Thanks Don for the reference to the Bridge.
I will certainly read this.
The problem you describe, responding to complex problems with committees reading reports to produce new reports resulting in no action brings to mind two issues:
1) the idea of "Thrownness", from Heidegger, "Geworfenheit". In design Weick's article seems to be quoted most frequently:
Weick, K. E. (2004). Designing for Thrownness. In R. J. Boland & F. Collopy (Eds.), Managing as Designing. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Thrownness is the phenomenon of being thrown into a situation where there is no overview of how to act while the situation unfolds while being aware of that not acting also has its consequences. One example used is a fireman being thrown into a situation of a fire, but I'm not sure if this is a good example since he would have premade action plans or patterns and experience to adjust to the situation.
Anyway addressing this state of thrownness more would be interesting. Harold Nelson mentioned to me the concept of the adaptive expert. There are many publications about adaptive expertise and its a field on its own right. It seems interesting to discuss the adaptive expertise in relation to the ability to act in situations of thrownness? Maybe more of this kind of expertise is needed?
2) Maybe there is an issue of information management and lack of systems overview in how the policy processes are designed. Reports are not necessarily a good format to achieve a holistic overviews to act upon. We addressed this in some small student projects for field workers in disarmament work with Derek Miller where he pointed out to the students that the information the field workers need is in the form of thick reports. These are inadequate media when stored in the dusty back seat of a Jeep somewhere in North Africa acting in situations of thrownness. This might also be inadequate for large complex policy processes where understanding the whole is only possible through filters of thick fragmented reports. I think design could engage more in policy processes to help designing the information flow and mediation. Are there examples of such work out there?
Here I intended to stop this post actually but I cant help unfolding a bit more:
Since I love sailing here's my best example of adaptive expertise and thrownness: This legend is from the 1883 mini-tonner world championship in Marstrand Sweden. The Swedes had a great advantage of local knowledge, meaning experience and from that the recognition of patterns and rules to act upon under varying conditions. Only shortly before the WC the Italians arrived, sailed and won everything. For some "magic" reason they always were at the right place in the right moment when winds shifted.
Their expertise was to cope with new unknown situations within a domain.
This leads to a return to the issue of 501 methods. The Swedes used methods and rules (local knowledge) while the Italians skipped the methods, rules and patterns and sailed on their instinct and tacit knowledge and on site observation in a situation of thrownness. Recalling Dreyfuss and Dreyfuss' skill aquisition model:
Dreyfus, S. E., & Dreyfus, H. L. (1980). A Five-stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition. Operations Research Center; University of California Berkley. Retrieved from http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA084551&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
according to this skill acquisition model lower stages of expertise base their decision making on rules and patterns while the expert no longer bases herself on rules but to an increasing degree on intuition and tacit knowledge.
To my mind there is something interesting going on when relating the concepts of thrownness, the Adaptive Expert and the Skill Acquisition model to design.
To be further explored if not already done by somebody?
Birger Sevaldson
Professor
Oslo School of Architecture and Design
________________________________________
Fra: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] på vegne av Don Norman [[log in to unmask]]
Sendt: 2. november 2012 10:46
Til: [log in to unmask]
Emne: with 501 methods, why can't we solve the X problem?
On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 1:17 AM, Jean Schneider <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> With 501 design methods freshly tested and published, there must be at
> least one that will resolve the financial crisis, another one the climate
> crisis, and more than one for happiness ;-)
----------
My favorite response to Jean's (tongue-in-cheek) comment comes from the
American Journalist H. L. Mencken:
Every complex problem has a simple solution.
And it is wrong.
-------
Which reminds me: I never responded to Terry's (tongue not in his cheek)
comment about my posting of articles from the American National Academy of
Engineering on decision making for wicked problems. He asked why each
discipline didn't know what others had done, implying that he found the
articles devoid of content. I fear he didn't read the papers.
The best paper (the one i recommended) pointed out that in the face of
complex problems, the most common decision is no decision: to delay
action, even when it is known that delaying action is the worst of all
possible courses of action.
See global warming. See energy crisis. See healthcare. see educational
reform. See disposal of nuclear waste. See preparation for predicted
natural disasters. See paying for the maintenance of infrastructure. See
reform of tax systems. ...
This is the political reality of the world we live in. All the formal
design methods, all the theories, all the work by clever people in multiple
fields (some readers of this list) does not erase the truth of real human
decision making when faced with a set of unattractive options, especially
when strong political forces are attached to each of the contradictory
options: stall, delay, make no decision.
So I urge all of you to read the real papers. '
Yes we have 501 methods to solve problems. But for really difficult
problems, we always appoint distinguished committees to read the multiple
reports of the previous distinguished committees, to make recommendations,
and to provide us with yet another thick, detailed report. The result is
that we end up applying method 0: do nothing and hope the problems can be
put off during our lifetime, leaving it for the next generation of people
to solve.
Don
(In a hotel in São Paulo, Brazil. At a User Experience, South America
conference.)
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