tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-246076432024-02-07T05:51:04.836+00:00Design leads us where exactly?Occasional observations on design research, emerging practices such as service design, and the framing of unframed problemsLucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.comBlogger154125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-53371231960866135202016-03-20T16:14:00.000+00:002016-03-20T16:14:03.701+00:00 Studios for Society – Why Design and Art Schools are Resources for Societal Innovation Some notes on experimentation in art and design included in a publication that accompanied the launch of <a href="http://www.arts.ac.uk/csm/csm-public/">CSM Public</a> at Central Saint Martins, London, January 2016.<br />
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<b><i>Illustration: Holly Macdonald from Kimbell, L. (2015). <a href="https://researchingdesignforpolicy.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Applying Design to Public Policy</a></i></b></div>
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Everyone is experimenting these days. Facing challenges at different kinds of scale within a dynamic, complex and fast-changing environment, public service providers, businesses, civic groups and policy makers are turning experimentation to generate and test solutions. <br />
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Experimentation sounds scientific. It demonstrates if an idea works or not, based on a hypothesis informed by theory. It provides evidence which then can be assessed to decide whether to go ahead with implementing a solution at scale. Within policy making, trials are not new. But over the last decade experimentation informed by behavioural insights has emerged in a context (organisational and digital capabilities), with a toolbox (the randomised control trial), a theoretical base (people need a nudge) and an ideology (the austerity agenda).<br />
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Other kinds of experimentation are also growing. Data analytics allows organisations to experiment with digital services. They can quickly and cheaply set up experiments to see, for example, whether more people click on option A rather than option B, sometimes without bothering with a hypothesis. They just want to see “what works” and can find out at scale without knowing why. <br />
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But as critics of the nudge approach point out, the scale of the ambition does not live up to the challenges society is facing. A small percentage change in an outcome can deliver substantial savings when spread over a population of (say) millions of people applying for driving licences. But is this the kind of change, behavioural or organisational, that is going to help communities address big challenges where entirely new ways of doing things are needed?<br />
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This is where design and art schools come in. Their business is creating the future, not studying evidence of past performance. Based in an abductive logic and using inventive methodologies, artists and designers generate new insights, new guesses (or proto-theories), and new concepts that are neither true or false – they just are.<br />
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Within the studio-based tradition of art schools, the studio is the site where possible versions of the future become materialised and aestheticised. Studio experimentation connects individual creativity with emergent practices at the margins of society. Artists experiment by bringing into being new kinds of cultural form and practice that give us insights into who we are and what matters, some of which become the way things are usually done. Designers experiment by proposing new cultural practices that we co-constitute as consumers, producers and users, some of which become the way things are usually done. Studio experimentation brings into being new ways of doing, knowing and being that can be shared, made sense of and combined into new routines.<br />
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These days, the studio is not located in particular places. Studio experimentation happens at the intersections between design and art schools and the local and global communities they are embedded in. In collaboration with policy teams, service managers, businesses, users and community groups, art and design schools prompt and propose and help bring innovative new practices into being. They are innovation studios for society. <br />
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<i>Lucy Kimbell is Director of the Innovation Insights Hub at University of the Arts London. She recently completed an AHRC fellowship in Policy Lab in the Cabinet Office. @lixindex </i><br />
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<br />Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-25599415792498010272014-07-20T21:12:00.000+00:002014-07-20T21:12:00.695+00:00Honorary Fellow address at Arts University Bournemouth <br />
27 June 2014<br />
Lucy Kimbell<br />
<a href="http://aub.ac.uk/">Arts University Bournemouth</a><br />
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Is this your first graduation ceremony? Mine too.<br />
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When I graduated from my first degree, I found myself to be awkward and gauche. I was not at ease with the institution I was graduating from. Or any institution. And as for many people, being anti-institutional was something I carried with me for some years. The kind words that the Orator spoke about me might have given you the impression that I move easily between major universities and other public institutions – that I’m at home there. When I finished my first and even my second degrees, that was not the case.<br />
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As well as not being at ease in an institution, I wasn’t at ease with myself. Feeling awkward was something that I continued to carry, and it accompanies me still. But rather than seeing this as a something to play down, maybe it’s something to think of positively. Being awkward, not quite fitting in, is perhaps a metaphor for what an art and design education gives us.<br />
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In art and design we are never quite satisfied with how things are. We don’t like quite how things fit together or understand why they are as they are. We have a restless curiosity that leads us to keep on fiddling, tinkering, mashing up, recombining. We create future visions that are speculative and imaginative, premised on creating difference.<br />
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All societies need people who question how things are, challenge institutions, and do not quite fit in. Within art and design we have a privileged place as creators of new things.<br />
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But along with the creativity, comes the critical questioning that Arts University Bournemouth has helped develop in you. Feeling awkward, not liking how things are, and being able to turn this into an analysis you can share and discuss with others, is central to creativity.<br />
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This is the thought I want to leave you with today, as you graduate and move away from this institution and on to the next phase in your life in which you will encounter many others. If you feel awkward – don’t lose that. Don’t apologise for it. Don’t hide it. Instead, if you feel awkward, recognise it and use it.<br />
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You will learn, if you don’t know already, that society likes the creativity more than the critical questioning.<br />
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But in art and design we know that you can’t have one without the other. If you want to succeed as a creative, you need to carry on being an awkward bugger.<br />
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In 2014 I joined an illustrious list of <a href="http://aub.ac.uk/about-us/honorary-fellows/">honorary fellows</a> at AUB.<br />
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Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-19087729149629177412014-03-23T22:03:00.002+00:002014-03-23T22:09:03.377+00:00Some futures for art and design higher education institutions, 2020<br />
In February I gave the keynote at the <a href="http://ukadia.ac.uk/conference/2014-conference/">Ukadia conference</a> of specialist art and design higher education institutions (the transcribed version will follow). In it, I summarised the drivers of change shaping teaching and research in these institutions as:<br />
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<li>Technology (eg broadband, multi devices, the cloud, IOT, SaSS, MOOCs, digital as material)</li>
<li>Collective making/solution creating (eg hackweekends, lean start up, Global Service Jam, Culture Hack Scotland)</li>
<li>An expanding field (eg Artist Placement Group, design thinking, co-design, toolkits, MindLab, OpenIDEO)</li>
<li>The importance of visuality and performativity (eg interfaces to everything)</li>
<li>Institution-making/disintermediation (eg free schools, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design<br />THNK, School of Communication Arts, Makerversity).</li>
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I then described four scenarios for UK art and design institutions in 2020. Half serious, half playful they were written to highlight some of the potential implications of current developments. </div>
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<b>Scenario 1 <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> Business as usual </b></div>
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By 2020 undergraduate student fees were £20,000 a year. Student applications from UK and Europe had dropped by half from 2015, but numbers of Chinese, Indian and US students coming to the UK to study continued to grow. Art and design schools continued their slow drift towards being a specialist finishing school. Some responded by focusing exclusively on one of three areas – luxury and branding, European classical art, and Shakespeare. They built campuses in China and Korea. They invested in buildings – snazzy glass boxes designed for spectacular displays. They built customer service teams to cater to their demanding students. </div>
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Morale dropped among teaching staff. Having a PhD was now a requirement even for visiting lecturers paid at hourly rates. The currency for lecturers was publishing in peer-reviewed journals, not practice. This pushed out the few interesting practitioners who were left, which was fine by them as the students they did tutorials with created projects which no longer interested them. Some art and design schools took another route, moving from offering degree programmes to short courses and CPD. But without access to workshops and studios, students did not get the in-depth, sustained training they needed. Entrepreneurial practitioners created new kinds of shared makespaces, outside of London since property there remained unaffordable except to a global elite. One result was property developers around the UK created new hybrid developments combining affordable housing, shared makespaces and small business units. Research for art and design dwindled and was available onto to institutions with good partnerships with top research universities on joint bids.</div>
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<b>Scenario 2 Low regulation</b></div>
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After the incoming minister for Business Innovation and Skills, Sir Michael Gove, opened up higher education to commercial providers, the pace of change was fast. By 2020, there were 30 so-called free universities offering art and design. Some were set up by commercial providers, some resulted from partnerships between corporations and existing universities. Tate Enterprises partnered with Harvard to create a new art school offering Tate BA and Tate MFA delivered at what used to be Chelsea College of Art, whose site they bought. A new free university focussing on consumer electronics was created by a joint venture between Phillips Electronics, Lenovo and Northumbria University, delivered in London and Shanghai. Some free universities came into existence through a management buy-out. Senior managers at the Royal College of Art found private equity backers who reorganised it to focus on global industrial design and digital design. </div>
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<b>Scenario 3 Open/social innovation</b></div>
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By 2020, climate change and global inequalities were drivers of change that art and design schools could no longer marginalise. Students wanted to address these issues, communities in which schools were located needed help with developing creative responses, and staff too wanted to work on something more meaningful than brand-driven D&AD briefs. Research funds too are oriented towards finding interdisciplinary responses to social and public challenges. As a result art and design institutions benefitted from research funding when proposals were constituted as design for sustainable mobility, or the arts for dementia, or design for development. Some schools reorganised to orient all their activities in response to these challenges. The Local Government Association joined forces with Lancaster University to create a suite of degree programmes, CPD and peer-learning aimed at local government, delivered online and through workshops all over the UK. A new intellectual property regime resulted in art and design schools focussing less on protecting IP. Instead a new open source community emerged that shared knowledge for others to build on. </div>
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<b>Scenario 4 Ateliers of the future</b></div>
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Following the lead of Ravensbourne, in 2020 a group of art and design institutions decided to give up awarding degrees. Instead they set up a network of art and design schools that offered courses aimed at passionate practitioners who wanted to develop and strengthen their expertise, working closely with employers who wanted to develop future talent. These students did not see the value of a degree. However they did value was experiential, collective learning that fitted in with their other commitments, inspiring and skilled teaching, and access to studios and machine shops. The new art and design schools found that students were willing and able to pay for this. And they found practitioners willing to teach tutorials and practical studio classes one or two days a week. Critical and historical studies moved online, using MOOC-like technologies to connect leading researchers around the world with motivated students. These schools flourished outside of London which was now too expensive to live in for most people including teaching staff. Instead Salford/Huddersfield/Bradford became a new hub for art and design - the Berlin of the 2020s. </div>
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Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-39077974572794854032013-10-11T15:33:00.001+00:002013-10-11T16:12:52.567+00:00Before empathy: Keynote at Design Research Conference, IIT Chicago<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Before
empathy<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Lucy Kimbell<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><a href="https://www.id.iit.edu/conferences-and-events/2013-drc/">Design Research Conference</a>, IIT Chicago<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">October 2013<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">There is a trick some speakers
do, that tries to build empathy in their audience. They share a personal story.
They offer an intimate confession that gives the people listening a hook that
will spark their attention for the half an hour that follows. I’m not going to
use that trick.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I am however going to
try this one. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hands up if you use
empathy in your work. Hands up if you don’t. Will anyone here admit to not
being empathetic?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">What I am going to do in
this talk – which is going to be more agonistic than the kind that starts with a
story – is explore what is going on in the fetishization of empathy within
design research over the past decade (see for example <span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24607643#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title="">[1]</a>)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24607643#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><!--[endif]--></a></span></span>.
To start off, I should say I am not anti-empathy, or anti-human centred design.
But what I am going to do is try to dig around a little to help us think about
what empathy is doing for us in design research, and what it is not doing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">There is one main reason
I’m doing this. In my work teaching MBAs, and advising entrepreneurs, I keep
coming across managers who have got the empathy bug. Apparently it’s <a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/05/empathy-the-most-valuable-thing-they-t/">the most valuable thing they teach at Harvard Business School</a>.
These managers want to be empathetic. They want the services they are
responsible for to engage better with users. They think design thinking is the
way to make that happen. Quite often they think that they are pretty good at
doing empathy already so they don’t need designers to do it for them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So with empathy now
being taken up by other fields, it’s worth looking at what is going on in
so-called empathetic design research. What comes with empathy? And what does it
ignore? Is it the thing that’s distinctive about design research?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A second reason is
that the strengths of a practice are often its weaknesses, so it’s useful to
step back and understand the issues and potential in a construct like empathy. However
this is not going to be a full-blown genealogy of empathy. But I will start
with what academics are supposed to do and go back to the literature. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Here’s the literature
I want to start with. Star Trek Next Generation (TNG) is not an academic literature
but it is a world which explores ideas and builds on them to create new ideas. I
propose that we can see Star Trek as a piece of design research - specifically, as an example of
what Ilpo Koskinen and colleagues in their book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Research-through-Practice-ebook/dp/B005JRHYTE">Design Research Through Practice</a></i> call constructive design research.
Gene Roddenbery, the creator of Star Trek, and his colleagues, the TV studios,
the actors, the audiences, and all the specialists involved, together built a
world and put it to use in the sense of trying it out over several seasons. I’m
going to come back to this idea of constructivist design research at the end of
my talk. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">To help us think about
empathy I want to enlist one of the characters from TNG, Deana Troi who has
the role of ship’s counselor on the USS Enterprise. Half human, half betazoid,
Counselor Troi has the capacity of being able to sense other people’s ideas and
feelings. In TNG they refer to this as telepathy, because she can do it at a
distance. But in fact what you see mostly in the seven series of TNG is
Counselor Troi having a face-to-face conversation with someone, or making
observations about people in front of her or a nearby planet. She doesn’t do a
lot of remote fieldwork – her practice is very interactive and it looks a lot
like some versions of empathy in design research. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Let’s have a closer look
at this practice. First of all, Counselor Troi is able to develop an
understanding about other lifeforms, and then create an analysis, which she
shares with her colleagues, often Captain Picard. Often she’s asked to do some
data gathering and form an opinion alongside Mr Data, the android, and Lieutenant Worf,
who’s a Klingon and claims to be very rational. In this clip, note how the male
officers are seated on one side of the table, while Conselor Troi and Dr
Krusher and the android (and so neither male nor female), Mr Data, are on the other. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> (This and the following clips are used absolutely without permission.)</span></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br /></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
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<br />
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Against the backdrop
of current conversations about big data versus what ethnographer Tricia Wang calls
<a href="http://ethnographymatters.net/2013/05/13/big-data-needs-thick-data/">thick data</a>, TNG looks ahead of its time by having Captain Picard invest his trust in
Troi’s embodied analysis. In this clip we can see Troi’s perspective is taken
seriously. She’s part of the officers’ discussion as the whole ship and crew at
risk of being incorporated into the Borg. It’s her analysis that crystallises
the challenge that the Borg represents to the Enterprise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
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</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But as a part-betazoid,
or maybe it’s her human half, Counselor Troi is also able to experience some of
the feelings of the people she is studying. This is not always a pleasant
experience for her and is sometimes alarming for the people around her.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Counselor Troi is
aware that she or others will use that analysis to take action. The research
she does is not just for interest, but is part of the way the crew of the
Enterprise reach decisions about the course of action they should take. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">One of the consequences
of being intimate with other lifeforms like this is that Counselor Troi has a
responsibility to speak up and challenge what’s going on. In this clip where
she’s temporarily in charge of the Enterprise, Troi is in the position of
taking sole responsibility for the action that will result from her empathetic
sensing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Counselor Troi’s
capacities are brought home in an episode in which she loses her empathetic
powers. Despite all the knowledge at the disposal of a Starfleet sick bay, Dr
Krusher is unable to give Troi much help. Faced with the loss of her empathetic
core, Troi is horrified to imagine what life is going to be like without the
ability to empathise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
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<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">These clips from TNG
nicely present some of the issues that result from empathy in research for
design, New Product Development and innovation. My Oxford colleague Steve New and I have written a
recent paper (<a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/stuff/New_Kimbell_Empathy_2013.pdf">available here</a>), which goes back to more conventional academic literatures and
tries to separate out the different strands that often get bundled together in
the term empathy. Here’s a typology of different aspects of empathy that draws
on this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The first is what we
call <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">cognitive</b> empathy. This is the
empathy that comes from trying to put yourself inside the shoes of the user to
understand their world, their point of view. This is me imagining what would it
be like to be you. It’s ‘I want to understand you’. This is the core territory
of Counselor Troi – it’s key to her role on the Enterprise. Her job is to
understand what’s going on for other lifeforms, sometimes aliens the crew
encounters, sometimes the crew themselves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">This is central to
much design research, even before it got tagged with the term empathy. Depending
on the version of empathy you subscribe to, it might just be an act of
imagining a user. Or you might actually do some research. If you take seriously
the word ‘research’ then pretty soon you need to start getting clearer about
your research questions, your choice of methods, and your theoretical and methodological commitments. So in cognitive empathy is about recognising otherness, but on the one hand it might be in the domain of the
imagination, or on the other, it might involve research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The second type is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">affective</b> empathy. This is the kind of
empathy where you don’t just try to imagine the other person’s world and their
feelings. <i>You have the feelings yourself</i>. This is ‘I feel your pain’. It
involves emotional labour. And this is what we see Counselor Troi doing often
in Star Trek. In the sanitised, organised world of Starfleet, Troi sometimes
brings these emotions on to the bridge of the Enterprise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">If we look at design
research, this throws up the danger of designers becoming so focussed on the
emotions they are experiencing, they forget what they are doing it all for.
They are so busy having emotions, the project becomes about their experience
not the interpretation and analysis that is part of research. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A third type of
empathy is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">performative</b> empathy.
This is where people who may or may not have empathetic capacities, present
themselves as having them. They look like they are empathetic, but it’s just to
achieve a goal. On Star Trek this is rarer – you’re either empathetic like Troi
and to some extent Picard, or you’re Ferengi, Klingon or just standard issue
male humanoid. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">In design research, this
is the kind of empathy that comes when someone commissioning a project states
that the end result must be user-centred, and the process must be
participative. Yet curiously this manager is often unable to acknowledge the
results of doing research if they disagree with the solution they’ve
already decided on. This kind is a ‘me-too’ empathy. It throws up an interesting
issue, about how you can tell whether research is really empathetic or not. Or, is
something that appears to be empathy good enough? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Finally there’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">anti-empathy</b>. In psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen's
view, we owe much by way of scientific progress and technology to individuals
who operate with less than normal empathy. On Star Trek, there are several
characters who are anempathetic, notably the Ferengi and the Klingons. The
android character Mr Data also lacks empathy although he’s very polite. </span>Baron-Cohen says that empathy
deficiency can lead to evil, but it can also be associated with a propensity
for systematization and quantification. So he sees a positive connection
between mathematics, engineering and Asperger's <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24607643" name="_GoBack"></a>syndrome.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">In design research
terms, this is the stance in which designers don’t do much imagining of users,
because they don’t need to. This is ‘sod the user’. The negative impact of this
is all the appalling designs we have to use when we interact with organisations
and systems. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">If we take this
simplified typology, empathy is not singular. It’s complex, contradictory and
it hides the power plays involved in studying and interpreting what goes on in
the world and the intended and unintended consequences that follow. So what is
my problem with empathy? It’s not so much a problem with empathy, as much as
problem with current accounts of empathy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The first issue is
that what we hear described as empathy often presents it as an individual
quality. On the one hand, there’s an <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">emphasis
on sensitivity </b>to others. Counselor Troi is the emblematic empath, which is
apparently linked to genetic traits she inherited from her betazoid mother, and
possibly to her cleavage or the clothes she wears. But on the other, Troi’s
sensibilities and skills exist within a collective world. She’s part of an
organisational structure within Starfleet. She has a job to do, and a rank, and
it is through her interactions with Picard giving her a seat at the table, and her other colleagues that her
cognitive and affective empathy comes into mattering - part of the apparatus around her empathy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">If we were to borrow
concepts from Science and Technology Studies, we could say that Troi’s empathy
is not a stand-alone quality, with clear boundaries, that exists outside the
object of study, which is waiting to be investigated. Rather, this view sees empathy
as constituted through intra-actions with the structures, reward systems and
behaviours on board the Enterprise, the habits she picks up and the routines
she takes part in. This version of empathy sees it as a collective
accomplishment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The second issue I
have is, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">why empathy now</b>? How is it
that technology giants are investing in public narratives about empathy? Or
governments redesigning public services, at exactly the same point their
political legitimacy is low as hardly anyone bothers to vote, and their
interest in people’s experiences coincides with cutting costs and getting
people to deliver things themselves? There’s the usual argument that all organisations
have to innovate to create new markets to still be players in five years’ time.
But dig deeper, and it begs a question about how the circulations of global
capital have spawned a generation of people who want to render experiences
visible in a world of dematerialised interactions. Someone else’s second-hand
thoughts and feelings can be a powerful challenge to the ebbs and flows of
immaterial capital. Strong emotion is often a starting point for action. It
drives people to activism, to bringing about change. But too much focus on all
the emotion can provide a distraction from the actual power relations. So there
is a danger in being so caught up in the detail of the experience and ignoring
the issues they are part of. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPDU8OVyddWkHRn7S-kq3Sad8T6mAYbUNvkaGjsP1C9EZ9yxnHAoCr3PPfvhFnpkwZZ8JYpj8UtIaNLylFRN35aTGLuarw0Yz8JTRv6frJcXIEY1zEmolMHtypJ9dcwQNkBU-mAQ/s1600/Slide17.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPDU8OVyddWkHRn7S-kq3Sad8T6mAYbUNvkaGjsP1C9EZ9yxnHAoCr3PPfvhFnpkwZZ8JYpj8UtIaNLylFRN35aTGLuarw0Yz8JTRv6frJcXIEY1zEmolMHtypJ9dcwQNkBU-mAQ/s1600/Slide17.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A third issue with
empathy is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">what it does to design
research</b>. Having made a distinction between affective and cognitive
empathy, my colleague Steve New and I also make a distinction in our paper between a
rational version of consultancy and an aesthetic version. Although this is
crude, this delineates some of the differences between the modes of consultancy
that exist as design research, and the mode that is business consulting. An
even cruder version would say that on the right-hand side, where design
research is located, are the nice guys. They care about users and their worlds,
really want to understand and engage with them, and have their feelings too.
But over there in the other quadrant is where the clever guys operate. They may
have an empathetic relationship with their client, but they pretty much try to
fit the client’s problem into a universe of problems with which they are
familiar. On an individual level it’s clear there are people who can flip
between these modes. The more interesting discussion is about whether
organisations have to be in only one of these spaces. So does design research
want to be operating in the domain it’s currently in, being nice guys, or does
it want to be over on the left hand side with the clever guys?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A final issue is that
empathy often looks like a dumbed-down version of ethnographically-informed
research. The danger here is that researchers think that the data “out there”
is the truth waiting to be discovered and interpreted. This approach – based in
Positivist science – gives researchers the idea that they are neutral carriers
of that data back from the field to the sites where decisions are made. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Crucially, this
ignores what ethnographers trained in anthropology call reflexivity.
Ethnographers are attentive to how they as researchers are brought into
relation with the object of study. Instead of trying to walk an uncomfortable
path between objective truth or subjective reality, ethnographers have
developed an understanding that their work is constructivist. This means they
pay attention to how they include and exclude different data, and their work of
interpretation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I think there are
other ways to do design research that avoids these problems. This approach harnesses some
of the resources that empathy in its different variants brings, but does
something slightly different and which is part of existing traditions in design
research. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Firstly, if we go back
to the bridge of the Enterprise, what Troi’s practice does, and what some
design research does, is expand the ontology of stakeholders and actors to increase the variance. What
that means is that in constructivist design research, a diverse group of people
and things are brought into relation with one another. Counselor Troi picks up
what other lifeforms are thinking and feeling, and her analysis of this then
changes what becomes possible for the Enterprise’s crew. This kind of design research
changes what an issue is made up of. It involves creating not just artefacts or
representations of research findings, but also new configurations of people and
things, which involve new symbolic structures, behaviours and scripts and new value relations being formed. It
doesn’t start with a given world, but creates a trajectory for a different one.
It draws things together into new combinations and this is an active practice
of including some things and excluding others. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Secondly, after Troi
has made her analysis and other colleagues have given theirs, this prompt
questions about whose data is right, whose feelings, whose worldviews, or whose
interpretations, matter more. Constructivist design research involves creating contestable boundary objects </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24607643#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title="">[3]</a></span></span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">. It sets up these
differences as a problematic to be worked through rather than ignoring the
power plays in any project or organisation. Done well, it draws attention to the
unintended consequences of decisions and the temporalities over which these
come into play. It helps participants such as the people we call users, staff,
managers, and clients help make sense of and situate themselves inside these configurations, and surfaces disagreements about them. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And thirdly, this kind
of design research prompts the researcher to investigate how to situate herself
in the work. It offers what anthropologist Lucy Suchman calls <a href="http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/research/publications/papers/suchman-located-accountabilities.pdf">located accountabilities</a>. If we look at what happens with Troi, by accessing these
other lifeforms’ worlds, Troi becomes mutually accountable to them. By making
public these accounts and her own affective empathy, Troi then involves other
crew members, resulting in an expanded set of accountabilities for the
Enterprise. Constructivist design research helps participants become visible
and accountable to one another as actors within these unfolding configurations.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">If these issues I have
outlined matter, then it is time to start talking differently about the thing
that is currently called empathy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">This involves a move
away from thinking of empathy as an individual trait, towards a collective
capacity. The opportunity is to create a version of empathy that recognises its
potential to constitute new configurations of people and things. So empathy
becomes less about individual sensibility. And more about organisation design,
culture, routines, habits, behaviours, reward systems, roles, and core assumptions about the
nature of change and agency. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">In closing, I want to
leave you with some questions to pose next time you reach for empathy to
differentiate you from other kinds of researcher. Remember Troi. But don’t
focus on her Starfleet suit, or her emotional sensitivity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Before you reach for
empathy, ask where are you located and to whom and what are you accountable? All
those emotions you are picking up, or experiencing yourself – what are they
stopping you paying attention to? What do you get out of being a nice guy? What
would happen if you stopped being a nice guy?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br /></div>
</div>
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<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24607643#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> See for example <a href="http://www.sap.com/campaigns/2013_05_design_thinking/index.epx">http://www.sap.com/campaigns/2013_05_design_thinking/index.epx</a></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24607643#_ftnref" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/05/empathy-the-most-valuable-thing-they-t/</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<div id="ftn">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24607643#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US">[3]</span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> Contestable boundary objects is not quite the right term but see also Noortje Marres (2005) Issues spark a public into being: A key but often forgotten point of the Lippmann-Dewey debate. In B. Latour and P. Weibel (Eds.) Making Things Public. Karlsruhe/Cambridge (MA): ZKM/MIT Press, and Carl di Salvo (2012 Adversarial Design. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-28826167100834208062012-11-19T15:27:00.000+00:002012-11-19T15:35:29.630+00:00Design and design thinking in public services<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Design
Commission Inquiry into Redesigning Public Services<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Evidence
from Lucy Kimbell<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Session
11.10.2012<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>This is an edited version of the comments I made giving evidence to the <a href="http://www.policyconnect.org.uk/apdig/public-services-inquiry-3">Design Commission Inquiry into Redesigning Public Services</a> taking place over the past few months, led by Policy Connect and its <a href="http://www.policyconnect.org.uk/apdig">Associate Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group</a>. This has involved many people from a wide range of backgrounds giving evidence about the role of design and design thinking in public services to the <a href="http://www.policyconnect.org.uk/apdig/public-services-inquiry-2">expert steering group</a>. The <a href="http://socialdesigntalks.org/">Social Design Talks</a> series I co-organise with Jocelyn Bailey of Policy Connect and Guy Julier of the Victoria and Albert Museum/University of Brighton is also feeding in to this process.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
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Lucy Kimbell: This is quite academic so I apologise but I do
think it’s useful… I’ve made some notes to organise my thoughts and they’re in
three broad categories. The first: what is design? What is that word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doing</i>? And for who? Secondly, is design
thinking changing that in some way – in terms of how, operationally, you can
embed design in organisations… and then thirdly design as a professional field
and its weak institutional base and why, even though design people think we know
how to sort these things out, we somehow don’t have the institutional power to
be in there straight away – we have to make the case constantly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the first things to address is that even if you’re in
design, it’s incredibly hard to define what design is. Do we mean design in the
mode of engineering, do we mean architecture, do we mean communications design,
do we mean digital interactions? And even if you look at the academic
literature on design, there are two major distinctions, which then come out –
is design about giving shape and form to things? And that thing could be a
physical product or it could be a digital interaction. Or is it about making
change happen? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The important definition here is from Herbert Simon, from 1969:
everyone who devises courses of action, to change existing situations into
preferred ones, is doing design. Anybody who is trying to change anything into
a preferred situation is basically doing design. And that is not about giving
shape and form, making stuff. That is a massive tension that comes up again and
again in these discussions.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then that stuff around changing behaviours and interactions
and services and systems is much more palatable when you look through that
second lens. But that tension is incredibly strong – this is not trivial, that
design is really hard to define.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let’s turn to a third definition, which takes that Herbert
Simon idea, and pushes it a little bit further…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In Herbert Simon’s book, The Sciences of the Artificial,
1969 – he won the Nobel prize for economics – he did a lot of work in computer
software and artificial intelligence, and he came out thinking the thing that
we’re all doing is actually design. That quote I just gave is the most famous
quote from it. But it’s part of a much longer chunk which then goes on to say,
in essence management, medicine and engineering are all design professions. And
if you say that to a doctor they think ‘well I diagnose and then I’m trying to
change the state of the patient – which has a physical effect – so yes’. But
then you have this problem which some designers go into of saying actually
‘design is everything’. If you push it that far you are saying design is
everything, and therefore designers can tackle anything. Which is not
necessarily the case. So that definition on the one hand seems right, but it
also alludes to this question about design and management – are they really
different? Management is about supporting people to do whatever they want to do
better – which might be citizens, or might be customers buying an airline ticket…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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Armand Hatchuel is a professor from the Ecole des Mines in
Paris – which is an engineering school, but he basically writes in management
theory – and he is the most interesting and profound person writing in design
theory in the last 10-20 years. He revisits Herbert Simon and says ‘Simon was
absolutely right, design is critical for organisations and mostly ignored.’ He
then presents two situations. You’ve got a group of people who want to go out
on Saturday night. They decide they want to go to the cinema – they’re going to
‘design’ their Saturday night. Going to the cinema is basically choice
selection. You’ve got a these films on in these cinemas, how do we choose? But
we know what the end result is. We don’t know how good the film will be, but it’s
a defined problem. That is choice. Making choices.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Actually, what design is: the example he gives is designing
a party. It’s the same group of friends, on a Saturday night – not going to the
cinema, they’re going to design a party. What’s a party? It could be any number
of things. It could be ten people, or a hundred people, it could be with
dancing, it could be with food. It’s an unknown – the outcome isn’t yet
defined. And that (although he has a much more theoretical version of it,
actually quite readable) that is what design is: it’s about expanding the set
of options. Not about selecting between options.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Herbert Simon, although he is saying design is important,
actually means selecting between options. Whereas design is about the creation
of new options. So it is about creativity and generativity.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A limited number of people actually read Armand Hatchuel –
even if you’re in management – but design theory people mostly don’t read him.
So while this is theoretical stuff, it points to these problems that most of us
on the ground have in conversation with a client, which is about ‘what actually
are you doing?’ Are you designing a physical thingy, or are you helping us
change how we engage with citizens? Which is a change process, which is then a
different thing, and necessarily involves ‘the organisation’, which most
designers are terrible at doing. They don’t know how to do that: it’s not their
training. Some of them might have ended up being good at that, at working with
people and facilitation, but they don’t have the analytical skills for doing
stuff inside organisations. And unlike for products, when organisations are
designing services, the consumption and production is happening at the same
time. The organisation is the entity that is the service: it is just a load of
interactions with digital and physical things, and with people.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This raises a lot more questions which, quite frankly, for
me, are not answered right now. But it comes back to this definition: what is
design about? And in reality you’ve got both of those things – you do want the
webpage to be well designed, and the leaflet, and the interaction with your
Citizens Advice advisors – the person-to-person face time stuff. Those all do
require designing. But does it mean that designers are necessarily good at
that? That’s one of the reasons why this is so hard: and it is really hard. It
is not as though academics – those of us who read and write about this stuff –
are in agreement about what is the core of design.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A simpler version of this is – if you look at the dictionary
definition, there is the verb and the noun. When you’re talking about the
‘design of a service’, there’s the noun: the actual finished arrangement of the
service. And then there are blueprints and artefacts along the way, which are
designs towards the final design. Then there’s the process of ‘doing
designing’, and then there’s the field as a profession. So that’s four
different potential meanings for the word design. And if we’re talking with a
local authority manager who is buying design: what are they buying? Which of
those four things? And again, what does a person who calls themselves a
designer, who maybe went to CSM and did web design and is now peddling service
design: what is it that they are offering? Are they good at all those things?
I’ll come to this again later – how we know what to go on.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, another thing then from within the management
perspective… <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have read a lot of
the management literature, I teach design on an MBA, where I am confronted with
making a space for this design stuff, but<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>there is a sense that all my other colleagues are asking ‘well what are
you adding? We already teach that.’ ‘What do you mean by design?’ always comes
out. Hence I’ve bothered to read all this literature and get clearer for
myself. But for them, it’s two things. Really it’s a phase in new product
development. Design is not the same as new product development. It is a phase
in new product and service development. There’s your first ‘research and
discovery’ – what you’re trying to do, your aims and objectives. Then your
engagement with the detail of the users etc, the analysis of what they want,
and segmentation. And then there’s design, and then there is prototyping and
roll-out. So design is a phase. If you look at management literature design is
a phase. But for example, what the Design Council are saying is, as designers
we own product development. We can do that whole arc. And maybe some do, really
well, but actually in most organisations that I’ve come across, ‘a manager’
does that whole arc. A product manager, with a management training, or a
project manager, is responsible for that whole arc – and the design bit is a
bit in the middle. But designers want to take over the whole thing. And some do
incredibly well at that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But there is a tension there again about what that word
‘design’ is doing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thomas Kohut: So would a design manager say ‘well I can do that
whole thing?’</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lucy: No it’s worse than that, some designers think they can
do the whole thing. They can elicit what the users want or should have or could
have, analyse that, interpret that, engage with stakeholders, articulate the
requirements, visualise, prototype, idea generate, blah blah blah – through to
then someone delivering it. So a designer will try and do that. My observation
about organisations I’ve worked with, which range from Deutsche Bank to
Vodafone – there are few people called ‘design managers’. They exist in the
Design Council’s universe. They barely exist in most organisations unless
they’re very product centric.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Julian Grice: Well they’re certainly not service innovation
people… And of course (and I agree with everything you’re talking about), as a
designer you always stray to the very front of the argument – because actually
it’s all about the user. And sometimes there will be some insight that modifies
‘this plan for that particular service’.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lucy: But the designer doesn’t own it. They own it. And this
is one of the things I’ve learned from teaching MBAs. I used to teach at the
Royal College – I used to teach designers who were utterly brilliant, but at
the end of the day when I started teaching MBAs I thought ‘oh this is so much
more fun’. Because these are the people who own the project. They hire a
designer to help them with this whole arc. And the venture and the opportunity
and all of that. They scope that, and then they write the brief, which a good
designer will probably then turn into a different brief, and do that front end
work. But the management people own the design. Not the designer.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Carol Moonlight: What we’ve seen – and maybe a parallel shift is
needed. What we’ve seen in the online world, is the IT people, the techie
people own it, which is invariably a bad idea. They should be called on as
consultants, and give their expertise as appropriate, but they shouldn’t own
the end to end process.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lucy: So that’s why this is actually about management, not
about design. It’s about who owns that thing. And that comes back to the
Herbert Simon definition – it’s about change. It’s about the shift online, or
the changing relationship with users, or saving money by getting citizens to
cut costs by doing whatever it is. Those set of aims at the beginning of a
project – which generally designers are not involved in – are formulated around
policy and organisational goals. So the design of public services is actually a
management question, not a design question. But there are then opportunities
for designers, design thinking, to play into that, because those managers
rarely come from that background.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Jocelyn Bailey: You might be about to come on to this, but how is
it then that the design profession has ended up positioning itself entirely
outside of that process?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lucy: Exactly! So if most managers think that they are
designing a service – and I work with people who are designing a service – I’m
currently working with the Metropolitan Services Trust, a housing provider and
particularly offering services for older people… They are designing the
service. I’m not designing it. They just hired in The Young Foundation, and my
team to do a little tiny bit of work – they are definitely designing it. We’re
just helping them with a few gaps where I’ve said ‘I can help you here… and I
think you should do this…’ and they said ok. But they are designing it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So the design response to the fact that actually managers
own all of this, whatever they are technically called in an organisation, is to
say either: ‘we can do the whole arc for you… give us everything and we can do
that. We’ve got this thing called “design thinking” that you can’t do. You
think you know your users – well we can know them better. We’ve got some special
methods, we’ve got some special participatory ways of eliciting more deeply what
they want. You’ll sit them in a room in a focus group and ask them, we’ll go
study them. So we’ve got methods ’. Which I am going to come to shortly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And the other design response – like from the Design
Council’s work – is about trying to quantify ‘our impact is “this”. If you hire
us you’ll get a better design’ – which is incredibly hard to measure. And I
would say, having read a lot of the literature, most of those attempts to
define the value of design, aren’t very good. Yet. And as you know the Design
Council and the AHRC are commissioning some work on that. It’s not easy to
measure… to get clear comparative studies. And most design consultants want
them. They want to be able to say ‘I did this, if we hadn’t involved ourselves…
the impact of us on your project was this, this and this.’ But it’s very hard
to get that… And we’re in this culture where you have to have statistics, and
maybe some qualitative evidence… So that’s one of the responses as well, is to
say ‘let’s get some really good data to prove that we’re really great’.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One response is to say ‘we’ve got this magical design
thinking’, the other is to say ‘we’ll get you better data’. And then the third,
which I think is more tricky but more interesting is to reconstitute the
problem itself – to say ‘this isn’t even the right question’. And just to do
stuff, in a completely different context, which then reframes what the question
should be. An example for me would be My Society – they’re not necessarily
designers, although they’ve got some designers in there – where they just say
‘we’re just going to go and do it over here’. Which then changes the nature of
the debate. They don’t ask the DWP to hire them as consultants, they just go
and do it because something should exist, and they believe that’s the way it should
be done. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Returning to the Herbert Simon definition of ‘making
change’… they’re making an artefact. A different artefact, over here, that is
great – and then it forces other people to realise they can’t do it themselves.
’We would never have asked for that, we would never have written the brief, but
oh look it does all this other stuff and it changes how the conversation
happens.’</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Carol: Just returning to outcomes… Evidencing that is
expensive – longitudinal studies are expensive. Very rarely do we get the money
to do it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lucy: There are potential ways around that though. If we’re
in a culture where we need to have better research about outcomes… universities
for example are really good at research. They would be the potential
organisations you could work with…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Julian: Whilst designers always complain about the brief
never being right – it’s the collaboration in that arc that is important. And
designers will always bleat on about the fact that they do have voice, amongst
a number of other voices that is worth listening to, before you present them
with their phase. Consumer brands are better at that than public services,
broadly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lucy: You’re also battling against professional culture. But
to get on to the design profession… the third thing I wanted to say is then, is
the design profession – meaning the people who went to design school of some
kind, call themselves a designer (not a manager), think about this stuff a lot
– what is it that that profession is doing right now. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And one of the important things is that, unlike engineers
and unlike architects, those other kinds of designers are not a chartered
profession. They are not strong institutionally. They weren’t founded in the
1880s, they don’t have a Royal Charter, they don’t have a guiding professional
body. They don’t have strong rules about who is in and who is out, and what
happens if you fail. You can’t get sued in the same way – you’re probably not
going to kill anybody from your bad design (whereas you might if you are an
engineer and your building falls down). So then the boundary work – that
managing of who is in and who is out is done by those institutions. In the sort
of design worlds that we’re in – anyone is in. Anyone could call themselves a
designer tomorrow – print a card saying user interaction designer – and then
everyone would say, ‘oh, really?’ It’s a culture, it’s not institutionally
strong…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And that matters because it’s about the ability to speak to
power, and make claims about your authority and your professional expertise. So
I would say design, meaning not engineering or architecture, which of course
are diverse design fields anyway and design is a multitude of fields,
obviously… But it’s institutionally weak. It’s got a poor academic knowledge
base. It’s got utterly brilliant practitioners, but they are mostly working in
very small firms, with good interpersonal links and so on, but there is not a
strong knowledge network, and ways of recognising what is good knowledge, and
what isn’t. And maybe that was fine for product design or graphic design or communications,
maybe that was fine… But it’s really not ok for this context. For talking to
government.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So there are some people who are trying to now create a stronger
charter for design – but they’re about 150 years too late in creating that
institution.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Jocelyn: Who is doing that?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lucy: I think James Moultrie is involved. And a design lecturer
at Nottingham Trent. Anyway so there is a bunch of people on the back of the
same analysis saying ‘right we’re going to try and make that thing’ – whether
that works in the current environment, where professions don’t have the same
value as in the 1850s… It’s a different thing. Though we are all professionals
flogging our skills and knowledge to other providers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Julian: There is a huge irony in all of that designers are
schizophrenic on their own topic: they desperately want credibility and
authority and voice… but on the other hand they love fragmentation, divergence
– and they can’t possibly agree.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thomas: And they are in business and making money without
it. You can see they would question the need for a professional body.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Julian: Well they all say that they do. But the reality is
convincing them they are all part of the same thing has been challenging. What
you need, is a crisis. A crisis in the design sector which creates a complete
lack of credibility…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lucy: Yes. Some really terrible things happening from bad
design. If buildings falling down did that over some decades for architecture…
death and destruction is one kind of crisis. So what is the same thing for
design…? I’m not sure it’s going to play out in that way. And the other
interesting parallel is that management consultants don’t have that, and they
do just fine. They peddle recipes and methods, they peddle professional
knowledge – they don’t have authorising bodies either, so maybe it’s not
required. But they have numbers. They have different modes of operating as well.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So those are some questions for the field – for the
multitude of professions. For me it’s not surprising that this is incredibly
complex<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>stuff and difficult for
government departments to buy, because they don’t know what design is – because
no-one else does – they don’t see professional authority, and competence that is
validated in ways they understand…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And then we come to design thinking – one of the other things
that’s being peddled. I think that’s been an interesting development. And when
I think about what characterises a designerly approach (so this refers to
people from the culture of design, who studied design, work in design consultancies,
care about user experience and what things look like – as one symptom of their
behaviour) I think there are three or four different characteristics. These
vaguely map onto design thinking, but I have a particular take on that which we
could later get into…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So one is the focus on – not human-centredness, I don’t
think that’s the right term – but human scale. Focussing on experiences and
capacities of users, which is very much the case in the citizen space, in a
social and material world. One of the problems when that language of ‘human-centred’
gets adopted by these manager-types – they are just adopting marketing speak.
They say they know they need their services to be citizen centred. I’ve already
read lots of documents that say ‘our services will be citizen centred’. But
they don’t know what it means. They can’t operationally do it. They are not of
the culture which really profoundly attends to human experiences at human scale<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and pays attention to the artefacts.
Designers do pay attention to the artefacts within the social world. Most
managers think the artefacts are something you do later once you’ve worked out
the strategy. The artefacts come later (unless they’re within some aspects of
operations management). So that is something that does distinguish the designerly
approach: it’s at the human scale. It’s not the macro picture, it’s actually
this quite small ‘what are we doing in this room right now, what are the
objects, what are the human interactions?’ </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And I’m not saying that other people don’t do it. This is
one of my problems with design thinking – when you look closely at these things
– although you could say designers in this culture do do those things, it
doesn’t mean others don’t. For example: the army really cares about ‘stuff’.
Because if that goes wrong, in the middle of an invasion, then you’re f*****.
And the same with Citizens Advice – if you get the forms and the bits of paper
wrong then it doesn’t work. So there are other professions that do care about
the interactions of the people and the stuff and the teams. But certainly
designers do do that. And the probably care more about the crafting of those
things, as a starting point. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Secondly: I would say designers are analytical – to do any
design work, somebody has to do some analytical work (the segmenting of the users,
etc – and working out which of the things they’ve moaned about are the ones
that matter). But actually I think more profound from a designerly training/
background/ profession/ skill is the ability to synthesise by giving shape and
form. So it’s ‘I’ve listened to everything you’ve said, now here is my sketch
for that webpage and how it should be.’ The very rapid synthesis, not ‘let’s
write a list of how it could be changed, and then write another list, and then
have another five meetings’, but ‘here it is right now, on a piece of paper’. Which
is not the same as making it visual. For me the emphasis is on the
synthesising. The ability to say ‘I’ve heard what you’ve said and those
interviews from those five users and now I’ve synthesised it’. That very fast,
very quick work. And that is in the production of artefacts. In which the
visual plays an important part. And a lot of designers will say it’s because
they are visual – and that is part of it but more important for me is the synthesising
ability.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A third thing is: coming back to Hatchuel – the generative
and the creating. The creating of the new. And I think for cultural,
psychological, cognitive, motivational – all sorts of complex reasons – some
people are really good at generating ideas and some people are not. So I think
those designers generally are good at having lots of ideas. And some of those
managers sitting in DWP are not. They might have one idea, and then they really
stick to it. Typically the studies of designers show they have a gazillion
ideas, and they just keep having more and more. And there’s for them a sort of
pleasure in having lots of ideas. And other people are not like that. So there
is definitely something about generative creativity, which is celebrated and
practiced in design culture. And rewarded. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And the fourth thing is an exploratory inquiry approach,
which includes prototyping. It’s not that you have the right answer… You may
get solution fixation, but you may also just keep throwing away your ideas from
one day to the next. So it’s not just the generation – it’s the co-evolution of
the problem and the solution (Nigel Cross in design theory writes about this). So
it’s not a linear model, where you understand the problem, and you work towards
a solution, which is the model in books. It’s more like a real life model – you
have an understanding of the problem, you suggest a solution, and the insight
that gives you makes you keep going back to re-evaluate the problem and find
better solutions – you keep evolving the problem and solutions. This often gets
translated as ‘iterative’. The fact that is it iterative is not the important thing,
it’s the fact that you keep refining your understanding of what the issue is
that you’re working with. Most organisations are not geared up to do that. They
want to define a problem, sort out a solution, put some resources to it, and
then make it go away. Again, it’s not only designers – entrepreneurs do this as
well – but research shows it is certainly true of designers.<br />
<br />
One other thing
that is part of that exploratory approach is the assumption by designers that
they don’t know best – they usefully don’t know. Their lack of expertise is
generative for a project. The whole design approach is actually about
continuous learning for the organisation. Now of course there are management
things that are about continuous process improvement – which aren’t a million
miles away. But they’re less fun/ messy – much more outcome-y – there is
something culturally distinct about them, although there are overlaps.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you look at design thinking and the people who write
about it, you can see echoes of these things. This is just my formulation of
some of the key distinguishing things. And so it comes back to the question of
who has authority to do it. Other people may well recognise in their work, that
they already do these things – so then it’s really hard for designers to claim
that as their professional territory. Because if other people are already
practicing these things – what is it that designers are contributing?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The only thing I can suggest is what I have observed from
people who are not designers coming on my MBA course. And they choose it not
really knowing what it is, and by the end of it they are better able to see the
service world they’re in.<br />
<br />
Through all of that stuff I’ve just given you the
condensed version of, the students think about their world of work
differently – they see themselves as being in a learning process, they pay more
attention to the artefacts at human scale – they see that the touchpoints and the artefacts
matter more than they thought. They are aware of what good design is, in a different way to
before. That is achieved by a learning journey that is partly reading some
theory, but also doing designing. And you could equally well do that with some
senior civil servants. It has potential amazing effects. It’s not about a
designer standing there telling them about a great web page.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24607643" name="_GoBack"></a></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-5612957767672513562012-10-30T10:59:00.002+00:002012-10-30T10:59:57.502+00:00Why a design dinner in Oxford in 2012?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiatp_7QHV1Hgj0vpiHe8SzW71LoX1LKpbzLDh2EzQJ7q6I3_zXieGgNLZBrVxd4pJNHwEV7y1FqO-1K8EkULI5qGn8tBbx5Apkrrc2MTEt7xo9vww3bXeRrgobRgkAAUNM5PSuvA/s1600/lincoln-college-oxford-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiatp_7QHV1Hgj0vpiHe8SzW71LoX1LKpbzLDh2EzQJ7q6I3_zXieGgNLZBrVxd4pJNHwEV7y1FqO-1K8EkULI5qGn8tBbx5Apkrrc2MTEt7xo9vww3bXeRrgobRgkAAUNM5PSuvA/s640/lincoln-college-oxford-2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
On Thursday evening, around twenty people will gather for a dinner in Oxford. Curated by <a href="https://twitter.com/PhilClare">Phil Clare</a> and Caroline Bucklow of the Knowledge Exchange and Impact Team in Research Services at the University of Oxford, and me (an associate fellow at Said Business School), this dinner aims to stage a new conversation about design within and around Oxford and its global and local networks.<br />
<br />
In contrast with other design dinners, often associated with events such as the Salone furniture fair in Milan, this one is perhaps less glamorous, although we do include some internationally-renowned practitioners and academics among the guests. In contrast to many other Oxford dinners, we’ll be talking about a field of expertise and practice that perhaps curiously is not well-represented in the university, which has schools of engineering, computer science, business and fine art, but not industrial design, product design, communications design or architecture.<br />
<br />
Guests include leading people from the design world, including from small, emerging studios, people working in established innovative consultancies and others from large corporations with an interest in design, as well as academics from different faculties and resources across Oxford University, as well as guests from Oxford Brookes University across the city. Although I haven’t checked – there are 800 years of archives to look through – this may be the first such dinner in the Oxford ecology. We think it’s timely for these reasons.<br />
<br />
Firstly, the profession and practice of design are taking up a new place on the world stage. Borrowing a term from art history, we might see as designers working within an ‘expanded field’. There are numerous examples of designers and architects such as Josiah Wedgwood or Victor Papanek addressing the issues of their day. But what is striking about the last decade is how designers trained in design schools now see their role as contributing to global challenges such as educational standards, climate change, public service design, or humanitarian disasters. Examples are Project H, openideo.org and Participle.<br />
<br />
Secondly, several academic fields have been exploring what a design-based approach can bring to research and teaching. For example in research, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Design Council are scoping out a research programme in the design of services. Within management education, there are now several universities around the world (including Oxford) teaching “design thinking” – the application of designerly approaches and methods to solving “wicked” problems and stimulating innovation.<br />
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Thirdly, within business, developments such as the cloud, 3d printing, mobile broadband, and a focus on delivering services, experiences and interactions, has lead to designers and design-based approaches being brought in not just to make things look pretty, but develop and explore concepts from day 1. Examples here are Berg London, Samsung and Intel.<br />
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Fourthly, the London 2012 Olympics and other cultural events have highlighted the role of the symbolic in day-to-day life. Creating and staging collective experiences requires the design and production of places, artefacts and signs, and paying attention to the design of the social interactions in which meanings are created. These are all activities that are central to designerly practices.<br />
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The aims of our dinner are however more modest. We won’t necessarily discuss these issues. But we do hope that participants will enjoy having conversations about their work and hearing from others, within an institution that has a great deal of history but also is a site of critical thinking and innovation. We believe this will provoke new relationships and lines of enquiry that might lead to new projects. The design of a dining experience seems a good way to start that.<br />
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<br />Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-5151121108807021212012-10-06T19:20:00.001+00:002012-10-06T19:23:02.684+00:00If only there was more data…: Creating evidence to prove the value of Design<b>(Originally posted 26 March 2012 on socialdesignpractice.wordpress.com)</b><br />
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<article class="post-502 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-research tag-data tag-evidence tag-research-2 tag-speculative" id="post-502" style="border-bottom-color: initial; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: initial; display: block; margin-bottom: 1.625em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 4.875em; position: relative;"><div class="entry-content" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 1.625em; vertical-align: baseline; width: 584px;">
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Take a moment and look up from the device with which you are reading this and look around you. That device and its software, the chair you are sitting in, the pen in your bag, the lamp above you, the clothes you are wearing, the arrangement of the space in which you sit … all of these have been shaped by the work of a professional designer. But one of the remarkable features of early 21st century public conversations in the UK is the invisibility of professional Design.</div>
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This may seem a large claim. The UK has an internationally-recognised <a href="http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #627f67; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Design Council</a>, now at arms length from government but set up in 1944 to give explicit voice to the role of design in public life and the economy. UK universities which house design schools are internationally renowned and students from all over the world come to London, in particular, but also Dundee, Newcastle, and Brunel to learn how to design products, communications, buildings and digital experiences. Conferences and seminars regularly showcase designers and managers promoting what professional designers have done, sharing how they have added value to products and services, and how they have helped firms and public sector organisations innovate.</div>
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And yet… If you flick through the daily and Sunday newspapers (and TV schedules) – which provide some kind of index of the UK’s national conversations – there is little discussion of designers skills, knowledge or contributions to public life. Instead there are specific discussions of <em style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">designed artefacts</em> such as clothes, products for homes and gardens, gadgets, buildings or other outputs of designerly expertise. The outputs of designers’ work, mediated through manufacturing, marketing and retailing processes, are everywhere. Some individual designers are celebrated for their designs in architecture, communications, furniture design or fashion. But in the UK, there is not a national conversation about a field of Design that draws attention to the processes and practices through which they work.</div>
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This invisibility and marginality of design professionals outside of their specific fields of activity is the context in which there is a renewed conversation about the value and impact of designers’ work. To bolster their proposals to clients, designers search for statistics and anecdotes that crystallise just what the value of design skills and knowledge is and the impacts they can have. Favourites here are the Henry Ford quote about the invention of the personal motor car (“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”) and <a href="http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/briefing01" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #627f67; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Design Council research</a> showing a positive correlation between investment in design and share price performance. Policy-makers and managers championing design struggle to find ways to convince colleagues who want evidence about what designers can bring. The implication, it seems, is obvious. We just need more data and a clearer analysis, and then the gates holding back the flood of resources that could flow towards Design teams and consultancies will open.</div>
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<em style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If only we had more data about the value of Design and its role in improvement and innovation, then things would be different.</em> This is the argument at the heart of a new initiative led by the AHRC and Design Council, currently conducting <a href="http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/ahrc" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #627f67; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">a piece of research which seeks to understand the impact of design</a>. Just over a week ago, a number of design professionals and researchers gathered at the Design Council as part of the consultation that is part of this research. We were asked to respond to a short presentation that reviewed literature (or ‘evidence’ as it is called in this exercise) describing and explaining the impact and role of design. We were asked to fill any gaps – a daunting task when confronted with a matrix which ranged from <strong style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">engineering design</strong> (a field that is institutionally strong with decades of academic research and ways to authorise practitioners as chartered engineers) to <strong style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">service design</strong> (which is embryonic rather than a discipline), across which the researchers want to find evidence of social, business and environmental impacts. There will soon be an online version of this consultation for anyone who wants to contribute (<a href="http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/ahrc" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #627f67; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">available here, open until 18 April</a>).</div>
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What does data actually do?</h2>
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As I sat there I began to ask myself how it is that people are persuaded about the case for something. How do ideas like “Design Thinking” or the value of Design in public life come into view? How might communities of practice such as policy-makers, senior civil servants, or entrepreneurs and managers in different sectors find themselves persuaded that something called Design is going to help them achieve their goals and is worth investing in? Will more data, or better data, persuade them? What will they do with it? How do we separate out analyses about what designers can do in organisations, projects and communities from the ebbs and flows of intellectual fashion, organisational politics or institutional agendas? Does having more or better data work in other fields?</div>
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An analogy comes from discussions of climate change. As anyone who follows that conversation will know, lots of data has not produced an answer to the question of whether human activity has led to rising CO2 levels and to climate change that is persuasive to some key decision-makers and organisational actors. On the topic of climate change there is a <em style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">vast</em> amount of data, produced in many disciplines. But what matters here are not just the data. On the contrary, a scientist with dataset A is positioned against a scientist with dataset B, revealing the thoroughly social backdrop against which their data are funded, created and used. Jerry Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz call this ‘post-normal science’ – the idea being that when values are in conflict and the stakes are high, the normal ways of doing science such as producing more and more data are not on their own sufficient to be persuasive.</div>
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In other domains – not that far from Design – there are ongoing research programmes with a similar theme. But here the data is not doing its job either. Decades of research in strategy, for example, have not definitively shown how particular strategic choices impact on firm performance. Nor has performance-related pay definitively shown that this approach benefits organisations and their employees in achieving corporate goals. Meanwhile elsewhere in the public sector, there are conversations about how to assess the value of children’s services and early intervention. For example NESTA is organising an<a href="http://www.nesta.org.uk/areas_of_work/public_services_lab/alliance_for_useful_evidence" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #627f67; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alliance for Useful Evidence</a> which situates the desire for more or better data within a wider conversation about what you might do with it, once you have it. And then within universities, academics are contending with the drive to produce metrics about their research through the government’s Research Excellence Framework.</div>
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So I am not convinced that a research programme to create new evidence about the role or impact of Design and its professionals in organisations or projects will necessarily achieve what its proponents want. It may result in new data definitively showing the value added (in economists’ terms) of what Design professionals bring into play on projects or in ventures. It may not. The data it produces may find its way into the pitches of designers and the arguments put forward by executives and civil servants. Or perhaps not. Further, such a research programme may do other things which might produce unexpected results.</div>
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Reshaping the conversation</h2>
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I do not want to conclude that producing and analysing data about designers, designing and the effects of professional design work is not valuable or useful. As a practitioner creating a design capability within an organisation and as an educator teaching design to MBAs, that data and analysis might be useful to me. I support putting some resources into creating data and analysis that answer clear research questions. I believe it does make sense to create data that satisfy the requirements of those for whom Design is at present marginal or not understood. The value of such research may be relatively short-term, meeting the needs of those working in contexts such as the Treasury or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, whose agendas are framed in particular ways that are not likely to change over the next 5-10 years. If we take seriously what we advocate as designers, then, yes, someone should be producing research artefacts that are useful, useable and meaningful for stakeholders such as these and other of Design’s clients in the social worlds in which designers live and work.</div>
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But I wonder what other activities researchers and practitioners working in Design fields might get involved with that recognise the contingencies of the contexts and practices in which data are created, analysed, critiqued, shared, disseminated and made use of? Here are three brief suggestions that move the conversation in a slightly different direction. They complement the attention paid in the AHRC-Design Council exercise to scholarly enquiry, but make explicit an attempt to reframe the conversation and attend more closely to how data are used.</div>
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<li style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Creating scenarios</strong> <strong style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">of the future value and impact of Design</strong>. Just as scenario planning is used to construct plausible and preferable futures for communities grappling with complex issues such as climate change or peak oil, we could use these methods to create future scenarios about Design professions and fields as they engage with contemporary questions. Creating scenarios can involve the participation of universities, consultancies and design teams, as well as their existing and potential clients, collaborators and wider publics in civil society and business. Created well, such scenarios become actors in the conversation itself – they enable stakeholders to begin to construct new ways of thinking about their practices in relation to other actors, which can shape how they allocate resources and go about their business. The impact of these scenarios is perhaps over 5-15 years.</li>
<li style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Investing in funding PhD studentships outside of Design and the humanities</strong>. There is a lack of good scholarship on the question of the value of design in commercial or public organisations. Rather than focus on creating a new research programme for existing researchers or one-off PhD studentships, the AHRC and Design Council should work with the ESRC in particular to jointly fund a series of studentships within fields such as economics, finance, accounting, operations management, public policy, social policy, and services marketing to build up not just data but a long-term research capacity and intellectual community of young researchers interested in these questions who may have never heard of the Design Council. It may take 10-15 years to produce results. The results may not be favourable to what advocates of Design want. But it is only through thinking broadly about research cultures and how these intersect with practice that those of us involved in Design will get a better understanding of our practices’ contributions (and their failures) in the wider world.</li>
<li style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Creating #topics to start new conversations</strong>. This more speculative activity resembles the practice on Twitter of creating a new hashtag which others may pick up on and start using, which in effect constitutes a new kind of temporary dispersed community. Those of us working within Design are often already doing this – creating a new artefact and making it public, organising an event or workshop or contributing to a festival, or writing a blog post. The Design Council’s Designs of the Times (<a href="http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/challenges/Communities/Dott-Cornwall1/" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #627f67; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">DOTT</a>) programme and collective participatory design challenges such as those organised by <a href="http://wearefuturegov.com/" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #627f67; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Futuregov</a>, the <a href="http://www.globalservicejam.org/" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #627f67; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Global Service Jam</a> or the <a href="http://design.temple.edu/designchallenge-2012/" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #627f67; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Fox School of Business</a> are good examples. We can think of these as part of a larger collective effort to make the collective practices of Design matter. I propose investing further in this kind of activity to change the nature of the public conversation about Design by creating ways to engage with those not immediately familiar with designerly practices and methods. More or better evidence is undoubtedly part of that, but reshaping the conversation is something we should also be doing.</li>
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Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-63020347586977848792012-09-22T18:34:00.002+00:002012-09-22T18:34:33.012+00:00Talk at Design Academy Eindhoven next week<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm doing a talk at <a href="http://www.designacademy.nl/">Design Academy Eindhoven</a> in their Design Debates series next Thursday 28 September, co-organised by MU, Onomatopee, Krabbedans, Alice, Capital D, CRISP and Premsela.</div>
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Jan Boelen, head of social design at DEA, is the respondent, and Bas Raijmakers is chairing. </div>
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See DesignDebates.nl<br />
Twitter: #DesignDebatesLucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-7833259733014547742012-06-01T16:45:00.003+00:002012-06-01T17:08:40.377+00:00Untitled (I measure therefore I am)I made a new piece of work for a group show with the title <b><i>Experimenting with Clouds</i></b>, currently at <a href="http://www.ruared.ie/">RUA RED</a> gallery at the South Dublin Arts Centre.<br />
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Here's the piece and below are a few shots showing how I made it. I plan to make other versions (using other texts including the Lacanian-inspired 'I am measured therefore I am'). For the first one, I used a phrase that I wove into several projects I created a decade ago including my book <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/Audit.html">Audit</a> (2002), which shows the results of conducting an audit asking how much I was worth, and the <b>LIX Index</b> (2002-3 and remade in a new version for the Dublin show and available at <a href="http://lixindex.org.uk/">lixindex.org.uk</a>).<br />
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The piece is formed of 20 letters about 12 cm high which I created by casting polyester resin. Inside the resin are keys from broken keyboards, calculators, phones and TV remote controls.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">View of the piece installed (with a line on the wall, that was later removed)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Close up of two letters</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Installation shot from the opening night at RUARED in Dublin</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My first sketch - the black letters are two of the cake moulds I bought</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; padding-top: 4px; text-align: center;">Some of the silicone cake moulds I used to cast the keys in polyester resin</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My small child helping liberate the keys from old keyboards I collected</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The keys from the old keyboards needed washing</td></tr>
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<b>Acknowledgements</b><br />
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Thanks to Kirsten Downie for helping me cast the resin. Thanks also to these organisations who supplied me with broken keyboards to ransack for keys: Archway Systems and KF Imaging. I disposed of the remains responsibly via my local recycling centre.<br />
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<br />Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-50178797799605588012012-05-10T16:21:00.002+00:002012-05-10T19:12:38.499+00:00New artwork in the Glitch festival at RUA RED, Dublin, opening tomorrow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've made a new version my <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/LIX.html">LIX Index</a> performance index and made a new gallery work for the <b>Glitch</b> festival at <a href="http://www.ruared.ie/">RUARED</a>, the South Dublin Arts Centre, in Tallaght, which opens tomorrow.<br />
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When I have photos from the gallery I'll upload them here and also describe why I've remade the LIX ten years after I updated data weekly for a year, now reworked for the era of the Quantified Self, ubiquitous computing and data privacy. The new version of the LIX project will be live in a few days at <a href="http://www.lixindex.org.uk/">www.lixindex.org.uk</a>.<br />
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For now, below are a couple of shots of the new gallery piece <i>Untitled (I measure therefore I am)</i>. It's a phrase I used across a few projects I created including the first version of the <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/LIX.html">LIX Index</a> (2002-03), my book <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/Audit.html">Audit</a> (2002) and the <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/PhysicalBarCharts.html">Physical Bar Charts</a> (2005-).<br />
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What I have done is assemble keys from old keyboards, phones, remote controls and calculators and cast them into letters using polyester resin.<br />
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<br />Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-72197883211821236802012-04-26T19:06:00.000+00:002012-04-30T13:52:45.612+00:00The Object Strikes Back: An interview with Graham Harman<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">A few months ago I did an interview with philosopher <b><a href="http://www.aucegypt.edu/fac/profiles/pages/harmangraham.aspx">Graham Harman</a></b> who is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">Associate Provost for Research Administration and Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo.The author of books with titles such as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Metaphysics-Phenomenology-Carpentry-Things/dp/0812694562">Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things</a>, Harman is a very accessible writer. His business is philosophy (which few people make accessible) but he has lots to offer those of us working in design fields, whether practitioners or researchers. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">I<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">nfluenced by Heidegger and by Latour, Harman’s philosophy treats objects as real but with hidden depths. His work explores how objects have been thought about in philosophy and proposes an object-oriented ontology that offers a new way of thinking about objects. This is timely for design, given the requirement to conceptualise what it is that we are working on and within as we design things we call 'experiences', 'services' or 'interactions'. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">The interview is not published until 2013 and then only in a peer-reviewed, subscription-only, academic journal (the excellent <a href="http://www.bergpublishers.com/?TabId=3594">Design and Culture</a>) which will reduce access to non-academic readers. Since I'm legally unable to put a transcript online, I though I'd offer a sort of trailer in the hope that interested parties might get in touch with me directly. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">Here are a couple of quotes taken from the interview - all Harman's words.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">'Objects are the anti-reductive principle par excellence. They exist midway between their tiny components and their palpable external effects. In this way they resist reduction both downwards and upwards– neither undermined nor overmined, neither undercut nor “overcut,” to coin another new term. Objects occupy the middle range in any situation, lurking beneath their outward effects, but they are also something real that cannot be decomposed into tinier elements. This is important because so much of recent human intellectual life is trapped in a permanent trench war between the tiniest (as championed by science) and the largest (a human-centered perspective championed, of course, by the humanities). The avoidance of these trench wars by way of objects is a method –and “middle way” is what “method” means in Greek– that can be used in pretty much any field</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">...</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">I think one of the weaknesses of the heavily relational approach of ANT (Actor Network Theory) is that it cannot adequately deal with the parts of the object that exceed its current relations. Latour’s best case studies (Pasteur, for example) are about things that have already happened. All the relations and translations have finally done their work, and we can use Latourian tools to explain how it occurred. ... </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Yet I’m not sure that ANT is quite as useful at counterfactual cases. What counterfactual cases do is allow us to look at the innate powers of a thing that might not have been expressible in their actual environment, and ask how things might have played out differently. ...</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">The danger of relationist thinking is that it focuses too much upon reciprocal interactions in the “now” and too little on what things should be doing that they are prevented from doing by the accidental set of physical and social relations in which they are now entangled. The term “essence” gets a bad press these days, because it has come to be associated with all kinds of oppressive and reactionary dogmas, but if we take “essence” in a more minimalistic sense to mean “what a thing is quite apart from its current accidental situation,” then a certain essentialism is unavoidable.'</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">See also</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Harman's <a href="http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/">blog on object-oriented philosophy</a> </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Harman's recent books published by <a href="http://www.zero-books.net/authors/graham-harman&i=9">Zero Books</a></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Discussion of Harman's and Latour's work on the <a href="http://anthem-group.net/">ANTHEM</a> (Actor Network Theory Heidegger Meeting), instigators of the 2008 debate at LSE involving Harman and Latour, now transcribed into a book <a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/prince-and-the-wolf-latour-and-harman-at-the-lse-the">The Prince and the Wolf </a>(2011) </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">A downloadable PDF version of Harman's <a href="http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_780980544060_Prince_of_Networks.pdf">The Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics</a> (2009) published under open access by <a href="http://re-press.org/books/prince-of-networks-bruno-latour-and-metaphysics/">Re-Press</a></span></div>
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</div>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-70032413481885306602011-12-21T09:36:00.002+00:002013-10-11T16:16:05.234+00:00Why I'm joining the Young Foundation as head of social design<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_PCeV9J0YsiB2ztOqR8SnLKjo2ZvZLUAkYlML8cwomgmKg3ZIS944DywIZJW8v_UK6Xo3QtELEAYoiWFD6WL-WzK6slF-DTV_UZN9UFD9EKt8w2SlimzQpXA8VSW2l6MQMZd8wA/s1600/MBA_Helen_services.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5688512684693879986" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_PCeV9J0YsiB2ztOqR8SnLKjo2ZvZLUAkYlML8cwomgmKg3ZIS944DywIZJW8v_UK6Xo3QtELEAYoiWFD6WL-WzK6slF-DTV_UZN9UFD9EKt8w2SlimzQpXA8VSW2l6MQMZd8wA/s400/MBA_Helen_services.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 299px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 400px;" /></a><br /> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 78%;"><i>Sketch of service ecology by my MBA students during a collaboration with MDes students from London College of Communication</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">In January I’m taking up a new role as head of social design at the <a href="http://www.youngfoundation.org/">Young Foundation</a>. I will remain an associate fellow of Said Business School at the University of Oxford where I have been teaching an MBA elective on design and design management since 2005. I am excited about the opportunity to join the Young Foundation and contribute to its work on social entrepreneurship and innovation. Especially at a time when the existing ways of doing things are failing or are under severe stress from climate change, funding cuts in the public sector, and increasing inequalities between resource owners and others who could use them. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">Here are some of the reasons I’m taking this role.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">Working in the spaces between research and action. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">Having been inside academia for some years I’m not sure that universities are a good place to do social or organizational research that leads to effective change. But “do tanks” like the Young Foundation potentially are. For every example of excellent scholarship that is engaged with public matters and communities outside academia (“Mode 2” knowledge), there are many others that produce research that is made use of by only other academics. I love reading a brilliant paper but brilliant papers are usually not digestible by non-academics. Many papers sitting in academic databases are hardly read by other researchers, let alone engaged with by people working in organizations or communities. So working with the Young Foundation and its network of ventures and partners will provide an opportunity to create faster feedback loops between research and action, at a time when there is a significant need to understand what is going on, try out new ways of doing things, and learn what the effects are.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">Working collaboratively across different kinds of expertise.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">The institutional incentives in academia are not geared to rewarding and supporting interdisciplinarity. The UK Research Councils have been trying to change this. For example they host “sandpits” where researchers from different fields, who have often not met before, and have quite different research cultures and agendas, construct project outlines during a residential workshop, that they then may work on together. But unless you are a senior, tenured academic, your institution generally rewards you for publishing in discipline-specific peer-reviewed journals, not for taking part in messy, cross-disciplinary projects that may or may not contribute to the various fields involved. And it is often hard for small organizations like SMEs, or the shifting practices and people that constitute local communities, to get involved in such research. Organisations like the Young Foundation which have research expertise and strong links with communities, businesses and policymakers, have the potential to be involved in and set up multi-expertise collaborations that generate learning and outcomes, without being overly shaped by discipline-specific practices and rewards.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">Developing a culture of strategic design and collective experimentation. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">The Young Foundation’s activities include creating new ventures, prototypes, research, advisory work and consultancy. In establishing this new role, the Foundation wants to build on its experience of working with service designers, and learning from members of its team not trained in design using approaches from design practice in their work. At a time when people in different contexts are turning to design, and designers are finding new sites for their work, including in public services, communities and sustainable living (eg <a href="http://www.mind-lab.dk/en">MindLab </a>in Denmark, <a href="http://www.participle.net/">Participle</a> in the UK, <a href="http://www.tacsi.org.au/">The Australian Centre for Social Innovation</a>, <a href="http://www.projecthdesign.org/">Project H</a> in the US, and the <a href="http://www.desis-network.org/">DESIS Network</a>), I am pleased to have an opportunity to help the Young Foundation develop its own vision of what social design might be. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">Just as the term “social” immediately generates questions – is it the social of social media, or of social innovation, or of social theory? – so, too, “design” is very hard to pin down. The way I think about this is to combine the practices of the art or design studio with creative, collective research and experimentation in the field: what I call the <i>fieldstudio</i>. Having explored some of these ideas in my consultancy, in academia, my arts practice, and most recently at consultancy Taylor Haig, the Young Foundation seems an appropriate context to try and contribute to explorations of design in the expanded field.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">One activity I’ll be working on is a new venture called the <a href="http://www.youngfoundation.org/our-work/international-ii/the-global-innovation-academy/the-global-innovation-academy">Global Innovation Academy</a>. Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, NESTA, the Gulbenkian Foundation and others, this aims to create a learning platform, tools and an experience for people in different kinds of organization who want to work in response to contemporary global challenges. Potentially this initiative is a disruptive intervention into professional higher education, currently being challenged because of high student fees and to what extent students are prepared for a complex world. My work will focus on the curriculum and learning experience. I will bring to this some of what I have learned by teaching a design elective in a business school for six years, and collaboration and dialogues with other educators such as <a href="http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/">Parsons The New School for Design</a> (with programmes such as the MFA Transdisciplinary Design), UC Falmouth (setting up a Creative MBA), London College of Communication (with its <a href="http://mdesservicedesigninnovation.co.uk/">MDes Service Innovation</a>), and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee (with its <a href="http://designethnography.dundee.ac.uk/">MSc Design Ethnography</a> and <a href="http://mastersdundee.wordpress.com/">MDes for Service</a>). </span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">Helping grow a culture.</span></b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">Although it’s 60 people, the Young Foundation feels like it has a start-up culture. It builds on the legacy of Michael Young, who created what are now well-established institutions such as the Open University, and was under Geoff Mulgan’s leadership until his recent move to NESTA. To date, it has been involved in creating or supporting over fifty ventures and initiatives from neighbourhood websites to community schools, new models of healthcare to training community campaigners. But it’s an organisation that is still creating itself, now under the leadership of Simon Tucker. With a matrix structure and several women in senior positions, it seems to have the flexibility and openness that I value in an employer. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 100%;">Over the coming months, my two main questions will be:</span></div>
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<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">How to lead and facilitate the Young Foundation’s move to develop design capabilities, not so much by hiring designers, but increasing the whole organisation’s design literacy, understanding, knowledge and skills to develop a more designerly culture; and finding ways to understand its effects and impact and articulate a perspective on design in the expanded field.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">How to use design to set up and enable creative collisions between the worldviews and practices of policymakers, community members, activists, researchers from interpretive social science, designers and artists, managers and technologists, to produce radical reconfigurations of resources to grapple with the challenges facing local and global communities.</span></li>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">We’ll be starting a blog in the Young Foundation’s new social design practice area, so this personal research blog will become quieter. I look forward to continuing and deepening many existing dialogues to explore the potential for this work in the UK and internationally.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><b>POSTSCRIPT</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">I resigned from YF a few months after joining and left in October 2012. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%; mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">------A bit more background---------</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%; mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">For anyone who’s interested in my previous work, it ranges from <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><b>Keynotes</b> including</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Keynote at <i>Service Design Network</i> conference (2010): </span><a href="http://designleadership.blogspot.com/2010/10/service-design-at-crossroads.html">text</a> or <a href="http://www.service-design-network.org/sites/default/files/media/videos/sdnc10/SDN_Fieldstudio.swf">video</a></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">Keynote at <i>Design Management Institute</i> conference (2010) <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/stuff/DMI2010_kimbell_draft.pdf">text</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%; mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%; mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><b>Writing</b> including<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%; mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.taylorhaig.co.uk/assets/taylorhaig_designthinkingandthebigsociety.pdf">Design Thinking and the Big Society</a>, co-authored with Simon Blyth (2011)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%; mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Peer reviewed academic papers on design thinking, service design and organisational aesthetics - <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/Writing.html">see my website for more</a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><b>Teaching</b> design and design management to MBAs at Said Business School, Oxford, since 2005 including an elective called Designing Better Futures - <a href="http://designingbetterfutures.wordpress.com/">see my teaching blog</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%; mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><b>Installations</b> such as the <i>Physical Bar Charts</i>, shown nine times internationally including at <a href="http://designleadership.blogspot.com/2011/07/physical-bar-charts-at-tedglobal-2011.html">TEDGlobal in Edinburgh</a> and currently<a href="http://www.strozzina.org/declining-democracy/e_kimbell.php"> at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence</a> (both in 2011)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">Creating digital tools such as <a href="http://www.powerleague.org.uk/">The Powerleague</a>, now hosted by Futurelab</span></div>
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<!--EndFragment--> <!--EndFragment-->Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-8879460561997887852011-10-12T11:10:00.014+00:002011-10-14T09:35:40.899+00:00Physical Bar Charts in Declining Democracy, Florence<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHYZwXd4e58S-I229lSsEGQaDHgSNUWsqrjhwtijW1pMgT8zMXfVEM1Yv7ulcyTTa0qte9IrKxCKOsDZfZeogmo2AtX6cF18-sXCF0jNZhsU2bGbXmKRfLvWdEL0F5tjexHPvVWw/s1600/Kimbell-0575c85.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 274px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHYZwXd4e58S-I229lSsEGQaDHgSNUWsqrjhwtijW1pMgT8zMXfVEM1Yv7ulcyTTa0qte9IrKxCKOsDZfZeogmo2AtX6cF18-sXCF0jNZhsU2bGbXmKRfLvWdEL0F5tjexHPvVWw/s400/Kimbell-0575c85.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5662561744905258034" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>My <b>Physical Bar Charts</b> installation is currently at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, part of the group exhibition <a href="http://www.strozzina.org/declining-democracy/e_index.php">Declining Democracy</a> at the <a href="http://www.strozzina.org/en/">Centro di Cultura Contemporanea</a>, open until January 2012. This is thoughtful exhibition exploring different means by which publics give voice or shape to their concerns. </div><div><br /></div><div>Other pieces include Francis Alys' <b><a href="http://www.strozzina.org/declining-democracy/e_alys.php">When Faith Moves Mountains</a></b>, a video which documents a process in which the artist involved around 500 volunteers in moving a large sand-dune close to a slum in Peru in 2002. This shocking piece asks the visitor to consider how "social" purposes take shape and are acted on. The apparently pointless act of moving of the sand-dune reveals how people are captured and engaged by ideas and then contribute to making things happen. <a href="http://www.strozzina.org/declining-democracy/e_cremers.php"><b>Roger Cremer</b>s' photographs</a> show different people are involved in a hobby of re-enacting aspects of World War 2. <b>Michael Bielicky & Kamila B. Richte</b>r created a digital installation called <a href="http://www.strozzina.org/declining-democracy/e_bielicky_richter.php">Garden of Error and Decay</a> in which data from Twitter and stock markets leads to a changing animated landscape. </div><div><br /></div><div>In some ways Declining Democracy picks up and develops themes from the 2005 show<b> <a href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/expositions/002_parliament.html">Making Things Public</a></b> at ZKM Karlsruhe, but where that was a monster exhibition involving many academics as well as artists, designers and others, this is a smaller, tighter exhibit which carefully constructs a way of thinking about how people make present their questions, criticisms and concerns about the world we live in - how we engage and to what effect.</div><div> </div><div>Declining Democracy also subtly interacts with the exhibition upstairs at the Palazzo Strozzi. Entitled <b><a href="http://www.palazzostrozzi.org/SezioneDenaro.jsp?idSezione=1214">Money and Beauty: Bankers, Boticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities</a></b>, it uses a mixture of paintings, historic artefacts and documents to trace connections between the development of international finance in Renaissance Florence and the emerging mercantile class and signifiers of wealth such as paintings. See the r<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/sep/22/europe-money-banking-art">eview by Jonathan Jones</a> in The Guardian. All relevant to today in the current economic, financial and cultural crisis. </div><div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwqN9dGWWIERKSFb5plCOGjuNmRPcQ7tJoPaHQmtUFORTD2Bnq-K64tUJLqjwP9UywgmENVzefyK4TtApGbPQh5y5PWBqV8wn9u7RIX5Res0jSftQFV2zrA76-DRSQpQHmgt1NgA/s1600/Kimbell-06bdb82eadc2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwqN9dGWWIERKSFb5plCOGjuNmRPcQ7tJoPaHQmtUFORTD2Bnq-K64tUJLqjwP9UywgmENVzefyK4TtApGbPQh5y5PWBqV8wn9u7RIX5Res0jSftQFV2zrA76-DRSQpQHmgt1NgA/s400/Kimbell-06bdb82eadc2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5662571719388524498" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>For this version of the Physical Bar Charts, the question posed next to the installation is "What did you do last week that made you a citizen?" in Italian and English. Badges in English and Italian in eight tubes offer ways to answer this question. People can take as many badges as they want.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>When I left Florence the night after the very busy opening, the badges which had become most popular (ie approximately 200-300 people had taken them) were, in order:</div><div><ul><li><b>I said what I believe </b>(most popular)</li><li>I did nothing</li><li>I broke the law</li><li>I raised issues</li><li>I used public services</li><li>I helped someone</li><li>I kept myself informed</li><li><b>I obeyed the law</b> (least popular).</li></ul></div><div><br /></div><div>The Physical Bar Charts do not purport to constitute "real" research that is statistically valid or reliable. But somehow the piece tells us something about a predominantly Italian audience at a time when Italy's democratic institutions are being questioned. The aesthetic qualities of the tubes and badges draw people in, adding a qualitative dimension to the typically dull routine of filling in a questionnaire or other data-gathering interfaces. </div><div><br /></div><div>But they do more than this too, since when people start wearing the badges, this triggers new connections and engagement. A Dutch journalist at the opening told me he had selected, worn and then taken off the badge saying "I broke the law" because he didn't want people to start asking him the circumstances. As a device the bar charts represent a low-tech way for people to reflect on their own participation in public questions and see how others do too. They make us public and potentially accountable too. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; "><b>Photo credits: Martino Margheri, CCC Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze</b></span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-68026479479634408172011-09-16T10:10:00.004+00:002011-09-16T10:16:23.454+00:00Behave: New services to change travel behaviours<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><b>Why do people use cars for short journeys when there are more sustainable alternatives?</b></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div></span></span></span></div><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/29070203?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400" height="225" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/29070203">Behave: New services to change travel behaviours</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user1785413">Lucy Kimbell</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</p><p><br /></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; line-height: 19px; "></span></p><div>This short film proposes new service concepts to change the travel behaviours of car owners for short journeys. The ideas were created in a two-day workshop held in Oxford in 2011, by mixed teams of MBAs, MDes and MSc students.</div><div><br /></div><div>Focussed on the Oxfordshire town of Bicester, the project is based in the idea that 'travel behaviours' cannot be separated from other social practices. The film suggests that shifting towards new travel behaviours involves creating new combinations of meanings and stories, infrastructure and stuff, skills and competences, and emotions.</div><div><br /></div><div>This collaborative project involved 55 students including MBAs taking my elective in Designing Better Futures at Said Business School, University of Oxford; students on the MDes Innovation and Creativity in Industry at London College of Communication at University of the Arts, London, and students on the MSc Environment Change and Management at the University of Oxford.</div><div><br /></div><div>Collaborators included travel planners from <b>Oxfordshire County Counci</b>l.</div><div><br /></div><div>The film and workshop were financially supported by <b>Samsung Design Europe</b>.</div><div><br /></div><div>For more information visit the <b>MBA Designing Better Futures</b> teaching blog at <a href="http://designingbetterfutures.wordpress.com/">designingbetterfutures.wordpress.com/</a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><p></p><p><br /></p><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 28px;font-size:12px;"><br /></span></span></div>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-12736599777363794362011-09-12T15:30:00.005+00:002011-09-12T15:41:14.807+00:00Physical Bar Charts in Declining Democracy<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyWm4FgOVDSyAj2-gEYV6dLnLuP4Nu-rHqXUfCBHAt5b8p_mcD7KWlzItlqln4Wf99YkjGnjo8ulwMMcnmZGd_aY04nSJg1JMY5FSXCLXAyHKmpeFyrgxnAbtjIEVMjUv_jdw77g/s1600/STROZZINA_PINS_Badgestexts.png" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 122px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyWm4FgOVDSyAj2-gEYV6dLnLuP4Nu-rHqXUfCBHAt5b8p_mcD7KWlzItlqln4Wf99YkjGnjo8ulwMMcnmZGd_aY04nSJg1JMY5FSXCLXAyHKmpeFyrgxnAbtjIEVMjUv_jdw77g/s400/STROZZINA_PINS_Badgestexts.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5651498572588188690" /></a><br /><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>My <b>Physical Bar Charts</b> will be part of the group exhibition <a href="http://www.strozzina.org/declining-democracy/"><b>Declining Democracy</b></a> at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina in Florence. <div><br /></div><div><div><b>DECLINING DEMOCRACY</b></div><div><b>Rethinking democracy between utopia and participation</b></div><div><br /></div><div>23 September 2011—22 January 2012</div><div>Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence</div><div><div>Tuesday–Sunday 10.00–20.00 </div><div>Free Thursdays 18.00</div></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Artists</b>: Francis Alÿs, Michael Bielicky & Kamila B. Richter, Buuuuuuuuu, Roger Cremers, Democracia, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Thomas Feuerstein, Thomas Hirschhorn, Thomas Kilpper, Lucy Kimbell, Cesare Pietroiusti, Artur Żmijewski</div><div><br /></div><div>Contemporary art as a platform to explore contemporary social and political issues: the exhibition presents the diverse artworks of twelve international contemporary artists that create a reflection on the values and contradictions that typify today’s society, addressing the possible declinations of the principles of democracy, which is being challenged more and more today.</div><div><br /></div><div>The exhibition was born out of a consideration of the contemporary international situation. While the current economic crisis has triggered deep social unrest in Western countries, a new sense of revolutionary political utopia, different from, yet parallel to developments in Europe, appears to have gained a foothold in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East. </div><div>The artworks on display will consider such themes as the clash between the individual and the community, the growing gap between the average citizen and the political classes, the power and influence of economic lobbies and mass media, the issues surrounding immigration and new potential forms of democratic participation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Declining Democracy is a project devised by CCC Strozzina with the scholarly contribution of Piroschka Dossi, Christiane Feser, Gerald Nestler and Franziska Nori.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div></div>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-15377741254195934662011-08-30T11:15:00.009+00:002011-08-30T11:36:27.769+00:00Recent publicationsHere are some of my recent publications in <b>peer-reviewed journals</b>. Some of them have been years in the making, a combination of major life changes (having a child, serious illness, moving house three times, family illness, being made redundant, etc, etc) and some are to do with the slow pace of peer review. But another important factor is that sometimes it takes time to get the ideas right - working out what you are trying to say and to whom. In contrast to the world of twitter and blogging, the slower speed of academic writing, reading, reviewing and dialogue can - if things go well - produce rich, more thought-through contributions. Or at least this has been what I have been telling myself as I revise and revise again. And then of course there is the pressure to perform as a researcher by creating public, traceable outputs that locate yourself in relation to other academic productions. Ironically now that I am no longer an academic (in the sense of having a faculty post), here, at last, is some product. <div>
<br /></div><div>Only one of these papers are easily available through an open access journal; the others are in journals that require subscription, which means they are therefore inaccessible unless you have university library access. Please contact me directly if you would like a digital copy of my original text.<div>
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<br /></div><div><b>Kimbell, L. (2011) Rethinking Design Thinking: Part 1, Design and Culture, 3(3): 285-306.</b></div><div>(Accessing this journal requires a subscription). </div><div>
<br /></div><div>ABSTRACT<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The term design thinking has gained attention over the past decade in a wide range of contexts beyond the traditional preoccupations of designers. The main idea is that the ways professional designers problem-solve is of value to firms trying to innovate and to societies trying to make change happen. This paper reviews the origins of the term design thinking in research about designers and its adoption by management educators and consultancies within a dynamic, global mediatized economy. Three main accounts are identified: design thinking as a cognitive style, as a general theory of design, and as a resource for organizations. The paper argues there are several issues that undermine the claims made for design thinking. The first is how many of these accounts rely on a dualism between thinking and knowing, and acting in the world. Second, a generalized design thinking ignores the diversity of designers’ practices and institutions which are historically situated. The third is how design thinking rests on theories of design that privilege the designer as the main agent in designing. Instead the paper proposes that attending to the situated, embodied routines of designers and others offers a useful way to rethink design thinking.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>KEYWORDS: Design thinking, practices, designers, innovation, organization design</div><div>
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<br /></div><div><b>Kimbell, L. (2011) Designing for Service as One Way of Designing Services, International Journal of Design, 5(2): 41-52.</b></div><div>(This journal is open access and the paper is <a href="http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/938/345">available here</a>)</div><div>
<br /></div><div><div>ABSTRACT This paper considers different ways of approaching service design, exploring what professional designers who say they design services are doing. First it reviews literature in the design and management fields, including marketing and operations. The paper proposes a framework that clarifies key tensions shaping the understanding of service design. It then presents an ethnographic study of three firms of professional service designers and details their work in three case studies. The paper reports four findings. The designers approached services as entities that are both social and material. The designers in the study saw service as relational and temporal and thought of value as created in practice. They approached designing a service through a constructivist enquiry in which they sought to understand the experiences of stakeholders and they tried to involve managers in this activity. The paper proposes describing designing for service as a particular kind of service design. Designing for service is seen as an exploratory process that aims to create new kinds of value relation between diverse actors within a socio-material configuration. This has implications for existing ways of understanding design and for research, practice and teaching.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>KEYWORDS: Designing for Service, Service Design, Service Management.</div></div><div>
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<br /></div><div><div><b>Kimbell, L. (2011) An Aesthetic Inquiry into Organizing Some Rats and Some People, Tamara: Journal for Critical Organizational Inquiry, 9(3-4): 77-92.</b></div><div>(Accessing this journal requires a subscription). </div><div>
<br /></div><div>ABSTRACT Rats crawling, an art gallery, rats as art, warm furry bodies, bright plastic tubes, disgusting, chilled dead frogs, rats for science, a preparation, a sweet little rat, a village hall, women in white coats, rats in cages, a rosette, urine, a rat in a pouch, cuddles, rats for art, the winner is, strong black tea, how many do you have, in the literature, breeding, get more rats, a rat down a sleeve, I’’ll give you a lift, sign in, a rack of cages, what is that, the data shows, please wash your hands, they can smell your perfume, protestors, I don’’t know, a knock out, brain surgery, squeak squeak, the Morris water maze, toys, slice, you are a messy boy, the critique, I haven’’t got a licence, drawings, rats in art, do you mind, a duvet, insurance, a queue, a drawing device, sugar rats, chunky knits, where’’s the nearest rat, black rubbery tails, video camera, a T-maze, sawdust, a cleavage, nail clippings, face painting, artist rat, drawings, it’’s different, two young women, a judge, art for rats, agility training, he remembers from last time.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>KEYWORDS: Art, Aesthetics, Rats, Research, Rancière</div><div>
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<br /></div></div></div></div>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-55205415366302287602011-07-11T12:01:00.014+00:002011-07-17T09:21:29.472+00:00Physical Bar Charts at TEDGlobal 2011<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIFGu3VJxPcD9wpNAoef5qFjUdRaVi3rSgSpmeVl1qBlcRim8wSc-2BIsduiWKpnEkempiQ-Vh7cWaMX2Y3es24_V536ORaS-fQuLu0W5TxFWlV7rxJOzlN3hRSThSjOxxx_AbZg/s1600/TED_PBC_starting.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIFGu3VJxPcD9wpNAoef5qFjUdRaVi3rSgSpmeVl1qBlcRim8wSc-2BIsduiWKpnEkempiQ-Vh7cWaMX2Y3es24_V536ORaS-fQuLu0W5TxFWlV7rxJOzlN3hRSThSjOxxx_AbZg/s400/TED_PBC_starting.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5628109367822420146" /></a><br /><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/26465421?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400" height="225" frameborder="0"></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/26465421"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Today at TED Global...by Lucy Kimbell</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">. Video timelapse edited by </span><a href="http://vimeo.com/user6545817"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Kiersten Nash</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">; timelapse data grabbed with help from Mike Femia of TED.</span></p></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>My <b>Physical Bar Charts</b> were installed at <b><a href="http://conferences.ted.com/TEDGlobal2011">TEDGlobal 2011</a></b> in Edinburgh in July. Over the conference, people helped themselves to badges from the installation, which together revealed a picture of what this temporary community was thinking about and how the conference shaped their activity.<br /><br />The eight badges for this version of the Physical Bar Charts had these texts (from left to right):<br /><ul><li>I surprised myself</li><li>I was inspired and acted upon it</li><li>My ideas were challenged (<b>least popular</b>)</li><li>What am I doing here?</li><li>I stayed up too late last night</li><li>My ideas had sex with another TEDster's</li><li>I delayed judgement</li><li>I said what I believe (<b>most popular</b>)</li></ul><div>People are invited to help themselves to badge(s) that say something about what's on their mind or what they have been doing at TED. Most of the badges are deliberately in the first person and refer to acts in the past. They of course mean different things to different people, but once selected and then worn, can spark conversations among members of the conference community. At the same time, the Physical Bar Charts reveal a collective picture - what the community says it has been doing as a whole. </div><div><br /></div><div>Together, as a device the Physical Bar Charts are an example of social data gathering, collaborative sense-making, playful research, real-time reporting, experiential inquiry. They spark conversations and prompt a community such as TED to reflect on its concerns and practices. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is the eighth time the piece has been shown. It was first developed and shown, in collaboration with sociologist <a href="http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/abarry.html">Andrew Barry</a>, for the group exhibition <a href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/livres/96-MTP-DING.pdf">Making Things Public</a>, curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2005. (See the <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10595">catalogue</a> published by MIT Press.) In other versions, the piece has explored how people think about citizenship and political activity and to what extent they want to make public their participation in collective life. The bar charts have been installed in venues such as public libraries, a university campus, art institutions and also small galleries on a city high street. </div><div><br /></div><div>The next version of the piece will be one created for the specific context of contemporary Italian politics, in a group show on democracy at the <a href="http://www.palazzostrozzi.org/">Palazzo Strozzi</a>, Florence, opening in September 2011. </div><div><br /></div><br /><a href="http://blog.ted.com/2011/07/14/raising-the-bar-qa-with-lucy-kimball-creator-of-the-physical-bar-chart/">TED Blog interview with me about the TED Physical Bar Charts</a><br /><div><br /></div><div>Thanks to Hermeet Gill who suggested the piece to TED, and to Kiersten Nash for helping realise it this year</div></div><p><br /></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG7ugHJ4cUhq3yIMaDE7bhBYBOYzddTMvB1c-bCOFoZ4cabEa1BGQTobkFsmuo5fdNT3nm91_4xkgZzWryziZiU10S98aFMS2SAPWpPQWPsQWmMqUg-4B34diRoLzwf53w5coSSA/s1600/TED_CU.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG7ugHJ4cUhq3yIMaDE7bhBYBOYzddTMvB1c-bCOFoZ4cabEa1BGQTobkFsmuo5fdNT3nm91_4xkgZzWryziZiU10S98aFMS2SAPWpPQWPsQWmMqUg-4B34diRoLzwf53w5coSSA/s400/TED_CU.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5629136415326192322" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIuWnyna2fOhuL2Dbb-sWTjeQ7-g2fR8Nb_85fKxyq9imR1ERs0Rz4Y5lb9Srryv0kKNt_eaQ2gbAa_T5iBLhhGaP0oxdAvUgtV-c-cCFhzmYZPvWK9q7wE_iyozs4O6XRdPnsxg/s1600/TED_lateWeds.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIuWnyna2fOhuL2Dbb-sWTjeQ7-g2fR8Nb_85fKxyq9imR1ERs0Rz4Y5lb9Srryv0kKNt_eaQ2gbAa_T5iBLhhGaP0oxdAvUgtV-c-cCFhzmYZPvWK9q7wE_iyozs4O6XRdPnsxg/s400/TED_lateWeds.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5629136405990611842" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwSxb6gmw5QKvz-s0LtAAFfjShOeMPCxVapqMiObkaBD8BU2rtV-yZ2sTgabm_xxLducb2pdLmvhRXlAbUBR7B0o1ZK09OVFg_YiAZQjyckI50R26WD1Efcq5Pf9mgTIUgn8Oe5g/s1600/Tubes_tall.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwSxb6gmw5QKvz-s0LtAAFfjShOeMPCxVapqMiObkaBD8BU2rtV-yZ2sTgabm_xxLducb2pdLmvhRXlAbUBR7B0o1ZK09OVFg_YiAZQjyckI50R26WD1Efcq5Pf9mgTIUgn8Oe5g/s400/Tubes_tall.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5629139262346655666" /></a>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-84689390424085947582011-06-23T10:46:00.005+00:002011-06-30T16:19:15.186+00:00Five things people designing solutions to social problems should knowDesigners are now working in a range of contexts that are quite different to what many of them were educated for. Some are designing public services, others work on humanitarian or development projects, others are creating social enterprises. Common to all these is an interest in social problems and the belief that designers’ ways of working – in particular “Design Thinking” – has special ways to solve them. We think designers have much to contribute to different kinds of community, but we suggest there are some important things they need to know.<br /><br />1 Social problems don’t just exist “out there” waiting for socially-minded designers or social entrepreneurs to trip over. On the contrary, they are constructed by the interplay of individuals, organisations, things and what brings them all together. Designers should focus their attention as much on how they and others construct social problems rather than just working towards solving them.<br /><br />2 Objects too can intentionally or otherwise spark a social problem into existence. Designers who have got busy designing “intangible” services rather than mundane things should be aware that their special knowledge about how to make stuff is of immense potential value in constructing problems as social problems.<br /><br />3 Design Thinking and its optimistic process pushes designers ever onward in pursuit of a solution based on responding to stories of personal troubles. This might not be right for messy, intractable social issues. Designers should attend to the nuances of the social worlds they work in and consider what they are driving themselves towards, and who and what is shaping this and why.<br /><br />4 Like any other actor in a social world, designers are able to interpret the world around them, and come up with ideas to change it. Those who look, uncritically, towards Design Thinking to answer the world¹s most wicked social problems are missing some important resources. We¹d encourage designers to draw on ideas and concepts from the social sciences - not just borrowing ethnography as a methodology but going deeper into understanding how social problems are constructed. For example concepts such as reflexivity can help designers become aware of how their own commitments shape how they understand what is going on and what they think they can change. <br /><br />5 Unlike architects, engineers and many other professionals, designers do not have clear disciplinary boundaries, strong institutions or professional codes of ethics. Designers with ambitions to design solutions to social problems are working in dangerous territory and should develop credible tools to reflect on the nature of their work and its possible and actual impacts.<br /><br /><br />The provocations are drawn from <a href="http://www.taylorhaig.co.uk/assets/taylorhaig_designthinkingandthebigsociety.pdf">“Design Thinking and the Big Society: From Solving Personal Troubles to Designing Social Problems</a>” by Simon Blyth (Actant) and Lucy Kimbell (Taylor Haig).<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Thanks to Cassie and Alex for pointing out the missing no.4.</span>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-14708825180848268432011-05-30T16:18:00.007+00:002011-05-30T16:37:08.953+00:00Physical Bar Charts at TEDGlobal 2011My participative installation <span style="font-weight:bold;">Physical Bar Charts</span> will be installed at <a href="http://conferences.ted.com/TEDGlobal2011/"><span style="font-weight:bold;">TEDGlobal 2011</span></a> in Edinburgh for the duration of the four-day conference in July. This is the eighth time I have made the piece, which was initially developed in collaboration with sociologist <a href="http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/abarry.html">Andrew Barry</a>. The work has changed slightly since the first version, then called <span style="font-weight:bold;">Personal Political Indices</span> (Pindices) in the group show <span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/96-MTP-DING.pdf">Making Things Public</a></span> curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, at ZKM Karlsruhe, in 2005. <br /><br />People respond to a prompt or question by taking badges that answer it in some way. For the TEDGlobal conference, there will be new badges with questions relevant to the conversations at TED. The resulting Physical Bar Chart shows which badges are most popular, and being viewable in a public space within the conference, allow people to have a bigger picture about what the conference is thinking. Meanwhile the badges prompt new discussions as they are worn around the conference and city, or back home. <br /><br />The piece operates on a number of levels. <br />- By creating a way for members of a temporary community to make sense of what they are hearing and discussing <br />- By creating a near real-time record of how participants are engaging with the ideas at the conference<br />- By revealing the creation of data and its analysis to be a thoroughly social process<br />- Sculpturally, by creating seductive forms that draw people in <br /><br /><br />The photo shows a version of Physical Bar Charts, installed at Said Business School, Oxford, in 2008 as part of the Imagining Business conference. More about the piece: <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/Pindices.html">Pindices</a> and <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/PhysicalBarCharts.html">Physical Bar Charts</a>. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBUw0fj7bd1r-IY3E3fZcx434Lq-ty5BN5MG8jCGTwMxoBzJnNthVuVaNc7irSiJMx5l3b1ZGPdLiHz2lAr6qbvX3Foot1ih2We1rPA1COF4VsNfgJBFWJpYCj4c84ofP7aRi1eA/s1600/SBS_strategic.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBUw0fj7bd1r-IY3E3fZcx434Lq-ty5BN5MG8jCGTwMxoBzJnNthVuVaNc7irSiJMx5l3b1ZGPdLiHz2lAr6qbvX3Foot1ih2We1rPA1COF4VsNfgJBFWJpYCj4c84ofP7aRi1eA/s400/SBS_strategic.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612548260478826082" /></a>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-69637135386480060572011-05-28T05:54:00.006+00:002011-05-28T06:17:06.656+00:00Design innovation workshop, PhiladelphiaIn March I co-facilitated the four-day <a href="http://design.temple.edu/challenge2011/">Design Challenge 2011</a> for students at Temple University, Philadelphia, with<span style="font-weight:bold;"> James Moustefellos</span> who with <span style="font-weight:bold;">Youngjin Yoo</span> directs the <a href="http://design.temple.edu/">Center for Design + Innovation</a> within the Fox School of Business. <br /><br />An open call to students across all departments at Temple resulted in around 18 teams signing up for the day. All of them had to be mixed in terms of disciplines, drawing on at least two departments, although the majority of participants came from the Fox Business School. <br /><br />The <span style="font-weight:bold;">challenge</span> to the students focussed on the area of the city close to the Temple campus, North Broad St. The project asked students<br />- How can we use increasingly pervasive digital technology to re-imagine the future of the city?<br />- Can we use digital technologies to inspire, mobilize and create social, economic, cultural, political and intellectual connections to solve the complex challenges that cities face today<br />- Can we build a sustainable open platform that encourages and supports a vibrant ecosystem of neighbors, entrepreneurs and communities?<br /><br />Over four days, students worked together to do first-hand research in the North Broad area and then come up with service concepts to address issues they identified. This included a detailed briefing with input from community leaders and from city organisations (on Monday) and a one day workshop (on Thursday) led by James and I, which was a day of intense idea generation and visualisation. The presentations at the end of the day, judged by a team of entrepreneurs, community leaders and academics, showed what a wide range of responses. Students presented their insights from their research, and then proposals for a new service journey or service encounter, communicate in a range of media from collage, to sketches, to role play. The successful propositions combined an understanding of the service ecology around North Broad St, and a creative reconfiguration of community resources supported by digital technologies. <br /><br />As a learning experience for the students, it showed how design-based approaches support rapid collaboration and proposition development. As a way to build relationships between the university and its community and city, it showed how to engage student energy and entrepreneurial drive. I look forward to next year. <br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1K-L5cvRYCzd8fiE6Sq55nklwkGqbVpVCUoenVGg93a0L3TQgT8IMZC-lPX1AWq3DAeNdyC_2kR0BdzWTWjQobonjiYFQ6MdmxryrU3PPbIHxHxXQ_KkYQtaCaOCntqxzLEvm3g/s1600/Temple_workshop_visualresearch2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1K-L5cvRYCzd8fiE6Sq55nklwkGqbVpVCUoenVGg93a0L3TQgT8IMZC-lPX1AWq3DAeNdyC_2kR0BdzWTWjQobonjiYFQ6MdmxryrU3PPbIHxHxXQ_KkYQtaCaOCntqxzLEvm3g/s400/Temple_workshop_visualresearch2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5611643201335704034" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX1VIFCVHwh5yLHJRQGAuIp0hzlQOP_7X_SAVRxUDD3vHqZ7zFsq0a2nDoD4Im-4YLKc3Vc3UOlkitmA5OyZr6JjCPlkxuGlBzz_kwnO2kBWedJHIvjX8bEs9OIa-PN5-GJod6NA/s1600/Temple_workshop_room.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX1VIFCVHwh5yLHJRQGAuIp0hzlQOP_7X_SAVRxUDD3vHqZ7zFsq0a2nDoD4Im-4YLKc3Vc3UOlkitmA5OyZr6JjCPlkxuGlBzz_kwnO2kBWedJHIvjX8bEs9OIa-PN5-GJod6NA/s400/Temple_workshop_room.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5611643194534908322" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOxYzlyxGoaW4cOyuUoQjk0TLeYMCwxRJcGlyOKaCTO2qhewEyhN5HZnHCvSEKWv0jvrC40FkzaGuoQ4JXlB-xmd9UYzS6ce0a8HVn2mhRNuwH37zz2N-Jgej4IOMxNG5OFcc4AA/s1600/Temple_workshop_persona.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOxYzlyxGoaW4cOyuUoQjk0TLeYMCwxRJcGlyOKaCTO2qhewEyhN5HZnHCvSEKWv0jvrC40FkzaGuoQ4JXlB-xmd9UYzS6ce0a8HVn2mhRNuwH37zz2N-Jgej4IOMxNG5OFcc4AA/s400/Temple_workshop_persona.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5611643203768686546" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS7EY0m8XgqAITkiV9AYtbG8jXoSttKaeECMVKg0_jjL7tgetQRVib_VDMKA4ajOk5IO9PyCB2IMgiMLlUNDQmuGFDVV7KDGXDj5lAtdrK5cZOlYUTnpWZMaJgP4ShjM9au2V_wA/s1600/Temple_workshop_presents.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS7EY0m8XgqAITkiV9AYtbG8jXoSttKaeECMVKg0_jjL7tgetQRVib_VDMKA4ajOk5IO9PyCB2IMgiMLlUNDQmuGFDVV7KDGXDj5lAtdrK5cZOlYUTnpWZMaJgP4ShjM9au2V_wA/s400/Temple_workshop_presents.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5611643208388381730" /></a>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-35165114795024468062011-03-08T20:28:00.004+00:002011-03-08T20:31:30.082+00:00Service design performances at Parsons DESIS Lab, March 2011<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis7_IxMMz1XZzJzZmLldAidNYe_Ifw9yNpyoxwJz6Eo1EqjybY5KuvLc_IsqNcymIVPS6nIjnLJWUQsgwpsdbG9DBGrvOkRfYPtjLnWq5zCBH_d4WsblOQQ-05f2vGzjzjX5iBsw/s1600/LK_talk_Parsons_2011.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 259px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis7_IxMMz1XZzJzZmLldAidNYe_Ifw9yNpyoxwJz6Eo1EqjybY5KuvLc_IsqNcymIVPS6nIjnLJWUQsgwpsdbG9DBGrvOkRfYPtjLnWq5zCBH_d4WsblOQQ-05f2vGzjzjX5iBsw/s400/LK_talk_Parsons_2011.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5581809365397564930" /></a>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-8656113638524453402011-03-08T19:51:00.006+00:002011-03-08T20:09:51.444+00:00Guest post: Derek Miller: Design Ethics for International Peace and Security<span style="font-weight:bold;">Intro</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">This is a guest post by <span style="font-weight:bold;">Derek Miller</span>, founder of the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Policy Lab</span> and senior fellow at the <span style="font-weight:bold;">United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research</span> (UNIDIR). The Policy Lab provides research and design services at the policy, organization, and field-levels to reduce barriers, create conditions, and design solutions for strategic engagement with local communities. It is the successor to the Security Needs Assessment Protocol (SNAP) project of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva (2006-2010). The SNAP project was an innovation initiative to explore the potential for best process approaches to the design of local action on security matters by UN operational agencies. With Derek and his colleague Lisa Rudnick, and ethnographer Gerry Philipsen of the University of Washington, I co-organised a three-day conference on <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/strategicdesignandpublicpolicy/home">Strategic Design and Public Policy</a> at Glen Cove, NY, in June 2010, the brought together specialists from design, policy and cultural research to explore the idea of bringing local knowledge to the design of local action in the context of security and disarmament. </span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Design Ethics for International Peace and Security<br /></span>October 2010<br /><br />Lecture delivered to the University of Gothenburg, Business and Design Lab, 6 October 20101<br />by Derek B. Miller<br /><br />Thank you for coming today. I hate it when I’m booked into a large room and no one comes. I have to suffer the double indignity of talking to myself and then having my own words echoed back at me.<br /><br />My thanks as well to professor Ulla Johansson, whom I met at a conference in Cleveland on the convergence of design and management.<br /><br />I do want to discuss a topic that I believe is important. It is not a topic I have seen addressed in any great detail or with particular urgency, and yet the topic deserves both. If we to boil it down to just a phrase, I’d say the topic is design ethics, and my particular concern is better ensuring that the ever-closer relations that design is forming with public policy is informed by the necessary seriousness of mind required to achieve some real good in the world. Underlying that aspiration is also a concern. The concern is that failure to do so could mean that we actually cause a harm.<br /><br />As designers look towards ever-new domains for social innovation, especially in public service, it would be wise to ensure that this aspiration towards social betterment is guided by the tutored consideration of our actions and their impact on others.<br />My perspective on design comes from outside the field looking inward. My vantage point for reflecting on design has been Security Needs Assessment Protocol project at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva. Started in 2006, SNAP was an innovation initiative into the design of community-level peace and security projects and programmes by the United Nations. I designed and ran that programme with Lisa Rudnick.<br /><br />SNAP was supported by the Swedish, Dutch and Norwegian foreign ministries and its purpose was conceptualize, design, and test new ways to A) generate local knowledge at the community level and B) turn it into a strategic asset in the design of local-level interventions. Our work was thematically concerned with community security — that is, attending to matters of violence — though the applicability of our work extends rather farther.<br /><br />Recently, I’m pleased to say, the 22nd Biennial of Industrial Design (BIO 22) being held at the museum of Architecture and Design in Slovenia selected SNAP as one of the “good practice examples” in the field of Service and Information Design to recognize this innovation in bringing social research, design, and international peace and security closer together. I’d like to add that our introduction to the field of design was assisted by our colleagues at Live work in London and Oslo. This wasn’t a client relationship but rather, since 2008, has been an on-going conversation into the relationship between our professional domains. Our conversations with Lucy Kimbell at the Said Business School at Oxford further contributed to our induction into the profession of design. Those conversations continue.<br /><br />The process of bringing together the professional domains of socio-cultural research, design, and international peace and security was a revealing exercise. And today, albeit briefly, I want to share a few things it revealed. The center of gravity for this discussion might be termed “responsible design.” The framework for considering responsible design is the topic of ethics.<br />To discuss this properly, I find it helpful to begin with a distinction. The distinction is between an ethos for doing good, and the ethics of doing good. An ethos is a general orientation, or set of guiding principles. It is like choosing a direction, like facing east rather than west.<br /><br />Many designers today, especially the younger generation of designers, want to do some good in the world. They no longer seem satisfied simply creating objects of desire for profit. This is laudable. But for the good intentions of the design profession to actually result in some good, it is going to be necessary to carefully attend to how we design. Design is both a social process, with implications for others who are participants to that process, and also brings something new into the world that may have social force. Attending to both matters responsibly will be essential as the field moves forward.<br /><br />This is especially true as design steps into the wider world of international peace and security — given that the issue here is not consumer value but life and death.<br /><br />If an ethos is an orientation, then ethics is the set of rules we establish and enact to guide and judge to our actions.<br />There is some limited discussion about ethics in design, but in comparison to codes of conduct in, say, anthropology, architecture, and medicine, one would be forgiven for finding them undeveloped. Design ethics appears to be under-theorized, and under- codified given that design research is now crossing the borderline into social research, including ethnography, which involves research with or on human beings. It is worth recalling, for example, that since 1947 and the establishment of the Nuremberg Code, the voluntary consent of people to research has been treated as “absolutely essential” by many organizations. Though written in direct response to medical experimentation, design research is now stepping into a world, as mentioned, where the process of learning, and the outcomes of learning both have social implications. It is time to turn an eye towards the ethics of design research.<br /><br />Perhaps even more importantly, design is also stepping into the area of social action, through such activities as social innovation, whereby the outcome of a design is a social change in the world. This invites a rather obvious question. What, exactly, is guiding your conduct? It is a profit motive that allows the market to regulate value? Or will you uncritically adopt the mandates and missions of the organizations that hire you? Will you trust your own inner voice to lead to you to proper conduct, or will you endeavor to determine what common ethical grounds can be created for cooperation? How will you do that?<br /><br />We are not going to solve this today. But we can take some preliminary steps to map out the terrain that we are going to face. That terrain is conceptual. It is a place of ideas, and the relations between ideas that in turn guide our actions. Clarity is helpful in that regard. So let’s first try, for just a moment, to conceptualize and situate design in continuum between knowledge and action.<br /><br />Close your eyes for a moment. Try to remember the world before Powerpoint. Imagine two circles beside one another. They do not touch. The circle on the left will be labeled knowledge. The circle on the right will be labeled action.<br />What is the relationship to be between knowledge and action? And where does design fit in that relationship both conceptually and procedurally?<br /><br />In my field, of international peace and security, we can actually see the institutionalized distinction between knowledge and action. The university system and think tanks, policy centers, and research NGOs constitute the “knowledge sector.” They get money from governments to go generate knowledge and then bring that knowledge across the street to the decisionmakers in the operational agencies as well as to the politicians. These latter people are the decision makers. They are the consumers of knowledge. (If we’re lucky). This is not ideal, but it is real.<br /><br />Those who generate knowledge are welcome to advocate for certain types of actions. But ultimately, it is the elected leaders, representatives or the civil servants who will really decide. (I’m speaking here about liberal democratic systems, and the international institutions modeled on them. That might not be the whole world, but it is that part of the world that cares about design.)<br /><br />Notice how something interesting has happened here. One of the inadvertent functions of democracy is to keep knowledge distinct from action. Action is to be a product of democratic choice, and bureaucratic implementation, not professional knowledge.<br /><br />That is, action comes from decisionmaking, and decisionmaking is a political process, subject to political correction. You don’t like the decision, you throw out the decisionmaker and elect another one. Design exists only in debate. Not as a process for moving knowledge to action.<br /><br />What is absolutely crucial to understand here is that the legitimacy of actions by decisionmakers — whether they are policymakers or civil servants — is derived from the political philosophy of democracy itself. Liberalism. The social contract. Self-government. We the people. That sort of thing. That is why it’s OK for them to do things to you. Raise your taxes. Tear up your roads. Go to war on your behalf. Change your health system. Legitimacy, in political processes, is presumed by the system. Is not a product of the system.<br /><br />Here’s what’s good about the democratic model: It allows for, and creates, systems and processes to try and ensure that the will of the people is expressed in the action of decisionmakers — whether at the highest or lowest levels. Said differently, social action is meant to be derived from democratic processes. Insofar as democracy is good, social action will be legitimately enacted.<br /><br />Here’s what’s bad about it: There’s no mechanism for good designs to be introduced into the system, because no one is really wondering what to do. When answers are dictated by political processes, people don’t entertain a lot of questions. Instead, they are given platforms, mandates or missions to fulfill. Because that’s what people want. The knowledge-to-action nexus simply does not create space for design process.<br /><br />So is that end of the story? If there’s no design space in public policy, isn’t that the end of the road for design?<br /><br />Actually, no. I think it’s just the beginning. And here’s why. The times are changing. Deep in the bowels of democratic nations, the very definition of legitimacy is starting to evolve. People don’t just want a voice anymore. They don’t just want to elect people who will advance their will. They are starting to demand results.<br /><br />If at one time governments simply had to make hard decisions about peace and war, the economy, and other matters, today, the systems into which they are making decisions is so complex, so non-linear and dynamic, that sheer force of will and character is no longer enough. Climate change, global terrorism, the depletion of fossil fuels and the energy crisis, the shortage of clean water, the threat to the nation-state system in most of Africa and the Middle East, the breakdown of almost every social service including transportation, health, and education... these aren’t decisionmaking issues. They can’t be solved by leadership alone.<br />These are design issues. They require tutored and fastidious attention to the process of both generating knowledge, and moving it to action through processes of design.<br /><br />I think the door is opening for design if we conceptualize design as a process for moving knowledge to action in innovative, rigorous and ethical ways. Design is the application solution for knowledge.<br /><br />It's time to go back to the circles. I want you to push those two even farther apart now and make space for one right in the middle. And we will label that one “design.”<br /><br />If we see little space for design in public policy due to certain philosophical premises in democracy — which become manifest as routines in bureaucracies — we do see comparably more space for design between knowledge and action in industry, where results somehow depend on the design of solutions to problems. Here, legitimacy isn’t presumed. It’s earned.<br /><br />It is no wonder, then, that designers and business leaders are thinking that design can now be applied to public policy.<br />After all, if people want results, and we design results, it should be a pretty smooth transference of skill sets. And so, with energy and a whole lot of money, design is stepping into the unknown and promising that it can lead.<br /><br />And yet, for those of us who are serious researchers and are serious public policy people, one can’t help but sense a certain loose relationship between design today and the simple notion of rigor.<br /><br />I had a professor at Oxford who once said, “the less you know about something, the easier it is to develop a theory about it.”<br /><br />As design moves away — or at least broaden from — its creation of objects of desire to social processes and systems, it is reaching a point of creative tension with its own premises. These premises are challenged as it steps into new domains, and also as it steps into new cultural systems. Premises about value. About utility. About rationality. About social relations. Even about the very nature and use of time.<br /><br />This is a wonderful moment because design now has a chance to step through the open door being offered by the re-imaging of public services and government. It is a formative period too, because the directions you set out on will have profound implications down the road as the paths further diverge. Get it right, and design will take it’s place between the philosopher and the king at the high tables of social influence. Get it wrong, get distracted, go the easy route, and design will be a trendy, marginal field that could never gets act together.<br /><br />My concern right now — as I advocate for design in public policy — is that the field is adopting some rather under-developed theory at what seems to be alarming rate, at a very formative moment. In the rush to be useful, to be seductive, to be creative, to be responsive, the professional field of design might be taking shortcuts that will lead it quickly to irrelevance. There could be a “design bubble” developing and it could pop.<br /><br />One way to avoid this is to not mistake the panic of industry to find new ideas with the quality of ideas its finding. Panic buying tends to push the price of ideas, and therefore the investment in them, down. In a panic, any old idea will do.<br />However. If the goal here is really to achieve some social good in the public service, lead design into a more socially influential future for the greater good, and actually mainstream design at the nexus between knowledge and action, then we might just need to slow down, and grow up.<br /><br />Those are two odd requests for design because, historically, it hasn’t needed to. But as design looks towards public service, and as business looks towards emerging markets, fragile states and conflict zones, business as usual is going to get people killed.<br />That’s not a mere turn of phrase. Here are the topics I deal with at UNIDIR, in no particular order. Small arms and light weapons, landmines, conflict prevention, crisis management, post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding, weapons collection, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants, crimes against humanity, child trafficking, gender-based violence, conflict analysis, conflict sensitive operational programming, and that’s just the small stuff. Add biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, weaponization of space, terrorism and counter-terrorism, state fragility and just basically war, and we’re starting to fill out the topics that come up on Monday mornings at 11 at UNIDIR’s staff meetings.<br /><br />These are real, grown up issues that need real, grown up attention by people who are committed — professionally – to trying to figure out what is wrong with their own ideas, and not what is right about them. Designers are worryingly not involved in that process. Design is trying to prove itself, rather than disprove itself. It is the latter, though, that will serve the social good.<br /><br />Allow me to explain. What my don at Oxford meant by his quip was that every idea seems like a good idea until you learn what’s wrong with it. And generally speaking, you learn what’s wrong with it by trying to.<br /><br />There is a very strong school of thought in science, and I count myself in this camp, that believes we cannot truly prove things. What we can do, however, is disprove things. We try to figure out, not what’s right about a given course of action, but what’s wrong with it. If you turn it over and over and over again in your mind and can’t think of anything, you give it a go. We haven’t proved it’s a good idea. But we’ve hopefully weeded out the worse ideas and in doing so raised our confidence in the course of action we’ve chosen. Karl Popper is a key reference here.<br /><br />Today, design does not seem to be centrally concerned with building theory or processes that can be disproved. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be interested in process at all. It seems to be interested in thought. And yet, thinking and acting are not the same. If one can engage in “design thinking” then it stands to reason that one can have “design thoughts.” But ... now what?<br /><br />The problem with so-called design thinking is that it is about just that ... thinking. Mapping out — or just speaking metaphorically — about ways of thinking is not the same as producing systems, processes or frameworks for mobilizing thought to action.<br /><br />Design thinking — though a catchy slogan to be sure — is not a developed analytical concept, is not distingusiable as a means of thoughts from other forms of thought, and let me go on record saying it is not a “methodology.” In the words of Gertrude Stein, there’s no there there. If it cann’t be distingusihed, defined, enacted, or falisfied, I’m not sure what it can do other can sparkle and hypnotize.<br /><br />For “design thinking” to be worthy of serious consideration, rather than just rhetorical appropriation, it will need to evolve into an actual analytical framework that tells me something about the world, and in turn allows me to differentiate it, genuinely, from other forms of thinking. Right now, it doesn’t. In a nice blog entry at the Harvard Business Review, Peter Merholz (9 October, 2009) shared a smiliar lament. He wrote, “We have librarians, and historians and fine artists. All of these disciplinary backgrounds allow people to bring distinct perspectives to our work [in business], allowing for insights that wouldn’t be achieved if we were all cut from the same cloth. Do we need to espouse ‘library thinking,; “history thinking,’ and ‘arts thinking.’” Merholz was right to call this absurd and to point out that design thinking is merely clever repackaging of some social science — but sadly, not good social science.<br /><br />The reason this troubles me, rather than just distracts me, is that “design thinking” is directing creative attention away from the pursuit of intellectual clarity, and the progression of design as a serious endeavor. And part of that failure is ours. Ours as a design community. And at this point, for this reason, I will include myself among this world of designers.<br /><br />Our collective failure to demand clarity from ideas — especially when our ideas lead to actions of moral consequence — is an expression of moral weakness. It takes courage to demand clarity. To stand in front of the masses and say, “I don’t understand. You are going to need to explain that again.” And an idea continues to make no sense, we must entertain the notion that the fault is not ours. Some things in the world are wrong. And it requires courage to say so.<br /><br />I would like to see a new contract formed between design and public policy. But only if that contract is well written.<br />I want to end this presentation by briefly mentioning what we’ve done to establish a new agenda and programme of work for design and public policy.<br /><br />In June of this year, the SNAP project at UNIDIR, in cooperation with the Said Business School at Oxford, and the Center for Local Strategies Research at the University of Washington, hosted an agenda-setting event called Strategic Design and Public Policy. It included top thinkers and practitioners in cultural research, design, and international peace and security. It put together a real and serious agenda. It is not as shiny as some of the other things on offer today. But I assure you, isn’t dull either.<br /><br />In considering those three circles again, it is now clear – following that event – that there are serious issues between and among all three of these thematic areas that are going to need attention if a new model for legitimate and socially beneficial design is to be developed. We need to step away from metaphor and mystical thinking, and get serious about strategic design.<br /><br />The Strategic Design and Public Policy agenda, created at Glen Cove in New York, explicitly notes the theoretical, methodological and practical gaps between the generation of knowledge and its application to design processes, on the one hand, and the integration of design processes and products into public policy on the other. We view these as matters for attention, and challenges, not obstacles.<br /><br />In the discussion that drew the event to a close, participants from cultural research, design (especially service design) and public policy suggested next steps as an agenda for strategic design and public policy. These steps are already being implemented in at least half a dozen organizations including UNIDIR at the UN, the University of Washington, and live|work, among others. It is a detailed agenda, but there are four categories for action. <br /><br />These are:<br />1. Supporting cooperation to develop new methods, tools and practices to learn more about each others’ ways of working;<br />2. Developing resources for cooperative action;<br />3. Promoting awareness of strategic design and its value for public policy and programming; and<br />4. Pursuing solutions for social betterment through social action.<br /><br />This cooperative agenda opens possibilities for research, design, and public policy to start working in closer synergy in a rigorous, ethical and systematic manner to build the foundations we all need to take more confident action for the public good. And I hope you’ll join us.<br /><br />I’m delighted to speak here at Götenberg on this topic, and my hope is that is the beginning of a conversation and not the end.Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-1931774321304320682011-03-04T21:09:00.023+00:002011-03-08T19:48:32.777+00:00Making Crafting Designing, 2011<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-LdRnKvpL7_pwiZ5a49A66NNRFTLP64ZCs4bcHt0m_-WdDAX2BspTfzeLP9Tff1cvg_dh3PgE3qquZllQoSFfNxFckEDGXd5BoMSc6B7GYuGLjPgjIQh2QB8uFvcMDObB2QKHeg/s1600/twitterdials.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-LdRnKvpL7_pwiZ5a49A66NNRFTLP64ZCs4bcHt0m_-WdDAX2BspTfzeLP9Tff1cvg_dh3PgE3qquZllQoSFfNxFckEDGXd5BoMSc6B7GYuGLjPgjIQh2QB8uFvcMDObB2QKHeg/s400/twitterdials.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5581798008975529490" /></a> <br />Image: Dials showing different levels of near real-time twitter activity in several locations, British Library<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />This is a short summary of the <a href="http://www.makingcraftingdesigning.com/">MakingCraftingDesigning symposium</a> held in February at the wonderfully-named <a href="www.akademie-solitude.de">Akademie Schloss Solitude</a>, near Stuttgart, organised by <span style="font-weight:bold;">Sarah Owens</span> (Zurich University of the Arts) and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Björn Franke</span> (Royal College of Art, London). Attended by around 100 people, mostly from design schools in Europe with a sprinkling of others, the event was particularly enjoyable in the way it ranged from discussions of design thinking and practice to questions of new sites for human activity in creating the artificial such as bio- and nanotech. By drawing such a huge canvas, I think the organisers succeeding in raising some big questions about whether the term design is useful to cover both the former and the latter. As usual please be aware I may have misunderstood the speakers and any mistakes in presenting their ideas are mine. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Richard Sennett </span>(New York University/London School of Economics) is a well-known sociologist, recently fashionable among designers because of his book <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Craftsman</span>, which asserted the importance of material skills and practices within a range of contemporary contexts, not just those we call 'craft' industries. Sennett gave his keynote on the first night, giving some insight into his next book which he had just finished. The basic idea seemed to be about the difficulty and critical importance of co-operation in the contemporary world especially getting along with and working with those we don't like or understand. Sennett made a distinction between the dialectical and dialogical underpinnings of cooperation and also between sympathy and empathy. Acknowledging difference was an important part of this thinking. <br /><br />The rest of the symposium took place the following day. <span style="font-weight:bold;">Sarah Owens</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Bjorn Franke</span> gave an introduction explaining a series of distinctions they wanted to make between making, bricolage, crafting and design, the latter seen as detached from specific design disciplines, with a higher level of abstraction than the other three terms, and a greater level of planning and awareness of the possibilities and consequences of productive action. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Rick Poynor</span>, a well-known design writer and critic, kicked off the day with a wide-ranging review of key developments in design over the past decade. He mentioned four, starting with <span style="font-weight:bold;">Design Thinking</span> in its various, not-always-complementary instantiations including the <a href="http://www.cumulusassociation.org/images/stories/Current_affairs_files/kyoto_design_declaration2008.pdf">Kyoto Design Declaration</a>, Tim Brown's book and Roger Martin's book. He noted "There's a lot of stories we could tell about design but Design Thinking is the one getting attention." Second was <span style="font-weight:bold;">Critical Design</span> which for Poynor started with Bruno Munari, author of <a href="http://electricdream.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/design-as-art/">Design as Art</a> (1971), as well as Jan van Torn, about whom he has written a book, and Dunne & Raby. The point of critical design, he thought, was to make it clear that design is loaded, and to reveal the codes by which it is produced and consumed. The third theme he noted over the past decade was <span style="font-weight:bold;">design criticism</span>, with a wide range of print and now online journals and sites for discussion. As a co-founder of Design Observer, Poynor knows what he is talking about - a fast-changing, urgent hunger to make sense of the worlds we have made and which make us. Finally, Poynor raised <span style="font-weight:bold;">Design as Politics</span>, the title of Tony Fry's new book, which offers an important challenge to how design is currently understood within and without design practice and education. (Rick's <a href="http://observersroom.designobserver.com/rickpoynor/entry.html?entry=24908">description and photos</a> of the environment in which the conference took place is a beautiful read.)<br /><br />Next up was activist (in Reclaim the Streets) and cultural theorist <span style="font-weight:bold;">Stephen Duncombe</span> (New York University). His talk "The Art of the Impossible: The Politics of Designing Utopia" reminded us of one important aspect of design and art practices - creating artefacts that fire the imagination. He talked about how Thomas More's Utopia was both satirical <span style="font-style:italic;">and</span> sincere. The point, he said, was that if a designer or writer leads you into an imaginary world, you begin to question what is normal or absurd. The self-conscious absurdity built into More's Utopia is a prompt for the reader - what is proposed is so ridiculous that it has to be modified, and this is the starting point. Contemporary examples he gave of people doing this included Julian Bleecker, and the Yes Men. "These impossible dreams open up new realities..they ask what if, without seriously saying, this is what...They are models that stimulate invention...left out for all of us to imagine with..." <br /><br />Next was my talk, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Designing Future Practices</span>, which I will publish below. This paper speculated that what designers are designing is future practices. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Susanne Küchler </span>(University College London) is an anthropologist whose background includes extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and Polynesia but who has been studying contemporary design more recently. Kuchler reminded us that in ethnography, researchers repeatedly ask "What difference does something make?" She emphasized the long-standing preoccupation with material artefacts that is part of anthropology which has revealed something about how designs shape cultures. But now, she said, maybe it is the end of any idea of there being a unified idea of design because of the advent of new materials. She described the recent development of materials libraries and where these come from and what they are doing. There are new materials that have been designed and developed way before a product design or architecture project might happen. Materials scientists and engineers are involved in inscribing properties into new materials that in a way makes design proceed in a particular direction - design before design(ers). She asked what kinds of thinking and making environments do we need in the 21st century to liberate ourselves from the stranglehold of existing disciplines? And how can we develop a language to engage with scientists who are designing things that design? Since I mostly notice the intersection of design and anthropology focussed on designing new things/services/organisations, it was fascinating to hear an anthropological discussion about design that focussed on the thingness of materials before designers get their hands on them.<br /><br />Alas at this point, the adrenaline had worn off and I was less focussed on the presentations by the next speakers, to whom I apologise. One was by philosopher of science <span style="font-weight:bold;">Alfred Nordmann</span> (Technische Universität Darmstad). He described how technoscience is trying to do things that exceed the imagination but result in the creation of mundane things in the world that evade rational control. His concern seemed to be challenging to the idea that technoscience can steer human nature in planned and predictable ways, something that I would hope designerly designers would be modest about. Finally, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Oliver Müller</span> (University of Freiburg) used the idea of Homo Faber to reflect on the implications of biotechnologies that support to enhance humans. By interfering directly with our biological selves, he suggested, we are the craftsman, tool, and product all at the same time.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Designing future practices</span><br /><br />Notes for talk for MakingCraftingDesigning, Akademia Schloss Solitude, February 2011 <br /><br />Lucy Kimbell<br />Director, Fieldstudio<br />Associate fellow, Said Business School, University of Oxford<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Introduction</span><br /><br />The question I want to pose today is, what is it that designers are designing when they do design? We think we know the answer to this because it’s clear that many designers design things: stuff. The tangible and digital objects that are part of day-to-day life. <br /><br />But in the past decade something has been happening in professional design practice, and in other fields that traditionally we didn’t think of as design, that makes it important to revisit this question.<br /><br />There are design agencies that say they help tackle big social challenges. There are design entrepreneurs who set up new ways for public services such as the police to engage with the public. There are consultancies using design-led approaches to design new social ventures to reduce dependence on the state. <br />There are multi-disciplinary teams who say they use a design process to re-think environments, products, experiences, and curricula for schools. There are people working in international security who want to work with professional designers to redesign disarmament programmes within the UN context using local knowledge to design local action. And of course there are conferences and workshops at which people come together to try to make sense of all of this. <br /><br />Ways of thinking about what designers design<br /><br />First let’s review some of the different ways of thinking about what designers design. <br /><br />1. The first is the artefact-centred approach. This is embedded in the ways that most Western design education is currently taught, as you can see from this slide from a well-known art and design school. This institution offers post-graduate courses based on different kinds of designed thing, from communications to textiles to products. <br /><br />Although there are projects and indeed courses that challenge this convention, with moves to “post-disciplinary design” or to a generalised “design thinking”, the artefact-centred categorization is broadly true. To be more accurate, the focus of design is not just an object, but the object and a user’s engagement with it. An echo of this object-based division of design is the idea of there being “four orders” of design which are signs, things, interactions and action (Buchanan 1992; 2001). <br /><br />However there are a number of problems with this approach. The most important is that a focus on specific types of thing, such as a toothbrush, can miss the situated nature of our engagements with designed things in relation to many other things in our social worlds. Taking one type of artefact and idealised user in isolation from the practices and contexts that link it to many others, amputates many of the important sets of relations that make things meaningful and purposeful. <br /><br />2. A second way of thinking about what designers design is to say they design systems. This has been developed by scholars and practitioners influenced by anthropology and sociology over the past two decades. Key names here are Pelle Ehn, Winograd and Flores, and Lucy Suchman, and others working in the communities known as participatory design and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), working mostly on the design of computer-based systems. Their insights came from studying not just artefacts – although those are important – but what people do with them, in spite of them, around them and in relation to them. The focus on users’ work practices shifted attention away from artefacts to the idea of designing systems that are both social and technical. An important idea here was that agency was distributed – it wasn’t just the user that mattered (privileged by a humanistic or rational approach), or the artefact (as hoped for by some designers), but rather the integration of people and things in places in relation to many of other socio-material arrangements that constitutes the world of design. <br /><br />I cannot hope to summarise this huge body of work. But I will refer to a paper from 2008 by Pelle Ehn, in which he does so, and directly addresses the evolving object of design. Using Wittgenstein’s language games, Ehn talks about design games and focuses on two kinds of game. The first design game is what happens in design projects, when the focus is design-for-use before use. The tradition of Participatory Design with which he was very involved in developing has a strong focus on designing with people and understanding their uses of things. The second design game takes place after a design project, at what Ehn calls “use-time”, when the designers are finished with their work, and are possibly even dead, but still people are using their designs. Thinking ahead to use-time, the object of design is then to create design games which users will engage with in their own ways, understanding that this can never be final or complete. <br /><br />Although this is useful, there are still questions to explore. One is how to conceptualize in more detail design-after-design: what happens when users engage with designs and infrastructures after project time, at use time; and what happens when they engage with artefacts in quite different contexts to the ones the designer imagined and designed for. A first question is working out an analytical category that helps us think about what that future use is. Can we talk about designing design games when the actors are extremely dispersed in time and space? A second question is, how do some kinds of usage stablise and become routine? A third is, how do different timeframes affect the idea of designers designing design games for design by others after design? <br /><br />3. In search of ways of understanding this better, I have been drawn to work by scholars in the social sciences who offer another way of thinking about the social world in which designers design, specifically theories of practice. Key writers here are Theodore Schatzki and Elizabeth Shove, drawing on earlier work by thinkers such as Bourdieu, Foucault, Giddens and also Heidegger.<br /><br />Now, Ehn’s work is centrally concerned with use as practice, based on the idea that it is through our practices that we construct reality. Further, he says “As designers we are involved in reforming practice” (Ehn, 1988: 147). But he stops short of saying this is what designers design.<br /><br />In what follows I will aim to show why thinking about designing future practices offers something useful to theories of design, and suggest what the consequences might be. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Designing future practices<br /></span><br />The proposition I want to explore is that what designers are designing is future practices. I want to see what the opportunities might be of thinking of design in this way. <br /><br />There is not time to go into practice theory in detail. One important idea is that practices are made up of several elements, which cannot be taken in isolation. Andreas Reckwitz (2002) describes practices as “a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz 2002: 249). A second idea is that practices are dynamic – they can change over time as different elements change. A third is a focus on routines – the repeated, mundane activities that constitute the social world. <br /><br />As Elizabeth Shove has pointed out in her work on the environmental impact of everyday practices of consumption, new designs for power showers lead to much higher individual water consumption at a time when authorities in many countries want us to conserve water. But instead of looking at bits of what goes on in showering in isolation, Shove argues that we understand how the contemporary practice of showering has come to be – combining both materials, stories and images, and knowledge and skills. Trying to change one of these, without attending to the other entwined elements of the practice, is, she argues, unlikely to be successful. <br /><br />The idea of practices, therefore, presents a way of ordering what happens in the future in relation to designed artefacts. It shifts attention away from infrastructures or design games that some designers had a hand in designing. In the future, at use time, there are people and their bodies and minds engaging with stuff within particular sets of relations, which constitute particular meanings. Design is always unfinished because practices mobilize artefacts and people and bring them into new kinds of relation with one another. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Ways of revealing practice<br /></span><br />Most designers don’t think about their work in this way, although there are inklings of it. The consultancy IDEO, for example, talks in terms of cell-phoning, rather than cell-phones. But in general the default concepts in contemporary design practice are things, users, and contexts, but not social structures and ordering. <br /><br />I want to offer up an artefact from professional design practice, which is heading in this direction, specifically the customer journey map created by designers of services.<br /><br />Service designers see their work as concerned with designing all the tangible and intangible elements of a service, both the digital and material touchpoints and scripts within the service encounter. Although service designers do not talk in terms of designing practices, all the elements I outlined earlier are there in the customer journey map – there are people, minds, knowledge, stories, artefacts, structure and agency. The customer journey map is not the only artefact that is required to do this design work, but it is one that tries to articulate the multiple dimensions of using a designed thing in practice, and understanding these routines to be situated, embodied and relational. <br /><br />I think this view of what designers design is relevant not just to designers of services but to designers of products, communications, buildings and also policies and strategies. It does not diminish the need to pay attention to artefacts – far from it – but it understands the meaning, value and effects of artefacts to be constituted in practice in relation to bodies, minds, stories and knowledge. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Practices presenting a choice<br /></span><br />I said earlier that Ehn’s work was based on the idea of practice but that he drew back from stating that designers design practices. For Ehn, what designers design are cultural-material design games (1988; 2008). The context of his early work was a Scandinavian approach to system design that found ways to involve workers in the design process for political reasons. This involved doing system design differently to serve the users – to make the resulting computer artefacts work better in relation to people’s work practices ie to design new computer artefacts that fit with practices, and sometimes creating new ones.<br /><br />In contrast, Tony Fry (2007; 2009) has argued designers should design new practices to change habitus, to use Bourdieu’s term. Fry’s concern is how design is implicated in making an unsustainable world. Designers need to understand the effects of their stuff on the world and their role in reproducing a way of living which is not sustainable, and to change it into one that is. His response is to propose a “redirective practice” with the ambition of designing another habitus, so that as humans we have a different way of being-in-the-world. <br /><br />So here is an interesting dilemma – whether to design future practices that are based on how people are now, as Ehn argues, or whether to design future practices that change how people are in the future, as Fry suggests. The former comes out of a Scandinavian commitment to a particular kind of democratic participation; the latter emerges from a deep concern with whether there will be a future in the future. Both are political but have a quite different set of implications.<br /><br />Clearly there is no right answer to this, but even framing the question highlights the importance of design’s role in world-making. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Implications for teaching and learning and practice<br /></span><br />Briefly, I finish with some suggestions about how this approach might change how designers practice and how they are educated. <br /><br />Although some designers have been moving towards a kind of dematerialized design thinking or to trans-disciplinary design, away from objects, people still need to design stuff. So my proposal is, that designers design stuff but understand the objects they make to be part of existing practices or involved in creating new routines in the future that are unfinished, contingent and, importantly, to some extent unknowable. <br /><br />The practice-based approach affects how designers of stuff conceive of what they are doing in these ways: <br />1. It draws our attention to how new designs can create new meanings, knowledge and skills, and potentially new ways of being in the world. <br />2. It highlights the unintended consequences of designs, which cannot always be known in advance, yet for which designers might consider themselves accountable. <br />3. It emphasizes the dispersed agency of the various actors that constitute future designs: and makes the designed stuff always in relation to other stuff and people. <br />4. It raises questions about the time-frames over which designers’ work has effects. <br /><br />How to bring these ideas into teaching and learning? I speak as someone who for over five years has been teaching exactly this approach to MBA students taking my elective in design. As managers and entrepreneurs, these students are already doing a kind of design activity although they rarely think of it like that. They design products, services, projects, ventures and organizations which create new kinds of practice involving both bodies, minds, things, agency and so on, disrupting existing practices and seeking to modify or replace them with a new kind. <br /><br />Among other things in my class I<br />(a) Disrupt the conventions of the lecture theatre arrangement designed for Harvard Business School style case teaching by having students arrange themselves as they want to around the room creating visual artefacts together in teams, a symbolic disruption of one form of education by another;<br />(b) Create opportunities for people from non-design backgrounds to understand the importance of material artefacts in organizations and their various instantiations as products and services within organizational practices; and <br />(c) Give them opportunities to use designerly methods such as mapping the service journey or visualizing the service ecology.<br /><br />Whether this approach is taught to MBAs or to more conventional design students, one important question is then what kinds of knowledge are required. I would say a passing knowledge of sociology and anthropology is essential now that design has realised it is profoundly social. But if you trawl the websites of design schools, the Venn diagram you usually see shows intersecting circles labelled “design”, “business” and “technology”. Ignoring the social worlds in which designed artefacts acquire their value and meaning is a weakness in much current design education. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Conclusion</span><br /><br />To conclude, I have argued that although we still fall back on the idea that designers design stuff, it’s more than time to bring in work from Participatory Design, CSCW and other design-based fields that have drawn extensively on anthropology and social studies of science. The contributions here have included attending to users’ work practices; to see agency as distributed; and to be concerned with thinking about design-after-design at use time. I then explored work from theories of practice that offer a slightly different way of thinking about the things that designers design emphasizing routinised ways of doing things – the habits that we take up and the habits that take us up. I believe this is a resource for designers – whose stuff already has unintended consequences. Thinking in terms of future practices offers one way of bringing these more directly into view. However whether designers want to change practices to serve people better, or change practices to change people, is a question that designers must answer for themselves. <br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Acknowledgements<br /></span><br />Thanks to Simon Blyth and Cameron Tonkinwise for their feedback on earlier drafts.<br /><br />Note: This essay is likely to be revised considerably for the proposed book which comes out of this conference. Comments welcome.Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-39848068325137206822011-01-27T13:09:00.011+00:002011-01-29T10:59:00.383+00:00MBA Entrepreneurship Project workshops 2011<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAW_iECSYr6jcOWmVKqclhPv1t5eZDCVLlsabVZhf8pACDqtQ_6vtAxVyJ8vC7A13-TaqQowp8GhBJmvXsCT8HMoJ0bu85HRFkzO3brj0g_0rCbTg7t50DZT6CrVgsXCdAeNLfSg/s1600/IMG_0605.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAW_iECSYr6jcOWmVKqclhPv1t5eZDCVLlsabVZhf8pACDqtQ_6vtAxVyJ8vC7A13-TaqQowp8GhBJmvXsCT8HMoJ0bu85HRFkzO3brj0g_0rCbTg7t50DZT6CrVgsXCdAeNLfSg/s400/IMG_0605.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5566852802215335490" /></a><br /><br />This year, I have again run workshops for MBA students doing the core<span style="font-weight:bold;"> Entrepreneurship Project</span>(EP) at Said Business School. The EP presents students with some important challenges<br />- how to explore an idea and develop it sufficiently to create a credible business plan<br />- how to integrate the various aspects of a new venture including strategy, marketing, operations, HR and finance<br />- how to work together collaboratively in their teams. <br /><br />My workshops help with all three difficulties at the tricky early stage of students' projects. Even if they have managed to agree on a project <span style="font-weight:bold;">title</span> and a <span style="font-weight:bold;">paragraph</span> describing it, often they don't know what to do next. My approach is to use methods and tools from creative design that help explore what the idea is (and reject it and come up with a better one if the team wants to) from different angles, synthesizing key aspects such as end users (or customers) and other key actors, artefacts, technologies and processes, and also integrating organizational functions for the proposed new venture. <br /><br />The important thing is that these methods are <span style="font-weight:bold;">exploratory</span> - they help the team look into and understand a bit better the central idea of their EP project which could be a new service, a bit of technology, or a relationship between people in one place and people somewhere else. The only testing we can do in the workshops is exposing the teams' ideas to one another - through design critiques that give teams valuable feedback from many brains. <br /><br />The four methods we used were <br />(1) creating <span style="font-weight:bold;">storyworlds</span>: visualizations mapping the key actors involved in a project, starting with a person or a thing;<br />(2) visualizing the <span style="font-weight:bold;">customer journey</span>: representing this as yet imaginary encounter between the user or customer and the enterprrise's offering;<br />(3) drawing rough sketches of the <span style="font-weight:bold;">user interfaces of key touchpoints</span> in an offering; and<br />(4) making sketches of the <span style="font-weight:bold;">service ecology or value constellation</span> to identify actors and relationships between them. <br /><br />Some teams found some of them hard to create. But they helped the students articulate to one another, for the moment, what their idea is and its implications, which is important to help them identify what research they need to do next. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijB7lFtMTk7AJuCCpTRQgTaTxgXoL4agP4f3EVq8gyzYPy0OxzWPrKrJwbzWBBTL8X4z-PphfDZYD8uopeodNqyVBGzl0UqONi3jUtNUzaaEcH2mDVR7RFd54wbIjMciUF3K7xaw/s1600/IMG_0608.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijB7lFtMTk7AJuCCpTRQgTaTxgXoL4agP4f3EVq8gyzYPy0OxzWPrKrJwbzWBBTL8X4z-PphfDZYD8uopeodNqyVBGzl0UqONi3jUtNUzaaEcH2mDVR7RFd54wbIjMciUF3K7xaw/s400/IMG_0608.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5566852817701096130" /><br /></a>Lucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24607643.post-82546858886910834272010-12-16T16:54:00.027+00:002010-12-18T12:05:48.100+00:00A year in designing for service: 2010<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHCFuxyH4jZU9qTj4297FWUvzoYtGSRimSNx4AwKzhWhyphenhyphenpU4qI3FCUDxPF_f1WqURmqrPZDLMknpeeNiQa-QkUqChN465ukHoQuw6qARVNx60FAyVltk0z2xnS17unI5tqnbMPTA/s1600/Borisbike.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 339px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHCFuxyH4jZU9qTj4297FWUvzoYtGSRimSNx4AwKzhWhyphenhyphenpU4qI3FCUDxPF_f1WqURmqrPZDLMknpeeNiQa-QkUqChN465ukHoQuw6qARVNx60FAyVltk0z2xnS17unI5tqnbMPTA/s400/Borisbike.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551762105969075922" /></a><br />This time last year I said something like service design was now pretty established. So what do I say a year later? Avoiding any single metaphor I could it's a little bit firmer, a bit bigger, a bit more rounded.<br /><br />In the UK, the year has been dominated by a limited economic recovery and the general election in May, with speculation about what that might mean for public services.The only question was, how big will the cuts be? Even once the Conservative-Liberal Coalition formed, months passed before the cuts in public spending began to take shape affecting nearly every area of public life. What this means for public service commissioners and managers is that service design might be reframed urgently as "how can we do more for less?", with additional pressure to be more transparent and accountable. <br /><br />But into this mix came a new term - the<span style="font-weight:bold;"> big society</span> (experimenting with lower case here as a form of resistance) - which is still to be fully defined although <a href="http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/building-big-society_0.pdf">this early articulation of the vision remains useful</a>. Since the big society is supposed all about local empowerment, innovation and new ways of doing things, this would seem to be an opportunity for designers, especially service designers but I think it is slightly to early to tell. There are various efforts to understand these developments and seize on this as opportunity for professional design. The Design Council, Institute for Government and NESTA hosted <a href="http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/Insight/Public-services-revolution-or-evolution/Big-Society/">seminars</a> discussing different aspects of the big society, while <a href="http://www.dottcornwall.com/design-matters/design-articles/emerging-themes-across-dott-projects">a review of DOTT Cornwall</a>'s work, which has seen the application of design processes and methods to a range of socio-economic issues in Cornwall, proposed this work as an example of big society in action. But is (service) design ready to take these issues? One person I interviewed, responsible for local government services, saw designerly design as a way of achieving innovation - but a key issue for him was the capacity of the organisation to understand its value. The question of the value of design, including service design, will remain an important one for the next year, something that was a key part of the conversation at the Design Management Institute conference in London. <br /><br />In terms of numbers of people, the <a href="http://www.service-design-network.org/content/conferences-2010"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Service Design Network</span></a> conference in Berlin suggested that business was thriving around Europe and Brazil too, with a separate conference in the US. The <a href="http://www.servdes.org/"><span style="font-weight:bold;">ServDes</span></a> research conference in Linköping, Sweden, which I was not able to attend, picked papers which included, to my reading, a bit more rigour but still familiar names rooted in design disciplines. In academic terms, special issues on service design in development at the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Journal of Behaviour & Information Technology</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">International Journal of Design</span> will support a more peer-reviewed dissemination of developing knowledge and on the PhD-Design list there were a few sparks of interest in service design. I'd still like to a see a conference that brings together a mix of speakers as varied as <span style="font-weight:bold;">Steve Vargo</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Pelle Ehn</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Wanda Orlikowski</span>,<span style="font-weight:bold;"> Lucy Suchman</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Tony Fry</span> to talk about designing for service but that might be a year or two away, or never. When I look at the pages of consultancies I know the numbers of employees and associates are still small. The <a href="https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23servicedesign">twittersphere</a> suggests to me that service design is still a small community where agreement, rather than difference and dissent, is valued but this is of course shaped by where I am looking. (Please dissent below.)<br /><br />One of the most exciting examples of service design came from somewhere unexpected. What we Londoners now call <a href="http://www.borisbikes.co.uk/">Boris bikes</a> (after the current Mayor Boris Johnson, although they were planned by the previous one, Ken Livingstone) is known officially as <a href="http://www.tfl.gov.uk/roadusers/cycling/14808.aspx">Barclays Cycle Hire</a>. Similar to schemes in other cities, the London scheme allows you to unlock a bicycle from a docking station, ride off, park it at another station, and be on your way cheaply, efficiently and without producing much carbon dioxide. It was rolled out and runs without a lot of fuss - well designed, well implemented, well used, and already a familiar part of London life. Launched in July, by December there were 108,000 registered users (according to the <a href="http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23903751-now-everyone-can-saddle-up-a-boris-bike-with-swipe-of-a-credit-card.do">Evening Standard</a>). Who was it designed by? Why, that well-known service design organization Serco, which designs and runs all sorts of services including prisons. The scheme is a great example of the internet of things realized as a service (including RFID tags in the bikes and data on the scheme made public and presented by various people <a href="http://oobrien.com/vis/bikes/">such as here</a>). It presents a challenge to most discussions of service design I hear. Firstly, your "experience" is constructed at least as much by your own pedalling, road sense, and the weather, as by the touchpoints in the service. And second, the service would not exist without considerable investments in political, institutional and financial capital; the designing of the organizational ecology and the associated processes is as much a part of the service as the bikes or the apps. One aspect of the service I am less impressed with, pointed out to me by <span style="font-weight:bold;">Alison Prendiville</span>, is the way the branding (in Barclays Bank's blue) has how made its way around much of inner London, competing with other London brands including those of the borough councils, Transport for London and the Mayor's office. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5DUWXBpG9HH-bpTHAUiOtjDXbhoOd-GMwrjqjaXUI9y9XiGZUmtyKSZQdZPETXewqhKZddfMaqldFTs7yFbUx8B3-RvFH196z4UrlW2UZB-urhRXPJfvwCDlxe4ZFbnSaFioDOw/s1600/Borismap.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 306px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5DUWXBpG9HH-bpTHAUiOtjDXbhoOd-GMwrjqjaXUI9y9XiGZUmtyKSZQdZPETXewqhKZddfMaqldFTs7yFbUx8B3-RvFH196z4UrlW2UZB-urhRXPJfvwCDlxe4ZFbnSaFioDOw/s400/Borismap.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551990817198027090" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">New books</span> included Christian Bason's <a href="http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?k=9781847426338"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Leading Public Sector Innovation</span></a>, partly drawing on his organization <span style="font-weight:bold;">Mindlab</span>'s work in Denmark. A highly illustrated book edited by Marc Stickdorn (in which I have a short chapter) also came out making the claim <a href="http://thisisservicedesignthinking.com/"><span style="font-weight:bold;">This is Service Design Thinking</span></a>. I look forward to seeing where the "thinking" tag moves things. Finally Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers' <span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/">What's Mine is Yours</a></span> became a (nice-looking) text to wave at people to prove - look! - things ARE changing for the better. I'm looking forward to books including Daniela Sangiorgi and Anna Meroni's and others in progress by Joe Heapy at Engine and Ben Reason, Lavrans Lovlie and Andy Polaine, and there are bound to be more.<br /><br />My own circumstances changed. After five years on the faculty at Said Business School, my fellowship came to an end and I left, somewhat unhappily. I will still be teaching my MBA elective there, which brings to the class experiential learning of design practices, knowledge of design management and a particular focus on designing for service. In 2009-10 48 MBAs took the class; I have yet to hear how many have picked it for this academic year. I finally finished a paper on service design I've been writing for three years. I did keynotes on service design at the Design Management Institute conference <a href="http://www.lucykimbell.com/stuff/DMI2010_kimbell_draft.pdf">(the text is here)</a> and at the Service Design Network <a href="http://www.service-design-network.org/sites/default/files/media/videos/sdnc10/SDN_Fieldstudio.swf">(the video is here)</a>. Leaving full time research has however freed me up to explore the value of academic research in consultancy, particularly around service innovation and I have enjoyed working with <a href="http://www.enginegroup.co.uk/latest/news_page/what_are_the_drivers_for_change">Engine researching the drivers of change on service organizations</a>, and culture-led service and organization design with <a href="http://www.taylorhaig.co.uk/">TaylorHaig</a>. I also helped Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research organize an event looking at the <a href="http://www.unidir.org/bdd/fiche-activite.php?ref_activite=535">possibility of bringing design-based approaches to security programmes and policy</a>. Next year I might finally get my book proposal to the editor...in the meantime, happy new year.<br /><br /><br />v1.1 with errors corrected, sorry, MrStickdornLucy Kimbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14492541825082887670noreply@blogger.com0