A quarter-long mini course I had been taking, Adaptive Service Design, has just ended. On the bright side, that means I’m only going to be taking four classes for the rest of the semester instead of five. The sad part is that it was a course with really interesting readings and classroom discussions that flowed freely, buoyed by a natural enthusiasm and curiosity that’s rare to find. This was the first time the course was taught, as well, so I feel lucky to have had the experience. For my final project, I created a service blueprint for an adaptive campus dining service, which I will discuss in greater detail in a later post.

Also this week, I finished reading an excellent book called Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink. It’s full of entertaining anecdotes about food psychology experiments conducted at Cornell, one of the most memorable being a comparison of how much soup people would eat out of a normal bowl versus a covertly self-refilling (aka bottomless) bowl. The finding: people use their eyes, not their stomachs, to gauge when they are full. I won’t give anything away, but there are some asides specifically about that study that made me laugh out loud.

I’m halfway through another book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. This book’s about choice architecture – the design of environments in which choices are made. It’s not as funny as Mindless Eating but still thought-provoking. Some of it reminds me of the material in my Information Design and Rhetoric course, the takeaway being that no design can be neutral. Beatrice Warde’s crystal goblet may be an aspiration, but it is also a mirage, ever unreachable. And since design always influences, the designer has a responsibility to influence with intent.

I mean…um… Spring break! WOooooOOooOoo!

Why are things the size they are?
How are a blues club and a zoo similar?
What is the relationship between reality and realness?
How is the Unabomber’s Manifesto relevant to society today?

These kind of lectures remind me why I enjoy the university environment. Not only was the talk entertaining and interesting, the students in the audience asked questions that were equally thought-provoking. I especially liked the debate that sparked over whether new media creates a low ceiling for creative thought – whether the images we see in television and movies limit our ability to imagine things outside our own experience.

Earlier in the afternoon, I attended a talk hosted by the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. Ezio Manzini, founder of the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) Network, described how designers are harnessing social resources to tackle sustainability issues. Citing examples from urban vegetable gardens to co-housing, the smiling Italian emphasized four characteristics of successful projects in this area: small, local, connected, and open. The Q&A session afterward for this talk provided additional food for thought.

What kind of foundation is today’s generation laying for future generations?
Are designers becoming a professional field without an industry?
What is the relationship between sustainability and resilience?

I look forward to pondering these questions further, in between the bursts of concentration I will, of course, devote to my course work and thesis topic musings…

He brought it up as an example of the egocentrism he wishes designers to  purge from their mindsets. But I think a serious consideration of these questions reveals a very compelling answer in favor of a future-oriented approach in design.

What have future generations done for us? Well, their very existence validates that the present generation will have survived successfully enough to propagate our species. We won’t have blown ourselves into oblivion or rendered our environment otherwise uninhabitable. In short, future generations signify that we won’t have screwed up humanity beyond all hope. Naturally, future generations can’t communicate this comforting revelation to us. The fruits of our labor will be realized in their lifetimes, not ours.

So, getting back to the original question, why should our work serve future generations? In the spirit of being audience-centered, I shall address this question from a self-interested perspective. Future generations will be more affected by our actions than we are, just as we are more affected by the actions of past generations than they were. You can call it the butterfly effect, compounding, or whatever you like. Our work affects future generations whether we intend it to or not.

If we work either without regard to how our actions will affect future generations or suspecting that our actions are likely to cause harm to future generations, we  decrease the likelihood of their existence. The grosser our negligence, the fewer future generations there will be. If the number of future generations goes to zero, then our generation is the end of the line. We end humanity. Do you want to take credit for that? No? Then get to work and stop bitching. The future is waiting.

Of course, if you are really, really successful at eliminating all future generations, there will be no one left to blame you. So I guess the takeaway message is, do whatever you like, but do it well.

Realization #1: Teachers have lives outside teaching.

This may be a throwback to the egocentric perspective of childhood, but I am still adjusting to the realization that instructors don’t simply appear at the start of class and dissipate after class into the ether to dream up new assignments while us students deal with all the trials of “real life” – all that stuff that we think our teachers don’t appreciate, like all the work we have to do for our *other* classes, our mile-long list of errands, that social event that’s going to take up our entire Saturday… Turns out, our instructors have stuff like that to juggle, too – stuff that gets in the way of their being able to flawlessly anticipate their students’ needs and questions.

Realization #2: Teachers have two jobs.

Like other professionals, teachers have to be knowledgeable about the subject they teach. Unlike other professionals, they cannot dedicate forty hours a week to continually develop that knowledge because they have to – oh yeah – teach classes. In addition to keeping their specialized knowledge current, they also have to develop the skills to effectively convey that knowledge to other people – people of differing backgrounds and priorities who all have their own preferred styles of learning.

Realization #3: Teachers are learning how to teach while they are teaching.

There is no universal solution for getting knowledge into someone else’s brain, let alone thirty different brains simultaneously. Teachers have their experience and perspective to guide them, but they also use student feedback to do their jobs effectively.

Bitch bitch bitch. Whine whine whine. Suddenly everybody’s an expert, and nothing’s good enough, despite the fact that we have well-trained professionals in countless fields. Well, if you think the situation’s bad now, just watch while we tackle issues that are actually hard! Goal-formulation, problem-definition, and equity issues are going to weaken the professional’s support system in a serious way.

In the 1960s, professionals in the U.S. were asked to consider the systems they dealt with more actively, what they do and what they should do, rather than what are they made of. This “goal-finding” turned out to be difficult. Boo. Meanwhile, people began protesting the systemic processes of contemporary American society left and right. Think the civil rights movement, the student movement, the anti-war movement, consumerism, conservationism, etc. Planners had to pay more attention to end-results, because obeying The Man was no longer a valid excuse for screwing up.

In the face of discouraging complexity, planning and policy sciences have been regarded as potentially viable means of improving society. But are social professionals up to the enormity of their task?

We have learned to question not only the efficiency but the appropriateness of a given solution. We have also become more sensitized to the interconnectedness of systems and, thus, more apt to realize that a targeted action may have undesired consequences.

Problems no longer appear as straightfoward as they once did. Defining and locating the problems turns out to be as difficult as outlining their solutions.

Creating a planning/governing system is difficult for one gigantic reason: we can’t see the future! It doesn’t help that societal problems do not have a steady state solution. They are less like science and engineering problems and more like Whack-A-Mole. We call them wicked problems in reference to their tricky and difficult-to-describe nature. Also because we’ve always wanted to see how many times we could use the word “wicked” in a scholarly paper. 49.

Even the task of describing wicked problems appears to first require identification of their solutions. If that doesn’t blow your mind, consider this: no matter how good a solution we find, there could always be a better solution. There is no way to tell for sure, so we just stop working when we get hungry or sleepy.

Also, there is no do-over for solving wicked problems. The system cannot be reset, and we can’t tell how long the effects of a particular attempt will last.

Come to think of it, we don’t even know what our end goal should be. Crap.

Posted via email from corinna’s posterous

Reading #1:
The Design Way
Chapter 1: The First Tradition

Everything kickass in human history that someone did on purpose should be considered design. And the geniuses who achieved these things should be called designers but probably weren’t because the world has never fully appreciated the awesomeness that is design. (Note to future-designer self: Create an experienced reality to fix this!)

Imagine something that doesn’t yet exist, then make it: that’s design.

Designers can’t know the full impact of their creations ahead of time. They’re not God, duh. But their creations can still have large-scale impact, either good or bad.

Why do we design? To survive, to improve, to develop, to create. And because we can. Designing gives us a sense of control over our lives and an opportunity to move closer ourselves to perfection.

Back in Plato’s day, thought was hot, and manual labor was not. This situation didn’t bode well for design, which unites thinking and making. The situation today isn’t much better. Consider: we still distinguish between blue-collar and white-collar work. Does maintaining this distinction serve us?

The pre-Socratic era had the idea of design broken down into useful chunks, but by the middle ages, it had become oversimplified to the point where people mostly abandoned design as an answer as they struggled to deal with the changes taking place around them.

Nowadays, people react to problems in their lives by trying to solve them. But some problems cannot be effectively solved with a problem-focused mindset. They are part of a larger system that cannot be optimized by ignoring all but one or two of the revelant variables.

Design wisdom combines reason with observation, reflection, imagination, action, and production. Being design-wise means you can shift from an analog experience of life, to a digital or analytic perspective of the world, and back again.

Agents of change: chance, necessity, and (design buzzword…) intention.

“Design utilizes a process of composition, which pulls a variety of elements into relationship with one another, forming a functional assembly that can serve the purposes and intentions of diverse populations of human beings.” (pulled verbatim because this sentence did interesting things to my brain)

A designer should critically analyze the nature of design. Think and practice with intention. Spread the word.

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom