Great Presentations

I’m putting together a proposal and doing some background research to buttress my proposition. Through yesterday’s research, I discovered some great ideas, which I’ll share in a minute, but first I’ll share a thought that occurred to me during the day:

Life used to be what you saw around you – the milkman, the neighbor, the car park, the airport, the plane, the landing strip, the drive, the hotel. We saw life in a direct plane outward from wherever we were. Now, life has become more like a land map, a blueprint or a satellite image – so many wires going this way and that, our life containing so much more than what our eye can take in – that we can no longer see our lives with the naked eye. This is such a huge transformation and so undeniably true and becoming truer by the day that I imagine it is becoming part of our psyche to flex a muscle that sees beyond the immediate environment. We think less ‘across the street’ and more ‘Hubble telescope’ because it’s the only way to get it all into one picture. We’re developing another quotidian dimension, a birds-eye instinct emerging. Another reason why we just can’t think or work linearly. Interesting, this thought helps my proposition a lot.

Now onto a few good ideas around the web:

I discovered Venessa Miemis:

“What are young adults thinking about money and value? How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance? What does the future hold for banks and other financial institutions in the wake of massive peer to peer exchange? This video was created as part of Venessa Miemis’ presentation at the SIBOS Conference in Amsterdam, 25 October 2010.”

I discovered Zaana Howard and loved her exercises:

Design thinking and knowledge management: brothers from different mothers

View more presentations from Zaana Howard.

I discovered a great and oh-so-satisfying article called At the Intersections of Design, Ethnography and Global Governance

…which spoke to my desire to merge deeper ethnography (spontaneous, creative, experimental ethnography and workshopping approaches to listening) with a designers ability to make incarnate the output of cultural insights that someone like me might synthesize but with words, not objects or actions. It do us all one better to take our thinking and filter it through design thinking – add analytical thinking, creativity, and cultural sensitivity together in the soup toward the purpose of dinner on the table.

Ethnographers, if you want to be a purist, aren’t really supposed to have much of a purpose outside understanding. At least not while they’re in action. That’s ethnography in its academic form which for argument’s sake, might just be a little too much self-talk (why I didn’t follow the academic route). That’s where this article makes so much sense to me in my search for a comrade in my desire to use ethnography for making things, services, communication, connectivity, the world – more interesting and more well-suited to apparent changes going on. Combining those who think in terms of design and those that think in order to understand and get at a wider truth can be a mighty powerful partnership.

Aditya Dev Sood, the article’s author, says: “socio-cultural knowledge and insight, acquired through ethnography and filtered through any array of disciplinary frameworks from the social science and humanities, while valuable and necessary, (in some prior experiment) was also (alone) proving insufficient. This was because cultural knowledge in terms of observed behavior and practice was being presented as observed fact, rather than dynamic operational opportunity (for me, why incremental application is great). To move from local knowledge to programmatic action was still a challenge, and this is where Design could play a critical role. Perhaps Design and Cultural Research and Public Policy really do fit together, as we had demonstrated to one another in our working group.”

He goes onto to answer the question of why ethnography and design haven’t always been natural partners (which I was wondering). He talks about ethnography once used for governance in discovering new lands (outdated, imperialistic) to eventually being relegated to academia, while design came out of the industrial revolution and was about adjusting to the industrialized mechanized world but now we’re reindividuating in our decentralized world – and that’s where ethnography steps back in. He goes on to create a great mental image of the loop of these two disciplines and how they can augment and further each others goals: “the sum of Design and Anthropology can be plotted as a line that courses back and forth without creating an area, a polygon, corresponding to new value” The article is fantastic, read it here. There is, as underpinning to his argument on joining ethnographers with designers, one non-essential logic that I disagree with personally, and that is those performing cultural exploration are shy and look backward, are not forward thinking, as opposed to designers who are people who think of what could be (hence the wobbling zig zag shape of their interaction). Maybe in academia, again, a purist making notes in the wild is only looking at what is, but personally, I’m propelled to look at cultural nuance specifically because of my inner futurist’s desire to see the edge of what could be (out there in kernel form).