Service design and public policy have been getting closer and closer to each other in recent years – at least among leading design thinkers and strategists. Part of this turn has been driven by the need to ensure more participation among policy makers and members of civil society. The currency of this participation and engagement has historically been developed by designers – designers whose aim has been to create successful communication strategies, product lines, and service offerings. Another facet to this confluence of design and policy has been the slow unfolding among policy makers, designers, scientists, and other knowledge producers that the facts needed to drive good decision making made in ways we are only beginning to get a full picture of.

Many facts that were once assumed to be self-evident, such as the existence of gravity or of gasses in the atmosphere, have been shown, while fundamentally true, to have also been the acute products of their time and cultures that developed them. This doesn’t mean that they are invalid. It simply means that we could just have easily arrived at different conventions for the length of a year, the weight of a kilogram, or the names and properties of each element in the periodic table.

From a policy perspective, this has obvious implications for the validity of different alternatives. From a design perspective, it validates the processes that have come in tow with so-called design thinking – processes that place users at the forefront of questions about the role of policy, infrastructure, bureaucracy, and governance in the social century.

Recently, the Glen Cove Conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy was held in Glen Cove, NY, on 9-11 June, 2010. Initiated by Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), and co-organized by Lucy Kimbell (based at Said Business School) and Gerry Philipsen (Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington), the event was conceived of as a small workshop which would bring together – for the first time, as far as they were aware – three groups:

• policymakers concerned with security in intrastate contexts and post-conflict situations, whose work is typically structured by intergovernmental and national policy goals;
• social science researchers, in particular ethnographers of communication who pay special attention to the construction of local knowledge, for example, how “security” is understood in communities in which the UN has a mandate to do increase it and having decided to help disarm ex-combatants; and
• designers and managers involved in designing services shaped by policy concerns about politics, exclusion and access.

Two participants blogged about their experiences: Lucy Kimbell a designer at the Said Business School and Aditya Dev Sood, one of India’s own and founder of CKS, a design consultancy based in Delhi and Bangalore. Links to their impressions and accounts follow below.

Lucy Kimbell: http://designleadership.blogspot.com/2010/07/glen-cove-conference-on-strategic.html

Aditya Dev Sood: http://www.cks.in/leedbackfoop/#section13

Thanks to experientia: putting people first for the find

Almost three years ago I participated in a workshop sponsored by the AIDI (Association of Industrial Designers of India). The event was intended to inform the implementation of India’s National Design Policy. Many design professionals and educators came together from across India and the world to develop strategies and actionable recommendations.

There were a handful of breakout groups, each dealing with a different focus area. These were: Education, Design Parks (these are intended to be urban design “hubs” so incidentally the solution was already posed), Branding and Communication of Indian Design, Culture, Environment, Social Development & Effective Public Spending (the ‘everything else’ category), and Competitive Advantage by Design (the group  participated in).

I ran across the data our group produced recently from an old blog post I did about the event, and it got me wondering, “So How Is India Doing?”  Have you seen any of these themes being implemented?  Please comment on this post describing where they have been implemented and most effective and how they have unfolded in your community.

Strategies for Building India’s Design Competitiveness

Theme Trend Implementation Knowledge Sharing Establish forums to share best practices and form points of view for the outside world and interested stakeholders.

Create design discourse

• Whitepapers
• case studies
• Interactive workshops
• client-firm shared experiences
• Local design chapters

Design Awareness for Public Engagement Active marketing of the value, processes and outputs of design

• Leverage formal and informal media networks
• Design shows, contests, team-based marketing, etc
• Cross-marketing across other organizations;
• “everybody’s is a design expert” / democratized design

Designer as Entrepreneur Encourage and nurture a favorable environment for entrepreneurship among designers

• Funding
• Facilities
• Business training
• Academic-business partnerships (large, small & micro)

Design as Competency

• Selling design as competency
• Establishing design as a core competency w/in organizations
• Create common languages and bridges among disciplines and practices
• Establish core functionality of design in organizations and ways that design can enrich other functions (sales, marketing, sustainability, ethics, r&d, etc)
• As enablers and facilitators

GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES

• DEFINITE INVOLVEMENT OF GOVT + DESIGN INDUSTRY
• CREATING A COMMON PLATFORM OF DESIGN
• CREATING AWARENESS FOR DECISION MAKERS

• MINISTRY AND DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN
  INCENTIVES FOR COMPANIES AND DESIGNERS TO PROMOTE DESIGN- FUNDING,
• TAX BENEFITS,ETC
• CREATE INCENTIVES OR ISSUE DIRECTIVE TO INCLUDE DESIGNERS IN STRATEGIC AND DECISION MAKING LEVEL
• NEW GENERATION OF COMPANIES TO PUSH INDIA AS LEADER IN DESIGN

DESIGN AS A CULTURE

• CULTURALLY & SOCIALLY RELEVANT DESIGN
• DESIGN TO BE SEEN AS A CATALYST.
• DESIGN AS A CULTURE
• DESIGN IN PUBLIC DOMAIN.
• KEY VALUE INDIA PROPOSITIONS- CRAFT, BATCH PRODUCTION.

• THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL – ‘GLOCAL’.
• CREATE LOCAL DESIGN THAT CAN WORK GLOBALLY.
• VISIBILITY IN URBAN SPACES
• PROMOTE DESIGN ALONG WITH DIFFERENT ART FORMS
• EMPART THRU MASS MEDIA
• RECOGNISE INDEGINEOUS/VERNACULAR DESIGN FORMS AND PROCESSES

HUMAN POWER

• HUMAN INTELLECT VS LABOUR/OUTSOURCING
• ‘DESIGN THINKING ‘ IN ALL WALKS OF LIFE
• MAPPING BEHAVORIAL PATTERNS

• SEARCH AND LEVERAGE DESIGN
• TAPPING TALENT
• also (my add) social capital

GLOBAL VS LOCAL

• DESIGNED N INDIA
• LOCAL SOLUTIONS FOR LOCAL PROBLEMS?
• INDIAN VS GLOBAL MARKETS
• APPROPRIATE DESIGN
• ASPIRATIONAL VALUE OF PRODUCT

• CREATE LOCAL DESIGN THAT CAN WORK GLOBALLY.
• DOCUMENTATION OF SOCIO-CULTURAL LIFESTYLES AND TRADITIONAL METHODS
• ENCOURAGING RURAL INNOVATIONS AND DESIGNS
• PROMOTE TRADITIONAL CRAFTS / METHODS AS ASPIRATIONAL PRODUCTS IN THE INDIAN MARKET

DESIGNERS AND OPPORTUNITIES

• HOW DO WE IDENTIFY NEW OPPORTUNITIES?
• HOW DO WE FIND SOLUTIONS TO ‘OPPORTUNITIES’ BEYOND A FIRM’S EXPERTISE.
• ‘POSITIVE DESIGN ECOLOGIES’

A COMMON BODY FOR DESIGN AND INDUSTRY / SMES

The Triadic Game Design is a workshop demonstrating the important components of games while simultaneously engaging in a game to support the learning process. It was developed by Casper Harteveld at TU-Delft. You can learn more about it here on his website or his forthcoming book.

Also, here is a brief video wrapping up the process taken during the International Simulation and Gaming Association conference in 2010.

I am in the process of adapting the game for a workshop that will take place during the Sustainability in Design NOW! conference from Sept 29th to October 1st in Bangalore. The goal of this game is to help participants leverage their knowledge of design for sustainability into games that will facilitate further skills development in the design and sustainability domain.

The process involves the overlap of meaningful skills, aspects of play, experiences of reality. This is a draft list of categories that may be used in the design of the workshop.

Play

Mixed Reality
Puzzle
Board Game
Strategy
Role-Play
Platform
Simulation
Quiz Game
Chance
Skill

Reality (note: these are adapted from the Design for Sustainability Guide)

Learning from Design Precedents
Secondary Products and Networks
Needs Assessment and Use Scenarios
Use Phase & Product Life Cycle
Lean Design
Manufacturing and Industrial Ecology
Product-Service Styling
Distribution
Retail and Use Life
Post-Use

Meaning

Acquire New Capabilities
Combine New Capabilities with Existing Ones
Decision Making and Choice Architecture
Common Ground and Cooperation
Systems and Complexity Perspectives
Analytical Skills
Clarity and Confidence
Coordination of Diverse Stakeholder Motivations
Integration Across Scales
Participation and Co-Creation
Transparency
Infrastructure as Pervasive Enabling Resources

Service designers identify and order goals in service systems. Service systems are a unit of analysis for an exchange of skills and capabilities which leads to the production of value in use (Vargo et al., 2008). Service systems are developed though the creation of value, where reinvention can transform the relationships of use and practice. Service systems are characteristically intangible, heterogeneous, simultaneous in production and consumption, non-perishable, and grounded in times and places that maintain their meaning and value (Kimbell, in prep).

One of the ways that designers understand service systems is by using a variety of approaches and concepts that isolate or concentrate focus on the relevant aspects of a system so they can drive experimentation and change. An example of this is a touchpoint, which means the aspects of the service are visible and come in contact with the users of that service (but see this discussion of its origins). You may have suspected that in a relationship of co-creation, touchpoints multiply quickly when production and consumption are linked since users are creators and vice versa. Another example that designers use is the line of visibility. This is similar to the touchpoint, and it describes what users see and experience in their relationships with a service system. It helps in rendering a system so that its processes and organizational structure are visible.

Because touchpoints and lines of visibility exist not only as tools but in practice, service experiences are tightly bound to tied to the production of narrative. Suspense in particular is a common experience for users when parts of a process, system, or set of relationships are hidden from view. Just imagine a time when you were the creator or recipient of a service. Much of your uncertainty or satisfaction was probably driven by what you knew or could expect about the outcome as well as the communication process that was taking place while the service was being delivered.

Richard Allen discusses suspense in his book about [Alfred] “Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony”. Allen cites Meir Sternberg’s distinction that, “suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiosity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as such it often involves and interest in information for its own sake.”

So when working in service design we should decide if we desire to create curiosity or suspense and design our process accordingly. Allen also incorporates Ian Cameron’s view that suspense is a “channeling of emotions”. Clearly emotions can be powerful, but how and why? In Allen’s analysis, suspense is something that happens in us as we are forced to take up the prospect of narrative outcomes that are contrary to the ones we desire. Suspense is constructed out of moral uncertainty, balancing our expectations with potential outcomes.

Allen discusses Hitchcock and develops descriptions of two types of suspense: pure and impure. Pure suspense is broad and objective, prolonged by tension, delay, and narration that is unrestricted, moving between vantage points and locations. It leads to an anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as the deadline looms. Arbitrary delays segment time and increase the tension because a bad outcome seems close at hand. Often, the audience sees a threat before the protagonist and surprise happens through the manipulation of time. The outcome almost always favor of the moral victory, especially in popular media.

Impure suspense on the other hand is local and subjective. It is developed from points of view that provide different sources of knowledge often through the eyes of the protagonists and antagonists, keeping the audience informed while the characters remain unwitting. Deadlines are set early on and acceleration commonly heightens the alert attentiveness of the spectators who are active participants in the construction of the suspense. Knowledge is not made by the director. It is made by the audience in cooperation with the information provided to the characters. All too often, the audiences senses the outcome before the characters do by filling in blanks sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Impure suspense favors empathy for the character, as if we were living through them. The moral outcome is less certain and often unrealized.

In order to try to make the differences between pure suspense and impure suspense more tractable, I imagined what users in a service system might say if they were experience one or the other. The result is in the chart below, and it adapts these distinctions and starts to resolve how one might go about implementing different narrative objectives for a service system.

Pure suspense Impure suspense Locations I move unrestricted between vantage points and locations. I stay highly local and subjective. Points of view My perspective is omniscient and wide-ranging.

I tell everyone what is happening everywhere. I get different sources of information through the eyes of the others.

I keep some people informed and others in the dark. Time My day is prolonged by tension and arbitrary delay. Deadlines are set early in the day and acceleration commonly heightens my emotional state. Emotional states I have anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as a deadline looms. I am alertly attentive, experiencing empathy for others. Knowledge Production The person in charge chooses and focuses attention on the priorities. I cooperate with the information provided to learn what to do next. Expectations I can explicitly identify a threat.

I am frequently surprised. I sense an outcome before others.

I fill in blanks with sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Moral outcome? I favor the best outcome – like what happens in popular media. The best outcome is less certain and often unrealized.

Vargo, S. L., Maglio, P. P., & Akaka, M. A. (2008). On value and value co-creation: A service systems and service logic perspective. European Management Journal, 26(3), 145-152. doi:10.1016/j.emj.2008.04.003

In the 1930s, evolutionary geneticist Sewall Wright pulled together research strands in the biology of inbreeding, the genetics of coat color in guinea pigs, statistical methods (including path analysis), and mathematics that codified the changes in gene frequencies in populations as a result of natural selection, mutation, and migration.

His resulting description of these threads set the stage for qualitatively different perspective on the evolutionary process. Wright described his perspective as a “shifting balance” model of evolutionary change, and it highlighted the role of small populations in the transitions between periods of high and low fitness. This pattern, which followed from his use of the term “drift”, describes the fluctuations of gene frequencies that result from the random sampling of small populations. This random sampling comes from mating in small populations that, because of chance, produces small deviations from the numbers of genes originally represented in the population.

Wright’s Shifting Balance perspective coincided with his introduction of the adaptive landscape as a term to describe the space in which random fluctuations of gene frequencies in small populations could push the populations away from adaptive peaks or periods in which they were reproductively successful, and which would in turn allow natural selection to push them towards new adaptive peaks – areas of differential reproductive success.

Though Wright’s perspective on evolution is controversial (in a generative way), the perspectives and tools that emerged from his ideas have endured. For example, Wright’s work preceded algorithmic approaches to optimization problems in mathematics, networks (traveling salesman), metallurgy (simulated annealing), and artificial intelligence – to name a few

The process of Shifting Balance is described as a series of three dynamic phases:

Phase 1, the exploratory phase, the action of small groups explores new combinations. Most stay on the suboptimal fitness peak (reasonably successful), but some get caught in adaptive valleys (unsuccessful).

In Phase 2, selection causes the groups that are in the adaptive valleys to move toward new, higher-fitness peaks.

Finally, in phase 3, groups at higher fitness peaks send off migrants helping other groups move to higher fitness peaks.

While Wright’s process was intended for population genetic systems, an increasing convergence between social processes, cognitive psychology, technology, ecology, and creative practice suggests that the concepts apply well to the exploratory, form-finding processes that precede the design and production of materials and services. The implementation of the Shifting Balance process as a analog for social and creative strategy is useful for the production of highly original and robust creative solutions – or, at least it’s a testable hypothesis.

For some, analogies between biological and social processes are difficult to comprehend. However, the design of services and interactions is dependent on the ordering and reordering of processes, materials, people, and ideas. Combinations and recombinations of these things, when developed thoroughly and communicated, can impact the delivery and relational aspects of individuals working in cooperation or separately.

We could envision this process as a sort of charette (period of intense design in collaborative groups) activity where:

1. The exploratory phase initiates adaptive schema (creative combinations) which are driven by the interactions, specializations, and diverse perspectives of small groups;
2. Intergroup selection resulting from evaluation, the inherent heterogeneity among groups, and intended service platforms begins the iterative process of amplification of good combinations;
3. Export and translation of valuable forms/schema to other groups in order to test them against different problems, social contexts for cooperation, and consumptive patterns.

The immediate benefit of this strategy is the demonstration of expertise in practice, the role of discourse, and the chance events that can drive innovation. Participants from different disciplines will have to opportunity to observe and engage in creative problem solving within highly diverse communities. Here the focus is on collaborative ideation followed by problem-solving across disciplinary and expertise-based boundaries and ultimately an exercise in cooperative translation, storytelling, and communication.

There is enough social scientific research to at least point to the benefit of diverse groups, although it would be worthwhile to have a better handle on an ideal number – i.e. what counts as a small population. Plus, how do we go about choosing? What is the process of selection…or should we instead be saying, “What is the process of attachment?” And finally, are there specific patterns of translation or dissemination that we should aim for? For if migrants endowed with the most successful schema do disperse and link up with others, they have an opportunity to cooperate and raise the capacity the other groups elsewhere. But through which mechanisms to we initiate and implement these processes?

There are a few other ideas that seem uniquely coupled to the Phases of Shifting Balance. An example is the goal of participation as a unique form of empowerment in community planning exercises. One particular model of participatory engagement provided by Conde et al. (2004) is used in the context of climate change planning (below).

This example shows transitional categories in participation. When viewed through a model of culture which emphasizes process over characteristics, these are skills acquisition categories that indicate differences with an impact on fitness – i.e. reproductive success.

Each category represents a different level of engagement, a level that itself suggests a tighter relationship between participants and the tools of participation or cooperation.

1. Informative participation is an exchange of information, which may or may not be meaningful.
2. Consultation requires that participants begin asking questions as well as providing information.
3. Functional engagement means that different participants identify and agree to share goals, thus ordering their actions in accordance with each other.
4. Interaction means the initiation of feedback, where signals and shifts in the participation is met with responsiveness and dialog with the others.
5. Self-motivated participation is demonstrated by the points at which processes are acquired and reorganized by the participants themselves.
6. Migration ultimately expands the instances of participation which have been successful, sharing them with other communities, and finding cooperative allies elsewhere.

References:

Conde, C., Lonsdale, K., Nyong, A., & Aguilar, I. (2004). Engaging stakeholders in the adaptation process. Adaptation policy frameworks for climate change: Developing strategies, policies and measures, 47–66.

Johnson, N. (2008) Sewall Wright and the development of shifting balance theory. Nature Education 1(1)

Wright, S. (1977) Evolution and the Genetics of Populations. Vol. 3: Experimental Results and Evolutionary Deductions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

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Next Generation Infrastructures Foundation
The Academy is being organized by Next Generation Infrastructures. This Foundation is a platform within knowledge institutions, market players and government organizations work together on current issues, as well as issues that won’t be current for another 20 years. Our work involves thinking ahead, solving ‘puzzles’, researching actual cases, taking a critical look at current infrastructures and devising solutions. Infrastructures that perform badly have a significant negative impact on economic growth and cause considerable dissatisfaction among users. The main challenge is to identify the technical and social aspects of infrastructure systems. A dynamic team of scientists from various disciplines and countries are working with policymakers, regulators, managers, investors, designers, contractors and operators in order to develop theories, models and instruments designed to ensure that infrastructures function to their full potential – now and in the future.

I’ve been thinking a little lately about impact and what it means to measure it.  What comes to mind is  the idea that we should be interested in verbs rather than nouns.  We should want to see transitions in practice from knowing something to knowing how to know or do new things.  What this means is that we might have to be more experimental in our approach to engagement and consequently with what we produce.  It might require us to make certain things more than others – decision aids for example – that will allow us to assess if our artifacts, maps, objects, writing, charts, and graphs, enable people and policy makers to do things differently than they otherwise would.

This is a difficult proposition because of the space in which we work – science and technology policy.  Because we deal with so-called wicked problems, everything happens real-time and experiments are ‘live’.  This means that by trying something out, we’ve already done it.  And so I’m looking for models of practices that employ an approach to design and experimentation where decision aids form the basis of practice and comparison.

The Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation is a good example of this.  Though their focus is on health care and the patient, they do two things there that could be applied to CSTEP’s approach.  The first is that they organize interventions into a cost and risk matrix (Table 1; Duncan and Breslin, 2009).  This allows them to assess if something is high risk and low cost and so on.  It also suggests where decision aids might change in their forms and details – e.g. from a visual rendering to a business plan or an object to spreadsheet.

Table 1

The second is that they use an experimental approach to validate their design process.  The approach of testing artifacts for their effect on health is fairly common in a clinical setting.  However, this may seem a little alien and awkward to policy contexts because it treats the policy maker (the decision maker) like a patient.  But it is in this sense that one could view the decision maker as being sick – of being unable to sift through the complexity of weighty decisions or lacking the information necessary for rational choices.

An article about a decision aid for diabetes treatment options outlines the process, and it includes some detail about the experimental protocol that allowed researchers to determine that the decision aid supported better decision  or at least decisions that were more consistent with the needs of the patient (Montori et al, 2007).

I think there is an opportunity in this second part of Mayo’s assessment strategy which is to test, scientifically and using evidence, the impact of decision aids produced by CSTEP on the ability of policy makers to make decisions, develop, and implement positive changes to existing policy.

The challenge of course is to gather these policy makers together and to compare the outcomes of their decisions.  As we get to the point of being able to run workshops, perhaps we ought to take on an experimental approach of using control groups to see if indeed games, maps, and other decision aids support the kinds of behaviors we are hoping to suport.  This is more common in a games-for-policy approach, where debriefing is part of the process.  Still, we ought to think tactically, practically, and socially to see if this is a possibility.  At the least, it is one way to demonstrate impact – albeit at a micro scale.  But then, isn’t it the micro decision making that scales the best?

Duncan, A. K., & Breslin, M. A. (2009). Innovating health care delivery: the design of health services. Journal of Business Strategy, 30(2/3), 13 – 20. doi:10.1108/02756660910942427

Montori, V. M., Breslin, M., Maleska, M., & Weymiller, A. J. (2007). Creating a Conversation: Insights from the Development of a Decision Aid. PLoS Med, 4(8), e233. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040233

Disaggregation among natural and social scientific communities can lead to misunderstandings about the different components of disaster management and socio-ecological systems. Terms like resilient, adaptive, robust are often used to describe systems and their processes and come up in the literature, policy, and the media very frequently. They have catch my attention because they have different use patterns in the field I know a little about: biology.

Adaptation, coping, resilience, and robustness have similar definitions, but they sometimes have different technical definitions across disciplines. Their different meanings contribute to their value, and they highlight the differences in perspectives that each scientific community contributes. However, the details matter for distinguishing important components of systems and what aspects might be suggestive for new insights or that might be responsive to intervention or assessment. It’s also important to establish common ground meanings when communities get together and work towards common goals.

There is a benchmark article Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–Ecological Systems that does a much better job at pulling together the literature than I do here, and I came across it after writing much of what is in this article. It is also the narrative used by the Resilience Alliance for their activities.

The following represents some of my notes and thinking as I try to sort out the definitions on my own. For me, it means asking how different perspectives contribute to the ways in which we interact in socio-ecological systems.

Adaptation
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report defines adaptation as:

Initiatives and measures to reduce the vulnerability of natural and human systems against actual or expected climate change effects. Various types of adaptation exist, e.g. anticipatory and reactive, private and public, and autonomous and planned. Examples are raising river or coastal dikes, the substitution of more temperature-shock resistant plants for sensitive ones, etc.

This definition takes its function from the ability of humans to manipulate their environment, making it better suited to human-identified goals and interests, even if acting on behalf of other organisms. Some synonyms include alteration, modification, redesign, remodeling, revamping, reworking, reconstruction, conversion, adjustment, acclimatization, acclimation, accommodations, habituation, acculturation, assimilation, and integration.

Adaptation is also used to describe genetically-accumulated evolutionary change over time in organisms as a response to natural selection. This is different from the case where manipulating the environment substitutes in the short-term replaces the pressure of genetic adaptation over the long term.

So I suppose this is why it calls to mind a version of evolution based on characters acquired in its lifetime (commonly known as Lamarckian inheritance)–if only for the appropriation of the term adaptation to refer to intra (within) generational processes and not inter (between) generational processes.

Adaptation for evolutionary biologists typically means processes through which a population becomes better suited to its environment over the course of many generations, often through natural selection. A great deal of debate and research has been directed at how we recognize adaptation in hindsight. This is because it can be difficult to state the causes for the evolution of a trait when we do not have direct observation and only historical signatures to learn from. Most notably this was discussed in “The Spandrels of San Marco”, a paper by Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979) that uses an analogy from architecture for the evolution of organismal form and function.

I agree that changing the environment in the ways mentioned in the IPCC definition will likely limit vulnerabilities for humans and other populations. However, there is an implicit assumption here that the goal should be for humans NOT to have to adapt over a course of generations–despite the inevitability of genetic change over time. It presupposes an assumption of stasis – and a very western one when compared to eastern notions of change and mutability. Richard Nisbett catalogs how some of these assumptions about change and stasis in his book The Geography of Thought. For me, it depends on what time scale one is looking to understand if stasis or change is more relevant. Still, I think its difficult to argue anymore that stasis is more relevant than change.

The necessary question should not be IF we should adapt (genetically or by manipulating the environment). Instead we should ask, “What are we adapting to and how are we getting there?” Will humans and other populations be adapting to artificially-supported ‘vulnerability balloons’ as we are almost surely doing now through our uses of technology and fossil fuels?

This question of adaptive goal is important because the IPCC definitions include definitions of costs and benefits with its description of adaptation. To what goal are these costs and benefits applied? Within the frame of a generation or an organism’s lifetime, explicating goals may make sense, but ascribing goals to a ecosystem – much less whole populations – gets very very slippery. You start to need some way to implicate who or what is writing that mission statement.

Similarly the IPCC includes adaptive capacity in its glossary as the ability, institutions, and resources that can be used to implement adaptation measures.

I think this is all a bit confusing, and I feel it makes more sense to reserve the definition of adaptation for genetic, phenotypic, and behavioral attenuation of organisms or systems to their environment across generations. To describe the processes that organisms and systems use during their lifetimes I think we need a term that encompasses more variability, one that is less blatantly anthropocentric and functionalist in its approach to socio-ecological co-evolution. We also need a long view on systems not ones that are limited to single generations only – something that the biological definition of adaptation retains but that the socio-technical one does not.

Borrowing from the literature of evolutionary biology, behavior, and developmental biology, plasticity seems far better suited to the processes of environmental manipulation being described by the IPCC. This is because it references a material (plastic) that maintains its basic molecular structure while having variable capacity to take on any number of manipulations or forms.

Coping and Plasticity
The terms coping and adaptation are sometimes used interchangeably leading to confusion. Here I think there is some opportunity to disentangle the two. A compilation of brainstorming sessions by groups of development practitioners in Ghana, Niger and Nepal described some differences which were then documented in the Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook (table 1). The results of the group’s sessions were pointing to what I think was a difference between 1) consistent and conscious actions to reduce vulnerability (adaptation) versus 2) ad hoc solutions (coping).

It’s worthwhile to differentiate coping and adaptation as within and between generation processes, respectively. Biologists use plasticity to describe the ability of an organism or group to adjust within its lifetime via behavioral or developmental responses to the environment. This may indeed include manipulation of the environment to decrease vulnerability. Phenotypic plasticity is a description that could easily encompass artifacts, behaviors, institutions, and aggregations of resources as extensions of an organism’s phenotype. It invokes important concepts from evolutionary biology including the role of cooperation in building and maintaining extended phenotypes (such as aggregations of useful materials like insurance, band-aids, and water) or how phenotypic reaction norms can change in response to different environments–shedding light on why a strategy in one environment may not be as successful in another. There is further correspondence here with plasticity and the concept of developmental canalization (that organismal systems can get locked in to specific trajectories) and with the concept of path dependence in the development of economic and institutional systems.

So a better definition of plasticity might re-appropriate the IPCC’s definition of adaptation and rework it as:

An adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities. Plasticity operates through cognitive (sensing), social (interactional), physiological, and other mechanisms that can adjust to a wide range of variability. Plasticity is the ability to respond to variability and a range of realized and possible futures continuously and in a sustained approach. Plasticity or coping strategies attenuate the use of resources to local needs and involve planning that hybridizes old and new knowledge and strategies in an exploratory process.

Here I think this definition makes it much easier to bridge what may be happening at a physiological level (cellular temperature variation, sweating) with responses at an artifact level (clothing, ventilation) and an institutional (e.g. policies towards what it means to be cool).

This is because the term plasticity explicitly invokes a connotation of variability, while adaptation feels more like a description of how well two things (in this case organism or population and environment) fit together. Clearly, if the environment is highly variable we need variability in our systems, not assumptions and values of how well we already fit and work within it.

Coping, on the other hand, seems pretty straightforward. Survive. It makes sense to leave a lot of variability open for this one, because when it comes time for coping strategies, any and all tactics may be appropriate. But then again, there can be ways to cope that are more responsive than others. But I think this starts to dig into a definition of resilience or robustness, where the system properties begin to matter more than than how they manifest themselves in practice. What I mean by this is that as people, organisms, and ecosystems attempt to cope with change, their ability to draw on networks or strategies for coping is itself embedded in the system. Some systems, as a function of their structure, cope better than others. Consequently the adapt better than other too.

Resilience
The Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook adapts its definition from UNISDR (2009) defining resilience as “the ability of a system to resist, absorb, and recover from the effects of hazards in a timely and efficient manner, preserving or restoring its essential basic structures, functions, and identity.”

The IPCC defines resilience as “the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organisation, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.”

While Walker et al (2004) define resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.”

In these cases resilience emphasizes a system’s ability to maintain or return to specific structural or functional features–i.e. to maintain its identity, its durability, its persistence. But as noted by Erica Jen in her article “Stable or Robust? What’s the Difference?” (2005), the choices of features or structural elements that we attend to are important for assessing both the capacity and quality of that responsiveness to change.

So what is the function, what is functional, and for whom? Definitions matter.

One way to think about resilience is to imagine a couple of different water balloons. One balloon is filled halfway full. Another is filled so that the latex rubber that composes its surface and membrane is stretched tightly to hold the water in. Now you can throw both balloons back and forth between each other, and neither may pop. But what do you think will happen when the balloons are stretched, twisted, or allowed to drop on the ground where a twig might be a hazard to the already tense surface of the overfilled balloon? It will probably pop and spill the water out.

A system’s resilience is a lot like a water balloon, and the degree of resilience is determined by how much water is forced into the balloon, the size of the balloon, and how much it is pushed to its limits. We might think of the balloons shape, its ‘throwability’ or the thickness of its membrane as examples of functional or structural elements. In most cases, we are looking at how well the balloon is able to maintain it shape and its continuity despite being stressed – i.e. it is functionally a ‘water balloon’, it has a round shape, and responds to the exterior and interior pressures of air and water.

Rarely do we think that a water balloon might reconfigure itself, rearranging the organization of its functions, structural elements, or features to be able to accomplish the same task differently. What would happen if the water and the balloon separated or if the water balloon system was able to draw on other systems (e.g. refrigeration) to change the relationships between its functional elements? What if we no longer simply considered only the water inside of the balloon as the system responding to the task of throwing? What if the throwing and catching movements were also included? Would we still think of a resilient system, or would we start to walk a path of robustness–of being able to adjust the definitions and constraints of the systems themselves in pursuit of coevolutionary relationships between them?

Robustness
Robustness is a different beast altogether – literally. While resilience is focused on maintaining a system, we can describe robustness as the ability of a system to change and in doing so to respond to environment and to develop entirely new functions as a result.

Some argue that robustness describes the ability of a system to withstand mutations and maintain its phenotype or “shape” as a result (Wagner, 2005). Instead I think there is a greater correspondence of robustness with transformation as used by Walker et al (2004). Transformability is “the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social (including political) conditions make the existing system untenable.” I’m less sure about the “untenable” part of Walker et al’s definition.

Robustness is the ability of a system to evolve system functions, not simply maintain those that already exist. In this way, an analogy can be drawn between adaptation/robustness and plasticity/resilience. Similarly, I think robustness has a quality of being parametric. Parametric architecture has the quality of being built from common construction principles, but by varying the parameter values of those rules of construction, endless forms become possible.

References

Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2): 5. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5

UNISDR, 2009. Terminology: Basic terms of disaster risk reduction and IISD et al, 2007. Community-based Risk Screening – Adaptation and Livelihoods (CRiSTAL) User’s Manual, Version 3.0.

Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook
http://www.careclimatechange.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Itemid=30

IPCC, 2007: Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I., M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson, Eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 976pp.

Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” Proc. Roy. Soc. London B 205 (1979) pp. 581-598

Wagner, Andreas. 2005. Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems (Princeton Studies in Complexity). Princeton University Press.

Nisbett, R. E. (2004). The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why. Simon and Schuster.

Indian States Renamed For Countries With Similar Populations (Click Map for Larger Version)

Inspired by: US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs

Indian States As Countries of Similar Population (Click Map for Larger Version)

Inspired by: US States As Countries of Equal Population

Indian States As Countries of Similar Population (Click Map for Larger Version)

Sources:

Population of Indian States: Government of India (2001). Census of India.
Population of Nations: Wikipedia. List of Countries by Population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population Retrieved 2010-05-27.

A group of researchers made up of advanced students from the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) and the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DAIICT) set out to learn about ethnographic practice and to experience the places and people that may have something to add to our understanding of how the technology fits (or doesn’t fit) with their everyday life. Their goal was to identify how user context could affect the landscape of educational technology…or at least that’s how they started out.

Playpower is a initiative to support affordable, effective, and fun learning games. The project is starting with an existing $10 TV-computer as a platform for learning games in the developing world.

The video below introduces the Playpower Foundation’s mission.

Playpower: An introduction from Playpower Foundation on Vimeo.

Working on a set of social research practices means getting to know or getting NOT to know (depending on how you look at it) the places and practices of the people who can potentially create something valuable from changes to the exiting technology and it uses.

We held a summary and feedback session at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy after their first week of training and observation. They shared their process of ethnographic research gathered feedback to develop it further and begin to implement more observations on a wider scale.

The research team gave a great introduction of their process with some initial results. What followed was a fantastic discussion among approximately 15-20 staff and researchers at CSTEP as well as visitors and the Playpower team.

Many themes began to emerge, and it became clear that the exciting thing about the Playpower project was more than its concept of low cost computing. Instead, I think it raises as many questions as it answers and engages its audience with problems about the role of technology in education and everyday life.

We explored multiple themes in more or less detail, but overall the session was a fantastic success and good model for how to bring about discussions that relate social science, technology, economics, and education in exciting ways.

Questions and themes for further follow-up:

1. What is the role of ethnographic researchers in relationship to the design process and the Playpower project more generally? That is, how do perspectives gained “on-the-ground” compete with held assumptions about the project and its implementation?

2.  How do we move from perspectives of technology as a solution questions about peoples’ goals and aspirations? That is, are we working on the Playpower technology as a panacea for educational constraints rather than understanding how family and individual wants and needs articulate their own technology (or otherwise) solutions?

3.  Understanding context means that we may need to do some questionnaire redesign – to understand more than just the landscape afforded by people’s lifestyles and incomes towards an understanding of how practice and purpose shape socio-technical interactions.

4.  How can the conclusions and assumptions held by programmers and designers be refined?  Put another way, do designers or researchers feel free, comfortable, or motivated to redress cultural biases and modes? Also, how is the distinction between game design and development articulated?

5.  Does ethnographic research inform through techniques beyond the interview-questionaire-film? What are additional techniques for research? 

6.  What are the values that Playpower is proposing, advocating, or nominating?  For example, are fantasizing, empathy, or transitions in behavior and practice something the project aims to make durable in its presentation and game design? What about the game or software content?  How do these values translate into design – e.g. process or pattern knowledge as bird’s eye views and 2nd order perspectives.

7.  Can film and cinema provide media and narrative precedents for games and instruction?

8. Did they buy (the original keyboard/game sets) because they are educational? Or for other purposes?

9.  Are there game paradigms to move beyond the screen and into interaction and engagement with the real world.

When comparing economic and social data we generally compare like political types: we compare Brazil to China or Texas and California, or even Shanghai and Lagos. (See 19.20.21 for an example of interesting comparisons of megacities). However, in the case of such a populous nation such as India, more insights may be gleaned by comparing individual states such as Karnataka with entire nation states such as France. As this chart shows the population and land area of these two political entities are very similar even if they have very different governance structure.

Sources:

Population  Bangalore + Jaipur: World-Gazetteer

Population for France: INSEE

Population for Kenya: CIA World Fact Book

GSP for Karnataka + Rajastan: Central Statistical Organization

GDP for France + Kenya: IMF

I hate to post to a blog with just one link, when I can twitter it and you can choose, but today, I was trying to tease out what we mean by “infrastructure” and I thought it was worth making a succinct hard sell. I found myself returning to the writing of Malcolm McCullough, author of Digital Ground.

I was trying to understand if street signage and bus schedules are hard or soft infrastructure, and it seemed to me it might be neither. It is the informational layer of the city. Without Informational infrastructure the city might be reasonably negotiated by long-time inhabitants through embodied, local and iterative knowledge, but is totally opaque to new comers. And we know there are a ton of new comers to cities like Bangalore, and many of them may not speak the local language (linguistic, cultural, economic etc.)

Malcolm’s new book is called Ambeint Commons – (the chapter abstracts and a “How to use this book”) are up on his website as a .pdf

Abstract

Rapid cultural shifts made necessary by planetary change generally place more value on surroundings. Ubiquitous information, once thought placeless, increasingly influences this transformation. Yet at this writing, “environmental history of information” yielded a null search on Google. Many people, particularly architects, believe that cultural outlook somehow lives in the way people dwell, and in what public places they choose to build and embellish. Fewer people see information enhancing the physical world, however. The effect more often seems like white noise, dematerialization, or escape. Where notions of a commons have applied to information, those have instead addressed intellectual property, especially where intellectual capital has been socially produced over networks. Now the move beyond the desktop into many more formats and physical contexts demands new approaches to shared resources. The genre of “urban computing” has arisen to explore this. How do the architectures of ambient information enrich urban experience, operate architectures, cultivate environmental sensibilities, or renew responsibility to some idea of a commons?

Ambient Commons is about attention in architecture. It is about information media becoming contextual, tangible, and persistent. It begins an environmental history of information. I am taking two phenomena that I see gaining currency in the rise of the “augmented city,” and exploring whether it makes sense to combine them. “Ambient” is that which surrounds but does not distract. Information is becoming ambient. Architecture is rediscovering environment and atmosphere. “Commons” is that which self-governs resource sharing, a process which political economists increasingly see complementing markets. “Information commons” has been topical since the mid 90s, but only now begins to merge with physical space. “Ambient Commons” does not exist except in a few niches of music: not in media studies, nor pervasive computing, nor urbanism. But should it?

Malcolm brings together a passion for good urbanism, complex systems thinking and IT like no one else. And I am thinking that this book might help me get my head around this whole informational infrastructure thing, and how we actively create humane augmented reality cities by intentionally designing informational infrastructure. In other words how do we work towards an Ambient Commons?

If you get a minute I recommend taking a look, as we enter the adventures of the always-on-electronically-augmented-urbanism of Bangalore, MegaCity Asia and beyond. It may be the most important call for an information environmentalism we have had.

James Riley has spent the last few months helping our lab develop some baseline information about the history of transportation and infrastructure in Bangalore. Here is the first cut of a presentation he gave that summed up some of the research.

Evolution of Bangalore Transportation Infrastructure

As researchers we always need to be aware of our cognitive biases.  Below is a particularly well designed guide to understanding cognitive biases.

Cognitive Biases – A Visual Study Guide by the Royal Society of Account Planning

Urban Gaming and Alternate Reality Games (ARG) as serious game platforms came up in a few conversations in the last few weeks. (I prefer the term Mixed Reality Gaming but that does not seem to have caught on to the same extent as ARG).

Urgent Evoke is one interesting model of mixed-reality gaming that is about problem solving or at least exploring problem spaces in a place based manner.

Their ABOUT page states “The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.”

In the last few years I have read three interesting novels about Alternate Reality Games.

“Halting State” by Charles Stross

“Daemon” & “Freedom tm” by Daniel Suarez

I highly recommend them as probes into what the possibilities of mixed reality gaming could be like when it leaves the screen. All are a bit cyberpunk / dystopic, but there are a lot of interesting interaction design elements to draw on.

ARGs seem to be a particularly rich spaces for future investigations into simulating possible policy options and outcomes, because they happen in haptic space, and allow interactivity and risk taking of gaming, while also making material changes to the world of atoms not just bits. (I spend too much time sitting in front of my screen / book as it is.

Two other relevant novels about virtual reality and mixed reality scenarios that may be of interest include:

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson

Spook Country – William Gibson

Any other good novels or ARGs anyone can recommend?

Here’s a visual representation of the Comprehensive Traffic and Transportation Plan for Bangalore . The report states that this plan was commissioned by the government of Karnataka to address the transport needs of Bangalore upto 2025. Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation (KUIDFC) has initiated this study and engaged RITES Ltd, a Government of India Undertaking, to carry out this study.

The plan outlines the various agencies which will be involved in implementing different parts of the plan. However there is no single agency which seems to be responsible for monitoring and coordinating the overall plan.

What is also interesting about the CTTP is that while a number of policies like the National Urban Transport Policy, the Draft Karnataka Urben Development Policy and the Draft Karnataka Transport Policy call for promoting non-motorised transport, out of the CTTP’s Budget of Rupees 45534 crore (for Phase 1 and Phase 2 only) not even Rupees 1 crore is allotted for bicycling, a significant mode of non-motorised transport. Having a closer look at the funds for pedestrian facilities, one sees that these funds are allocated for pedestrian overpasses and not for footpath improvements. This even as the draft BMLTA pedestrian policy says that pedestrian overpasses are a failure in most places.

It therefore does make one wonder if there is a disconnect between policies and plans for actual projects. Have a look at the plan and let us know if it raises any questions in your mind too. Do also share what you think about the visualisation.

(This is a new version):

(Here was the original version):

(As you can see the many projects and organizations responsible for them make this a particularly rich information design challenge).

Present below is another map showing the routes and locations for the various projects proposed in the CTTP. Interestingly, the outline of the map does not confirm to the new BBMP boundaries or the old BMP boundaries. The map shows a plan for a Bus Rapid Transit System(BRT) on the outskirts of the city. Most BRT implementations across the world cover the core city area and are not restricted to the outskirts. By proposing a outskirts only BRT, does the plan indicate that within the city, buses cannot get priority over cars or other motorised private transport?

(Click for larger version)

It’s not often that unfunded proposals make their way into disinfecting daylight. Sometimes you try again, and sometimes you just let them waste away among the dusty electrons of your hard drive.

I don’t know which category this one falls into, but I do feel it’s worth sharing and making public. Perhaps someone will even comment with improvements. I can only hope.

In any case, this proposal was dependent on a constellation of partnerships (and funding) to make the project move forward–at least from my perspective. Sometime a little cash can help develop needed projects and spur collaboration. This was a submission to the Knight News Challenge which is supposed to announce its winners sometime in mid-June. Since I know I’m already out of the running, there isn’t really a compelling reason not to share—but please tell me if there is!!!

Anyhow, here is most of it—-minus some names to protect the innocent—–except one: this logo was created by Zack Denfeld, and we’ve used it on a variety of projects. For more, you should visit his launchpad.

Describe your project:
Envirocasting adapts global weather information to the cultural and operational needs of local [international disaster preparedness organization] branch offices and communities, supporting their risk assessment and preparedness needs. A wealth of information exists to support disaster preparedness, but a gap exists between the design of information services and their local use-contexts, limiting widespread use and effectiveness. The benefits of these information services are clear to local decision makers, and they are anxious to put the tools and news sources into practice.

However, exposure to digital news platforms is low, and the capacity to use them in decision making contexts is minimal as a result of this disconnect between design and use.

Envirocasting takes a design anthropology approach to inform the design, distribution, and acquisition of digital weather information services to local decision makers. Design anthropology seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human. Using this approach, local patterns of information consumption and culture related to futures, information design, and technological metaphors can be identified, allowing for the design of appropriate services. Design principles as well as specific, local use-applications will aid in the distribution and assessment of weather forecast efficacy. Thus, weather news for risk assessment can flow more precipitously to decision makers, allowing them to coordinate the disaster preparedness efforts more quickly and strategically.

Simulation games for local communities will support learning and the application of information services in context. This provides use-case memories of the future and practice in managing uncertainty with minimal risk.

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?

Envirocasting aims to localize climate information by making it simple, non-technical, clear, easy to use, and as meaningful as possible. Maps are relevant when their colors, numbers, icons, and scales are relevant and supported by culture and context. Information that connects with specific actions can be used confidently in planning and decision making. Specific use-cases communicated by local communities will drive the development process and will help weave the digital media fabric with aesthetics, narratives, and metaphors. Games support critical thinking and social play to help decision makers and communities explore the dynamics of news and information-based decisions for climate-related disaster preparedness.

How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)

Envirocasting innovates by translating connections between design and use. When local conditions refract the design and dissemination of information from distant or multiple sources, innovation is an inherent byproduct. Envirocasting is designed with the mind in mind, understanding cultural legacies that influence the recognition of uncertainty and metaphors. It bridges experience, play, and interactions, creating memories of the future. The project identifies appropriate implementations of open-source digital information services and defines a set of prescriptive resources for innovating across disaster risk contexts and cultural processes based on abstractions and lessons from six local communities in three countries.

What unmet need does your proposal answer?

A fact-finding mission conducted surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops over two-month periods in 2008 and 2009.

Explicit unmet needs include:

1. An Increase in the Accessibility and User-Friendliness of Climate Information Products
2. New Products to Fill Information Gaps for Needs–Starting with Improved Flood Forecasting Tools
3. Training in the Use of Climate Tools and How Climate Information Could Trigger Action Such as:
   • Learning to access and interpret climate information tools.
   • Learning how to monitor seasonal forecasts in conjunction with medium and short-term forecasts.
   • Understanding how to take gradated actions.
   • Channels of communication and decision-making to receive and take action based on time-sensitive climate information.

And don’t take my word for it:

What will you have changed by the end of your project?

More-Measurable outcomes:

• Prototypes that adapt weather information services to local use-contexts.
• Documents that communicate design processes for cross-cultural communication.
• Heuristics or ‘rules-of-thumb’ for the design of climate information services for risk assessment.
• Country and local use-context reports that document specific patterns of information acquisition and behavior.
• Relevance of climate information for local decision-makers.
• Ability to align information with decision and action.
• A folktaxonomy of climate information and categories for creating a cultural consensus model (CCM) to realize translations in cognition and practice among cultural contexts.
• An index of context-specific actions and the values associated with them.

Less-measurable outcomes:

• Perception of the design process and innovation pathways for news and information about climate-driven risks.
• The relationship between information providers, researchers, designers, policy makers, and implementing offices providing the opportunity for continued support, training and dialogue necessary to realize the potential benefits of using climate information.
• Channels of communication between information providers and decision makers and between decision makers and community constituents (incl. digital information services).
• The scope of the implementing organizations to conduct cross-cultural research and information adaptation projects.

How will you measure progress and ultimately success?
The uses of weather and hazard preparedness information can be measured using surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops and compared to current estimates of use and use cases, but those data are useful differently for different people including the decision-makers, their constituents, their supporting agencies, and funders of this project. Thus, we intend to cast progress in varied terms for the different stakeholders and partners.

Some of these guiding questions include:

• What are the iterations, changes, and improvements to existing systems?
• What does the trajectory of individual decision-maker’s tasks or questioning look like?
• How do other elements of the media ecology change and what stakeholders are invoked or leveraged in the process?

Success, on the other hand, is more elusive. Disasters are sporadic and may not always afford a direct link between information effectiveness and risk reduction. However, existing case studies show that these types of information, when combined with specific actions, can lead to significant reductions in both the vulnerability and negative effects of a disaster such as flooding. The key to assessment it to engage in a continual processes where we value choices and transitions in practice. The design of this project take into account the high-stakes involved in the decision-making and information uses by providing opportunities for both high stakes (post-hazard) and low stakes (simulation-games) assessment.

Do you see any risk in the development of your project?

The biggest risk at present is that the organizations listed do not have a history of working together (this is indicated by the generic names rather than their proper ones), but this is also where the opportunity exists. The leadership (particularly of the larger orgs) is wary of their participation in the project without first-hand knowledge of all partners and/or certain funding. This conversation is ongoing at the time of this application and continues to develop. If the proposal moves through to the next round, we should at that point be able to name each of the partners in more specific terms.

Supply-side risks (design-mediated)

• Inability to generate meaning either through lack of empathy or translation of needs to designers
• Research products are not absorbed and implemented during the design processes because they are non-normative, unclear for direct application, left uncommunicated, or other
• Partner coalition denatures from lack of shared goals or mental models
• Emphasis on technological development or information diversification over use-context and user needs
• Existing insights, stakeholders, and methods are unknown or unengaged
• Irrelevance, inability, or non-linkage of digital mediums and meaningful information services
• Cultural heterogenetiy too great for scaling of appropriate information services
• Ability and capacity of project managers to recognize and adapt to other sources of risk
• Expertise of project partners is missing or unleveraged
• Translation of local use-contexts into primary research is distorted or biased

Demand-side risks (user-mediated)

• Low frequency acquisition of technology platforms, information services, and/or symbolic systems
• Scripting of use and application to local decision making is unclear
• Appropriation for local use-cases is nonexistent
• Assembly does not fit into the local context of everyday life
• Cannot be integrated into normal practices, culture, and concerns
• Practice with information and platform is sparse

What is your marketing plan? How will people learn about what you are doing?

The conduits for marketing are, in many respects, already in place. The organizational structure and extent of [intl. disaster preparedness agency] branch offices will facilitate branding and distribution using existing networks of community organization, tactical planning, and response offices. Though the value of the services should be self-evident in the design and cognitive acquisition of the services, the goal is to help users to practice using and applying these information services. We also recognize that aesthetic values can elevate the recognition of value and the maintenance of that value through everyday use. Thus, arriving at these values will be a principle objective for all participants.

In order to increase domain knowledge, the outcomes can be shared among the participants, their centers, and via professional and interest networks including the design research community which actively engages with similar project goals. Because some of the project partners include university centers, schools and research organizations, the outcomes will be shared with emerging professionals including graduate students and visiting fellows.

Tactically, the marketing plan for simulation game-based training is slightly more difficult because it requires additional preparation, training, and presentation. Nonetheless, with a bit of effort, these games will reinforce the marketing strategy for the primary goal of adapting weather information using the same local community branch office network structure. We also expect to develop videos that demonstrate our process as well as the use and value of the informations service under construction. But ultimately, the best marketing will be the effectiveness of the adaptation process.

Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant? If it is to be self-sustainable, what’s the plan for making that happen?

Envirocasting is the application of a process to translate meaning across cultural contexts with relevance for local concerns. We do not view it as an experimental process so much and an underutilized one. Luckily, there are many resources, case studies, and additional expertise to draw from in the process. Our goal is to assemble them and to draw the pieces together into relevant platforms and prototypes for weather information services.

The project will accomplish this goal as a one-time research project that will publicly document its methods and outcomes as guides so that they can be applied in new use-contexts and for wider information arrays. We fully expect that the different project partners will continue to apply the work and experience in varied ways after the initial project, although they may carry it out to their own ends.

Our method for fostering rhizomatic-like dissemination of the results (and thus, sustainability) is to link with additional strategic partners whose networks span varied social groups, languages, use-contexts, and concerns. Furthermore, the acquisition and integration of the research (as well as the information services it supports) can be broadly advocated from a policy perspective because successes arise from its application and benefit in specific, local communities. The overall plan for sustainability is to demonstrate that these information service platforms reduce risk by enabling decisive action before pending hazards become disasters. If this is demonstrated, sustainability will ensue, even if not in the form described in this proposal.

These are notes from a critical thinking session we did yesterday where we looked at the positives and negatives of the India-UNDP Institutional Strengthening and Capacity Building strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR; SI#12). The project is being implemented by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) in relation tothe National Policy on Disaster Management which was approved in October, 2009.

We will be working on a more detailed analysis, but in the meantime here are our initial interpretations. Note: these have not been verified with the implementing agencies, and only come from our reading of the documents themselves.

Implementation Strategy Positives Negatives Agency Roles for State Disaster management Agency (SDMA) and State Executive Committee (SEC) SDMA serves as a dedicated agency for planning.

SEC works as a broker, coordinating SDMA’s efforts with State and District Actors. SDMA lacks authority and/or may not be in a position to receive critical feedback.

SEC may have authority but may miss opportunities and/or have little contribution to policy (e.g. how coordinate intersects with planning). Capacity of SDMA and SEC to carry out roles effectively. Opportunity for Synthesis

Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) responsibility is decentralized by default Human resources and technical assistance is absent or lacking

Mixed and overlapping responsibilities between SDMA and SEC. (e.g. HR resources are listed for SDMA but not SEC; work requirements are not allocated appropriately) Scale of Project

(3-6 Districts/State) Tractable.

Value in Experiment May not include Bangalore.

But we need scale NOW!

Existing models not taken into account

SDMA vs State and potential for political preferences or interference National Steering Committee and the Identity of “Relevant” Departments at the State Level Flexibility to choose different departments or to determine relevance Relevant State Department are not known, nor are there planned criteria for inclusion

Might miss relevant actors Provision of Dedicated Human Resources from National Level to Fill State Interim Needs Immediate Expertise

Flexible

Top in Class

Diversity Lagged Capacity as New People are Trained

Possible Gaps in Capacity or Even a ‘One Off’ Presence of Expertise = Unsustainable

Unfamiliar with Local Conditions Distribution of Support Roles Interdisciplinary Too Many Responsibilities.

SDMA is Missing a ‘networker’ = Someone to Connect SDMA Outputs Strategically with Agencies and Local Actors (provided in part by SEC) Hazard and Vulnerability Analysis Can be Multi-Sectoral

Can be Interdisciplinary

Based on and Developing from Existing Processes Scale and Resource Limited

Needs to Connect Macro and Micro

Key Institutes and Experts Not Specified nor are Criteria for Inclusion Given Entire DRR Process (whole strategy) Relevant and Realistic Based on Response not Preparation Standard Methodology for Post-Disaster Need Assessment Bangalore as a Center of Expertise

Sector-Specific

Modular Feedback Mechanisms Missing Recovery and Reconstruction Sector-Specific

Modular

Validation

Community Focus

Capacity Building at Community Level

Learning from Past No Funding or Enabling of NGOs Mainstreaming DRR Forward Looking

Disaster Management Perspective

Anti-Corruption Focus

Curriculum Development

Pilot Efforts Lack of Appropriate Tools and Methods

Narrow Disciplinary Focus (engineering) Capacity for Preparedness, Response, Mitigation, and Planning Sector Relevance

Mitigation Responsibility Placed with Department Officials to be Achieved through Zoning, Regulations, and other Instruments Almost All Training is Aimed at Response

Mitigation Effectiveness is Limited Awareness Building State Can Access Widespread Communication Channels Not at an Appropriate Scale (i.e. taluk)

Responsibility at State Level Knowledge Networking Knowledge Hubs

Integrative

Focused

Scale-Free Hubs May Not be Networked

Narrow Disciplines

Not for Public Consumption

Values are Not Prescribed

See how just a little paint can shows realtime traffic flow and patterns.  It’s non-toxic and water soluble—and pretty! Thanks information aesthetics!