Knowledge Translation Lip (Sync) Service
Posted: September 29, 2011 Filed under: knowledge translation, public health, research, Social media | Tags: arts, cancer, communication, design, health communication, knowledge translation, Social media, video, YouTube 1 Comment »
Dancing for a Cure
Researchers and policy makers wring their hands and wrack their brains at ways to get people to take up the knowledge generated through scientific research and use it for social good and further invention. Some, stop doing this and just make it happen and YouTube and the Internet are showing us how.
Designer, strategist and broadcaster Debbie Millman, host of the Design Matters podcast, signs off each episode with a great quote:
We can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both
It seems when talking about knowledge translation, there is a lot of talk about how to do it better and then there are some who just do it better. McGill University and some of the researchers associated with the Goodman Cancer Research Centre have partnered up with filmmakers, volunteers and a medical supply company to ‘dance for cancer’ as a means of promoting their work and raising funds for cancer research. (The company, Medicom, has offered to donate per click so if you’re interested in donating and being entertained, click the link below).
Besides being catchy (Taio Cruz‘s club hit, Dynamite, is the song that these researchers and cast are dancing to) and well-produced, the video unscores the potential that video and some creative use of the arts can offer the scientific community in showing the world what it does and how it does it. The video shows what life is like (in a singing-and-dancing way) in a lab and showcases some of the people who do it, making them real humans rather than some mysterious “scientists off in the lab”.
They are designing a knowledge translation opportunity that (so far) has been viewed nearly 30,000 times as of this writing. I suspect that number will triple in the coming weeks. When some of the best, most cited research articles in the world are read (viewed) by maybe hundreds of people, the attention of thousands in such a short time should give pause.
Further, of the thousands that view the video, it is safe to say that most are non-scientists. For many, but certainly not all, of the studies we do in public and population health, the audience for this video is almost the same as ours — or at least includes many of the same people. Not all studies or research projects will yield the kind of data that are video-worthy or inspire photosharing, but some are. Many more than we acknowledge. And if we want the public engaged in science, if we want to reach practitioners and inspire policy makers and researchers alike to pay attention to the evidence being generated, this video might offer some suggestions for a way forward.
While you think of that, enjoy the choreography and lip sync skill of McGill’s brave super-translators and support a good cause in the process:
Systems Thinking and the Design of Empathy
Posted: September 22, 2011 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, systems thinking | Tags: Charles Leadbeater, design, developmental design, developmental evaluation, empathy, organizational change, systems thinking Leave a comment »
Leadbeater's Systems Thinking - Empathy Grid
Scalability is an issue that faces practitioners in systems and design. How do we design systems at scale and if so, what might they look like.
Charles Leadbeater has been on a mission to find ways to make large organizations — particularly those in the social sector – more innovative. Leadbeater, like many social innovators, is hard to pin down to a single title or role. He is at once a researcher, a designer, a systems thinker, and a urbanist. Like most innovators, all and none of these descriptors truly fit.
Leadbeater was in Toronto earlier this week to speak on the issue of innovation in cross-sector collaboration for public good at the MaRS Discovery District. If you’ve seen Leadbeater speak (consider the talks on TED here or elsewehere), you’ll know that you’re in for some English-style self-depricating humour alongside of much about the manner in which people engage in change actions within a system. You’ll also get a lesson in social design, the kind that Victor Papanek advocated for.
To my delight, Leadbeater did not disappoint. Unlike other talks, the value came less from a focused “take home message” and more in a way of conceiving social systems through the combined lens of systems and design thinking (my terms, not his). At the heart of his talk was the challenge we face with building systems and empathy at scale. When things interact, eventually they become understood within a set of boundary conditions and interact, thus making a system. The system in turn begins to establish rules (or rather, the rules determine the system). These emergent properties thus shape the way the system operates or, in social situations, governs or guides the actions of those within it.
The problem is that at certain scales the very factors that create positive social relations, that is those that yield tangible emotional, resource, or informational benefits for one or more parties, get warped under the changes in that scaling. Thus, we have the countless stories of a beloved small business grown in a confined community that becomes a multinational corporation and, in doing so, loses the intimacy and connection to its customers in the process. Companies do this, government organizations show this, and so do cities.
The more one designs for the humans within the system in ways that create meaningful engagement, the greater the empathy. Yet deep empathy is often founded upon intimacy, which is something that is difficult to scale. Leadbeater illustrates the various ways in which firms and cities have addressed this on the graph above. In each case, there are examples that fit. In business for example, there is Ryanair, which embodies a highly structured system with low empathy (top left corner). Opposed to that is the local farmer’s market where one gets to know their grower, experience high mutual empathy, but in a manner that is unique, idiosyncratic and non-systematic in most ways. The challenge is how to design organizations at scale from the cosy-ness of the Farmer’s Market without becoming a Ryanair.
It struck me that the food service industry might be one of the areas where the scalability can be achieved. For example, Starbucks is a gigantic corporation with shops worldwide, yet it still manages to create a very homey, local feel at each one. In the mornings I go to the gym I stop by a location to get a smoothie and my server always remembers my order. At the location near where I take classes, they gave me a free drink because they couldn’t get the computer to take off my 10 cent reusable cup discount. In each location, the benefits were not just in customer service, but in the chit-chat and relationships that I develop with the staff. It’s not like I am speaking to owner-operators at some of the great independent coffee shops around my city, but it is close.
The Starbucks experience was thought through, intentional and thus, by design. We can do this with other systems. The key is whether or not the systems themselves are aware enough to know when they have, indeed, become systems. Starbucks today could not be empathic in exactly the same way as it was when it was a one-shop place at Pikes Market in Seattle. But it can create something similar, which is parallel to Simon’s notion that design is about the science of the artificial.
I’ve been developing and advocating for an approach to creating scale — in time and scope — that I call developmental design. A developmental design approach means shifting and changing over time and designing things in a manner that adjust to the complexities associated with dynamic systems. It brings together complexity, systems, design and the detailed feedback mechanism that comes through developmental evaluation. Leadbeater’s grid helps add to this concept by giving a focus to the development, from one level of empathy to another and one systemic scale to another.
Through thinking in systems and acting through design, perhaps then we can create the kinds of services and organizations that respond to the challenges we face.
And designing for empathy will help us know when we’ve achieved it.
Like this:
Quid nunc cogitat? In search of a definition of design thinking
Posted: September 10, 2011 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: Andrea Yip, complexity, creativity, definition, design, design thinking, innovation, OCADU, Richard Buchanan, Roger Martin, strategic foresight, university 3 Comments »
Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a concept that has gained much purchase in the creative industries and beyond, but what does it mean and does it matter? Determining an answer to this question might mean the difference between advancing it further or ending the concept’s use altogether.
The Latin form of the question of “what is design thinking?”, quid nunc cogitat?, asks about what is design thinking now? It implies a sense that design thinking is a moveable, dynamic concept and might better illustrate its true nature than trying to develop a singular definition.
I’ve been struck by the concept of design thinking for some time and this week I began a two-year journey towards a Masters degree in design at OCAD University in Toronto where the concept will be placed at the centre of the curriculum. Perhaps not surprisingly, the first course of the program is Business and Design Thinking. This was the first week of classes and after spending a few days with my classmates it might be expected that this group of mid-career professionals interested in design thinking might have a clear idea of what it is that sits at the centre of their studies, but that hasn’t been the case.
Nor was it the case a few weeks ago at the Design Thinking unconference that I posted on earlier where people from across North America (and beyond) gathered to spend two days discussing the subject. It seems that no matter where I look, whatever books I read, the answer to the question of what is design thinking seems elusive. All these design thinkers and no definition to unite them.
The simplest answer to the question of what it is might be : it is what designers think about when they work.
And a designer might be: anyone who creates something with a conscious intent.
While these might suffice for cocktail parties, they are unsatisfying to those of us who seek to explore the concept of design thinking further than the hors d’oeuvre tray.
Among the best examples of what design thinking is about are conveyed through metaphors, like the Periodic Table of Design (twice!) or the design enzyme, both by social designer Andrea Yip. Roger Martin and others have considered design thinking to be a form of abductive reasoning around complex problem solving. Richard Buchanan suggests that this is the kind of thinking that is applied to wicked problems.
These examples either illustrate the concepts in specific terms or generalized ways of thinking, but do not in themselves provide a definition of design thinking. It seems we are very good at delineating the key elements of design thinking (Andrea Yip), the ways of approaching design problems (Roger Martin) or defining the types of problems that design thinking works best at addressing (see Richard Buchanan), but we are less good at saying what it is.
Perhaps we are left with the paradoxical answer and question posed by Faith No More
What is it? It’s it.
Sudhir Desai has argued that we need terms that have little or no prior meaning to define what design thinking is, lest we risk creating more confusion resulting from pre-conceptions like the words “design” (design what?) and “thinking” (isn’t it about ‘doing’ things too?). Taken further, this argument suggests that we will not find a suitable definition using the existing terms.
I am not so sure. There is another road to take. Consider DT’s close peer, systems thinking. Although not uncontested, many systems thinkers and scientists agree that systems thinking refers to a class of theories, methods and tools that address systems-level issues in a coherent manner. Complexity science, system dynamics, soft-systems methodologies, and cybernetics are among the fields that fall under the broader systems thinking rubric. This organization is best articulated in Michael Jackson’s 2003 book on Systems Thinking, cited in the Censemaking library.
Another good example (also in the library) is the work by evaluators Bob Williams and Richard Hummelbrunner on systems concepts in action. In this concise and articulate work, the authors illustrate the various concepts that fall within the larger realm of systems thinking in a manner that allows people to appreciate the breadth and depth of the concept and its multiple ways of understanding systems.
Design thinking may be ready to make the leap to this style of conceptualization. Rather than seek to kill the term and replace it with something else, as some have argued, perhaps its time to expand it while putting the effort forward towards articulating its components and the relations between them rather than seeking to come up with a gold-standard definition that suits everyone. The latter idea is one that has already suggested its doomed to fail.
Using this example, design thinking might be ripe to be re-defined as an umbrella term to support concepts like human factors design, plan-do-study-act approaches to change, and strategic foresight. Rather than design thinking be conceived of as a specific thing, it might be better off described as a set of things of which design and thinking are two of the central, unifying features.
Leaving my first full day of school, I walked a classmate to the subway and we discussed this fuzziness with the term and, prior to us parting said “it really is making things with some intent behind it, isn’t it?” to which the response was “yeah, pretty much “. Behind what seemed like a pat answer on both of our parts is a sense that we know design thinking is real and offers something of value that other concepts do not. That is the reason why the search for a definition is important and why this is not just an academic exercise in semantics, but a larger journey for understanding the role creativity plays in finding and addressing problematic issues and how we can better tackle them all.
So perhaps the new definition for design thinking now is: it is what creative people seek to find a definition for.
Like this:
The Poetics of Insight and Innovation
Posted: September 2, 2011 Filed under: innovation | Tags: contemplative inquiry, design, knowledge translation, lectio devina, meditation, mindfulness Leave a comment »
Communicating more or communicating more deeply
It’s probably rare that you have asked for more information in your work if you’re a health promoter, scientist or designer. Information is everywhere and, too often, in professional worlds, this information is presented in volumous tomes that are devoid of much of the energy that went into creating the knowledge in the first place. This is a problem for knowledge translation.
Poetry offers us insight to worlds that few other means of orality — written or otherwise. In 21st century Western countries, poetry is far less something considered worthy of serious study and is much more a tool of the romantics. We may learn about poetry in English class, but few of take it seriously enough to pursue beyond the halls of academe or a hipster-infused evening of spoken word at a local club once in a while.
That’s too bad.
Catholic scholars have used a process called Lectio Devina, a meditation on a specific phrase, to gain insight. Lectio (or Lexio) Devina involves taking a single phrase and meditating on its meaning at length. What is remarkable is how much information one can get from a single sentence or phrase. After considerable reflection, the multiple-layered storylines emerge and the options for
Consider what kind of knowledge we could glean is we took a more poetic approach to our work. By crafting it in depth, soaking into a single section, we have the ability to derive a more intense picture of what we are looking at.
Take a research paper. A published report or manuscript typically represents years of effort in conceiving an idea, gathering resources, undertaking a study and doing the work to transform data into information and into knowledge. Yet, the final product — the manuscript — is over viewed with relatively little appreciation. How often have we truly pondered and soaked up an article in depth? Really crticially questioned its contents and marvelled at the methodology, findings and recommendations in a manner that gave us the pause we took? This means going beyond p-values, ’N’, or saturation points to the heart of what the meaning is behind the article.
Or what about re-imagining what the paper could look like from the very start, much like Andrea Yip did with a recent paper of ours transforming a standard manuscript into a more artful work.
As authors, how often have we written something that was worth pondering and not just reflecting the minimum requirements or social conventions for publication?
As editors, do we encourage the kind of writing style and narrative formation that allows research and evidence to be displayed in a manner that encourages deeper reflection and not just represent an addition to the evidence that will be used without broader appreciation for the context from whence it came?
As publishers, do we create a space where these stories can be told? Or are we simply trying to add to the volume of literature, getting the kind of quick-bite science published without a sense of what it might mean beyond the study being reported and in the present moment?
As managers, teachers, researchers, and scholars are we taking space when offered and encouraging others to do the same?
How does our work pass when viewed from the perspective of Lexio Devina? Imagine if the research we did was greater, richer in its depth that begged us to question the phenomena of study in sufficient depth that we wouldn’t have to resort to reading hundreds of articles to gain what feels like a small crumb of knowledge.
There may be much in poetry, with its ability to say so much in so little space, that we can learn from. I don’t see haiku’s on randomized controlled trials anytime soon, but imagine staying up late at night reading and contemplating a research paper not because you had to go through it, but because you wanted to. You wished to savour the content, feel the words and enjoy the poetry of understanding? What would your work look like?
What might it produce differently than we produce now? Might it also reduce the overwhelming volume of information that we are simply unequipped to fully contemplate and synthesize?
Let’s try and find out. As we start a weekend devoted to celebrating labour, let’s contemplate what it might mean to labour differently and value what we’ve done a little more than we do now.
Design Thinking and the Metaphors of Science
Posted: August 28, 2011 Filed under: complexity, design thinking | Tags: Andrea Yip, chemistry, complexity, design, developmental design, learning, science 3 Comments »
The Chemistry of Creation
There is a certain way in which things come together to create a successful design (or relationship) that is often chalked up to “chemistry”. But design chemistry could mean something both literal and evolving just like biological organisms if we take the concept to its fullest.
Metaphors are commonly used in tackling complex problems. The uniqueness of the situation, the level of detail of the manner by which the influencing factors coalesce, and the multidisciplinary ways of seeing the problem in the first place all present a problem of language, thus using oblique comparators can often fill the gap.
Science and mathematics have the advantage of being closer to ‘universal’ languages than many of the other forms of communication we share as a species (Leibniz’s ideas notwithstanding). They are less (not completely) influenced by cultural variations and local differences and can be shared globally. It is for this reason that the the prospect for a means of communicating concepts like design through science has appeal. As Andrea Yip has pointed out, design itself can be transformed into chemistry using the periodic table as a guide to serve as a more universal metaphor for understanding the way design thinking is experienced and practiced.
Chemistry is the study and creation of the bonds of the universe. More specifically, it is:
the science of matter, especially its properties, structure, composition, behavior, reactions, interactions and the changes it undergoes.
As a metaphor for design thinking it works beautifully. Through the Periodic Table of Design Thinking we see an attempt to lay out the properties of design thinking, map out the structure and explain their composition. Through practice and reflection we will see how these compounds play out in the design process.
Another scientific metaphor that takes up the charge from where chemistry leaves off is from developmental biology:
the study of the process by which organisms grow and develop
In the case of this metaphor, design thinking is the organism. Just as an organism, made of chemical compounds interacting over time, evolves, so too does the design process and the thinking that comes with it. In this case, metaphors like those proposed by Ms Yip and the concept of developmental design fit harmoniously.
Designing for and with complexity requires attention to a dynamism that can be lost if one takes the approach that product development happens at only stage of its life cycle. For many products this might be appropriate, but it falls short when we describe social design issues such as creating policies or social programs such as those found in health and education. I’ve referred to this concept as developmental design. Developmental design, like developmental evaluation, implies an evolved, dynamic approach to generating knowledge or outcomes and while I only loosely conceived of it in a way that matched developmental biology, it may be time to revisit that more intently. Designing developmentally means working through the design process on an ongoing basis, like perpetual beta in the software industry. It means evolving strategies for adaptation rather than solving problems because true solutions to wicked problems are often more dream than reality.
Taking the chemistry metaphor, it means that the ingredients, dosage and combinatorial mixes change over time in the production of a new compound or design. They may require catalysts — such as the inclusion of new perspectives or a particular discipline — to provoke certain reactions and move ideas into new space. It may also involve the same type of intervention from the designer to bring these chemicals to life. The chemist is not removed from her creation.
All of these are metaphors, yet they provide us with a means of taking the messiness of the language, something discussed in previous posts, to a new place until we can find the language that is most appropriate. Until that time, science might offer one of the better means of conveying design, complexity and the creativity that comes when we apply them both to generating products and services.
Photo Chemistry! by matfred used under Creative Commons Licence from Flickr.
The Science of Design Thinking
Posted: August 27, 2011 Filed under: art & design, design thinking | Tags: Andrea Yip, Buckminster Fuller, design, design science, design thinking, health promotion, Nigel Cross, periodic table of design., science, visualization 10 Comments »My colleague and design collaborator has proposed a way of viewing design thinking as something akin to a periodic table of elements. Beyond just posing a brilliant way of explicating and organizing the multiple facets of design thinking, Andrea Yip has shown the world that there is much we can learn from science, visualization and how they both apply to design.
Last weekend a group of design thinkers got together to discuss the concept of design thinking and what it means. The conference, summarized in another post, explored the language of design thinking, the need for visual thinking, and the importance of understanding the context of design and design thinking.
While this was going on in Vancouver, another designer (my colleague, Andrea Yip) was back in Toronto taking these same ideas independently and transforming them into an organizational structure that should create much room for thought among those interested in design thinking. The model she has developed is one not based on areas that are familiar to design – architecture, art, graphic design, business strategy, or engineering — but science.
Designers often speak of a need for multidisciplinarity in their work. While laudable, this commonly refers to the inclusion of multiple perspectives on a design problems from within the broad field of design. It is indeed rare to find such multidisciplinary teams comprised of scientists. Andrea has turned that upside down by proposing a model of design thinking based on the periodic table of elements. The table, shown below, is a first draft, but a highly sophisticated one and something that ought to be taken seriously.
Periodic Table of Design (version 1.0) by Andrea L. Yip on DrawedIt
By using the structure and format of a bedrock of science, Andrea has shown that there are ways of thinking about design that transcend the boundaries that we often unconsciously bind around it. This new model inverses the terms posed by the creative arts or the applied disciplines of engineering or architecture, each that have made enormous contributions to the field, yet all rely on a level of subjectivity, and replaces them with a model based on a more universal language: science.
Science and design are uneasy partners. Some, like Nigel Cross, have pointed to the challenges with the use of terms design science and the science of design, while others, like Buckminster Fuller, use the term design and science in ways that are open to challenge from those who identify as practicing scientists. Ms Yip, a designer trained in science (biology) and social science (health promotion) fields, sees things in ways that transcend these perspectives to propose using science as a guide to inform the way we understand design.
In doing so, she provides a bridge between the worlds of science, with its emphasis on evidence and strict adherence to protocols, and design, with its flexible, rapidly evolving, yet often non-specific methods. Indeed, Andrea’s blog showcases many examples of how design and fields like health promotion fit together and differ. It is time for both designers and scientists to listen more intently to this conversation.
By using methods, theories, analogies and conceptual models that extend our thinking beyond the realm of conventional design and science, we offer opportunities to make things better — and in doing so shape our world for the greatest benefit for us all.
Andrea’s blog is called Drawed and can be visited at: http://drawedit.wordpress.com/ . She welcomes feedback on her ideas.
And if the Periodic Table of Design is not enough, Andrea’s also developed a prototype set of trading cards based on the table for those more inclined to school-yard forms of collaborating around design that are also up on her blog.
For more dialogue on design thinking, stay tuned to this space and the Twitter feed @d_bracket for the upcoming launch of the Design Thinking Foundations project and corresponding site. And wouldn’t you know? Andrea Yip is the coordinator of that project.
Extra-Sensory Knowledge Translation and Design
Posted: August 18, 2011 Filed under: art & design, psychology | Tags: arts, creativity, design, expression, innovation, knowledge translation, sensory perception 1 Comment »
A new type of extra sensing perception
There is a myth that we only use 10% of our brain, but we certainly don’t use the fullest array of creative means of communication at our disposal. What if designers, health promoters and those seeking to communicate better started considering a more sensory-forward way of sharing what they know to each other?
“Pheromones!”
“Pheromones?” I said.
“Yes. Think about how much we convey by pheromones?” my colleague said. “Imagine what we could explain if we knew what they told us?”
Indeed.
So started a conversation between three of us faculty at the annual Center for Contemplative Mind and Society annual faculty curriculum development program. The conversation was prompted by a performance by New York-based dancer and fellow contemplative Yin Mei the previous night that we found bereft of words to fully explain. The performance, and our conversation, The dance and movement performance blended film, sound, music, dance and kabuki-style masks in an interactive dance studio environment. If I wrote any more and I wouldn’t be doing the performance justice.
Here were three people who were literally involved in a performance virtually unable to share a common description of what they saw, even if it was the same thing. We three were stuck trying to come up with words to describe what we had experienced. Words, feelings, text all failed. And that is how we came up with our conversation.
Our discussion has inspired reflection on how much information we neglect and the types of information that we privilege when we design things and communicate what we know to the world around us.
Pheromones are a means of communication available to us to use. Yet, we don’t, nor have the knowledge of how to use them. We might develop an instantaneous connection with someone — even fall in love (or lust) — for reasons that make no rational sense to our brain, but it happens. We don’t have the sensory intelligence to make sense of the signals we receive, but we nonetheless transmit and receive a lot more than we are aware of.
When we seek to develop a design for something, good practice involves engaging a diversity of perspectives to generate ideas that create new knowledge, best suit the communication of those ideas, and develop those ideas into products, services and policies that best help people. However, our means of communicating these still remain with spoken and written words.
A touch can convey information that is immeasurable. A look, a feeling, a smell, a brush of a hand are all sensory means of conveying information and learning about our world. As we seek to tackle the kind of ineffable, yet persistent and pernicious problems that complexity introduces, new ways to express and share our understandings are necessary. There are simply times when words won’t or cannot do it.
The practical application of this sensory-based approach to design is not a simple venture. Western culture is not very kinesthetic making a lot of touch-based collaboration problematic. Add in the very real issues that those who’ve experience physical trauma or abuse, and such application of touch must be handled with care. But just as words can be weapons or means to joy, so too can touch if done with compassion, skill and sensitivity. Artful methods like dance, sculpture, or video could be means of communicating ideas that simple words cannot.
What if we could cultivate the means to be intimate with these methods in the service of better design and communication? What kind of design would that look like? Could we engage a much broader range of people into the discussion? Right now, we privilege those who can write and speak well, those who are forward (i.e., extroverted) and verbal, at the expense of those who might have as much to offer, but for whom writing, reading or oral communication might not be their strongest method of communication, yet that is all they are given.
We are more than our words and we can be more than what those words convey. It seems time to start taking this a little more seriously and seeing where it goes. Who knows? Maybe the best ideas are just a painting or dance away.
Design for Social Norms or Social Change?
Posted: August 6, 2011 Filed under: behaviour change, design thinking, health promotion, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, creativity, danah boyd, design, emergence, health inequity, health promotion, Keith Sawyer, social change, social design, social justice, Social media Leave a comment »
Social change or social norm?
Designing for how people live is part of good design practice, but what about designing for the way people could be? What does it mean to design for social norms and what role does design have in changing them?
Media scholar and youth researcher danah boyd recently wrote on the need for designers to consider social norms as part of their media creations. The post received a lot of attention in the mediasphere and came on the heels of another interesting post by Keith Sawyer on Chinese social norms and the Tiger Mom phenomenon (that I also wrote on a while back). Returning to boyd’s argument, she makes the case that designers don’t dictate the behaviour of people in the systems they create, the people tthemselves do:
Social norms aren’t designed into the system. They don’t emerge by telling people how they should behave. And they don’t necessarily follow market logic. Social norms emerge as people – dare we say “users” – work out how a technology makes sense and fits into their lives. Social norms take hold as people bring their own personal values and beliefs to a system and help frame how future users can understand the system. And just as “first impressions matter” for social interactions, I cannot underestimate the importance of early adopters. Early adopters configure the technology in critical ways and they play a central role in shaping the social norms that surround a particular system.
What boyd is arguing (using my words and concepts from complexity science) is that emergence and path dependency shape design’s manifestation in the social realm. In technology-oriented systems, the ‘early adopters’ are the ones who set the stage for how the next wave of users interact with the system and boyd points to examples from Friendster about how attempts to control its community helped drive people away from the site (ultimately leading to its demise).
People don’t like to be configured. They don’t like to be forcibly told how they should use a service. They don’t want to be told to behave like the designers intended them to be. Heavy-handed policies don’t make for good behavior; they make for pissed off users.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t design to encourage certain behaviors. Of course you should. The whole point of design is to help create an environment where people engage in the most fruitful and healthy way possible. But designing a system to encourage the growth of healthy social norms is fundamentally different than coming in and forcefully telling people how they must behave. No one likes being spanked, especially not a crowd of opinionated adults.
The focus here is more on social media and online spaces, but the argument could be made for the same thing in social design. But unlike information technology, which favours a very particular group of people, social design has the potential to intentionally engage specific populations. Using boyd’s argument, one might assert that much of the technology we use from Foursquare to Instagram to the iPhone itself is shaped by the under-40 set of educated, middle class, largely white male hipster knowledge workers as they are typically the earliest visible adopters for such technologies (even if that is changing) .
In this model those with the most power, privilege and social capital at the outset greatly determine what comes next. This might be OK for technology, but is highly problematic for social justice and social inequities. A health promoting social design has the potential to change this by seeding that early adoption cycle with different people with potentially different values to shape outcomes not defined by a narrow set of social groups.
Keith Sawyer’s article points to the social norming around Chinese parenting (as defined through Amy Chua’s Tiger Mom) and how it clashes with a particular type of parenting model that dominates in the United States and our ideas of creativity. In describing his reaction to a recent review of Chua’s book and its contents, Sawyer points to the unease it creates in him when comparing norms and what it means for creativity and innovation:
I ought to be lined up with all of the horrified American parents who hate this book. But I just can’t side with them on this one. Creativity is hard work, and you don’t get creativity without paying your dues. No one magically learns how to play piano or violin (I’m reminded of the old joke: “Do you play the violin?” “I don’t know, I haven’t tried it yet.”) And as Amy Chua points out, there’s nothing like the joy that comes from being able to do something well, knowing that you earned it with hours, months, and years of hard work. As a child, I took piano lessons for eight years, and now thirty years later it’s a major source of joy in my life.
Chua’s parenting is an issue because it doesn’t fit with the dominant social norms, just as the self-esteem-at-all-cost approach that Sawyer rightly exposes as problematic in its own right would be in China.
These are designed systems. Just as we create path dependencies for one set of values, so too can we do the same for others and with other people. The focus on the outcomes of systems rather than their design is problematic if we want change. Starting with design and values at the outset, being conscious of who we invite in and how we engage them and by remaining contemplative about how these systems unfold and the emergent patterns that shape them, designers of all stripes may be better positioned to create social change rather than just for social norms.
Visualizing Evaluation and Feedback
Posted: August 3, 2011 Filed under: art & design, evaluation | Tags: art, contemplative inquiry, data visualization, design, program evaluation, research, utilization-focused evaluation 1 Comment »
Seeing Ourselves in the Mirror of Feedback
Evaluation data is not always made accessible and part of the reason is that it doesn’t accurately reflect the world that people see. To be more effective at making decisions based on data, creating the mirrors that allow us to visualize things in ways that reflect what programs see may be key.
Program evaluation is all about feedback and generating the kind of data that can provide actionable instruction to improve, sustain or jettison program activities. It helps determine whether a program is doing what it claims to be doing, what kind of processes are underway within the context of the program, and what is generally “going on” when people engage with a particular activity. Whether a program actually chooses to use the data is another matter, but at least it is there for people to consider.
A utlization-focused approach to evaluation centres on making data actionable and features a set of core activities (PDF) that help boost the likelihood that data will actually be used. Checklists such as the one referenced from IDRC do a great job of showing the complicated array of activities that go into making useful, user-centred, actionable evaluation plans and data. It isn’t as simple as expressing intent to use evaluations, much more needs to go into the data in the first place, but also into the readiness of the organization in using the data.
What the method of UFE and the related research on its application does not do is provide explicit, prescriptive methods for data collection and presentation. If it did, data visualization ought to be considered front and centre in the discussion.
Why?
If the data is complex, the ability for us to process the information generated from an evaluation might be limited if we are expecting to connect disparate concepts. David McCandless has made a career of taking very large, complex topics and finding ways to visualize results to provide meaningful narratives that people can engage with. His TED talk and books provide examples of how to use graphic design and data analytics to develop new visual stories through data that transcend the typical regression model or pie chart.
There is also a bias we have towards telling people things, rather than allowing them to discover things for themselves. Robert Butler makes the case for the “Colombo” approach to inviting people to discover the truth in data in the latest issue of the Economist’s Intelligent Life. He writes:
What we need to do is abandon the “information deficit” model. That’s the one that goes: I know something, you don’t know it, once you know what I know you will grasp the seriousness of the situation and change your behaviour accordingly. Greens should dump that model in favour of suggesting details that actually catch people’s interest and allow the other person to get involved.
Art — or at least visual data — is a means of doing this. By inviting conversation about data — much like art does — we invite participation, analysis and engagement with the material that not only makes it more meaningful, but also more likely to be used. It is hard to look at some of the visualizations at places like
At the very least, evaluators might want to consider ways to visualize data simply to improve the efficiency of their communications. To that end, consider Hans Rosling’s remarkably popular video produced by the BBC showing the income and health distributions of 200 countries over 200 years in four minutes. Try that with a series of graphs.
Health for Design
Posted: July 14, 2011 Filed under: design thinking, health promotion | Tags: conference, design, design thinking, health Leave a comment »The Design4Health conference is on this week bringing together designers from different fields together with health policy, practice and research professionals. While the focus is on the relationship between design and health, it is also inspiring thoughts of how health itself is designed.
This week the first Design4Health conference is being held in Sheffield, UK. The conference attendees includes designers looking at interactions, service, interiors, architecture, fashion, and industrial areas of design. Mixed with is group are physicians, physiotherapists, psychologists sociologists, health promotion practitioners, artists, and policy researchers. This mix represents much of what makes the design and health intersection so exciting, but also the (somewhat) predictable “Tower of Babel” with many disciplines working to be understood by the others.
The language issues have been relatively minor, but on one level the more complicated area of confusion is not where one might guess (the application of design to health issues), but rather the understanding of health itself relative to design.
To illustrate, much has been presented on the way design has re-fashioned devices for those with some form of physical disability. From wheelchair designs that are aesthetically pleasing and light to female portable urinals to address issues of incontinence and the social issues women face trying to relieve themselves in non-toiletted spaces, the products being discussed have shown what some design thinking can do to potentially improve people’s lives. But what if those lives don’t need improvement in the way we think?
Consider the language of health in popular use, which focuses on the ability to control conditions and both be free of physical discomfort and mental stress. These are deficit-oriented models that focus on what must be absent or is undesirable, rather than what a person does with their life and their capabilities to act on their values and interests. What if we viewed health differently?
Further, what happens to design when we focus it’s talents on alleviating pain and discomfort as defined by some standard that is both ideal and unattainable at the expense of promoting personal wellness as defined by the person living their life? What we’ve not talked about is the idea that someone with a substandard medical device might have creative ways to live a life where the sub-standard product becomes nearly invisible. This is not to suggest that we lower the bar, but it does beg the question why we are so focused on ‘problems’ of a particular perceived nature and not opportunities?
We also seem to be poor at reflecting the diversity in the public and their relationship to their bodies, minds and lives that we embrace in our attendance at our conferences. Just as we come from different disciplines, so too do people’s sense of what is a ‘problem’ and what contribution design has to addressing that problem. This is about designing health, not the design for health.
