Transforming That Sustainability Thing
“At a time when the blogosphere seems preoccupied with one–cycle views on many subjects, the connections between nineteenth century American transcendentalism, Bucky Fuller, and the current sustainability movement are interesting to consider. Without doubt the 21st century rise of neotranscendentalism is a fascinating subject and one that remains dear to the hearts of many of us with multi-cycle perspectives....
Since today we can find the original concerns of the American Transcendentalist movement being recontextualized and recombined on the global stage in the present day notions of sustainability by Al Gore, Alex Steffen, John Thackara and numerous others, how it might or might not connect to participatory co-creation, next design, inclusive innovation, whatever you choose to call it, are useful to consider....
Respectfully acknowledging all the amazing problem identification work done by Thoreau, Bucky, Gore and zillions of others along the way, let’s then look at where we are proportionally in terms of emphasis and capability in relation to the complexities identified. If one side of any transformation coin is content knowledge and the other side process knowledge, it seems clear to us which side is over abundantly represented at this sustainability party and which is sorely still disproportionally absent.
In practice when we talk about sustainability we are referring to sustainability of continuously adaptable transformation capability rather than just environmental sustainability.
Excuse the metaphor but if we look under the hood of “sustainability” we find not one problem type but rather hundreds, probably thousands of problem types. What’s stopping us from repairing climate change cascades down into zillions of related challenges of tremendous diversity that extend far beyond climate. It seems clear that in a continuously changing world it is not enough for individuals, teams, organizations, regions and countries to be able to solve one type of problem.
We believe the deeper challenge for humanity and certainly for our educational institutions is to get beyond the present focus on content knowledge of one problem type and get to work on what we believe is our more fundamental challenge: creating sustainable adaptable transformation capabilities across multiple generations.”
Download Towards Adaptable Inquiry as PDF file
Rick Poynor asks:
1. Does design have a cultural value beyond its business uses and functional purpose and, if it does, what is that cultural value?
2. If you think that design does have a cultural value, then what contribution does the level of aesthetic quality in a design make to its cultural value?
GK VanPatter: Answers to these questions inevitably become entangled in definitions of design as well as various possible meanings for the terms function, culture, value, contribution and even business. Today all of these words are quite slippery. Some of us might be referring to design in the individual sense, a designer person, while others might use the same word to refer to a company, a discipline or number of disciplines. Some might be referring to a process and a way of thinking. Today all disciplines including design are patterns in motion. Some patterns are moving at a snails pace while others are rapidly accelerating. Unfortunately it is what design was ten years ago that remains the primary focus of the traditional design press. (Don’t expect to find the future there.) The currency and precisions of design have already forever changed beyond that old picture. The reality is that some among us are most comfortable using old precisions and the old currency configurations while others are already using the new precisions, the new currency, freshly minted and still quite experimental. All of this makes for considerable confusion within and around the fields of design today. It also makes for an extremely exciting time for many of us.
Download Beyond Hostility as PDF file
Beyond Hostility
Finding & Creating Inclusive Models for Co-Creation
GK VanPatter posts to the PhD Design List.
GK VanPatter points out that firms operating in the organizational transformation activity space have long ago moved beyond the kind of hostility navigation dynamics suggested in the Rotman models. Cross-disciplinary, co-creation is not, or does not need to be, about one group gearing up to navigate another groups hostility. If that is what is going on in your organization you are likely using fatally flawed power-biased models.
“To be as tactful as possible here: I believe you will find out for yourself, by doing the [DeFuzzing WHO] exercise, that in the real world gaining insights into attributes and preferences of cross-disciplinary teams is not as simple as preassigning attribute tags to disciplines as proposed in the Roger Martin / Rotman model.
To suggest that some humans have preferences for validity and some for reliability is one thing but to suggest that we can predetermine and hard wire those notions to specific disciplines, especially without any blind self-determination mechanism is something quite different. The Martin / Rotman validity/reliability model appears to be more of a hypothesis rather then a real operationalized tool. Obviously there is a huge difference between those two things.
FYI: We have known for numerous years that anyone calling themselves a designer or a business manager could lean towards any one of a number of different problem finding/solving styles or preferences. For some time we have known that organizing teams by discipline tags alone is no longer meaningful, no longer enough if the goal is to create diversity of thinking, especially today when anyone can pretty much call themselves anything. Apparently it is news to the Rotman crowd but discipline tags as a single organizing principle have for some time been obsolete.”
Download Beyond Hostility as PDF file
NextD WorkshopONE
The 2007 Summer Session has wrapped. Check it out!
Launch NextD WorkshopONE Summer Session 2007
[ A portion of Unidentical Twins was first posted to Peter Morville’s blog on April 4, 2007. ]
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000149.php
This is a difficult story to tell in this format and one that is unlikely to appear on any of the Information Architecture-driven blogs. It is shared with you here with the intention that it might help some of our friends in the present Information Architecture and Strategic Design communities who are attempting to make sense of what they are seeing in their own community and in the broader marketplace. It is a story that not everyone will likely appreciate.
Some of you might know that Elizabeth Pastor and I had the privilege to work with Nancye Green, Richard Saul Wurman and others in what are now considered the early days of the Information Architecture movement. Nancye and Richard were both pioneers in Experience Design, Information Architecture and Information Environments Design. We learned a lot from them both. Elizabeth and I found ourselves outside of what became the Information Architecture community when its purpose was narrowed and distorted early on in the dot-com era. For us (and likely others from the early days), there is a great deal of irony in this thread. (More on this later.)
Download IA’s Unidentical Twins as PDF file
The Unintentional Slip?
Several bloggers have speculated that there was a slip in the Unidentical Twins text that confused Peter Merholz and Peter Morville. There was no slip. Perhaps unknown to some bloggers is the fact that Peter Merholz and GK VanPatter spent five months, from October 2005 to March 2006, constructing the Ladder of Fire dialogue that appeared in NextD Journal as Conversation 8.3. Certainly they have for some time been aware of each others points of view.
Appearing more then a year after Ladder of Fire, the Unidentical Twins piece makes reference to a November 2006 public exchange between Peter Merholz and Peter Morville that can be found among the “comments” related to Peter Morville’s November 29, 2006, Information Architecture 3.0 blog entry:
“Posted by peterme [Merholz] on November 30, 2006
Before I read this post, I had written one over on the AP blog very similar themes.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2006/11/29/greatly-exaggerated/
I also find it funny that you label me as one who feels constrained by definitions, but then you cite the words I wrote in the IA Institute business plan about the domains of IA. I'm doing what I can to encourage IA to grow so that it continues to be relevant to my evolving concerns; I encourage other IAs to do the same!
Posted by Peter Morville on November 30, 2006
Yes Peter. I discovered your post this morning, and commented (still pending moderation) that I mostly agree.
In a couple of recent talks, at IDEA and in Chile, you have argued, with the Polar Bear book as your prop, that we made a mistake in the 1990s by defining IA too narrowly.
I disagree. To start a new discipline, it's important to begin with a narrow definition that's focused on core competencies and unique value. That's the point Jesse made so eloquently in ia/recon.
Now that we have succeeded, and IA is well-established, the time is right to be more expansive.
So, we disagree about the past, but appear to be on the same page about the future. Cheers!”
You can see the exchange for yourself here...
REACTIONS TO UNIDENTICAL TWINS
The Unidentical Twins piece spawned numerous blog and list “discussions” especially in the Findability Information Architecture community. Reactions range from “a splendid account of where things are” and “the overall meaning is spot on” to VanPatter “deserve[s] every bit of derision and condescension we can reflect back at him.” Some focused on the ideas within Unidentical Twins, others preferred to direct hostility at PDF publishing.
Below are a few reaction excerpts from one of the Findability Information Architecture community lists:
“It's a splendid account of where things are. Except for one or two things, it's right on.....“...I think history won't be kind to the LIS [Library Information Science] faction of IA that tried to steer it away from the holistic process of Design to a pseudo-scientific orthodoxy, rendering IAs as operational apparatchiks drowning in a sea of academic babble and deliverables. I suspect Dante has already reserved a reception area for those involved. :-)”
Ziya Oz
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“what did he get wrong?”
Eric Scheid
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“....other than the turgid prose, the overall meaning is spot on. There is still a narrow, 'ivory-tower' mindset among a number of practicing IAs which can be largely attributed to a few, vocal individuals in the past who cared more about self-promotion than cross-disciplinary collaboration.”
As for the pdf format, it makes sense. if i spent a whole afternoon writing 6-page rebuttal, i certainly wouldn't want to make easy for others to copy/paste my thoughts out of context.”
Lee Hsieh
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“He publishes his opinions in a (if you'll forgive the term as I am using it literally) retarded PDF format, and then he whines about the fact
that people are currently using a term (IA) differently than he and his friends did almost twenty years ago.” ....GK VanPatter's petty and
seething criticisms deserve every bit of derision and condescension we can reflect back at him and his "Institute".
Christopher Fahey
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...i for one, didn’t perceive his comments in the offensive tone you describe so maybe we're both projecting ;-) it seems to me that any hostile retort, no matter how justified, only provides ephemeral satisfaction but ultimately lowers the possibility for mutual understanding..
“....i've watched the industry grow since '94, as have many others, so i'm not pulling this out of thin air. Not once have i come across an informed, gracious reply to IA criticism by the highly vocal proponents of IA. If anything, responses to criticism have always been tainted with some form of derision, condescension and hostility. On the other hand, those same proponents are quick to praise /promote some event, publication or new term that they were involved with.”
Lee Hsieh
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“...if there is a "LIS faction" and "Design faction" in IA, what are the defining characteristics of both? Is it something that we
could run a questionnaire on and gather some numbers?”
Andrew Boyd
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“I'm coming to this a bit late but having found and read the article I do have empathy with what it's saying. From my perspective books such
as the polar bear book do strengthen a bit of a myth that IA is somehow different from experience design. There is also a myth that
Information Architecture is about the organization of information...”
Stewart Dean
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If you care to wade in this is where the list is:
http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0704/
NextD Futures, the book is in the works and will be available soon. If you would like more details and or want to be notified when advance copies of NextD Futures / ReReThinking Design are available please send an email to info at nextd dot org with NextD Futures as the subject.
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Understanding Design 3.0
This material was created by NextD Research in collaboration with UnderstandingLab and as part of the NextD Futures series. This was part of a larger presentation originally made by GK VanPatter at the AIGA national design conference in September 2005.
All screens and text within are Copyright © 2006 NextDesign
Leadership Institute. All Rights Reserved. For more information please email info at nextd dot org.
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Reality Check
NextD Reality Check was created in collaboration with UnderstandingLab as part of a larger presentation designed to help explain the NextD concept.
Seen here are a few screens from the 2002 presentation that we first showed to leadership at Art Center College of Design in California. In this mindscape we make a comparison between the attributes of Traditional Design and NextD. Since 2002 the diagrams from this presentation have been widely republished, often with our permission..:-)
Reality Check is Copyright © 2002-2007 NextDesign Leadership Institute. All Rights Reserved.
Launch Reality Check (45K, Flash 5 required)
This conceptual model was created in collaboration with UnderstandingLab as part of the NextD Innovation Learning System.
Click here to view the map at a larger size.
This map is Copyright © 2004 NextDesign Leadership Institute. All Rights Reserved. For more information please write to us at info at nextd dot org
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AskNextD
The Third Lens
Making Sense of Thesis Complexities Now!
Questions submitted by
Jaime Barrett
Graduate Student
Emily Carr Institute
Vancouver, BC
Canada
Download The Third Lens as PDF file
Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0
Making Sense of Design Now!
Questions submitted by
Sune Aagaard
Journalist
Kontrabande
Copenhagen
Denmark
Download Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 as PDF file
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NextD Diagrams in INDEX Magazine
from Denmark
Imagine our surprise when we opened the new INDEX magazine and found our redrawn, uncredited and repurposed diagrams there depicting "The New Design Field" and "The New Design Practice"! These diagrams were evidently borrowed from our NextD Mindscape 1.0. Ooops! The gracious folks at INDEX subsequently explained their oversight and offered an apology which we greatly appreciated. They also went back into the digital version of the magazine and added a NextD credit. Their promotional magazine is now available on their site.
http://www.index2005.dk/news/news_item.2004-09-29.3664431837
Click here to view the preview at a larger size.
Points of View from the 2005 Institute of Design Strategy Conference.
Josephine Green / Philips Design
Larry Keeley / Doblin Inc
Donald Norman / Neilsen Norman Group
GK VanPatter / Humantific / NextDesign Leadership Institute
Patrick Whitney / Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology
Download this document as a PDF file
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What Matters?, an analysis of the proposal to create a new Graduate School of Design at University of California, Irvine was contributed by GK VanPatter to the Design in the University Conference held on-line at the PHD-Design List in December of 2003.
Download What Matters? as PDF file
topThe NextD Innovation Models Evaluation Framework iMFrame) was created to help us think about, make sense of and evaluate the various innovation theories and models that are floated in our direction. iMFrame helps us consider and visually map how well other theories/models fit the realities of scaling cross-disciplinary innovation in real organizations today.
Podcaster Christopher Gee of the Prepared Mind interviews GK Van Patter regarding how the NextD initiative got started, its continuing mission and the need for a new generation of design leadership skills.
http://www.thepreparedmind.com/pm/
GK. VanPatter: The InfoDesign interview
Peter J. Bogaards of InfoDesign interviews GK. VanPatter regarding business innovation,
complexity overload and the value that a reinvented design brings to business transformation.
http://www.informationdesign.org/special/vanpatter_interview.php
GK Posts to the Design Observer:
This is My Process
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/017485.html#comments
The Persistence of the Exotic Menial
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/010963.html
Innovation is the New Black
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/008049.html#50
The Road to Hell: Now Paved with Innovation?
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/014697.html#more
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Copyright © 2002-2008 NextDesign
Leadership Institute. All Rights Reserved.