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In our work with The Really Useful Media Company, we are very fortunate to work with clients who put together thought provoking events and ask us to document them on video. We recently covered a wonderful series as part of the new Parsons MFA in Transdisciplinary Design, which strikes a particular chord with my personal/academic interests (I’m serious…someone may need to restrain me from applying to go back for round two of grad school).

Lifted from The New School’s site, here is the description of the third lecture in the 2010 Stephan Weiss series:

More and more, designers are designing businesses, services, policies, and emergent social forms, and the experiences that go with them. Along the way they are inventing new methods and tools, fundamentally altering how design is conceived. To mark the establishment of the new MFA in Transdisciplinary Design, the School of Design Strategies is presenting a lecture series that explores how design must shift in a world where the complexity and interconnectedness of people, infrastructures, networks, and economies challenge traditional disciplines.

Transitional States, a 2010 Stephan Weiss Lecture, considers such questions as: Can design help governmental and non-governmental organizations deliver things like infrastructure, education, and healthcare? And What kinds of alliances and collaborations are bringing design into large-scale social and technological services?

It’s not exactly liveblogging when I take notes with pen and paper, then type them up days later, but here are my notes, nonetheless.

Update: Watch the video! These two were far more brilliant than digitized scribbled notes can convey.

Nigel Snoad

(technical evangelist and product manager for Microsoft Public Safety Initiative and advisor for the ICT for Peace Foundation and the Institute for State Effectiveness)

• teaching Design for the Red Cross at Parsons
• design for emergent, self-organizing changes, movements — “Complex Adaptive Systems”
• social networking vs. societal networking systems: we have to think about the societal if we’re going to design for change
• standard systems models assume problems/issues are soluble (cause and effect, rational choice)
• recommends Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Age of the Unthinkable:Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It
• a world of inherent unpredictability and newness
• The earthquake in Haiti finally crystallized some new thinking on humanitarian response design
• 3 kinds of solution approaches:

1. Simple: characterized as being a puzzle; e.g., following a recipe
2. Complicated: characterized as being a problem; e.g., sending a rocket to the moon
3. Complex: characterized as being a mess; e.g., raising a child

• the growing complexity of a problem is not linear
• life as a citizen is complex — you interact with multiple jurisdictions, services, agencies as part of your participation
• design is about the evolving interaction between problem and solution; i.e., design for constant change
• you can’t understand a system unless you can map it

• design principles:
  • open ended
  • exploratory
  • sensing
  • revealatory -> discoverable
  • flexible
  • human scaled
• simulation and play are essential exploratory techniques
• “framing of choices for changing individual and collective behavior: how to nudge people toward beneficial action”
• we each have our own maps and systems for organizing and making sense of our worlds, so look at systems and ask if they are as complex as they need to be, yet also look for the underlying simplicity. One person’s chaos is another person’s orderly system.

Natalie Jeremijenko

(associate professor of Visual Art, and director of the xdesign Environmental Health Clinic, New York University)

• crisis of agency: “What to Do?” – revealed by climate crisis
• redefining health to mean something shared/collective/actionable: who can act? who can change?
• we cannot treat the environment as something so global if we want it to be actionable
• the top five conditions pediatricians spend the most of their time treating all happen to also have environmental implications: asthma, developmental delays/spectrum disorders, rare childhood cancers, diabetes, obesity
• Environmental Health Clinic is a place to coproduce solutions to environmental health problems in a clinical setting; sense making out of complex ecosystems and environmental challenges
• “flight was the original Internet – it was going to end all wars.”
• we don’t just need critical thinking, we need critical making: experimental production that helps us understand “what to do” to address challenges
• Dewey knew: participatory democracy as skeptical experimentation by the people
• there is an issue of needing citizens to feel qualified to experiment, collect evidence, analyze their own data, and discuss/defend it
• education holds a systemic belief that making stuff doesn’t matter
• we’d be better off trying to educate people in their sleep because that’s a less constrained environment than the classroom
• if you want to change education, you have to address teachers as people – not as teachers – as people capable of making autonomous decisions and intelligent judgments.