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7 Session seven: 4 April 2016
Creating together
Creating the conditions:
How we see, relate and communicate
SOCIALDESIGNFOUNDATIONS

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Being serious about
creating together

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SYSTEMIC: Consider the whole system, andwork to shift its patterns
PARTICIPATORY: Participate in and with the system
EMERGENT: Work with emergence
ALIVE: Create in and with real human moments
Let’s take TOGETHER seriously:
Who’s involved, the way they’re involved,
and our own role and relationship with the
others involved in the work.
In the first few sessions of this course, we’ve said
we need approaches that are…

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1960’s – 1970’s
Trade unions in Scandinavia extend the workplace democracy movement into
the right of workersto co-design IT systems that impact their job. They call this
“cooperative design.”
1970’s
Americans get interested, but thing “cooperative”sounds too collectivist, so
they all it “participatory design.”
1980’s
The practice spreadsto fields other than software, including urban design.
Successstories accumulate.
1990’s
“User-centered” design takescenter place in industry, while “participatory
design” remains a narrow, specialized practice. (There has been an annual
Participatory Design Conference since 1990.)
2000-2010
Prahalad and Ramaswamy publish in Harvard Business Review, and a series of
books. They popularize the idea of companies creative withcustomers, and
people creating together within companies.
There’s some history behind this
www.slideshare.net/XPLANE/a-brief-history-of-cocreation

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You’ll encounter a lot of terms: participatory
design, co-design, cooperative design, user
design (vs. user-centered),….
People have different ideas and ways of
working when it comes to questions like:
• involve all stakeholders, or only the
direct “users”?
• involve people throughout the process, or
only during initial concept development?
• treat them as a source of input, or as full
participants in the work?
• go visit “them,” or work as “we, altogether”?
Why there’s such variety

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Participatory
approaches are
becoming(a bit)
more prominent
in the management /
organizational
developmentworld.
ßHoly moly we think
thesetwoarehot.

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Placemaking: pps.org
Positive Deviance: positivedeviance.org
Participatory Narrative Inquiry: pni2.org
Reos Partners: reospartners.com
In “social innovation”, transition, etc. creating
together is a fundamental tenet of practice

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This is not
only about
better results…

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A STORY
In 2012, Frog Design createdthe “collective action toolkit”
and distributedit for free.
www.frogdesign.com/work/frog-collective-action-toolkit.html

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It has been well received,…
…but also it has upset some people.

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Maria Lamadrid
www.mlamadrid.com

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As part of her thesis work, Maria made her own toolkit. It’s
for communitiesto use when a social designer showsupat
their door.

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Her Social Design Toolkit offers a series of activities you can do
with your social designer, to help them become aware of the
cultural, consumer,andindustrial bias they bring to their work.

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I tell that story to remind us that working with situations that
are mostly made of people is unavoidably political.
It requires humility. It requires us to let go of the idea that we
are the big fancy experts who are going to guide a group of
people to something better. LET GO. And embrace the
much more powerful possibility of something huge and
surprising emerging from the efforts of everyone involved.
“What you can plan is too small for you to live.”
-DavidWhyte
Social design is personal, de-abstracted, humbling, and
thrilling. It does not easily fit into the box of a single
approach or process.

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The punch line
Commercial and institutionalpracticehas a long history of
distancing itself from the people who are affected by their
choices and outcomes.
This tendencyis so strong, it keeps eating the good intentions of
people who try to work more horizontally, equitably, “together”
— despitemeasurably better results in many industriesand
contexts.
Meanwhile the theories and practicesare advancing on the
fringes of commercial work: in organizationaldesign, social
innovation, urban planning and design, conflict resolution, etc.
Key themes: letting go of control, staying personal, being IN the
conversations, participating WITH the system’s dance, standing
as a partner/catalyst among a group of peer creators.