Focus on the activity (not the object)
A recent issue of American Indian magazine had an article about a change in how Mi’kmaw artifacts will be kept and curated. In addition to moving them to Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre (MDCC) where they are closer to, and curated by, members of the Mi’kmaw community, the objects will be displayed and curated based on the activity they are a part of rather than the material they are made of or the form they take.
As someone who spent my early career working in collections management, I am familiar with the object based focus of museums, and admit to an inherent love of things and what we can learn from them. But this is overpowered by my understanding of the importance of context and the knowledge that things don’t stand in isolation. If we don’t understand how and why they were made, used, and valued, and what other objects, practices, and values are attached, we cannot learn and understand more deeply.
As an archaeologist, one of the foci of my dissertation was grinding stones. In the landscape around South Indian temples that I surveyed, these could be used for food preparation, both household level and to feed pilgrims, depending on location. But some were used to grind puja powders or other non-edibles. Stones that have not been used for hundreds of years don’t necessarily yield all of their context of use, but by observing modern practices and talking to people I could begin to understand and frame the possibilities of the larger picture of these activities.
Reframing from object to activity applies well beyond how we curate museums and strive to understand and honor cultures that are not our own. It is fundamental to how we need to understand our own thoughts, processes, and activities. Too often technology development and business processes are siloed into their constituent parts, without acknowledging how those parts impact each other.
At EPIC 2022, Kurt Ward of Philips Healthcare gave a fantastic keynote where he drew on the history of Cartesian thinking in healthcare, critiquing the view that everything can be broken into parts and medicine can focus on and fix the individual parts. He noted our current understanding of how our bodies are interconnected — think of how important we now know our microbiomes are. Resilient, healthy bodies need to be seen holistically.
This applies to other systems as well, and the normative, siloed perspective seems to still be pervasive in large organizations. I recently worked on a project with a large agency that wanted a service blueprint of a particular end to end process. The team produced an amazing artifact that clearly showed how activities and practices on the “right” side of the blueprint affected the “left.” However, the agency was very insistent that they wanted proposed solutions that were narrowly focused on a particular aspect of the left hand side. It wasn’t that they couldn’t see the interconnections, it was that they were structured in such a way that they couldn’t address the challenges other than by tackling individual pieces with discrete owners.
As a consultant, I know to work with clients where they are, and even a piecemeal approach can eventually build toward impactful difference. But the more we can collectively remember that it is the activity, not the object, and the context, not just the singular moment, they more we can understand what is really happening and make better strategic and design decisions that truly matter.
