Lavendergarage

The problem and the pattern which connects

2011-08-22T11:47:00.000-07:00

Design problems are wicked because their solution exceeds what is ready to hand - on the other hand solutions are confined by the horizon of imagination of those who has the problem, and this horizon we may assume is framed by what they see as a solution space, and working rules for acting within this space - hence to reformulate a wicked problem we must exspand the imagination's solution space and rules of manipulation.

After Luhmann

2011-08-22T11:02:00.001-07:00

He is right, Luhmann: systems do not understand each other, they disturb, they mingle, and then maybe they change - but although informative for a social scientist, this position is not very helpfull to a designer - we must be concerned with what understanding - despite all disturbance - can run from a user to a producer and back, because the flow between producers, retail/politics, and users is the flow that eventually inform our choices and make things end up the way they do, in the market place or as an application on my desktop. So - designers can not stop at sense making as phenomenologists would recommend - we need to invent pattern languages which against all odds can generate communication between users and designers, between designers and engineers, between designers, engineers and customers. To say that communication in this chain is impossible is to say design is impossible.

and ….. phenomenology

2011-08-01T07:48:00.001-07:00

“Where were you then”? “What does your stomach tell you”? are common questions when journalists interview people involved in dramatic events. A search for embodied localized knowledge, it seems. The idea of common knowledge is under pressure, however, at the expense of the idea that experience is all we have. Locations do, however, not speak up themselves, neither do bodies. Humans make locations and bodies speak. Humans interpret experiences in language. Humans communicate. And as soon as we speak, we generate more speak. Language is the currency by which we exchange experience, and hermeneutics is the way we evaluate the exchange.

Phenomenology is a name for the acceptance of knowledge originating from experience, from being-in-the-world, but without language and without interpretation, sharing is impossible, and without evaluation through interpretation knowledge is impossible.

Hence, in case we want to evaluate a learning environment of some sort, let us begin by asking (1) Does this learning space allow participants’ experience to be spoken of? (2) Do participants share a language in which to exchange experiences? (3) Do participants share rules by which to commonly discuss and evaluate the exchange?

Hermeneutics - HELP

2011-07-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

Maybe it is the vacation - it certainly can't be the hot summerweather - anyways, I have got this void feeling about my research: what do I really know, what is the firm ground when researching Information Architecture and Information Ecology? I keep coming back to hermeneutics and to embodied cognitive semantics and to space as a phenomenon in a phenomenological sense - but I wonder if that can lead to improvements in design, still I keep trying to find my way

SUMMER IN MAINE

2011-05-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

Memorial day is tomorrow and my present voluntary exile – a guesthouse on campus at the University of Maine – is getting into summer. The sky is grey on the framed picture in our sitting room entitled ‘Summer in Maine’: A moose in a wide green meadow with lupines, a blueberry meadow, a small stream meandering, mountains as backdrop. A perfect match to the grey outside, infinite nuances of grey, which you learn to appreciate, since the costal climate sends showers persistently, day and night. Grey is also the news I just read on the Danish news site I follow, about billions of money to be saved by digitizing the forms, which travel between public administration and citizens in need of a passport, a building-a-carport-permit, or a maternity-leave-compensation-application. Dull as it may seem, each little transaction of data-translation in these departments requires transformation, a transformation with political, social and semiotic implications: read Spinuzzi’s ‘Tracing genres through organizations’, or read some of the publications from our just recently concluded research on how to employ interactive technologies (e.g. social media, web 2.0, pervasive and mobile technologies) eGov+ (http://www.egovplus.dk/index.php?id=2234) in the communication between government and citizens. There is no such thing as a transformation free travel of data from one information ecology to the next.
Still, while the moose keeps chewing grass in the meadows of Maine, I keep writing about ‘Information ecology and design of information systems’. The moose and I carry on, just as well, while politicians yell out their blue-sky visions, and maybe get elected for another term.

Change happens - understanding is hard work

2011-04-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

"You can only understand life backwards, but we must live it forwards." - This famous Kierkegaard quote runs contrary to the innovation rhetoric which sees innovation as progress while truth is that innovation is our effort to keep up with change in the environment without changing ourselves. Trying to understand backwards is about finding patterns, finding the breadcrumbs I dropped on my way out, it is about coming home, about having changed and discover it.

Spring again

2011-03-13T12:53:00.000-07:00

Like this blog has been sleeping since October, so have I it feels, at least, but now this old grizzlebear smells spring and crowl out of its winter dwelling, sniffing and coughing and starving. Back to the old routines of outdoor life - back to life, that is. "Write about us in your blog", one of the students said the other day. Well, ok then: Apart from repeating Steve Job's advice; stay hungry, stay foolish what is there to say but: we are working on it, "it" meaning the training in communicating about human information behavior: how we recognize a piece of information, how we search it out, and how we move it into our repertoire of things that helps us survive in a cruel world. We play the role of a clever project manager, and try to figure out how to communicate with users and customers, how to communicate with programmers, and how to make sure that for each project, the team members refelct on successes and failures and update their personal resume accordingly.

From 'tacit' to 'story'

2010-11-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

During the seminar we found that the first translation 'from tacit to story' worked well, letting tangibles and storytelling mutually support and enforce each other, so that understanding information ecology becomes easier, once you combine storytelling, theater, and working with tangibles. Unfortunately we did not have time to explore going 'from story to form'. The translation of stories into knowledge organization will take place in the virtual learning environment. Card (image and/or words) sorting activities are a challenge when people sit remotely and work. Another point from the seminar was that postponing 'vision' to the end made the outcomes much clearer, than in other cases, where we started with the vision part.

Transformative translation through tangibles

2010-10-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

I am teaching information ecology this week. I suggest to the students to take a 'discovery-route' running from 1. discovering knowledge organization to 2. discovering information foraging to 3. discovering information ecologies to 4. discovering design to 5. discovering visions, to ... wherever they as Information Architects want to go. Each 'to' represents a journey and a transformative translation - which is what I call 'discovery'. You can not arrive at the concept of 'information ecology' unless you have discovered the concept of 'knowledge organization', and so on and so forth. I find vision-design-information ecology-information foraging-knowledge organization mutually inclusive: without the one you can not understand the others. All these concepts are elusive, hence, we must make them tangible, to use them as 'hangers' for stories, metaphors and images - the works of transformative translations. Taking the discovery route implies communicating images, words on cards, drawings, and theater.
Thanks to my eLL www.ell.aau.dk/ colleague Thomas Ryberg http://twitter.com/tryberg who alerted me to the concept of permaculture, we will also explore this design method.

ICONIC RECIPE

2010-10-08T11:12:00.000-07:00

According to Rebecca's pocket of today http://www.rebeccablood.net/ IKEA has just launched a cookbook http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2010/09/24/homemade-is-best/ , presenting ingredients as pictures. Misplaced concreteness I'd claim, without having seen and tried it myself - but - I am going to.

ALLWAYS DO THE INTELLECTUALLY MOST IMPORTANT THING

2010-08-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

said Aron Sloman to me in 1987, when I visited Cognitive Studies Unit at University of Sussex as a PhD student, and asked him for advice on how to find my way as a researcher in between AI and the late Wittgenstein and Chris Freeman and the other scholars, whose work I was introduced to at Arbetslivscentrum in Stockholm. His advice has stayed with me: It helps me remember why I went into academia in the first place: pure selfish joy of being close to reason.In these early days of preparation for the autumn semester, where all the day-to-day business of administration is dimmed, we come close, in reading, in discussing over lunch, in having time to listen to each others ideas and arguments. Nice.

Design - re-assembling form

2010-07-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

I am half way through Latour's 'Reassembling the social', motivated by Mette Eriksen, who told me that Latour's way of seeing if and how things ask other intermediaries to become actors by asking them to do stuff is fruitfull in design. A different take than that of affordances and that of Krippendorf. I am still waiting for the clue, but I feel that my reading makes me appreciate my habit of listening to the voices of things, cultivated throughout childhood, and initially inspired by H.C. Andersen's fairytales.

REPEAT ition

2010-05-02T01:47:00.000-07:00

Doing it again, and again, and again is a precondition to become skilled. How to redefine repetition, from boredom to inspiring garage-time? I talked to a martial arts instructor yesterday. He told me that his students have to obey three rules to study under his guidance: 1. Never say "I can't", 2. No excuses for failure, 3. Eat the shit.

Simple, but not easy. I'd like to add a 4th: Time, task, and territory, the good old tavistock insight. It is a tremendous relief to know where to do what when, including where, and when to apply rule 1,2,3.

FORM

2010-04-18T00:04:00.000-07:00

This spring I have taught a course 'Design, Use and Meaning' where we have tried to update the Scandinavian tradition for participatory design with a semantic turn a la Krippendorf. We were grabbling with ideas, but it was like we hit a 'what is it that we are talking about, really' glass ceiling. My idea was and still is that we have to develop a product semantics for ICT applications. It must be domain- and setting specific, because what we need the semantics for is the communication with users - the 80% of design sense making, while the designers can add their ideas and knowledge about technical constraints for the other 20%. At first we worked through the Scandinavian tradition of involving users. Then we analyzed the history of the pneumatic tube, the logbook, the calendar - all interesting stuff, but we got kind of stuck - we lost the nerve to explore further. When I talked to Anne Marie Kanstrup about this, she said: It is because coming from participatory design, we do not know how to focus on form, we focus on use situations. So here is the challenge to participatory design: to develop a sense for form without loosing the capacity for situation.

Local R&D

2010-03-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

These days I am excited by finding ways of improving local research and development - which I take as another word for userdriven innovation - how to take that local creativity to other nodes in the network, and grow and come back. I know one example - the idea of quality circles which traveled from the UK to Norway, to Japan and to Europe - bu that is in a way a sad story, because it lost it's situatednes along the way. Will a statement like 'Humans first' help people to remember that such practices die if cut off from the lokal working culture?

CAN WE SEE LEARNING - AND CAN WE MANAGE IT?

2010-02-14T12:22:00.000-08:00

If the mind works like a mechanical system, following laws similar those according to which rockets and billard balls move - then yes. But if the mind works as systems of living communication - then we are limited to interpretations of behavior. A wealth of theories mushroom around this interpretation. And if you are an action researcher like myself, you also need methods for collecting data and for relating them to theory and go back and forth between theory and practice, if you want to build a strategy for managing learning. This week I will work on creating networks around action research in learning which involves ICT.

SPRING TERM 2010 Product semantics of ICT for development

2010-01-31T23:47:00.000-08:00

The graduate course 'Design -use and meaning' I teach this term is a continuation of the Design course last Autumn where we worked with designer-identity and basic design skills. Product semantics is the link, and Krippendorf's work is the backbone here, although it does not cover participatory design. Nor does it address eLearning Lab's research on ICT for development - so luckily, there is room for improvement, and lots of research work to do

DESIGN TOOL APPROPRIATION

2010-01-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

The Mobile Design Lab is part of e-Learning Lab, and it needs a make-over. This is high on my agenda this week. I plan to pack each element together with a brief description of its design-tool-potential. I consider the Mobile Design Lab a box for tools dedicated provocation, articulation and communication of conceptual ideas: we have tools for building personas, for building scenarios, and for forum theater. And we have games, designed by students over the years. All by inspiration from ITProduct design at the Mads Clausen Institute in Sonderborg, and further developed in the design workshops held by Anne Marie Kanstrup and I together with students.

A NEW BEGINNING

2009-12-31T07:16:00.000-08:00

What should happen in Lavendergarage in 2010 - stupid question since the future approaches us from behind. But what if I turn around, and face the past, can I know, then? Information Architecture as the underlying, invisible structure of information, of difference, how long can I drawn lines back? Together with students I'll be looking at log-book traditions, calendar traditions and air tube system traditions to identify patterns of interaction, and patterns of underlying information structures, this way hoping to inform the information architecture of a project team collaboration system the students are going to build a concept for. We will look for what users can do, which activities are mediated, and which role is assigned to the user - and I so look forward to this. This work will, maybe, lead me on to a fruitfull understanding of the Erwoll system in police investigation, a piece of work I have left for some years, and which I want to re-assume.

FROM SERVICE DELIVERY TO ...

2009-12-08T00:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended a seminar guided by Mark Munger, senior consultant, Valeocon, US in regi of the National task force for competence development in public service in Denmark. The approach promoted was named 'positive deviance' a combination of von Hippel's lead user thinking, appreciative inquiry, and Wenger's communities of practice thinking - organizational learning and development it is. A direction for applying this approach was given by Jacob Schjørring, Mindlab, who talked about moving from service delivery to involving citizens in forming relationships with service workers 'co-creation of new solutions for the public sector' was the term. I kept thinking of the graffiti 'hjælp politiet - tæv dig selv' (help the police - spank you yourself).
The discrepancy between Munger telling how to listen and give voice to all stakeholders, and Schjørring telling about how 'we' could get so-and-so citizens to co-create, was striking. Maybe, only if you seriously tried to walk the talk of Soren Kierkegaard and know how big you failed, you can tell the difference - I refer to his essay on authorship, chapter 1, §2, where he states what it is to be a good teacher:
‘All true helping begins with a humbling. The helper must first humble himself under the person he wants to help and thereby understand that to help is not to dominate, but to serve, that to help is not to be the most dominating, but the most patient, that to help is a willingness, for the time being, to put up with being in the wrong and not understanding what the other understands …’.

HARD DISK CRASH

2009-11-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

What's in a hard-disk? I thought I knew, but this weekend's crash of the hard disk of my beloved MacAir has taught me that I didn't. A hard disk holds much of the functionality, structure and style of work. I know that now. Having to re-generate functionality, structure and style of one's working life is a sad good bye to habits, and a hesitating, dounting hello to a new, and hopefully more secure, way of working. A wonderful new beginning - No! well, maybe. Great if your computer developes into a functional organ of your workings, but if the organ stops functioning, you feel like organ failure also in a physical sense. Do I have a memory outside that of my computer? The good news is Yes! I do remember my husbond, children, grandchildren and friends - but I have difficult staying in contact - as for now I still need to get scype up running again - anyways: I am grateful for the support from the IT-guys at work and at home, and for almost being computerized again

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

2009-11-08T06:59:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-17T01:54:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-16T04:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-07T11:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-29T01:26:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-14T23:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-09T02:37:00.000-07:00

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!

Information architecture - the invisible infrastucture of communication

2009-08-24T00:42:00.000-07:00

Communication travels from one thinking system to another on an infrastructure, which is invisible, because it consists of relationships =differences, which make a difference to someone in one of the thinking systems involved. I call the infrastructure of communication 'Information Architecture'.

Information Architecture - constantly an object of design - is difficult to talk about.Strangely enough, since humans have a long history of communicating about invisible things: in ancient times we talked with the spirits of nature - using our imagination. We handled problems of molecules and microorganisms before we could trace them in a microscope - using theory.

To talk about the invisible infrastructure of communication itself, however, we need both imagination, a theory - and a mirror, because of the inherent reflexivity of communication: talking with the environment is always also talking with ourselves.

This week I am preparing a crash-course in Information Architecture for 9th semester Information Architecture students - where I invoke imagination, theory, and hopefully also introduce a mirror, in order for the coming information architects to get to grips with form elements and functional elements and make them able to create (new) information architectures.

All we need is - sensemaking?

2009-08-14T11:02:00.000-07:00

After a week of planning of teaching and research, and the anniversary of an old colleague, I wonder: What - in the relationship between humans, work and technology - has, really, changed over the past 25 years?

Fear and hope seem stable, compassion and vanity as well, and nothing moves without the sense making activity of humans.
- But technology has changed - good to know, and very consoling for us who make a living out of designing and studying technology: because of the change in technology sensemaking is needed, anew, every day. There is the challenge, right at hand.

Casablanca moods

2009-08-05T12:56:00.000-07:00

This Monday I re-assumed working at e-Learning Lab at Aalborg University, with focus on teaching design theory and methodology. I have learnt a lot from being part of IT-product Design at the Mads Clausen Institute for a year - I miss the colleagues there, yet I also enjoy being together with my colleagues in eLL - so in sum I have gained a lot, and I am grateful.

DESIGN OF INTERFACES TO METERING IN THE HOME

2009-07-26T11:33:00.000-07:00

Is it important that home metering devices comply with basic psychological needs for autonomy and relatedness? Usually designers focus on cognition, technical feasibility and style, and design of interfaces typically comes rather late in the process. But if metering is to benefit energy conservation and a more frugal lifestyle in general, cognitive and ecological approaches alone, may - despite their obvious importance - not do the trick.

Currently I am reading up on Deci & Ryan's so-called 'organismic' approach, which is about humans' need to feel autonomy as well as community. The empirical material Anne Marie Kanstrup and I have collected on user reactions to electricity metering in the home holds so many puzzling details, that it deserves more analysis, and a stronger theoretical underpinning of the analytical model.

Ideas relating to smart metering and smart grid technology are flowing abundantly at the moment, but little attention is given to socio-psychological and cultural-historical aspects: Humans have metered nature and resources like forever, and apart from the obvious reason of trying to predict and preserve living conditions, it is likely that this activity contributes to human development of both autonomy and community. Just as Gibson's concept of affordances offer designers conceptual guidance regarding how artifact can become a tool in the hands of humans, a better conceptualization of the role of the experience of household metering may improve chances that these systems can serve as regulating 'traffic lights.'

WITTGENSTEIN

2009-07-17T13:44:00.000-07:00

YouTube provides us with a quick version of what Wittgenstein is about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0cN_bpLrxk and the following. Ben Mathews has provided me with a deeper entry, for which I am most grateful: Norman Malcolm's Wittgenstein-book: 'A religious point of view' with a response by Peter Winch, Cornell University Press, 1995. Pelle Ehn, Ingela Josefson, Bo Göranzon and Hans Siggaard Jensen all introduced Wittgenstein to me in the early 1980ies - and I stayed faithfull to the little I understood, I should say. But Malcolm's book makes an important point, which I did not get back then: The limitations of analytical thought, and it is just SO important these days, where all design knowledge and all design competence is seeked codified - there are at the moment more than a million entries on 'design thinking' - give that a thought!

PENNSYLVANIA

2009-06-29T18:05:00.000-07:00

Been to Pennsylvania for the first time - traveling the back roads for five days. Most puzzling so far was last nights dinner at an Amish culture house. Somehow energy conservation is on the forefront all the time: the ancient cableing, the enormous stand by consumption, the air cons, the freezers, the proportions of meals and drinks, the cornfields meant for making bioethanol, the cars and cars and cars - being part of all this silences me in a strange way - and then the nature: Pennsylvania Grand Canyon so overwhelmingly beautiful, and in the mountains, all of a sudden an area of the forrest that brought us back from summer to spring, with smell and all, and a grizzle bear was seen in the village where we slept last night - on a trail we walked just two hours earlier .. :-)

TALENT MANAGEMENT

2009-06-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Today I attended the 5th international conference on energy efficiency in domestic appliances EEDAL 2009 http://www.eedal.eu/

I presented on behalf of myself and Anne Marie Kanstrup and the FEEDBACK project, http://feedback.noe.dk/projektbeskrivelse/pdf/engprojbesk.pdf, a paper on consumer narratives about received feedback about electricity consumption via e-mail or SMS for a year. In itself interesting stuff. But the experience of the day, for me however, was when Mr. John R. Mollet, Vice President, Corporate Development of the International Copper Association, Ltd. (ICA) in New York presented his and his associates' work on bringing better supply of electricity to the urban poor of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

John Mollet's responsibility is to travel the world to build partnerships with governments, multilateral agencies, non-governmental organizations, public and private foundations, and industry to coordinate optimally their activities with ICA's Sustainable Energy, Environment / Health and in Technology programs.
- What is GREEN PEACE saying, I ask myself. I am sure ( and I am a donor) that Green Peace will have some stories about the International Copper Association, Ltd. (ICA).

Nevertheless, Mr. Mollet presents a convincing case of making a positive difference for illegal residents in the urban area of Sao Paulo, by way of making electricity available on a legal and safe basis.

Mr. Mollet has worked at ICA since 1998, most recently as Vice President, Sustainable Electrical Energy.
Before joining ICA, Mollet held several senior management positions in the metals industry, first as Project Director at the Bekaert Corporation and then as a Senior Product Manager at Tetko, Inc. (now Sefar America, Inc.). His career covers responsibilities in purchasing, sales, marketing, technical services, project and business management. Besides the electrical and electronic markets, his experiences include electromagnetic compatibility; steel reinforcement of radial tires and rubber products; precision filter media in synthetic and metallic materials for a wide variety of applications such as medical, aerospace, automotive, food, beverage, water. Mr. Mollet is a graduate electrical engineer from the University of Ghent, Belgium.

And here it is that I have to leave Mr. Mollet's CV, and think about the parable of the talents trusted (Mat. 25: 14-30 for those who have access to a Christian bible). The thing in this parable is: What do you do with the talents invested in you.
Mr. Mollet choose to travel the world telling about a way to electrify the poor in ways that also make them citizens -agents of society.

What do I do with the talents invested in me, I ask myself.

ON THE BUSINESS BORDER BETWEEN AID AND EXPLOITATION

2009-06-04T23:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I learnt about the existence of a Danish organization www.iug.dk which organizes help from Engineers to Médecins Sans Frontières - such a wonderful idea. In the coming week I attend a big international conference 'joint action on climate change' http://www.jaocc.net/ where Anne Marie Kanstrup will present our paper on the difference between perceived affordance and perceived annoyance when it comes to mundane housekeeping activities such as using electricity and reducing the consumption of electricity. We worked with eight families on the issue of designing motivating feedback, and through the design activities they formulated the position, that the effect of feedback depends on when, where, and how much information is given. This they agreed on, regardless of difference in values and attitudes towards electricity consumption in general.
At the same conference I'll be chairing a session on the' Bottom of the Pyramid' business approach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_of_the_pyramid, where the line between exploitation and help is up for debate.
On Friday, June 12, I, ,representing SPIRE, participate in a conference at Alsion 'Cradle to Cradle' and conduct a workshop together with Michael Braungart on how to map out the process of designing a cradle to cradle product (SPIRE is a strategic
research centre at the University of Southern Denmark with a unique approach to user-driven innovation
– participatory innovation).
From all of this I will take some questions and maybe even answers regarding the designer's role on the business border between aid and exploitation.

HARVEST MOON

2009-05-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

is astronomically speaking not here yet, but exams are, and for the teacher it means harvest of feedback - about teaching and learning. In the twilight silver shine of the moon the teacher meets him or herself in a personal experience of the shortcomings of reason: so much for planning, so much for benchmarking and careful selection of literature, and yet: the joy of seeing students grow and take charge is such a gift! Being able to manage oneself in new and challenging situations is after all the testbed of theoretical accomplishments.

And afterwards, I will read to the moon about patterns, which connects the items of learning, and mirror neurons as a possible way of grounding this otherwise ephemeral notion.

MEANWHILE ...

2009-05-14T01:22:00.000-07:00

I re-read Gregory Bateson's paper 'Social planning and the concept of deutero-learning (Steps pp 159-176), especially the concluding paragraph: " All we need to be sure of is that, at any moment, achievement may be just around the corner, and, true or false, this can never be tested. We have got to be like those few artists and scientists who work with this urgent sort of inspiration, the urgency that comes from feeling that great discovery, the answer to all our problems, or great creation, the perfect sonnet, is always only just beyond our reach, or like the mother of a child who feels that, provided she pay constant enough attention, there is real hope that her child may be that infinately rare phenomenon, a great and happy person'

- Nordahl Grieg's poem' Kringsatt av fiender' comes to mind 'som om du bar et barn, varsomt på armen'

CRADLE TO ......

2009-05-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Cradle to cradle is a design concept coined by Michel Braungart- see http://www.epea.com/index.php - and highly relevant to the idea of design being everything from God's creation to the forming of garbage bins.

Just like with the concepts of Access2Innovation (http://www.access2innovation.com/) and base of the pyramide (http://www.bop-protocol.org/ ), cradle-to-cradle has sustainability written all over, with the noble goal of saving humanity from the monumental catastrophies of human behavior as its mission.

Does Gaia care about design? Is Gaia a concept designers can work with? How about love and design? Hate and design? What is it about design anyway? Deep questions, and no answers. Chris Heape suggests I read Noel G. Charlton's 2008 attemtpt to link Bateson's concept of 'mind' to the Gaia concept of sustainability "Understanding Gregory Bateson - mind, beauty and the sacred earth'.

INTERACTION DESIGN

2009-04-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

This week will be about wrapping up teachings in aspects of interaction design: what are the key elements, what are the germ cell components from which this activity, this profession, this discipline involves, what can NOT be taken away in case we are talking about Interaction Design? Two conference papers about interaction design of feedback on electricity consumption to private households written together with Anne Marie Kanstrup are due: one for the EEDAL 2009 in Berlin 'Energy efficiency in domestic appliances and lightening' conference http://www.eedal.eu/ , and one for the JAOCC conference in Aalborg 'Joint action for climate change http://www.jaocc.net/ - both are about outcomes of the FEEDACK project http://feedback.noe.dk/ user driven innovation research. Also this research is about interaction design, and brings a lot to bear on key interaction design questions.

INNOVATION LITERACY

2009-04-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

This week's primary task is to explain to a number of different audiences the added value of teaching innovation - this is an old hobby horse of mine - that for democracy in innovation to be real, it has to be taught in primary school - and on Thursday schoolchildren will actually visit Alsion to hear - among other things - why I became a researcher of innovation. We can all improve the technology we surround us with - humans have done that always, sometimes to the benefit of the few, sometimes to the benefit of the many - in all cases imperfection is the home of invention, and innovation is the destination. It all begins with being able to tell the difference between perfect and imperfect, between good and bad, between right and wrong - that is innovation literacy, and there is no conclusion, just a constant negotiation of criteria, conditions and conceptualizations - that is the democratic part, not the technology per se.

HORIZONS ...

2009-04-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

In the 'Horizon Report 2009' http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/chapters/trends/ we can read that because companies like Apple has opened for third party development to their mobile technology 'educational content grow at a fantastic pace' and further that 'Collective intelligence may give rise to multiple answers, all equally correct, to problems. The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are redefining scholarship as we grapple with issues of top-down control and grassroots scholarship. Today’s learners want to be active participants in the learning process – not mere listeners; they have a need to control their environments, and they are used to easy access to the staggering amount of content and knowledge available at their fingertips'

In chapter 7 of 'Angles fear' Gregory Bateson claims that rule-following in acts of knowing mainly serves the purpose of protect the fragile boundaries and make people able to tell the difference - between the sacred and the profane, the aethetic and the coveted, the intentional and the unconscious, and between thinking and feeling. These boundaries, the tacit rules, are continually under pressure, Bateson claims, and gives examples of what he sees as violatio.

To me, claiming that finding content on a webpage by a mobile device and discussing it with friends in a coffeeshop should give rise to 'collective intelligence' is a violation of the notion of knowledge. I want, once again, to return the wisdom of the Little Prins in Saint Exupery's novel: 'It is the time you waste on your rose that makes it so precious'. There is no way a round it: the high road to knowledge is hard work: blood, sweat and tears - it is experience that counts: always mobile, seldom intelligent, travelling from the collective realm to the personal ditto, and then back for verification.

Paul Ricoeuer said it so clearly in 'Time and Narrative': SPACE OF EXPERIENCE, HORIZON OF EXPECTATION or think of the WABI SABI aesthetics - thanks Jo, for the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00j8bkc

CATCHING UP

2009-04-06T00:15:00.000-07:00

This week - easter week - will be about catching up: with family, friends, work, sport, and culture, so is my plan, which is actually not a plan. Today commenting on thesis-work has priority together with a visit in the Berlin TV tower. The rest must follow as sun shines and trees come out.

DESIGN ANTHROPOLOGY

2009-03-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

This week will be mostly about DAIM, http://chokobar.wordpress.com/ , the research project on design anthropology where designers - practictioners and academics and students from DKDS and IT product Design work on ways of letting everyday practices inspire design. Phase I , the recycling case, is coming to end, and phase 2 'golden projects' is about to begin. My research question in this is to what extent, and why, collaborative development of design languages is the solution to the problem of representing and transforming user-experiences of need and opportunity into new products, and in specific how the mechanism of projective identification relates to learning in the moment-to-moment encounters where such design languages are born.

WabiSabi and User Centred Design

2009-03-22T11:33:00.000-07:00

Wabi Sabi can not be grasped or defined. However, Leonard Koren makes an attempt in his book: 'Wabi-Sabi'. There are stories of tea, which opens for the understanding, and today I received a picture of an unfolded tea sprout - which I Wednesday evening enjoyed as tea, and which on Thursday morning opened as portrayed here at the bottom of the empty cup. Somehow the picture tells what I in three consecutive lectures am going to talk aboutl this week: a systemic aesthetics: 'The whole is always in a metarelationships with its parts. As in logic the propositions can never determine the metaproposition, so also in matters of control, the smaller context can never determine the larger (Bateson in Steps, p 267) The meta-relationship which connects contexts is what Bateson understood as aesthetics: the need for double description/relational information, which is the source of innovations such as metaphors, art, science, religion, and poetry - designers should be sensitive to such patterns. If you look at the drawings on sustainbility you get the drift of what is NOT communicating about relationships http://computingforsustainability.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/visualising-sustainability/

IS RECESSION THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

2009-03-14T04:54:00.000-07:00

Marketing consultant Martin Lindström (‘Buyology’) says in NYTimes March 14: ‘Two concepts apply. First don’t ask consumers what they want; figure out what they need. (No one knew they wanted an airbag, but they knew they wanted safer cars.) In recessions, affordable, small luxuries, like chocolate and perfume, hold their own, as do cheap entertainments like movies. Second, practical features give consumers a reason to make a purchase. Wellington boots sell because they’re useful — and have clever designs. Products that protect our assets and homes also do well, like anti-virus software. Shopping doesn’t stop in recessions, but consumers need a reason beyond just impulse. ‘ To me this sends a strong message to design anthropology: anthropologist should know how to get to understand user needs I think – but my dear colleague Wendy Gunn and I have been over it many times – she resists to talk a bout need. As I take it she – and many others - resists the ontological part. Frankly I do not understand their argument, but maybe this recession will be a dawn, not only of inventions, but also of a renewed epistemological debate beyond social constructivism? Bateson’s ‘Mind & Nature’ would be a point of departure as pointed out by Jesper Hoffmeyer in his Introduction to ‘A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics’, Springer 2008, where he quotes Bateson in Mind & Nature, p. 14 ‘ … a story is a little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance.’

VISUALIZATION

2009-03-08T03:09:00.000-07:00

I want to add Grove to my awareness list, because every time I go there I feel good about possibilities of visualization. These days we live through visual communication and storytelling, and somehow this fact should pervade the way we plan and communicate about design projects. On the other hand - plans are also made to nail down contracts about who is doing what when, hence un-equivocal clarity across different experiences, practices and languages is a must. Sounds like a contraction in terms as well as in practice, hence a compelling design challenge :-) Tinkering may be a stepping stone on the way, staged performance another, but at some point the articulation process must land - and I would like to land it in a form of pictorial design brief. At the moment I just do not know how. But in the DAIM project as well as in teaching User Centered Design I try out all possible ways ...

BODY, BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR

2009-03-01T02:53:00.000-08:00

This week's agenda is tangible interaction, and we will begin tomorrow with Bødker & Bøgh Andersens excellent model of mediation. As for now I just returned from owl-spotting, tree-hugging and dog-padding in the Schloss Park Charlottenburg, where birds were singing, the sun shining, and thick and thin, tall and small people of all ages were welcoming spring on its first day. If those ancient trees could talk ... Tree-hugging is tangible interaction with - with what? The sub-liminal part of me coming out of human history? The tree and I are branches on the same trunk of life as Jesper Hoffmeyer would put it in his bio-semiotics - and hurrah for that.

FACEBOOK feeling

2009-02-23T13:38:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow SPIRE people have a seminar, and members of the SPIRE facebook group will know what it is about :-)

A couple of weeks ago I was washing the dishes while having my computer open on Facebook, and I felt like writing in the field 'Ellen is ..' but not about dishwashing. The snow had been falling all evening, and I got an urge to write 'Ellen is walking in the snow with bare feet' - just to realize that I could not write that without actually having done so - Hence, for the first time in my life I went out on the lawn barefooted in the dark. It felt not nice, not bad, vaguely strange, though, and I returned quickly, but taken on my woolen socks afterwards felt SO good.

To those who think facebook is too virtual - NO!

TO KNOW WHERE YOU WANT TO GO DOES NOT PREVENT YOU FROM ENDING UP SOMEWHERE ELSE

2009-02-01T11:15:00.000-08:00

Driving from Berlin to Sønderborg without map/tomtom/phone/ brought me to a village called Zabel, and three nice citizens cheered me and lead me back on track - Hannes Wader's 'Wieder Unterwegs'-epos came to mind.

Monday the UCD-students start their work on usability-evaluating the SparOmeter, and I look forward to the information and the ideas, we can give back to SYDenergi and project Zero.

Wednesday is the official enauguration of the SPIRE Center - the program is great with DACAPO theater and Base of the Pyramid-seminar in the morning, and in the end the studio-housewarming presentations, all under the auxspicies of participatory innovation.

GETTING READY TO MOVE

2009-01-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

The spring semester starts out next week, which implies all sorts of last minute check ups and corrections + the thrill of beginning something new. For me the new is the mix of engineering, business and design students and the case – redesign of the SparOmeter, which the providers and governmental agencies still promote as a tool in the service of household electricity saving.
Also this week I’ll attend an exciting 2-day seminar on ‘Intangibles of Everyday Living – Designing for Air, Energy, Waste and Money‘, which I’m sure will inspire upcoming paper writing to the EEDAL conference in Berlin this summer on ‘End-use metering and informative billing – customer positions’, where Anne Marie Kanstrup and I will promote the insight that customers want metering to become a social object.
And speaking of Berlin, this weekend I’ll move into a flat in Charlottenburg, where I expect to spend quite a number of weekends this spring.

TAKE IT EASY AND BE AWARE OF GLASS WALLS, THEY HIT YOU WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT THEM TO

2009-01-18T00:49:00.000-08:00

Thursday last week I splashed into a glass wall because I was in a hurry and my mind had run ahead of my body. My nose still hurts and my head aches, so this week I am going to take it really easy: mind and body should enjoy the pleassure of being together for a while. Luckily, lots of adventures are to be explored, still. On Monday night design anthropology studio people will work on our prestentation of the studio for the SPIRE opening af February 4 2009. There are lots of ideas on the table. Tuesday and Wednesday the SPIRE people are on retreat at Sandbjerg working out the content of the first SPIRE Book, and Thursday the students will present the outcome of their January design work.
And before all that to happen I have critical reflection papers to read and grade, and a longstanding promise to myself and the 1years students to fullfill: a summ up of the autumn's IT-visions course to help the memory of the students, especially those writing papers for the SIder 2009 conference 'Flirting with the furture' in Eindhoven April 15-17, where paper submission deadline is February 1.

PEDAGOGICAL TWEAKING

2009-01-12T02:41:00.000-08:00

The overall planning of the courses is now in place, and I go back and forth over the mix of lectures, workshops and checkpoints, that may at best bring students to engage and learn. It is a creative process, and relaxed also, in the sense that experience has over and over taught me the difference between planning and situated action, so - although indispensable - for good and for bad planning does not account for the actual outcome. Sources of inspiration is this week plenty: Mette Mark Larsen gives highlights from her stay down under on Tuesday, all of Wednesday is about the DAIM project at the Design School in Copenhagen, and Thursday we have a work space design workshop all day, Friday I am censoring Information Architecture projects in Aalborg, and also Judith Gregory and Anne Marie Kanstrup will come visit for dinner, so it will probably be weekend before I am done with my pedagogical tweaking – ☺

Welcome 2009!

2009-01-05T01:48:00.000-08:00

Sun is shining, its is freezing cold, and our pond is ready for iceskating. 2009 has arrived with an edge. Plain and simple - lets go working. My mind is on an attempt to theorize over user driven innovation as an activity arrizing from a need, mediated by ability, and realized though opportunities as hand, the implications of which being to conceptualize need in a Maslowian sense, ability as skill beheld by acting individuals, and opportunities being affordances of the environment in a Barker-Gibsonian sense - summing up to seeing user driven innovation as social- and environmental psychological phenomenon. Hope to be able to work this out.

'You can never hold back Spring'

2008-11-30T06:52:00.000-08:00

I quote Tom Waits here, because this week will be much about planning for teaching in the spring term. Seasoning is one of the beauties of the teaching profession - it is like your body knows, just like a farmer's body knows: now is the time for cultivating the soil, getting ready for sowing the seeds. But - to stay in the farmer metaphor - also we are close to harvesting the fruits of our work in the autumn semester, so in sum: teaching and planning for teaching is the headline of this week.

INNOVATION PRACTICE WEEK, WITH AN EMPHASIS ON THE USE OF VIDEO

2008-11-24T01:47:00.000-08:00

Innovation and conservation behavior: methods for engaging actors in restraining themselves – I’ll sit in on a project presentation, followed by two days of SPIRE partner seminar, where my focus will be research on how to move inventions through business case to realization, concluding with Kyle Kilbourn defending his PhD thesis on patients as skilled practitioners. Running through these activities will be a specific methodological question: In what way are video-clips of skilled practice productive? For an invention to stand the ‘business trial’, it must invoke the imagination of managers and CEOs within seconds, and here video-snippets are effective in their capability to display situations as a. understandable sequences of movements, inviting storytelling, inviting identification with happy moments of flow, media of communicating before/after differences. Two questions arise: what characterizes busimess-case decision-situations that are receptive to video-snippets, and what characterizes video-snippets that communicates well in these situations. A convincing argumentation, theoretically as well as by examples, needs to be worked out.

Performance week

2008-11-15T06:43:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday I give a workshop on methods and techniques supporting user-driven innovation at a Network of E-Learning seminar at Aalborg University.

On Wednesday we have our IT-visions class at UCD dealing with the IT-visions in Alan Kay's Dynabook and Nigropontes One Laptop pr child, discussed in the light of positions about democracy of education of Dewey and Barber.

Thursday is DHRS symposium at Aalborg University - I so look forward especially to the 1 years presentation of videowall-tool and recycling skills videos. My own contribution is about listening as an important skill in design education - hope I can make myself understood.

The red thread running through these activities? This is what the thinking week was supposed to make out, and well: it is all about listening; why listening is so difficult and how to learn this skill - and I do not have any answers yet

Thinking week

2008-11-11T00:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Torben Vestergaard, director of Cathrinesminde Brickfield Museum, http://www.museum-sonderjylland.dk/ told me about the industrial history of Sønderjylland - exiting, and so much (in the small scale) like the industrial history of Silicon Valley - food for thought, when we think about 'the soil of innovation'. Thinking should be this week's headline, since the Feedback II report draft MUST be completed, and preparation for two presentations next week MUST be done. I should think about the pattern which connects the items of innovation - that was the subject of Elisabeth Vestergaard, head of institute for border region studies here at University of Southern Denmark, Torben Vestergaard and my conversation last night: Why does some regions flourish at a certain point? Is it when manifacturing, education and some sort of spiritual Geist come in sync? We talked about Bateson, of course, about anthropology, and about the importance of emphasizing the comparative aspect - comparison as a precondition for telling the difference, which makes a difference.

Utility discourses

2008-11-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

This week, Nov. 3-7, writing has priority - I am on the brink on having several things almost ready - the DHRS paper on design skills to be submitted Monday, the Feedback II evaluation report together with Anne Marie Kanstrup no later than Thursday, a journal paper also together with Anne Marie Kanstrup on user engagement also Thursday - and abaove all this there is this question hovering: what is the pattern which connects the items of learning frugality, when it comes to how electricity and heating and water - can less be more, when it comes to utilities?

Graduate studies in IT Product Design

2008-10-26T05:56:00.000-07:00

This week, from Monday Oct.27 to Thursday Oct. 30 is devoted to presentations, planning and meetings regarding the graduate course program on IT Products Design http://www.ug.dk/internationalt.aspx?article_id=english-techitproductdevelop . The program is wonderful and deserves a lot of attention. It positions itself vis a vis ‘innovation management’ and ‘design’ study programs, and programs on Interaction Design. Its profile is engineering meaning planning, designing, constructing, operating, and maintaining activities, which transform resources of labor, capital (money, materials, & equipment), and knowledge into the physical facilities required to meet a broad range of social and economic needs. Its pedagogy is case- and problem based, with focus on innovation, through value-adding participation of all relevant stakeholders, by means of tangible interaction.
On Friday Anne Marie Kanstrup og jeg work out the draft of the FEEDBACK2 report.

To do-s of Oct. 20-24

2008-10-19T04:05:00.000-07:00

Monday is dedicated to analyzing 22 interviews with customers from SydEnergi , who have received SMS and/or e-mail about their electricity consumption as part of the experiments conducted by the FEEDBACKproject. On Tuesday administrative work will take up most of the time, while on Wednesday Klaus Kaasgaard. Kaasgaard is invited by SPIRE , and he will talk about business strategies and user driven innovation. On Thursday Dr. Aleksandr Tsypin, Danfoss Russia, Dr. Victor F. Kuzishcin, Docent at Moscow Power Engineering Institute and Dr. Alexander V. Andryushin, Senior Lecturer of Moscow Aviation Institute visit SPIRE and I'll replace the director Jacob Buur in presenting SPIRE and UCD activities. On Friday the department of border region studies has a big event, which I'll attend.

2008-10-19T00:59:00.000-07:00