Rising Wisely

Service design and public policy have been getting closer and closer to each other in recent years – at least among leading design thinkers and strategists. Part of this turn has been driven by the need to ensure more participation among policy makers and members of civil society. The currency of this participation and engagement has historically been developed by designers – designers whose aim has been to create successful communication strategies, product lines, and service offerings. Another facet to this confluence of design and policy has been the slow unfolding among policy makers, designers, scientists, and other knowledge producers that the facts needed to drive good decision making made in ways we are only beginning to get a full picture of.

Many facts that were once assumed to be self-evident, such as the existence of gravity or of gasses in the atmosphere, have been shown, while fundamentally true, to have also been the acute products of their time and cultures that developed them. This doesn’t mean that they are invalid. It simply means that we could just have easily arrived at different conventions for the length of a year, the weight of a kilogram, or the names and properties of each element in the periodic table.

From a policy perspective, this has obvious implications for the validity of different alternatives. From a design perspective, it validates the processes that have come in tow with so-called design thinking – processes that place users at the forefront of questions about the role of policy, infrastructure, bureaucracy, and governance in the social century.

Recently, the Glen Cove Conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy was held in Glen Cove, NY, on 9-11 June, 2010. Initiated by Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), and co-organized by Lucy Kimbell (based at Said Business School) and Gerry Philipsen (Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington), the event was conceived of as a small workshop which would bring together – for the first time, as far as they were aware – three groups:

• policymakers concerned with security in intrastate contexts and post-conflict situations, whose work is typically structured by intergovernmental and national policy goals;
• social science researchers, in particular ethnographers of communication who pay special attention to the construction of local knowledge, for example, how “security” is understood in communities in which the UN has a mandate to do increase it and having decided to help disarm ex-combatants; and
• designers and managers involved in designing services shaped by policy concerns about politics, exclusion and access.

Two participants blogged about their experiences: Lucy Kimbell a designer at the Said Business School and Aditya Dev Sood, one of India’s own and founder of CKS, a design consultancy based in Delhi and Bangalore. Links to their impressions and accounts follow below.

Lucy Kimbell: http://designleadership.blogspot.com/2010/07/glen-cove-conference-on-strategic.html

Aditya Dev Sood: http://www.cks.in/leedbackfoop/#section13

Thanks to experientia: putting people first for the find

Almost three years ago I participated in a workshop sponsored by the AIDI (Association of Industrial Designers of India). The event was intended to inform the implementation of India’s National Design Policy. Many design professionals and educators came together from across India and the world to develop strategies and actionable recommendations.

There were a handful of breakout groups, each dealing with a different focus area. These were: Education, Design Parks (these are intended to be urban design “hubs” so incidentally the solution was already posed), Branding and Communication of Indian Design, Culture, Environment, Social Development & Effective Public Spending (the ‘everything else’ category), and Competitive Advantage by Design (the group  participated in).

I ran across the data our group produced recently from an old blog post I did about the event, and it got me wondering, “So How Is India Doing?”  Have you seen any of these themes being implemented?  Please comment on this post describing where they have been implemented and most effective and how they have unfolded in your community.

Strategies for Building India’s Design Competitiveness

The Triadic Game Design is a workshop demonstrating the important components of games while simultaneously engaging in a game to support the learning process. It was developed by Casper Harteveld at TU-Delft. You can learn more about it here on his website or his forthcoming book.

Also, here is a brief video wrapping up the process taken during the International Simulation and Gaming Association conference in 2010.

I am in the process of adapting the game for a workshop that will take place during the Sustainability in Design NOW! conference from Sept 29th to October 1st in Bangalore. The goal of this game is to help participants leverage their knowledge of design for sustainability into games that will facilitate further skills development in the design and sustainability domain.

The process involves the overlap of meaningful skills, aspects of play, experiences of reality. This is a draft list of categories that may be used in the design of the workshop.

Play

Mixed Reality
Puzzle
Board Game
Strategy
Role-Play
Platform
Simulation
Quiz Game
Chance
Skill

Reality (note: these are adapted from the Design for Sustainability Guide)

Learning from Design Precedents
Secondary Products and Networks
Needs Assessment and Use Scenarios
Use Phase & Product Life Cycle
Lean Design
Manufacturing and Industrial Ecology
Product-Service Styling
Distribution
Retail and Use Life
Post-Use

Meaning

Acquire New Capabilities
Combine New Capabilities with Existing Ones
Decision Making and Choice Architecture
Common Ground and Cooperation
Systems and Complexity Perspectives
Analytical Skills
Clarity and Confidence
Coordination of Diverse Stakeholder Motivations
Integration Across Scales
Participation and Co-Creation
Transparency
Infrastructure as Pervasive Enabling Resources

Service designers identify and order goals in service systems. Service systems are a unit of analysis for an exchange of skills and capabilities which leads to the production of value in use (Vargo et al., 2008). Service systems are developed though the creation of value, where reinvention can transform the relationships of use and practice. Service systems are characteristically intangible, heterogeneous, simultaneous in production and consumption, non-perishable, and grounded in times and places that maintain their meaning and value (Kimbell, in prep).

One of the ways that designers understand service systems is by using a variety of approaches and concepts that isolate or concentrate focus on the relevant aspects of a system so they can drive experimentation and change. An example of this is a touchpoint, which means the aspects of the service are visible and come in contact with the users of that service (but see this discussion of its origins). You may have suspected that in a relationship of co-creation, touchpoints multiply quickly when production and consumption are linked since users are creators and vice versa. Another example that designers use is the line of visibility. This is similar to the touchpoint, and it describes what users see and experience in their relationships with a service system. It helps in rendering a system so that its processes and organizational structure are visible.

Because touchpoints and lines of visibility exist not only as tools but in practice, service experiences are tightly bound to tied to the production of narrative. Suspense in particular is a common experience for users when parts of a process, system, or set of relationships are hidden from view. Just imagine a time when you were the creator or recipient of a service. Much of your uncertainty or satisfaction was probably driven by what you knew or could expect about the outcome as well as the communication process that was taking place while the service was being delivered.

Richard Allen discusses suspense in his book about [Alfred] “Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony”. Allen cites Meir Sternberg’s distinction that, “suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiosity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as such it often involves and interest in information for its own sake.”

So when working in service design we should decide if we desire to create curiosity or suspense and design our process accordingly. Allen also incorporates Ian Cameron’s view that suspense is a “channeling of emotions”. Clearly emotions can be powerful, but how and why? In Allen’s analysis, suspense is something that happens in us as we are forced to take up the prospect of narrative outcomes that are contrary to the ones we desire. Suspense is constructed out of moral uncertainty, balancing our expectations with potential outcomes.

Allen discusses Hitchcock and develops descriptions of two types of suspense: pure and impure. Pure suspense is broad and objective, prolonged by tension, delay, and narration that is unrestricted, moving between vantage points and locations. It leads to an anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as the deadline looms. Arbitrary delays segment time and increase the tension because a bad outcome seems close at hand. Often, the audience sees a threat before the protagonist and surprise happens through the manipulation of time. The outcome almost always favor of the moral victory, especially in popular media.

Impure suspense on the other hand is local and subjective. It is developed from points of view that provide different sources of knowledge often through the eyes of the protagonists and antagonists, keeping the audience informed while the characters remain unwitting. Deadlines are set early on and acceleration commonly heightens the alert attentiveness of the spectators who are active participants in the construction of the suspense. Knowledge is not made by the director. It is made by the audience in cooperation with the information provided to the characters. All too often, the audiences senses the outcome before the characters do by filling in blanks sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Impure suspense favors empathy for the character, as if we were living through them. The moral outcome is less certain and often unrealized.

In order to try to make the differences between pure suspense and impure suspense more tractable, I imagined what users in a service system might say if they were experience one or the other. The result is in the chart below, and it adapts these distinctions and starts to resolve how one might go about implementing different narrative objectives for a service system.

Vargo, S. L., Maglio, P. P., & Akaka, M. A. (2008). On value and value co-creation: A service systems and service logic perspective. European Management Journal, 26(3), 145-152. doi:10.1016/j.emj.2008.04.003

In the 1930s, evolutionary geneticist Sewall Wright pulled together research strands in the biology of inbreeding, the genetics of coat color in guinea pigs, statistical methods (including path analysis), and mathematics that codified the changes in gene frequencies in populations as a result of natural selection, mutation, and migration.

His resulting description of these threads set the stage for qualitatively different perspective on the evolutionary process. Wright described his perspective as a “shifting balance” model of evolutionary change, and it highlighted the role of small populations in the transitions between periods of high and low fitness. This pattern, which followed from his use of the term “drift”, describes the fluctuations of gene frequencies that result from the random sampling of small populations. This random sampling comes from mating in small populations that, because of chance, produces small deviations from the numbers of genes originally represented in the population.

Wright’s Shifting Balance perspective coincided with his introduction of the adaptive landscape as a term to describe the space in which random fluctuations of gene frequencies in small populations could push the populations away from adaptive peaks or periods in which they were reproductively successful, and which would in turn allow natural selection to push them towards new adaptive peaks – areas of differential reproductive success.

Though Wright’s perspective on evolution is controversial (in a generative way), the perspectives and tools that emerged from his ideas have endured. For example, Wright’s work preceded algorithmic approaches to optimization problems in mathematics, networks (traveling salesman), metallurgy (simulated annealing), and artificial intelligence – to name a few

The process of Shifting Balance is described as a series of three dynamic phases:

Phase 1, the exploratory phase, the action of small groups explores new combinations. Most stay on the suboptimal fitness peak (reasonably successful), but some get caught in adaptive valleys (unsuccessful).

In Phase 2, selection causes the groups that are in the adaptive valleys to move toward new, higher-fitness peaks.

Finally, in phase 3, groups at higher fitness peaks send off migrants helping other groups move to higher fitness peaks.

While Wright’s process was intended for population genetic systems, an increasing convergence between social processes, cognitive psychology, technology, ecology, and creative practice suggests that the concepts apply well to the exploratory, form-finding processes that precede the design and production of materials and services. The implementation of the Shifting Balance process as a analog for social and creative strategy is useful for the production of highly original and robust creative solutions – or, at least it’s a testable hypothesis.

For some, analogies between biological and social processes are difficult to comprehend. However, the design of services and interactions is dependent on the ordering and reordering of processes, materials, people, and ideas. Combinations and recombinations of these things, when developed thoroughly and communicated, can impact the delivery and relational aspects of individuals working in cooperation or separately.

We could envision this process as a sort of charette (period of intense design in collaborative groups) activity where:

1. The exploratory phase initiates adaptive schema (creative combinations) which are driven by the interactions, specializations, and diverse perspectives of small groups;
2. Intergroup selection resulting from evaluation, the inherent heterogeneity among groups, and intended service platforms begins the iterative process of amplification of good combinations;
3. Export and translation of valuable forms/schema to other groups in order to test them against different problems, social contexts for cooperation, and consumptive patterns.

The immediate benefit of this strategy is the demonstration of expertise in practice, the role of discourse, and the chance events that can drive innovation. Participants from different disciplines will have to opportunity to observe and engage in creative problem solving within highly diverse communities. Here the focus is on collaborative ideation followed by problem-solving across disciplinary and expertise-based boundaries and ultimately an exercise in cooperative translation, storytelling, and communication.

There is enough social scientific research to at least point to the benefit of diverse groups, although it would be worthwhile to have a better handle on an ideal number – i.e. what counts as a small population. Plus, how do we go about choosing? What is the process of selection…or should we instead be saying, “What is the process of attachment?” And finally, are there specific patterns of translation or dissemination that we should aim for? For if migrants endowed with the most successful schema do disperse and link up with others, they have an opportunity to cooperate and raise the capacity the other groups elsewhere. But through which mechanisms to we initiate and implement these processes?

There are a few other ideas that seem uniquely coupled to the Phases of Shifting Balance. An example is the goal of participation as a unique form of empowerment in community planning exercises. One particular model of participatory engagement provided by Conde et al. (2004) is used in the context of climate change planning (below).

This example shows transitional categories in participation. When viewed through a model of culture which emphasizes process over characteristics, these are skills acquisition categories that indicate differences with an impact on fitness – i.e. reproductive success.

Each category represents a different level of engagement, a level that itself suggests a tighter relationship between participants and the tools of participation or cooperation.

1. Informative participation is an exchange of information, which may or may not be meaningful.
2. Consultation requires that participants begin asking questions as well as providing information.
3. Functional engagement means that different participants identify and agree to share goals, thus ordering their actions in accordance with each other.
4. Interaction means the initiation of feedback, where signals and shifts in the participation is met with responsiveness and dialog with the others.
5. Self-motivated participation is demonstrated by the points at which processes are acquired and reorganized by the participants themselves.
6. Migration ultimately expands the instances of participation which have been successful, sharing them with other communities, and finding cooperative allies elsewhere.

References:

Conde, C., Lonsdale, K., Nyong, A., & Aguilar, I. (2004). Engaging stakeholders in the adaptation process. Adaptation policy frameworks for climate change: Developing strategies, policies and measures, 47–66.

Johnson, N. (2008) Sewall Wright and the development of shifting balance theory. Nature Education 1(1)

Wright, S. (1977) Evolution and the Genetics of Populations. Vol. 3: Experimental Results and Evolutionary Deductions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

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During a one-week course (September 19 – 24, 2010) at the retreat of Duin & Kruidberg Country Estate in the Netherlands we will have three independent tracks resp. about ‘Energy markets, market design versus actual performance’, ‘Strategic Asset Management, an integrated life cycle approach’ and ‘Governance to go, regulating cross-border infrastructures in the age of European Integration’. The NGINfra Academy focuses on giving young professionals and researchers the tools to embark on the challenge of society’s growing demands on infrastructures. Register now via www.nextgenerationinfrastructures.eu/academy

Next Generation Infrastructures Foundation
The Academy is being organized by Next Generation Infrastructures. This Foundation is a platform within knowledge institutions, market players and government organizations work together on current issues, as well as issues that won’t be current for another 20 years. Our work involves thinking ahead, solving ‘puzzles’, researching actual cases, taking a critical look at current infrastructures and devising solutions. Infrastructures that perform badly have a significant negative impact on economic growth and cause considerable dissatisfaction among users. The main challenge is to identify the technical and social aspects of infrastructure systems. A dynamic team of scientists from various disciplines and countries are working with policymakers, regulators, managers, investors, designers, contractors and operators in order to develop theories, models and instruments designed to ensure that infrastructures function to their full potential – now and in the future.

I’ve been thinking a little lately about impact and what it means to measure it.  What comes to mind is  the idea that we should be interested in verbs rather than nouns.  We should want to see transitions in practice from knowing something to knowing how to know or do new things.  What this means is that we might have to be more experimental in our approach to engagement and consequently with what we produce.  It might require us to make certain things more than others – decision aids for example – that will allow us to assess if our artifacts, maps, objects, writing, charts, and graphs, enable people and policy makers to do things differently than they otherwise would.

This is a difficult proposition because of the space in which we work – science and technology policy.  Because we deal with so-called wicked problems, everything happens real-time and experiments are ‘live’.  This means that by trying something out, we’ve already done it.  And so I’m looking for models of practices that employ an approach to design and experimentation where decision aids form the basis of practice and comparison.

The Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation is a good example of this.  Though their focus is on health care and the patient, they do two things there that could be applied to CSTEP’s approach.  The first is that they organize interventions into a cost and risk matrix (Table 1; Duncan and Breslin, 2009).  This allows them to assess if something is high risk and low cost and so on.  It also suggests where decision aids might change in their forms and details – e.g. from a visual rendering to a business plan or an object to spreadsheet.

Table 1

The second is that they use an experimental approach to validate their design process.  The approach of testing artifacts for their effect on health is fairly common in a clinical setting.  However, this may seem a little alien and awkward to policy contexts because it treats the policy maker (the decision maker) like a patient.  But it is in this sense that one could view the decision maker as being sick – of being unable to sift through the complexity of weighty decisions or lacking the information necessary for rational choices.

An article about a decision aid for diabetes treatment options outlines the process, and it includes some detail about the experimental protocol that allowed researchers to determine that the decision aid supported better decision  or at least decisions that were more consistent with the needs of the patient (Montori et al, 2007).

I think there is an opportunity in this second part of Mayo’s assessment strategy which is to test, scientifically and using evidence, the impact of decision aids produced by CSTEP on the ability of policy makers to make decisions, develop, and implement positive changes to existing policy.

The challenge of course is to gather these policy makers together and to compare the outcomes of their decisions.  As we get to the point of being able to run workshops, perhaps we ought to take on an experimental approach of using control groups to see if indeed games, maps, and other decision aids support the kinds of behaviors we are hoping to suport.  This is more common in a games-for-policy approach, where debriefing is part of the process.  Still, we ought to think tactically, practically, and socially to see if this is a possibility.  At the least, it is one way to demonstrate impact – albeit at a micro scale.  But then, isn’t it the micro decision making that scales the best?

Duncan, A. K., & Breslin, M. A. (2009). Innovating health care delivery: the design of health services. Journal of Business Strategy, 30(2/3), 13 – 20. doi:10.1108/02756660910942427

Montori, V. M., Breslin, M., Maleska, M., & Weymiller, A. J. (2007). Creating a Conversation: Insights from the Development of a Decision Aid. PLoS Med, 4(8), e233. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040233

Disaggregation among natural and social scientific communities can lead to misunderstandings about the different components of disaster management and socio-ecological systems. Terms like resilient, adaptive, robust are often used to describe systems and their processes and come up in the literature, policy, and the media very frequently. They have catch my attention because they have different use patterns in the field I know a little about: biology.

Adaptation, coping, resilience, and robustness have similar definitions, but they sometimes have different technical definitions across disciplines. Their different meanings contribute to their value, and they highlight the differences in perspectives that each scientific community contributes. However, the details matter for distinguishing important components of systems and what aspects might be suggestive for new insights or that might be responsive to intervention or assessment. It’s also important to establish common ground meanings when communities get together and work towards common goals.

There is a benchmark article Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–Ecological Systems that does a much better job at pulling together the literature than I do here, and I came across it after writing much of what is in this article. It is also the narrative used by the Resilience Alliance for their activities.

The following represents some of my notes and thinking as I try to sort out the definitions on my own. For me, it means asking how different perspectives contribute to the ways in which we interact in socio-ecological systems.

Adaptation
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report defines adaptation as:

Initiatives and measures to reduce the vulnerability of natural and human systems against actual or expected climate change effects. Various types of adaptation exist, e.g. anticipatory and reactive, private and public, and autonomous and planned. Examples are raising river or coastal dikes, the substitution of more temperature-shock resistant plants for sensitive ones, etc.

This definition takes its function from the ability of humans to manipulate their environment, making it better suited to human-identified goals and interests, even if acting on behalf of other organisms. Some synonyms include alteration, modification, redesign, remodeling, revamping, reworking, reconstruction, conversion, adjustment, acclimatization, acclimation, accommodations, habituation, acculturation, assimilation, and integration.

Adaptation is also used to describe genetically-accumulated evolutionary change over time in organisms as a response to natural selection. This is different from the case where manipulating the environment substitutes in the short-term replaces the pressure of genetic adaptation over the long term.

So I suppose this is why it calls to mind a version of evolution based on characters acquired in its lifetime (commonly known as Lamarckian inheritance)–if only for the appropriation of the term adaptation to refer to intra (within) generational processes and not inter (between) generational processes.

Adaptation for evolutionary biologists typically means processes through which a population becomes better suited to its environment over the course of many generations, often through natural selection. A great deal of debate and research has been directed at how we recognize adaptation in hindsight. This is because it can be difficult to state the causes for the evolution of a trait when we do not have direct observation and only historical signatures to learn from. Most notably this was discussed in “The Spandrels of San Marco”, a paper by Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979) that uses an analogy from architecture for the evolution of organismal form and function.

I agree that changing the environment in the ways mentioned in the IPCC definition will likely limit vulnerabilities for humans and other populations. However, there is an implicit assumption here that the goal should be for humans NOT to have to adapt over a course of generations–despite the inevitability of genetic change over time. It presupposes an assumption of stasis – and a very western one when compared to eastern notions of change and mutability. Richard Nisbett catalogs how some of these assumptions about change and stasis in his book The Geography of Thought. For me, it depends on what time scale one is looking to understand if stasis or change is more relevant. Still, I think its difficult to argue anymore that stasis is more relevant than change.

The necessary question should not be IF we should adapt (genetically or by manipulating the environment). Instead we should ask, “What are we adapting to and how are we getting there?” Will humans and other populations be adapting to artificially-supported ‘vulnerability balloons’ as we are almost surely doing now through our uses of technology and fossil fuels?

This question of adaptive goal is important because the IPCC definitions include definitions of costs and benefits with its description of adaptation. To what goal are these costs and benefits applied? Within the frame of a generation or an organism’s lifetime, explicating goals may make sense, but ascribing goals to a ecosystem – much less whole populations – gets very very slippery. You start to need some way to implicate who or what is writing that mission statement.

Similarly the IPCC includes adaptive capacity in its glossary as the ability, institutions, and resources that can be used to implement adaptation measures.

I think this is all a bit confusing, and I feel it makes more sense to reserve the definition of adaptation for genetic, phenotypic, and behavioral attenuation of organisms or systems to their environment across generations. To describe the processes that organisms and systems use during their lifetimes I think we need a term that encompasses more variability, one that is less blatantly anthropocentric and functionalist in its approach to socio-ecological co-evolution. We also need a long view on systems not ones that are limited to single generations only – something that the biological definition of adaptation retains but that the socio-technical one does not.

Borrowing from the literature of evolutionary biology, behavior, and developmental biology, plasticity seems far better suited to the processes of environmental manipulation being described by the IPCC. This is because it references a material (plastic) that maintains its basic molecular structure while having variable capacity to take on any number of manipulations or forms.

Coping and Plasticity
The terms coping and adaptation are sometimes used interchangeably leading to confusion. Here I think there is some opportunity to disentangle the two. A compilation of brainstorming sessions by groups of development practitioners in Ghana, Niger and Nepal described some differences which were then documented in the Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook (table 1). The results of the group’s sessions were pointing to what I think was a difference between 1) consistent and conscious actions to reduce vulnerability (adaptation) versus 2) ad hoc solutions (coping).

It’s worthwhile to differentiate coping and adaptation as within and between generation processes, respectively. Biologists use plasticity to describe the ability of an organism or group to adjust within its lifetime via behavioral or developmental responses to the environment. This may indeed include manipulation of the environment to decrease vulnerability. Phenotypic plasticity is a description that could easily encompass artifacts, behaviors, institutions, and aggregations of resources as extensions of an organism’s phenotype. It invokes important concepts from evolutionary biology including the role of cooperation in building and maintaining extended phenotypes (such as aggregations of useful materials like insurance, band-aids, and water) or how phenotypic reaction norms can change in response to different environments–shedding light on why a strategy in one environment may not be as successful in another. There is further correspondence here with plasticity and the concept of developmental canalization (that organismal systems can get locked in to specific trajectories) and with the concept of path dependence in the development of economic and institutional systems.

So a better definition of plasticity might re-appropriate the IPCC’s definition of adaptation and rework it as:

An adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities. Plasticity operates through cognitive (sensing), social (interactional), physiological, and other mechanisms that can adjust to a wide range of variability. Plasticity is the ability to respond to variability and a range of realized and possible futures continuously and in a sustained approach. Plasticity or coping strategies attenuate the use of resources to local needs and involve planning that hybridizes old and new knowledge and strategies in an exploratory process.

Here I think this definition makes it much easier to bridge what may be happening at a physiological level (cellular temperature variation, sweating) with responses at an artifact level (clothing, ventilation) and an institutional (e.g. policies towards what it means to be cool).

This is because the term plasticity explicitly invokes a connotation of variability, while adaptation feels more like a description of how well two things (in this case organism or population and environment) fit together. Clearly, if the environment is highly variable we need variability in our systems, not assumptions and values of how well we already fit and work within it.

Coping, on the other hand, seems pretty straightforward. Survive. It makes sense to leave a lot of variability open for this one, because when it comes time for coping strategies, any and all tactics may be appropriate. But then again, there can be ways to cope that are more responsive than others. But I think this starts to dig into a definition of resilience or robustness, where the system properties begin to matter more than than how they manifest themselves in practice. What I mean by this is that as people, organisms, and ecosystems attempt to cope with change, their ability to draw on networks or strategies for coping is itself embedded in the system. Some systems, as a function of their structure, cope better than others. Consequently the adapt better than other too.

Resilience
The Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook adapts its definition from UNISDR (2009) defining resilience as “the ability of a system to resist, absorb, and recover from the effects of hazards in a timely and efficient manner, preserving or restoring its essential basic structures, functions, and identity.”

The IPCC defines resilience as “the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organisation, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.”

While Walker et al (2004) define resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.”

In these cases resilience emphasizes a system’s ability to maintain or return to specific structural or functional features–i.e. to maintain its identity, its durability, its persistence. But as noted by Erica Jen in her article “Stable or Robust? What’s the Difference?” (2005), the choices of features or structural elements that we attend to are important for assessing both the capacity and quality of that responsiveness to change.

So what is the function, what is functional, and for whom? Definitions matter.

One way to think about resilience is to imagine a couple of different water balloons. One balloon is filled halfway full. Another is filled so that the latex rubber that composes its surface and membrane is stretched tightly to hold the water in. Now you can throw both balloons back and forth between each other, and neither may pop. But what do you think will happen when the balloons are stretched, twisted, or allowed to drop on the ground where a twig might be a hazard to the already tense surface of the overfilled balloon? It will probably pop and spill the water out.

A system’s resilience is a lot like a water balloon, and the degree of resilience is determined by how much water is forced into the balloon, the size of the balloon, and how much it is pushed to its limits. We might think of the balloons shape, its ‘throwability’ or the thickness of its membrane as examples of functional or structural elements. In most cases, we are looking at how well the balloon is able to maintain it shape and its continuity despite being stressed – i.e. it is functionally a ‘water balloon’, it has a round shape, and responds to the exterior and interior pressures of air and water.

Rarely do we think that a water balloon might reconfigure itself, rearranging the organization of its functions, structural elements, or features to be able to accomplish the same task differently. What would happen if the water and the balloon separated or if the water balloon system was able to draw on other systems (e.g. refrigeration) to change the relationships between its functional elements? What if we no longer simply considered only the water inside of the balloon as the system responding to the task of throwing? What if the throwing and catching movements were also included? Would we still think of a resilient system, or would we start to walk a path of robustness–of being able to adjust the definitions and constraints of the systems themselves in pursuit of coevolutionary relationships between them?

Robustness
Robustness is a different beast altogether – literally. While resilience is focused on maintaining a system, we can describe robustness as the ability of a system to change and in doing so to respond to environment and to develop entirely new functions as a result.

Some argue that robustness describes the ability of a system to withstand mutations and maintain its phenotype or “shape” as a result (Wagner, 2005). Instead I think there is a greater correspondence of robustness with transformation as used by Walker et al (2004). Transformability is “the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social (including political) conditions make the existing system untenable.” I’m less sure about the “untenable” part of Walker et al’s definition.

Robustness is the ability of a system to evolve system functions, not simply maintain those that already exist. In this way, an analogy can be drawn between adaptation/robustness and plasticity/resilience. Similarly, I think robustness has a quality of being parametric. Parametric architecture has the quality of being built from common construction principles, but by varying the parameter values of those rules of construction, endless forms become possible.

References

Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2): 5. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5

UNISDR, 2009. Terminology: Basic terms of disaster risk reduction and IISD et al, 2007. Community-based Risk Screening – Adaptation and Livelihoods (CRiSTAL) User’s Manual, Version 3.0.

Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook
http://www.careclimatechange.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Itemid=30

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Indian States Renamed For Countries With Similar Populations (Click Map for Larger Version)

Inspired by: US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs

Indian States As Countries of Similar Population (Click Map for Larger Version)

Inspired by: US States As Countries of Equal Population

Indian States As Countries of Similar Population (Click Map for Larger Version)

Sources:

Population of Indian States: Government of India (2001). Census of India.
Population of Nations: Wikipedia. List of Countries by Population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population Retrieved 2010-05-27.

A group of researchers made up of advanced students from the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) and the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DAIICT) set out to learn about ethnographic practice and to experience the places and people that may have something to add to our understanding of how the technology fits (or doesn’t fit) with their everyday life. Their goal was to identify how user context could affect the landscape of educational technology…or at least that’s how they started out.

Playpower is a initiative to support affordable, effective, and fun learning games. The project is starting with an existing $10 TV-computer as a platform for learning games in the developing world.

The video below introduces the Playpower Foundation’s mission.

Playpower: An introduction from Playpower Foundation on Vimeo.

Working on a set of social research practices means getting to know or getting NOT to know (depending on how you look at it) the places and practices of the people who can potentially create something valuable from changes to the exiting technology and it uses.

We held a summary and feedback session at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy after their first week of training and observation. They shared their process of ethnographic research gathered feedback to develop it further and begin to implement more observations on a wider scale.

The research team gave a great introduction of their process with some initial results. What followed was a fantastic discussion among approximately 15-20 staff and researchers at CSTEP as well as visitors and the Playpower team.

Many themes began to emerge, and it became clear that the exciting thing about the Playpower project was more than its concept of low cost computing. Instead, I think it raises as many questions as it answers and engages its audience with problems about the role of technology in education and everyday life.

We explored multiple themes in more or less detail, but overall the session was a fantastic success and good model for how to bring about discussions that relate social science, technology, economics, and education in exciting ways.

Questions and themes for further follow-up:

1. What is the role of ethnographic researchers in relationship to the design process and the Playpower project more generally? That is, how do perspectives gained “on-the-ground” compete with held assumptions about the project and its implementation?

2.  How do we move from perspectives of technology as a solution questions about peoples’ goals and aspirations? That is, are we working on the Playpower technology as a panacea for educational constraints rather than understanding how family and individual wants and needs articulate their own technology (or otherwise) solutions?

3.  Understanding context means that we may need to do some questionnaire redesign – to understand more than just the landscape afforded by people’s lifestyles and incomes towards an understanding of how practice and purpose shape socio-technical interactions.

4.  How can the conclusions and assumptions held by programmers and designers be refined?  Put another way, do designers or researchers feel free, comfortable, or motivated to redress cultural biases and modes? Also, how is the distinction between game design and development articulated?

5.  Does ethnographic research inform through techniques beyond the interview-questionaire-film? What are additional techniques for research? 

6.  What are the values that Playpower is proposing, advocating, or nominating?  For example, are fantasizing, empathy, or transitions in behavior and practice something the project aims to make durable in its presentation and game design? What about the game or software content?  How do these values translate into design – e.g. process or pattern knowledge as bird’s eye views and 2nd order perspectives.

7.  Can film and cinema provide media and narrative precedents for games and instruction?

8. Did they buy (the original keyboard/game sets) because they are educational? Or for other purposes?

9.  Are there game paradigms to move beyond the screen and into interaction and engagement with the real world.