TIME, TASK AND TERRITORY - the road to liberty at work

Last week I experienced a connection between the Tavistock idea of crucial boundaries of working: time, task, and territory http://akriceinstitute.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=34, and I saw a relationship between the Tavistock principles for group work, and the principles of agile software development, most celebrated today. In both cases the idea is that the freedom to work dynamically and situated, 'the journey is the destination', and what have we, depend on a clear and definitive time frame, explicit definition of goals to be achieved, and a limitid space to work within. In agile development such moments are called sprints. Working this way - this is my experience and new insight - gives so much piece of mind, that ideas and good spirit in collaboration seems to foster itself.

SUSTAINING VALUE NETWORKS IN DESIGN AND RESEARCH

This week is about communication of ideas and concepts in creative teams - of designers or researchers - I emphasize the commonalities here. In both cases my perspective is that of value network, and my point is that each and every encounter must give value to all parties: users and designers, designers and developers, actors and researchers, researchers and publishers. All these asymmetrical yet mutually dependent relationships undergo at least three phases of value-attribution: the initial trust-building, the idea development where the question what is the problem, and the conceptual phase where solutions are tried out, accepted or rejected. To sustain value networks participants must experience both autonomy and community within their zone of competence. For this to happen, sufficient information, choices and the possibility of expressing mixed feelings are crucial conditions (Ryan & Deci). Simple, but not always easy to provide.

ALEXANDER - OR NOT

I am a great admirer of Christopher Alexander's work, and as I just stumpled over a nice collection of bits and pieces which describes it http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Chris.text.html I sank in, and read. Then I sat back and wondered: Why is it, that the whole 'synthesis-of-form and patterns' way of thinking design suddenly strikes me as a strait-jacket? Maybe there is more truth to Löwgren & Stolterman's claim that a design language must be formed anew for each project than I thought at first. Maybe.

Experiencing-by-proxy: IMAGE CLOUDS and STORY-BY-WALKING

Clouds of water molecules, or of concepts, are same-quality-objects-in-proximity except for one parameter. We take omens from cloud (weather-forecasting), and we infer that concepts written with larger font indicates more attention. Image clouds are more difficult to deal with: we can think of Warhol's Monroes, the Harvey Keitel tobacco shop-owner's corner pictures in the movie 'Smoke', or 'humping man'-positions on the Youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz4lix7hiLo&feature=player_embedded. When it comes to image clouds, the variation in one quality has difficulty to produce meaning right away. However, human kind has a strong tradition in telling stories by inviting people to follow the food steps of someone else. Numerous tourist guides follow ' in the food steps' of some famous explorer, but also the police investigator/detective can choose to walk the path of a victim in order to better make sense of traces.

From a design perspective sharing experience across cultures, across ages, across individuals is always a challenge, and there may be some gold to be digged in learning from these ways of experiencing-by-proxy.

TRICKS OF THE TRADER

It was the sociologist Georg Simmel who pointed out that the stranger to a culture has the role/work/lifestyle of a trader, who buy and sell, and brings goods from one place to the other – owing goods, but no land, belonging to none of the cultures visited – living on borders. This form of life is close to that of the designer, and a designer can learn a lot from paying attention to the tricks of the trader.

PORTFOLIO AND STORYTELLING

For two weeks now, 9th semester Information Architecture students and I have worked on their portfolio information structure: What do potential audiences want to read, and how to structure content so that readers get the desired picture at a glance + get curious for more? We have tried to get the idea of relationship under the skin: It is not the content, it is not the readers or their context of reading per se, but the relationship in between, which generates interest. One solution, yet to be tried out, it that of storytelling: Storytelling has an information structure which already Aristotle put on form, and which more recently Ricoeur has elaborated: Mimesis. My suggestion is to try out building portfolio writing on the mimesis information structure. Like yesterday, we worked with Schutz's essay 'the stranger' and how, when being on the border between two cultures, you have to get conscious about your most basic assumptions, and then open yourself to negotiation. I suggest to make this a point in the IA students' method portfolio, by describing a personal experience of estranging yourself. The thing is: it is hard work, because you can not maintain the so convenient detached on-looker position, which Schutz so vividly describes, and which we as academics so enjoy.

ITEMS OF LEARNING

This week 9th semester Information Architecture students and I have been working on the relationship between 'presentation', 'practice' and 'perception'. I introduced Bateson's thesis that '...if we inflict a series of similar learning experiments on the same subject, we shall find that in each successive experiment the subject has a somewhat steeper proto-learning gradient, that he learns somewhat more rapidly. This progressive change in rate of proto-learning, we will call 'deutero-learning'. (Steps to an ecology of mind, 1972/2000, p. 167). I added that this explains Bateson's other thesis that '...Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality' (MInd and Nature, 1979/2002, p. 7) - Why? Because the pattern which connects the items of learning (= protolearning - thanks to Majken Kjærulff for clarifying that) is the deutorolearning, it is the habit of learning, which makes it possible to connect one instance to another, and create a rule. Hence the pattern of people, places, the things we do, the way we do them, should be kept stable for a certain case of learning. Scrum is an example: the morning meeting: standing in the same place, answering the same questions, provide a framework for understanding the differences, which makes a difference between last meeting and next meeting. So: Here's to rituals in teaching!