Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa: Video

A think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa: MBA students collaborate with designers from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

Over one day, the MBAs and designers used visual methods to frame and tackle problems facing the organisation. Soul of Africa employs women to make shoes which are sold around the world, while a percentage of the profits goes back to help communities in South Africa affected by AIDS. Mixed teams worked on strategy, operations, marketing and design combining creative and analytical approaches to generate recommendations for Soul of Africa. This short film gives an overview of what happened on the day.

The MBA students then carried on working on the project as part of their assessed work. Their documents were shared with Soul of Africa, who may take some of the ideas forward.

Organised as part of the MBA Design Leadership elective, Said Business School, University of Oxford in April 2009.


For more information about Soul of Africa visit http://www.soulofafricacharity.org/

Design Thinking track at EURAM 2009

At last week's European Academy of Management in Liverpool, a gathering of organisation and management academics mostly but not only from Europe, I was delighted to spend time with some scholars paying serious attention to questions of designing and it relation to managing. The track on Design Thinking, Management and Innovation was co-chaired by Armand Hatchuel, from Ecole des Mines and Rachel Cooper, Lancaster. Hatchuel and Weil's C-K (Concept Knowledge) theory is an important contribution to the study of management, via engineering design theory, and formal logic. Not that this was being presented at EURAM on this occasion...Hatchuel's chairing encouraged speakers and those listening or asking questions to take seriously the claims we were making, whether rooted in economics, sociology or by way of Foucault.

I particularly enjoyed papers by
- Le Masson, P., Hatchuel A. and Weil, B, on new design strategies;
- Starkey, K, on Foucault and the history of the business school;
- Bejean, M, Segrestin, B. and Hatchuel, A. on art-based firms, and
- Stigliani I. and Ravasi, D. on how organisations collaborate with external consultancies
(written in pseudo citation format for any readers searching for references).
I was left with a sense that the work being done in North America by Boland and Collopy, and by Roger Martin, and others, is in an important dialogue with these ideas, whether they are familiar with these scholars or not.

Some references

Hatchuel A., 2002. Towards design theory and expandable rationality : The unfinished program of Herbert Simon. Journal of Management and Governance 5:3-4
Hatchuel A., 2001. The two pillars of new management research, British Journal of Management, Vol.12, special issue, (S33-S39)
Hatchuel A, Weil B. 2003. A new approach of innovative design: an introduction to C-K theory. In: Proceedings of the international
conference on engineering design (ICED’03), Stockholm, Sweden, pp 109–124
Hachuel, A., Weil, B. 2009. C-K design theory: an advanced formulation, Research in Engineering Design, Volume 19, Number 4 / January
Starkey, K.; Hatchuel, A.; Tempest, S. 2009. "Management research and the new logics of discovery and engagement", Journal of Management Studies, 46 (3), pp. 547 -558.

Ahead of my visit to Liverpool next week (and Tate Liverpool and, even better, FACT...) here is my paper I'm giving at the European Academy of Management (see . I've already had loads of useful criticism including from journal editors (within management/org studies). I'm posting it here in the expectation of reworking the paper after EURAM and welcome other feedback from readers.

Design practices in design thinking
Abstract

Management and organization scholars interested in design typically draw on Simon’s (1969/1996) distinction between science and design. Scholars, educators and practitioners proposing that managers adopt “design thinking” often describe the practices of professional designers, but neglect the studies of designers’ activities in design studies. For its part, that tradition has paid little attention to the practice turn in contemporary social theory and the role of non-designers in constituting designs during consumption. This paper contributes to discussions about the value of the ways designers do things by using the practice perspective to attend to what constitutes design practice. Drawing together these traditions – studies of what designers do within design studies, and practice theory within organization studies – a pair of concepts is proposed: “design-as-practice” and “designs-in-practice”. Using this pair offers a way to move beyond discussions of individual designers and acknowledge the work done by others in constituting designs.

Key words
Design thinking, design, practice, design-as-practice, designs-in-practice

Download the paper from here

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 3

In this class we undertook a “crit” (critique) of design at Said Business School and began to generate a vocabulary for talking about the success or failure of design outcomes. I asked MBAs to identify two examples of ‘good’ design at SBS and two examples of ‘bad’ design based on their own criteria, and bring them to class. Examples included service and process design, product and furniture design, web/interface design, graphic and communication design, interior design and architecture.

Through this discussion of what makes good or bad design we attended to the practices of people who uses the outcomes of design processes, whether they have been designed by professional designers or not - designs-in-practice. Our discussion of criteria for good and bad design drew on different ways of making judgements about design such as Vitruvius: firmness, commodity and delight; Sanders (1992): useful, usable and desirable; and IDEO's framework of desirable, feasible and viable.

Our second activity was to write briefs based on these criteria for design improvements in the school. Students took one of the issues they had identified, mapped the stakeholders connected to this issue, prioritised one, and then defined criteria from that point of view for a re-design.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 2

After the 'think and make tank' collaborative workshop with designers the previous week, this session offered the MBAs a chance to consider and discuss what is distinctive about what designers do, how they do it, and the sorts of artefact they create along the way – what is sometimes called “design thinking” or “designerly ways of knowing”. Studying the research into designers’ work demystifies the creative design process and offer students insights about what to expect when products and services are designed by or with professional designers.

But the term “design thinking” has limitations – although people using it may claim to be user-centred, it nonetheless privileges the designer as the key agent in design, ignoring decades of work in anthropology and sociology. Introducing the terms “design-as-practice” and “designs-in-practice”, the elective offers students a way to understand that design is not just about what designers do (or how they think), but also about what stakeholders, users and artefacts themselves do in constituting design.

In this class we watched the well-known ABC TV segment in which the product design and innovation consultancy IDEO re-designs a shopping cart in just five days. A second viewing gave students a chance to analyze in detail the process the designers use to come up with their innovative re-design and identify when there was divergent and convergent thinking and use of methods such as ethnographically-inspired research, visualisation, brainstorming, and prototyping. Attending to the design or management of the process was identified as an important skill.

MBA elective: Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa

During a one-day workshop, 37 MBA students worked with 11 designers from different disciplines to help frame and tackle some of the current challenges facing Soul of Africa, which employs women hand-stitching shoes which are sold internationally, with the profits going back to support AIDS-affected communities in South Africa.

Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa

Tomorrow, the 36 or so MBAs taking my Design Leadership elective will be joined by 12 designers and three representatives from Soul of Africa, for a one-day workshop.  The aim of the event is to bring together the ways of problem framing and solving typically used by MBAs with designers from different disciplines, to help Soul of Africa engage with some of the challenges it is faced with. From Soul of Africa, we will be joined by co-founder Lance Clark, Galahad Clark of Terraplana, Franziska Amaral, and Martin Foley. Soul of Africa was originally started with £30,000 and has raised over $2m which has been invested into South African communities affected by AIDS. Women handstitch shoes which are then shipped to the UK and US, and sold in major retail outlets such as Clarks and Next. 

The designers - selected from an open call to participate to which over 75 people responded - are from backgrounds in textiles and fashion, graphics, industrial design, design management, interaction design. They are: Titi Abiola, Stephanie Chen, Jason Coop, Rachel Manning, Dejan Mitrovic, Kathryn Moores, Olive Ntkula, Lars Rosengren, Pammi Sinha, Tom Tobia and Rachel Turner. 

To help facilitate the day, my colleagues and others helping are: Marc Ventresca, university lecturer in innovation at the school; Sarabajaya Kumar, Skoll Centre for Social Entpreneurship; Trudi Lang, DPhil candidate, InSIS; Meng Zhao, DPhil candidate; Caroline Norman, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, course leader MA Design Management; and Hermeet Gill, MBA alumnus who did my elective last year. We'll also be joined for some of the day by Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entpreneurship. I'm grateful for their support and for our internal admin team for making this happen. 

In a week or two I'll be posting a short film showing some of the day's activities and some the approaches we are using. Right now, however, I need to go and make some props. 

The difference between art and design: Aurabox

One of the things that comes up in discussions of design is if, and how, it's different from art. At last week's European Academy of Design in Aberdeen, there was talk of critical design, a term associated with Dunne and Raby (see my earlier post about the conference) as well as other practitioners. One of the claims Fiona Raby made in her keynote at EAD was that in contemporary art, now you can do pretty much anything, nothing is shocking or draws attention, whereas it can be a radical gesture to present an artefact in the context of design, inviting audiences to imagine something in use through proposition and speculation.

Here's a contribution to that discussion. It's a work called Aurabox (2005). It looks a bit like something you might buy at IKEA. But what is not (yet) at IKEA is the two embedded LED lights indicating the status of the object's aura, either on or off. It's inspired by Walter Benjamin's idea in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) that "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.". Here's a short film showing the Aurabox in the group show Product and Vision in Berlin in 2005.

European Academy of Design 2009: Design Connextity

This is an image from Dunne & Raby's Technological Dreams Series: No.1 Robots (2007). Fiona Raby was one of the keynotes at last week's European Academy of Design 2009 conference in Aberdeen. What I enjoyed about the conference was its ability to step through several of contemporary design's realities, from work by Dunne and Raby (as exemplars of "critical design") to mainsteam design management to Josephine Green, who helps Philips think about and visualise futures. Fiona teaches on MA Design Interactions at the RCA, and alongside her and Tony's work, showed lots by their students (some of whom were collaborators with my MBA students on a short project in 2007). At the other extreme, Josephine Green gave insights into how a traditional manufacturer of objects is using design to visualise and rethink its core activities to engage with some of the challenges facing contemporary societies (see some slides from a similar talk here). I also very much enjoyed the talk by Julian Bleecker of the Near Future Lab, originally an engineer, now following what he calls an "undisciplined practice" at Nokia's Design Strategic Projects studio in LA. Julian's stated aim of creating more habitable near futures by combining material practices with knowledge practices was a model which complements my own efforts.

Ideas running round this conference included the fairly standard (how can design's value be understood...communicated...appreciated) to new disciplinary specialisms (eg service design, design for sustainability). For me, the benefit of attending, in addition to catching up with UK and international colleagues, was hearing how distinct approaches to design - from critical design, to Daria Loi's work in the Digital Homes group at Intel, to Stuart Walker's gentle arrangements- all involve the material practices of design in making things public through creating visual and tangible forms.

Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa

We've had an amazing response to our call for designers to participate in the one day workshop in April. In this 'think-and-make-tank', designers will collaborate with 36 Oxford MBA students and participants from the Soul of Africa organization to help frame and tackle some of the challenges this social enterprise is facing. A few weeks ago I put out a call to designers via emails to colleagues and friends, via blogs and on twitter. Over 75 designers applied, from many different disciplines, many from outside the UK including Finland, France, South Africa and the US. I was only able to pick 12 and that was very hard indeed. Our resources limited us to covering travel expenses in the UK.

From reading through the designers' statements, I have a strong sense that the shift that was already taking place within design education and practice, away from a fascination with highly styled consumer goods to a design practice that is concerned with equity and sustainability, has now changed things permanently. As the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship opens today in my building at Said Business School in Oxford, it's clear that designers, both students, professionals and educators, want to apply their practice to systemic problems we are all implicated in. One of the challenges is to create opportunities for that to happen.

Further details about the think-and-make-tank will be posted in in the next few weeks. For those interested in creating projects of their own, here are resources that may help through inspiration or more directly.
Social Innovation Camp
The RSA Design Directions Awards
Audi Design Foundation

Steve Vargo: Service-dominant logic

Vargo and Lusch are key thinkers within management studies addressing the theory gap in services - of relevance to service designers as much as to service managers. At a seminar organized by the Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) last week, I was able to hear Steve Vargo first hand on the service-dominant logic. References to the key papers are below. There's also a book which I have not yet read. This is the quick summary of what Vargo presented which draws on the papers. Calling their ideas a 'logic' does not mean Vargo and Lusch are making claims to something that works similarly to a mathematical proof. Rather, they are drawing attention to the underlying dynamics of economic theory if it's rethought as to do with service, rather than products to which, in the industrial production model based on a (mis)reading of Adam Smith, value is added. The fundamental idea is that people (and organizations) exchange services for services.

1 There are no services - only service. (The use of the singular draws attention away from 'services' as offerings that are produced slightly differently to products, to the concept of a service-based economic model. This has already been influential in the renaming of the IBM-led initiative services science as service science.)

2 There is no new service economy. Instead all economies are inherently service economies. Some services are direct and some are indirect, involving goods or money.

3 There are no producers and consumers. Instead all parties are what Vargo and Lusch currently call 'resource integrators' playing a role in assembling resources in to offerings. Service is a process.

4 Goods are not 'goods'. Intead goods are value propositions within service. Goods (what some people call products) are 'appliances' for service delivery.

5 Firms do not create value. Value is co-created.

6 There is no B2C. Instead, economic interactions are all B2B in which all of us are resource integrators operating at different scales.

My apologies to Steve Vargo if I have got their ideas wrong in this summary.

References
Vargo, S. and R. Lusch (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic in Marketing,” /Journal of Marketing, /68, 1-17
Invited Commentaries on “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing”, /Journal of Marketing /Vol. 68 (January 2004), 18–27
Vargo, Stephen L. and Lusch Robert (2008), "Service-dominant logic: continuing the evolution," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1), 1-10.

Designers wanted: Join a Think-and-Make-Tank for Soul of Africa

Wednesday 22 April 2009 10-5.30pm
Saïd Business School, Oxford

We need up to 10 designers who want to use their design practices and skills to help social enterprise Soul of Africa tackle some of the challenge facing it, during a one-day workshop in Oxford in collaboration with MBA students.

The workshop is a participative, creative "think-and-make-tank" that brings together people from management and from design to use visual methods to analyze and tackle specific problems identified by an organization. MBA students from Saïd Business School will be joined by designers from different disciplines to help social enterprise Soul of Africa engage with key challenges.

Soul Of Africa is a charitable initiative and a self-sustainable project created to facilitate employment and funding aimed at helping orphans affected by AIDS through the sale of hand-stitched shoes. Unemployed and unskilled women in South Africa are trained to hand-stitch shoes, giving them the self-empowering ability to feed their families and provide them with essential health care.

Download more details here.

What we are looking for

Designers (recent graduates, current MA or BA design students, and design professionals) are invited to take part. Ideally, we’d like a mixture of people from these backgrounds:
- visual communication
- product/industrial design
- service design
- interface design
- fashion
- design management

How to get involved

To apply, send an email to Lucy Kimbell (lucy dot kimbell at sbs dot ox dot ac dot uk), to arrive on or by Friday 20 March 2009.

The email must include
- your name and contact details and any institutional affiliation
- your design discipline (eg product, visual communication)
- up to 150 words on why you want to participate.

Successful participants will be contacted by Friday 3 April at the latest. Reasonable travel expenses to Oxford (standard class return, UK only) will be reimbursed to those who attend the workshop, on the production of a receipt.

Apprenticeships: an economic history

Contemporary art and design practices - even if now taught in art and design departments in modern universities - bear some relation to the institutions of apprenticeships that developed over hundreds of years in several European countries. A seminar at Said last week raised some interesting questions about what we think we know, and what we actually know, about such apprenticeships. Tim Leunig of LSE, an economic historian, gave a wonderful seminar for the Centre for Corporate Reputation drawing on his work into apprentices in London in the pre-modern period. Given access to a huge set of data (produced a man whose job allowed him time to input vast amounts of data from historical records) about 161,000 London apprentices between 1420-1930, Leunig and colleagues found out some interesting things which challenged their - and my - assumptions about how people were trained in pre-industrial societies in England.

Looking specifically at records from 1600-1750 from 760 London companies (eg vintners, grocers) whose members were masters offering seven-year apprenticeships, Leunig and colleagues found, to their surprise, that
- kinship relations and local connections were not important in how young men chose their masters in London;
- nor were their fathers' trades important in the decisions they made about what to become apprentices in; and
- nor did the distance of their village or town from London have that much of an impact either.
There remain questions about how these young men did make decisions about who to pick to be their masters and what information they had available. But this research suggests that these young men made choices that were not encumbered by things we associate with pre-modern societies - such as kinship and location. Like "modern" apprentices, they made other kinds of choices.

Being of an ethnographic orientation myself, I must confess I have never really "got" quantitative research before. But now I do! The way these scholars framed questions around the data set, crunched numbers to produce something meaningful, and then told a clear story about it was an inspiring piece of scholarship.

Economies of contribution: a developing research agenda

At the invitation of Scott Lash and Götz Bachmann (cultural studies, Goldsmiths), philosopher Bernard Stiegler (Centre Pompidou) and Robert Zimmer (computer science, Goldsmiths), a diverse group gathered at Goldsmiths for a day or two to consider the idea of economies of contribution. The workshop included perspectives from media, art, design, software and other fields of theory and practice. In their introduction, the organizers outlined the emergence of a shift from consumer capitalism to an economy of contribution raising questions such as
- Are movements such as Open Source and Wikipedia just detached phenomena, or are they the pioneers of a new economy?
- How do specific localities and regions shape different economies of contribution?
- What are the new power relations and new forms of exploitation?
- How can we use and shape this economy of contribution?
Recent work on open source, crowdsourcing and user-generated content of course was relevant. What was distinctive here was to bring together those with a focus on cultural production, understood as art, design, film, software and broadcast, whether done by professionals or amateurs (if those terms fit).

During the workshop, presentations of research and practice included work by media artist Graham Harwood (MediaShed), Bronac Ferran (who organized the CODE conference in Cambridge in 2001 which had laid out many of the issues); artist Neil Cummings, several of whose projects have questioned the role of cultural collections (see Capital, 2001, at Tate); and Matt Fuller whose work emphasizes the importance of the commons. From Tate, there were presentations by Jennifer Mundy (research), Anna Cutler (learning) and James Davies (online) describing how they are designing new forms of consumption/engagement/contribution to their collection. From Centre Pompidou, there was an overview of some of the technologies of annotation they are developing such as Lignes de Temps. Unfortunately I had to miss the second day and presentations by design/art/media practitioner David Garcia, media theorists from Goldsmiths and others.

My contribution (here, about 7 pages, PDF) was to suggest resources from management and organization literatures that might have something to offer this emerging area, such as practice theory and the turn to design. At a time when the debt-laden consumerist economy seems to be in a tailspin, it is time to pay attention to ways of practice and organizing, and invent new cultural forms that invite a range of modes of participation, engagement and contribution. Media artists - specifically those inventing cultural forms that create novel arrangements of people, software and objects enabling new sets of relations; and service designers - who foreground the involvement of stakeholders in co-designing arrangements of objects and people over time and space - have, I believe, something important and distinctive to offer in the face of these challenges.

Image: screengrab from my project Making a Difference at the University of Plymouth (2004)

MBA Design Leadership elective - Think and Make Tank

This year's MBA elective in Design Leadership at Oxford from April-June will include a one day workshop in which the MBA class will collaborate with design students to help social enterprise Soul of Africa address some of the challenges they currently face. The exact details are being worked out, but I'm putting up this post now while the MBAs are considering signing up for the elective.

A think-and-make-tank is a participative, creative workshop that brings together people from management and from design to use visual methods to analyze and tackle specific problems identified by an organization. A one-day event such as this will crystallize ideas that can be taken forward by the organization, complementing its other activities.

The people involved on the day will be:
- approx 20-25 MBA students from Saïd Business School, taking the Design Leadership elective
- approx 8-10 MA design students from different disciplines such as product design, fashion and design management
- people from the Soul of Africa organization, including co-founder Lance Clark
- Saïd Business School faculty

To make best use of the day, Lance has identified three challenges facing the organization which the workshop will be designed to tackle, which are: marketing and communications; service operations/organization design; and product management. The combination of creative and bright students from management and from design will, we hope, serve to generate tangible, useable ideas for the organization, as well as offering an engaging learning experience.

We are seeking a small amount of funding to support this workshop, so please get in touch with me if you can help.

Things I've recently been ....

In the last few weeks, here are some of the things I've been consuming (or co-producing, depending on your theoretical orientation)

Reading
This Book Will Save Your Life, AM Holmes
A Late Dinner: Discovering the Food of Spain, Paul Richardson
Maisie's Bus, Lucy Cousins
A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), by: Bruno Latour, keynote at Design History conference, Cornwall, 2008
ZEITHAML, V. and BITNER, M.J., 2003. Services marketing: Integrating customer focus across the Firm, 3rd ed., New York, NY: McGraw-Hill
The Two Cultures, CP Snow
BIJKER, W. 2004. Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs: Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
ALEXANDER, C. 1962. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Looking at
Abigail Reynolds, The Universal Now, 17 Gallery, London
Turner Prize Show, Tate Britain
Cold War Modern, V&A

Watching
House
Lost
BBC CBeebies: In the Night Garden

Listening to
Montserrat Figueras Ninna Nanna

Eating and drinking
Smoked mackerel
Porridge
A bottle of Luigi Bosca Malbec from Argentina (thank you Tomas)

Introducing the critique to an MBA class

When Dick Boland visited us last term, one of the things he talked about was a paper by his Managing as Designing collaborator Fred Collopy (whose Fast Company blog is worth reading). As I recall, the idea was to apply an aspect of design practice - the crit (or critique) - to artefacts such as financial instruments. Inspired by their use of the crit, I decided to make explicit this way of approaching idea generation and development within our MBA Entrepreneurship Project this term.

I first experienced crits as part of my MA in what would now be called digital arts at Middlesex University's art school, a strange and wonderful course where they taught artists and designers to program in C so we could write our own software. Then later I taught in art and design colleges, where the crit is a standard part of the teaching and learning environment, mostly at the RCA in London on the MA Interaction Design which is also rooted in that art school tradition.

I can't cite any papers on this yet. What I know about crits is all tacit knowledge and reflection in practice - but the main features were as follows:
- the student presents to a group (faculty, possibly other students) their work to date
- they actually have to show artefacts (a model, a sketch, a set of photos from research, ideally several things)
- they have to explain what the artefact is, how they got to it, and why they did what they did so far (their reasoning)
- and what they plan to do next and why.
And then the people present, both teachers and other students, ask lots of incredibly difficult questions ranging from the nature of the enquiry, the method, the tools, but also the reasons. And also may suggest very concrete ideas too like what other materials or tools to try or other people's work to look at.

Viewed through the lens of practice theory, this is activity in which learning is embodied and situated, in which artefacts play key roles, in which habits and routines develop, in which there is thinking, and doing, and saying. It is therefore not something that can easily be ported to another context, such as the one I am now in, a business school.

But I thought I'd try. Having already introduced the idea to students taking my MBA elective in Design Leadership (in which we do a crit of the Said Business School), I decided to bring in a crit to this year's Entrepreneurship Project. Still at an early stage of their project development, the MBA teams presented along the lines described above, and received a lot of feedback from the people present - members of faculty and my guest designer/researcher Bas Raijmakers of STBY. Doing this prototyped a way of teaching that seemed to work but was novel in our school, where lectures and supervision are the dominant modes of learning and teaching. Oxford (and Cambridge) pride themselves on their tutorial system which has turned out great thinkers and doers, for many many years. Art and design schools have also turned out great thinkers and doers using the crit. The artefacts produced in each case vary (essays v anything at all that an art or design student might create) but the underlying method has some simliarities. But the crit offers something special in a context in which uncertainty about the problem space is high. For students generating ideas for a new business in the EP, it is not even clear what the problem or opportunity is, and it is here that art and design approaches are of value.

Photo by Alice Wang from workshop/crit during project involving MA and MBA students, Said Business Schooll 2007

Public innovation and digital media: what should public subsidy pay for?

This is a very big question, addressed by many of the great and the good, but I have an answer which comes at the end. The question underpinned a session on Public Innovation at the Oxford Media Convention 2009, held at Said Business School yesterday. Four speakers, two from the big bucks public broadcasters, one from a government taskforce, and one from a consultancy background and network of media activists, shared their visions for what was involved in public innovation in broadcast and digital media. This being the UK, with its long history of taxpayer-funded broadcasting and internet content, it was not a surprise that social and political agendas were taken for granted (although what currently mattered and to who, was not). Most likely other bloggers and twitters will give a better summary than me of the event, but I wish to draw out two tensions. And then answer the big question. At no direct cost to the public purse.

Richard Halton, (not sure of his current job title but something like) director of new media at the BBC, pointed to how the BBC, across much of what TV and radio people call its "output", now has such a raft of online services that there is "no difference between digital and non-digital". Current activities include Canvas, an effort to create common standards for convergence between online media and TV. And of course the BBC i-Player is a brilliant way for people around the world (those online, anyway) to access recent BBC radio and TV programmes. But in his talk, Halton several times referred to "content".

What is this "content"? And does his use of this term suggest the web-friendly BBC still has not understood the changes happening in peoples' homes, schools, offices, devices, heads, and lives? I love the BBC. I used to work as a business journalist on the BBC World Service in the early 1990s, and in 1997, when other institutions were still unsure what to do with the web, the BBC commissioned my company Soda to make online learning environments for children. But if the BBC still has the mindset that its job is to squirt content through media platforms at people (who may get to send in some of their "content" too) then it may not survive the next decades.

In contrast Jon Gisby, director of new media and technology at Channel 4, did not talk content. Instead he talked about the take-up of broadband in the UK in 2008 and "what people do with broadband" (notice the verb, do). While I am old enough to remember enjoying the launch of Channel 4 Television, I was convinced by his presentation of a vision of public innovation across media platforms that is not about pushing content. His discussion touched on the digital divide, media literacy, education, health and accountability - all terms connected with what institutions think taxpayers want from digital media. His vision questioned on a deep level where organizations that have a history of public service broadcasting should go next. Government spend online is also relevant, he argued, saying "every government department is realising it's a media business". Examples of things that Channel 4 is involved in include 4IP, a £50m fund run by Tom Loosemore to drive public digital media.

So here are two positions: there is stuff called content and there are platforms and technologies, or, there are sets of relations and things that people do which involve practices and infrastructure. Whichever view ends up dominating the public discussions about innovation in public media, there remains the question of what all that money should be spent on. Here is my answer. I think it could work for either position.

Public subsidy should not be spent just on more content, or more technology, but on processes that involve multi-disciplinary teams who take seriously insights learned from ethnography/participant observation, visual methods, and prototyping and involve many others in co-designing the future of public media. These teams should contain social scientists (who know something about people and their practices), designers (who know something about working through uncertainty and ambiguity using visual methods and prototypes), engineers (who can build things) and MBA-types (who are good at turning ideas into marketable models with numbers attached), and then the people who we might have called audiences but now are stakeholders. The brief to these teams is to imagine, invent, discover, create - or in a word - design the future for public media services driven by people's practices. Contemporary design practice and theory acknowledges the necessary incompleteness in design processes. Investing in that a design process attentive to the practices of people would be a start.

Designing new enterprises

This academic year, I'm teaching on the MBA Entrepreneurship Project, a term-long process during which the students generate, explore and develop ideas for new enterprises which they pitch to VCs at the end of term. My contribution is to help with the early stage of idea generation - which the problem space is not defined, let alone solutions in the form of identifiable products, services, strategies, or organizational forms. At this early phase of the development of a venture, design methods can play an important role in identifying practices which might offer business opportunities. Visual methods - such as this collage shown here- create ways for teams, often from diverse national and professional backgrounds, to work together. It might have been an idea to test whether those teams making use of the workshops I'm offering come up with "better" projects. Better for who?, of course. But what I'm seeing each week is that projects are moving from the realm of high level strategies, markets, and organizations to identifiable customers with practices around which services and products can be organized.

Blog party

Building Space with Words is a project by social scientist Anne-Laure Fayard (assistant professor of Management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, NYU-Poly) and artist Aileen Wilson, associate professor of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute. Along with several others, I have been invited to join their blog conversation where they/we discuss matters such as disciplines, practices, materiality, art v science, social science v science and so on. Indeed the subjects being discussed, and the range of backgrounds of the contributors are such that I was worried that I couldn't keep up with all the posts and all the threads. But then I realised it is rather like being at a party of people, some of whom know each other, or know of each other, or faintly recognise each other, with two hosts who keep offering drinks or things to eat, and introduce you to each other. But where are the gatecrashers?