms but also with the autonomy that formerly we observed only in living organisms. 

 The technical object becomes as autonomous as the living organisms and living matter as programmed as our former technical objects. 

 Interesting symmetry. What it tells about ourselves, is worth exploring.

 

 

Hybrid research about organizational innovation: our presentation at GastroTech Days

One result of my stay in Columbia during the academic year 2010-2011, has been an ongoing collaboration on new ways to study organizational innovation. More precisely, how to connect the tradition of qualitative and quantitative methods in the sociology of innovation and organization with methods related to intensive data mining from sources inside and outside an organization. 

The interesting approach that the COI follows is that the connects a qualitative approach based on the idea of complex assemblages of people, tools, media an systems in a vein close to Bruno Latour's (who is affiliated with COI by the way). The notion of agency as something that i is not strictly human is not strange for someone, like myself, with a background in artificial intelligence. The COI approach also is connected to a specific view of networked elationships within and outside an organization.

I am fortunate enough to put all these approaches to test with a real case. Thanks to an agreement with Telefonica I+D, I will be collaborating with Pilar Opazo, who will work on her PhD thesis at Columbia on this research (I will be part of her PhD Committee). We  will  study the transition from elBulli to elBullifoundation in terms of innovation in organization. 

We presented the roadmap for our research today at the GastroTech Days that took place in Barcelona. 

Today we just shared one dimension of research, namely the ues of codified language for creativity and innovation at elBulli. For us it is one of the components of their a solid platform for creativity and innovation.

GastroTech Days: Language as a platform for innovation, lessons from elBulli

View more presentations from Ramon Sangüesa.

We are still on the phase of completing the discourse analysis but we showed how it will seed other phases of the research. We are sticking to a strong committment to combine qualitative and quantitative tools in our toolbox to have a better idea of the main contributions to innovation and creativity from the organizational perspective and how they can give more general lessons not just for the gastronomy sector. 

 This is a project that we hope that will give Master and PhD students both in Sociology and Computer Science the opportunity to engage in new challenges and to learn both about their respective disciplines and how to be more creative and innovative as well. 

But this is just one of the projects that I am starting this year. There are others about the mutual and enriching relationships between different disciplines: art, science, design and technology. 

Beyond Design Thinking: Metadesign

"Design Thinking" keeps walking. Almost all design schools are more or less happy with the great attention that the talk about design thinking brings to them. Some, however, will concede that it may actually be hight time to avoid being caught in this conversation.

What I am reallty tired about  is the portray of design thinking as a "simple" way to use recipes (empathize, prototype, iterate, implement). Nothing is further  away from a design attitude. And nothing less suitable for the complicated type of problems where “design thinkers” are invited to join and try a solution.

Indeed, design is being used to tackle increasingly complicated problems. It is mentioned as a silver bullet in any discussion about "wicked problems": global warming, poverty, pollution, etc.  Don't get me wrong, designers think and are knowledgeable of methods that are very helpful at this.

Those are problems and systems that actively involve the "earlier known as users" with decision-making within a web of relationships between systems at many levels. These are probems that rely on some type of social change, a change in social organization. The so-called “social innovation” (another buzzword rapidly surpassing simple "innovation") requires designing for this level of complexity. Design thinking may amount here to the creation of  situations and processes that enable users to design their own solutions, including organizational and social ones. In this, one can see the emergence of a certain  reflexivity: you let people learn to design and they are both part of the problem and the solution. It is in these situations where the prêt-à-porter design thinking that is advertised and promoted everywhere falls short. The best designers recognize that their role has changed. Some of them address new challenges rom the service design perspective applied to public situations.

That’s why I'm interested Humantific methods for social change. They insist a lot in the role of language and conversation to articulate real change in heterogeneous groups of people. For example, a group of citizens in a city, people that are not constrained by the same type of norms and requirements as employees and costumers of companies... which makes the problem even more open.

Designing the conversation

I wondered whether it would be useful for all this to resort to all the accumulated knowledge from traditional cybernetics and its insistence of complexity, multiple levels, feedback, etc. I was thinking about this when I came across the talk of Paul Pangaro at PICNIC. Paul Pangaro was adopting the cybernetics perspective. There is a lot in this video.

Rethinking Design Thinking - Paul Pangaro - PICNIC '10 from PICNIC Festival on Vimeo.

 

 

I’d like to remark just three of Pangaro’s comments:

• The conversation as the basis of the design process
• Design the conversation, not the product
• Prototype the solution, not ideas

"Designing the conversation” is basically to set the goals and norms of the process of design. So, you are asking participants to become designers of a process where hey will be a part of it.  This is what Pangaro calls “Metadesign” (there are other uses of this same expression within the design community, by the way).  I hope it is useful and doesn’t not become another buzzword itself.

Seen in this perspective, IDEO, Tim Brown et al. were able to design a good conversation about their concept of "Design Thinking" and created a solution that worked for their goals.

Design, social change, and education: redesigning society from the school

Design is seen by some not just as a professional skill but a basic human competence. It has been said that many actual social problems can be improved if approached with a design attitude. "Design for social change" is a sentence that one can hear more and more. It seems to be the solution for every social problem, from proverty to pollution. However, in order to be effective as a means for social change, a certain critical mass of citizens with the corresponding competences, skills and abilities as design thinkers are needed.

Tha's why it seems to me that this initiative by Studio H, in the poorest rural county in the USA, contains important lessons. The team led by Emile Pilloton seems to have applied a holistic design thinking approach to the reality of Bertie county. In so doing, they are using it as a prototype for what can become a wider waver of change. They started to work on the education system there and move outward from it towards the rest of the society. This is a very interesting and in som moments a very moving video that explains their project.

I find specially remarkable that they recovered manual work as a way to teach to think as a designer.  It is related to some of the lessons of using actual physical prototypes not only to express your ideas but to think about what you want to do, about the difficulties around a given problem. Interestingly enough, it is also about cooperating with others in problem solving by actually "touching" the prototype of the problem.

The project in Bertie County was addressed to high-school students but other initiatives teach design thinking at an earlier age, like this initiative of the Stanford Design Institute  that proposes a design thinking curriculum for K-12 kids. Their website is full of materials and ideas to use in class.

On designing (invisible) “things”

“To think of artefacts in terms of design means conceiving of them less and less as modernist objects, and conceiving of them more and more as “things”

Bruno Latour,

Last week I read again the text of a lecture given by Bruno Latour in 2008 at the Networks of Design conference. Latour focused on the importance of design and explored some of its implications in order to characterize a theory of action.  He connected his views on design with his own work on Networks (Actor Network Theory) as well as to Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of “Spheres”. Latour’s conference was entitled “The Cautionary Prometheus”, at the same time pointing to the transformative nature of design and its differences with the hyperhero of Modernity, Illustration, Science and Engineering (don’t forget that the title of Mary Schelley’s book is “Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus”). Latour introduces a very interesting distinction between (modernist) objects and the  emergence of a very different type of entity through design: “things”. 

If things, or rather Dinge, are gatherings, as Heidegger  used to define them, then it is a short step from there to considering all things as the result of an activity called “collaborative design” in Scandinavia. 

How did he reach this conclusion? First, he remarked five characteristics of design (or, as he called them, “advantages”):

1. Humility: Design seems to be close to arts and crafts, to skills rather than to grandiose approaches of big, modern projects. Thus, it lacks radicality when confronted with other endeavours.

As a concept, design implies a humility that seems absent from the word  “construction” or “building”. Because of its historical roots as a mere addition to  the “real” practicality, sturdy materiality and functions of daily objects, there is  always some modesty in claiming to design something anew. In design there is  nothing foundational. It seems to me that to say you plan to design something,  does not carry the same risk of hubris as saying one is going to build something.  Introducing Prometheus to some other hero of the past as a “designer” would  doubtlessly have angered him. Thus, the expansion of the word “design” is an indication (a weak one to be sure) of what could be called a post Promethean  theory of action.  This theory of action has arisen just at the moment (this is its  really interesting feature) when every single thing, every detail of our daily  existence, from the way we produce food, to the way we travel, build cars or  houses, clone cows, etc is to be, well, redesigned.

This is something I am not so sure about. I cannot see Bauhaus or the Soviet Constructivists as mild non-revolutionaries.  they were designers and used design to try to bring about radical change.

2. Attention to detail.

To the contrary, a careful attention to  detail, craft and skill, was precisely what seemed reactionary as this would only  have slowed the swift march to progress. The expanding concept of design indicates a deep shift in our emotional make up: at the very moment when the scale of what has to be remade has become infinitely larger (no political  revolutionary committed to challenging capitalist modes of production has ever  considered redesigning the earth’s climate), what means to “make” something is  also being deeply modified.  The modification is so deep that things are no longer  “made” or “fabricated”, but rather carefully “designed”, and if I may use the  term, precautionarily designed. It is as though we had to combine the engineering  tradition with the precautionary principle; it is as though we had to imagine  Prometheus stealing fire from heaven in a cautious way! What is clear is that at  this very historical juncture, two absolutely foreign sets of passions (foreign for the  modernist ethos that is) are having to be recombined and reconciled.

3. Semiotics: designed objects become more a more a mix of symbol and function in a very literal sense.  

Artefacts are becoming conceivable as complex assemblies of contradictory issues. The transformation of objects into signs has been greatly accelerated by the spread of computers. It is obvious that digitalization has done a lot to expand semiotics to the core of objectivity: when almost every feature of digitalized artefacts is “written down” in codes and software[...]. If Galileo’s book of nature was written in mathematical terms, [...], this expansion is even truer today when more and more elements of our surroundings are literally and not metaphorically written down in mathematical (or at least in computer) terms. Although the old dichotomy between function and form could be vaguely  maintained for a hammer, a locomotive or a chair, it is ridiculous when applied to a mobile phone. Where would you draw the line between form and function?  The artefact is composed of writings all the way down! But this is not only true of computerized artefacts and gadgets.  It is also true of good old-fashioned materiality: what are nano- or bio-technologies if not the expansion of design to  another level? Those who can make individual atoms write the letters “IBM”, those who implant copyright tags into DNA, or who devise nano cars which “race” on four wheels, would certainly consider themselves to be designers. Here  again, matter is absorbed into meaning (or rather as contested meaning) in a more and more intimate fashion.

4. Design as a remedial practice: according to Latour, all design is redesign (something I don’t completely agree, by the way). Latour identifies this as a healthy stand since it spares excursions into creationist temptations, undermining, for example, arguments that use design in a very warped way as is the case with the proponents of Intelligent Design.

There is always something that exists first as a given, as an issue, as a problem. In other words, there is always something remedial in design. This split is a weakness to be sure  ([...] but it  is also an immense advantage when compared to the idea of creation. To design is  never to create ex nihilo. [...] things are never created but  rather carefully and modestly redesigned. [...] Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing, or breaking with  the past. It is an antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings, and radical departures.

5. Design is an ethical practice:

Design is that it necessarily involves an ethical dimension which is tied into the obvious question of good versus bad design. But it is easy to understand that when you say that something has been “designed”, you are not only authorized but forced to ask whether it has been well or badly designed. The spread of design to the inner definitions of things carries with it, not only meaning and hermeneutics, but also morality. More exactly, it is as if materiality and morality were finally coalescing.  [...] this normative dimension that is intrinsic to design offers a good handle from which to extend the question of design to politics. A politics of matters of facts and of objects has always seemed far fetched; a politics of designed things and issues is somewhat more obvious.

This reminds me of some very practical consequences. For example, some of the chaotic and (bad) behaviour that we suffered during the recent financial crisis was designed into the software used by the financial brokers. One can argue that this is a case of (ethically) bad design. As my good friend Daniel Beunza, currently at the London School of Economics, says “Morality is in the machine”. 

Why I blog this?

This made me think about the new types of “objects” that are the result of digitization: mixed accumulations of actions and infrastructure, software. etc. which require a thorough an sensitive knowledge of design, people, relations. It also demands the ability to sustain a lot of discussion and negotiation over meaning as well as what good and bad design entail. Maybe it is  training people in designing this type of "invisible things" that is crucial if widespread social innovation based on digital concepts is ever to take off. 

It also reminded me of the disproportionate place that the object has in reflections about design. Not surprisingly, a recent documentary about design and designers is entitled "Objectified"! (a very worthwhile film, by the way). 

Sunday Quotation "Digital fluency should mean..."

 

"Digital fluency" should mean designing, creating, and remixing, not just browsing, chatting, and interacting"

Mitchel Resnick

Mitchel Resnick develops in a recent article the rationale for designing the Scratch programming environment. As he stresses right from the beginning, this is a project aimed at developing digital fluency" at a deeper level than current approaches to teaching technology to kids. It tries to enrich the experience and abilities of children well beyond their typical behavior as "Digital natives".

The Scratch team goal was to create a programming environment that were:

- more tinkerable: i.e., extensible, adaptable, an environment where it is to try and try and try new ways of getting things done

- more meaningful, easy to relate to its users' goals, exploiting in the same environment programming, media and digital narratives so that users could express themselves and communicate through an environment that was first and foremost a programming environment. This is one of the keys of Scratch as it bridges the usually separated worlds of programming and media narratives (this is why game programming environments are also very powerful but usually lack the pedagogicla  and methodological orientation embodied by Scratch).

- more social than other programming environments: i.e., easy to share  your programs with other people and also to connect your projects with other projects. The worldwide Scratch community is really huge.

In their own words:

Since the public launch in May 2007, the Scratch Web site (http://scratch.mit.edu) has become a vibrant online community, with people sharing, discussing, and remixing one another's projects. Scratch has been called "the YouTube of interactive media." Each day, Scratchers from around the world upload more than 1,500 new projects to the site, with source code freely available for sharing and remixing. The site's collection of projects is wildly diverse, including video games, interactive newsletters, science simulations, virtual tours, birthday cards, animated dance contests, and interactive tutorials, all programmed in Scratch.

More interestingly:

It has become commonplace to refer to young people as "digital natives" due to their apparent fluency with digital technologies. Indeed, many young people are very comfortable sending text messages, playing online games, and browsing the Web. But does that really make them fluent with new technologies? Though they interact with digital media all the time, few are able to create their own games, animations, or simulations. It's as if they can "read" but not "write."

Which is something that Derrida and Stiegler almost said exactly word by word in discussing the current traits of digital culture and the "contributor culture" and how important it is for the majority of citizens to be able to "write" this new world.

Of course, here "writing" gets a stronger sense than blogging, creating wikis or else. It is in fact, "designing" and "building". That's the reason we chose Scratch at Citilab as the first environment into the digital world for kids. And that's why Jordi Deglado and his team  are currently very busy extending  it to connect it with a whole variety of robots, sensors and other devices. Because "building" involves also acting in the physical world. And connecting to a wider community of kids, parents and teachers.

Sunday quote: What Picasso didn't know

Google's Gmail "quote of the day" bar surprised me with this some days ago:

Pablo Picasso - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

(click to see the ZKM video)

Picasso died in 1973.

It is unfortunate that he didn't see what became of computing after his death. Personal computing, graphic interfaces, the internet turned computing into something else than just answer-oriented number crunching. At that time, however, even his genius couldn't help him imagine computing's current possibilities or its pervasiveness, either.

More than number crunchers or gateways to information, computers are an excellent way to explore ideas, to get to know better what the problem that nags you really is. 

One way of doing that is by simulation, i.e., using computers to simulate what you don't understand. The other way is just by diving into programming to get deeper into your problem. In the process you start questioning yourself more and more.

My friend Jordi Delgado keeps on saying at every single change he has that programming is another way of inquiring. Basically you can start programming with a fuzzy idea of what your problem, you set out from an ill-defined problem, and in the process you get a better understanding of it, not just a closed answer. Talking with Jordi I found nice connections of this way of learning and inquiring with the ways of craftsmen, who explore knowledge while building objects. This is an aspect of computing that Alan Kay has championed for at least 30 years. It is extensively described in Howard Rheingold's  book "Tools for Thought". There he explored the goals and motivations of some not-so-well-known geniuses that anticipated in the 60s and 70s what Picasso couldn't see: Licklider, Engelbart and, again, Alan Kay.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oaspetele_de_piatra/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Instead of giving answers, then, computers may help spark new questions.

So, it is important that when talking about "ICT Literacy" or "Computing Literacy" we think about this other way of looking at computers. These initiatives should be seen and devised as an effort to let people appropriate themselves of another big strategy for thinking and exploring creatively the problems they are concerned with.

However many people think otherwise, being as ignorant about computers as Picasso was in his time. They still look at computers as a means of getting asnwers either as a closed calculation or as the result of a search on the Internet.  They even take pride in appearing as ignorant about computers as Picasso, but without the excuse of not having seen what Picasso wasn't able to see (for the simple reason that he died before big things in computing and communications become more evident).  

Curiously enough Picasso also knew and practiced every single day of his life this other exploratory aspect. As he said:

I don't seek, I find.

Maybe he found more questions than answers when he did that. And started again from these new questions. One more time, his own words:

“Others have seen what is and asked why. (a side effect of a given answer?)

I have seen what could be and asked why not.”

Wouldn't be great to use computers to let ourselves keep asking "Why not?".

Readers and writers. Users and designers?

When technologists and policy makers discuss about the interest of completely changing the way we are currently making technology known, I tend to stress the need for an active way of passing knowledge on to people. That is, to initiate processes that will result in active users, builders, designers not just mere passive user, receivers, consumers (link source in Spanish). 


(foto http://flickr.com/photos/jenwaller/)

This is why I was happy to come across this excerpt from a conversation between Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler. I hope their read/write analogy is enjoyed as a present by those who believe in active, practical, learning and skeptics alike. Let's see if it helps make understandable what we are after in places like Citilab. We walk with citizens along the path that leads into the kernel, the center of technology, of its code and what you can do when we you learn to write that code and to assess what it implies.  

In their set of interviews, philosophers Jacques Derrida and Bernard  Stiegler discuss how different kinds of media allow, more or less, certain  kinds of participation.

Their model is the alphabet, suggesting that “it  is hardly conceivable that the addressee of a book could successfully  read it without knowing how to write.”

Stiegler in particular anticipates that the increasing availability of video, audio and other software  will create a cultural politics in which people classically formatted as  receivers become agents of production. Derrida responds by differentiating between the ability to use something and knowing how it  works, a technical form of knowledge which he might be read to imply is superior.

(foto http://flickr.com/photos/joyoflife/)

Design Thinking: doing, feeling, connecting, thinking and doing, and...

Now that Design Thinking has reached the general newspapers (have a look at the New York Times on Design Thinking), and that the "Design Thinking" term has spiked in Goggle Trends, I just want to compare the popular way of understanding this activity and how it is thought and talked about by people that do really practice it.

On the one hand, the NYT article gives a fast overview including well known success cases. The usual suspects appear as well: IDEO, Stanford's D.school and so on. From the journalist point of view,  Design Thinking would be a methods used to created new objects and services that has much more interaction with users than was usual previously. She sketches a very linear picture of the whole process:

While definitions vary, design thinking usually involves a period of field research — usually close observation of people — to generate inspiration and a better understanding of what is needed, followed by open, nonjudgmental generation of ideas. After a brief analysis, a number of the more promising ideas are combined and expanded to go into “rapid prototyping,” which can vary from a simple drawing or text description to a three-dimensional mock-up. Feedback on the prototypes helps hone the ideas so that a select few can be used.

The sequence would be:

(1)  Field research

(2) Observation

(3) Analysis

(4) Prototype creation

(5) Selection of the final idea

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?. It should because, as one of the interviewed people says :

“It’s the designers’ version of the scientific method”

So, here we have a first reduction of Design Thinking to something already known.  A final sentence from the Executive Director of Stanford's D.School contributes a second reduction:

"“It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves everything. That’s putting it too high on a pedestal,” [...]

“Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful.”"

So, with the help of the New York Times, one can get the idea that design Thinking is another ability of designers that interact with users as passive objects of study, much in the same vein that Science works in the subject/object dichotomy. Moreover, only after the acquisition by designers of some managing abilities or with the collaborative help of MBAs, does Design Thinking amount to something of real value. 

To put if very briefly, designers have to become scientists and need MBAs to have any impact. 

Sorry but I don't buy it. And it might very well be that Design Thinking is much more than that.

Let's start by saying that there is a long tradition that starts with Herbert Simon and others that takes this argument and turns it upside down, i.e., it considers that, to start with, sscientific method is a form of design thinking, not the other way around as the popular media has it. Besides that, another strand of thinking in organization and managing studies stresses the fact that management is by itself a process of design and that good managers excel at design thinking. Just have a look at "Managing as Designing" edited by Karl Weick in order to get a hint of this way of conceptualizing the management practice. It is not a matter of creating artist or design managers but to get people (managers or other) to use the same cognitive strategies as (typical) designers and other creatives use.

But what is this way of thinking like?

No one better to answer the question than a "Master of Design" who has reflected, and quite a lot, about how he thinks when he designs. Here Arnold Wasserman answers the questions posed by   Taxi Design Network. He shows a very different vision from the other sources about what Design Thinking is and about who can use and develop it.

Having been named one of “20 Masters of Design” by Fast Company magazine and being one of the pioneers in the practice of user-centered, multidisciplinary product development as a competitive business strategy, how do you envision this entire regime to evolve within the next generation of fully Internet-savvy users?

Arnold Wasserman>>I want to answer this question by talking about how designers think and how we need to think about design now.

What most people understand as ‘design’ has to do with familiar material objects - from Arne Jacobson chairs to iPhones, from H&M fashion to the Swatch Smart Car, from Frank Gehry museums to sustainable green communities. Design today is evolving along new paths and at an accelerating pace, blurring the traditional boundaries of design and compounding the ambiguity between ‘design as product’ - physical, tangible stuff - and ‘design as process’ - a way of thinking, a set of cognitive skills, methods, tools and techniques having intrinsic value in their own right. Those of us who were trained in design schools and who work every day in a design studio - industrial designers, architects, communications designers, digital media designers - know tacitly what design thinking is. We do it every day (although it must be said that few designers are self-reflective about the process itself or know the epistemology of the field.) What we don’t realize is how alien our way of thinking is to non-designers and how powerful it can be as a cognitive methodology applicable to fields far beyond the traditional scope of design, such as health care, educational transformation and sustainable development — and at larger scales of strategic planning, organizational transformation and public policy.

[...]

Three tenets of design thinking guide my own practice. The first is that designers should apply design thinking to improve life widely beyond the traditional boundaries of design. The second is that everybody can learn design thinking and that designers should disseminate design thinking by collaborating, not only with practitioners from other disciplines but with non-designers - the practice known as ‘co-design’. Finally, design thinking should be embedded in K-12 curricula both as a subject domain in its own right and as a pedagogical structure for teaching academic subject matter.

This interaction with "non-experts" and our profound belief that design can be learned is what drives our philosophy at Citilab. Moreover, we believe that one way to infuse Design Thinking in schools is   vía the ability to design that is brought about by digital technology and digital culture (in Spanish)

Wasserman expands his views and remarks how good designing is a reflective practice, how it creates a state of connection with what is being designed. He recalls this feeling when he describes his memories about an old motorbike, in the spirit of  "Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

He also points to the changing role to the designer figure (from star to facilitator) that the Internet has brought about with it. F:

As to internet-savvy users, the emergence of a “Digital Native” culture shifts power from producers to users in ways that challenge what it means “to design.” The shift is from a "Create-and-producer-push" model of design to a "Co-create-and-user-pull" model of design, as exemplified by the explosion of user-generated content in Web 2.0 sites -- games, 3-D virtual worlds, blogs, vlogs and social networks. We are sitting in the middle of a design transformation wherein the designer delivers not the finished product, but the platform, algorithms, objects, scripts and tools for users to create the content themselves. The customer as co-designer is a new and unprecedented design genre that is affecting how all design -- of material as well as virtual artifacts -- will be conceived, executed and experienced from now on.

This, in particular, reminds me of what I learned with Massimo during UrbanLabs, that is: how to design communities that can make emerge groups ... that are able to design.

The rest of the interview wit Wassermann is worth having a reading too. It deals deeper with subjects that have to do with design as a tool to change the world and its implications for developing countries.

I can't finish this (longish) post without stressing the relationship between passion, the activity of doing design itself and the reflective step. It is another case of how reflective thinking is a vital ability. Unfortunately it is an ability that is seldom learned how to practice in schools. It is neither taught onr learned at individual level and much less at the group level. Schools, companies and other organizations are not flagships of reflective practice.

The results are disheartening sometimes. In my experience more often than not, when you try to invite a group into reflective practice what happens is that (a) if anything is done, then there is little grou reflection about what has been learned in doing it or (b) people do reflect a lot about what to do and how to do it but the whole group never gets it done. In opposition to the exploratory and creative aspects that type of reflective practice that Design Thinking is what prevails is argumentative, discursive and defensive talking both individually and colletive. Design Thinking practice is a much needed ability given the challenges that as individuals, organizations and societies we have to confront.  Or so it seems.