Are you letting data from the past drive your future strategy?
Yesterday, I was deep inside Google looking for datapoints to connect that would add up to give me a sense of what was going on in these turbulent times, and I came across this insightful article on strategy. It was clear the author felt as obsolete as I did about the way strategic planning for […]
Only when I laugh
I was hired by The Second City in August 1998. The letter above was issued for a visa application to visit Canada. Has it truly been a lifetime and a century since I learnt to improvise as a professional? I can only say that I must have embedded the skills and techniques so deeply in […]
Sensemaking sparks creativity
The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over. ~ Charles Eames This […]
Exploring the edge of the abyss
Design is but a form of applied creativity, as is art or music or dance. You’d think I’d know this by now. Funnily enough, its taken literature review on creativity in adversity to bring home to me that the engine of change and transformation is not design but our own capacity and agency for creative […]
Transformative Research and its Discontents: A design practitioner reflects
[ Personal and societal transformation] are intertwined and that personal transformation is a necessary component of research that is designed to support change at the societal level […] if we design our research so that it explicitly addresses issues of discrimination and oppression that the probability of personal and social transformation increases. (Mertens, 2017) This […]
Legacy breakdowns, blog theme changes, and pandering to the gods of search
From now on, I’ll have to capture your attention in the first 55 words I write. Due to ongoing work in the back-end for my legacy website, I’ve had to plug this theme and settings in as an interim measure. Content navigation tools have been added to the site navigation menu running horizontally along the […]
Buchanan’s Nightmare Or the Fragmented Landscape of Design Practice
Its within little known and less cited literature published at the very end of the previous century that hints of the challenges we face today can be found. Stumbling through these dusty old archives, I came across some thoughts and words which capture contemporary issues so well that I was moved to write this post. […]
Core values guiding Nordic social design practice
Distilling the core values underpinning my conceptualization of Nordic social design, as introduced yesterday, and adding links to previous writing on each selected word. To review briefly, I introduced the concept of Nordic social design by combining Koskinen’s (2016) definition where the object of design is the social for ex. social structures, processes, practices, forms […]
Designing an organization for delivering Nordic social design
I arrive at the concept of Nordic social design by combining Koskinen’s definition of ‘new social design’ (Koskinen, 2016) as that where the object of design is the social for ex. the social structures, processes, practices, forms of actions, etc., with elements drawn from Markussen’s original framework (Markussen, 2017) to set the purpose of this […]
Informal Community Boundary Spanners Build Knowledge Bridges to the World at Large
Now that I know what I am looking for, after the two rounds of data analysis focusing on the links between the training experience and the real world unassisted experience of the facilitators, and the kinds of beneficial outcomes experienced by the participants, some effects of which were explicated by participants reflecting more than a […]
