Reading you Stephen Allard: Thanks for your comments. Unfortunately I do not have the bandwidth to hang out here often and respond to every nuance. There are some days when I wish that was possible and other days I am happy it is not.
Regarding your “gateway” question. Perhaps it might help if I tell you briefly that NextD is now and has always been a community sensemaking and changemaking experiment. What you are looking at there is not how we go to market. We are sharing the NextD Complexity Ladder, Design 1,2,3,4 to the scale of societies as a work in progress, as an example of how we make sense of that still emerging picture. To say that another way; the NextD Complexity Ladder is a picture of what we found and did not find when we looked at design practice and design education. It was and is a gift to the design community. It is not our practice. It is structured in such a way that we use it to have more meaningful conversations about what is present and what is missing, what is the same and what is different. Without such a framework we see many conversations about design and design thinking on this list and elsewhere go around in circles. For those who like circles that might be perfect.
Bringing some clarity to those issues, present, absence, etc. has not so surprisingly proven to be not always appreciated in some quarters and greatly appreciated in others. What is going on inside that picture continues to shift pretty much in the direction as we talked about in 2005 when the Complexity Ladder framework was first published.
As per my previous comments, for us NextD Geographies has never been about orders of magic design thinking but rather approximated zones of practice based on scale that have educational implications. Certainly the intoxicating notion of designers as magic thinkers capable of scaling tall buildings is a much easier idea to sell in the design community. Magic thinking has wide spread adoption in the design community. Indeed certain quarters within the design community want no more clarity than that. Not surprisingly there are no change drivers in the magic thinking model. In the socializing of NextD Geographies we have been denounced in numerous quarters for not subscribing to magic thinking, and for not subscribing to the notion that Design 1 and 2 are well equipped to save the world.
On this list and elsewhere NextD has often been mistaken for our go-to-market strategy. It is not. Unless a client of ours has a particular interest in such conversations we are not bringing the various aspects of the NextD research into our client work. How a carpenter talks with another carpenter is what you are looking at with NextD. Not all carpenters want to engage in such conversations. We are not here to convert the ones who do not. We have already used the various NextD sensemaking models and frameworks in thousands of conversations and continue to find them extremely useful. That material continues to be accessed online by a wide audience.
We have never been focused 24 hours a day in the direction of NextD as there are certainly bigger fish to fry elsewhere.
I am happy to tell you that we have quite different conversations with clients via Humantific. It is quite a different vehicle with a rather different purpose.
At some point in the future those conversation streams may merge but for right now they are often quite different. As the market-dialogue moves so too does public awareness of various issues. In practice we keep all of these movements, some fast, some slow in consideration.
Presently we operate across a constellation of initiatives rather than on a single track. To make the picture a little more complicated Humantific has for some time been doing research for the Innovation Methods Mapping book in concert with OPEN Innovation Consortium and it is in that context that the issue of language mode arose.
By looking across 50 years of innovation methods spanning several knowledge domains not just design, we had to figure out a way to convey that different assumptions are often embedded but not graphically signaled in method representations. We had to figure out a way to talk about something that has historically been ignored and so in the book we call this dimension of consideration language mode. That consideration is one of ten that are embedded in the analysis framework used in the Innovation Methods Mapping book. You can see more about this in the key conclusions visible in the Preview.
http://www.humantific.com/innovation-methods-mapping-preview/
To be brief, historically in most design methods, content and process were/are being intermixed in one expert in one role. We call this Mixed Language Mode. In the parallel universe of applied creativity methods this is often not that case. In the practice or execution of applied creativity methods process roles and content roles are different. We call this Split Language Mode. Suffice it to say that in practice the implications are enormous and beyond the scope of my postings here.
This is not the kind of stuff being discussed in most innovation 101 type workshops or in most graduate/postgraduate design schools. We recognize that not everyone is interested in the subject of methods at this level. For us what comes out of the methods analysis has the potential to inspire and inform a new generation of consideration for and design of innovation methods, not just design thinking methods.
Regarding your Asia comments: Generally yes I am aware of the various business legacy systems that exist in Asia. In our corner of the universe if a team, organization, industry or country signals strong preference for “doing” we generally know what that means from a thinking preference perspective. This valuing preference often translates into an over emphasis on pattern optimization rather than pattern creation. Strategic design firms can certainly find opportunity in such orientations but hey that is a conversation for another day.
Regarding your Google question. I found no hacker approach in Google's hacker approach unless we reframe lack of basic methodology history knowledge as hacking. Its rather straight forward stuff. There is generally an abbreviation going on around methods for younger audiences. This you can see in the Google process model such as it is. Some might say that is about attention span reduction as much as it is about business urgency. In any case there is not much there-there. This again is a topic for another day.
I am going to have to leave it there for today.
Have a good Sunday.
Related:
NextD Library on Issuu
http://issuu.com/nextd
Humantific Library on Issuu:
http://issuu.com/humantific
Combined Documents on Academia.edu:
http://nextd.academia.edu/GKVanPatter
GK VanPatter
Co-Founder
Humantific
SenseMaking for ChangeMaking
NEW YORK / MADRID
6 West 18th Street, 9th Floor
New York City, NY 10011
T: 212-660-2577
http://www.humantific.com
NEWSLETTER:
Subscribe to Humantific Quarterly
Follow Humantific on twitter: http://twitter.com/humantific
...
On Jul 23, 2013, at 7:38 PM, Steve Allard wrote:
> GK...
>
> Thank you for your detailed reply. Any additional response(s) to my ongoing curiosity is most appreciated.
>
> The language shift points you made are indeed relevant. (i.e telling vs co-creating). Is this aspect/tool of design thinking used as a gateway to getting work/contracts in these areas? Are there resources in the literature that address these language issues? In my experience with governments it is the written word in the form of proposal/reports that gets the project award. Prototyping in my experience is usually met with bewilderment due to inadequate means to make decisions by audience decision makers.
>
> You also mentioned that these areas of Design 3 and 4 are heavily "occupied and defended". Does this aspect of the business have a body of ethics and professional acumen surrounding it in the US and Europe? (i.e corruption, bribes, graft, slush funds, kick backs)? Here in Asia, the momentum is on the side of those who are "doers" and the ethics of large urban design project transactions are fraught with dynastic politics that are larger than the legal system can handle.
>
> You mentioned "old power privileging" reinforcement by business schools adopting design thinking. Who on the inside of all these large corporate HR departments that sets the hierarchy for power and the compensation that it goes with? In my experience working in Asia (Singapore and South Korea) I see a very different power association attached to design. The CEO of a government statutory board I worked with was trained in the UK as an industrial designer. Kia has recently made one of their car designers President/CEO. Ones Title here in Asia still carries the weight it did during the Victorian era of Europe. Is this changing at all in the west?
>
> Is the hacker approach to design that gives Google its halo, not with any merit at all? I'm sure they are not writing about their methods in order to get published.
>
> Cheers...
>
>
>
> Form follows culture...
>
> Stephen B Allard
>
> Bourgogne Allard Design Inc.
> Seoul National University of Science and Technology
> Myongji College of Design
>
> Seoul mobile 010-9980-8341
>
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