Solving for Pattern

Just looking again at the call for abstracts (due next week) to this fall’s symposium on Emerging Contexts for Systemic Design.

“In re-examining the relationship of systems thinking to design we believe it possible for systems thinking and design praxis to develop the foundations for new, interrelated practices.”

Symposium co-chairs are Birger Sevaldson of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Peter Jones of Design Dialogues and the Strategic Innovation Lab at Toronto’s OCAD University, and Harold Nelson, coauthor (with Erik Stolterman) of The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World.

Here are the first few lines from the excellent Design Way:

Humans did not discover fire — they designed it. The wheel was not something our ancestors merely stumbled over in a stroke of good luck; it, too, was designed. The habit of labeling significant human achievements as ‘discoveries,’ rather than ‘designs’, discloses a critical bias in our Western tradition whereby observation dominates imagination. Absent from the conflicting descriptions of Leonardo da Vinci, as either a scientist or artist, is the missing insight into his essential nature as a designer. His practical, purpose-driven and integrative approach to the world — an archetypal designer’s approach — is primarily what made him so distinct in his own time, as well as our own. Through his imaginative genius, augmentations to the real world were made manifest. This has been the contribution of all designers throughout human history. Outside of nature, they are the prime creators of our experienced reality.

Carefully designed artifacts accompany the remains of our earliest ancestors. Designed implements have been found which predate the earliest human fossil remains discovered so far. In fact, it is evidence of design ability, and activity, which allows an archeologist to distinguish between a species that is not quite human and one that is. So, it appears that it is our very ability to design which determines our humanness.

Design is a terbium quid — a third way — distinct from the arts and sciences. In support of this argument we make a case for the reconstitution of sophia — the integration of thought and action through design. We make a case for design as its own tradition, one that reintegrates sophia ratter than following the historical Western split between science and craft or, more recently, between science and the humanities.

H/t to my colleagues at the Collaborative Design MFA program, where we hosted Harold Nelson earlier this year.

“I’m not worried about being right; I’m worried about learning,” says former marine colonel Mark Mykleby in this interview for The Conversation podcast.

Mykleby is co-author with Wayne Porter of “A National Strategic Narrative” (pdf), written in 2011 for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and currently works with the New America Foundation’s Smart Strategy Initiative.

In reference to George Kennan’s famous Mr. X article, Porter and Mykleby wrote under the pseudonym Mr. Y.

Mykleby:

All our strategies … are focused on how we’re going to keep something away. They’re all focused on how you’re going to control things. And we said we weren’t going to do that.

We wanted to write a strategy based on opportunity — on where we’re going to go, and what we’re going to create, and who are we going to be, and what are we going to look like as a nation in the future. …

We really have to approach the world as an open system. And in an open system you have to start thinking in ecological terms. That’s why Wayne and I started calling it a strategic ecology. …

You have to have credibility — credibility about who you are and what you are. That means the strength of your nation. … That credibility is going to give you influence.

There’s a great line in Beowulf that says, “Behavior that’s admired is the path to power among people everywhere.” That’s just human dynamics 101. …

What made Kennan one of our greatest strategists is he focused more on potentials and tendencies than analytics. He synthesized things. …

Because we were thinking about strategic ecology, and we were reading those types of things, the concept of sustainability kept coming up. We’re not friggin’ tree-huggers, and I’m no poster child for sustainability. I’m trying to figure it out.

But sustainabiltiy seemed to fit and here’s why. We looked at the ecological definition of sustainability: an organism’s ability to remain diverse and productive over time. Suspend your [dis]belief for a second and consider that the United States may be an organism in the greater ecology — the strategic ecology.

So if our enduring interests are prosperity and security, look how that maps to the definition, given our current context. Diverse means depth, means redundancy, means resilience. That part of it is your ability to take a gut punch and come back swinging. That’s security — 21st century style.

There’s no amount of bubble wrap we can wrap around every American’s head to keep the bat shit away.

In the preface to the strategic narrative, Anne-Marie Slaughter describes it as advocating five shifts:

1. From control in a closed system to credible influence in an open system;
2. From containment to sustainment;
3. From deterrence and defense to civilian engagement and competition;
4. From zero sum to positive sum global politics/economics; and
5. From national security to national prosperity and security.

In Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, educational reformer Ken Robinson quotes Robert Witkin’s twist on Descartes: “I feel therefore I am.”

In conversation today with James Reed, he and I enjoyed another twist: “I feel therefore I may become.”

Here’s the passage from Robinson:

Descartes said, ‘I think therefore I am.’ As Robert Witkin pointed out, an equally powerful starting point would have been, ‘I feel therefore I am.’ Feelings are a constant dimension of human consciousness. To be is to feel. ‘Feelings’ encompass a wide range of subjective states, from calm intuitions to raging physical furies. Feelings are evaluations: for example, grief at a death, elation at a birth, pleasure at success, depression at a failure, disappointment at unfulfillment. Feelings are forms of perception. How we feel about something is an expression of our relationship with it. We experience a wide range of feelings precisely because of the complexity of our perceptions of events, other people and ourselves. …

Throughout the history of state education there has been a contest between the mainstream view that ‘reason’ and ‘objective’ knowledge should dominate education, and those who have argued for forms of education based on personal development and the expression of feelings. These views have come respectively from the rationalist traditions of the Enlightenment and the expressive traditions of the Romanticism. They have led to two different concepts of individualism. Both have compounded the division of intellect and emotion. This tension is not only in education. It bubbles up in many different ways in Western culture at large.

[Update: A related piece, from Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity.]

[P]eople ‘happen’ as wholes in process. Their ‘minding’ processes are simultaneous functions, not discrete compartments. You have never met anyone who was ‘thinking,’ who was not at the same time also ’emoting,’ ‘spiritualizing,’ and for that matter, ‘livering.’ When the old progressive educationists spoke of teaching ‘the whole child,’ they were not being idealistic. They were being descriptive. Teachers have no other alternative than to teach the whole child. The fact that teachers exclude ‘the emotions’ and ‘the spirit’ from their lessons does not, of course, mean that those processes are unaffected by what the teacher does. Plato said that, in order for education to accomplish its purpose, reason must have an adequate emotional base, and Dewey spoke often of ‘collateral learning,’ by which he meant most of the learnings that occur while the teacher is dealing with ‘the intellect.’

Educational theorist Ken Robinson, whose 2006 TED talk has garnered over 16 million views, takes a more conversational approach at the 2012 Future of Learning Conference, where he concludes with a synthesis of design principles (shortened here without ellipses):

There are some principles that we might observe here.

The first is that education will only work if it is personalized. We have the tools now to contour education to every single student in the system. We never had that before.

Secondly, we have to customize education to the individual communities where it is actually taking place. If you’re a teacher, you are the education system — for those kids.

I think we need to accelerate the shift in the curriculum from subjects to disciplines. A discipline isn’t just propositional knowledge, it’s about skills and processes and procedures.

This supports a shift from knowledge as being static to knowledge as dynamic. We need to engage with the flow of knowledge and with the evolution of understanding, and we therefore need forms of curriculum which are open and dynamic.

We need to move from education being seen as a solitary activity to being seen as a collaborative process. We still teach children in groups — but too rarely do we teach them as groups.

[Another] shift is in assessment. We have to see assessment as moving from judgement to description. We achieve best when out expectations are raised and when we are encouraged and supportive. We need forms of assessment that are empowering.

Four years ago, on May 3rd 2009, Paul Hawken came to Portland, Oregon, to deliver a “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful” commencement address at the University of Portland (pdf).

“Civilization needs a new operating system,” he said, “you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.”

Hawken’s metaphor of transformation — along with its ascription of agency, charge of responsibility, and invitation to opportunity — fit perfectly the tone I sought for the Ecotrust publication “Resilience & Transformation: A Regional Approach,” and we used it as a pull-quote with the introduction (pdf or magazine).

As the metaphor implies, current operating systems — the institutions of social, political, and economic relations — leave the peoples of the world vulnerable to deep-rooted social and ecological stresses. There can be no resilience without transformation.

I sometimes think of the resilience-transformation relationship as binary, like man-woman or black-white: the existence of each dependent on the other. No resilience without transformation.

And I sometimes picture resilience and transformation interacting across time, in an unfolding resilience-cum-transformation narrative. System resilience following system transformation.

For programmers or designers, these interactions are visualized in a figure redrawn below, from a paper by Frances Westley and 12 coauthors (“Tipping toward sustainability: emerging pathways of transformation”).

In this figure the programmers or designers are labeled institutional entrepreneurs, and the new operating system is described as an innovation regime. But the patterns of change are similar.

Consider our usual practices as part of a regime: our gardening, eating, and such as part of a food regime; our needs for mechanized mobility as part of a transportation regime; and so on. These regimes are defined by the worldviews, the rules and norms, the business models, the infrastructures and technologies that support ways of existing and interacting — while shaping and being shaped by ecological interdependencies.

In this view, a new operating system is more like a network of operating systems (i.e., regimes), each fulfilling a particular need and each, potentially, operating closer to home. The basic three-step of resilience-for-transformation design becomes: nurture regimes that better support wellbeing, undermine maladaptive regimes, and help to bridge one regime to the next.

Does this conceptual framework fit or inform your own practices?

Which factors are most significant in reducing energy use: personal attitudes toward the environment, social norms around conservation, or availability of key infrastructures and technologies?

One study into this question was a 2011 paper comparing electricity use at four Colorado high schools (“Reducing Energy Consumption and Creating a Conservation Culture in Organizations: A Case Study of One Public School District”).

The paper highlights the fact that energy conservation efforts can achieve dramatic results — especially in a community-based context like a school. Moreover, as EnergyStar.gov reports (“For K-12 School Districts”), U.S. K-12 schools spend more on annual energy bills than on purchases of textbooks and computers.

Chelsea Schelly, Jennifer Cross, and coauthors examined 2000-07 data on four high schools in the Poudre School District of Fort Collins, Colorado. One of the four, Rocky Mountain High School had achieved electricity savings far greater than the others, prompting the question: “What did Rocky do that was different than the other schools, and can we replicate this across the district?”

From the case study:

Rocky was able to reduce its energy consumption by 50% because it is in a district that made a commitment to energy conservation and sustainability, supported leaders in all organizational levels, and provided policies and incentives in support of schools making a commitment to sustainability. In this context, Rocky made unprecedented change; it reduced its electricity consumption to levels below a newly built and certified LEED school. …

In this school, perceived efficacy, behavioral expectations, and organizational culture all motivated behavioral change, but no participants described changing their attitudes. Respondents indicated that even without a sense of environmental concern and without engaging in environmentally responsible behaviors at home, they participated in energy conservation and other efforts (such as recycling) within the organizational setting. This suggests that setting new standards is more important than changing environmental values.

Furthermore, different motivational factors were important for different participants. Charismatic leaders were motivated by their personal environmental values, whereas students and staff members were motivated by feelings of efficacy. Participants at all organizational levels responded to communication, particularly comparative feedback, and the district and the school made concerted efforts to communicate both expectations and successes.

[Update: This post led to an email discussion with colleagues about the authors’ use of the term “efficacy,” which is similar to what I often call a “sense of agency.” Additional excerpt below.]

Efficacy and beliefs. Students and staff at both schools discussed the importance of feeling like their efforts make a difference or perceived efficacy. At Rocky, sense of efficacy was related to having the opportunity for responsibility and decision making. … One student said,

‘I felt like that at first when I heard all this global warming and stuff; you think about it and it’s such a big problem, there’s nothing I can do. Once you start doing things and seeing the difference it makes, I think that’s just so important.’

H/t to Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez of the Garrison Institute’s Climate, Mind and Behavior Program, who discussed these findings at the 2012 Ecodistrict Summit.

“[T]he fundamental task of education is to enculturate youth into this knowledge-creating civilization and to help them find a place in it,” insist Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter in the 2006 article, “Knowledge building: Theory, pedagogy, and technology.”

Scardamalia and Bereiter, founders of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, have been experimenting with computer networks for collaborative learning since 1986 (see Wikipedia on Knowledge Forum).

In the 2006 article they describe six themes that “underlie a shift from treating students as learners and inquirers to treating them as members of a knowledge building community.”

One theme: Knowledge of versus knowledge about.

Knowledge about sky-diving, for instance, would consist of all the declarative knowledge you can retrieve when prompted to state what you know about sky-diving. Such knowledge could be conveniently and adequately represented in a concept net.

Knowledge of sky-diving, however, implies an ability to do or to participate in the activity of sky-diving. It consists of both procedural knowledge (e.g, knowing how to open a parachute and guide its descent) and declarative knowledge that would be drawn on when engaged in the activity of sky-diving (e.g., knowledge of equipment characteristics and maintenance requirements, rules of particular events). It entails not only knowledge that can be explicitly stated or demonstrated, but also implicit or intuitive knowledge that is not manifested directly but must be inferred (see Bransford et al., this volume). Knowledge of is activated when a need for it is encountered in action. Whereas knowledge about is approximately equivalent to declarative knowledge, knowledge of is a much richer concept than procedural knowledge.

Knowledge about dominates traditional educational practice. It is the stuff of textbooks, curriculum guidelines, subject-matter tests, and typical school “projects” and “research” papers. Knowledge of, by contrast, suffers massive neglect. There is instruction in skills (procedural knowledge), but it is not integrated with understanding in a way that would justify saying “Alexa has a deep knowledge of arithmetic”—or chemistry or the stock market or anything else. Knowledge about is not entirely useless, but its usefulness is limited to situations in which knowledge about something has value independently of skill and understanding. Such situations are largely limited to social small talk, trivia games, quiz shows, and — the one biggy — test taking.

To be useful outside the limited areas in which knowledge about is sufficient, knowledge needs to be organized around problems rather than topics (Bereiter, 1992).

H/t George Siemens’s talk on “Responding to the fragmentation of higher education.”

Analysis offers a science of parts, synthesis a science of the integration of parts.

These are the thumbnail-sketch definitions used by Buzz Holling to describe “two very different ways of viewing the world.” Holling’s 1998 essay “Two Cultures of Ecology” was posted to “help shape the focus” for the then-new journal Conservation Ecology, now Ecology and Society.

Here are two approaches to analysis-synthesis comparison, the first from Joël de Rosnay’s 1979 book, The Macroscope, and the second from Holling’s essay. De Rosnay cautions against an “excessively dualist” interpretation and urges that analysis and synthesis be understood as complements, neither reducible to the other. Holling compares the two cultures of biological ecology as an example of the two streams of science he describes more broadly throughout the essay.

See also:

• Bartlett, G. 2001. Systemic Thinking: A simple thinking technique for gaining systemic focus. Numerous diagrams on “analytical” versus “systemic” thinking.
• Barton, J. and T. Haslett. 2007. Analysis, synthesis, systems thinking and the scientific method: rediscovering the importance of open systems. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 24:143–155. “The paper argues that the scientific method is most usefully interpreted as a dialectic between analysis and synthesis supported by the triadic logic of C.S. Peirce, and that the role of systems thinking is to frame this dialectic.”
• Saner, M. A. 1999. Two cultures: not unique to ecology. Conservation Ecology 3(1): r2. A response to Holling’s paper.
• Umpleby, S., et al. 2012. A Report from the 2012 IFSR (International Federation for System Research) Conversation (pdf). Distinguishes between “Science I” and “Science II” and provides conceptual background for the upcoming Modes of Explanation conference.

“Debt,” wrote Margaret Atwood in Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, “is revealed as a double-sided balancing act in which debtor and creditor alike are culpable.”

Yet “debt traps are not immutable,” assures Robert Kuttner in “The Debt We Shouldn’t Pay,” a New York Review of Books commentary on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Kuttner outlines a range of policies for debt relief.

On national debt:

With a Chapter 11 law, Greece could have written off old debt and used new borrowing to finance new growth, just like a private corporation. Even acknowledging past bad behavior (as in the case of many corporate bankruptcies), a Chapter 11 for countries could sensibly combine incentives for honest bookkeeping with macroeconomic policies that write off old debt for the sake of recovery.

On mortgage debt:

Government could refinance mortgages directly using the Treasury’s own low borrowing rate, as was done by Franklin Roosevelt’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Fannie and Freddie, remade into true public institutions, could provide the refinancing. The Obama administration’s existing mortgage relief program, run through private banks, excludes the most seriously underwater homeowners. The terms largely prohibit significant reductions in mortgage principal owed, and these limitations should be liberalized by the administration.

On student debt:

[A]n Obama administration program permits about 1.6 million of the 37 million college borrowers to finance education costs by paying a small surcharge on their future income taxes, instead of incurring debt. This option could be made universal. The group Campus Progress proposes allowing college debtors, who currently pay an average of almost 7 percent interest, to refinance their debt at the ten-year Treasury borrowing rate of about 2 percent. This would save young adults $14 billion this year alone.