Patrick Whitney On Abstraction: The Missing Link In True Innovation
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Using Design For Peace Keeping
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This report of the Strategic Design and Public Policy Conference held between June 9-1 2010 was produced by the Saïd Business School, the Center for Local Strategies Research and the United Natios Institute for Disarmament Research. The workshop was co-organised by Lucy Kimbell, Clark Fellow of Design Leadership; Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; Dr. Derek Miller, Senior researcher and project co-manager, Security Needs Assessment Protocol Project, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research; Prof. Gerry Philipsen, Professor of Communication, and Director of the Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington; and Lisa Rudnick, Senior researcher and project co-manager, Security Needs Assessment Protocol Project, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.
The workshop brought together over 25 academics and practitioners from three domains:
a) those working within UN and other organisations on issues of peace and security and concerned with how to make it more effective;
b) people working in management and design especially service design; and,
c) people working in cultural research
The agenda for Strategic Design and Public Policy established at Glen Cove provides an organizing platform from which to consider and advance new activities that may lead to the improved design of peace and security initiatives around the world. It opens a massive and profoundly complex field of endeavors in which the ethical, practical, intellectual, and political landscapes are still partly beyond imagining.
Cultural research, for example, maintains a very tentative and ambivalent relationship with public policy generally, and with all matters of security and military engagement specifically.
Design aspires to both deeper research and more policy relevance, and is forcefully moving in that direction, but it remains insufficiently developed compared to other fields when it comes to ethics, research design and methods, and adapting its premises to new contexts of safety, security, and moral impact.
Public policy, for its part, will have to reflexively consider and navigate the complex shoals of political representation vs. community-led innovation, and begin to consider what relationship the civil servant does, or can have, to the design of public activities.
None of these problems are new. However, when seen from the perspective of a shared agenda, new and emergent challenges come to the forefront that will need to be grappled with if opportunities are to be properly developed in a responsible manner.
Something important is happening. It is hoped that this event helps like-minded people take a further step towards its fulfillment for the common good.
The Power of Design: Milking the Clouds, Bringing Water to The Desert
In my final project at Industrial Design in DuocUC in 2000 I had the opportunity to develop a project to improve the quality of life of low-income people in the Atacama desert, a virtually rainless plateau in South America, covering a 600-mile strip of land on the Pacific coast of Chile. The access to water in this area is scare and communities living in the area depend on private suppliers. After spending three months interacting with communities in the area I detected a significant problem relating to water. During my research I noticed that low income families needed to spend money due the high level of minerals in the water that spoiled pots and kitchenware. This was also reflected in poor levels of health and several illnesses in the youngest population. The issue was not the supply or the price of water; the problem was the quality.
In parallel I discovered an existing project that aimed to provide drinking water through the condensation of morning fog through a ‘fog collecting device’. Although the project was based just six kilometres from the town and had strong awareness amongst local residents, the initiative was completely external to and disconnected from the community. This was mostly because the project was still perceived as an novelty and it had been conducted out of the community. The final device was a primitive device, a scientific experiment that the community failed to see as a product that could give solutions to their problems.
For the next two months I worked with anthropologists to define an approach to overcome the distrust towards the project as well as the lack of sense of ownership from the community. This work provided important design and engineer guidelines for the project as well as enabling a more fluid design process with civil engineers, architects and designers. The input from each discipline had an important bearing on the definition of the mechanics, physics, functionality, user interface and the physical form of the ‘fog-collecting device’.
The result: The approach and overall process produced an excellent result with the final prototype being approved for building and testing in four communities in Chile. The device generated up to 80 liters of water per day, as much as the previous model being half the size, thanks to the double layer of fabric and the use of wind tunnels to maximise condensation.
The costs were kept low using basic materials and adapting existent parts. The reception was overwhelming, the device was presented as a finished product in a box, it can be set up by as few as two or three people following the instruction manual that details every step with text an graphics illustrating all the necessary processes.
Drawing from this experience I recognised the diversity of the wider challenges that designers face when developing products or services. I became passionate about discovering ways to improve people’s lives through design and bridging the gap between design and other social-related disciplines. This is where the inspiration for my MA research was fermented; to bridge that gap by understanding the theoretical roots behind design thinking and providing a concise justification for design thinking in the social sector.
About ECö: Milking the Clouds
This innovative product captures morning fog in desert areas and condenses it to produce water for local communities with no access to drinking water. Made with low cost materials the system is affordable for poor families and a smart solution to source scarce water resources in extreme conditions.
Simple materials and mechanisms make this product a creative solution for users and producers. All pieces are standard (with minimal modifications) to keep production costs down. The product can be set up by two or three people and comes with an installation manual.
The project was developed based on an investigation sponsored by the Australian Embassy in Chile.
Continuum + Rockefeller Foundation Workshop: Design For Social Impact
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Developed by Continuum together with the Rockefeller Foundation during the Design For Social Impact Workshop in Bellagio, Italy; this document contains valuable insights in what it takes to enable designers to approach and solve social issues.
One of the essential insights is the importance of using design tools and methodologies along with social research and theories is the best way to achieve a truly collaborative innovation and improving the success of its implementation.
SHAPE: A methodology for people-centred service innovation
Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking
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This article was published in the California Management Review from the University of California, Berkeley back in 2007. However the way it is structured is still topical and relevant to the innovation practices around the world.
The innovation process returns to the concrete realm to generate solutions, choose the ones that best meet the imperatives, and test them with potential customers or users. This part of the innovation cycle is, perhaps, the best documented and exercised in practice.
Based on the imperatives, which firmly connect back to the observational research, the innovation team can use a wide range of concept generation techniques to come up with alternative solutions, a well-documented set of concept selection techniques to choose the solutions they wish to take forward, and then a variety of mechanisms for soliciting feedback from potential users.
Innovation teams must be careful not to remain isolated in either the concrete or abstract realms, but must move fluidly between them in the iterative process of innovation.
Tim Brown on Design Thinking for Social Innovation
New Book on Design Thinking and Service Design by DMI
(via: @liveworkstudio)
The president of the Design Management Institute Thomas Lockwood has recently published the book Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience and Brand Value. This book is divided into three sections focused on innovation, service design and experience design. The second section has a special collaboration from UK based live|work service designers Lavrans Lovlie, Ben Reason and Chris Downs where they expand on the 'triple-bottom-line' as a measurement of the value of service design.
A great read for those seeking to improve productivity in their business and also for those who understand creativity as a source for innovation.
Video of IDEO's Ripple Effect in India
(via @jocelynw)
Developed with Acumen Fund this project sought to provide drinking water to low income communities in India. For more information click here.
A conversation with design thinker Frank O. Gehry
An intimate conversation with the great architect and design thinker Frank O. Gehry that explores the way thinkers see, work and relate with design projects. He speaks about his design processes and says that what motivates him is the world of possibilities rather finding the right solution.
Specially interesting is his take on how museums deal with art, what he calls the white cube syndrome, how by clearing the space around a piece of art and putting it in a perfectly white space it becomes precious and separates it from the viewer. "If you put a great painting in a garage [...] it is still a great painting", this draws a parallel with the perception of design as a precious thing that occurs in a separate dimension from the viewers/users while in reality they are inherent to the processes and thinking of design.
