Hello everyone,

Not too long ago we had a very interesting thread on design and politics. 
Ken Friedman pointed out to an interview I conducted with Mitchell Sipus, a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House. Below is the note from Ken's email.

---Snip---

"The current issue of the Journal of Design, Business, and Society features an in-depth interview with Mitchell Sipus - Presidential Innovation Fellow at the Obama White House. Editor-in-Chief Gjoko Muratovski describes the interview this way: “Sipus is an interdisciplinary designer and urban planner who works with complex socio-technical systems and has a particular interest in reconstruction of cities affected by future wars. Prior to joining the Obama administration as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, Sipus worked in some of the world's most challenging environments and most terrifying war zones from Afghanistan to Somalia. In the ‘Tour of Duty’ interview we will be discussing his background and experience, and why he has chosen to follow such a challenging career path. Also, we will discuss about what does it take for a designer to operate in this context and how does it look to work as an innovator at the highest levels of government. In the lead up to the interview, I will also summarize the Presidential Innovation Fellows program; how it all came about; why the US government is seeking innovators to work with politicians; and how this program is planned to evolve in the post-Obama years.”

---Snip---

If you would like to read the interview, here is the opening excerpt and link to the full length interview. The discussion with Sipus is very interesting and sheds some light on how design is becoming increasingly powerful as a political tool. 

---------

Tour of Duty: A Conversation with Mitchell Sipus – Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House
- by Gjoko Muratovski, Journal of Design, Business & Society

Introduction

In 2012, the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, established the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program – a twelve-month ‘tour of duty’ program where select individuals were asked to serve as ‘entrepreneurs-in-residence’. His goal was to attract top innovators from a range of diverse fields into government and pair them with top civil-servants and change-makers at the highest levels of the federal government. The challenges that needed addressing sat on the intersection of technology, policy, products and processes. ‘We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. So we must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government’ – the President proclaimed in his second inaugural address.

The program was design-led and human-centered and the Fellows were asked to take on a citizen-centric approach to problem solving. They were given five guiding principles to follow: Discover (use design thinking to understand how people interact with the government); Design (develop responsive solutions that can be tested quickly and improved iteratively); Build (turn ideas into products and services by using an agile development approach); Measure (use metrics to evaluate the impact of these solutions); and be Lean (create effective solutions and services that will work for everyone and anyone). According to the White House, success of this program will mean ‘(…) saving lives, saving taxpayer money, fueling job creation, and improving how government serves the people’ (Presidential Innovation Fellows, 2015).

Todd Park, then-federal Chief Technology Officer, was tasked with the recruiting. ‘Basically, what we’re looking for is badass innovators. [For] the baddest of the badasses out there to come to the government for focused six-to-12 month tours of duty to partner with our best innovators on game-changing projects’, Park told a TechCrunch conference in 2012.

Since the launch of the program in 2012, 96 top innovators (entrepreneurs, executives, technologists and designers) have been recruited into this highly competitive program from across the nation. Fellows have partnered with leaders at more than 25 government agencies, and according to the White House, they managed to deliver impressive results within a matter of months rather than years in areas such as health care, open data and data science, crowd-sourcing initiatives, education, veterans’ affairs, jobs and the economy, and disaster response and recovery. The success of the program prompted President Obama to issue an Executive Order on 17 August 2015, making the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program a permanent part of the US Federal Government and moving it from the White House into the State Department.

This initiative was well received by the US Congress, who codified the PIF program by introducing the TALENT Act. Senator Cory Booker stated the following in support of this new legislation:

"The Presidential Innovation Fellows program has furnished our nation’s boldest engineers and technologists with a unique opportunity to work with government agencies on providing more innovative and engaging services to the public. (…) By making this program permanent, Congress can ensure that government keeps up with the pace of innovation while fostering transparency, saving taxpayer dollars, and developing collaborative programs that work for the American people."

About Mitchell Sipus

For this issue of the Journal of Design, Business & Society, I have conducted an interview with one of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows – Mitchell Sipus, an interdisciplinary designer and urban planner who works with complex sociotechnical systems and has a particular interest in reconstruction of cities affected by future wars.

It is hard to define what kind of designer Mitchell Sipus is. As a designer he was working in some of the world’s most challenging environments and most terrifying war zones such as Kabul and Mogadishu. He worked on rebuilding government infrastructures in war-torn Somalia; he studied Taliban warlords in Afghanistan; led projects on reduction of gang violence in Cairo; worked on redesigning Dadaab – the world’s largest refugee camp, which is based in Kenya; and was monitoring the destruction of cultural heritage in Syria. In an interview for Wired magazine, this is how Sipus described what a typical day of a fieldwork for him looks like:

"In Afghanistan, if I put on a hooded sweatshirt and don’t say anything, I can walk around fairly freely and nothing happens. In Mogadishu, it’s an entirely different situation. It’s stressful. Every time you go anywhere you have a pickup truck of young soldiers. When I do get the opportunity to go somewhere, I usually can’t stay for more than 15, 20 minutes. You’re constantly in this position where you’re not sure, should I go out tonight? Should I walk down these roads? Can I spend time walking around meeting people? If I do that, can I come back tomorrow? It’s exhausting. On the other hand, when I first showed up, al Shabab had only been gone a handful of months, and it was like Mad Max."

Sipus was also the first designer to work with the US National Security Council and he held meetings at the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). Yet, his work goes even further that this and his interests also lie in robotics and human–machine interaction. His next task as a PIF will be to lead a dramatic overhaul of State Department’s sociotechnical process to uphold nuclear diplomacy treaties, a process that has remained unchanged for more than 40 years.

The work that Mitchell Sipus does defies conventions and challenges the existing notions of how far design as a profession can go in the twenty-first century. Even when we look at the forecasts of how the most important design jobs of the future could look like, we can see that Sipus already sits on the far end of some of these projections. Nevertheless, his appointment at the White House and the State Department further confirms my earlier trend forecasts on the new role of design in governments:

"As the world becomes increasingly complex, governments will likely emerge as major new clients of design services. In the first instance, they will resort to commissioning design consultants that are experienced in social innovation and sustainability, and it is very likely that they will also start developing their own in-house design departments."

While it is clear that the designers’ roles are evolving and that designers now hold bigger and more important positions in both society and business, we also need to understand that this is still an uncharted territory and we are yet to see how far designers can go. When it comes to applying design in sociopolitical contexts, we should also think about the extent to which politicians are prepared to introduce design into government? Also, we need to discuss about what kind of mindset and skill set designers should have in order to work in this area? And how does one venture into such a career in the first place? These were some of the questions I had for Mitchell Sipus.

Follow this link to Vol.3, No.1 of the Journal of Design, Business & Society to access the full interview or to subscribe to the journal. 
https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=3308/

Alternatively, you can access the interview on my Academia.edu page by following this link.
https://www.academia.edu/32772880/Tour_of_duty_A_conversation_with_Mitchell_Sipus_Presidential_Innovation_Fellow_at_the_White_House_Journal_Article_

(All references are included in the original file.)
-- 
Dr. Gjoko Muratovski PhD, FDINZ
Director and Endowed Chair: The Myron E. Ullman, Jr. School of Design
College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP)
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati OH, USA

Guest Professor and High-End Foreign Expert
College of Design & Innovation (D&I)
Tongji University
Shanghai, China

Visiting Professor
Department of Marketing
Copenhagen Business School
Copenhagen, Denmark
------
Tel. +1 513.556.4230 (US Office)
Email: [log in to unmask] 
Academia: http://uc.academia.edu/GjokoMuratovski
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gjokomuratovski


-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list  <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------