Technoculture(s)

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.

A new challenge: connecting UL09 with UrbanLabs010

The concept of UrbanLabs originated from our perception that there was an opportunity to accelerate change in the city by gathering stakeholders in urban phenomena under the digital culture umbrella . We set ourselves to the goals of awakening the civic conscience of those with technological capability, bringing together urban managers and new digital urban designers and promoting  practical outcomes by letting them work on projects, not just listening to talks.

However, we didn't reject the traditional conference format. This time talks were more focused on the potentiality of the digital discourse about the city. Dave Harte, Juan Freire, Adam Greenfield, Ben Cerveny, Laura Forlano, Dana Spiegel and Antonina Simeti, each one in his or her own way and from their own perspectives and experiences, shared concepts, methods, projects and results. They helped us understand  how to drive the complexity of urban (re)design from the digital culture standpoint.


In comparison with UrbanLabs08, we attracted more professionals from architecture and city management who were responsive to the "call of the digital".

We also tested a first specialized workshop format, Fabien Girardin's LIFT workshop on urban computing.

The method of work we first tried in UrbanLabs08 was intensified thanks to the "broths" managed by Platoniq who also introduced some humor. In addition to creatives, technologists, architects and activists  I  saw plain citizens joining the project tables. Still, they were  a minority This is something  we must consider seriously  if we want UrbanLabs to generate projects of real interest to citizens.

We still have to work hard so that participants leave UrbanLabs with something more than an endorphine surge.

Fortunately, a very enthusiastic community is emerging around UrbanLabs. It can evolve into a good mix of all these types of people. The UrbanLabs Club or UrbanLabs Rebooted  may start in the form of a regular meeting format. Sure Chris, and  the Citilab entire staff will put all our best to make it successful and to improve continuity between one UrbanLabs and the next one.

Meanwhile, it is good to share criticisms, suggestions and new ideas for the the next UrbanLabs010 here.

Citilab-Digital Birmingham: considerations on the social context

Yesterday Dave Harte gave an excellent opening keybote speech at Urbanlabs09.  Here you have it on SlideShare. He explained at length the different dimensions along which Birmingham has evolved as a Digital City. 

It is difficult to summarize all the aspects he talked about. However, I think he very clearly showed that for him (and not only form him!) a Digital City is not just a city that uses digital technology for accessing and distributing information. A Digital City, as the different examples from Birmingham that Dave gave showed us, is a city where technology is also an opportunity for citizens to cooperate together and innovate in different spheres of civic activity. Possibly, the most spectacular example he gave was the hacking of the City Council website by a group of citizens that got together and set up a different website with all the services and information they really wanted ("BCC DIY").

He also showed how behind this type of initiatives there is a concept of innovation that is open. Not only it is open in terms of access to public data but also in the final goal and expected results and evolution of the innovation process itself. That is, it is an open-ended process that helps in learning new things, innovate and how this has social and economic impact.

He identified several key aspects to develop this type of initiatives:

1. The interest of citizens to get together and discuss

2. A culture of civic engagement and a culture of contributors

3. There should be public data available and a will  from individual citizens to share their own data (he showed what he did with his own home energy data or his jogging data)

4. Some big trigger that sparks the reaction of citizens  (in the case of Birmingham the cost of the City Council website was identified as such: 2,8 Milion Pounds were thought too expensive and started the whole hacking project)

This made me think on another conference by Ethan Zuckermann that I got to know (thru Ismael López Peña) about the key factors to trigger social innovation projects from and around technology. This connection made me think about where do we stand here as current state and possibilities for social innovation and what we can do here.  And by "here" I think on the community that is physically close to Citilab but I think I could extend this consideration to Spain.

 

I could elaborate on the relationship between both types of "key factors" about social innovation. I will try to go through all f them in the future.

For today I'll just mention that, in my view,  one of the main differences between Birmingham and our closest environment is not just how different the proportion of citizens with technological knowledge is but specially the different attitudes in terms of "contributor culture".

I think that the former (extent of digital knowledge) is correlated with the latter (contributor culture).  So,  to be successful in spreading digital social innovation here, and if Zuckermann is right, one urgent task for Citilab is to understand very clearly which are them main traits of local culture here.  Having this this in mind we have to devise better ways to contact with the leading citizen contributors and how to adapt our digital culture programmes to their context. We are putting  a lot of effort to get to know better (through ethnographies, workshops and other means) and we are rethinking our current formats. As a next step I'd love to see citizens codesigning  Citilab activities.

Sunday quote: "Geeks are citizens too"

My colleague at Citilab, Chris Pinchen, was beaming after his intense days in Birmingham. There he attended an event sponsored by Digital Birmingham "Developing Digital Birmingham District". He presented Citilab as a possible component of a wider urban innovation strategy.

He poured on me a lot of impressions. He was radiating good vibes.  Got very positive appreciation from the people that attended the conference  (follow their conversations and QA on Twitter here and here) and explained me about how to reinforce some initial cooperation we are starting as well as many others that he was able to initiate while there. Then we started to review his presentation on SlideShare. It has a lot of humour. Specially about current (mis?)conceptions abroad on the relationship between Barcelona and innovation. Then I saw this slide:

which, Chris told me, started a round of applause among the attendants.

Which is understandable. There is a strong Birmingham civic activism that is led by tech-savvy citizens  I'll comment sometime in the future about several initiatives in Birmingham that illustrate perfectly well how and in which imaginative ways a critical mass of "geek citizens" can make a difference to the city's present and future.

In other words, I think some Birmingham examples will help me show some possible pathways to citizen-led innovation that couldn't happen at all without their knowledge of the digital culture.  It might also be that they took these steps because they thought as digital design thinkers, not just as digital wizards (which some of them definitely are!). This is what Citilab is all about: letting people innovate in whatever sphere they want by using the strategies, practices and tools of the digital world.

In a way, it is a matter of turning citizens into geeks, too.

And this parallelism is what we will explore further during UrbanLabs09. Don't forget that the motto for Urbanlabs  (a contribution of one of its founders, Enric Senabre)  is:

"Technocitizenship" (geeks with civic conscience and citizens with digital abilities)

and

"Socioinnovation"  (let technocitizens invent their collective future).

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. 

What do we talk about when we talk about Living Labs?

 Open innovation  has many forms and facets. Living Labs, have received a lot of attention lately. More or less, they are connected with user involvement in innovation. However, there is a whole world of possibilities under these two umbrellas and their intersection: users and labs.

The European Journal of Virtual Organizations has published a special issue on Living Labs that helps in getting a clearer perspective on Living Labs.

I found two articles specially interesting. 

In the first one Asbjørn Følstad reviews current literature in order to classify the different types of Living Labs applied in ICT innovation.

In the second one,  Esteve Almirall and Jonathan Wareham explore the role of Living Labs in the general process of Open Innovation. I'll go through it in a future post.

Let's go with the first one. 

Følstad divides living labs into three general classes:

1. Living Labs as platforms to expose users to new applications, i.e., Living Labs as "testbeds".
   
2. Living Labs to experience and experiement about the consequences and unexpected uses of a new technology. For example, the Living Lab set up by  Georgia Tech for R+D in  ubiquitous computing.
3. Living Labs as true open innovation platforms for co-design and co-creation with users. The author cites, for example, the European Network of Open Living Labs and he stresses the fact that Living Labs are connected with a given context, which most of the time, is a geographical one. He cites as an example Arabianranta, the Helsinki Living Lab.
   

From my point of view, this classification seems to define a scale of "Livingness" related to the degree and type of user involvement. You would have R+D Living Labs that are closer to the linear mode of innovation with the twist that the research is being done not just on products or services but also on the relationship of the users and this services. However, my feeling is that users act more as "testers" or "guinea pigs" than co-designers in this type of Labs. This would just be the first level of Living Labs, let's call them, Level 1 Living Labs. 

Then you would have  "Level 2" Living Labs where the focus is more on goals and methods derived from the User Experience area.

Finally, "Level 3 Living Labs" would require are more intense involvement of users not just on the final products or services created by research labs or shown by marketing departments but truly participating in the ideation, design and actual creation of experiences, services, products and technologies. 

So, we go from the concept of innovation as something related to the closed R+D department to a type of process and organization that shares some characteristics of cooperation and involvement with Open Source initiatives.

In comparison to other innovation methods, Level 3 Living Labs are the ones that embody the most distinct characteristics of the Living Lab approach. To set them up there is a host of methods and processes that have to be in place in order for the Living Lab to be successful. The paper reviews a lot of them. 

Given that next week we open the UrbanLabs congress and given that they are focused on exploring how the Living Lab idea can be used for the redesign of cities and the creation of new strategies for local growth, I have been pondering about some questions related to the urban innovation as process of strong citizen involvement.  I hope that these questions will be approached from different perspectives. For example, from the citizens and local government points of view.

Some of the questions  I have been thinking about follow:

What's the role of user/citizen motivation? How do they become motivated to get involved into innovation?

Incentives? Seduction? Self-motivation?

How do we convince local governments to wake up and open collaborative innovation spaces? They are very good at strategic urban planning, but how do they fare in urban innovation?.Talking about innovation, how open are our local governments? How collaborative are citizens? Do we, as citizens, just feel happy being critical or we know how to articulate initiatives that will have an impact on the redesign of our city? And on the spread of innovation?.

What about companies? How do we succeed in inviting them to cooperate with citizens beyond the "testers"/"customers" perspective? And how do we get them to share knowledge? Or to share any other results that may come out of each Living Lab/UrbanLab?.

Just asking myself....