What touring the world taught us
In early 2015 after running our Strategy Conference and Design Research Conference for well over a decade, IIT Institute of Design set out on a mission to reconceive “the design conference” into a more immersive, holistic, and meaningful learning experience. To achieve this, we had to entirely rethink both format and content, eventually arriving at a new model we call the Strategy World Tour.
On the tour, we visited four cities: San Francisco, Hong Kong/Shenzhen, Mumbai and Detroit. We selected these cities for the critical mass of emerging behaviors and models that pose the most significant challenges to traditional ways of doing business, providing services, or — especially in the case of Detroit — going about daily life. In each of these cities, the Institute of Design has existing partnerships and research activity. However, up until the point of the tour we had not conducted a macro exploration of how disruptive activity — such as the maker movement or cause-driven commerce — is recreating industries or the cities themselves outside the context of specific projects or partners.
At the outset we identified the maker movement, robotics and AI, social innovation, and innovation at scale as emerging drivers of change. We gave ourselves the rather daunting challenge to weave through several seemingly disparate dynamics over four cities and come out with a cohesive story on the other end. Yet, surprisingly we found numerous recurring themes and arrived rather naturally at the new examples that cropped up in each subsequent location.
For instance, our minds were blown by The Marin Country Day School upending traditional education models by infusing making into school culture. We took the maker movement lens to Hong Kong and stayed at a hotel that is also a higher ed teaching institution and living lab. They are training a hospitality workforce to support over 60 million tourists in a city occupied by only 7 million residents. By the time we landed in Detroit for our examination of social innovation, we were primed to think about how these approaches could provide sufficient and sustainable education for the city’s impoverished. Nothing could better exemplify the power of this kind of approach than the Detroit Achievement Academy, founded three years ago by an ex-Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The charter school performs not only better than any other school in the city, but ranks nationwide despite that 60% of its students are homeless and 100% struggle with poverty. By the end of the tour we had added immersive learning as fundamental to our exploration.
Throughout the course of the tours, we visited — oftentimes shockingly smart and complex — changemakers who shared their stories and creations. Our conversations took place in factories, innovation centers, laboratories, and slums. We talked over drinks on a lush garden rooftop in Mumbai, a yacht on the Victoria Harbor of Hong Kong, while riding a bus through the sprawling industry of Shenzhen, walking through the Redwoods outside of San Francisco or examining the soil on a Detroit urban farm.
The tour is a not a series of events, but rather a platform that repositions the role that design can play in the changing world. It is deliberately porous, allowing for many inputs. Everything was documented with film, photos, blogging, diagramming, and social media coverage.
Participants can make this model work for what they need. It’s a novel way to develop curricula and faculty research, which we are already seeing migrate into classes examining open innovation systems and local manufacturing. Our alumni can use it to access fresh inspiration for their work compressed into a short, action-packed adventure, rather than a standard workshop or white paper. Corporate partners can conduct quick studies on factors that will soon impact their industries.
During the upcoming conference, our intent is to implore even more deeply into some of what our tour experiences suggested. We think we can achieve this by providing a structure that will facilitate connecting drivers of change to application areas like healthcare, education, government and city planning. And we aim to engage all of our participants directly with the content and potential outcomes.
In addition to the conference, we are producing The Strategy World Tour Reader. This is essentially ID’s version of a trend report with an emphasis on musings, speculation, and new frameworks for thinking our way through our increasingly complex world. The final content pieces for The Reader will come from outputs of the May conference, providing an opportunity for our larger community of thinkers to join ID in codifying new knowledge.
Join us in May and stay tuned for more on the reader and Strategy World Tour locations and dates for 2016–2017.
