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Balancing Acceleration and Systemic Impact: Finding leverage for transformation in SDG change strategies
Get PDFAcceleration increases the rate of progress toward system transformation. Systemic outcomes are durable impacts from coordinating foundational changes. We studied the form, leverage, quality, and effectiveness of theories of change in the 35 Joint Programmes of the UN’s Joint SDG Fund. We conducted four analyses on programme strategies: (1) Classified types of Theories of Change, (2) Analyzed cases to identify the most effective JP Theories of Change; (3) Defined how leverage could accelerate the SDGs and their targets for social protection; (4) Analyzed cases to show leverage in the JP’s change strategies. We argue that programmes with systemic theories of change and that show effective leverage will be more effective in accelerating the achievement of social protection. We advise designers of complex change strategies adopting these systemic design tools to formulate strategies for systems-level change. Our analyses identified important tensions in the pursuit of acceleration. While goal acceleration is a means to an end, acceleration can become the goal; we must balance by design for long-term systemic impact. These desiderata are relevant to large-scale transformation contexts such as SDG programmes, climate change strategies, and other contexts where leverage can both accelerate and reach systemic program goals
Air Quality in Delhi
Get PDFAir pollution in Delhi, India, is one of the most hazardous issues that the developing nation is facing in the current day. Through our gigamap, we encompassed research and intervention and recommendations and developed an understanding of the numerous relationships between the individual elements in this system. Designed for our “Systems” class, the gigamap shows our process of researching, mess mapping, and three horizons (short term and long term effects of the potential solutions). The layout of the gigamap was informed by identifying patterns and categorizing problems, allowing us to define the broader problem and tackle it effectively. The map outlines how to affect positive change in the different categories within this system through various interventions. Through a STEEP analysis, we found that this is a wicked problem because there is no definable solution and it must be approached from a variety of leverage points. Through this process, we learned how strategic solutions and design thinking play a role in intervening in a wicked problem such as air pollution in Delhi and how designers can use these tools to help bring about a positive change to an increasingly complex world.
Reading Air Quality in Delhi
Our gigamap organizes the information into six sections: introduction, feedback loops, mess map, three horizons, interventions, and the impact of globalization. The viewer should approach our map by first reading the introduction and feedback loops to gain a general understanding and breakdown of the wicked problem. Then examine our mess map, three horizons, and interventions recognizing the problem on a more complex level to grasp our approach to intervene over time. Finally, the viewer should read how the wicked problem ties to economic globalization. (Viewers should refer to the key to understand the relationship between various factors in the map)
Designing Learning Spaces: Embracing playing with tensions
No full textWe prefer to call this interactive workshop a Playshop.
We feature a brief introduction with a conceptual foundation around key themes and then an interactive task. The interactive task brings together Play Probes (Gulden) with ideas of framing (from Bateson) and play in the design of learning spaces. The task allows us to emphasize both content and process issues, as the task is an opening up to tensions being unconcealed, with reflection on tacit assumptions about design, play, and systemic understanding. With reflexivity being a key issue in systems design, this session also reflects on how we are enacting the very process we are inquiring into, about playing with tensions.
Recognizing the proliferation of the use of AI and its relationship to the design of virtual learning spaces, we also make connections with the proposed session on the New Macy conferences, and how assumptions of AI shape not only how we create what is possible in a learning space, but also encourage movement away from the importance of play and tolerance, even embrace, of variety.
The format of the playshop involves cross-pollination of teams, bringing in possibilities from The World Café (Steier, Brown, da Silva). In addition, we encourage people to draw their ideas together, while also reflecting on the use of the visual and oral, which may itself create tensions as opportunities for design.
As a summary, the format is an introduction, the initial phase of groups, the second phase with cross-pollination, sharing of ideas (focus on play and tensions emerging) and then wrapping up – with a look to the future.
This workshop was designed as a face-to-face event; however, it is also set it up so that it can be done virtually. Indeed, the very tension between the two – if face-to-face what is gained compared to it being virtual, if virtual, what is gained (or lost?) compared to it being face-to-face – is part of the playshop. We also bring in what new expectations are present from experiences in virtual meeting spaces, such as the use of chat – but also others – and how those new mediated features also allow us to play with tensions in design conversations and meetings.
Workshop agenda
At the heart of our playshop, key themes of play, tensions (and paradox), complexity, and systemic design methods will be featured. We see a particularly strong connection with the overall theme of Collaboration and contexts in systemic design.
For some elaboration, one of the key themes is the idea of play probes. The intention with a play probe is to elicit creative agency, playful behaviour, and a natural dialogue about a specific theme that is intended explored by the researchers, among the workshop partakers through framing. The idea of such elicitation is to be able to observe the discussion, behaviour, and possible tensions, connected to the theme studied, that the play probe may produce. An example of such a frame could be a partly designed board game that lacks rules and goals for the gameplay or a well-known board game such as Snakes and Ladders that is stripped for rules. The play probe will contain an assignment for the partakers to for example define the goal with the game aligned to the situation studied and describe reasons for why you have to move back or may move forward when playing the game. The play probe thus is meant to elicit natural dialogues, discussions, tensions, and dynamics that are connected to a specific theme and study that makes it possible for the researchers to observe without interventions by for example questions.
In addition to play probes, the very idea of play will be foregrounded. Here we will build on Gregory Bateson’s classic: The Message This is Play and recognize how an invitation to play can operate as a metacommunicative space that leads into ideas of framing and context (how will we know that each of us is playing, as compared to, for example fighting, or arguing. How will we know that we are being seen or heard as playing). We will bring in Bateson’s ideas of frames and framing as well as Kees Dorst’s framing design. Consistent with the theme of playing with tensions, we will also, at the outset, introduce what can be understood as the paradox of framing (including with the play frame). Here we recognize that we need to assume that we are in the same frame as others when we are in conversation with each other in order to interact together – but at the same time NOT make this same assumption that we are truly in the same frame, as we need always be prepared to question this assumption when we recognize that it may not be held at that moment. While this paradox holds in general, it is especially pertinent in play frames – and also in the design process. Part of our playshop will thus be about how the design of learning contexts is so difficult
Technology for Living: #NewMacy in the 21st century
Get PDFThe #NewMacy initiative was conceived in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Collaborators produced a scholarly rationale grounded in cybernetics that invoked the transdisciplinary history of the original mid-20th century Macy Meetings. As a result of a series of #NewMacy Conversations still ongoing, the initiative has narrowed the focus to the social impact of Today’s AI, the pernicious AI algorithms that are core to the large Internet platform companies and that thereby affect the daily lives of so much of the world’s population.
Specifically, the call-to-action for #NewMacy is to produce exemplars of alternatives to Today’s AI in the form of design patterns and prototypes that return interaction with digital algorithms back to the organic, analogue roots of our individual and social lives. By bringing forth replacements for the algorithms of Today’s AI we can foster digital interactions with more humane values and positive outcomes at the level of the individual and the social. Novelty and choice, transparency and conversation can become new core principles for our online lives.
Thus, in a modest but powerful way, #NewMacy affords a new vision for the future of sociotechnical systems where cybernetics becomes a bilingual glue, bringing together the humane qualities of analogue experience and modelling with the effectiveness and efficiencies of digital technology.
Related: Responding the the Pandemic of “Today’s AI”
#NewMacy Workshop
This interactive workshop engaged RSD10 participants as collaborators in the process of generating these #NewMacy outcomes. Participants will contribute to the ongoing definition, collection, creation, and critique of designs and implementations, for example by incorporating contemporary work from design, art, architecture, media, systems, and engineering as well as to expand the conversation to new communities.
Given the foundations described above (and in greater detail in the links provided) this interactive session advances the work of #NewMacy, consistent with the emergent and participatory nature of the initiative.
Between the time of this proposal (August 2021) and RSD10, two activities were held: [1] an interactive event hosted by the American Society for Cybernetics on September 19 as part of the related series (@NewMacyMeetings on Twitter), and [2] structured conversations in smaller, focused groups, each of which will develop a draft plan for a specific deliverable that presents an alternative to Today’s AI algorithms.
Hence the interactive workshop at RSD10 was designed to engage with participants in expanding the variety of #NewMacy in the form of vetting, critique, and improvement. For the attendees of RSD10, it offered ways of reframing the qualities of AI that we want in our daily lives, exposing a strategy for developing tangible alternatives in the form of design patterns, media art, and prototypes, and offering an entry point to engage in #NewMacy activities.
This interactive workshop viewed RSD10 participants as collaborators in the process of generating these #NewMacy outcomes. Participants contributed to the ongoing definition, collection, creation, and critique of designs and implementations, for example by incorporating contemporary work from design, art, architecture, media, systems, and engineering as well as to expand the conversation to new communities.
Exploring RSD10 themes
Playing with tensions
Cybernetics offers a systemic, transdisciplinary view of purpose in interactions replete with uncertainty; AI offers a transactional, computational view for producing results intended to remove uncertainty. #NewMacy proposes cybernetics as a frame for modelling interactions and as glue for joining the analogue and digital faces (which also constitute tension). The oppositions of cybernetics and AI are many, and the activity of articulating the differences and benefits for each, and embracing them to the extent needed to deploy them both effectively, is a foundational challenge to #NewMacy.
Embracing new complexity, collaboration and contexts in systemic design
AI systems today, for all their internal complexity, rely on models that (over-)simplify the nature of human emotions and decision making, reducing problems to those that an AI can compute. In contrast, cybernetics widens the frame to embrace complex systems with socio-technical contexts and to integrate design within and through that complexity. This requires designers to acknowledge the complexity of the world that they embed new systems within, encompassing collaboration and contextual awareness.
Breaks in scale
Pandemics are of massive scale; no less so the pandemics generated by Today’s AI. #NewMacy is specifically cast toward individuals forming expert groups that create exemplars to offer alternatives. The goal is not to trounce existing platform companies from top-down (for example, by attempting to gather forces toward government regulation) but rather by example to influence designers, teachers, students, entrepreneurs, and businesses to deploy alternatives that are in service of human values first, and revenue later. This is inherently a bottom-up effort working from the micro-level.
Sociotechnical
Clearly the issues with AI – its creation and its deployment – is a social issue as well as a technological one. By creating exemplars that offer technological alternatives that embody social values, the effort is squarely in the socio-technical realm.
Collaboration and transdisciplinary working
The #NewMacy is grounded in the history of transdisciplinary effort from cybernetics and the original Macy Meetings. Furthermore, we seek to design Conversations that are transglobal and transgenerational. The effort is fundamentally collaborative. See Design+Conversation.
Workshop format
120 minutes | maximum number of participants 50 | We are currently exploring collaborative platforms such as ohyay.co
Workshop Agenda: #NewMacy
The planned structure for the interaction session is:
Capsulize the activities of #NewMacy to-date
Icebreaker: Expose the issues that surfaced thus far about the terms ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’
Capture new feedback and insights about possible pitfalls and value in using the terms, and how
Break into small groups, each to explore a specific proposal for producing an alternative to the algorithms of Today’s AI
Create a visual model for capturing insights
Return to plenary to share each group’s model and insights with everyone.
Gather any unaddressed questions and seek gaps in prior thinkin
Antinomies in Systemic Design: Dilemmas, paradoxical tensions, and Werner Ulrich
Get PDFThis short paper explores the relevance of Ulrich’s (2021) boundary critique to the practice of systemic design (SD) today. The concept of ‘critique’ (disclosure) lies at the heart of dilemmas and paradoxical tensions intrinsic to SD foundations and is complementary to maps (correspondence) and design (coherence) as ways of knowing and acting in the world. In turn, boundary critique provides a unique account of unfolding paradoxical tensions and dilemmas: Its historical, conceptual, and pragmatic fit with SD’s context and concepts could also help create, modify, and extend its learning competencies and knowledge routines. On the flip side, a systematic approach may incidentally preclude the nuanced, boundary-crossing understandings that characterize SD. We suggest that scholar-practitioners consider theory synthesis approaches to embrace the diversity of perspectives and methods
Design by Doing in Louisiana Farmers Markets: Adaptive cycles, learning, and innovating in the time of the COVID-19 crisis
Get PDFIn March 2020, Louisiana farmers markets halted in-person operations to adapt after COVID-19. Consumption of healthy foods at farmers markets, especially among poor and minority communities, is a subsidized public health priority in the US (USDA, 2021). Grant funding supported marketing, adopting online platforms, and farmer incentives. An initial study examining the changes in these farmers markets during COVID-19 investigates if innovation occurred, the factors that influence innovation, the types of learning that facilitated innovating, and how COVID-19 influenced learning and innovation. More broadly, the paper discusses how public health institutions can support innovation as co-creators. Qualitative methods were used to analyse publicly available records including documents and audio-visual recordings (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2020). A modified Holling’s cycle served as an analytic model to understand how innovation after a crisis unfolds over time (Fath, Dean, & Katzmair, 2015). Analysis showed during COVID-19, support resulted in multiple innovations supporting short-term resilience. The discussion demonstrates learning over time addresses the tension between design of interventions as an initial, strategic planning process vs. iterative cycles of co-creating, learning and co-evolving
Design-driven Industrial Reconversion during COVID-19 Global Outbreak
Get PDFThis paper highlights the evolution of designers’ responsibility during an unexpected emergency period like the COVID-19 outbreak. This process will be described through a set of case studies showing that the design discipline is resilient and capable of gathering the proper needs at the right time and relieve market tensions. Indeed, designers can help companies in the process of industrial reconversion, an ambidextrous strategy that allows producing what is missing but extremely urgent during an emergency. The paper describes the way firms converted to produce necessary goods such as clean hand sanitiser, lung ventilators and the personal protective equipment needed by citizens and medical personnel. During the COVID-19 emergency period, what are, and have been, the challenges for designers? What new expertise, skills, activities will the designer have to gain? How do designers give innovative answers with new activities to support companies during emergencies? The answer was found in the designers’ ability to examine the problem holistically and choose the most innovative and contextually appropriate solutions. Together with management ingenuity, they also fit in with ambidextrous strategies that direct the company towards new opportunities by exploiting the resources already belonging to the firm, untangling the economic complexity
Moving Toward Paradigms and Patterns of Transformative Innovation in Public Sector Labs
Get PDFThis paper shares work in progress from action research focused on the transformative potential of public sector innovation labs (PSI labs). Much of the research about PSI labs remains within current paradigms of Western and European governance. If public sector innovators hold an ambitious and systemic innovation intent, then there is a need to stretch beyond these dominant paradigms. Westley et al. (2011) capture the need for this ambition:
“to support 9 billion people without transgressing critical planetary boundaries, efforts to diffuse and scale the most promising innovations must be accelerated. This requires the transformation of the institutions that shape our cultural, political, and economic transactions” (p. 775).
Given this urgency, I argue that PSI labs that hold an ambitious, systemic intent must take an approach to their work that does not (inadvertently) reinforce the problematic dimensions of dominant paradigms. Action research data is used to construct a conceptual framework that proposes aspects of transformative/emergent/resurgent paradigms of governance for innovation. The tensions inherent in moving away from what is, and toward what must/may be are explored. Potential roles and responsibilities of design/ers in skillfully navigating the spaces that these tensions create conclude the paper
Reverberations at the Edges: Politics of designed im/materiality
Get PDFUS politics foster a conflicting mode of existence—one that centres on heterogeneity and individual freedom. The contradictory nature of these two characteristics divorces the individual from networks and cause a collective state of disparate dissonance. This brings to the fore the line of inquiry on hegemonic influences on the concepts of objectivity, normativity, and standardization as systems are designed and developed in the US. The assumption of a system’s inherent apolitical nature overlooks the foretelling promise of marginalized groups’ intuit on what may be at stake and what may be a great potential due to points of tension in a system. This conjures the affective world of politics and the political in the designed im/material worlds
Future through Memory - Virtual Storytelling in Toronto's Chinatown
Get PDFFuture through Memory is a study in the affordances of virtual production through co-design as a method of civic engagement, placemaking and placekeeping in Toronto’s Chinatown. The title “Future through Memory” hearkens back to Wendy Chun’s text, The Enduring, Ephemeral, or The Future is a Memory (2008). Using participatory action research as the central methodology, co-creation workshops were held with individuals within the Toronto Chinatown community to develop what Pierre Nora’s describes les lieux de mémoire (site of memory) in "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire" (1998) within an interactive documentary using WebVR (A-Frame). This study explores the use of collective memory, oral testimony, transmedia storytelling and 3D photogrammetric scans as a method to highlight the agency of participants within the community, the diaspora experience and discussions of identity. This project takes a decolonial theoretical framework and is centred on developing a collective memory — “collective, plural, yet individual” (Nora, 1989), questioning traditional structures of historical representation within virtual reality