Skip to content

Superheroes of Unfinished Design

When I was thinking over the weekend about the sort of design that might be paradigmatic for Unfinished Business, I thought of my top 3 designs and designers.

The design of Central Park and the original landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmstead. The core idea of his then newly conceived art of design, landscape architecture, was its central concept of “distant effects”.

The design of the sovereign as an artificial person and the original design of the first AI system, Thomas Hobbes.

The design of the Constitution of the United States and the so-called Founding Fathers (the crew that launched the biggest start-up of ‘em all).

Who are yours?

Innovation Parkour’s 1st “Live Fire” Scramble

Yesterday, Innovation Parkour (IP) co-creators, Matt Milan and Michael Anton Dila led the first IP live fire exercise at the Net Change Week at MaRS. We had almost 40 participants, who were ultimately divided into 6 project teams. After an introduction to the core ideas of Innovation Parkour, the participants were set an assignment and given 60 min to complete it, report back to the rally-point and present their group’s response to the challenge.

After making the disclosure that Innovation Parkour is a “social software” project in alpha and that they were the code base, the participants dove into a project to discovery and design a tour of Toronto’s Discovery District.

We learned a lot. We had set out to challenge three myths of innovation: that’s it is always expensive, time-consuming and requires deep specialization. The group’s work and presentations after just an hour of working with people they’d just met were remarkable validations of some of our assertions and theory.

As we toss this out to the group of participants I hope they’ll add their impressions, describe what they experienced and learned and that they’ll share more of their work/media from the session.

Thanks all, for the lively discussion, thoughtful questions, your insights and your participation.

Here’s the presentation we gave:

Here’s the video of Team 3’s exploration of the piste of discovery.

Net Change: Innovation Parkour on the go! from SiG @ MaRS on Vimeo.

Innovation Parkour Video

A video of the talk that Michael Dila and Matthew Milan gave on Innovation Parkour at the 2009 Planners Unite conference in Toronto, Canada.  Innovation Parkour is a ‘technology’ under developement as part of the Unfinished Business project.


Innovation Parkour - Toronto Planners Unite Conference from Matthew Milan on Vimeo.

Thinking about Design Thinking: an emerging literature?

For all the talk about design thinking, it is more than a little bit difficult to pin down just what it actually is. Who would be the definitive authority on the matter? Where is design thinking’s authoritative publication, its approved reading list, the schools which teach its tenets, organizations that instantiate its practice, or the guilds of bona fide practitioners of design thinking?

Does design thinking need all or any of these things in order to be considerate legitimate? And to be considered a legitimate what, exactly?

If, as many seem to assert, design thinking is indeed an important new capability, one that deserves a place alongside other strategic practices of business and management, then it seems reasonable that we ought be be definite about what it is exactly. That sounds easier than it is.

In line with Clay Shirky’s idea that we can now “organize without organizations” and David Weinberger’s notion that the mess of Internet culture and the disorder of our ideas is not something we necessarily have to fix, I am inclined to suggest that design thinking is not broken just because we can”t fit it into a neat schema of boxes (and arrows?).

But, neither can we accept that design thinking has no boundaries at all. Because for it to be even an idea, whatever else it might be, we have to have some minimal formula or criteria for what the idea includes, as well as what it rules out.

I recommend here a kind of light weight empiricism. Let’s start by looking at where we find the idea showing up and see what sense we can make of it as we follow it on a path from its emergence into language and along its way to shaping or informing behavior, practice, and, well…thinking.

There seems to be some consensus that the current usage of the phrase traces back to IDEO and to Tim Brown, in particular. It seems likely that instances of the term may pre-date the IDEO vernacular, but I’m happy to credit them with the genesis of the idea to give a baseline to what we all mean when we say or refer to design thinking. But, when push comes to shove, what is it precisely we are referring to when we use the phase in a sentence?

With all this in mind I offer up my very crude experiment into trying to identify the literature of design thinking, which I conducted on Twitter this morning (13 March 2009). I asked a network of people who have more than a passing interest in the currency of the idea of design thinking, what they would vote as their own top three books in the “field”.

I’ve ended up with an eclectic list of nearly 50 books from just over a dozen people, so far. What’s interesting is that only a very few books (most hits were on Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind and John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity, hmmm) were mentioned more than once.

I hope commenters will add still others, offer up reasons for why their choices belong on this list, suggest patterns and thoughts about emerging or organizing memes.

Mostly, I want to thank everyone who responded to my Tweets on this question. The list includes many titles I did not know, which I am now looking forward to becoming better acquainted with as I continue to puzzle over and think about design thinking.

P.S. As I get time and comments come in, I will both add to this list and link titles and authors as much as I’m able. I will also try to post the list with link text visible so others can borrow, add, remix, and share.

Ten Faces of Innovation, Tom Kelly
Business Model Generation, Alex Osterwalder (forthcoming)
Mental Models, Indi Young
Art of Innovation, Tom Kelly The Art of Innovation - Tom Kelly
Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda
Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz
Design Methods, John Chris Jones
Fifteen Things Ray & Charles Teach Us, Keith Yamashita
Design Management, Brigitte Borja de Mozota
Small Change, Nabeel Hamdi
A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink
Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs.
Abstracting Craft and/or Digital Ground, Malcolm McCullough
The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger
After Postmodernism, Jose Lopez & Garry Potter
The Social Construction of Reality, Peter L Berger & Thomas Luckmann
Writings on Cities, Henri Lefebvre
Understanding Material Culture, Ian Woodward
The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin
Macroshift, Evin Laszlo
Web of Life, Fritjof Capra
The Heart of Enterprise, Stafford Beer
Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough
The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin
Artful Making, Austin & Lee Devin
The Green Imperative, Victor Papanek
Massive Change, Bruce Mau
Designing Interactions, Bill Moggeridge
The Difference, Scott Page
Insatiable Curiosity, Helga Nowotny & Mitch Cohen
The Innovators Dilemma, Clayton Christensen
Naked Innovation, Zachary Jean Paradis & Dave McGaw
Consilience, E.O.Wilson
The Creative Priority, Jerry Hirshberg
Design Thinking, Peter G. Rowe
Art & Visual Perception, Rudolf Arnheim
Homo Ludens, Johan Huizing
Mechanization Takes Command, Siegfried Giedion
Inquiry by Design, John Zeisel
Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon
A Simpler Way, Margaret Wheatley
The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp
Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton
In the Bubble, John Thackara
Design Research, Brenda Laurel
Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen & Michael Raynor
Critical Path, R. Buckminster Fuller
The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander

Keep the Internet Open: The Value of the Unfinished “Design” of the Web

This past Sunday New York Times has an article about security and the Internet. This is not too strange. More and more, people use the Internet for commerce and commercial transactions. People pay bills, buy everything from books and DVDs to automobiles and T-shirts bearing crowdsourced designs. People worry, though less and less it seems to me, that something bad will happen: their credit card information will be stolen and abused, their computer will fall prey to a virus costing them their family photos or, worse yet, that a massive cyber-attack will bring down major financial institutions (though clearly that can be done by something far more insidious and low-tech).

What surprised me in this piece were not the general concerns, but the paranoid and misguided view of “one alternative [that] would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety.”

I think that the comforts offered by closed systems, whether the gated communities the wealthy use to keep out the riff-raff or the ones that AOL, once upon a time, used to create a sort of Disneyland of the web, offer us the trade of safety in exchange for our freedom.

As it turns out, the sacrifice we make in that exchange is as much epistemic (about what we can know) as it is about freedom of expression or privacy. David Weinberger has eloquently made the case that the Internet has been able to scale precisely because it has formed what he calls a “Permission-free zone.” The Internet as a space without rules and managers forms a kind of digital Wild West.

If the Wild West parallel is a strong one, some argue, then a day is coming when we need to start thinking about putting a Sheriff or two in place to makes sure the townsfolk are safe from the stray bullets of lawless gunfighters. The RIAA and MPAA and countless others who find their “property” (though really it is their business model they are tying to shield from market and technological innovation) under threat, have tried to introduces electronic deadbolts and security systems through Digital Rights Management. But it almost exclusively the music publishers and movie producer/distributors who care about this. Users (the audience) have never asked for or benefited this “security”. Increasingly artists and creators see these things as bogeymen that companies are using to maintain their relevance and control.

I suggested earlier that a walled garden model of the Internet will require that we make sacrifices about what and how we know. The untamed Internet has upended convention models of authority in the production and distribution of knowledge. The press (which we now call mainstream media), has finally been seen for what it is, commercial and partisan, and no longer has exclusive control of the news. The “objectivity” of journalism has been revealed as a sham, and the qualities that make journalism great, courage, thorough research and good writing, turn out not to be the exclusive possession of people with either journalism degrees or jobs at an “approved” media outlet.

From citizen journalism to blogging, free individuals have been contributing knowledge and information of incredible scope and value. Some of this is organized through structures like Wikipedia, some of it, like weeds, spreads anywhere and everywhere. But it is a myth that all weeds are by definition destructive, many if not most are weeded out to satisfy an aesthetic of control or a particular conception of beauty, not because they are inferior or malicious forms of life.

The argument is not that everything created in an open system has equal or even any value. That has never been the strong program for either freedom or openness. It is rather to recognize the corollary to the old “dumb” system view: Garbage in garbage out. In closed systems, everything is so well protected that nothing new can get in. And if something should slip past the guards, then it is sure never to get back out: All your base are belong to us now.

The Internet existed for some time before it was public and during that time it was useful and enabled just the (but also only) thing that it had been designed for: collaboration and exchange within a specialized (and authorized) knowledge community. The public Internet, what we call the Web, has no design, no purpose, no single order, but like the systems from which its makers and users have emerged and on which they depend, it has created not only complexity and diversity, but even beauty, truth, and dare I say, life.

Designing for the Cognitive Surplus

Designing for the Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky has suggested a term for a newly visible natural resource: he calls it the cognitive surplus. This surplus is created when we turn our attention away from television and allow ourselves apply our minds to anything else. Just as we are reckoning with other parts of the digital economy and their effects, we now have to not only calculate the potential effects of the redistribution of attention and the possibility of an increasingly large cognitive surplus: we have to start designing for it.

Why single out television? Because in the aggregate we spend more time watching TV than we do doing anything else. It has long been one of the world’s most troubling statistics: the amount of time that people spend watching TV. Shirky claims that in the United States alone people cumulatively watch 200 billion hours of TV. Like so much in the media business, those numbers, and the behaviors underneath them, are changing. More people in more places are changing how they spend their screen time. In some cases, time away from telly is being bought up by the new screens: computers and mobile phones, even game consoles, which may technically use the TV screen, but have been weaning youth off the regularly scheduled programming of media networks. Where has all the attention gone?

One answer is that significant amount of the time people were spending watching TV even five years ago is now being spent online. The difference that that makes is remarkable: it is the difference between no You Tube (launched in 2005) and the fact that people are now contributing over 10, 000 hours of video a day to the service (equivalent to the output of 385 always on TV channels); it is the difference between no Flickr (launched in 2004) and the public sharing of over 3 billion photos. It is the difference between no Wikipedia (launch in 2001) and the world’s largest source of collaboratively produced encyclopedic knowledge with almost 9 million registered contributors and nearly 200,000 active contributors (people who have contributed in the last 30 days).

As much time as people are spending online, significant amounts of this new cognitive surplus is being spent in face to face interactions that people were not having 5 years ago. And while it is more and more that these meetings start and are coordinated online, it is supremely important that these people are getting together in real-time in the “meat-space”. But people are not just meeting for coffee or dates, nor are they simply meeting one-on-one and their gathering are not solely or even primarily recreational. People are organizing.

Designing for the cognitive surplus is taking surprising turns. The growth of Twitter, the emergence of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMPORGs) being turned to serious issues like energy dependence (http://worldwithoutoil.org/), social change (http://akoha.com/), or global crisis (http://www.superstructgame.org/). As we turn this cognitive surplus away from TV, we are learning, sharing and organizing in unprecedented ways and numbers. We do not know where this is going or what is coming next.

But, paradoxically, though we cannot be prepared for our future, we can design for it. It fact, that is precisely what we each and all are doing anytime we interact, collaborate or participate with others on the platfoms that enable us to search, share, organize, communicate and create.

You can find video of Clay Shirky talking about these ideas here. And a key exerpt of the talk in text here.

Unfinished is “Open for Business”: So is Best Buy?

I am about to head to Munich for DLD, and I just saw this video pop up in the Twitterstream. Having seen it, I’m now much more interested to connect with the Best Buy crew who will also be in Munich.

Though the conception of what being Open means to Best Buy may not be as robust as I would like, it is nonetheless interesting to see such a big retailer adopting this language.

Here’s a brief video I which I outline the Unfinished kernel and the connection to the idea of building capabilities that are Open for Business.


Unfinished Business: Ignited from Michael Dila on Vimeo.

Unfinished Thoughts: Naomi Klein, Wally Lamb and Malcolm Gladwell

I have been reading Larissa MacFarquhar’s piece on Naomi Klein in the 8 Dec issue of New Yorker. There’s something that’s always nagged at me about Klein, but to see this full on profile, complete with a Platon portrait, really set my blood to boil.

I said the other day to a colleague, “it’s not that I don’t recognize that Naomi Klein has many accomplishments, it is just that I am not sure that those accomplishments are that important.” That, frankly, was a snide way of expressing something more philosophical. Something I didn’t find the right words for until I read a review of Wally Lamb’s new book, “The Hour I First Believed” in the NYT Book Review.

In that review, Louisa Thomas suggests that Lamb gives short shrift to moral complexity, by spoon-feeding us satisfying and comforting answers: Thomas wants fiction that challenges us to question, rather than giving us a crib sheet for the answer’s to life’s tough questions. “Fiction can indeed deepen our understanding of trauma; it can expand our capacity for empathy and provide consolation. But its highest achievement is to complicate, not simplify — to leave us better students of our messy lives, not to graduate us with honors and send us blithely on our way.”

Reading those words, I finally understood what has always bothered me about Klein’s writing. It is the tendency to simplify, to start the inquiry supposing that we already know the answers. Corporations are always evil, governments are always suspect and power is only ever something to be resisted. Reading such stuff is hardly ever surprising, because the point of view always gives away what we are supposed to think in advance.

Malcolm Gladwell, on the other hand, seems to excel at both making the complex accessible without spoon feeding AND at making surprising connections which amplify understanding or spur critical thinking. His writing makes us interested in the questions, rather than simply trying to make us comfortable with the answers. So, it occurs to me, that good writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, is made stronger by leaving loose ends rather than tying things up in bows. I think this is also why I prefer Gladwell’s magazine writing to his books, even though they have the same content. His books always feels more propositional than his writing needs or wants to be. It is Gladwell’s ideas rather than his propositions which are truly compelling.

Drawing conclusions, like deadlines, are sometimes things of necessity. But we should never fail to remember that both are arbitrary, things we impose or are imposed on us, but about which we always make choices. Edward Tufte, whose course I recently attended in San Francisco, offered an important reminder of one of the most important contributions of the scientific view (which could be said equally of the open society), that the strongest statement that evidence can ever make is that it represents the most complete point of view on the matter, until, that is, it is replaced by a yet stronger one. Our thoughts and our words are, perhaps, most questionable precisely when we offer them as final.

Unfinished Management

We have all heard praise heaped on companies with flat structures, which echew hierarchy in favor of consensus. But people can be forgiven their skepticism about whether this is the best way to get things done. In a recent article in the Financial Times, CEO Terri Kelly, who runs $2.3 billion textile company, WL Gore, argues that while an inclusive management approach can take longer to reach decisions, it has stonger buy-in and investment in those decisions which pays off in driving execution.

The key to successfully negotiating this style, it seems, lies in a different approach to the distribution of power. Unfinished management requires ceding control to the system or process, trusting that common commitments and values can shape norms that are as strong or stronger than those established by conventional leadership. Nor does this approach obviate or preclude individual leadership, it just requires a more delicate negotiation between management and the managed.

If the idea of management as an unfinished or open framework has a virtue over established management styles it lies in its openess to a spectrum of vision. Perhaps this creates organizations with better peripheral awareness?

Unfinished Publishing and Business Model Innovation

Unfinished friend and colleague Alex Osterwalder is proving yet again that not only does he eat his own business model dog food, but that he is an unfinished exemplar, par excellence. Alex and his colleague Yves Pigneur have been working on a book about business model innovation. Slated for publication in May 09, Alex and Yves have decided that they and we shouldn’t and don’t have to wait that long. They have created a business model for releasing the work in progress in chunks, leading up to the May launch. For $24 you get a chunk at a time, a chance to contribute via feedback and 50% the finished book. SIGN ME UP!

Book Chunk Project - prototype
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: book project)