Tag: Finland

behaviour changesocial systems

The Design Paradox of Democracy

on October 9, 2016

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The series on paradox continues as the matter of politics, democracy and the power of the people get puts under the spotlight as we consider what it means to empower, express power and re-claim power in this post-liberal, globalized, information age and how we can do better, by design. 

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time – Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill’s often paraphrased quote was uttered in the British House of Commons at a time when Britain (and Europe) was literally and figuratively rebuilding itself after horrible continental war that killed millions of people and left an echo that is still firmly felt today. The European Union and its various associated trade and cooperation agreements were, in part, a designed solution aimed at bringing the continent closer together as a means of preventing the kinds of conflicts that had ravaged Europe for centuries. And yet the European Union is just one of many examples of a situation where enhanced cooperation through democracy is creating some of the conflicts it was meant to solve.

Democracy has different forms, but ultimately is about individuals having the freedom and means to choose their own path on collective matters. It sounds fair and reasonable, but as Churchill knew too well: it has a lot of problems associated with it and they are ignored at our peril

On matters of complexity, these problems become all the more clear.

Complexity by referendum

Earlier this month we saw what many thought would be the end to the 50-year war between the FARC rebels and the Colombian government as a peace agreement was made and put before the people for a vote, where it was defeated to the surprise of the world. How could this happen? many asked after so much effort when into the agreement — something that many thought would never become reality. The answers can be found looking deeper into the rationale why people who consistently and uniformly wanted peace also demand fairness and justice and for many that wasn’t seen in the agreement. Add in real-world issues of weather, logistics, voter turnout and you have something that may have partly earned Colombia’s president a Nobel Peace Prize disintegrate before the world’s eyes.

Referenda are blunt instruments used to shape complex social phenomena. On matters of identity politics we’ve seen relatively narrow defeats of proposed separatist/independence referenda in Quebec (Canada) in the mid-1990’s and in Scotland (United Kingdom) in 2014 . This year, we saw another separation-focused referendum put before the Scots and the rest of the United Kingdom and it was narrowly voted for, hence ‘Brexit‘.

No matter what your perspective on any of these initiatives, there were substantial costs and benefits to be weighed for each decision and those were all bundled under either “for” or “against”, which is part of the problem. We have a very complex set of issues treated using a tool that is both inappropriately simple and rational when neither of those conditions are (solely) present in the problem itself.

Complexity tools: the heart and the brain

In the United States presidential race, Donald Trump is showing that facts, truth, ethics, morals or integrity don’t matter as much as many think when it comes to who should lead the nation. That he is even the Republican candidate for president in itself should be shocking to anyone, no matter what your political leaning is, when you consider the vast litany of things he says (and has said) and does (and has done). Yet, this man who recently admitted to statements caught on tape that confessed to assaulting women, still has support among 38 per cent of decided voters two days after the video of that confession was released — a number that is just four points lower than Hillary Clinton, his opponent.

Do Americans not care about all these things? Do they love Trump so much that they are simply blind to his flaws, perhaps thinking he’s just misunderstood? Are they stupid? The answer is: (mostly), no. So why? Canadian newsmagazine Macleans ran a cover story on Americans who had thrown their support behind Donald Trump and found surprisingly nuanced thinking underlying their choice architecture on the matter. But what struck me was this reported felt sense that something was wrong, had been that way for a long time, and that Donald Trump brought an entirely new way to approach an old problem

What often comes through in these accounts is a feeling that something isn’t right and a resonance for a person or group that is reflecting something that comes closer to mirroring that feeling. We respond strongly to mirroring as a form of social persuasion and relating to one another. Human behaviour is this complex weave of social, cognitive, biological and inter- and intra-personal influences and too often we focus our energy on just the cognitive (rational) parts of this relating when it comes to change-making. The thinking is that if we just convince people of things using the best evidence, we’ll win the day.

You see this with Trump. “Surely this is will sink his campaign” or “he’s done, now” and phrases of that kind have been uttered now for 18 months and he’s still here with nearly 2/5 of the polled population behind him.

What Trump is doing is bringing to light a manifestation of that felt-sense of injustice that people are experiencing and they see a shock to the system as a remedy for changing that system.

Systems change: shock and awe vs slow and steady

As a recent cover story in the Economist in a defence of globalization pointed out “Since the 184os advocates of free trade have known that, though the great majority benefit, some lose out. Too little has been done to help these people“. Trade deals are a mix of both shock and awe and slow and steady, which make them very tricky things to evaluate. The shock comes with the rapid change in policy from one day to the next, the slowness comes with the impact on the system as certain industries fade, others emerge and yet others adapt. Whether one agrees with any particular deal or not, it’s undeniable some benefit more than others and what hurts is when people feel they lose, unfairly.

This is a matter of justice. This feeling of justice is what these referenda — and elections, which in the case of the United States’ political system is ultimately a referendum on the candidate for President — are all about.

justice |ˈjəstəs| , noun

1 just behaviour or treatment: a concern for justice, peace, and genuine respect for people.

• the quality of being fair and reasonable: the justice of his case.

On social matters, justice isn’t black and white. Social issues are multilayered, contextual, and dynamic and referenda treat this complexity more as static. It’s why change in complex systems is better done through a slower, less dramatic, but persistent set of actions connected together than through a dramatic shock. In the case of Brexit, Colombia and the US election the issues that people are complaining about are large, persistent ones and those aren’t easily rationalized, but they are felt. This is the emergence of slow change, and its powerful and is often disguised as a shock. The two are siblings and live together when it comes to complexity and paradox.

Even on matters of crime and punishment, there is a real disconnect between the logic of a a sentence or decision and the experience of those around them. Those who commit a crime and their victims may have their lives completely transformed because of one moment of poor decision making that isn’t greatly changed after ‘justice is served’. There is still that cauldron of emotions — regret, anger, loss, confusion, resentment — that can linger well past the term of sentence or the financial compensation, if any is received. Yet, justice is often viewed as a decision, a single event, meted out through rational argument, application of law and rules, deference to evidence.

This isn’t how people experience it.

Getting out of our head

This need to feel and not just think about the issues one of the reasons an approach like sociodrama, used by change leaders like John Wenger, can be a useful tool as it allows not only for thinking about an issue, but feeling it and doing so within a social context. Another approach is the dialogic design method that my colleague Peter Jones has been undertaking through his design practice and DwD events in Toronto.  Bodystorming is another approach that makes design feel more real and less ‘in the head’ and more ‘in the body’.

Designers at their best know this connection between heart and head and body well. The bodymind is a guide. Legendary Finnish product designer Alvar Alto designed a three-legged stool that by most rational accounts is one of the worst ideas ever for a piece of furniture, yet it’s style and utility was embraced and is still made today more than 80 years after it was created. Alto’s approach was rooted in how people saw themselves, their lives, their environments and that philosophy was what contributed to the design even if there are many other ways of doing a stool that are more stable and functional. He got his designs out of his head and into the world he was designing for.

If we are to expect to do anything about our democracy our designs have to be better  at allowing us to communicate, decide, and influence the world around us that ensures the heart and head are heard and justice not just served, but lived. In doing so, we may still find ourselves wanting to make similar choices about staying or leaving or on certain other policies, but we might be better at asking the right questions at the start and also avoiding decisions that risk putting someone like the man pictured above into positions of global power.

Photo credit: Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore. Thanks for offering your images to the world, Gage.

art & designcomplexitydesign thinkingevaluationsystems thinking

Design Thinking, Design Making

on August 13, 2013
Designing and thinking

Designing and thinking

Critics of design thinking suggest that it neglects the craft of products while advocates suggest that it extends itself beyond the traditional constraints of design’s focus on the brief. What separates the two are the implications associated with making something and the question: can we be good designer thinkers without being good design makers?

A review of the literature and discussions on design thinking finds a great deal of debate on whether it is a fad, a source of innovation salvation, or whether it is a term that fails to take the practice of design seriously.  While prototyping — and particularly rapid prototyping — is emphasized there is little attention to the manner in which that object is crafted. There are no standards of practice for design thinking and the myriad settings in which it could be applied — everything from business to education to the military to healthcare — indicate that there is unlikely to be a single model that fits. But should there be some form of standards?

While design thinking encourages prototyping there is remarkably little in the literature on the elements of design that focus on the made product. Unlike design where there is at least some sense of what makes a product good or not, there are no standards for what ought to emerge from design thinking. Dieter Rams, among the most vocal critics of the term design thinking, has written 10 principles for good design that can be applied to a designed product. These principles include a focus on innovation, sustainability, aesthetics, and usability.

These principles can be debated, but they at least offer something others can comment on or use as foil for critique. Design thinking lacks the same correlate. Is that a good (or necessary) thing?

Designing for process and outcome

Unlike design itself, design thinking is not tied to a particular product profile; it can be used to create physical products as easily as policies and programs. Design thinking is a process that is centred largely on complex, ambiguous problems where success has no pre-defined outcome and the journey has no set pathway. It is for this reason that concepts like best practices are inappropriate for use in design thinking and complex problem solving. Design thinking offers a great deal of conceptual freedom without the pressure to produce a specific outcome that might be proscribed by a design brief.

Yet, design thinking is not design. Certainly many designers draw on design thinking in their work, but there is no requirement to create products using that way of approaching design problems. Likewise, there is little demand for design thinking to produce products that would fit what Dieter Rams suggests are hallmark features of good design. Indeed, we can use design thinking to create many possible futures without a requirement to actually manifest any of them.

Design requires an outcome and one that can be judged by a client (or customer or user or donor) as satisfactory, exemplary or otherwise. While what is considered ‘good design’ might be debated, there is little debate that if a client does not like what is produced that product it is a failure on some level*. Yet, if design thinking produces a product (a design?), what is the source of the excellence or failure? And does it matter if anything is produced at all?

Herein lies a fundamental dilemma of design and design thinking: how do we know when we are doing good or great work?

Can we have good design thinking and poor design making?

The case of the military

Roger Martin, writing in Design Observer, highlighted how design thinking was being applied to the US Army through the adaptation of its Field Operations Manual. This new version was based on principles of complexity science and systems thinking, which encourage adaptive, responsive unit actions rather than relying solely on top-down directives. It was an innovative step and design thinking helped contribute to the development of this new Field Manual.

On discussing the process of developing the new manual (FM-05) Martin writes:

In the end, FM5-0 defines design as “a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe complex, ill-structured problems and develop approaches to solve them” (Page 3.1), which is a pretty good definition of design. Ancker and Flynn go on to argue that design “underpins the exercise of battle command within the operations process, guiding the iterative and often cyclic application of understanding, visualizing, and describing” and that it should be “practiced continuously throughout the operations process.” (p. 15-16)

The manual’s development involved design thinking and the process in which it is enacted is based on applying design thinking to field operations. As unseemly as it may be to some, the US Army’s application of design thinking is notable and something that can be learned from. But what is the outcome?

Does a design thinking soldier become better at killing their enemy? Or does their empathy for the situation — their colleagues, opponents and neutral parties — increase their sensitivities to the multiplicities of combat and treat it as a wicked problem? What is the outcome in which design thinking is contributing to and how can that be evaluated in its myriad consequences intended or otherwise? In the case of the US Army it might not be so clear.

Craft

One of terms conspicuously absent from the dialogue on design thinking is craft. In a series of interviews with professionals doing design thinking it was noted that those trained as designers — makers — often referred to ‘craft’ and ‘materials’ in describing design thinking. Those who were not designers, did not**. No assessment can be made about the quality of the design thinking that each participant did (that was out of scope of the study), but it is interesting to note how concepts traditionally associated with making — craft and materials and studios — do not have much parallel discussion in design thinking.

Should they?

One reason to consider craft is that it can be assessed with at least some independence. There is an ability to judge the quality of materials and the product integrity associated with a designed object according to some standards that can be applied somewhat consistently — if imperfectly — from reviewer to reviewer. For programs and policies, this could be done by looking at research evidence or through developmental evaluation of those products. Developmental design, an approach I’ve written about before, could be the means in which evaluation data, rapid prototyping, design excellence and evidence could come together to potentially create more robust design thinking products.

We have little correlates with design thinking assessment.

The danger with looking at evaluation and design thinking is falling into the trap of devising and applying rigid metrics, best practices and the like to domains of complexity (and where design thinking resides) where they tend to fail catastrophically. Yet, there is an equal danger that by not aspiring to vision what great design thinking looks like we produce results that not only fail (which is often a necessary and positive step in innovation if there is learning from it), but are true failures in the sense that they don’t produce excellent products. It is indeed possible to create highly collaborative, design thinking-inspired programs, policies and products that are dull, ineffective and uninspiring.

Where we go and how we get there is a problem for design and design thinking. Applying them both to each other might be a way to create the very products we seek.

* It is interesting to note that Finnish designer Alvar Aalto’s 1933 three-legged children’s stool has been considered both a design flop from a technical standpoint (it’s unstable given its three legs) and one of the biggest commercial successes for Artek, its manufacturer.

** The analysis of the findings of the project are still ongoing. Updates and results will be published on the Design Thinking Foundations project site in the coming months, where this post will be re-published.

art & designdesign thinkingenvironmentinnovation

Design / Time

on July 11, 2013
Creating cultures of design in space and time

Creating cultures of design in space and time

Design’s relationship with space is complex and well documented in the literature on architecture, interior design, and product innovation. The relationship with time is much more complicated particularly with the rise in popularity of the concept of design thinking.

The discourse on design thinking largely focuses on applying the cognitive patterns and creative techniques more common within the design disciplines to new areas like business, education, and social innovation.

Among the central features of design thinking as it is discussed in the literature is rapid prototyping. The concept builds on various forms of brainstorming and ideation and is aimed at providing a reasonably unfiltered look at ideas and then quickly assembling mock-ups of these ideas to achieve some form of working model to test.

Design group IDEO and its leaders past and present like David Kelley and Tim Brown have done much to advance this perspective. Design scholars and practitioners like Jon Kolko at AC4D have furthered this thinking into specific methodologies used to train designers and social innovators.

I spent much of June touring Italy and Finland, two major global centres of design and came away with many reflections on the role time plays in all of it. In doing so, I realized how ill-considered time is when discussing design thinking.

A read through most of the popular works on design thinking or to view documentaries or reports on design thinking finds great emphasis on the use of rapid, quick-burst ideation and development. To be sure, this is not the only way to proceed, but it is certainly given the lions’ share of attention. This makes sense in a world where communications and product development cycles are increasingly moving faster.

Applications of design thinking to product (or service) development often employ a model based on the charrette, a concentrated workshop-style event that can last between a half day through to many weeks. Having participated in, facilitated and convened many of these in my work I can attest that the majority of such events are closer to the half-day version than the 7 or 8 day one that is favoured by the National Charrette Institute when employed for social planning.

The argument is that people are busy and the pressures to come up with immediate responses to problems are high. It is the quintessential argument of our time — the present shock that Douglas Rushkoff writes about — that we need to act now, and do it fast. But both Italy and Finland are testaments to what happens when you spend considerable time in developing ideas and models rather than seeking fast solutions.

A lasting architecture

A lasting architecture

 

Thinking to my last post on floods, I was reminded of the situation of Calgary’s Scotiabank Saddledome arena, which is in need of serious repair at a time when its main tenants, the Calgary Flames hockey club, is seeking a new building. The Saddledome was built in 1983 and was already being viewed as near the end of its run before the June flood hit that city. In Rome I visited the Colosseum (above) , still standing after more than 2000 years despite earthquakes, neglect and many wars in between. It was built to last.

Another impressive architectural highlight in Rome is the Pantheon, another architectural gem that illustrates longer-term thinking in the design, construction and maintenance of a structure. It has been re-purposed different times and still looks incredible despite being built around 125 AD.

The Pantheon: Built to last

The Pantheon: Timeless design

 

True, these Italian landmarks were built in different times, with different materials, but the idea of building to last and working with history is something that permeates Italian design culture today. Speaking with architects and designers in Italy it was clear that the thinking — the design thinking — that goes into developing, restoring or transforming things today builds time into the plans differently than is visible in much of the popular discourse. That translates in Italian design to taking the time to know history, know places, and understand the context in which a design in implemented.

Yet Finland, a far younger society, has also managed to do this in a different way by anchoring its design and architecture to its natural environment. The Finns take great pride in building structures and environments that fit with the land they call home and the lifestyle they wish to lead.

Consider the image below of the pedestrian underpass built in the heart of the city of Helsinki. Where in North America we do things like the Big Dig in Boston for cars, here they have done something similar for pedestrians and cyclists. Why? Because the Finns value nature and being able to engage the outdoors enough to warrant thinking about how to build that into their cities. One could argue that Canadians have the same interest in nature, but we haven’t managed to translate that into design.

The Big Dig: Helsinki Style

The Big Dig: Helsinki Style

This isn’t meant to argue cars vs pedestrians, rather the way that time and connection to the space around us plays in design. While cities like Toronto build enormous glass skyscrapers that look gorgeous (sometimes), their half-life might be measured in decades – creating a slow-motion failure of design.

The place for rapid thinking is assured for design thinking, but perhaps it is time to spend more energy on considering what other types and amounts of time might be useful if we wish to build things to last, not just to address Ruskoff’s present shock.

The examples presented here are from architecture, but the ideas of thinking longer and taking the time to understand things in a deeper way still resonate. In future posts, this issue will be explored further.

In the meantime, take some time to consider what good design, healthy design and innovative design mean to you.

Photos: Cameron Norman

 

 

Uncategorized

Returning Home

on July 6, 2013
New ideas are blossoming

New ideas are blossoming

 

After more than four weeks of travel, conferences and events it is good to return home. CENSEMaking’s sabbatical is over and over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing the insights gained from a brief, but deep immersion into of the biggest design cultures in the world (Italy and Finland) and spending time exploring the latest in evaluation research and practice from around the world at the Canadian Evaluation Society‘s annual conference as well as time spent at PAHO in Washington DC working with the eSAC team looking at how to develop engaged communities of practitioners, innovators and policy makers in public eHealth and equity.

Stay tuned and enjoy the start of summer wherever you are.

Cameron