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Metadesign for Murph
@willshJohn V Willshire
Designing the future with lessons from Interstellar
dConstruct 2015
773 days and 1.3 miles ago…
pic: nasa.gov
MAN OF STEEL 2013 dir. Zac Snyder
Most of my childhood superhero knowledge comes from here, Hamilton Library
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
Worldwide admissions
1978 20101990 20021982 1986 1994 1998 2006 2014
SpidermanThe Schumacher-Clooney near-extinction event
Iron Man
Kenneth Branagh’s Thor
BatmanSuperman
Avengers: Age Of Ultron
Man of Steel
Superhero films since I was born…
It’s the first Superman film I’ve watched as a dad…
I’m suddenly paying lots of attention to what the dads are doing.
Me, my ideas, and fools who didn’t listen
My child with my instructions
A place where my ideas will save everyone
It’s a film about parenting, and heroing
Metaphorical Parenting:
You’re a parent not just to children But also to people you work with Friends have have Peers you know Clients you create for
Who’s doing the designing?
Whose future is it anyway?
“Suddenly, here was an entire generation crying out for an evolved version of the things they were consuming as children”
Simon Pegg
EVOLVED
http://simonpegg.net/2015/05/19/big-mouth-strikes-again/
EVOLVED
In The Night Kitchen Maurice Sendak
saraelin.com
EVOLVED
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
*Worldwide admissions, calculated using box office adjusted for ticket price inflation
1978 20101990 20021982 1986 1994 1998 2006 2014
Hey, can we get some Superhero films now too..?
Catholic Guilt Batman
Bro-bin Hood
http://joshualaw88.blogspot.co.uk
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
*Worldwide admissions, calculated using box office adjusted for ticket price inflation
1978 20101990 20021982 1986 1994 1998 2006 2014
These aren’t films. They’re franchise wormholes.
Now we’re repackaging and sanitising it for our children too
“I want to be batman”
DO YOU WANT SPARKLES?
DO YOU WANT SPARKLES?
No. I’m trying to fight crime on
the streets of Gotham.
DO YOU WANT SPARKLES?
No. I’ve centred my fighting style on a ninja-like darkness.
Sparkles won’t help.
DO YOU WANT SPARKLES?
DO YOU WANT SPARKLES?
Oh.
Are we trapped in a now-endless superhero culture?
Is it helpful to live in a cultural universe where science and magic are so wilfully muddled?
http://andyparkart.deviantart.com
“Hey babe, your ancestors called it magic, and you call it science, but I come from a place where they’re one and the same thing”
If we’re talking ‘designing the future’, it's better to leave that superhero universe and explore fiction grounded in reality
inception
interstellar
"I liken it to the blockbusters I grew up with as a kid: edgy, incisive, challenging."
Christopher Nolan
Contains Spoilishes (Spoilers you will only know are spoilers if you’ve seen the film)
“In Earth's future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable.”
Source: Google Description
“Professor Brand, a brilliant NASA physicist, is working on plans to save mankind by transporting Earth's population to a new home via a wormhole.”
Source: Google Description
“But first, Brand must send former NASA pilot Cooper and a team of researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find out which of three planets could be mankind's new home.”
Source: Google Description
We’ve seen this movie before…
It’s a film about parenting, and heroing
Prof. Brand has a massive equation
Me, my ideas, and fools who didn’t listen
My child with my instructions
A place where my ideas will save everyone
“I thought I was prepared. I knew the theory. Reality’s different”
Dr. MannsplainingProf. Brand Dr. Mann
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
‘We’ don’t…
How do we design for a future we can’t see?
Different daughters
This is a much more interesting parent/child relationship…
Timey-wimey, wibbley-wobbley
How do you design a world of designers?
METADESIGN
METADESIGN
“to nurture the emergence of the previously unthinkable through interdisciplinary collaboration”
Wikipedia
“to nurture the emergence of the previously unthinkable through interdisciplinary collaboration”
User-centric design
Participative design
Metadesign
“You start, I’ll finish”
“Let’s do it together”
“Here - off you go…”
METADESIGN
ProceduralEmergence
Topologies
Synergies
Diagrams
Languaging
Interdisciplinarity
Eh?
A lot of the writing & terminology currently around metadesign is quite hard, specialist and academic.
Instead, I thought I’d explore it using three stories…
I ran a workshop at UX London in May. Part of it was a game
we’ve played lots before…
exploringIt uses Artefact Cards, which we make:
artefactshop.com
These help people play with ideas more easily and intuitively
Popular Thing For Broken Thing
Write two cards with ‘popular things’
These are services you ove, and why you love them.
Then write two cards with ‘broken things’
These are issues you, or others, have with a particular thing
Then in teams of four, line up your eight popular things, and eight broken things.
You now have TEN minutes to make EIGHT startups - ‘popular thing for broken thing’
Each person then takes ONE idea, finds a partner from a different team, and pitches them their idea for a minute. Then the other person pitches back for a minute.
You have a minute to think about your pitch again, then you find a new partner, and repeat three or four times.
What happens is each idea either gets better, or gets worse. They just don’t remain UNKNOWN….
I’ve always wondered why this works so well…
The creative quartet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9dIQOrVhM5E - Prof. John Wood, TED, on Synergies
Prof. John Wood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9dIQOrVhM5E - Prof. John Wood, TED, on Synergies
Prof. John Wood
1
2
3 45 6
If I had two cards, I’d have 1 synergy.
But with four cards, I can find 6.
With eight cards, it becomes 22.
With twelve cards, it’s now 66…
Such a simple principle, but with massive exponential benefits
Second story…
This guy is Dmitri Mendeleev. He invented (well, discovered) the periodic table.
In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev published a periodic table. Mendeleev also arranged the elements known at the time in order of relative atomic mass, but he did some other things that made his table much more successful.
To get to this, Mendeleev had created a card deck with all the elements, their properties, and the atomic weights on them.
On long train journeys, he played what he called ‘element solitaire’ - sorting through the cards, exploring orders and connections… just finding patterns in the individual elements.
What’s fascinating about Mendeleev’s table is not just the correct order he found for KNOWN elements, but the spaces his table had created.
These spaces allowed him to deduce that there were other elements we had not yet discovered and should look for. He correctly predicted five elements we would discover, three of which were found before his death.
Dan Dennett
I thought about this in the context of something else Dennett brought out in his book ‘Intuition Pumps’…
Rene Descartes
The Cartesian Coordinates, the simple X & Y axes Dennett reminds us, are an invention, a discovery
It’s one of the most useful tools, and so widely applicable beyond the specific disciplines we’re taught it in (Maths, Physics etc)
Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2014
Oboist’s ‘Mapping It Out’ really demonstrates the wide applicability of
this simple mapping idea.
Like Tim Berners-Lee’s map of the internet
Or Bruce Sterling’s map of the reading habits of Bruce Sterling readers…
It’s so simple, you can do it with kids…
BIG
SMALL
COLD HOT
Scott Smith - @changeist John V Willshire -@willsh Laura Clèries - @lcleries Andrew Colmenares - @colmenares Christina Bifano
We did it in various ways when we taught this course in the summer
“TIME AS A SPACE”Scott Smith, @changeist
We made maps of people in the IED courtyard
We made maps of the things we discovered in the Barcelona streets…
The students used these maps to create fantastic
prototypes for these future worlds they could see
Again, a super simple tool with
applications wherever you
choose to apply it
Third story…
http://www.onyerbike.cc/donate/@fraser_hamilton
When we started working together, Fraser asked “what do you actually do…?”
(it’s a good question)
I’d just started exploring it more, thanks to two books that two different friends had recommended to me in the same week, by the same author.
I like coincidences like this.
but this year…
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
The books were written five books apart, but I was looking at them at the same time. As a result, I saw something that connected the two…
What if these two models went together, somehow?
What if people and space were intrinsically linked?
slow moves slow
fast moves fast
This part is the gearbox
When I looked closely at the gearbox, it occurred that there may be a way to think about the non-obvious connections between people and space
S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
P5
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Firstly. there’s the line of best fit, where slow moves slow, and fast moves fast
The line of best fit…
The slow drift east
Cronuts for lunch
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In London, over the last ten
years creative company have moved to new
buildings around Old Street
You look on the desks of these companies, and you can tell from the foodstuffs what is currently fashionable
Look away from the line, and you see other more interesting uses, often powered by technology
S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
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P1Lighting displays based on actions
You can use fast people actions
(sales,productivity, noise) to chance the look and feel inside
and outside of the building through
lighting
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The cultural judo of iPads for allChanging the way that everyone accesses the company in their personal space could created a massive cultural shift nearly overnight
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This system view allows us to think well about the sorts of problems, and first initial solutions, might pop out from thinking about people and space as a whole
We have a simple version we can quickly sketch out as a tool for thinking…
But we also needed a way to access the depth of possibility contained in the system view
S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
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What could we use to populate each of these cells?
“I just don’t think your bookshelves are trying to talk to you, Murph”
Coop
I spent a weekend dancing around stacks of books, making a physical representation of the system of our practice
just in time…
31 posts image?
“The acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money or expert knowledge alone.
Not even both factors together suffice for the establishment of a real library.”
- Walter Benjamin
It’s not having the ability to buy books, nor the knowledge of which books to buy, that makes a library
It’s knowing how all the books relate to each other.
What matters is what’s between the covers, but not on the pages
All libraries are five-dimensional
S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
P5
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System views as shared mental models
Map views, as reads on certain circumstances
Element views, to quickly explore connections
S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
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It's pretty simple…
METADESIGN
…and contains a lot of the composite parts of Metadesign
userresearch.blog.gov.uk
We know this is a thingWhen you look for it, we see it in the practices we all value everyday
But why don’t people present this as simple? Why present it as a difficult thing instead…?
Is wireframing really heroic?
We’re driven by the systems we work in to value ‘specialisms’
Superheroes are specialists
Specialists face off against specific problems
When we do find superhero who are generalist, who can assume all the powers, it breaks the narrative. There’s no tension.
IRL, we don’t get to write our own villains
We don’t know…
…what they’re going to face
We don’t know what jobs future generations will want to do,or have to do
We can’t see the knock-on effects of the world we’re leaving for them
“How do we create adaptive, living people?”
Prof. John Wood
METADESIGN
ProceduralEmergence
Topologies
Synergies
Diagrams
Languaging
Interdisciplinarity
Metadesign is not rocket science
Metadesign is not a superpower
Metadesign is a vital, basic skill set
It's what we can pass on - designing the future is not defining their future
Help them create a future that’s edgy, incisive, challenging
Leastmodernism?Apply the attitude and belief of modernism, but to the intention of doing less, not more
A manifesto for leastmodernismHow can we do less? How can we have one client instead of ten? Work with five colleagues indeed of five hundred. Find customers who only want to buy once?
How can we have one car instead of two? Three bedrooms instead of five? Buy two, leave the third where it is?
How can we do this in a day and not a week? Write one sentence, say ten words, make one thing once?
How do we create the most value from doing the least we can?
More is less, more or less.
If you want to find out more about Metadesign, please visit:
metadesigners.org
Thank you
@willshJohn V Willshire
