Lifted from The New School’s site, here is the description of the third lecture in the 2010 Stephan Weiss series:

More and more, designers are designing businesses, services, policies, and emergent social forms, and the experiences that go with them. Along the way they are inventing new methods and tools, fundamentally altering how design is conceived. To mark the establishment of the new MFA in Transdisciplinary Design, the School of Design Strategies is presenting a lecture series that explores how design must shift in a world where the complexity and interconnectedness of people, infrastructures, networks, and economies challenge traditional disciplines.

Transitional States, a 2010 Stephan Weiss Lecture, considers such questions as: Can design help governmental and non-governmental organizations deliver things like infrastructure, education, and healthcare? And What kinds of alliances and collaborations are bringing design into large-scale social and technological services?

It’s not exactly liveblogging when I take notes with pen and paper, then type them up days later, but here are my notes, nonetheless.

Update: Watch the video! These two were far more brilliant than digitized scribbled notes can convey.

Nigel Snoad

(technical evangelist and product manager for Microsoft Public Safety Initiative and advisor for the ICT for Peace Foundation and the Institute for State Effectiveness)

• teaching Design for the Red Cross at Parsons
• design for emergent, self-organizing changes, movements — “Complex Adaptive Systems”
• social networking vs. societal networking systems: we have to think about the societal if we’re going to design for change
• standard systems models assume problems/issues are soluble (cause and effect, rational choice)
• recommends Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Age of the Unthinkable:Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It
• a world of inherent unpredictability and newness
• The earthquake in Haiti finally crystallized some new thinking on humanitarian response design
• 3 kinds of solution approaches:

1. Simple: characterized as being a puzzle; e.g., following a recipe
2. Complicated: characterized as being a problem; e.g., sending a rocket to the moon
3. Complex: characterized as being a mess; e.g., raising a child

• the growing complexity of a problem is not linear
• life as a citizen is complex — you interact with multiple jurisdictions, services, agencies as part of your participation
• design is about the evolving interaction between problem and solution; i.e., design for constant change
• you can’t understand a system unless you can map it

• design principles:
  • open ended
  • exploratory
  • sensing
  • revealatory -> discoverable
  • flexible
  • human scaled
• simulation and play are essential exploratory techniques
• “framing of choices for changing individual and collective behavior: how to nudge people toward beneficial action”
• we each have our own maps and systems for organizing and making sense of our worlds, so look at systems and ask if they are as complex as they need to be, yet also look for the underlying simplicity. One person’s chaos is another person’s orderly system.

Natalie Jeremijenko

(associate professor of Visual Art, and director of the xdesign Environmental Health Clinic, New York University)

• crisis of agency: “What to Do?” – revealed by climate crisis
• redefining health to mean something shared/collective/actionable: who can act? who can change?
• we cannot treat the environment as something so global if we want it to be actionable
• the top five conditions pediatricians spend the most of their time treating all happen to also have environmental implications: asthma, developmental delays/spectrum disorders, rare childhood cancers, diabetes, obesity
• Environmental Health Clinic is a place to coproduce solutions to environmental health problems in a clinical setting; sense making out of complex ecosystems and environmental challenges
• “flight was the original Internet – it was going to end all wars.”
• we don’t just need critical thinking, we need critical making: experimental production that helps us understand “what to do” to address challenges
• Dewey knew: participatory democracy as skeptical experimentation by the people
• there is an issue of needing citizens to feel qualified to experiment, collect evidence, analyze their own data, and discuss/defend it
• education holds a systemic belief that making stuff doesn’t matter
• we’d be better off trying to educate people in their sleep because that’s a less constrained environment than the classroom
• if you want to change education, you have to address teachers as people – not as teachers – as people capable of making autonomous decisions and intelligent judgments.

There was one other writing project for which I deserve very little credit but am very proud: my sister’s new book, Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What it Will Take for a Woman to Win. My love of learning leads to a strong affinity for research and I have often said that the best thing about graduate school was having the full time job of reading interesting and provocative things about the world all day and then writing about them. Well, for a short time last year, it was my job again, as I researched and annotated a global perspective of women in presidential and executive politics. It was fascinating to dive deep into the case studies of “Iron Ladies” like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Angela Merckel, and Michelle Bachelet, as well as less well known politicians like Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir of Iceland and Laura Chinchilla, who recently was elected Costa Rica’s first woman president. The truly interesting stuff in the final product are the myriad insights on American politics and gender. Yes, of course, I’m doubly biased in recommending this book. But, as an avid non-fiction reader with a 21st century attention span, let me just state that, if the place at which many books on my shelves are dog-eared counts as evidence, about 95% percent of the books I read are one-third longer than they need to be. Notes was the rare book that I read cover-to-cover, and seriously…not just because I worked on it. With the midterm elections later this year and 2012 already on the horizon, we have lessons to learn.

This year, the bonus for me was helping out as G4C’s Festival blogger and tweeter, which became an opportunity to participate differently than I’m used to (for one thing, having to focus my undivided attention; it was also the first time I wasn’t demo’ing a game at the Expo Night so I finally got a chance to walk around and see a whole lot of amazing projects). A number of ideas (especially this one and this one) are still marinating in my head for a reflection post here, and I have a whole lot of wonderful people to follow up with, but for now, here are my daily roundup summaries on the G4C blog:

G4C 101 Workshop

Festival Day 1

Festival Day 2

And then I thought, what if the Qwitter developer had instead built a Twitter application that helped to solve world hunger? Or helped Twitter users keep their angst in check and redirected them toward taking some type of action?

There’s a good reason that idea popped into my head, and it’s called the Change the Web Challenge. And good news, world! Now there are 35 ideas submitted in that spirit to the project gallery. I’ve been volunteering with Change the Web for the past couple months, helping to spread the word about this innovative concept to take the Social Actions API, get developers to build great things with it, and lower the barrier to people changing the world as part of their everyday Internet use. It has been a lot of fun, and in the process I’ve met the great people behind Social Actions and deepened my own thinking about online activism, learning/behavior change, and civic engagement. Twitter itself is where I first found out about the volunteer opportunity, and the whole experience has helped to make my professional use of that tool more meaningful.

So now, the best part is the voting that has been going on all week, and there’s only 48 hours left! If you have even the slightest interest in social issues, activism, civic engagement, and/or the interweb, you need to check out these brilliant ideas, leave comments for their creators, and vote for your favorites. Read the primer Joe Solomon wrote if you feel pressed for time. Just get moving so your vote can be counted to help the top 20 finalists move on to the judges, who will select three winners to receive cash prizes.






*For the record, I interchangeably say “solve world hunger” or “create world peace” or “cure cancer” — no bias when it comes to which causes people choose to redirect their negative energy.

Going to SXSW is a big investment in my own professional development, and I realize I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to attend, let alone eat my my way through a week in Austin. The many recent news stories about exploding demand at food banks across the US have left me very aware and grateful that we’re still able to buy groceries and cook nutritious meals.

Last weekend, as I was planning my SXSW schedule, I made a decision that happens to tie in perfectly with the Pledge to End Hunger: NO BUYING FOOD AT THE CONVENTION CENTER CONCESSIONS. Having attended many, many conferences, I like to think that I’m somewhat of a convention center food connoisseur. I know well the overpriced muffins and heat-lamp-cooked pizza across this great land, and I know that I do not want to eat any of them next week. Neither time nor my freelancer budget are going to permit eating out at restaurants on Sixth Street every time my stomach growls, so in keeping with this new rule, I’m bringing snacks. Yes, I will be that nerd, the one eating goldfish crackers out of a ziploc bag. If you’re going to SXSW, I hope you’ll join me. Skip the concessions, even if just once, and donate what you save to help end hunger for children in America. (You’re also welcome to join me, literally, if you want to grab a bite. No concessions doesn’t mean no food at all. I’d love to meet up.) If you’re not going to SXSW, but still planning to eat lunch next week, it’d be great if you joined in, too — check out www.pledgetoendhunger.com to learn how.

But first, one impression.

This was a relatively small event, but a far more diverse crowd than anything I’ve been to in a while (ok, not including the Inauguration). Not only were there more people of color than I usually see at both nonprofit and K-12 education events, but there were also other young professionals there, which was hugely refreshing after several years of dragging down the average age everywhere I go. Yet I was in the minority in one way — I was the only person taking notes on a laptop. Sure, I am biased toward events that have a technology focus, and this one did not, but it left me wondering, what are all these people going to do with their handwritten notes? I don’t just type mine for the sake of speed, but because it puts me one step closer to sharing them with my network, putting the information out into the wider world. I don’t doubt that my colleagues in attendance will make excellent use of this knowledge in their nonprofit settings, and I really hope someone else typed up their notes and blogged about it, too, but it really made me think that the impact of all this social media for my generation — which was most definitely represented in the room — has been exaggerated if it has little or no role in our professional development, reflection, and practice.

And now, back to the regularly scheduled programming.

Context for the panel:
There are four generations at work in the workplace — the previous focus of generation gap conversations was on leadership development to prepare for new leadership when baby boomers retire. Now economic crisis is leading to baby boomers not retiring, so we need to look beyond just intergenerational dialogue and leadership development.

Moderator: Christine Rhee – American Express Philanthropy (the next generation of nonprofit leadership is one of their funding themes)

Panelists:

Frances Kunreuther – Director of Building Movement Project, author of Working Across Generations

• Less than a year ago, the conversation in the sector was about filling the jobs of exiting leaders. Now the conversation is about older generations not leaving their jobs and the need to find ways to integrate younger generations into organizations and leadership.
• A decade ago, older generations felt like there was no one behind them to rise to leadership, younger generations felt like they were unseen and unheard.
• One change in the landscape has been an emerging recognition that there are leadership skills that could be taught beyond just energy and commitment

• Her book talks about rethinking the frames around generational shifts
• four generations: veterans of change (aka the Silent Generation), Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials/Gen Y — book defines each generation’s tasks and roles in leadership and each generation’s reaction to the generational shift
• many of today’s organizations have never been through a generational shift because they were founded in the 60s and 70s
• why is there fear about younger generations? why are younger leaders not taking positions?
• there are shared values across generations, but how people enact their values varies based on their life experiences and when they were born
• older people say younger generations are: not committed, too entitled, don’t want to pay dues, too sharp a personal/work life divide
• younger people say older generations are: burnt out, work is their life, not efficient, too many meetings, don’t listen
• there is no charted territory for a generation that should be retiring at 65 and isn’t
• how to build trust across generations?
• structural problem – people were saying they would leave their JOBS in five years (Compass Point studies), but it’s because they didn’t want to be executive directors anymore because the jobs were undoable, and they still haven’t left the sector/stopped working entirely.
• younger generations were always being asked to “give input” but weren’t allowed to be involved in decision-making – they hated this and wanted a different form of participation and accountability
• boards are also an issue – many organizations have boards that are much older than the staff
• currently doing a survey with Idealist.org to find out what works for younger leaders in the sector and how organizations can change culture and structure to implement such changes
• sector also needs to prepare for potential conflict of retirees returning to the workforce

Dave McKinney – Public Allies

• The conversation needs to be about organizational culture, not just “the pipeline to leadership”
• Public Allies: working to change the face of leadership by working directly with young adults who are emerging community leaders, name is a play on Public Enemy (founded in 1992)
• Alumni range from early 20s to late 30s – aspirations in the sector: younger ones say they want to be executive directors, older ones have aspirations but don’t necessarily want to be executive directors, oldest say no – they’ve had enough
• Younger people have no access to interact with leadership or be involved with decision-making, and so the possibility of being in that position still holds some allure for them
• Older young people are looking for other ways to effect change (entrepreneurship, private sector) because they’ve seen what doesn’t work about being an executive director – “don’t believe the hype”
• Public Allies is aging (staff in their 30s, organization is 15 years old) and trying to address generational gaps and culture shift as they work with the youngest leaders entering their programs:
  • managing for results, developing metrics for this (used to be all about process, now it’s about results) – this builds trust, lets people be accountable for their own work
  • the older generations’ obsession with static models is prohibitive to a generation that is used to open networks
  • “create monkey bars and not ladders” – instead of hierarchy, take a holistic approach to the work, create flatter organizations, take a more generalist approach to defining staff positions and advancing mission
  • changing the physical environment to be alive for younger generations

• lessons from Obama campaign:

1. built a powerful brand that reflected people’s aspirations
2. respected the possibility of change coming from the bottom up
3. had a clear and measurable strategy and managed for those results
4. excelled online and in face-to-face organizing (didn’t see these as binary)
5. ubiquitous web presence
6. supported and built leadership of young people

Alexis Terry – BoardSource

• Governance doesn’t usually make it into the conversation about the generation gap
• BoardSource’s mission now includes inspiring board service and reaching out to individuals who want to serve on a board, not just those who already do
• BoardSource study: only 2% of nonprofits have board members under the age of 30. 36% have board members between 30-49.
• Findings on how to engage young professionals in board service:
• common barriers:
  • baby boomers say they don’t know how to find younger generations
  • concerns about isolation (afraid of them being the token youth or token ___)
  • preference for board members to be chief executives or officers at corporations
• Boards need to go extend young people’s involvement beyond either answer tech questions or being the representative young person
• Boards should have an “age down” strategy – figure out your current board age average and plan to reduce it by 5 years over the next 5 years
• Top skills/qualities boards seek in young people in order for them to add value:
  • the ability to think long term (18-24 months into the future)
  • understanding technology as a complement to face-to-face interaction, don’t impose it as the end all be all
  • expecting the feedback loops to be different from what they expect at work – “board work is team work” – don’t expect individual recognition for contributions, the reward is the advancement of the mission of the organization
• Top qualities of boards that are open to young people:
  • view Gens X and Y as leaders today – accept our ability to contribute now
  • remember what it was like when they first joined a board
  • try to restrain themselves from framing situations with, “when I was your age”

Abridged Notes from the Q&A:

Frances Kunreuther (FK): it’s not that people don’t have ideas about how to create new structures, there often isn’t support for doing so – often a fear from boards and funders of an organization that is trying to cultivate a new structure.

Alexis Terry (AT): boards are learning that they need to model things for their organizations – e.g., modeling inclusivity, shared leadership. One way to do this is to set up an onboarding program for new leadership – e.g., pull from a young professional network or membership pool, leverage the ex officio status to bring in young board members (have a first year of board service with non-voting status as a training model).

Dave McKinney (DM): it is hard to do organizational change well, many organizations have a hard time fitting this in, being intentional about it, among all the other priorities.

Question: how does multigenerational partnership work in small or mid size organizations?

FK: often in small organizations, the leader or founder is so influential in the organizational culture that change becomes harder. “You can’t make change without struggle” – don’t be afraid of differences or struggle in the process of change, but there needs to be an openness to it, and all generations need to be open to change.

DM: sharing of stories is a good way to create space for the “congruency of values” across generations (especially when there is a perception of a values clash).

Question: how to deal with founder’s syndrome?

AT: BoardSource has a toolkit for founder’s syndrome and long-term chief executives, includes experiences of Gen Xers moving an organization from founder’s syndrome to them being there for only 5-10 years.

DM: consider value of transition plans, also having an executive coach to help leaders think about their style.

FK: sometimes it’s okay for organizations not to outlive their founders, and there are new organizations and social ventures being launched by younger people all the time.

Question: is one of the reasons that transition planning doesn’t happen because so many organizations follow a model in which the outgoing leader is totally kept out of the succession/hiring process?

DM: there should be responsibility on the part of the Executive Director to think about the position as something bigger than him/herself and work with the board to make succession happen.

FK: it’s a fine line – there should be a way to let the outgoing leader be involved, but not control the process. Also, there is more and more evidence of Executive Directors leaving their position, but not the organization – mixed results on that.

Christine Rhee (moderator): Important to embed talent management in the organizational culture so that there is a clear understanding of who within the organization has the abiilty to rise to new leadership when the opportunities emerge.

Question: Addressing people of color (and absence thereof) in leadership roles?

DM: need to make an intentional effort to develop leadership of people of color so we can contradict the notion that white people should be EDs, Development Directors, Board Chairs (i.e., the ones who control the money). We need to have conversations about privelege and power, which are often the elephants in the room, so that there is a culture where it’s ok to talk about it.

AT: Look at the work of the Foundation Coalition in California – ten foundations that have articulated what they will do to fund work that focuses on inclusion.

Question: how do you ask/know when the purpose of your organization is not valid anymore?

FK: outside forces tell us – when you can’t gather the interest from constituents that you once could…sometimes there are things that in our minds are important to us, but it jut isn’t the right place and time for it. And it’s okay to let things go because new things will emerge. It’s so hard to have that conversation because we’re so invested in what we do, but it’s really important for the board to ask itself, “are we still relevant?”

AT: Look at the work of Rick Moyers from the Meyer Foundation, who writes a lot about the role of mergers in addressing the relevancy question.

Questions: How to balance addressing basic human needs (hunger, homelessness, health) vs. this kind of overarching capacity building for the sector? And how to integrate this kind of civic education/leadership development in school?

DM: Public Allies’ strategy is to expose people to issues, teach them how to act on the issues they care about, and cultivate a long term commitment to working on those issues. If they’re able to engage people in the issues, they’re supporting the growth of our democracy and giving them voice on the issues that affect their lives.

FK: We need to teach critical thinking skills in conjunction with teaching the issues that matter in people’s lives if we want them to be able to make a difference. Also need to focus not only on cultivating young people’s individual voices but also the power of collective voice.

My notes:

Eli Pariser

• we can allow ourselves some giddiness over the next few days, but then we have to address what this means for our politics and take it seriously — moments when people fear for their economic survival = shifts toward conservatism, so we can’t ignore the possibility of that challenge emerging and the pendulum swinging back the other way
• can’t build sense of togetherness and guard against reactionary behavior through the media because it thrives on fear — and Obama can’t do this alone, either — has to happen through organizing.
• collective action problem — not just one person can spread a sense of hope, everyone has to do it together, build institutions together through the struggle
• “virtuous cycle” – people believe their actions can change things, sense of hope becomes an incentive (so need to leverage people’s recent experience of doing something that led to tangible change — this is an opportunity to create great change in a short period of time)
• not a single troop has come home from Iraq, not a single green job has been created, no one has better healthcare…yet. this is the work we have to do now.

JoDee Winterhof

• CARE measures impact of development work on women and girls
• how to partner with members of Congress and agencies, create participatory democracy is a shift in thinking after so many years of working against government
• “build the boat while we sail it” – have to act quickly to create change
• CARE’s constituents (in terms of advocacy) are people who care about what happens in the development contexts where they work
• the stories of how policies/potential policies are impacting real people are known to those who are working in communities, not those creating the policies in Washington – community workers have to keep getting those stories to the people at the top
• continue using all the avenues (Facebook, letters to the editor, email, etc) used during the election to advocate for change

Van Jones

• emotional to be older than MLK was when he was killed
• have to remember those who won’t be at the Inauguration because they sacrificed to get us here
• recognized Green for All staff by name in audience
• also have to think about the people who aren’t celebrating tomorrow and will be scheming, because our dreams are their nightmare
• campaigns have to win one day, governance has to try to win everyday
• tendency to get our own history wrong and believe that Obama is the most central figure in this movement, and everything has to relate back to him — important to remember that we were working to build this before anyone had heard Obama’s name
• struggle for economic justice, taking to the streets around the prison-industrial complex, WTO — building our pro-democracy capacity goes way back beyond what started a year and a half ago (and now people act like nobody voted for Nader)
• “we had to drag that flag back to make it a peace flag” – the struggle against injustice during the Bush administration
• “pro-democracy movement made a fool of Karl Rove” by 2006
• Obama saw that the country was ready for change because of the movement that had been building for a long time, he was the vehicle for the movement
• Obama and the country do not need us to go spend four years in a state of elation, agreeing with Rachel Maddow
• “you only get a couple of lines next to your name” (“Lincoln: freed the slaves” “Churchill” beat Hitler”) – the lines next to Obama’s name are up to us. Could be “first black guy” or it could be “world’s hero” — so don’t go easy on him. Set the bar high and give him a challenge so he can be the world’s historic figure he needs to be.
• when Mandela was released from prison, he said it was the time to intensify the fight against apartheid, not ease up — now is the time to intensify the struggle for democracy here

Q&A

*The question and answer period pretty quickly unraveled into a series of appeals to Van Jones for help in one way or another, so I eased up on the notetaking at this point.

question: how to continue to broaden the base for a progressive majority, building on all the people who voted for Obama after never having voting for a progressive?

Eli Pariser: MoveOn.org tries to listen to its members, find out what they care about, and make it easy for them to make change – technology makes it easier to figure out what those issues are…have to use listening mechanisms to understand what is important to actual people. We have to keep the channels clear from around the country so Obama can hear us, over the pundits and insiders.

JoDee Winterhof: help people stay focused on the core issues, not the distracting issues that conservatives want them to worry about

Van Jones: the gov’t is about to spend $1 trillion — it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for people to try to shape that stimulus. We need to advocate for projects that are people ready and planet ready, not shovel ready.

The movement has picked up bad habits of how we treat each other — “need to go from diesel to solar” in how we relate to each other — the movement needs to stick together, be kinder to each other. “it matters who we are being” as a progressive majority – “do the right thing, but be the right people as we do it”

question: it’s inevitable that many of us will be disappointed by our elected officials during this administration, how should activists behave when our elected officials betray or disappoint us?

Jones: it’s up to movements to create political space for them to step into, so if they fail us, we should assume we didn’t.

Winterhof: we have to make sure our voices are heard and are at the table

Pariser: have to remember how many people will be spending this administration reading the polls and thinking about the next election, not doing what they think in their hearts is right. So “creating the political space” means continuing the persuasion campaigns of the election that move public opinion throughout the country toward supporting “what’s right” (e.g., green jobs) that politicians might not otherwise support if they don’t see it in the polls.

Winterhof : approach advocacy by layering strategies and broadening appeal over time

Jones: need to create jobs for the most marginalized people (“green economy Dr. King would be proud of”)

question:
how to use technology effectively for advocacy without diluting all the progressive causes due to information overload?

Pariser: one cannot assume that when there is a problem, others are taking care of it. it’s up to us to see problems, accept that we might not be experts, but do what needs to be done. what needs to be built, and maybe i’m the person to build it.

figuring out how to make information move up, down, and across networks is a challenge that has not been solved — although technology has helped in recent years — and we still have to experiment and mess up to get it built.

Final Highlight

Among the celebrity guests, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who sang the campfire favorite, “If I Had a Hammer” (Yes, we sang along. Yes, we even did the camp hand motions.) and agreed to pose for a picture with us:

Wait! Before you jump to leaving a comment attacking me for dropping $200 on an iPod so a kid I’ve never met can be distracted from her true academic potential, hear me out, because her letter represents trends that have been growing for several years now, and have big implications for education.

Technology is becoming rapidly more affordable, and that can make it more accessible. Yes, it’s within recent memory that these were luxury items, but I found a decent MP3 player for $30, less than the suggested spending limit.

One Laptop Per Child is putting inexpensive computers in the hands of children all over the world, and while they’re not the $100 miracles they were once promised to be, they’re cheap enough that they even make a reasonable donation. They also have helped make way for competition from other laptop manufacturers, so overall prices continue to fall. While OLPC was meant to create new learning opportunities in the developing world, it has also done so here in the US. As these technologies become more accessible, parents and schools have realistic choices when they consider how to maximize the learning that their dollars provide.

Kids love technology, and it has an impact on how they learn. We tend to think of these devices for their entertainment purposes, because that’s how they’re marketed to us. But their potential as devices for learning is enormous, both in and outside the classroom.

The role of technology in education has long had its evangelists, but now, after three years of research, a new report shows just how much kids learn from their casual everyday use of technology. Look, I know she just wants to listen to music, but the recipient of this MP3 player is also getting a device that can record data and download podcasts. Computers are an amazing learning tool when you think of them in the context of the networks and information they connect their users to.

The real question isn’t whether this student’s learning will be affected by her having an MP3 player while she does her homework — teenagers have been listening to music while they study for decades. The uncertainty lies in whether the educators in her life are going to recognize the importance of technology and help her gain access to it in positive ways. She and her peers are going to learn from technology because of these trends, or despite them.