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.

Wait! Before you jump to leaving a comment attacking me for dropping $200 on an iPod so a kid I’ve never met can be distracted from her true academic potential, hear me out, because her letter represents trends that have been growing for several years now, and have big implications for education.

Technology is becoming rapidly more affordable, and that can make it more accessible. Yes, it’s within recent memory that these were luxury items, but I found a decent MP3 player for $30, less than the suggested spending limit.

One Laptop Per Child is putting inexpensive computers in the hands of children all over the world, and while they’re not the $100 miracles they were once promised to be, they’re cheap enough that they even make a reasonable donation. They also have helped make way for competition from other laptop manufacturers, so overall prices continue to fall. While OLPC was meant to create new learning opportunities in the developing world, it has also done so here in the US. As these technologies become more accessible, parents and schools have realistic choices when they consider how to maximize the learning that their dollars provide.

Kids love technology, and it has an impact on how they learn. We tend to think of these devices for their entertainment purposes, because that’s how they’re marketed to us. But their potential as devices for learning is enormous, both in and outside the classroom.

The role of technology in education has long had its evangelists, but now, after three years of research, a new report shows just how much kids learn from their casual everyday use of technology. Look, I know she just wants to listen to music, but the recipient of this MP3 player is also getting a device that can record data and download podcasts. Computers are an amazing learning tool when you think of them in the context of the networks and information they connect their users to.

The real question isn’t whether this student’s learning will be affected by her having an MP3 player while she does her homework — teenagers have been listening to music while they study for decades. The uncertainty lies in whether the educators in her life are going to recognize the importance of technology and help her gain access to it in positive ways. She and her peers are going to learn from technology because of these trends, or despite them.

Apologies to the fans. I know it’s not what you were looking for. But if it’s any consolation, this was awesomely hilarious to see on the chateau tour.

-being bilingual does not make you a translator

-translators are often not technology people, so they don’t know the right technical language to translate interface words (“apply”, “enter”, ‘submit”)

-context is everything — if the translator can’t see the language in context, they will get it wrong

-have a translator on board at the wireframing stage, so that person can point out contextual and cultural issues

-localization isn’t just replacing the words in one language into another, it’s also about giving appropriate cultural and social context

-translation needs to deal not just with literal words, but also with concepts that don’t translate from one culture/language to another

-Social networking sites don’t choose their users, users choose the site — snses grow because users tell their friends, and want to find people like themselves. If a site has a high concentration of users in a particular culture, it sometimes turns users from other countries off because they don’t understand why the site seems so saturated with members and content from another country (this happened with Orkut — Americans complained that it was too Brazilian! So Orkut responded by giving users the option of only connecting with other people who speak the same language as them)

-most sites view internationalization efforts as moving to a language other than English

-Community driven translation is NOT the norm – one of panelists asked if anyone was allowing their online community to do the translation for them — only two of us raised our hands (probably 75-100 in the room)

-use icon based representation with mouse-over where possible, to reduce multilingual formatting issues (words being longer in diff languages) — but beware the problem with an icon/image having different cultural meanings

-sometimes you try to localize so much that you end up with something that is “just ok” in a lot of languages, and “not so great” in a few — instead of trying to rebrand and make the site almost its own stand alone in different locations

Cool sites to check out:
-One of the speakers was from Worldwide Lexicon project — really cool open source translation and localization tools, ability to develop multilingual web apps, Simple Localization System (SLS – php library), and multilingual blogging/publishing tools — with a wiki approach to translating web content.

-dotsub — community subtitling and translation tool

-red flag words: need, can’t, easy, only, fast

-”be successful and make money by helping other people be successful and make money” — people are more willing to pay for things that help them — spot chain reactions and be the catalyst for making them happen

-minimize the chance for competition from entrenched players — e.g., build tools that provide just the simple solutions of what people need (vs. the products that are overkill for most people “nonconsumers”)

-question your work regularly — remember that you don’t know everything:
Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?
Will this change behavior?
Is there an easier way?
What’s the opportunity cost?
Is it really worth it?

-it’s really important to ask what you can’t do because you”re taking on something else?

-many sites don’t just suffer from bad design, they suffer from bad copy that don’t make sense to anyone — PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORDS YOU USE TO CONVEY MESSAGES TO USERS. Words that need fixing are a much cheaper problem to solve than technical ones.

-err on the side of simple — start with the easy way of doing things and see if it satisfies what you wanted to do

-get three things done in one week, instead of one thing done in 3 weeks — ‘the longer it takes to develop something, the less likely you are to launch it”

-resist the urge to try to do more the next time around

-invest in what doesn’t change — what are the core things about the business that are important now and will still be important ten years from now?

-”what’s your cookbook?” — Celebrity chefs as a metaphor (they don’t try to keep their recipes a secret out of fear that people will open copy-cat restaurants). Figure out what expertise you can share, and share it — don’t be afraid that people will overtake and steal your business — your business is sharing what you build.

-interruption kills productivity — having people around you who interrupt you makes you not get stuff done. Try to combat this with passive communication (wikis, IM, email, etc) — these tools let the other person hear from you when you”re ready, not when they think you”re ready

-be open, honest, public, and responsive — people would much rather hear the truth, even in crisis.

-break problems down to the atomic level — “when you make tiny decisions you can’t make big mistakes”

-everything you do should matter — don’t do stuff that doesn’t matter!

-hire by looking for people who are honest/have good character, curious (most important), and do interesting things outside of work

-use what you build, and then you will know when it works

The opening keynote on Saturday was a conversation between Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You) and Henry Jenkins (professor at MIT, Comparative Media Studies Program). As a chronic conference-goer, I find myself hearing the same people keynoting over and over again, saying the same things over and over, and often saying essentially the same things as one another. It was refreshing that, despite having read the work of both speakers, and having heard each speak at other events, I actually learned some new things and had a chance to rethink some previous ideas.

That said, there were some points I was glad to hear repeated, since the audience at SXSW is not dominated by educators. We need people in other sectors to rally behind the need for empirical evidence and educational assessment models that support new media literacies, and to challenge the current reality that schools measure autonomous, not collective, learning. Also:
-high school students are one of the most highly underestimated groups online, but the challenge is — can we free young people up to write about what’s happening in their community? (not punish them, censor them, restrict their first amendment rights)
How do we give students the tools to use the time, creativity, and idealism they have, so they can be active community participants?

-if 50-60% of young people are creating content online, what is causing the other 40% not to create? Social, cultural, and economic disempowerment? Lack of ethical guidance from adult mentors?

-if America is failing in the world, it’s because workplaces and schools are failing to empower workers and students to realize their full potential — they start with the premise that we”re all idiots, not that we are all knowledgeable with expertise and creativity to share.

On politics, Jenkins made some interesting points about Obama’s “yes we can” as a metaphor for new kinds of social/civic engagement, by using language that describes a process of participation, collecting knowledge and distributing it to make change. He also argues that the criticism of Obama borrowing pieces of a speech from Deval Patrick holds less water if you look at it through the new lens of collective learning, knowledge, and participation. And, we should be asking what a culture of democracy truly looks like.

Other thought provoking ideas:
-the deep level of fan/consumer engagement with tv shows like Lost and The Wire, and the pop culture communities that have grown up around them, often come out of people not having enough intellectual and creative stimulation in the workplace.

-thinking about collective intelligence as Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” (pooling knowledge and averaging out an answer) vs. the deliberative sharing of knowledge from different points of view and reaching a consensus (dependent on individual expertise, diversity of the community, and respect for all perspectives brought to the table). Jenkins aligned these approaches with YouTube (what moves up is the dominant/majority/popular perspective) vs. Wikipedia (a space with mechanisms for inclusion of diverse perspectives).

-it’s important to question the usage of the language of addiction related to online activity and gaming (many “addicts” are actually depressed and the addiction is manifesting itself through gaming; also Chinese gov’t using “addiction” as reason to restrict young people’s access to the internet)

-progressives need to have a context for where progress is coming from in order to encourage the movement to continue growing (this sounds like what Chris Lehman often says about the current technology in education movement)

Cool sites they mentioned:
- Harry Potter Alliance– global network of young people trying to change the world, inspired by Harry Potter as a young person who transformed his world:

- Outside.In — Johnson’s project, building out geographic infrastructure of the web and fostering people using the internet for very local community participation. Their about-to-launch tool is On My Radar (“like a geo-twitter,” commented Kate). Speaks to a need for civic media tools for local experts to participate and share knowledge without having to go through traditional media structures to communicate

Finally, some dissertation-ey thoughts about new media literacies. Because of YMEX I”ve had Jenkins” framework on the brain for quite a while, but one component I would like to spend more time unpacking — is where these new media literacies intersect with the sociolinguistic concept of codeswitching. If young people are developing the ability to learn and access information across a range of modalities (what Jenkins calls transmedia navigation), can it also be argued that they are learning to communicate in a range of linguistic codes that these new media require? How well do they codeswitch between the linguistic norms of each — from text messaging to online social networking sites to the f2f classroom, etc.? How might educators interact better with their students if they understood their ways of communicating through the lens of codeswitching? I”ve been thinking particularly about how Ben Rampton‘s work on codeswitching and youth could be applied…

And, apparently not everyone at SXSW was hearing repeat speakers. As I walked out, I heard a guy behind me say to his friend, “It was cool, but I didn’t know who he was exactly…I thought it was Henry James.”

Right.

One of my best friends from high school is now an actor in one of Chicago’s most successful and fresh young theatre companies, and she refused to settle for anything less than her dreams, no matter who told her that she would have to wait tables, or that she better major in something practical, just in case. The pictures of my sister sitting at a typewriter at age two seem now to be the perfect symbol of her life path to becoming a newspaper reporter, covering the politics beat. Neither are easy goals to attain, but I’m lucky to know firsthand what it takes to get there.

The person who is perhaps my oldest friend in life – we started school together at age seven and graduated from high school together ten years later – is now a scientist, completing her PhD and contributing to research that is deepening our understanding of ocean sustainability and climate change. My memories of her as far back as middle school include her dreams of being a marine biologist, and I’ve had the opportunity to see that dream grow into a reality, through many years of formal education, fieldwork, muddy boots, and the most admirable tenacity, even in circumstances under which most of us might give up. Knowing her all these years did little to improve my own scientific abilities, but it taught me what it looks like to do hard work, to be a researcher, and now, to care more about the application of scientific knowledge to the social issues about which I already care very deeply.

For all the talk about preparing students for the world of work, as important as it is to define skill sets and ready them for the global economy, it often seems that we leave out from the conversation what those pathways really look like. There is outstanding work being done to define specific pathways to global citizenship and to digital citizenship, but are we also showing students what it looks like to identify their passions and pursue their own goals? It seems like we’re afraid to let students see, “this is what it looks like to be a scientist” and how you can get there, because we’re caught up in a belief (or fear?) that jobs will change too fast, as if the economy of the future does not allow for goals or dreams. Knowing that those pathways exist is important, even for the ones who haven’t figured out what their dreams might be, and regardless of what they ultimately pursue. Young people should have a realistic (and media literate) understanding of the pathway to the least attainable goals – like being an NBA superstar or the next American Idol, and they should have the same awareness of more common professional journeys, and of those pathways that change at every turn. We should be situating the necessary skills, knowledge, and capacities in these real world pathways – we’ll never engage students in those frameworks in the abstract. And, they should know that each of these involves failure, and most of them involve failing multiple times. We’re definitely too scared to let students in on that secret, even though learning from failure is likely the most important piece we can model for them.

This morning I set out to read a New York Times article about the convergence of casual games and social networks, as seen in the success of games like Scrabulous, and the enormous potential that has for generating advertising revenue. No sooner had I clicked on the title, which included the phrase “a net to snare social networkers” in it, than was I assaulted by an OpinionMart popup survey asking me to give it all up right then and there.

It’s not a bad article, by the way, but since I still can’t figure out if this is intentional irony or not, I’m resisting the urge to help the Times with their potential link baiting strategy on this one.