Week 13,433
Through London design firm BERG’s blog, I’ve come across the practice of writing a ‘weeknote’; a reflection of what’s going on with the team each Friday. Encouraging people to be more reflective is an aspect of lots of the RSA’s work, for example in human behaviour and education. It seems natural to try one for the RSA’s Design team. This is actually week 13,433 for the RSA (which is a little intimidating). So what’s going on?
The Design team are working at desks in the ‘Oval Office’, which is half grey and half yellow – and only half oval. In plan, the room is rectangular with a curved wall at one end. We sit at the non-curved end, and our three windows look across John Adam Street to the second floor of the Adelphi building. Each window goes all the way from the floor almost to the ceiling. Moving anticlockwise…
Matt is wearing a blue T-shirt and peering intently into his screen. He’s creating a series of icons in Illustrator that the Connected Communities team can use to help people understand their social networks. This is a real information design problem; often the data that is collected through social network analyses is complicated and difficult to communicate. Matt’s icons will represent the type of relationship between two people, and how strong it is.
Emily has just sent off the text for the new Design & Society pamphlet – Nabeel Hamdi’s essay Architecture, Improvisation and the Energy of Place, accompanied by our Resourceful Architect call for Ideas and a review of the shortlist. She’s also working furiously on the schemes of work for the Design Faculty of the new Creative Education Trust Academies in Rugeley – great opportunity to respond to the critiques of DT that arose in our What’s Wrong with DT? pamphlet and Ian McGimpsey’s lit review. Naturally beginning to fret over her ten minute presentation at the forthcoming RSA Trustees meeting on 14th September.
Sevra is typing away and drinking her beloved iced coffee. She has just launched this year’s Student Design Awards, and is working with design tutors across the country to help them integrate the briefs into their curricula. As with all the Design team’s projects, each brief asks designers to demonstrate how the insights and processes of design can increase the resourcefulness of people and communities.
Melanie is sitting very upright and working on 75 Days; a skills bank that connects Royal Designers’ expertise to projects led by RSA staff or Fellows that could benefit. She’s just connected Geoff Kirk, retired chief design aero-engineer from Rolls Royce with the RSA’s Academy. Geoff and the Academy staff are going to challenge students to design a toy based on a scientific principle, getting them to research, design and make a prototype.
Looking at my colleagues has made me realise I was slouching. I’m writing a new draft of a report that explores how ‘design thinking’ could benefit public services; specifically improve the experience of being in court. The report follows on from an RSA seminar earlier in the summer. Lots of projects have looked at the value of design in public services, but courtrooms are interesting because they have such strong heritage, and deal with issues like justice and truth.
Important stories are being observed and understood by a select few while the rest of us see only pretty pictures
We’ve all seen the infographics in the Guardian supplements or on the BBC News website: they’re colourful, engaging and communicate large amounts of information over relatively small press space. We understand them on a fundamental level. Network visualisations on the other hand seem to alienate the majority and by their very nature are too complicated. Huge amounts of valuable data become beautiful amorphic pictures that fail to communicate important stories to a broader audience.
Upon looking at complex network visualisations one gets a sense of ‘geekiness’ for want of a better word, with a Zuckerberg/Silicon valley flavour to them (which could of course be because of the number of social network based visualisations that are out there due to the recent availability of data from these sources), academic elitism that boggles the minds of everyday people. Often I feel the aesthetic runs the risk of intimidating a more general audience because they are unintuitive, not engaging and too much like something you might see in a physics text book. The revelations can be lost in the context of the network as a whole because they can be overwhelming.
This is of course a real shame as the power of large, complex data sets can be invaluable, tend to come from extremely credible sources and are often the result of extensive and timely research. There is also a good chance that a large amount of information may be lost because it is not displayed in a way that allows it to be properly understood by a broader audience. Important stories are being observed and understood by a select few while the rest of us see only pretty pictures.
My role as the Connected Communities and Design intern here at the RSA is to develop a process to visualise large complex networks in a manner that is engaging, holistic and intuitive. These will be used to communicate stories within the network to a number of potential audiences; academics, policy makers, respondents to the surveys that the visualisations will seek to represent, the press and general public.
Moving forward I will aim to cater to all groups and will be exploring the middle ground between infographics and network visualisation and perhaps tying the two together. Data sets will be explored and visualised in network visualisation software (such as Gephi or UCINET) and then exported and rearranged/designed in a style that allows stories to be more easily extrapolated from the mass of data. The designs will need to vary depending on the audience and the story being told. Our visualisation process will allow for additional simplification and explanatory layers to be added to the initial complex picture.
Here is a network that has been visualised in Gephi using the Force Atlas 2 algorithm. With the use of a key one can begin to understand the network, identifying attribute categories which both yield the most connections and are most central to the network. Gephi allows visualisations to be exported as vector files, offering a level of zoom that makes intricate details within the visualisation clear to see. There is also a plug-in called ‘Seadragon Web Export’ which exports visualisations that are embeddable in any web browser allowing smooth network exploration using zoom and pan tools. Click on the image to enlarge.
I will aim to strike a balance between displaying the true network to highlight the presence and scale of complexity (a vital part of understanding a network as a whole) with additional graphic design elements, icons, familiar tools of measure and small amounts of text to better tell specific stories within the data. It is my hope that insight and perspective will be easier to gain by displaying these graphics side by side with the complex network visualisations – not only by academics but by all of us alike
As outlined at the start the nature of visualising large networks will bring with it inherent difficulties. Combined with these are the challenges associated with catering to multiple audiences. I come from a graphic design background and am trying to solve these problems in that vein. I intend to post ideas and mock-ups as I go and would gratefully welcome any advice, ideas or suggestions.
Here is an example to showcase some graphic techniques which could be used to better communicate stories within complex networks. Illustrated here are the personal networks of the most and least connected people within the employment categories 'Retired', 'Other' and 'Unemployed'. A magnification also offers more detail into the most connected retired persons personal network. Finally the personal network of the most connectected person within the entire network is displayed (the Postman). Click on the image to enlarge.
Design’s imperfect proxy
Congratulations to the Design & Technology Association, Seymour Powell and the James Dyson Foundation for the excellent event they put together on July 12th to debate the question “Is Creative Britain in Reverse?” Compliments also on the ‘manifesto video’ they launched that night which has gone viral in the intervening time.
The Coalition Government’s curriculum review, likely to strip Design and Technology (aka ‘DT’) of its compulsory status at Key Stage 3 (roughly corresponding to ages 11-14 in the pre-GCSE period of school life) was the occasion for this debate. Eloquently setting the scene, Deyan Sudjic mused that ‘Design puts you at the centre of things, not the periphery’. Others in the film talked persuasively about how badly we need design. While Ellen MacArthur couched it in the environmental imperative to ‘use things, not use them up’, David Kester declared design ‘absolutely essential to our economic growth and success’.
Neither I nor anyone else in the audience that evening would likely demur. The rub happens when you substitute DT for ‘design’. First I heard that DT ‘teaches children to think for themselves’, ‘gives children a reason for applying their literacy and numeracy’ and gives them ‘a broader set of choices’ about the future. Hmmm. Then I heard that ‘the design education system will collapse if DT is stripped of its compulsory status’. Skepticism is now making me wince, because it’s all true about design, but DT is an imperfect proxy.
Finally I heard ‘We would not have our creative industries if DT had not been introduced into the curriculum’. Ah yes: the creative industries. By this giddy phrase do we not mean design and art direction, film, tv and media production, publishing and music, not to mention the arts per se as they can be commercialised? And do these activities not depend just as much on ‘artistic’ intelligence as they do on Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths? Enter the elephant in the room, Art, and that other subject in the National Curriculum, Art and Design. Is the panel happy, I asked, with the divorce from Art that the National Curriculum perpetuated? To be fair, the panel weren’t happy; certainly Dick Powell vigorously acknowledged that the divorce was wrong.
Back to DT, the imperfect proxy for design: RSA Design and RSA Education have jointly commissioned two pieces of work to begin to answer the inauspicious question ‘What’s wrong with DT?’ John Miller’s essay, here, analyses the reasons why DT has failed to break the bounds of its pre-National Curriculum antecedents in Art, Craft & Design and Home Economics, and has not become the place where students explore how to create a better world.
We asked Ian McGimpsey to answer the question in a different way, by reviewing the academic literature on DT since its establishment in the National Curriculum. His review, here, suggests that DT has tried to be too many things to too many people, rather than focusing on its own worth and integrity as a subject area. By claiming to be supremely inter-disciplinary, and a solution to Britain’s global competitiveness via an often tenuous relation to STEM, DT has been preoccupied in over-justifying its place on the curriculum to the detriment of the subject itself.
Rather than defending DT, can we use the new curriculum freedoms, afforded by the Government’s diversion to assessing performance in ‘E-Bac’ core subjects, to reform DT? To re-couple Art with Design and to give purpose to Craft, Technology and ICT under the banner of design. Because it’s true: understanding design will give children a broader set of choices about what we do with and in the world. Just don’t call it DT.
Internship culture… is it part of the solution or part of the problem?
Filed under: Design and Society, Education Matters, Social Economy
Internships are seen as the passport to interesting and dynamic careers, but how many get turned away at the border because they don’t fit the ‘right’ profile?
This week with the publication of Ross Perlin’s ‘Intern Nation’ and Wednesday’s planned ‘Day without interns’ protest outside Westminster the rights and status of graduates looking to get a foot on the career ladder is in the spotlight. The internship system of largely unregulated, unpaid work placements is being attacked for boosting social immobility and inhibiting the career development of all but the few with the freedom, finance or connections to benefit. I have no doubt that the time has come to review intern rights and wrongs, but in the process is it time to have a bigger conversation about how we all navigate our professional lives in changing times and how we can best support each other to reach our potential.
I’m not your typical intern, for one thing I’m older than most. I’m in the process of changing career, hopefully taking my experience as a designer into new places where I can use my skills for social good and create a sustainable future for myself. For another thing, here at the RSA I am paid, which is important not only for my survival, but for my self-respect. I returned to education as a mature student, as did most of my peers on the MA Design for Development at Kingston University, all of whom brought a diversity of professional, cultural and life experience to the table.
Whilst the internship debate quite rightly advocates for the rights of the young and inexperienced, the internship culture itself now dominates access to many creative professions. With that comes the implicit expectation of youth, unfettered responsibility, and freedom from personal and financial obligations; and out goes opportunity for ‘people of all ages and backgrounds’ (e.g. mature students, career changers and parents). It follows that people whose lifestyles can adapt easily to unpaid work (plus paid second jobs) can later adapt to the exacting working practices that uphold the status quo. Companies describing themselves as ‘young’ do so as if describing a virtue, but with that assertion comes a whole host of other assumptions that discriminate not just against people of different ages, but people’s whose lifestyle for many other reasons does not match the ‘youthful’ profile.
The way we work is changing; few of us can expect jobs or careers for life. We need to adapt to become more flexible in not just how we manage our careers, but how we plan for a future where the good these changes bring can be embraced by all. By focussing on the internship issue alone, are we perhaps missing an opportunity to throw open the debate and re-evaluate the professional landscape as a whole?
London; the never ending story
Emerging practices in design are creating opportunities to engage with new disciplines, and for designers to enter previously unchartered territories. Transdisciplinary approaches between design, innovation, and the social and environmental sciences, are creating spaces for a cross fertilisation of ideas with transformative outputs. As a designer myself it is this space I am attempting to move into, and my immersion in the Connected Communities project as part of the new paid internship programme at the RSA is instrumental in my journey. So it’s with some surprise that it is the language of architecture, the profession I worked in for a decade and thought I was moving away from that has lately been at the forefront of my mind.
For the first time in many years I am spending each day on foot, trains and buses getting reacquainted with the city I was born and grew up in. After a troubled relationship (and a couple of lengthy affairs with Sydney and Dublin) I’m finding myself falling back in love with London.
I have to thank in part my mentor and colleague on the Connected Communities project, Tom Neumark, because for one he appears to eschew the underground altogether, preferring to walk or if pushed catch the bus, and secondly that his love for the city, its people, it’s history and it’s stories is infectious. From the rubble of the partially demolished Heygate Estate in Elephant, to the half built towering glass fortress of the Shard; from the grandeur of Wren’s post Fire of London boulevard in High Holborn to the optimism of Camden Council’s 1960’s post-war reconstruction era town hall I am perhaps for the first time seeing the edifices of my home city as a huge and never-ending story book, a narrative of our hopes, dreams, folly and misfortunes played out in stone, concrete, steel and glass.
Viewed through this lens, a recent trip to Peterborough to scope a suburb that will be the focus of connected communities research in the near future told a very different story; acres of abandoned factories and warehouses and gap toothed local shopping precincts echoing where many people stand today, facing a post-industrial future amongst communities blighted by mass redundancy and unemployment.
In a dematerialising age it is perhaps here, at the juncture of community life and our creation of a previously unimagined collective future that creativity is now key. Last week at the RSA ‘The Resourceful Architect’ finalists’ event saw presentations by architects of what that might mean for their industry. Our buildings contain within them the dynamic vision of commerce; the time, energy, specialised skills of an army of individuals from the architect to the crane operator, and the momentum of inhabitants whose collective purpose and activity defines and gives life to a space. If we were able to apply the same vigour, ingenuity and collaborative vision to the wider project of our time, how to adapt and evolve against the constraints of volatile economic, social and environmental change where could that take us? We have a chance to write that story now and leave our own imprint for future generations, if not in bricks and mortar, then in how we support each other and build a sustainable future.
The ABC(D)…. of small things
In a world where we are constantly reminded of the importance of the powerful, it’s refreshing to be reminded of the power of the humble and less obvious.
For the last year I have been grappling with how to translate the enthusiasm, talents and ideas of my local community into real events and greater involvement around local parks. I have been doing this not only as a design and community engagement project I ran last summer for my Masters , but as a member of an umbrella community group for parks and green spaces in my local area. The scale and projects the group is involved in are small and simple, and very low key in the greater scheme of things, yet it was my experience of the network of parks people that sprung to mind this week at an enlightening meeting with Cormac Russell of the Institute for Asset Based Community Development.
Cormac works across three continents, applying a Community Development model based on making the most of what’s already there; utilising people’s innate ‘gifts’ and reflecting back to communities what they have, what they care about and what they want to act upon as a catalyst for them developing their own projects. The fact that ABCD gets results in contexts as diverse as Ireland, USA, Canada and Kenya (where communities are divided by inter-tribal conflicts), is testament to the flexibility and universally empowering nature of the model.
One of the barriers I discovered when exploring potential local involvement around parks is that many people felt discouraged by the hierarchical nature of community groups, the length of meetings, the bureaucracy involved in making anything happen and the expectations that would be placed upon them if they put themselves forward. Cormac’s expertise mirrored my experience, that a community’s’ latent gifts are often not freely given because people feel that they aren’t ‘qualified’ and that ‘doing’ is exclusively the domain of the professional. The ABCD model recognises leadership not as a position, but as a behaviour and a narrative, the key characteristic of which is the ability to connect people over interests and passions circumventing those barriers; and it is these characters (be they members of the community or local authority representatives) that need to be elevated systemically to be able to effect positive change.
What touched me most about the ABCD approach was how well it described the often unseen value of small, unassuming, inclusive projects within communities, and the potential impact of people whose contribution to community life is to many inconspicuous, lost within a culture that can often overvalue professionalism and competition. This awareness will not only go on to inform my own practice, understanding the place of design and creative process as a tool for community development, but in my personal life with a renewed pride and enthusiasm in the work of my local parks group.
Internships! Three new positions in RSA Projects
Filed under: Design and Society, Emboldened, Social Brain, Social Economy
It would be hard to trump the great Social Brain job opportunity just out today, but in some semblance of an attempt to do so, I’d like to announce that we have three brilliant new internship positions opening up in the summer. The adverts are out today and the deadline for applications is on Sunday 22nd May, so please start applying. And don’t forget, they’re paid at the London Living Wage.
The opportunities are as follows:
Enterprise Internship - a chance to work within the RSA’s nascent Enterprise programme. This will involve working alongside social entrepreneurs, undertaking research into emerginig concepts, helping to arrange events and assisting with writing a business proposal for a new social enterprise.
Social Brain and Behaviour Change Internship - an opportunity to assist the RSA’s Social Brain project and our wider work around behaviour change. This will consist of undertaking primary and secondary research, horizon scanning, assisting with fundraising, and helping to deliver an existing project on improving fuel efficiency among taxi drivers.
Connected Communities and Design – a chance to help the RSA’s Connected Communities and Design teams as they seek to improve how we visualise social network data. This will involve researching into existing data display systems, designing a new system or optimising a current one, and then applying this system to help visualise social network data within an upcoming report.
Alpha Ingenuity
If there was ever a field in need of a little resourcefulness, it’s public sector IT. In the past the UK’s government has had the dubious honour of awarding some of the largest IT contracts in the world. Some of these have been simply too big to manage, and have failed at significant cost to the public.
On Monday, the Cabinet Office launched alpha.gov.uk. In response to digital champion Martha Lane Fox’s recommendation, this is a prototype of a single domain for all government information and interactions with the public. The parallel is with the BBC’s single domain website (ie bbc.co.uk), on which you can find everything from the latest table tennis results to instructions on how to roast a chicken. The result looks something like a Google for government.
But what’s more notable than the idea of a one-stop-shop for digital delivery of public services (having had Directgov, and Gordon Brown’s MyGov idea etc.) is the process behind its creation. An alpha site is usually a pre-release version (ie. bits of it might break), but the team behind this one have taken the unusual step of releasing it to the public to gather feedback. This is particularly unusual for the public sector, which has often been described as a bit ‘1.0’ when it comes to the internet.
The team have written about the ethos behind the project that have guided the site’s development. The ‘agile’ approach they have taken emphasises a much faster and iterative approach (as well as being people-centred), in stark contrast to large IT programmes which become too big to fail, soaking up ever more money.
There are similarities between their approach, and a paper we recently published on ‘ingenuity’, which defined ingenuity as a sort of creativity on a budget. In this paper we defined ingenuity as the ability to solve problems by combining few resources in a surprising way.
So is alpha.gov.uk ingenious?
Well, it’s been developed in three months on the fairly minimal resources of 261k (not at all a fair comparison, but Directgov’s design and build costs came in at over 6 million). It may (time and the results of their feedback will tell) solve the problem of how to help people interact with government more successfully and cost-effectively. I’m less sure whether it uses its resources in unexpected ways, but seems to have at least used off-the-shelf rather than expensive custom technology.
Verdict? Too early to tell, but promising…
How to be Ingenious
Filed under: Design and Society, Emboldened, Social Economy
Quite recently I came across a story about a science teacher in rural Madhya Pradesh. Mr. Raghuvanshi teaches in a school with small rooms (12 by 18 feet for 47 students) which contain just a blackboard and a few chalk pieces.
Further constrained by local educational bureaucrats, he’s strictly required to teach from the approved textbook (incidentally described as “barely comprehensible to the students and often left a native Hindi speaker … flummoxed” by an observer).
But Mr. Raghuvanshi manages to work within these constraints, often teaching without explicit reference to the textbook and instead using his students’ everyday experience. For example he uses their familiarity with electrical farm machinery to show the difference between direct and alternating current.
In a further example he improvised an electrochemical cell from a lota, a water purification candle and chemicals. He demonstrated this caused current to flow by placing a magnetic needle close to the circuit and showing the students that it twitched.
Mr. Raghuvanshi’s teaching is a great example of ingenuity. Over the last few months (as Matthew recently blogged) RSA Projects have been exploring the concept of what it means to be ingenious, and how to enhance people’s ability to be ingenious.
This week we publish How to be Ingenious, our first pamphlet in this field, which draws on our research to outline a fledgling definition of ingenuity. Our definition has three elements at its core:
- an inclination to work with the resources easily to hand
- a knack for combining these resources in a surprising way
- and in doing so, an ability to solve some practical problem
But beyond simply defining the word, our pamphlet advances principles and specific methods that could enhance the ingenuity of individuals and teams within government organisations, businesses and communities.
The ability to do unexpectedly more for less in the face of constrained resources is a timely concept to be exploring. The public and third sector are moving abruptly from plenty to austerity, making the ability to cope on tiny resources mandatory. Although the business world had their downturn a couple of years ago, the economy is still shaky – described as “substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex” by CEOs.
Though still theoretical, we hope to develop our understanding of how to be ingenious when faced with constraints in future practical project work. If this sounds interesting, then do read the pamphlet, and feel free to get in touch.
Hacking together a project
Filed under: Design and Society, Emboldened, Social Economy
In a blog a couple of weeks ago, Matthew Taylor called for ideas for a new RSA project on manufacturing. Given the RSA’s commitment to practical project work, he suggested that heavy industrial projects would be impractical for us and that worthy reports on the future of manufacturing in the UK are two-a-penny.
The rise of hacking (see this paper published by the RSA’s Design team in 2009) provides food for thought, but the practical project isn’t yet clear… Anyway rather than go over the same ground again, I thought I’d do something more constructive, like make a map of the Hackspaces that are springing up around the UK. This one (click on it to go to the actual map) shows the Hackspaces listed on the Hackspace Foundation website as of today.
I’d be interested to know what factors contribute to the forming of a hackspace. Is it a university near by? More diverse or tolerant communities? Concentration of creative or high-tech industry? What do you think?
Map of UK Hackspaces - data taken from http://hackspace.org.uk/
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Sevra Davis trained as an architect and urban designer and worked in both of these roles prior to coming to the RSA. She currently runs the national RSA Student Design Awards programme, thinking up design challenges for students that will address pressing social issues.
Jamie Young trained in product design and environmental policy and worked as a design engineer before joining the RSA. He has run several research projects and practical interventions at the RSA to encourage sustainable behaviour change, social innovation and better use of technology by society at large. Follow @dt99jay