Prototype

Recently, we threw a party trying to ask the question: “What if work was a party?” Could a bunch of people who are united for a short time produce something more than empty beer bottles? There were some pretty amazing insights, so here’s a look at the rules we set up and some of the observations and principles we can see in the results.

Our Approach:
Create zones for people to work on different parts of a process.
Give them methodologies to get them going.
Reward them for work with our own currency, which buys booze and money.

Get Buy in:
So first thing you do when you come in is sign a big giant contract with everybody else’s name on it, committing yourself to working for the evening under a set of friendly rules. This is important because it helps people understand it’s serious, and that other people are committed as well.

Now, as trainee, you see a map of how this work actually takes place, and a simple 3 step guide to their new “job”, as well as a “company org chart” showing all pieces and parts for details.

Establish Leadership & Contact point for help

Since nobody reads, we made sure that we had a hilarious “Office Manager” to greet you and show you around the different zones, and get you started with a few “The Movement” for a drink.

Incentive’s

Most important to keep everything moving forward, is the fake currency system. People do work and report to the Office Manager, get paid, and get a drink. You gotta keep working to keep drinking, so the cycle is complete. The “Office Cantine” hands the money back over to the Office Manager, and he pays more “employees” as they continue to drink and work!

So what is the actual work? We started the party by prompting a few problems that needed to be solved: Local produce being too expensive and our of reach, Political apathy & confusion, and too many messages bombarding us.

Give clear Actionable Tasks within a Context

We broke down the problem solving process into 5 parts. Research, Analysis, Synthesis, Explaining, and Spreading. Each part of the process was given a zone, or as we call it, a Department somewhere around the party for people to work on that part of the process. The zones are of course clearly labeled, and have their own instructions.

Then we broke down each step into a set of possible actions and put them on game-cards. (The game card set will become available in a future post.) People would pick up a card, do what it says, put their work back on the filing table, and it would be ready to be pushed to the next phase of the process.

Have fun Workin!

Ok, so about 100 people showed up and actually got to work. Can you believe it? Here’s some of them working when there was enough space to take pictures.

So what did we learn, & what can You use?

People will do what everyone else is doing if it looks fun. Here’s a few things that were critical to the success of the party as we could tell.

1. The office manager driving people to the work, and being very deadpan hilarious about the whole thing.
2. A small critical mass of people starting the work, so that as others arrive, the right course of action is clear. People seem to have no problem trying something new if it looks like other people are having a good time with it.
3. Incentives, its the beer and constant peer affirmation through joking about the money, joking about the drinks, and so on, that were able to drive some serious thinking and conversation.
4. Lots of easy starting points, that were challenging and open to interpretation, that have a high focus on individual opinion and values.
5. Good people.

Dont do…

Coffee break. We decided everybody needed a break a few hours in, and never got the momentum back. You can’t stop people from fraternizing once they start doing it on a mass scale, so be prepared to have your event slip from work mode to party mode at some point and just celebrate it rather than fight it.

Thanks to Eleni Alpous for photo-documenting the early parts of the evening, and check out her flickr for more shots. Open up the Google Doc if you’re interested in seeing some of the ideas and solutions in text-only format, of which our lovely intern Lauren painstakingly transcribed for us.

Good luck holding your own work party or collective action event, and just send an email over to us if you need any help or would like more details from ours.

Next time somebody asks you how much you make, what will you answer? Will you ask them to clarify what they mean?”How much what?”

Change? Apthy? Money? Mediocrity? Data? Privilege? Waste? Entertainment? Meaning? Power? Function? Understanding? Happiness? Passion? Trouble? Insight? Emotion? Commentary? Music? Art?

Funny how we assume that money is the thing we “make” so often that’s all anyone would want to know or ask about, or that that is the most interesting part of someone’s life. It’s a construct many of us seem to follow and a question often asked, which means there is a habits of thinking that are hard to break out of. To help out, download the sketch as a desktop background and keep it for a few days, see if it helps.

We’ve got millions of years behind us in experience design. How can we help our own life through design at all. We can design pieces or parts of machines to work with oiled precision, but when we speak of social interactions, we can’t get much better than the designs of evolution.

So often we speak of a happy time, or a joyous place, an ideal state, or a desired outcome. Picture that. Imagine it. Get an idea in your head, think it through, consider how it feels. Pictures, images, ideas, thoughts, and feelings. These are the only real tools we have for envisioning what life could be. How important it is to stop and use these tools, for without them, we have nothing more than the sensory inputs of the short now.

If we imagine, we create. Looking around today at the iphone, genetic engineering, the mars rover, mechanic arms, cyberspace, replicators, and mass transit; we’re living a science fiction novel. Our daily lives are the creation of people who had the simplest of tools: a pen and paper. Through their words they have inspired generations of thinkers, scientists, engineers, and designers. And those inspired, took those words, and with a deep sense of urgency and passion, wrought the pieces which make up our lives in this environment.

Each step we talk in this manufactured landscape is above sewer systems, atop concrete, between walls, beneath a clouds of wires, and toward some economic imperative. All these, systems which we’ve designed, have brought us the world, plummeting, a momentum toward our limit, fast approaching a critical turning point.

Notice “we’ve” designed them. When we speak of the past, and progress in the modern age, it is second nature to use the plural: “we”. Just as “we” have created this bird’s eye magnificence, a “visible from space” mark, “we” too must decide on the direction of all this. Otherwise suffer the backward walking world of blind progress, stumbling toward certain catastrophe.

To summarize: We’ve made these systems through passion inspired through vision.

All of the previous assumptions are based on past actions; the past tense. Our visions of the future have become the past, or in many cases have been distorted into a mess of unfortunate unforeseeable situations. We need a new vision for our life. In short, the economy is not working, our structures of work are not “working”, our local communities are waning, and our general perspective on how to fix all of this is blurry.

What we must remember is that economy was created by people who are old or dead. The school system is the same. Our politics centre around fictitious intervals of involvement, and our laws reflect that few knowledgeable enough about the system to challenge them. We live in systems of systems of systems. We are herded from workplace to home, and given little place to actually work. Most of our work days are spent in the guise of productivity, fully denying the truth: Without vision and passion our lives are hamster wheels.

I want you to tell a story. It must be a story set in the future. I want it to be ideal, fuck pragmatism. I want you to paint a picture of what our lives could be like. What would happen if we could make any changes we wanted?! Our systems are ours, we can change them, we made them, change is our duty. Tell me a story of your life. A life amidst new systems, new ways of thinking, new ways of being. Tell me a story.

But don’t just think about it on your own. Come to this event at OISE and get your say in our future

What is it about interests which compel us toward discomfort? Evolutionarily speaking, we should be trying to maximize our comfort level, but still, this idea of better haunts us. This feeling, is a painful grumbling stomach, it’s the dry throat after too much coffee. Too close to a bodily reaction, we can’t separate the need for better from our instinctual urges. Should we accept that our outward actions of perceived progress, are in fact innate tenancies, a number of new developments might arise. If we were to see better as the desire as proposed in Deep Economy, we might find a different set of opportunities present themselves.

Help the starving children. Though water and food are the base levels of human need, we have no problem including caring into the equation. People die of heartache, lose their minds in isolation, find meaning in caring, and spend much of their lives working to support their children. If we included the need for betterment as an essential, the children we work to support are still starving. The first 18 years of our lives are based on performing repetitious tasks. Throughout our schooling there is no focus on betterment of the outside. We learn about things which were, how things are, the people who govern, and those who disobey. When is the last time your life was affected by a student’s work? Was it your own child? Imagine the effect your child has on you. Imagine what effect your child could have on others!

Stop the forced prostitution of millions. Sitting in a cubicle, counting the hours before quitting time. Performing mundane tasks. Working, with little vision of why, other than the financial progress of an employer. The figurative definition of prostitution is “the unworthy or corrupt use of one’s talents for the sake of personal or financial gain”. We are all talented individuals, our desire for better is crushed by, what we are told is, the realities of life. Our desire for better is cornered and limited to our home, our family, our own property. What betterment can come from only our own? Better is not owned, it is not individual, it is by its nature shared, it works for all, it breeds, it grows, it is built upon, when it is lost, it is lost by all. These people still better something, but only as much as a child eating rice gets his/her fill for the day. The betterment lasts only a short while, after that, this person is malnourished, full but empty.

Billions of people dying every day. Imagine all of the people in the world. You can’t, but you can look at the number and get a vague idea: 6 000 000 000. Of these nine zeros try to imaging how many better the world to the extent which they are able. Even in a “developed” society like Canada, only 25% of people aged 18-25 vote. A vote happens around every 3 years. Distractions are different from disabilities. These billions, who have a real desire for better, are disable, and it’s the chemical of poorly design economy which has spread these disabilities like wild fire. This disability in most cases will last a lifetime. Billions of people today will not be able to change the world for the better, one billion will not even have the basic need of clean water fulfilled.

Simply solving world hunger for food and water is not enough. It is halfway, and alone is not economically sound. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach man to fish and he’ll eat for a life time. Give a man better and he’ll thank you for a day, teach a man to better and you’ll thank him tomorrow.

Watching Up the Yangtze was sad but ultimately inspiring. One of the main characters is a teenage girl with parent’s living on the edge of the Yangtze. Her father says “I’m sorry we have to exploit you, but I cannot read and we have no other choice”. She cannot afford to go to high school and must support her family, so she gets a job on a cruise which goes up the Yangtze. The very notion of not being able to afford high school signals a crack in our system so severe I can hardly imagine. What could she have done, with that want for betterment and a brick wall of money in the way. What have we thrown away on countless occasions, while we push our youth into books with objection.

How can this thirst for betterment be quenched? What would it look like if passion for better was the currency of our world.

Recent conversations have been surfacing the idea of content and containers. It seems the more activities I become involved in, the more I wiggly my way in to a good fit with the world of work. Dave Pollard, or Alan Smith, or someone like that smarter than me, said that you should seek to do what you want, what you’re best at, and what is needed. The more I wiggly, the more I realize that Design is neither what I do best, nor what I want to do, and only part of what is needed. This is where the discussion of content and containers begins. The lines between skin and guts.

Designers in many senses create containers. My role as an interaction design is to facilitate interactions within an experience which amplify, enact, or visualize a persons intent. A [great guy] in the Toronto design community has a big focus on actioning people’s intent. Behance has a good deal of literature on the action method. Though a noble and necessary step, aiding in collaborative action is only half of the coin. This collaborative container needs something else: Content.

Traditionally in the design world content has been an asset. Copy, much like images, or colour palettes, fills the blue bounding boxes of our spreads. Recently a movement to see designer as author, partly a response to the cold removed ideals of Swiss modernism, has emerged. Though a designer can bring a valuable visual narrative, such a professional still seems to lack the precision of text, and literature’s ability to deal with the abstract complexity which is our socioenvrioculturonomic reality.

Words still work, diagrams help, and visualization spurs insight. Words can move, images confront, and film is stunning. Surely the visual and textual exist on a spectrum rather than in separate silos of copywriters and designers. Taking on this new world of melded thought, a visual culture as McLuhan might put it, has its growing pains. Perhaps instead of a designer trying to write a story, a better position might be a journalist trying to visually explain. A simple shift of starting points, a beginning in writing rather than sketches, might bring to light a new understanding, a more concrete abstraction. Creating the content before the container might be just what is needed to clarify.

One example of such an approach is the first book in the Shift series, published by the OCAD Student Press.

Students in their last year of schooling at OCAD got together on a summer’s day much like any other, but had an insight. It seemed that each time they tried to fulfill a vision, that vision was distorted and muddled by the very processes of application. Whether it was poor direction by a mentor, distraction with detail, or even the harsh realities of trial and error; those original visions seemed to get lost in the lab. But they had an insight. What if our ideas, our virgin ideas, could be saved before the wrecking ball of education. What if we wrote our thoughts before we lost them to the distractions of application.

Quite successfully they did so. Through a great deal of leg work, some generous contributions, and a good deal of interesting virgin ideas. They had assembled a real printed book, selling out at real live book stores. The important lesson to take from this is that the most lasting part of that process was before the application. The most fertile ideas hang from baselines, words as ripe as cherries in Port Colborne. Writing was in this case the first spark, and the most lasting trace of these student’s fires of passion.

Question: My business often does socially responsible work, and we lose money. Luckily we make good money elsewhere to support this. Am I doing a good thing?

Well, you’re not alone. All across the world companies do a “good thing”. They charge their good reliable paying clients market prices and turn a profit. Then along comes some great NGO, some genious startup, some altruistic charity, or somebody else who’s about to do something really good and they need the services. Catch is they don’t have the cash. Said company does some social arithmetic and comes to the conclusion that they can do the job at cost or slightly lower, because it will mean good things for society.

It seems like a good thing doesn’t it? Hells yea!!! At least at first…

Think about it like this: The company that feels the urge to be socially responsible is the one who ends up losing money for doing the right thing. Still sound like a good?

Even worse is that it’s often hidden! Disclosing you can get into trouble. Try saying this to a client “Yeah, we did work for these guys for cheap, but we gotta do it for you for full price.”, or ” We judged you, you’re not doing great things for the planet, you’re simply a gravy train for us, cha-ching!”

What is happening here is the silencing of good deeds, which we can probably agree should be celebrated & encouraged instead.
The question comes up: How can we work around this?

Two parts of the Problem:

1. The client doesn’t get a say in where their money goes
2. It’s often pretty fuzzy, and there are few legitimate economics in place.

Answer: The Non-Profit-Margin.

1. Client involvement in choosing where to spend the Non-profits.
2. A fund where X% of a job (the Non-Profit-Margin) is held.

The first can exist in many forms, like a list of general categories the client check off. A list of actual groups you’ve got lined up (a la good magazine), or already donated time & money to. A hotline where the client can refer organizations they think would benefit from your services with a specific dollar amount tied to the referral.

The second, is really not complicated at all. Ask your book-keeper to open a separate account at your bank to funnel the Non-Profits into. Keep a simple spreadsheet with each clients contribution into the fund, and the information collected from the client on where they’d like it to be spent. Then have some discipline when offering discounted services, by consulting the books and sharing them with the group getting the discount.

Lastly, tell everyone. Talk to your friends about it. E-mail your past clients, let organizations you’d like to help with. Tell all the future clients that come in the door, get your sales rep on-board, do whatever you can to let people know what you do is the shit.

With any luck, you and your band of Merry Men/Women will be on your way to invoicing the rich and discounting the poor with no quarrel from either!

With new forms of media being created an spread everyday, its difficult for the no-technical person(ie 90% of people) to keep up. Rising to the occasion is:

Rising Voices proudly announces the first in a series of outreach guides meant to explain the fundamentals of citizen media to a non-technical readership.The first guide, An Introduction to Citizen Media, offers context and case studies which show how everyday citizens across the world are increasingly using blogs, podcasts, online video, and digital photography to engage in an unmediated conversation which transcends borders, cultures, and differing languages. From the introduction: 

Check out the guide in pdf format. 

The outstanding folks over at FITC have recently posted videos of 2007’s conference. Among them, the presentation entitled “You Can’t do Everything” by yours truly The Movement.

Download the presentation in pdf format, or, go check out all the presentations.

This happened twice, so it must be significant. What does it say when the road is completely clear, but the sidewalk is overlooked. I wonder if the pile was make by a truck or a person. Would city workers with shovels affect our city differently than trucks with shovels. It’s significant that we call it a sidewalk and across the pond they call it a footpath. Certainly the images below are beside the road, but hardly paths for feet. A sidewalk near King and Strahan  A sidewalk at King and Brant.Spacing has a discussion about salt over on their wire. Interesting ideas there.

I highly recommend playing this game. I will only take 5 minutes of your time, maybe less if you’re good. The remarkable quality here is the collaboration with oneself. It takes a while to actually figure out how to work with your past self, much like a baby figures out how to work with the world around it. So really, the question is, can we work better with others once we realize how to work with many selfs.  The question might also be, why are the Japanese so good at making crazy shit.