Mads Soegaard and his wife Rikke Friis Dam have been hard at work over at their Interaction-Design.org site, a free and well put together resource of educational materials about interaction design. The whole site is set up as an encyclopedia with tightly focused articles that have expert commentary underneath and often plenty of video interview material. It’s also been formatted for print/PDF export as well as iPad/iPhone reading. A lot of effort has gone into the site (read the history of it) and it is well worth regularly visiting – the main encyclopedia page already has plenty of useful chapters.

Mads has pre-released some new material on End User Development, “a set of methods, techniques and tools that allow users of software systems, who are acting as non-professional software developers, at some point to create, modify, or extend a software artifact” (Lieberman et al 2006). The intro video is below, which gives some definitions:

While the focus of this tends to be on software, I think there are also some lessons to be learned in terms of service designers delivering tools and skills to organizations they are working for, who in turn can further develop according to their needs themselves. On the one hand, it feels like we’re almost putting ourselves out of business – the old teach a man to fish idea. But I think there are plenty of smaller situations in which organizations do well working internally and pull in outside expertise when they feel they need the external input or a deeper knowledge of a process. It’s much like the difference between basic car maintenance and hiring a mechanic. The added benefit is that organizations are much more receptive to your processes and interventions when they have already taken on the mindset themselves.

Have design education and design research failed to fire up the imagination in public discourse? I believe so and I believe the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) mantra has unbalanced thinking about education curricula in general. John Thackara’s recent Observers Room newsletter notes the same:

Last month, as the Dutch government expelled trouble-making artists from the state funding system, UK and US policymakers demanded a stronger focus by education on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — the STEM subjects. They claim a STEM workforce “determines a nation’s ability to sustain itself.”

No it does not. A too-sharp focus on STEM creates an innovation policy that is not fit for purpose. We need to diversify, not reduce, our ways of knowing and acting in the world. We need to emphasize the social dimension of innovation, not just technology. And we need to master systems thinking more than silo thinking. Experimental art and design can help us do all of the above — not as an alternative to science, but as its enrichment.

True innovators decline to remain locked in the STEM cell.

Last month I spoke at the Cumulus/Design Research Society Researching Design Education Symposium in Paris and argued a similar case. For a profession that claims imagination and divergent thinking to be among its key attributes, design research has failed to ignite public imagination. Despite efforts by the likes of John Maeda, the rhetoric of STEM dominates the media. Science writers expound in newspaper columns, entire TV channels are devoted to the wonders of science. Science is, of course, important, but this one-sided view of research has not been counter-balanced by an equivalent, passionate exploration of the boundaries of design in the public sphere. Yet the potential is there – arguably, a handful of TED Talks have done more to raise the awareness of the importance of design than several decades of design research publication. Although there are exceptions, design research has failed to imagine and communicate an integrated vision of design comparable to that of science.

The paper I wrote for the presentation argues that design has failed to integrate the nexus of theory, research and practice and is a call to arms for design researchers to bring their activities into a broader, public discourse. Despite the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, design education research has become too convergent in its thinking and discipline specific. As practices such as service design engage in projects at the public policy level, it is essential for design to explicitly articulate the process of design synthesis in order to gain and maintain credibility, for such projects offers an opportunity to bring design’s value and activities on par with the sciences in public discourse.

You can download the full paper, Design Research – A Failure of Imagination? and the presentation slides (8.5MB PDF – lots of images). The full proceedings of the symposium are available on the conference website.

I would be very interested to hear any feedback or opinions from others on this subject.

Possibly related posts:

1. Talking Service Design at Parsons NYC On my way back from the (very good) Interaction ’11...

“We have been educating people for many years to be a certain type of person. We have been educating for a society that maybe is gone. We need more and more creative people in society. We need more people who will make things connect together, who will go in strange directions. We don’t only need good workers. Those days are over.” – Sir Simon Rattle.

The documentary feature, Rhythm Is It! was shown on German TV recently and was so inspiring that I rented the DVD on Lovefilm to watch it again. The film documents the journey of 250 children from inner-city schools in Berlin rehearsing for a dance performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Led by choreographer, Royston Maldoom and accompanied by the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

Both Royston Maldoom and Simon Rattle have excellent insights into the psyche of young people and learning. The film shows how Royston, in particular, isn’t just teaching dance, but really teaching these schoolchildren to discover themselves. I’m aware that all of this sounds like utter clichés, but I urge you to watch the film for yourself. It was one of the most inspiring and moving documentaries I have seen in a long while.

(The version I have found the online trailer for and the DVD I rented has German subtitles for the English parts and the rest is in German, but actually most of it is in English.)

(Picture from Aquent’s E-Fail service)

Interdisciplinarity vs Cross-Disciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity have been buzzwords for the last few years, especially in education. I teach on the COFA Online Masters of Cross-Disciplinary Art & Design and in my main position at the Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst (HSLU), the phrase regularly enters discussions. The terms are used often interchangeably and often without really explaining what they mean. As so often is the case, the idea seems to be that by just talking about disciplines working together magic things will happen.

I prefer the term cross-disciplinarity because it suggests making connections rather than blending everything together into some kind of discipline trifle. One area that necessarily crosses many disciplines is service design, which I teach at HSLU. The fascinating thing for me about the service design approach is that it is about understanding connections and patterns rather than normalising.

Over the past year teaching service design has revealed three key insights to me. The first is that service design crosses over so many different areas and disciplines that teaching it is more about teaching a mindset and an approach than specific tools and techniques. The methods are still being invented and developed, which makes it an interesting voyage of discovering for my students and I.

The second insight is that it has made me realise how hard it is to teach people a certain way of thinking and seeing the world, especially at a Masters level when quite a lot of that mindset is already, well, set. Service design does involve doing, but the things we actually do are pretty simple technically. Sketching up or acting out prototypes, mapping out blueprints and journeys, even the ethnographic methods – probably the most skilled aspect of doing in SD – are not demanding in the way that, say, playing the piano is. The greater part of the service design process feels more like pre-production in film and involves a lot of thinking through complexity and zooming into individual stories and out again to the entire pattern and context. And, like film, it involves drawing in other skilled people to execute many of the ideas.

The third insight is that this was always the case. Teaching programming isn’t about teaching technical skills. If it were, then you would be better off learning to touch type, because the biggest craft skill of programming is typing. Except, of course, it isn’t. The best coders I know have a way of thinking about coding and often sketch it out before they even write a line of it and they can code in whatever languages fit the purpose – they’re not tied to one application or platform.

Mindsets vs Skillsets

The way disciplines are often defined is by what people do, but really they have always defined by how people think.

I used to teach interactive media at COFA and head the School of Media Arts, which also meant heading the “Digital Media” program. The digital revolution collapsed the craft definitions of disciplines in many areas, especially in design and media. Calling a person or a piece of work “interdisciplinary” is as redundant as referring to it as “digital” (the course name always bothered me).

What people do does not necessarily define them in terms of disciplines. Actions might speak louder than words, but thinking leads to action. I can lay out type in Illustrator or InDesign with a reasonable degree of technical knowledge, but I know enough about graphic design to know that my typographic skills are pretty average and that the act of doing it doesn’t make me a typographer. I can take chisel to a chunk of wood, but that does not make me a carpenter.

Conversely, I know plenty of people who are interaction designers who can neither design nor code very well – what many people see as the end result of interaction design – but they can do interaction design very well indeed (Dan Saffer is a great example and freely admits this).

Professional Humility

There is a counter argument to this, which is the 10,000 hours rule – popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers – that it takes 10,000 hours to become the leading expert in whatever you are doing. Like Seth Godin, I only half agree with this concept.

While 10,000 hours might make you the best at something, it can also useful to be bad at something but at least be doing it. 10,000 hours means 10 x 1,000 hours not doing other things. Doing things the ‘wrong’ way can also lead to insights that other, trained practitioners have missed because the thought didn’t enter their head to do things differently that the way it has always been done.

When people talk about interdisciplinarity, they tend to focus on the artefacts of the craft skills. The classic examples are artists working with biochemists to create bio-art, architects and fine artists designing buildings, or designers and musicians working on artworks. In a lot of those cases, the interdisciplinarity seems to be more about mixing media than about mixing mindsets. Mixing mindsets is a lot harder because it involves, as Simon Penny argues, “deep professional humility”.

The problem is that professionalism is all about defining yourself as more skilled than those not in your profession. In academia, building and defending your professional castle is the name of the game, preferably while knocking down other people’s. We might talk the talk of interdisciplinarity, but as long as we still have departments and departmental budgets, program and course names that signal boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, interdisciplinarity remains just an abstract concept.

Arguably, the strength of service design is about understanding how all the parts fit together and concentrating on the glue in-between, because that is what everyone else ignores when they focus on their speciality. Expertise – whether 10,000 hours or half that – is useful, but so is spending some time in other disciplines in addition to your expertise.

I like Simon Penny’s term “deep professional humility,” because once you frame cross- or interdisciplinarity in that way, you realise that far from being defunct, we are light-years away from achieving it education. One of the things that attracted me to service design as a way of looking at the world – as a way of thinking – is that it requires that professional humility. It means accepting that you are a catalyst and facilitator more than an expert conferring knowledge or fixing problems. When you design with people instead of for people, it involves being open to what they bring to the table, understanding how their lives are put together and recognising that they are the experts of their own lives.

Almost all the tools and methods employed in service design, design thinking, innovation, etc. are really about achieving this humility. They are about deconstructing barriers between stakeholders, understanding people as people instead of their titles and roles, and trying to gather material that will help others see things with fresh eyes in order to create sustainable change and innovation, such as presenting customer insights or stories to a client or mapping out the complexity of an organisation via blueprints.

In the end, it is all about saying, “You currently see things this way, which is may be creating problems or blinding you to opportunities, how about seeing it from this angle?” Co-creation helps people shift towards a professional humility because they are all in it together (ideally). Liz Danzico’s various writings on design and improvisation really highlight this well (see her present on it at Interaction 10).

Let’s stop using the term interdisciplinarity as a magic buzzword and actually tackle what it means to mix mindsets, to work across disciplines. On an institutional and organisational level this also means dismantling the structures that encourage professional conceit instead of humility. Instead of focusing on racking up 10,000 hours, spend a few hundred hours being bad at something. It is a good way to understand other people, appreciate their skills and the way they view the world and it is a good reminder of what it feels like to learn something new. A mindset can be changed in the space of time of a short conversation if you are open to it.

(Thanks Liz for feedback on this piece).

I couldn’t help but agree with Seth Godin’s summary of the coming melt-down in higher education – it’s an almost perfect echo of the themes I have been harping on about for ages. I also happened to read it shortly after finding the short video of me talking about the dysfunctional nature of education at DOTT Cornwall (I was very jittery – too much coffee before speaking and a sand glass with only four minutes to get it all out). It’s nice to know it’s not just me thinking this way.

You should read Seth’s complete post, but here’s the summary of the main reasons:

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.
3. The definition of ‘best’ is under siege.
4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.
5. Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

Out of all of these, the last point is key because it contains the other four. Higher education institutions have based the value of their currencies (the degree you leave with) on the quality of its education and what you can do with the proof of that education afterwards. That currency’s value, like any currency, is entirely based on its reputation and scarcity – it is pretty much divorced from the reality on the ground. The convergence of the points Seth lists – along with shifts such as aging populations, changing business structures, the shift from industrial command and control thinking to a more networked, service and knowledge mode of thinking – are very real and most likely to coagulate into a big shift behind most of the major player’s backs. Seth sums it up well:

The only people who haven’t gotten the memo are anxious helicopter parents, mass marketing colleges and traditional employers. And all three are waking up and facing new circumstances.

Does this mean there is no future for higher education (and that I am out of a job)? I hope not. It’s not that places like Cambridge or Harvard are going to die out, it’s just that they’ll end up the way that most people view politics (in the UK at least) at the moment – highly bureaucratic monoliths that don’t appear to be very relevant to anyone’s lives anymore. That doesn’t sound to exciting to the average teenage school leaver if you ask me.

I think there is a place for higher education, but I think institutions must think radically for them to remain relevant. Instead of thinking about accreditation – either of themselves to government or of the students – they need to think about the service experience they offer. It’s the experience of higher education that has real value, not the delivery of knowledge. That’s the reason behind the COTEN Project that takes a service design approach to thinking about innovation in higher education.

When it comes to thinking about higher education designers – or perhaps just design academics – seem to suddenly forget everything they know. We teach the value of ethnographic research, 360º stakeholder input, co-creation, yet throw it all out the window when it comes to designing curricula and the institutional structures they are housed within.

To have a crack at tackling this, I am running a new collaborative online project called Creative Waves – COTEN (the COTEN part is short for ‘co-creation 2010′), which aims to take a service design approach to higher education. It builds upon over a decade of successful online creative collaborations bringing together world renown designers and thinkers together with students, experts, practitioners and academics from all over the world. The project will also have a line-up of special guests such as Arne van Oosterom and John Thackara with more to be confirmed.

An army of politicians, bureaucrats, auditors, managers and administrators have failed to offer an innovative vision for higher education – we invite you to apply your most innovative thinking to the problem. It is free to take part, but places will be limited. The deadline for applications is April 30th 2010 – please see the COTEN web site for details.

If you are involved in higher education or some other networks, please pass on the links and information to your students. It’s important that we get a mix of practitioners and students on the project to get a fully-rounded view of the issues. And please blog and tweet the project far and wide!

A recently launched service in Germany called PaperC (Twitter: @Paper_c) looks like it might become a pretty handy resource for students and researchers. It is an online library of commonly used textbooks for studying. You can read all of them online for free, but you can also download PDFs, make notes and bookmarks, and copy and paste quotes. The latter functions cost something, but not much. A PDF of 10 pages costs 1 Euro. The idea is not that it replaces books, as such, but replaces the photocopier. So far they have 2,799 books in their library.

Here is some info about the founders and their rationale behind it (my translation to English). It’s a good example of a service developed out of personal observation and frustration:

The founders of PaperC are Felix Hofmann, Martin Fröhlich and Lukas Rieder. The idea for PaperC came into being as Felix was commuting between Berlin and St. Gallen while writing his final thesis and having to schlepp many textbooks from the library around the place. At that time, there was no comfortable, online library. So we developed PaperC as an online platform for textboks. What was important to us was that one could read the complete book online, not just an excerpt. Our vision is to make knowledge freely available and at the same time allow authors and publishers to the possibility to offer their content online and earn money from it.

They have done a pretty good job of the service design of it (although I think the pricing should be more obvious) and it’s the book equivalent of being able to buy individual MP3s instead of an entire album.

What is interesting for me is that it’s really a service that universities should have already built themselves. [Update: The PaperC guys point out that it was built as part of a research project at St. Gallen's Institut für Medien und Kommunikationsmanagement with Bozena Izabela Mierzejewska. Good for them for doing this, but I still think the point below is valid.]

The question is why they haven’t. My guess is that it is an example of how most library IT systems – and IT departments in general – tend to make little effort to understand what people need and what their daily tasks and frustrations are. Many of the existing IT solutions in universities (not just HSLU, but around the world) are purchased in one of two scenarios: an IT company selling a solution to someone who has no idea about the technology and is dazzled by the features, or an IT company selling a solution to an IT department, who are dazzled by the features (and, perhaps, the ease of implementation/security). Niether scenario includes the end users in the requirements gathering for such a system. This creates opportunities for services like PaperC.

Why should universities take note? Because it is a service that, had they developed it themselves, would have made much greater use of their limited resources. Libraries have limited space for multiple copies of books and books that are in great demand often aren’t available. When they are, they are often in poor condition with many notes written in them (if that’s you – stop it!). A service like this solves that problem and saves money – they need less copies of books and they don’t need to replace damaged ones.

Additionally, the library also has to maintain photocopying facilities that students pay for with their copy cards. This is conjecture, but I suspect the copy machines in most university libraries are under a leasing and service contract and that a large amount (if not all) of the copy card money goes to the leasing/servicing company and not the library. If the uni had developed the service such as PaperC themselves, the money would go towards improving the system, buying new titles and expanding the library offering. Of course there are the initial development costs, but it’s not hard to imagine that funded by a research project. [Update: Ditto the previous update]

There’s usually a downside to a service that replaces another. In this case it is that you have to print out your own copies instead of using a copy machine, which means, potentially, you have to pay twice (once for the PDF and again to print it out – either at uni or at home). But you don’t have to print them out because you can always read the PDF on screen. I’m tempted to say that is more environmentally friendly, but the power consumption and resources in your laptop probably offset not printing out copies. The real payoff is having a library of texts both stored in your online PaperC account and/or on your computer at home and not having to haul a bag of books around the place. Of course, a potential weak spot in the system is that ‘enterprising’ students share the cost of a PDF and pass it around. The PDFs have no DRM as far as I am aware, but they do have your email address stamped across the top.

Does anyone know of an equivalent English language service, especially one offered by universities?

A note for Apple addicts: although you can read the PDFs on your iPhone, you can’t use the web service on it because they use Flash to control the online PDF reader. But they do have an iPhone version in the pipeline, which means they will also have an iPad version in the pipeline, and that makes the whole offering sound pretty attractive.

Don Tapscott has a piece in Edge today called The Impending Demise of the University. In it he takes the same line that I have been for some time in Designing Education’s Future, The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be as well as the idea that Google isn’t making us dumb, smart is changing. (Not that I’m saying Tapscott nicked my ideas, of course, but rather than great minds, etc., etc.)

The basic issue is that traditional education is broadcast – you tell a group of people to be in a certain place at a certain time and spray information at them. This is something that really hasn’t changed since the Victorians stopped beating kids and putting them down mines and stuck them in classrooms instead. The dressing has changed, but the pedagogy hasn’t. The culture of students has changed radically, however.

From the Edge piece:

Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge sweeney both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.

Meanwhile on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

When my colleagues and I wrote a paper about dispelling some myths of online education we touched upon some of this and it has guided our views ever since. I always had the feeling my other colleagues were mildly interested before mildly dismissing it as a fad and moving on. But a set of converging issues – declining student numbers, rising fees, an aging population, private institutions and more – are a very real threat to universities who are already closing down large departments and becoming ever more mainstream and homogenous. Although many academics scoffed at the idea of McDonald’s offering A-Levels the danger for them isn’t a dumbing down of education, it’s that McDonald’s end up doing it far better.

Many universities are already looking pretty empty on campus because they simply don’t offer a decent learning environment. Instead they’re intent on building grandiose teaching spaces, which nobody turns up to.

My prediction is that it is a race between two generational shifts – the student body and the faculty either expiring or retiring. Universities are notoriously slow at cultural change and tend to promote the dead wood. The prognosis doesn’t look healthy.

The RSA have now added a link to download Sir Ken Robinson’s talk that he gave there last week called ‘The Element’ – “the point at which natural talent meets personal passion.”

I like Sir Ken’s view of education, namely that most schools kill creativity and dearly hope that some government bods responsible for education listen to what he has to say.

I also like that when you are given the honour of a knighthood, paradoxically everyone gets to call you by your first name, albeit it with “Sir” tagged on. So now he’s called Sirken.

He is a good presenter too and uses the classic tell-a-story, explain why it’s meaningful technique with a good dose of humour too, but the message of his talk is very important indeed.

A selection of RFID tags from Timo’s Flickr set.

Touch is a research project examining Near Field Communication that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things.

You will have probably used some of them already in your daily life – Oyster cards, swipe cards, etc. (see above image). It’s an interesting cross-over of cultural and social practices and interaction, product and service design with a whole bowl of technology mixed in.

The interdisciplinary team led by Timo Arnell have been teaching at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

For anyone learning about or teaching interaction design and related disciplines, it’s a great resource and they have also put all their design briefs online.