PODCAST: Silver linings and collaborative strategy: in conversation
Ewan McIntosh in conversation with Tim Logan, on strategic school design and rebuilding a business through Covid19.
Download this podcast from the Future Learning Design Podcast.
How have recent events affected your working arrangements, plans, offerings at NoTosh? At what point did the notion of “transition design” emerge for you?
We’ve had a distributed team for 11 years, with no office to call our own. So working from home is a natural habit for at least some of the time. But not travelling and having those fresh experiences of otherness is something we all miss. We’ve all had to go out of our way to read, listen and view stuff that we wouldn’t normally, just to get that infection of new ideas that you get when you travel.
Working days have become a lot more intense — where we used to have downtime waiting for a plane, or being alone in a hotel room, we’ve lost all of that. Our kids have been at home for months, and while it’s wonderful to spend more time with family, everyone needs private time and some routine. I’ve spent August and September rebuilding that routine — I had to before I went mad!
In terms of the business itself, there were three phases. First of all, we were super busy — we had a ton to deliver between March and June, on all sorts of projects. Learning design, space design and strategy.
Then in June through July, we rested, and had a bit of a renaissance. Ideas which our customers told us they didn’t want just two years ago were likely to work now — specifically, doing what we do online, for cheaper prices.
In July and August, we built our infrastructure and initial content, and now in September, we’re launching it.
How have recent events affected your more general view of the role of design in social and organisational innovation?
The Helsinki Design Lab’s explainer video of “Strategic design” explains the problem: “It may be a cliché…” it starts. Well, it is. When people hear Strategy and when they hear Design, they have a whole bunch of clichés flood into their heads. The point they were making is the same one NoTosh made five years before: Problem Finding is the most important aspect of any project, and if you get the problem wrong then the solutions will be hopeless.
I think the idea is a noble one, but it needs more than designers. Designers tend to put themselves at the centre of problem-solving — they take the work off the people who should be doing it. They “deliver real value” — not the people who should’ve been delivering it.
So when people don’t have ownership of that design process, and the design work themselves, because it’s been backfilled by a group of designers, it’s likely the impact won’t last.
At NoTosh, we’re all teachers first and foremost, designers second. That makes a big difference. The design work we do won’t be as slick as a designer’s, but it will solve the right problem better in many ways.
Strategic Design? I’d prefer to talk about Problem-Finding and helping people to design their thinking.
Through your work with schools, what are you learning about “the role they, as designers, play in creating learning spaces and influencing education.”?
Physical environments have traditionally been designed for their users — architects design for occupants. For all the reasons I give above, this shouldn’t really work, and it doesn’t, when you compare what you get when you start by helping architects really listen, and put their own expertise to one side.
Specifically in that project, what did the designers discover about ‘‘where teachers go to learn’?
Moments are everything. You don’t design space for learning. You design interactions, as Bill Moggridge put it. We call those Moments, through a collaboration we’re in with Steve Collis and the team at Amicus. The moments that get in the way of learning might not be anywhere near the classroom.
What is Human-centred design, and how can organisations benefit from it as an approach to strategic planning or community envisioning? (eg. ISPrague/ISBeijing)
We prefer “human-informed design”.
Ask people what works, what doesn’t and what makes their community what it is — that might be special, or it might be a nightmare. But you’ve got to work out what the secret sauce is.
When you bring 5000 of those stories together in a room, and spend 16 hours reading every one of them, expanding on them, dissecting them, you end up with some big headlines that sum up the uniqueness.
We say it’s informed, because the real magic comes from our team having the experience and knack of distilling that, quickly, into plain English. When you get it right, people cry with joy when they hear it. Get it wrong, and they forget it before they’ve left the building.
In school/learning/strategic design, how do your approaches allow you to navigate constraints and be integrative rather than disintegrative and siloing? E.g. “How do you to deliver an innovative and engaging education while working within the constraints of a rigid curriculum?”.
We don’t have time or knowledge of the community to care too much about their silos. We just want everyone engaged. We do annoy some people because we don’t respect those silos, and then can’t get our heads around why one can’t have a conversation with that person about the crappy structure they’ve created that’s getting in the way of every teacher doing their job. But we’ve had those conversations — hard as they might be — and revealed a window for change, or at least alerted them to the idea that what they’ve done so successfully for decades might not be the best way to do it today.
Innovation is just prodding the way you do things today to see if there’s not a better way. You don’t need to disrupt or destroy. A lot of change sounds like that. Instead, you tease, cajole and play. It’s an optimistic experience.
Update: October 5, 2020: Download our White Paper, Transition Design: Silver Lining Strategy for Schools.
