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Participation, reconnection, and designMarc Rettig and Hannah du Plessis13 April 2017
Participation, reconnection, and designMarc Rettig & Hannah du Plessis | Fit Associates, LLC
www.fitassociates.com
[email protected] | @mrettig
[email protected] | @hannahdup
This workshop was presented on April 13, 2017, at a meeting of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Interaction Design Association. For more information, see
ixda.org and www.facebook.com/IxdaPittsburgh.
© 2017, Fit Associates LLC
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike 4.0 License. You can copy and redistribute it, and you can remix, transform, and build
upon this material, so long as you attribute credit to its authors, and share under the same license. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
sa/4.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
Marc [email protected]@mrettig
Hannah du [email protected]@hannahdup
fitassociates.com dsi.sva.edu design.cmu.edu
Three parts
Interaction 17 Reflection sessions report
A version of our keynote talk
Group reflection and discussion
Morning reflection sessions at Interaction 17An invitation to step back and notice what you we are learning
Reflect by yourself
Reflect in pairs small groups
Listen to the room
Day 1: YouWhy is it important for you to be here? What do you plan to get at this conference? What do you hope to give at this conference? What really matters to you at this conference, what stands in the way of having an experience that matters?
Day 2: The conference conversation“I’m tired of …”“I’m grateful for ...““I’m missing ...”
Day 3: Our industry and future
We stand in a difficult moment in history. We have
inherited a world that works for some at the
expense of others. We are disconnected from the
consequences of our actions. It is alluring to participate
unconsciously and believe that “everything is ok.”
It is therefore important to step outside the comfort of
our industry and our time, and ask critical questions.
What might future generations ask of us?
What might those outside of, but affected by our industry, ask of us?
So we asked…
Do we consider the unintended consequences of designing only for ourselves?
Why don’t we take the opportunity to change consumption habits rather than feed technological addiction?
Why don’t we take leadership to shift the moral and ethical compass of our design community?
Why don’t we refuse to do work that is against our moral commitments?
Why aren’t we talking about designing jobs away?
Why so many fucking photo apps?
Some of the answers we heard
“Business as usual” ain’t working, it’s hurting.
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen
and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you
recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence
the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several
million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, a
alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists
think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the
opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief
that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who
and what is may impact, are not things we can know….”
Rebecca Solnit
Possibilities everywhere
Two points about that…
“Business as usual” ain’t working, it’s hurting.
1. At the same time, a lot of good things are happening, and they add up to something big.
2. We’re finding methods, strategies and approaches that help us all participate in those things.
1. At the same time, a lot of good things are happening, and they add up to something big.
(My job for the next four minutes is to overwhelm you with just how many good things are going on.)
Look at one lab: the South Africa Lab
One (of three) summary presentations lists eight projects
Forty-one labs
John Thackara
Reconnecting…Communities with forestsCities with the rainAir and soilFragmented landscapesCommunities with streamsCities with riversCities with natureEconomies with capacity to repairLocal makers with factoriesFarmers with hackersEnergy and placeLocal parallel internets
thackara.com
ASA Project, Brazil: one million cisterns
www.aguariosypueblos.org/en/the-asa-project-one-million-cisterns-–-brazil
Hawken has been cataloging grassroots environmental groups around the world.
He has identified a minimum of
130,000such groups.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW8BytViI54
“These aren’t the last guttering candles before we slip into total darkness. These are the symptoms, flowers, and seedlings of the future. This is exactly what you would expect for the early stage of an ecological transformation.”John Thackara
The Berkana Model of system change
berkana.org/about/our-theory-of-change Sketch by Chris Corrigan, chriscorrigan.com
We affect the grand shift by shifting the way we participate in our own contexts, and by creating contexts that afford shifts in others’ participation.
Mechanisms:participation and (re)connection
medium.com/@EskoKilpi/networks-and-leadership-d8400046eae6 | www.peterblock.com/_assets/downloads/Civic.pdf
2. We’re finding methods, strategies and approaches that help us all participate in those things.
Methods: room-of-people scale
Strategies: wisely connecting room-scale activities in sequence
1. A lot of good things are happening, and they add up to something big.
We see an exciting blossoming of methods for doing this work at roomful-of-people scale.
Methods in practice:
The “treat-animals-well society”
Gather from many departments (“gather diversity and power”
Shift: from think-by-talking to think-by-making
Assumption Dump
The key activity: Collective Story Harvest
amandafenton.com/core-methods/what-is-the-collective-story-harvest | www.uie.com/brainsparks/2016/02/23/a-story-told-about-story-listening-ux-immersion-podcast
Suspend judgment and listen
Update assumptions
Reflect (take a walk), Reframe
We can connect these methods in series to make STRATEGIES for participatory, systemic, emergent acts of co-creation.
Here’s another story…
Methods: room-of-people scale
Strategies: wisely connecting room-scale activities in sequence
Approaches: engaging with bigger scales and longer horizons
Sam Kaner
www.communityatwork.com | Source of this story (recommended!): vimeo.com/32178909
A visual language for participation strategies
Sam Kaner
Sam Kaner
Convene diversity and power, engage authority
Sam Kaner
Support participation with process expertise
Sam Kaner
Create good conditions, then give emergence its time
Sam Kaner
Stabilize, amplify, and perhaps spread what takes root
The people who curated this process are
fluent in the work of social emergence:
convening and hosting conversations,
participatory decision-making, the dance
between acting or intervening and
stepping back to trust the creative forces of
community. We can also gain that fluency.
1. At the same time as all the bad things, a lot of good things are happening, and they add up to something big.
2. We’re finding methods, strategies and approaches that help us all participate in those things. We can know how to do this stuff!
And that’s my two points.
Shifting the way we participate in our own contexts (and working with the conditions for others’ participation) requires awareness, courage, support and practice.
A third point
Practicing open dialogue during a meeting
Practicing acceptance and conversations
Photographs: Stephanie Sun
Practicing difficult conversations
Photographs: Stephanie Sun
Thomas Lommee
Never before have the possibilities for action been so abundant.Never before has the potential to interconnect all these actions been so great.Therefore the time for putting the blame to those in power lies behind usand the time for kick-starting small but massive action lies in front.
In a networked society the transition to a more sustainable living environmentwill not only be realized by a handful of large-scale projects that are orchestrated by a few.It will mostly be shaped by a billion tiny interrelated actions that are initiated by all of us.
In a networked society we, as citizens, have power.We can influence decision making by posting, forwarding, grouping, choosing and approving.We can reshape our living environment by initiating, exchanging, sharing, improvingand building upon what was developed by those who came before us.
It’s now simply up to us to be aware of these new opportunities in order to exploit them to the fullest.
Thomas Lommee
www.intrastructures.net/Intrastructures/Actions_-_The_next_big_thing_2.html
Reflection and discussion
It’s a method!1-2-4-All
www.liberatingstructures.com/1-1-2-4-all/
