Design Dialogues

Part II.   Human-Scale Tools for Change

While many authors recently warned of the consequences of an ideology of unfettered growth, including Ronald Wright, Jared Diamond, George Monbiot, and Thomas Homer-Dixon), philosopher/priest Ivan Illich warned us 40 years ago.  He foresaw a collapse of the post-industrial economy, which did not happen then. Illich proposed that autonomous, creative citizens take responsibility for creating the tools that might regenerate a civilization for real human needs and purposes. Perhaps both, breakdown and a creative civilization, are happening now.

As with the Club of Rome (1969) and their Limits to Growth (1972), Ivan Illich was right – but at the wrong time.  Those who remember the 1970’s may recall that alternative publications at the time (I have all the old Co-Evolution Quarterlies) treated the mid-70’s as if the apocalypse was happening then. Perhaps it always seems that way. As Dayton’s (now Austin’s) Troy Campbell sang on 2004’s American Breakdown, The World Keeps on Ending – every generation reinvents their desire the end the problems they inherited before the problems end the generation. Yet this time there is something different, something truly timely in Illich’s Convivial Tools notion.

I can only conjecture on how the breakdown of industrial society will ultimately become a critical issue. But I can make rather firm statements about the qualifications for providing guidance within the coming crisis. I believe that growth will grind to a halt. The total collapse of the industrial monopoly on production will be the result of synergy in the failure of the multiple systems that fed its expansion. This expansion is maintained by the illusion that careful systems engineering can stabilize and harmonize present growth, while in fact it pushes all institutions simultaneously toward their second watershed. Almost overnight people will lose confidence not only in the major institutions but also in the miracle prescriptions of the would-be crisis managers. The ability of present institutions to define values such as education, health, welfare, transportation, or news will suddenly be extinguished because it will be recognized as an illusion.

Ivan Illich  (1973)  Tools for Conviviality

John Thackara revived a conversation for Tools with brio at the CHI 2004 conference in Vienna. With Bill Buxton, they presented an unscheduled dialogue they called “A Convivial Conversation” to intrigued conference participants. As I recall they debated their fairly polar perspectives on the possibilities and consequences of ubiquitous, cheap flat screen display panels in the public sphere. They both made convincing cases. Thackara’s is the case that would be expensive to ignore, if he and Illich turned out to be “more right.”

What Happened

Even if you cannot recall (and I can’t), it is clear that in 1973 few – if any – individuals were prepared to make the call that IT would become the great engine for new growth in the next decade. Society was not even yet mourning the loss of manufacturing and the blue-collar middle class the declined with it, because that had not happened yet. Even if Illich did not foresee the forestalling of the American breakdown granted us by 25 years of IT-fueled growth, what Ivan got right was that constant, increasing growth largely serving a managing elite was unsustainable. Crashable, and in a big way.

What economists, sociologists, and visionary editors (like Stewart Brand) also missed was the possibility that long waves of growth and destruction have their own cycles. Although both Kondratieff (1925) and Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning called the collapse for soon after the millennium, and not in the 70’s, most people missed those memos, as they were making other plans. Although long wave patterns are not provable hypotheses, they are empirically supported by the evidence they refer to in their models. While all models are biased, the biases that you accept make a difference in the real world.

The 1970’s saw the creative destruction of the first industrial economy. But it was a preview of the larger economic changes that could occur when the IT revolution completed its cycle of automating efficiencies, first by replacing rote work and then destroying administrative employment. Take a look at the figure on the Kondratieff page. We are living in that end phase of the growth cycle right now. We don’t know what’s next, and you’re living in happy times if you believe the Kurzweil post-human Singularity will somehow save us. You should really disbelieve anyone who says they know what happens next.

What’s Happening Now

You also don’t have to believe James Howard Kunstler’s take, that we should learn to live off the land again. Along with systems theory, back-to-the-earth was a major theme in Brand’s old Co-Evolution Quarterlies.  Stewart Brand himself shrugged off the possibility of re-ruralization for the new millennium in a recent NPR interview, and he appears to now be on the side of the “bright greens,” if not the Singularity movement. You don’t have to believe President Obama either, that recovery is imminent. (What are we recovering to?) Just observe for yourself, the evidence is available.

We may be in a services economy that generates value from IT-enabled constellations. But services have not yet generated the sustainable employment necessary to create and hold quality of life and cultural growth. Between these historical shifts, the leisure class we were promised 100 years ago never really got off the ground. The smartest among us today are also the hardest working people I know. Leisure and culture are hard won, perhaps.

Why a Convivial Response?

What does a convivial world even look like?  Do we have any good examples? Copenhagen? Willits, California? Toronto?

Let’s return to what Illich called the tools for conviviality,http://redesignresearch.com/dialogues/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=572&message=1 a process of human-scale cultural design. This means for us to “invert the present deep structure of tools” in order to “give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.”

I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. …  I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.

Liz Sanders of Make Tools (former Sonic Rim, Fitch) represented Illichian design thinking to an IDSA conference in Cincinnati (also around 2004). She founded the new design firm on a convivial concept: that users in any service have the autonomy and desire to create their own concepts to express needs and desires for their world. She calls this generative design, a radically co-creative participatory design approach. Make Tools has people “making tools: or expressive projections of their wants, as a means for producers to create new tools in turn.

As designers and innovators, we are social tool producers. What Illich points to is that, while we may find our tools liberating or enhancing of our own autonomy, we  may not foresee whether we serve any long-term social goals. When we serve our clients, are we contributing to more of the same? Where do we, as design “thinkers” grasp the reigns of ethical vision sufficient to effect, not abstract “change,” but just the conversations that change people’s minds? Do we even have the convivial tools of deliberative communication?

A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. I use the term “tool” broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible http://redesignresearch.com/dialogues/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=572&message=1commodities such as those which produce “education,” “health,” “knowledge,” or “decisions.”  School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks.

What are tools for scaling conviviality? We need tools for dialogue and making sense together. We need tools that create a culture conducive to communication and dialogue. We need tools we can share – literally, like Philadelphia’s Tool Library.

Let’s look at America. How do we save our neighborhoods from decline, enhance local transportation, bring local farming and food into small towns and cities? How do we use online tools effectively to promote real democratic change? How do we recover election integrity? How might we re-envision school systems and universities? Money and banks? Journalism and news? All of these are questions of conviviality. They all require people work together across ideologies and boundaries, intervene, document their work, make serious decisions, and propose alternatives to others in the community.

January 9th, 2010 | Tags: Cultural Design, social values, Transformation | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

The new year often finds blogs and commentators concerned with the memes and themes of the oncoming era hurtling toward us. Participating as I do in the more “abstract” design communities (e.g., experience, anthro, service design, strategic innovation, interaction, information architecture) I observe a lot of unproductive self-definition.  This takes the form of pronouncements about what a certain field is or is becoming, and why we we ought to care. To be charitable, we might view these discussions as a socially-adapted process of guiding disciplinary evolution. To be less charitable, when I compare design’s disciplinary development with the mature fields I work closely with (in my design research), I have to wonder whether we’re up to the job.

Take a strategic view of Design (and I don’t mean business or competitively strategic, or strategic as in winning).  Strategic also means the capacity to imagine the broader unfolding of the consequences of interventions and emergence toward a desired horizon of some, but not all, possibilities. Let’s ask, who do we really desire to be when we grow up? Because grow up we must – reality is different in 2010. It requires informed action.

Taking a step back and viewing the longer-term evolution of cultural and economic practices, most of these disciplinary definition concerns appear trivial and defensive. Scanning the online community responses to the new year/decade, reflective responses show how seriously we treat things that have little impact, and how we likewise may miss things that we (designers and human systems researchers) should be taking seriously. Rather than waxing normative, let me pick on a couple of examples.

Last year’s (2009) New Year’s posts by Business Week commentator Bruce Nussbaum reflected on the shift in design thinking from innovation to Transformation. I responded to this by suggesting innovation was not dead yet. Hundred of other commentators responded online or by linking, and so it had impact, whether or not we agreed with the proposition. (So it has been a year since then – was 2009 the year of Transformation or not?)

Nussbaum’s latest New Year’s posts aimed toward social impact at globalization, the decline of America, and massive social shifts between generations and countries. He took a more serious position than the aforementioned broadside on innovation, yet it found far less commentary from the “glimmerati.” Not that this comment fell flat, but by comparison, far more heat was generated by his taking on Don Norman’s suggestions that design research is a follower, not leader.

We protest too much. Don has a well-regarded perspective on things, and has a serious publishing history to back it up. After you get past the differentiation and definitions among commentaries, Don is mostly right. So what. It is just what’s so, it doesn’t mean design research fails to innovate.

Don Norman’s (by now) infamous piece Technology First – Needs Last (Dec 2009) was taken as provocation, which design “thinkers” rushed in to disagree with. As a scholar, I could take issue with some of the points as well, but the intent of the article was just to express an observation. It was not a peer-reviewed publication.

Don’s laconic response to Bruce Nussbaum’s huffing about the implications of the piece represented the turning point. (“Sorry folks, but I think you miss the point. I too bristled at Norman’s conclusion — and I happen to be Norman.”) The meta-message I’m reading is that we are behaving as insecure representatives of what should be creative, engaging and developing disciplines. We are focusing far too much attention on differentiating and justifying ourselves. If we miss the big picture, we will find design left out of the very meaningful contributions we say we need to make.

We take ourselves and our definitions of design, design research, transformation, impact, and influence way too seriously. I look at it this way – established professions do not find themselves questioning the public understanding of their identity and perceived value at every turn. Designers, especially the newer design disciplines that have grown up online, appear to thrive on inward-facing identity crises. Let’s get over it and start helping people, working cooperatively, and helping each other build credibility and trust toward an authentic and valued profession.

I acknowledge that the diverse disciplines involved in innovation may adopt meaningfully different definitions. For those still wondering what sensemaking really means, it means (at least) a process of resolving situations where gaps occur in understanding that enable meaning to resolve and recover “sense.” Brenda Dervin, who has struggled with transdisciplinary communication breakdown longer than most of us have been in disciplines, recommends a practice of “verbing.” When we transform the nouns we objectify (and then fight over) into verbs that describe activity that we can agree upon, we recover sense and meaning.

So rather than taking sides, we might starting taking cites. We might become more convivial, not in the social sense, but in the sense of caring for more than just our own tribes. In a recent panel session (OCAD Health Summit), with other designers in healthcare, we resolved to  cite each other more often and share the credit. Designers (and artists) are notorious for ignoring influences, unless they are French postmodernists. We will help the larger field grow if we have some confidence and listen more. If we look up and reference those whose work we admire, even if we don’t happen to love the commentator (see references to spat, above).

We gain nothing by pretending, especially to a designerly audience that does not know the literature, that we invented the concepts we favor. We might learn about the deeper currents that inform our work (like Dervin) and give substantive credit to our influences, and not glossing over them. From a cultural point of view, we are all in the same field. We all play in “design and innovation” as opposed to basic science, arts, or engineering. There’s enough leadership to go around. There’s room for everyone, and we gain more by cooperating than by competing with each other.

Who are our real customers? Is it the evolving progressive society and enlightened commerce? Do they understand what we really do and offer? We could start helping our field recover from its self-inflicted pettiness, and offer something of real value to the society we envision bringing forth. This was the perspective of the 2009 Global Forum, Business as Agent of World Benefit.

This is Part I, the problem statement.  Part II will serve up the obligatory New Year’s foresight and requisite design recommendations.

January 4th, 2010 | Tags: Design Thinking, Transformation | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Designers and people in the caring professions may have different and valid ways to think about caring and systems. On the Wenovski design community a wide-ranging discussion involves the question of designing “systems that care.” I take a position that we can care for systems practices, but systems will not perform as caring agents. (We could talk about future robots and the “uncanny valley” of likenesses and human qualities, but robots are not what we mean by systems, or even organizations).

What is care and where does it show up in systems, by design or by emergence?

Care is a deeply-held value to people, but when services designers explicitly adopt a language of values, they risk demeaning that value with real customers. I’ll try to say why I think so. First of all, can systems care? It would be like asking “can we design systems that love?”

What is the standard of care for a service or an information system? Without the accompanying duty of care that the professions have to honor, it may be meaningless. Care is at once a social value, a value of being (B value), and a legal term. So could it be unethical to profess a value such as care when it is not measurable or evident in the outcomes of the service?

Physicians are required to determine the standard of care for a patient condition. Unless we are designing medical devices that perform as actors in a medical system, designers are not held to meeting that standard. That diminishes our standing in the health professions.  So how should we profess to meet a standard of care?

While my job usually requires meeting standards of technology design, my philosophy is humanistic. My impulse is to reframe perspectives on systems and services as actors in (human) networks, and to dig into where caring actually shows up.

Claudio Ciborra’s last publication,  The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems, (2003) talks about the ways in which systems have a social life the evades our best intentions. While designers may wish to infuse a humanist intent, the social history of systems shows that they become bent toward instrumental tools and can produce outcomes we did not intend. For one, Ciborra cautions against the notion that we can “design in” qualities we believe will be perceived per the intent of design. He notes how “drift” and technique and adapted uses change any system toward often-unforeseeable outcomes. Heidegger’s Gestell, (which also emerged in Jacques Ellul’s Technique) is raised to examine how a system tends to level experience. wherein everything available becomes a “resource available to yield.” He describes a move from the rational systems approach to one committed to “Xenia,” or hospitality.

So can we host systems and social design practices with our stakeholders, moving from efficiency to care in the process? Can we actually do this? Ciborra leaves this chapter incomplete, without an example of such caring. It remains to be seen.

Let’s start with a definition of care that hold us to a higher standard. If we don’t consider care a B-value, a uniquely human and non-embeddable value, we may risk diminishing the quality of real care in our lives. Perhaps we can design contexts for integrated social systems that require the performance of human care, as in healthcare systems. But following Ciborra’s line, its clear to me that, over time, the stresses on and drifting of the health system form a context where care becomes a deliverable, and less of a human value.

We also mean very different things by Care today. When doctors speak of “delivery of care,” they mean the full complement of health treatments and services they personally oversee that represent caring for the patient.   It is like the value of Justice, that may mean one thing to judges and another to laymen. As designers, or at least in my case as a designer/researcher, I use the definition owned by the stakeholder I’m designing for, and not what I’d like them to adopt.

I think terms like “Customer Care” are atrocities of language and diminish the value of real care. Yes, they “mean well,” but I know of no service that even comes close to meeting a standard of care. People may care, but the service does not perform care. Shoshana Zuboff’s notion of the individuated consumer in the Support Economy, perhaps setting a  standard in services. We need to set a higher bar for the conditions of care, a new “standard of care.”

Care must be evidenced in constant acts of kindness, empathy, and situational intervention. Unless we are in a hospital, care is what people do when they work around the institutional rules to help us. It is not people doing their job to answer our questions when having trouble with our mobile phones. Care might be selected by careful hiring, and modeled by behavior and rewarded in organizational values sustained by ongoing dialogue. But in the design context, we might ask ourselves and our stakeholders:

• Who is caring for the participant/customer/user here, at this point?
• What is the standard of care for this situation?
• How do we encourage humans in the system to take the courage and trust to express care?
• Where is care perhaps not meaningful or necessary?
• Where does the participant bring their caring to the scenario?

December 12th, 2009 | Tags: Design for Care, Human, Human Experience, Human Values, Social systems design | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Experienced systems and design professionals have increasingly raised their concern for the poor design of eHealth Records (EMR, EHR) systems for the last couple of years. The rapid increase in adoption and deployment, spurred by US government stimulus spending, has pushed vendors to roll systems to market in unrepentant haste. With interaction design that would make a 1980’s mainframe designer cringe (like me, I worked on AT&T’s TIRKS as well as with their Labs AI group).

People working directly in the EMR world are building workarounds, add-ons, patches, and alternative displays to fit the data systems to their work contexts and institutional needs.While EMRs are enterprise information systems, they are tightly controlled by their vendors and generally not extensible.

The ad hoc design/development process is unsustainable, could lead to communication and data breakdowns between the EMR and the multiple add-ons. Future maintenance of the workarounds is not guaranteed -a major EMR vendor upgrade could wipe out a year’s worth of work on integrated applications that were rendered incompatible .

There are two huge issues at stake: 1) That poor design or mission critical systems could lead to loss of life and investment, and 2) the institutional lock-in of poorly designed enterprise IS platforms cripples the ability of the organization to innovate with their own data resources.

Current proof? Consider this news article from Pittsburgh two weeks ago, keeping in mind that no “bad news” that could suggest liability will ever emit from a hospital IT representative:

Switch to electronic records alarms Jefferson Regional physicians
By Walter F. Roche Jr.
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, October 30, 2009

Jefferson Regional Medical Center’s attempts to convert to electronic medical records have some doctors concerned about patient safety.

In a memo issued this month, the hospital’s Health Information Technology Committee announced the 373-bed facility in Jefferson Hills would revert to printed versions of patients’ consultant reports “due to patient safety concerns from the majority of physicians.”

Jefferson executives downplayed the memo and said they found no evidence that patient safety has been impacted, arguing a small group of physicians expressed concerns and not a majority, as the memo claimed.

“It was a very small number that were concerned. It wasn’t the majority,” said Dr. Richard F. Collins, Jefferson’s vice president for medical affairs. “To this point, we haven’t identified any issue of patient safety.”

I credit and point you to the excellent Health Care Renewal blog, which found and deciphered this disclaiming bit of news (their highlighting was maintained here). A UX designer (and full-time EMR workarounder) also noted this brilliant bit of satire that is (he assures us) quite an accurate representation. See Extormity and prepare to laugh, and cry.

Innovation often occurs at the edges of infrastructure, as new adopters are found within the existing ecosystem built around the platforms. Technical standards beget systems beget services, then beget workarounds and new services. Twitter and other social connection services emerged from the rough-laid brick of the simple RSS feed. Linux exploited the original open O/S BSD, then open source desktop applications grew to fill the consumer need. As Health Care Renewal also finds, and I agree, World VistA could be the Linux of EMRs. But in the meantime, EMR lock-in may lead to innovation stagnation in the secured and highly regulated healthcare enterprise.

November 12th, 2009 | Tags: Design for Care, Healthcare informatics | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)