7 Session seven: 4 April 2016

Creating togetherCreating the conditions: How we see, relate and communicateS

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Being serious about creating together

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SYSTEMIC: Consider the whole system, and work to shift its patterns

PARTICIPATORY: Participate in and with the system

EMERGENT: Work with emergence

ALIVE: Create in and with real human moments

Let’s take TOGETHER seriously:Who’s involved, the way they’re involved, and our own role and relationship with the others involved in the work.

In the first few sessions of this course, we’ve said we need approaches that are…

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1960’s – 1970’sTrade unions in Scandinavia extend the workplace democracy movement into the right of workers to co-design IT systems that impact their job. They call this “cooperative design.”

1970’sAmericans get interested, but thing “cooperative” sounds too collectivist, so they all it “participatory design.”

1980’sThe practice spreads to fields other than software, including urban design. Success stories accumulate.

1990’s“User-centered” design takes center place in industry, while “participatory design” remains a narrow, specialized practice. (There has been an annual Participatory Design Conference since 1990.)

2000-2010Prahalad and Ramaswamy publish in Harvard Business Review, and a series of books. They popularize the idea of companies creative with customers, and people creating together within companies.

There’s some history behind thiswww.slideshare.net/XPLANE/a-brief-history-of-cocreation

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You’ll encounter a lot of terms: participatory design, co-design, cooperative design, user design (vs. user-centered),….

People have different ideas and ways of working when it comes to questions like:

• involve all stakeholders, or only the direct “users”?

• involve people throughout the process, or only during initial concept development?

• treat them as a source of input, or as full participants in the work?

• go visit “them,” or work as “we, altogether”?

Why there’s such variety

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Participatory approaches are becoming (a bit) more prominent in the management / organizational development world.

ßHoly moly we think these two are hot.

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Placemaking: pps.org

Positive Deviance: positivedeviance.org

Participatory Narrative Inquiry: pni2.org

Reos Partners: reospartners.com

In “social innovation”, transition, etc. creating together is a fundamental tenet of practice

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This is not only about better results…

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A STORY

In 2012, Frog Design created the “collective action toolkit” and distributed it for free. www.frogdesign.com/work/frog-collective-action-toolkit.html

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It has been well received,…

…but also it has upset some people.

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Maria Lamadridwww.mlamadrid.com

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As part of her thesis work, Maria made her own toolkit. It’s for communities to use when a social designer shows up at their door.

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Her Social Design Toolkit offers a series of activities you can do with your social designer, to help them become aware of the cultural, consumer, and industrial bias they bring to their work.

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I tell that story to remind us that working with situations that are mostly made of people is unavoidably political.

It requires humility. It requires us to let go of the idea that we are the big fancy experts who are going to guide a group of people to something better. LET GO. And embrace the much more powerful possibility of something huge and surprising emerging from the efforts of everyone involved.

“What you can plan is too small for you to live.” -David Whyte

Social design is personal, de-abstracted, humbling, and thrilling. It does not easily fit into the box of a single approach or process.

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The punch line

Commercial and institutional practice has a long history of distancing itself from the people who are affected by their choices and outcomes.

This tendency is so strong, it keeps eating the good intentions of people who try to work more horizontally, equitably, “together” — despite measurably better results in many industries and contexts.

Meanwhile the theories and practices are advancing on the fringes of commercial work: in organizational design, social innovation, urban planning and design, conflict resolution, etc.

Key themes: letting go of control, staying personal, being IN the conversations, participating WITH the system’s dance, standing as a partner/catalyst among a group of peer creators.