Plot | strategic design & innovation agents

Plotting with HarvardXDesign

HarvardXDesign - a blast of a student conference

The weekend of 25/26 January was the first in a Student-run conference that boldly aims to "build a platform of innovation by engaging key stakeholders through the creative process." A group of students from Harvard managed to bring a whole lot of designers and design and business students together for a weekend to talk and to work through a design challenge.

Crossing the streams of the design and business schools may be a huge deal, but it didn't look like two worlds. The conference moved across Harvard Innovation Lab, Harvard Business School, and the Graduate School of Design, and brought some really interesting people together. And then there were the students. What a bunch of confident, openly networking the room look demons they were. And how friendly and talented and up for taking on something as tough and demanding as a 5 hour challenge of a huge gnarly problem, in which they have had a particular experience which they needed to put aside in order to think in new ways.

I'm always impressed by people who can move out of their own experience and viewpoints and are able to see differently, despite either difficult experiences or entitled ones. And these guys could too, and then be enthralled by the new things they were thinking about. That's not about being smart or privileged, but about agility of thinking, and that is a skill for life.

Friday night had a group of speakers setting the tone of a more contemporary and diverse kind of design. Apart from agreeing with each other, the really interesting voices came from an ebullient Marco Steinberg from SITRA, and the wonderfully eloquent Sanford Kwinter, who obviously has a huge support from the audience there. He's came to Carnegie Mellon a couple of weeks later for Liss Werner's Encoding Architecture Conference.


Saturday had parallel tracks of either listening to speakers or working on a challenge, and I'd been talked into running one of the (winning) challenge teams. "The challenge is a studio workshop of interdisciplinary teams – designers, students, faculty and professionals – who work on a particular challenge problem."

Selecting a challenge of new forms of education was big enough to keep us spinning for a few hours, and finally coming up with a more person-led, life educating concept and framework, with a clarifying bee and flower metaphor that put people at the heart of deciding what they learn. An interesting concept, and well worth further thinking if any of the participants get a chance to work on it again. You never know how these things recur over time…

 

The final session was a large critique of the ideas from 2 teams (mine included, did I mention?) and some feedback from Bruce Nussbaum, Patrick Whitney, Harry West from Continuum, Charles Adler from Kickstarter. Core77 suggest that the other team had the better idea, but the trashing they got from the panel suggests a diifferent outcome...having been there...And see
Bruce Nussbaum's critique below...

You can find their HarvardX Design manifesto here

Credit needs to go to Roderick McMullen, Jonathan Arena and Miriam Roure for great organisation and brilliant harnessing of stablished designers who on the whole brought less ego and more energy. Really great event.

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Stop Fetishizing Failure

I know, lets make it open....

Here's a little gift for those of you that might find this useful. It's a wallchart (please print out on A3 or larger) about the service design management process developed with Bill Hollins as a part of our activity on the British Standards for Service Design Management.  Download SDMWallchart Please download and enjoy!

It seemed a simple resolution of the fact that the BSI standard needed re-writing to make it more contemporary. There are 2 parts - the main document, which has always been a more formal format of defininitions. This will be half of the standard, and the main document will continue to be the core definition with some background and explanations of the kinds of activities described.

I'm releasing this wallchart under creative commons license, so please mention who wrote it if you use it, and it also means we can get it out there as fast as possible. So please share.

It's a fact that its far easier to share something than legislate for it, or police it. As Rob Van Kranenberg used to say years ago, it's easier (and maybe cheaper) to share a wireless network than to set up a pricing mechanism to extract amounts of money out of people (wifi companies please take note!).

So trying to enforce some ownership, or rights over something like this feels just plain backward in the light of all that has gone on with the documented benefits of sharing things and the successes of the creative commons.

And the lightness of being open is so refreshing, and subversive.

So we're stunned when we see the small print of a company who are busy creating their own version of "open". Basically you give them your ideas for free, and they can use them commercially as they wish. The balance is so tipped in one direction, that beyond any micro-fame that might be implicit in joining in, the payback for the contributor is minuscule. Whereas the potential of the idea for the company could be significant. Hmmm. Here's what it says (sorry, its got to be without the company name).

"Your Contribution to xxx on this Site is entirely voluntary, non-confidential and gratuitous. You grant to xxx and its designees such as another Challenge Host an unrestricted, perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable, non-exclusive fully-paid up and royalty-free worldwide license to use any ideas, expression of ideas or other materials you submit on this Site without restrictions of any kind and without any payment or other consideration of any kind, or permission or notification, to you or any third party."

So is 'open' now a euphemism for taking people's ideas and profiting from them without appropriate rewards?

Sounds like bollocks to me.

SDMWallchart by Gill WiIdman & Bill Hollins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at plotblog.typepad.com.

Design Facilitation workshops

Freshly back from a training session on teaching something completely different to design, and having reflected on the teaching approach to a different subject, it made me think a bit. Whilst our book on facilitation won't be done for a while, we might be able to do something which makes our approach a bit more accessible to others to use.

At Plot we're finding that people are looking for some of the basic skills we use in the live work we do with people. The designing of participatory sessions, facilitating groups of people well, and engaging people in activities that challenge them, you know, that sort of thing.

Initially we're thinking about a workshop on elegant facilitating, on designing productive interactions between people, and (for managers) creating a prototyping culture.

One of the comments we often get back from workshops we do is that we make the hard work of getting a whole bunch of people to make some progress on their work feel light, despite the fact that it really is hard to work with new people and produce something of meaning.

So we're thinking of putting together some training workshops in London for the summer months, as a starter. We're no real idea if there is a market for this, so if you think you, or someone you know might be interested, would you let us know?

A new kind of council

We're going to be contributing the the launch of The Council, Rob Van Kranenberg's brilliant collective of great thinkers in the Internet of things arena. He's managed to attract a fascinating group of people working right across all of the issues that come to mind, from policy to artists interpretations, to developers and makers like Tinker it! I'm really looking forward to the launch event this coming friday in Brussels, and will be running a workshop on the Sensing City, as well as dusting down some scenarios we produced that still have not yet happened. It looks like we've got a sizeable group to come and play, as I'm getting really excited about where it could go. I'm doing the preparation for the workshop, and putting some great stim material together. I've been wanting to do this subject matter for a long time, and being able to design and facilitate the workshop to our spec is a dream.

The idea is to give us a chance to think through some different perspectives on what the IOT could be in cities both developed and slums. We'll be working out some scenarios using different forms of stimulus and building on some of the great wok already done. Will post some of the output after.

This Council is one to watch.

Hearing voices

Well, it's been increasing for a while now...

First, I started hearing announcements about where the bus was heading to, and roads we were passing, then bus stops. All quite loud, and unavoidable. The tube also started announcing destinations (in addition to any the bus driver wanted to make).

"Cranley Gardens, this is a 43 bus to (pause) London Bridge"

No, actually, now I think about it, it started in the Post Office.

"Window number (voice rises significantly) three, (then drops) please"

On the platform, an announcement would tell us where the next train was headed and what the next station was.

"The next train is for Morden via Bank. Next station, (pause) Highgate"

Recently I waited on a over-packed platform for the overground train from Stratford to KentishTown, which put the automated announcements in a rapid-fire queue of what they might be saying next. One was apologising for the delay to the 13.10, which was an increasing amount of minutes late. Then there were additional warnings about leaving bags unattended. Then further announcements, all in a lined-up sequence of each other. It was exhausting! And once on the train there were more.

So I was really excited to try out automated checkout counters in Finsbury Park Tesco's. Of course I did not read the instructions fully, put things in the wrong area, and didn't have a clubcard when it asked me for one. Probably the most impersonal service pretending to be a humanised version of a machine I have come across.

"Please place your items in the bagging area"

I think it also thanked me for shopping at Tesco's but I was long gone, swearing 'never again'.

Don't get me wrong, I love the potential of what good announcements can do, and have been secretly collecting the ones that made me smile. But they were exclusively messages spoken, by a person in a particular context and with a sense of humour that lifted people's spirits at the time. When I worked in Canary Wharf, there was a guy at ASDA who would announce bargains of the day, and his way of pronouncing a cockney version of "mange touts" would make you grin. The kind I'm making a point about are the automated announcements that are programmed to 'deliver the message' at repetitive times. The bus announcements are aspects of accessibility, but in effect they work to the detriment of everyone else.

Here's some thoughts about why companies should really think about audio messaging in confined spaces:

• People stop listening when they are bombarded with repetitive messages
• Audio bombardment can cause people to feel pressured, and significantly raises the ambient level of noise
• If you don't want to alienate people, consider a human tone of voice
• Don't assume they know what you mean
• They need to be prototyped in context for levels and reactions
• If you can (and why not) have people giving the announcements around a flexible script that encourages their personality to shine.
• audio messaging is unavoidable, unless you have difficulty hearing - with visual ones you can look away

"We hope you have not been inconvienienced by the lateness of this arrival."

Thankyou fellow travellers Peter, Tim, Roger...

Probably the best podcast we have ever listened to. Clicketh here (mp3). This is where Plot comes from...

Game on? Enough already!

I've been trying to listen less hard to the news, and more to the patterns behind it.

The trickle of you-must-listen-to-my-doom-laden-message just drains me. It reminds me of how people not so long ago were trying to impress upon all of us how important it was that we go to war. Hmmmmm.

The list that has penetrated my defences seems to have a theme. People who abuse people get protected. Whistle-blowers are punished first, and get listened-to second. The business culture surrounding sport seems less than sportsmanlike. The UK tacitly (or explicitly) supports torture. Politicians base their actions on the letter rather than the spirit of the law. Arrogant banking executives get away with blaming what happens on the "circumstances" and not their actions. (Yet the  exact opposite is claimed when they are successful.)

Trust is a precious thing — hard to build and easy to lose.

Onora O'Neil made trust the subject of her 2002 Reith Lectures. This was right in the middle of public collapse of trust in major institutions like the National Health Service. I wonder how she might re-frame the lectures in the light of current events?

The real point is how institutions respond to the changing demands made on them. If they are allowed to change that is. For the bankers' "bonus culture", read the public sectors' "targets culture".

The micro-management of public service reform in the UK has been comprehensively reviewed (and demolished) by John Seddon in his new book Systems thinking in the Public Sector Seddon has a  background in Deming's quality philosophies and their practical application, and he has written a brilliant follow-up book to his "Freedom from Command and Control". Anyone working or designing in the service arena will find it fascinating.

His analysis leads him to the conclusion that targets and measures always deflect an organisation from it's purpose if they are not derived from the actual work of doing the work. Targets generate their own proxy-purposes, and they don't embody the knowledge of the people who work in the system. In our terms the sub-plots multiply and overwhelm the main plot. The result is always waste.

The Japanese word is 'muda' (pdf 114k). It means 'pointlessness', and can apply to a stupid result (like pollution), or a stupid activity (like keeping people in an ambulance so that it doesn't 'count' that they have arrived at the hospital), or a stupid system.

He also highlights the inevitable 'gaming' that follows —  if you set a target then people will find the most expedient way there for themselves — which may or may not be the best solution for the organisation, and is rarely the best solution from the user's point of view.

Studying the way people game systems is a hugely creative space — what if we could harness that creativity? @pistachio gives a perfect example:  if you set up a 'beauty contest' that works on numbers (like the Shorty Awards) then it's unsurprising that people will try to game it by getting people to vote for them. In this particular case they engage the talents and bodies of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to inflate the numbers.

Gaming is a natural skill, but it requres accountability and transparency to generate value. That's the point. See, I got there eventually, and without shortcuts.

Making made easier part one

Oh I love this from Ponoko.

Regenerative Dirt

We're working with those Dirt people again - this time Claire Hartten, Sarah Benjamin and Patricia from la Fromagerie and Maria Weedun have hooked up with nef and the Open University on 1st July for Interdependence Day.

More details of the whole day, booking etc. here

Don't just take our word for it!

We have a different vision for what RFID could be doing than the main industry applications. We've been trying to share this with them for a couple of years now...

Changing how people think about things they are able to influence is impossible without credible evidence of the kind they consider good sources. It's been a Plot change-conspiracy project for the past 2 years to bring user-centred approaches into the mainstream RFID industry. Why? Because it's currently all very much about a deep fascination for the technology potential; lots about security; mostly about logistics; and so far so little about what people might actually want.

It's been a fascinating journey finding out how the industry thinks, what's important, and what's driving change.

In preparation for a workshop I'm doing at the RFID Forum in May, I thought I'd enlist some of the vocal creative brains who are motivated enough to air their views about what they might like to see it used for. And what views!

Good to spend time with people getting them to imagine what it is they would like to see. Instructive to hear what they don't want their world to be filled with...

Gill