Listen to what Donald Norman, the inventor of the term User Experience really meant when he created the term User Experience (UX).
Transcript
Once upon a time a very long time ago, I was at Apple, and you know, we said the experience of using these computers is weak.
The experience when you first discover it, when you see it in the store, when you buy it, when you oh, can’t fit into the cars in this great big box that doesn’t fit into the car, and when you finally do get it home; opening the box up and ooh it looks scary: I don’t know if I dare put this computer together — all of that is user experience;
it’s everything that touches upon your experience with the product. And it may not even be near the product. It may be when you’re telling somebody else about it.
That’s what we meant when we devised the term “user experience” and set up what we called the User Experience Architect’s Office at Apple to try to enhance things.
Now, Apple was already pretty good so we were starting with a good product, making it even better. Today that term has been horribly misused. It is used by people to say “I’m a user experience designer, I design websites, so I design apps” and they have no clues to what they’re doing and they think the experiences that simple device the website or the app or who knows what.
No, it’s everything: it’s the way you experience the world, it’s the way you experience your life, that’s the way you experience the service, or — yeah an app or a computer system — but it’s a system that’s everything.
I did too much. And I did nothing. This is the story of how being a perfectionist got me stuck. (Photo by John T on Unsplash)
Failure is an opportunity for learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn’t work as expected, about the clarity of the vision.
How come you are writing every day and you publish on your blog every week? You could add.
And how come your latest article was in April? We’re almost in June. You could infer.
Yeah, I have excuses. So many I could fill you with them.
I wouldn’t even need all of my excuses, I could just mention the pandemic.
You know, that insignificant event taking over the world, recently?
But the truth is another.
Perfectionism.
This killed my publishing schedule.
While, when I write in my personal diary, I flow like oil. I can write from 1’000 to 5’000 words per hour. I’ve reached 250 days of continuous writing for 350’000 words. I can go on and on. I frequently reflect on my work (no, not necessary on why I am not blogging). I think aloud to better form some thoughts. It’s working in understanding better. Who? Me.
Come on, the usual ones: UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, Design Systems, management, leadership, Organization Design, parenting, sustainability, Systems Thinking, complexity, emergence, feedback loops, causal diagrams, unintended consequences, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Systems Change, social innovation, facilitation, teaching, training, learning, consciousness, the mind, space, writing, thinking, publishing, building an audience, writing the next article, and some other 357 things.
Writing the next article. Yes. Let’s talk about this for a moment.
I’ve been “writing the next article” for more than a month, now.
It’s the next episode of the “OsservAgro” saga. It was one of the most stimulating experiences I had in 2019. I have a mountain of notes and ideas about it. And I committed to myself to tell its story. My experience. How I did it. What I’ve learned. What we did together. What we could do.
But I wanted to be a historian. I wanted to tell exactly what happened, who said what, what I replied, what I thought, what I did, and what we achieved at the end.
That is not an excellent way to summarize an experience. I am afraid. The more I recalled about the first workshop I facilitated, the more I wrote. The more I wrote, the more details I recalled. The more I wrote the more ideas, facilitation methods, tricks, reflections came to my mind. And the more I wrote. So, after a month, what was a 1’000 thousand-words essay is now 5’000.
And I feel exhausted. And nausea comes to me if I reopen the third draft. I don’t want to publish it. It’s too long. It’s not flowing. And, the worst thing, I feel it’s… incomplete.
That is exactly where I am now. In the meantime, I’ve collected (just about) 1 extra million ideas. More drafts, more articles waiting to be written. The idea of creating a “digital mind garden” came to my mind because now it seems to be fashionable.
Kristel van Ael talked about Systemic Design, the differences and similarities to Design Thinking and she introduced the Systemic Design Toolkit, a tool to help using the methodology in business contexts.
Namahn is Humanc-centred design agency in Brussels, Belgium.
Systemic Design Definition
Systemic Design integrates systems thinking and human-centered design, with the intention of helping designers cope with complex design projects (also called Wicked Problems).
Traditional design methods are inadequate to face the recent global challenges stemming from increased complexity as globalization, migration, and sustainability.
Systemic Designers need improved tools and methods to design responsibly while avoiding uninterested consequences/side-effects.
Wicked Problems involve multiple aspects, multiple parties, multiple interests and perspectives. They show no clear link between cause and effects.
See how we failed with poverty reduction, waste management, migration, pollution and climate crisis.
Limits to Growth. Donella Meadows.
The problem with Reductionist Thinking
From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price.”
—Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline.
Unintended consequences
The Cobra Effect. An example of unintended consequences.
Unintended consequences are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen.
Unexpected benefit: A positive unexpected benefit (also referred to as luck, serendipity or a windfall).
Unexpected drawback: An unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy (e.g., while irrigation schemes provide people with water for agriculture, they can increase waterborne diseases that have devastating health effects, such as schistosomiasis).
Perverse result: A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse).
How is COVID 19 an intended consequence?
What is Systemic Design?
What is Systemic Design?
Systemic Design lays at the intersection of Design Thinking and Systems Thinking and aims at helping designers to face complex problems.
By zooming out to understand how the parts of the system influence each other.
By zooming in, co-designing, with the stakeholders, the components that can leverage Systems Change.
Design Thinking has a focus on the parts, products and services, to create optimal User Experiences.
provides a structured problem-solving process
Puts people on the center
Hands-on, co-creative, cross-disciplinary
allows to learn and improve through prototyping, and testing
Systems Thinking has a focus on the whole, on the interaction of stakeholders, products and services aiming at influencing the emergent behavior of the system.
to identify non-linear relationships (see also Circular Design and Circular Economy)
It’s open ended, shaping the conditions for change. With the Systems Thinking approach you need to focus on creating an environment conducing to the emergence of the changes that you aim for.
The Systemic Design Toolkit
Built by Namah in collaboration with shiftN, MaRS and SDA, the Systemic Design Toolkit is a methodology and a library of tools based on academic research and human-centre design expertise.
It’s based on the principle that Systems Change should be co-designed and co-created within the system and with the actor of the system, preferably, with the stakeholders in the same room. And provides tools to foster dialogue between the parts without requiring participants to master its inner working and principles.
The structure of the Systemic Design Toolkit. Diagram.
The Systemic Design Toolkit is composed by seven steps and includes more than 30 tools.
Framing the system (Systems Thinking)
Listening to the system (Design Thinking)
Understanding the system (Systems Thinking)
Defining the desired future (Design Thinking)
Exploring the possibility space (Systems Thinking)
Designing the intervention model (Design Thinking)
Fostering the transition
Framing the system
You cannot change what you don’t know: generate shared understanding of the current context and identify the stakeholder to involve.
Map the rich context of current practices, trends and innovative initiatives.
Listening to the system
Analyze the interactions between the actors by identifying hidden relationships.
It’s a way to communicate the essence of your field research.
Actants describe archetypical relationships.
Understanding the system
Develop a shared understanding about forces and interdependencies in the system to discover the leverage points.
Create a system map, “make the system visible” by visualizing its structure and the relations between its components.
Defining the desired future
Align the stakeholders on the Value Proposition. What do we want to change and how? What is the future we are imagining?
Co-Design an ideal desired future (better thinking about “futures”) by imagining how we want to improve the future context of individuals, organizations and society.
To give sense to the whole process designers need to explore different types of possible intervention by making sure they are covering the big picture emerged by the initial research activities.
A brainstorming activity to craft an intervention strategy in which you explore the leverage points in a system.
Designing the intervention model
Investigate how interventions connect and reinforce each other to envision an effective strategy for change.
The intervention model represents the DNA of change. Interventions are Design Concepts that will enable Systems Change.
Fostering the transition
Plan the transition towards the desired goal by moving from the Minimum Viable Product (maybe the Minimum Viable Solution in this case) to the full implementation of the intervention model.
The roadmap for transition is a tool to plan the implementation of the interventions, in a way that transformation happens step by step.
This is an extract of the interview transcript that David Orban conducted live on the 14 April 2020 for his Internet who Searching For The Question Live.Massimo Curatella (me!) was interviewed on Personal Knowledge Management, writing and education.
I’ve made small corrections and fixes only for the sake of clarity and brevity.
Watch the recording on:
Searching For The Question Live #26 Knowledge Management With Massimo Curatella
David introduces the show, and Max
David Orban My name is David Orban and I am very glad to have all of you following the show. Before we start, I want to remind you that even if we are live you can always watch past episodes, both on Facebook and YouTube. And on YouTube, you can also subscribe to the channel. We also have a Discord community, and I invite you to join http://davidorban.com/discord. And finally, if you find the show valuable, as well as the other content that I produce and the knowledge that I share, you are welcome to become a supporter on Patreon at https://patreon.com/davidorban
Today’s theme is knowledge management.How do you manage the information flow? What are the ways that you cope with overload? What are the best tools of knowledge management?
The guest is Massimo Curatella. Max is a designer, a facilitator, a writer and also a friend. He lives in Rome with his wife and son and we met a few years ago when he came to a meetup I organized. I have the habit of setting up impromptu meetings around themes that interest me, such as technology-driven social change, decentralization, network society. Sometimes a dozen people come, sometimes several hundred. At the Rome meeting, there were not many people but one of them was very passionate, curious and skeptical. He held the Italian edition of my book, Something New, AIs and Us, full of notes and markups. On the first page, he jotted “Sono tutte stronzate?” “Is this all bullshit?” So we evidently had to go to have a pizza and several beers. And after the event, we kept talking into the night. Since then, Massimo became the Italian Ambassador of Network Society, a collaborator on several projects, as well as the agent provocateur on many of the things that I do. For example, He was the person behind the idea that gave rise to The Context, my weekly video series alongside this one Searching For The Question Live. One of Max’s passions is knowledge management. So I thought I would invite him to the show.
Welcome, Max.
Massimo Curatella Hello everybody. It’s a pleasure being here. Thank you for having me.
How to manage many interests
David Orban Let’s start talking a little bit about you. One of the things that is common to many people as a matter of fact, somebody just last week asked me for an opinion, because he is a designer and was redoing his website and he didn’t know how to talk about himself and the many things that he is interested in. You have the same problem. And I do too, except that I don’t care about it.
Is it the problem of somebody having many interests, a polyhedric personality and having some difficulty in conveniently representing him or herself to others so that he can be put in a box?
Massimo Curatella This is actually a painful experience I’ve been experiencing since forever in my life, and sometimes it becomes so painful that I cannot sustain it. And so I invite my friends and I ask them to listen to me. And what I found useful is to get out of the mess that you have in your brain in terms of passions, interests, and things that you like and you love and let your friends try to recognize some patterns. To make sense together, to me is the most valuable thing.
And something that I really appreciate for instance, in what you do, David, is that as you were saying, “I don’t care” in a way that is a provocation and a way of living and this has been always a problem with my culture, because I always been taught to be all set up perfectly, and you need to do things in the “proper way”, not specifying what’s the proper way.
This is a limitation. To fight this limitation, it took me several years. And this is when I decided that to build my online identity or my professional identity, I didn’t care anymore about being perfect or having specific titles. So I invented some ways to manage this. I started to collect labels. And I said if I want to be interesting in a certain context, and I have a label that is relevant, I will use that label. If I don’t want to talk with people, I will say the opposite. And it worked. So this is one of the ways to manage multiple facets of your identities.
David Orban We are all full people, right? We are not mono-dimensional or bi-dimensional we are multidimensional and as in the beautiful book Flatland by Abbot, talking about how a cube meets the inhabitants of a bi-dimensional world and how it is difficult for them to communicate because the cube is not suffering from their limitations. Similarly, I believe it shouldn’t be your fault that you have so many interests if you are efficient in pursuing those interests and anybody should be able to see you in a given projection. And then if you develop a deeper and broader relationship with them, that projection will encompass more and more of what you are. To establish a professional relationship that is based on just a given section and a given perception of what you are is perfectly appropriate.
Knowing wide and knowing deep
Massimo Curatella Yes, this is true, I agree, but it’s a matter of your culture and your attitude to life. I feel that in most of our contexts, especially in the Italian culture when we talk about school and how you develop as a human being, this is not promoted. This is not facilitated because you are supposed to find your place as soon as possible, you need to settle down and you need to find your title and you’re going to be your professional title. And this has been a curse to me. This is one extreme but, at the same time, the opposite of being completely open, but superficial on many different topics like a butterfly, without ever focusing on something and going by deep diving. Do youknow the metaphor of T-shaped people? (By the way, I am an O-shaped person) It’s when you can go wide and broad on topics but if you are polled on a specific concept you are able to go deep down and be able to have profound conversations about it. This is, for instance, what I really appreciate when we meet because we can talk about anything: life, universe, or c++.
The need for a culture of experimentation and innovation
David Orban What you said about Italian culture is sad because the necessity of telling a very young person that they are whatever happens to them in that moment for the rest of their lives was a necessity 100 years ago, but it is a profound condemnation today. And it really forces an entire population, not to experiment not to enjoy the alternatives possible, not to evolve with the needs and necessities of society as it is improved by technology.
So what do you do with your own children or child?
How can you tolerate this kind of violence that they go under at school?
Creating an environment conducive to creativity
Massimo Curatella This is a serious issue, and I live it every day. What I do is to try to nurture an environment that is conducive to be eclectic, and with many interests. And I try to always invite my child to anything that I do for work and recreation. And sometimes I use him as a sparring partner, as a creative person. I did that yesterday for a workshop I had to organize with 100 people. And I tested a prototype with him and I told him: “work with me for one hour, I want to see how it works”. The difference is in how you treat the person. Because if you treat a young human being like a child that needs to be fed and you have to wait for them to become persons, one day… This is what our parents were doing with us and I don’t want that. So I talk to him. When I want, as a child, as my son, but most of the time as a person, I talk with him about going to Mars or what Elon Musk is doing with reusable rockets or The Context by David Oban talking about living on the moon. And he is so excited and sometimes, it’s like planting seeds, you cannot see the immediate fruits of that. But after years or weeks, you get some returns because it comes back with the drawings, with ideas with worlds he wants to build on Minecraft. And this is fantastic, but you have to be present in everything that happens. You need to change your attitude. So educators or parents or relatives are absolutely important in the environment of young minds.
Coronavirus as a boring horror movie
David Orban How is life in Rome these days with the lock-down and everything?
Massimo Curatella It’s surreal. You would see scenes that are really familiar to any other place around the world. And the first time that I had to get out to buy groceries, it seemed to me like I was living in a movie scene from 12 monkeys. I felt like Bruce Willis, navigating this incredibly deserted world. And I was scared, you see people in long queues and they are way farther than two meters one from the other. And you can feel the embarrassment, the fear in the eyes of people.
On one side you still see the elders being absolutely not disciplined (along with the younger). One of the best scenes I was part of was a person with plastic gloves, and a mask, he went into a bakery and he bought a piece of pizza bianca. He put down the mask and he started to eat in the middle of the road like, nothing was happening. I said, so why are you wearing a mask?
On the other side, this was a month ago, the first time that I met my mother in law the instinct was to hug ourselves. And I said, Okay, no, no, we need to touch our feet. This is what they used to do in China. So this is our way of saying hello. And it was fun and sad at the same time.
Sped-up digital transformation
David Orban A lot of people who postponed the adoption of modern tools are now forced to use video conferencing and share the collaborative platforms, documents, either on Google or Microsoft Teams or maybe some open source solution as well. And they are hopefully going to realize that there is nothing to fear that it is going to be good to keep going with these tools even when the peak of the pandemic has passed and when children go back to school and, and when the workers are back in their offices.
So what do you think about the relationship between the tools of knowledge management and the ability to manage knowledge?
Becoming intentional in digital knowledge managment
Massimo Curatella This is the essential concept that we need to address for people like me who like to play with everything and experiment with everything and they keep on having thousands of ideas, everything they do. Having infinite space at the finger for free. It’s a curse. It’s like the tool you’re using right now Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, with a finger you keep on scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, it’s just like drugs. You’re addicted, you go there and you scroll for hours.Now the same is happening when you can save any piece of information. With the illusion that one day you will read it or with the illusion of knowledge since you have grabbed a beautiful piece of writing or an article or a video. You have the illusion, the dopamine boost, of being smarter. And this is, unfortunately, so easy that I frequently fall into that. And this is what I’m trying to fight by trying to be more intentional. This is the most important thing we need to nurture in our children and in ourselves, to be intentional. We should still be open to serendipity, finding things where you’re not looking for it. But that cannot be 90% of our lives. At the same time, trying to be more intentional needs discipline. So I’m doing a lot of effort in trying to ask myself, why am I saving this link? I’ve been collecting information since 1995 and I still have those collections. I still have them after 25 years, with the illusion that one day, maybe I will review them because I remember there was something interesting. And it’s like prehistory, it’s the archaeology of myself. After 20 years, I really don’t care. The difference today is not what I’m saving, but what I’m gonna do with that information.
David Orban And I like letting go of things that once I thought were so important, I feel it as a cathartic moment when I realized that it had its place and now it has a different place and I can do without and I also like Saving, stuffing the knowledge that I am not going to, for example, read the article that I am saving, but I have an expectation of an increasing utility in the tools that surround me. So that they will be able to derive the correlations among the components of the information that I am saving in order to surface in a contextual manner, what is relevant in a given time in the future and, and there are glimpses of that already. For example, even though it is a tool that we used to love and now we love it less because we believe it may not last forever and we are a little bit afraid of its proprietary nature and format. Evernote when you start writing, it’s pretty good. Bringing you other notes saying this might be relevant to what you are writing. And also, there are other tools that are doing similar things.
Do you believe that it is reasonable to expect AIs to become effective assistance? And pretend that whatever we don’t do is because we don’t want to make the effort, they will do it in our place.
Think strategy before technology
Massimo Curatella I hope so. But of course, we have to discuss what we mean by that. I’ve been dreaming about Google before it was born. I was dreaming about Yahoo groups before it became a reality. And my idea was to have my brain in a digital format so that I could share it with anybody else on the internet. I could create a connection while I was sleeping. At the same time having the assistance of Google or Alexa is, for now, a little bit more than a toy. But when you mention tools like Evernote or Notion or others, they are powerful, advanced, but still, if you are not disciplined, they are going to become a mess very soon. So we’re not there yet. I want Google to tell me, 30 years ago, you were thinking about this. Do you want to have some more information about this concept?Because there is David talking about this right now. This is what I want.
The future of Personal Knowledge Management will be in our brain
David Orban Or given your browser history, I know that whatever you attempted 30 years ago, you were not ready. But now you are ready because you have acquired the skills and what you wrote, contains certain components.
We have Sabina Spagna, saying that children must be stimulated in every context. And this is called divergent thought. And it is also a successful movie and a book hasn’t read it but I know it’s very popular.
Neuralinkis one of the newest Elon Musk companies, where he’s able to rapidly assemble an excellent team, where he gives instructions coming from his approach of first principles, redesign of solutions to achieve a tenfold or a hundredfold improvement on anything that was possible before. Neuralink wants to achieve the ability to interface our brain and our thoughts directly with computers. And with other humans at a depth and speed and completeness that would make us all for every practical purpose telepathic. But we have a problem with bandwidth. If we communicate like this, the effective transmission of information via a spoken word, it is not a very high rate, especially if I am not a good communicator. So, Neuralink wants to increase the communication bandwidth between humans and our exo-cortex.
The only people who want to go through the effort of doing that are the paralyzed. Today the first attempts with Neuralink will be on people who have no alternative. But yes, there will be a time when the system will be less expensive, less cumbersome, less dangerous, less delicate, and it will not require FDA approval and exception anymore. And that is when many of us will eagerly embrace that.
Flip education
David Orban Time is money and getting relevant knowledge needs precious time.
How can we make sure that the information we get is relevant and that both children and teachers can use the best methods available? So what do you say, Massimo, to that?
Massimo Curatella Do exactly the opposite, ask children to teach to teachers, this is the very first thing you should do.
David Orban And what is needed in order for that to happen?
Massimo Curatella We need a transition in our culture and in the system because, of course, if you are living on the salary that you are getting by giving tests and giving rating you cannot do otherwise than that. So the system needs to be changed. In fact, I think the teachers right now are victims of the system. They are not only the perpetrators of what they’re doing. So I feel compassion and I’m empathetic to them. Because when I was a teacher, I had the luxury of doing whatever I wanted. So in any class that I was teaching, I said, you don’t want to do that? You do want to do computer graphics. You want to do photography, let’s do photography! And the student, you know, didn’t pass the course. But he was so happy. And he changed his life. He did another job and after 15 years, he’s saying thank you, Max!
Systems Change starts with you
David Orban Now, what about the family pressure where they need to study in order to pass a given admission to the next school and then the next school and then the next school for 20 years, at least or you know, if somebody stops at high school after 12 years or 13 years, whatever it is there? because we are talking about children and teachers and the families right, all three have to agree that the current system is not working
Massimo Curatella When we talk about changing the system, the system has different levels, the first level is yourself, then you have to go in circles, and expand them gradually and see who you have near you. You have your family, this is still the system, and then you get outside, then you have the school, and then you have the nation-state, the government and then the world. So you cannot act only top-down or bottom-up, you have to intervene in all of those levels.That’s why it’s so difficult. That’s why I keep on failing every day.
Knowledge Management in the workplace
David Orban Since the title of this episode is knowledge management, it is not surprising that we are talking about schools and children. But the same challenges are applied also in the workplace where a very hierarchical and centralized decision system pretends to assign you tasks that you do unquestioningly and then measures the time that you spend on the task and the more time you spend, the more important the task is. And if you questioned the method, you are seen as rebellious and dangerous and set aside. Now I’m describing the worst possible workplace, but is the challenge harder or easier in your opinion to re-calibrate the minds and the culture around what we really need to focus on what matters in terms of how to cope with the information flow and what is happening?
Massimo Curatella It depends on the environment where you’re working. And workplace and personal knowledge management, they are two different things. But of course, there are similar kinds of approaches and methods. In the workplace, If you are in the old school, I don’t think you have any chance you have to follow the hierarchy. I was having some pains in working in a very strict hierarchical system where I wanted to share knowledge and share information with my colleagues higher or lower. It was a problem. It was a problem because I was not respecting the hierarchy. Now, in a very formal, scientific environment I can even think there could be some benefits, of course, because otherwise, it is completely chaotic. But I still feel that it’s a sort of limitation because it’s very old school, you get beaten on your hands, why did you do that? you have to pass by me! And even if you go a little bit lower in medium-sized organizations, even in Italy, they are still like this.
Knowledge Curation and Personal Knowledge Management
Massimo Curatella When instead you go and work with people that are more open and modern in terms of sharing and managing knowledge, what I really appreciate is where everything is transparent and available to everybody. In that case, you have other kinds of problems, because you have too much. The next step is to curate knowledge,Personal Knowledge Mastery becomes the needed approach. What do I want to do with the knowledge I’ve acquired? In the workplace, if we are working together, we need to have conversations and work actually together to discover what we need and aggregate and let the information grow. So that one day we will have clusters of something that is meaningful or relevant to us.
David Orban I really don’t like when somebody just shares a URL, and nothing else. And when they do it on their own wall, and maybe they asked me to be a direct connection, what Facebook calls a friend, I look at their walls, and it’s just a series of links with zero context, zero opinion, zero curation, as you say, and I just can’t accept, because I don’t need that human to be a collector of links. What I want that human to be is a thinking value adding actor that provides his or her opinion on whatever is important.
I want to make sure that our viewers can find you. So they can go to curatella.com Is that like a cold cut from Rome? That’s how it sounds to me. Maybe too close to dinner. That is why I think mortadella-Curatella
Massimo Curatella That’s the worst joke they used to do to me when I was a young boy, but it’s not. It’s actually a plant and it is coming from South America. I think it’s Curatella Americana. It’s herbal medicine. And it is a nice name because it reminds “curating”.
David Orban All right. So, on your website curatella.com there is contact information and people can get in touch with you. To have you design and facilitate and write and do all the other wonderful things including provoking and upsetting and disrupting. Which you do very well as well. So, as we go towards the end of our hour together, what would you like the people who are here, take away? What can they do to make our conversation actionable to them?
Building a writing habit
Massimo Curatella Oh, that’s a beautiful question. I am a technologist. I am a software developer. I do software engineering, I love technology. What I will tell you is: forget about technology, widgets, smartphones, unless you can use those toys to really augment your brain, the first thing that I would suggest is to write, you have to write, you have to get things out of your brain. Writing is painful if you’re not accustomed to it. To reach the stage of publishing on my blog, I’ve been writing a quarter of a million words, privately, nowhere to be found, only for me. And it was an immense effort.
David Orban And you posted it somewhere, and I commented, well, where are those words? Yes. Why are you hiding them?
Massimo Curatella Yes, what I suggest is to try to work on your character by building a habit. It’s even more painful than quitting smoking or sugar. But once you’ve discovered the power of having an outlet getting thoughts out of your brain, it’s a superpower, you cannot do without it, you will change, you will change your life. So, write, you will think better, publish, and then think about technology.
David Orban So, the people who should be recommending technology as the solution, you specifically recommend a deeper analysis and understanding of the objectives and of the outcomes, and only when that is better understood to find the tools but at the end tools do make us better and faster in achieving what we want to do, or even sometimes to do what seemed impossible when we couldn’t read or write. The ability to aggregate and curate knowledge was severely limited by oral culture. The invention of writing was fundamental. When we invented airplanes, we really started to do something that all humans dreamed about and almost all of them believed it would never happen and it would be impossible. So I understand and agree that analyzing in the abstract or within yourself, what are your goals, How do you really want to understand the task or the knowledge that you are managing is important, but I also think that the tools and technologies can help us over achieve With respect to what we would be doing without them.
Technology can help to build your digital brain
Massimo Curatella I agree completely I could not live without technology. And that’s why I have several thousands of digital books. I have an enormous amount of notes in several collections. And there are tools that will help you if you have your intention to collect a certain kind of knowledge. For instance, you mentioned Evernote, I would like to give you some suggestions about some tools: one is RandomNote for Evernote that would pick for you randomly every day a note from the past. So it would reemerge, you will get inspiration about something you have said in the past. Another suggestion is the Zettelkasten where this concept is taken to an extreme. This guy, Niklas Luhmann, in the ’60s created a slip-box method where every concept would be written on a card as a note, identified by a numerical ID, and every note would be connected to others through a relationship. So, basically, by following numbers, he would have been able to create a dialogue with his notes, with his brain. And that was on paper. Okay, today I would never do that although maybe on my back you can see something that wanted to reproduce that. Today, I would do that with Evernote, or with Notion and Readwise or with WordPress. I would export all the notes that I’m getting on my Kindle. and using a tool that is called readwise.io, I would get all these interesting pieces of knowledge to come back up to me, maybe in six months, maybe in three months. So technology can absolutely help. If you go on my website curatella.com/notes, that is my experiment with my second brain online. To write something publicly, you need to be confident. Am I writing something that makes sense? And then you need to connect it. That’s why I have keywords, pointing at key concepts that I want to use in the articles that I’m writing. It is a lot of work, but that’s the way to do it.
Conclusion
David Orban Wonderful. So Massimo, thank you very much for being a guest on the show.
Here on Searching For The Question live. That is what I do every day, experiment with new tools, and invite guests to take part in these conversations. And you can also vote for who would like to be one of our next guests on the URL that you see on the screen. And you can come and participate in the discord community to have conversations that we can have beyond the live stream as well. And the opportunity is absolutely open for us to keep these conversations.
Speculative Design is about re-imagining our imagination to create better futures that are possible and desirable. These are the notes I’ve taken, live, during the webinar held by Debora Bottà about Speculative Design/Critical Design and Future Design.
This, in essence, is what these methods are useful for.
Deborà Bottà is a UX & Service Design Lead in Digital Entity of NTT Data. She manages teams designing User Experience for digital and non-digital services. She also the author of “User eXperience Design” a book in Italian about UX Design.
What is Speculative Design?
Captured slide: a typical futuristic landscape shown within the context of Speculative Design
When we talk about Speculative Design It’s easy to think about science-fiction landscapes as we can see in movies and Tv series in which our lives are radically transformed by technology. This is not the true meaning and purpose of Speculative Design although these disciplines tap into some of the techniques used by science-fiction to imagine future worlds.
Speculative Design has no roots in this type of literature but in the field of Radical Architecture.
Radical Architecture A cohort of Italian architects and designers active from the late 1960s through the 1970s. They placed themselves in opposition to the rationalism and functionalism of 20th-century modernism and formed during a tumultuous period characterized by political violence and extremism, student uprisings, and social unrest. Working in collectives including Archizoom, Superstudio, and Studio Alchimia, they produced experimental, anti-establishment architectural and interior designs, furnishings, and objects. A spirit of playfulness undergirded an approach that had serious aims. Their eccentric output—ranging from speculative monuments meant to foster worldwide order to lounge chairs shaped like an oversized patch of grass—broke from what they saw as the prescriptive thinking of the past to shape a future free of war, inequality, materialism, and other human ills. —https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/135
Radical Architects wanted to promote utopian ideas of architecture using what were considered as advanced technologies at that time. Italian culture, as frequently happens, was also key in the development of this movement.
A definition of Speculative Design
“Let’s call it critical design, that questions the cultural, social and ethical implications of emerging technologies.
A form of design that can help us to define the most desirable futures, and avoid the least desirable.”
A Critical Design that reflects on the implications of the technological progress, this is how the seminal book, “Speculative Everything”, defines Speculative Design. What are the most desirable futures? This, the key research topic.
Speculations
An example video of what a Speculative Design activity would produce as an outcome.
A Day Made of Glass… Made possible by Corning. (2011)
The application of technology where transparent surfaces become screen to interact with digital devices, in everyday life: home, business, and education.
A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked. The Story Behind Corning’s Vision. (2012)
This video shows a utopic vision of a world where technology is pervasive and increases the quality of our lives.
In Black Mirror, an entertainment product, a TV Series produced by Netflix, usage of technologies not always bring good outcomes. In this case, the future is seen in a completely different way.
Black Mirror, TV Series, Trailer.
Properties of Speculative Design
Speculative Design/Critical Design is not utopian nor dystopian. Future has many shades and it’s complex because we’re unpredictable and contradictory compared to the perfect consumers we would we supposed to be
Speculative Design/Critical Design Is not an exercise in fantasy. it ‘s based on knowing existing technologies and trends, using the knowledge of experts when needed. It considers futures that are probable, plausible, possible, and preferable, but not impossible.
A Taxonomy of Futures. Redrawn from Speculative Everything. Stuart Candy.
Speculative Design/Critical Design is not a prediction of the future. Rather, it creates a narrative of possible future realities to help us questioning the possible implications on the present: on society, on the economy, on business and so on.
Speculative Design/Critical Design does not solve problems, it finds them. Design becomes a means to search for problems to approach. The role of technology is rediscussed to face its implications rather than its applications.
Speculative Design/Critical Design does not create innovative products. It rather creates imaginary and fictional worlds that allow us to reconsider our world. It questions ideas and assumptions on the roles of products in our lives.
Speculative Design/Critical Design does not talk to consumers. It moves from the needs and wants of the market to focus on a broader social context. It creates artifacts to think on and with, not to be purchased.
Manifesto a/b
A comparison table showing the differences between Traditional Design and Speculative/Critical design
(a) Traditional Design
(b) Speculative/Critical Design
Affirmative
Critical
Problem-solving
Problem finding
Design as process
Design as medium
Provides answers
Asks questions
In the service of industry
In the service of society
For how the world is
For how the world could be
Science fiction
Social fiction
futures
Parallel worlds
Fictional functions
Functional fictions
Change the world to suit us
Change us to suit the world
Narratives of production
Narratives of consumption
anti-art
Applied art
Research for design
Research through design
applications
implications
Design for production
Design for debate
fun
satire
Concept design
Conceptual design
consumer
citizen
user
person
training
education
Makes us buy
Makes us think
innovation
provocation
ergonomics
rhetoric
Speculative/Critical Design is the use of design to create artifacts living in a future scenario, fed by current trends, to start a dialogue and a critical reflection. It is not an effort to predict the future but to create stories of possible future realities to question the implication on the present.
—Debora Bottà
That is the meaning of the expression: “Imagining our future to start building it today”.
Starting from the reflection we do on future scenarios we go backward to question what we have learned about what we could do and use it to steer our present towards that desirable future.
Artifacts of Speculative Design
Example: Helios Pilot, a project of Near Future Laboratory, commissioned by Amazon.
It’s a quick-start guide for a fictional autonomous driving car. The idea was to imagine how they would have presented to future users how to use the car instead of thinking about the actual features of the vehicle.
This helps to empathize with real users and consider the implications of this technology. How is my life changed if I own and use an autonomous car?
It’s a tangible artifact supporting our reflection.
Catalog from the Near Future – IKEA
Another example from the same agencies, using the popular IKEA catalog, designers tried to imagine how everyday life would be in the future where the Internet Of Things would be more pervasive. Another way to reflect on a possible future.
Moovel in a Box
What if you could be shipped? A very speculative view on the future of personal transportation.
Example: Mitigation of Shock (London) – Suncorp. By Superflux. A pragmatic experiment practicing hope for a future disrupted by climate change
Superflux imagined a future in which climate change becomes an important disruption: how would we find food? In a real apartment, they created an installation in which they created every detail about newspapers, books on how to use insects to prepare meals. With special lamps, it would be possible to cultivate plants in-house. In this case, they went beyond the prototype by creating real working technologies.
In this case history, Nefula imagined the futures of work by mapping different possible futures and their relations.
Speculative Design, as seen in the previous examples, could be used to imagine a far future or a closer one according to the level of speculation designers are aiming to. It’s always important to remember that al imagined futures must be possible.
what if our data had funerals too?
Design Friction explored a what-if scenario: “what if our data had funerals too?” Would data acquire a different value?
And it rethinks the future using those technologies and those social relations that can emerge from our current world. It questions hypotheses and prejudices that we have on the role of products and services in our lives.
Speculative Design Tools
What do designers use in their Speculative Design practice?
Thing from the future card deck
Combining three cards, a type of futures (green), an object (red), a context (blue) you can create combinations acting as creativity prompts to imagine future scenarios.
Example: “in a green future there is a festival dedicated to health, what is it?”
In this exercise, participants are invited to imagine an object coming from the future. While it’s easy to set-up the starting question, trying to go back to design that object, to make it plausible and possible, is the real design challenge. This process promotes critical reasoning about the implications of the imagined future.
Flaws of the Smart City
A tool to think critically about smart cities and their implications.
The Tarot Cards Of Tech
A card deck to stimulate the discussion about technologies and their impact.
Actionable Futures Toolkit
A complex toolkit for designers familiar with Design Thinking approaches to help organizations to build services and products aligned with the future. What should happen today, if we backtrack from imagined futures, to allow it to happen?
New Normal 2020 – Nordkapp
Nordkapp created a report, in which they describe future technology trends to be used as starting points for more documented and researched scenarios.
The Institute for the Future
US Based, with an office in Italy, the IFF is a research organization publishing reports on trends, data, and content to support your Speculative Design.
Reflections on Speculative Design
Differently than science-fiction, in design fiction, there is always a bond between the present and the imagined future. Extending the present in the future is what makes the narrative of Speculative Design a powerful tool to generate discussion and second-thoughts on our lives.
All of the practices we have seen implicate changes.
“Design today is concerned primarily with commercial and marketing activities but it could operate on a more intellectual level.”
— Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Design can also be used at a higher level to imagine desirable futures. It can become a means to rebuild our future considering what we are living in today.
“To create something new, or make a change, we have to be able to imagine how things can be different. The future is a place where everything can be different.”
— Jane McGonigal. Institute For The Future
Exercise your Imagination
Jane McGonigal created 3 simple exercises about imagination:
Predicting the past. What if you didn’t do what you’ve just did
Remembering the future. What about projecting yourself in a specific place with the desired person to do something you want to do?
Hard empathy. Stories and cultures: how would you imagine yourself within different contexts you have read in some stories?
“By speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable and although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening.”
— Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
We need to re-imagine our capability to imagine.
“We need to be able to imagine positive, feasible, delightful versions of the future before we can create them.”
— “From What Is to What If”, Rob Hopkins
UPDATE: watch the webinar recording, it’s in Italian but you can activate translated subtitles.
Thanks to Debora Bottà for her wonderful webinar. I’ve found so many insights and inspirations to fuel my imagination for the foreseeable future. 😊
How to facilitate group processes in solving simple, complicated, and complex Problems. Methods applied in the 1st Collective Intelligence Workshop of OsservAgro on the Sustainability of agri-food systems. Part of a series on Collective Intelligence Design.
Series Navigation Collective Intelligence Design and Facilitation
Facilitating Collective Intelligence to solve complex problems
To find solutions we need first to understand the problem we are trying to solve.
Not all problems are created equal. By distinguishing between different types of problems we can choose the processes that are better suited to solve them.
How to solve a problem?
You can work to solve a problem only if you have a clear model of the problem you want to solve. To avoid being busy just for the sake of it, wasting time and resources, we need to do some preliminary thinking about the problems we’re passionate about or which are creating pain to us.
Working at the definition of the problem is the first important step towards solving it. Problem setting is a part of the solution method.
In any design method, as the Design Thinking method, for instance, the initial effort is dedicated to understanding, clarifying and defining the solution we are designing for. The “design-as-a-plan” process includes a research and exploration phase which helps to clarify what the “design-as-a-noun” is supposed to be.
Identification of a “North Star”, a future vision where the problem is solved (or changed as we will see, later on).
Identification of a “Near Star”, the next big achievement we need to steward the system to, so we can concretely move towards our North Star.
How to define a problem?
It’s always difficult to put one problem, an abstract concept with tangible consequences, into clearly defined boundaries. But “boundary” is a key concept at the foundation of the Systems Thinking approach when talking about a system. How can you point your finger at “a system” if you cannot put it within finite and defined boundaries? We would go, of course, beyond the realms of concepts which we can easily grasp and manage, to reach the field of philosophy (what are the boundaries of the sky?).
Still, by arbitrarily setting possible boundaries to a system, it becomes easier to talk about it, to have the possibility, and sometimes the illusion, to manage it and, to a certain extent, to understand it.
Stretching our minds to define boundaries (think about nation-state borders, can you see them in real life?) is a needed step to start working with systems and to collaborate on understanding them.
That is why there are so many different thinking approaches, sometimes overlapping, other times contradicting each other.
Navigating and adapting to tides and currents are much better analogies when we talk about facing complex challenges. How do you command your boat in white waters? What’s the wind like?
Problems: making distinctions
It’s natural and intuitive for most of us to distinguish between two main types of problems: easy and hard. Sometimes we use words as “complex” or “complicated” by meaning the same thing: that is a difficult problem. By going deeper we discover that we can put the systems in which our problem lives in a more articulated set of categories. The most apparent to us are: simple, complicated and complex problems.
What is a simple problem?
Simple problems have a straightforward solution. They represent the “known knowns”.
If the water faucet is leaking I can call the plumber who will fix it.
I am not thinking about any other consequence besides calling another person, explaining the problem, setting an appointment, paying for the service and… using again the faucet.
This problem could become a completely different one if I start to consider:
I am in a nationwide lock down due to a pandemic. Can I call a plumber?
What if I try to fix it myself: am I able to do it? Should I study how to do it?
What if I don’t fix it? How much water am I wasting? Am I contributing to wasting public resources which could be precious in time of need?
As you can see the context I am setting to define the boundaries of my problem are directly affecting the consideration of the nature of that problem.
What is a complicated problem?
My car broke. While my grandfather’s car would have needed just a look under the hood, today, I just got an “error code XYZ.”
It doesn’t matter how much effort I make to classify this problem as simple: “My car just broke.” And, because of a more “modern” context I could not just lift the hood and “have a look at it”. Really, I wouldn’t know where to put my hands. I could even make more harm than good but intervening.
This is a complicated problem to me. It is part of my “known unknowns”. Sure, there will be hundreds of people able to fix this problem. But those would not include me. I am not skilled to solve it. I can only call somebody who is an expert on this and ask them to fix my car for me.
When we are able to recognize complicated problems we should have the humility and the wisdom of calling an expert to solve them.
What if by looking for the error message produced by the car information systems in the reference manual we discover that it means: “You ran out of fuel. Go to the nearest fueling station.”? Would that still be a complicated problem?
What is a complex problem?
By eliminating simple and complicated problems we remain with others less intuitive categories of problems.
What if there is no straightforward solution as in the leaking faucet case? What if there is a leak happening in several different places for several different reasons? What if my car doesn’t work anymore because there is no more oxygen in the atmosphere to allow the internal combustion engine to produce power? What if imposing a lock down to only some regions of the country, to prevent the spread of a virus, pushes people, instead, to run away to other regions, accelerating the contagion?
When we don’t know what is happening and why it is happening, when we don’t even know the things that we don’t know, we are descending in the realm of complexity: the “unknown unknowns”.
How do you solve complex problems?
Complex problems have no right answers. The relationships between many causes and many effects are difficult to identify and continuously changing.
It’s only by experimenting, reflecting and adapting our actions that we can find leverage points on complex systems.
Problem-solving approaches
Once you decide how to differentiate between simple, complicated and complex problems you need to choose possible problem-solving approaches. This will allow you to leverage existing methods and tools which worked on that type of problem.
Dave Snowden has been researching and publishing about approaches to problem-solving and organizational design for years. He devised a problem definition and solution framework called Cynefin.
What is the Cynefin framework?
If not all problems are created equals, we should be careful in choosing how we are designing solutions. We need, first, to understand the nature of the problem and then deploy a solution strategy.
The Cynefin framework provides thinking and collaboration tools to make sense of systems. Although it is not a way to classify problems it allows us to make decisions according to the systems they fall within. In this regards the Cynefin framework breaks down systems in five domains:
Obvious (Simple). Relationships between cause and effect are clear.
Complicated. Clarifying cause and effect requires expertise.
Complex. Cause and effect are clear only after they happened.
Chaotic. Cause and effect are unclear.
Disorder (in the middle). When you don’t know in which of the previous four your problem resides.
How to collaborate to solve complex problems?
Hunger, Sustainability of food systems, education, peace are just a few of the most crucial examples of complex problems we are facing. A pandemic as the Coronavirus in 2019 and 2020 (I really hope I will not have the need to revise the years in this sentence) is one of the global challenges which are not simple nor complicated. And we need to keep this kind of global issue out of the Chaotic and Disorder domain if we want to keep on walking on this Earth.
The workshop was titled: “The Common Heritage of Knowledge” and was aimed at re-establishing the dialogue between diverse stakeholders coming from all fields: science, research, policymaking, education, activism, business, and common people.
The facilitation agenda
The facilitator organized the session of about 2,5 h with about 30 people as follows:
Introduction and context description. Presentation of the rules of engagement. Organizers/Sponsors give short context on OsservAgro
Post-it
Filtering and clustering
Post-up
Topic selection
World Café
Presentation and Open discussion
Closure
1. Introduction and context setting
The facilitator, in charge of keeping time and establishing pace, stated the rules of how participants will collaborate and introduce the topic.
Sponsors, briefly, explained the reason why they’ve organized the session and suggested their expectation (rather than outcomes) by the end of the work.
The rules for inclusive collaborative thinking:
Dialogue is important to solve complex problems;
We don’t have to agree on everything except on the need to explore together;
Let’s admit uncertainty and not-knowing.
2. Post-it activity: What is Simple, Complicated and Complex?
We finally had participants activating their brains to fuel the collective mind. On each of three posters, hanged, each participant stuck a post-it mentioning, one by one, what they think is:
“What we know that we know”, that is the simple problems (Everybody knows it)
“What we know that we don’t know”, that is the complicated problems (Ask the expert)
“What we don’t know that we don’t know”, that is the complex problems (what we have to discover together)
Example outcome of “What we know that we don’t know”,
Is there a standard system of indicators for biodiversity?
Which diet should I do?
Is Bitcoin an opportunity?
What are the benefits of the Mediterranean Diet?
How can we produce more without polluting more?
Example outcome of “What we don’t know that we don’t know”
Trust
When should we ask the expert?
How will Artificial Intelligence impact our lives?
How can we give value to our local products?
How can we be intelligent together?
What does “good food” mean?
How can we protect planet Earth?
3. Filtering and clustering the emerging topics
By pushing towards creative divergence, participants generated ideas and had the opportunity to be part of the game. As in the brainstorming phase, when it is forbidden to criticize or reject any idea, participants created free thoughts and shared them in written format.
After that, it was time to refine the material produced. The facilitator asked participants to split in groups and create clusters.
To keep the session consistent, facilitators need to guide participants in refining the ideas produced by decreasing the level of approximation of knowledge and by minimizing redundant and irrelevant content.
In our case we had four key topics to emerge. Emergence is an important phenomenon of Systems Practice and, in this case, as facilitators (observer and Systems Changers/Stewards) we act on the conditions which promote the emergence of the outcome we desire.
An example of the clusters emerged
Simplicity
Food and nutrition
Health
Ecology
Knowledge
Complicatedness
Environment
Biotechnology
Health
Diet
Fintech
Epistemology
Complexity
Empathy
Method
Sustainability
4. Post-up: presenting and discussing the refined ideas
Each group, in turn, represented by one person, presented their findings.
This is an important setting in which participants interact: we finally had comments and exchanges on the various topics selected. I could feel the group to be productive, motivated, focused. This is the moment in which the magic of facilitated Collective Intelligence manifests itself in a joyous and satisfying way.
5. Topic selection
The facilitator had to make the participants converge. Usually this is a difficult moment to manage because people are excited, stimulated and while discussing others’ ideas they come up with new ones of their own. They want to talk. They want to participate!
And you have to stop them…
It seems to be counter-intuitive but when you have a limited amount of time, (2 hours!) you cannot allow discussion to roam free. At least not for too long.
At the end of the post-up session the group agreed upon summarizing the discussion in one key topic represented by the question: “How can we integrate diverse knowledge to create a sustainable agri-food system?”
Although the outcome of the first part of this session could seem to be taken for granted to you, and not novel, it’s part of the facilitation method to “rediscover the obvious”.
It makes an enormous difference to convene 30 people in a room and start with something like “Ok, thank you for coming, now split in groups and discuss how we can integrate the diversity of what you know to create a sustainable agri-food system.”
Participants have not been part of the process, they would not feel involved nor motivated to contribute.
What are the benefits of a facilitated collaborative process?
These are some of the reasons why you need to facilitate alignment for a group of diverse people:
To allow them to know each other
To promote diversity in the ways they are called to collaborate
To gain their trust in the collective thinking
To maximize their creativity and productivity
To increase the ownership of the outcomes
6. World Café: let’s imagine solutions by mixing minds
You have now original material produced by the convened participants. They can split in groups and move to a more hands-on activity. The World Café facilitation technique entails having participants break out in smaller groups, we had 4, and having one person to stay at the group table while the rest are moving and rotating among the other groups.
Diagram of how participants are moving in a World Cafè session.
The “rapporteur” who stays at the table will be the group facilitator, keeping the conversation’s continuity and presenting the outcome at the end.
Facilitators need to be prepared to manage high levels of noise and people moving around. This can be messy and loud so it’s important to establish some ground rules:
One rapporteur per group will lead the local discussion
All group members must be involved and included in the discussion
Using a poster, participants should write down their contribution as much as possible, in a collective collage which will build up the final artifact.
The lead facilitator needs to check timing and give the cue to switch groups considering the remaining time. At least two switching iterations are suggested.
The lead facilitator needs to prevent dominant participants to emerge and promote a balanced dialogue between everybody.
The lead facilitator needs to signal when delivery time is approaching to the rapporteurs to allow them to refine their posters.
7. Final presentation and plenary discussion
At the end of the World café activity, participants prepare to present their posters through the voices of their rapporteurs.
Facilitators set the allocated time slot for each and signal the beginning and the end of each presentation.
This is where presentation skills are useful. Still, participants are not supposed to be skilled presenters. That is why facilitators need to coach presenters so they are clear, timely and to-the-point.
In our workshop, we had 4 groups with four presentations illustrated on four posters.
Example of the posters produced by the 4 World Cafè tables.
Emergent benefits of Collective Intelligent facilitation
I won’t go into the details of the content produced in this session but I want to highlight the type of reasoning and expectations you can have:
Strangers, work together to produce a common idea.
People know each other: relationships and collaborations will bloom.
Sparse and disordered knowledge gets refined and its clarity is increased.
Lots of doubts and questions are raised: this enriches the key question and the foundation of the Sponsors’ mission.
Taken-for-granted knowledge and well-established definitions are put to a test. Examples: sustainability, collaboration, intelligence, problem solving, design, etc.
A more holistic and systemic thinking is naturally nurtured. A diversity of opinions promotes wider perspectives.
More inclusion. Shy, less represented, unengaged people are included in a collective process relevant to them.
Systemic Design. A more structured, design-based, rational process tends to emerge. Empathy for stakeholders increases. Consequences of actions are considered.
Critical Thinking. A more critical approach to thinking is reinforced by the diversity and the knowledge of participants. A more rational thought is a better thought.
Leadership. Participants get in touch with the process of governance, decision-making, management and leadership. Some of them, unfortunately, for their first time.
Personal development. A bond is created between participants. If they were motivated to participate in the first place, and if they had a great experience in the workshop, they will feel even more motivated to go deeper and to do more.
Did we solve our problem? How to measure the solution’s effectiveness?
This kind of workshop can be done dozens of times while discovering new knowledge, new ideas and useful insights, each time. The key concept is to iterate and adapt while integrating the discoveries and the clarification into an organic knowledge base. Facilitators and organizers, when it is not possible to delegate to participants, become the custodian of the new knowledge built. A heritage of refined knowledge which needs to be carried on the next steps, next actions or the next editions of workshops. With the same participants or with new ones.
That is why a workshop like this is to be considered the start of a process. At the foundation of a movement of people wanting to understand better the context of the complex problems they want to mitigate. Those same people, to have their time worth, need to meet, again and again, to apply Collective Intelligence techniques and methods if they want to see, in perspective, possible action to take, to dream about a solution. Or, a new possible and better future.
So it is difficult to talk about success criteria and metrics in this type of participatory workshop. It’s the group who decides what is useful and worth to produce, to write down and to transfer to the future activities. A lively and moderated discussion should be encouraged by the facilitator to promote reflection on the results and envisioning of the next steps to take.
And now what? What did we learn?
If we don’t reflect, together, immediately in the final part of the workshop and soon after with the organizers we risk to lose the best of the results. It’s important to reach the final part with focussed energy to spend. All the work done so far was to allow higher thinking and reflection upon the insights gathered.
Sponsors, organizers and facilitators should absolutely do a retrospective after the workshop. What worked? What did not go well? What have we learned? How can we refine our strategy by adapting the next workshop? Second-order thinking is the cornerstone of the entire work, otherwise, it is just a bunch of people talking.
An example of the outcome of this workshop:
We decided to share the material produced online to invite the discussion to continue.
Suggestion to apply, immediately, any new learning in everybody’s day-to-day life, especially in their organizations.
Identified the need of writing a manifesto to express our common intent.
Promoting each’s organization involvement to guarantee a more stable presence and participation to the next workshop events.
Initiating a systems change process by identifying specific actions to take.
The final message was: “(On the road to sustainability) we do what we must do. What will be possible will happen!”
A leader’s framework for decision making by David Snowden, Harvard Business Review, 2007. The Cynefin framework is a sense-making device aiding decision-making, created by Dave Snowden.
Capturing, identifying, titling, citing, searching, linking, indexing, moving, sharing. Most of it has been automated in digital. Can you do the same on paper?
Automation allows a more fluid and fast-paced writing workflow. Integrating different services providing sources allow to make notes to converge in a consistent manner.
Tags allow to describe content to improve search-ability.
Linking: rather than referring to a numerical id, “links” in digital are actual working links. Sames for index. See TOC in Evernote, for instance.
Easily moving notes between notebooks without breaking links and losing metadata.
Demo: Ebook highlights in Kindle
Shows how to create an highlight to be shared via email. If you send it to a special email address (for instance in Evernote) it get automatically added to your notes.
Demo: Online Articles
When on your mobile phone you can, for instance, save it in Instapaper and in the Read Later app you can easily read saved articles (even in dark mode, easier on the eyes). With IFTTT you can integrate “read later” apps with your “note taking” apps to gather all highlights into your notes.
Demo: Webpage and Liner
Select interesting parts of a web page you are browsing and with Liner you can synchronized them with your notes.
DEMO: PDF Highlights
Similarly, highlight with your favorite PDF reader and share the selected highlights to save them into your digital notes. Searching, you’ll be able to get back to the source.
Readwise allows to do time-spaced reading of your notes.
An ecosystem of tools
Tiago shows a suite of different categories of tools to acquire, read, manage and save notes.
Reflections
Allowing potential combination of pieces of information to enhance creativity.
Reviewing notes? Do not. Just retrieve them only when you have a specific context of use.
Tools mentioned: Evernote, Notion, GoodNotes, Notability, etc. Difference between drawing apps and note taking apps, they serve different purposes.
Your Second Brain is an entire constellation of apps. It is not just ONE software. Do not use one piece of software. You need to use your most suitable combination of digital and analogue tools.
Why Note Taking?
Information overload deserve to be replaced with “Information Exhaustion“. See “How Emotion Are Made“: information has physical effects, it can have direct biological impact to your body. It comes down to your quality of life.
Every day we consume a huge amount of information. And it is increasing about 3% per year. source UC San Diego, 2014.
FOMI: Fear Of Missing Information. So much of our life happens online and it is not realistic to abstain from technology. Similar sound to the word for “Hunger” in Portuguese.
What is the mindset of a curator?
Instead of having the information from outside to hit your brain directly, you create a filter between the outside world and your mind. So you strategically engage with information only when and if you need to.
Shifting attention from public to private, from novel to timeless, from sensational to subtle, from consuming to digesting (publishing, sharing and collaborating).
Digital Abstinence?
Better using the metaphor of information as food. What food/information to consume? When? How can you get the right “nutrients” from the better sources?
When it’s over, I don’t want everything to go back to the way it was.
I don’t want to go back to clog the streets. I don’t want to go back to invading the skies, to plunder the seas, to wear out the earth. I don’t want to go back to health to breathe sick air.
I don’t want to waste time in traffic or waiting for public transport, meeting indifferent glances as if sadness were common life.
I don’t want to go back to a male-sized world that made the rest of humanity “the others, the last, the different”. I don’t want to go back to a performing society that is afraid to stop in order not to lose an unsustainable record. I don’t want to go back to a fast time, which no longer dances with the cyclical nature of women and nature.
And I don’t want to, I certainly don’t want to go back to a world of grown-ups. I want to be in a small world for children, where life is an infinite possibility to play without leaving anyone on the sidelines. Where nobody is another’s game but everyone is played and brings joy and their difference to make us learn.
I want a world that changes the rules of being together to keep everyone, absolutely everyone in. You too who feel ignored. And you, who think you are defeated.
I want a shrewd world where things are made for the most sensitive and before making an important gesture, ask themselves: will it bring more love? Will it hurt, especially the most defenseless?
I no longer want to go back to mass society, with mass tourism, mass consumerism, and mass culture.
I want a whole fragmented world. I want a mosaic, where each one is a slow and precious fragment, and where there is no need for bars or bans to notice the grace of this springtime.
OsservAgro has the goal of promoting a collective reflection process on the relationships between science and society by involving all agri-food system’ stakeholders: knowledge builders, businesses, knowledge mediators, decision-makers, and civil society.
Collective Intelligence is the emergent phenomenon created by people collaborating. They co-design possible solutions to the complex problems they discover through cooperation. Co-creation leads to more inclusive and systemic solutions that are more robust, sustainable and long-lasting.
How to design a workshop?
A Co-Design Workshop requires these elements:
a Sponsor and/or a client which decide the purpose of the workshop;
one or more facilitators who are put in charge by the Sponsor to organize and deliver the workshop;
a facilitation plan, including a vision and specific objectives;
a location or an online facility where to hold the event;
technical equipment and resources;
participants invited to attend the workshop.
As a facilitator, you need to adopt an adaptive and iterative design approach. You have to learn about the objectives that sponsors want to achieve, so that you can plan and design together with them the actual structured activities to be facilitated during the workshop.
Workshop Design Phases
Usually, I divide the workshop design work into four phases:
Discovery
Ideation
Delivery
Reflection.
This breakdown of steps has a lot of similarities with the design thinking process, the Human-Centered Design framework, the Service design process or the Lean Startup model in the business field.
It is based on Strategic Design and it is inspired by many of the principles you can find in: Systems Thinking and Critical Thinking.
Second-order thinking is another approach laying at the base of a robust Workshop Design strategy. It requiresreflecting critically about how facilitators, sponsors, organizers and the same participants are acquiring knowledge to see if you need to adapt your plans according to what you have discovered through action.
The Discovery Phase
Information gathering
If it is your first workshop, you will need to meet Sponsors and organizers to understand as much as possible of their world. While you need to be a deep listener, you will have on the one hand to write down and have a shared agreement on the final objectives, on the other hand, you need to help them to clarify those objectives in a non-ambiguous and feasible way. Your role as a facilitator is already starting when you work with the organizers on day 1.
(Users) Participants Research
The facilitator needs to work as a Designer following the Human-Centred Design principles. We need to create tools, services, and co-design workshops that are solving the real problems of our stakeholders. While this requires, usually, extra effort in the Design Research phase which could increase the required budget and competencies of the designer/facilitator, it is also very difficult to access the intended audience.
Many social innovation workshops are open to the public and not strictly planned in terms of the profile for the people invited. It becomes very difficult, due to time and resources constraints, to interact with the workshop attendees with the intention of building a more tailored workshop for all of their needs.
There are several alternatives, from the very approximate and improvised ones (interviewing the sponsors, doing stealth guerrilla research, proto-Personas, etc) to the more radical and blocking (refusing to work for an unknown public!).
I was never able to do proper research and my best strategy has always been the following: never assume anything or, even better, always assume the worst possible scenario.
The Ideation Phase
Strategy and Planning
The craft of deciding how to actually organize the time in a room with participants is leaning more on the art side of things rather than science. You are dealing with people so you need to take into consideration the complexity of a group of complex organisms organized to create a synergistic mind to be more intelligent than just one of them. Yes, the ingredients are there, and experience helps but as it happens for the best cooks it is only when you have a wide range of facilitation tools available, good raw matter (the people!) and a clear vision, that you can aim at great success.
If you are preparing a workshop after the first one in a series, you will need to take into consideration any useful insights you have discovered during the previously facilitated events. This is where, in the Iterative Design approach, you apply the Adaptive Design mindset to facilitate the emergence of the final outcome most wanted by your group of stakeholders.
Using insights from previous workshops the designers refine and adapt the goals and the delivery plan to accommodate hints and suggestions.
You are building upon the feedback and the insights and the lessons learned from the previous workshop and you adapt your strategy and your plan in the structure of your delivery for the next workshop.
Define the Objectives
You need to transform requirements, needs and wants into objectives.
When it’s impossible to define a specific set of knowledge or skills that will be obtained by participants, the facilitator needs to negotiate, at least, the general aims or artifacts the Sponsor wants to get.
In OsservAgro’s case, there was the strongly declared aim of writing a Manifesto for the movement and a scientific publication illustrating the method and the outcomes. This was the North Star for me, as the facilitator, to drive choices and allocate resources. It was particularly useful to define the agenda for each workshop while keeping the continuity of all the design phases. I was lucky to work with clear-minded people: be very careful when you are not able to agree upon clear objectives for your workshops, it can lead you to chaos.
Content design and knowledge
During the preparation phase for the facilitator might be difficult to deal with new knowledge-domains, and new terminology, but this should not be the main concern for the facilitator because they are not supposed to be subject matter experts. Facilitators need to become effective collaborators by creating a synergy with the organizers in a way that they trust them and vice-versa. It’s difficult to design and deliver a workshop if there is not a solid trust relationship established since the very beginning.
The Agenda: Designing the Structured Activities
The Workshop Outline is the most important design tool for a workshop. A facilitator must use it as the single-source-of-truth establishing the written plan to reach the workshops’ objectives.
Sometimes you can be explicit and take the Learning Outcome concept from the training field as a design tool. But most of the time it is impossible to state, clearly, upfront, what “by the end of this workshop participants will know…”, know what?
We are gathering to discover together what we want to know more of, it’s difficult in these cases to state it upfront.
According to the difficulty and the ambition and the scope of the workshop, you might need a number of preparation sessions. Sometimes, a lot of them. In my experience, I tend to work from 1 hour to one day for each actual hour of facilitation. This is one of the difficult and hidden aspects to communicate to the outside world. That is why the session design should be participatory.
The facilitator is already starting to work since the first meeting with the sponsors and the organizers. They are more designers facilitating the process of co-designing together. Although there is less pressure for going fast and quick or having to respect specific constraints, so you are more free-flowing, the facilitator still needs to work as a designer having the goal of preparing the workshop. Especially if you need to be ready before the delivery date to support promotion activities start to prepare learning materials.
This phase needs to be managed as a real production process. The more you iterate, the more you’re able to reach your workshop with well-crafted sessions with very clear instructions enabling participants to give their best contributions towards the workshop’s goals.
How to collaborate
It’s very important to establish an environment of collaboration with a very open bi-directional communication channel, between the facilitator and the sponsors.
It is called co-design because the workshops are created together. Not only the participants are working collectively to pursue the workshop’s aims, but the Workshop Design is also collaborative and it needs to include, as much as possible, a representative group of all stakeholders. The facilitator is the orchestrator and the lead designer of the co-creation process.
The mood and the environment between the facilitator and the organizers need to be very smooth and the right place where everybody can be included in the preparation phase.
Not only everybody can be creative but the facilitator has the important responsibility of promoting the focused creativity of all the people involved.
While it is important to know how to combine different design and facilitation tools with the right timing, for the right people in the right way, (un)fortunately, there are infinite ways to prepare the recipe for a successful workshop. It’s like preparing to go into the field where you must have a plan but you also need to be ready to improvise. This is something that lies on the shoulders of the facilitator because they need to be ready in a redundant and conservative way about the many areas that can be faulty.
The facilitator’s role
During the delivery, the facilitator is not participating at all in the structured activities. A facilitator is responsible for:
leading the dialogue
timing
promoting the resolution of disputes
negotiating debates
And, the facilitator has a very important goal on top of all the others that is to bring the results home. The facilitator needs to do whatever is in their capabilities to reach the final objective negotiated with the organizer during the preparation phase.
In these regards, the facilitator needs to be a project manager, a coach, an organizer of the communication flows, and then needs to be the director of this Little Big Show that is going to happen in a collective way during the workshop.
From this point of view, it can be something really exciting. At the same time, you need to be able to get under a certain level of control of all of those aspects and be ready to improvise and cover any lack, or of any issue that will inevitably arise and still aim at creating the best possible outcome.
Learning experience design for social innovation
In the end, you are preparing a learning experience for a certain number of people that are going to learn, open themselves with others, discuss, work together in order to face some complex challenges. We’re talking about facing world hunger, improving the adoption process internationally, reducing the hazard of specialized workers in the heavy industries or in the healthcare or in the finance world or working in the field of social innovation in which you want to empower both the common citizens as well as scientists with the tools of clear communication with the final goal of facing problems as sustainability. The previous are some instances where I had the chance to facilitate workshops.
Keep following curatella.com to read about the next Workshop Design phases: Delivery and Reflection.
Series Navigation Collective Intelligence Design and Facilitation
Only shared decisions are effective in the long-term
It’s in historical moments like this that we need to think more about creating better futures. You need to act in advance to build a network of change agents that could work collectively in creating better futures. This is the main reason why I worked passionately and with great fun with the organizers of the Osservatorio sul Dialogo nell’Agroalimentare (Observatory on the Dialogue in the Agrifood System). We leveraged on the Collective Intelligence for envisioning together better futures for the systems of food and agriculture.
One of the Co-Design Workshops I have facilitated for OsservAgro.
I was the lead Collective Intelligence Facilitator for five participatory workshops held by the Observatory. I had a great learning experience with them. I met smart and wise people: scientists, researchers, teachers, communicators, managers, opinion leaders, event organizers, activists, common people, and facilitators. We investigated the stakeholders, we mapped the systems of their relationships and we ideated a better future for our Society by identifying a Vision, a Mission, and practical objectives to take action upon.
and by a group of researchers, teachers, and actors having an interest in the dynamics of the agri-food sector.
The key persons I worked with made a difference in how the movement has been organized and the opportunities they’ve created during the co-design sessions. I am thinking, in particular, to Andrea Sonnino, the Observatory’s Coordinator and Paola Carrabba, a tireless science researcher who worked hard to support all the activities of the Observatory. I’ve been lucky and honored to be introduced to them by my friend Marco Valente, a professional facilitator, initially involved with them.
The problem: Agri-Food is Unsustainable
We went through a path of collective reflection where diverse people from different backgrounds were convened together. Marco Valente facilitated the first of the six public encounters while I was responsible to organize and facilitate the remaining events.
We discovered that there is a lack of dialogue between all parts of society: Science, Politics, Business, Media, Education, and Citizens. The linear model for knowledge transfer of the past doesn’t work anymore. In the last century, unified knowledge was generated by scholars, recognized as the official creators of such knowledge, and then it was transferred by professionals, teachers, specialists and journalists to the masses which benefited passively.
Today, knowledge, pulverized in hyperspecialization, is communicated through fragmented narratives and languages to the large public, which on the one hand asks for more active participation in the decision-making processes which involve themselves, on the other hand, are frequently disoriented by a confused flow of contradicting information. The roles of diverse stakeholders acting as economic operators, decision-makers, influencers, and knowledge builders, became liquid, adapting to the different contexts where they act.
This has led to confusing communication, mono-directional information flows, fragmentation of languages. This novel situation generates a climate of confusion and uncertainty, reciprocal distrust, a lack of respect for competences and roles and a difficult resolution of diverging interests. This issue is particularly evident in food and agriculture, in which interactions with consumers’ health and with the environment are concerning the whole Society.
As a consequence, it becomes harder to make decisions: because they are not shared, because there are reciprocal distrust and a poorer recognition of the reciprocal role of everybody.
Our approach: Facilitated Collective Intelligence
We adopted and applied participatory methods of Collective Intelligence strongly based on Critical Thinking and Systems Thinking approaches. The agri-food system has peculiar features, but also universal elements, that is why reflecting on this system could offer important insights also for other scopes.
Participants, in a break-out room, working on their proposal for more sustainable futures in the agri-food systems.
In our workshops, we re-established an environment of reciprocal trust where, together, we could imagine possible futures and how to reach them. Now, we want to extend to the entire society our experience to make decisions that last longer. Only shared decisions are more effective in the long-term and we want to create a network of Change Agents to build novel sustainable futures.
The outcome: Mission, Manifesto, and Actions
This is the first of an article series in which I begin to write about my experience of facilitating several co-creation workshops. In the next articles, I will tell you how we’ve contributed to writing and rewriting the Observatory’s Mission and how we laid the foundations for a Manifesto to be published. I will write more about the method and how we have defined a set of actions for specific groups of actors to activate a Network of Change Makers for the Sustainability of the Agri-Food Systems.
While you can join the OsservAgro (if you can read Italian) to tell your story of food and territory and be part of a more Sustainable Society, keep on following me on Curatella.com to learn more about my facilitation experience with this project.
Thanks to Andrea Sonnino, and Paola Carrabba for the help in writing this article.
Series Navigation Collective Intelligence Design and Facilitation
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