Ciberia

I’m quarter of the way into, what I hope will become, a Masters in Systems Thinking in Practice. Overall the course content has challenged my thinking on many fronts – but the concept that I think about most is: What do we do when we do what we do? Ray Ison attributes it to Humberto Maturana, the Chilean biologist and philosopher.

Ison writes:

Too often we inhabit a taken-for-granted world where our ways of doing things are not questioned. Questions like this that invite critical reflection on our circumstances are not common. ¹

To understand what this means, it helped me to revisit practice.

What is practice?

Ison describes practice as a practitioner P, with a framework of ideas F, a method or methodology M, engaged in a situation of interest S. Let’s call it the PFMS practice system.

Why is this relevant?

When appreciating practice in the context of digital design, I’ve noticed that design decisions are often method M driven. Designers starting out – and a few seasoned veterans – focus on method, which is understandable as new methods for doing the same things tend to recur in cycles (for example, HTML5 attempting to recreate the world of Flash). Clients like to be shown new stuff, and business analysts often ask, ‘where is the wow factor? – which is often something visually tangible.

But focusing on method obscures the frameworks F underpinning, and influencing, our work. Frameworks are an equally important dynamic in our practice system, and it needs visibility in language.

All four elements in the PFMS practice system exist in a dynamic relationship. Change in one, causes change in the other, and the changes can have unintended, and surprising, consequences. This is why it is important to hold a conceptual model of what practice is in mind when engaged in projects. And based on feedback from a project, it may be necessary to modify the dynamics between PFMS in a way that is context sensitive.

This opens up a new awareness where we appreciate our own performance in the PFMS system, acknowledging that who we are has a direct bearing on situations we are in. Based on this feedback we can adapt our approach. Ison describes this shift as a move to reflexive practice – where we shift from simply being in, to becoming critically aware of our being in situations.

When looking at practice in this way it becomes clear that over-focusing on methods – at the expense of frameworks – may mean that areas of potential remain hidden, and lost to projects, our clients, and ourselves.

With the emergence of web fonts, and grid systems for responsive design, UIs are beginning to look like well designed print designs. I have a copy of Designing Books: Practice and Theory – an out of print hard to read European style book of design theory – flipping its pages inspires me to re-think designing for screen. ¹

I’ve been wondering if web designers were making the print design connection, then I came across Mike Kruzeniski – How Print Design is the Future of Interaction. The article is recommended reading if you’re unfamiliar with print design, or its history.

All of this has been rekindling my love of fonts untill I discovered Simon Garfield’s Just My Type: a book about fonts, which has caused my type-love to burst into flame again.

But besides design work, I also use fonts as meditation objects when I run by playing a kind of type trumps game. Let me explain.

I’ll visualise a counter in a particular font, say Akzidenz Grotesk, and have it repeat in cycles of 10 or 20, usually driving the counter with my footsteps, and focusing on the detailed anatomy of the characters.

When my mind wanders I’ll switch fonts to regain focus. This helps me to forget about time and distance.

After a run I usually write down a few notes, which is surprising, because when I run I try to meditate on letters and not thoughts, but somehow meaning persists.

For me, this highlights the importance of fonts as containers of thinking – we should not underestimate the role of fonts in mediating our cognitive processes. And with the arrival of web fonts, typography on the web can finally come of age, allowing the creation of experiences with wider, more subtle, meanings.

I’ve always viewed speed reading with suspicion. Then I discovered Spritz – a text streaming app – and for an avid reader, with a preference for books, it takes some getting used to.

The premise seems to be; with so much to read – read faster.

To me it’s a simplistic response to distraction and information overload.

From the Spritz website:

When reading, only around 20% of your time is spent processing content. The remaining 80% is spent physically moving your eyes from word to word and scanning for the next ORP¹. With Spritz we help you get all that time back.

Being human does involve a lot of repetitive physical positionings before we can start doing something: chewing, for example, before we swallow food – activities that can be framed as time lost. I guess we are going to have to live with it. ²

And even if I could, I don’t think I’d want to read Catcher in the Rye in three hours – I’d feel physically sick – and I’d miss the point of reading fiction, which to my mind means finding emotions on the page, and allowing it to reshape our internal emotional landscapes.

But hang on, I hear you say: text streaming is not for reading fiction, what about business reading? Surely this is an area where reading faster will help, just think of all the emails we need to get through…

Considering the scale of the challenges before us, I’d counter that business, or professional reading, requires the greatest care. Reading faster is not the answer. A different kind of reading is required, and it starts by deciding what to read, how to interpret, and how to respond.

We are not mechanical machines; we are emotional machines. To be different to what we are we need a different biology. ³

I’m not arguing against being productive, but as a species, if there is anything we need to do more – it is doing less of wanting to do more. ⁴

The productivity-movement is selling their ideas on the premise that by doing things more ‘efficiently’, ‘time’ will open up for ‘other’ things.

But for me, traditional reading is one of those ‘other’ things, and no better way to invest ‘time’. Even if, in a mechanical context, I’m wasting 80% while doing it.

At Company X ¹ every second Friday of the month used to be Digital Friday – a day set aside for peer-to-peer learning and ‘innovation’. My guess is that the originators had it in mind to create an environment where a learning culture would take hold, ultimately leading to the creation of a learning organisation. ²

There is a name for this phenomenon, and it is called a community of practice (CoP), a concept originally coined by the educational theorist Etienne Wenger. Company X is not unique in doing this, other companies are doing it too, and on the Web networked CoPs thrive. Wenger lists a number of concepts that characterise a CoP:

self-governance, voluntary participation, personal meaning, identity, boundary crossing, peer-to-peer connections, ³

but Digital Friday was in trouble – a new manager stepped in and Digital Friday was the first thing to go. This is not a disaster – community making continues online. But what is regrettable is the loss of sponsorship for a ‘designed’ learning community from a senior manager.

Wenger writes that CoPs don’t fit easily into hierarchical organisations and that many ‘designed’ CoP fail or die early:

The concern is that their informality and the difficulty to measure their value lets them fall through the cracks and lose priority. The word ‘community’ itself sometimes arouses suspicion of clubs or unfocused groups. A manager declared that a series of self-organised groups sounded too much like chaos.

But out of chaos comes order – probably nowhere more so than in digital culture ⁴ – and fronting up to this takes vision and courage.

Initiatives like Digital Friday are important. Peter Senge writes why:

As the world becomes more interconnected and business becomes more complex, work must become more ‘learningful’. ⁵

At Company X, attempts to nurture the emergence of a digital community – as a learning culture – are now superseded by self-styled ‘digital experts’.

Worldviews

In user experience we talk about personas and mental models a lot. We need to understand worldviews – or epistemes as Foucault called them – of the people we design products for, and with. I’ve not come across a critical look at the influence of digital workers’ worldviews – from within our community – on the products we make. Considering the state of (some) digital products unleashed on unsuspecting users, this is something I’d argue needs attention. Alain de Botton puts it succinctly:

Never underestimate people’s dexterity at seeing things from their own point of view. ¹

Going into projects, our own points of view need scrutiny first; we need awareness of the impact that our points of view have on the work we do, and be prepared to shift.

Boundaries

Worldviews meet at boundaries, and they are important. Etienne Wenger ² writes that boundaries:

connect communities and they offer learning opportunities in their own right.

and:

a boundary interaction is usually an experience of being exposed to a foreign competence.

Boundaries are alive with learning possibility, but they can be challenging places to negotiate, which is why we employ, what Wenger calls, boundary objects. From a UX perspective these include, but are not restricted to, deliverables, and we employ them as understanding traps ³. But the existence of these objects present challenges of their own – Wenger writes that:

Boundary objects do not necessarily bridge across boundaries because they may be misinterpreted or interpreted blindly.

And this has implications for design quality, which is why critical awareness of our interactions at boundaries are important.

Unbridgeable chasms

In The World that was Ours, Hilda Bernstein describes the clash of worldviews at the Rivonia Trial:

On one side was the State with its deep Calvinist roots asserting the unchanging nature of man and race, of man created immediately and in his present form, rejecting evolution, adhering to belief in the rigid and unalterable patterns of human behaviour; fixed laws, the virtues of obedience, attainment as related to hereditary not environment. On the other side: the vision of man as endowed with creative and developing gifts, the ability to learn and change; free-developing, self-fulfilling man, black and non-black.

Whenever I reach an apparent unbridgeable chasm of divergent stakeholder worldviews this paragraph comes to mind. The question is how do we move forward at boundaries where both sides operate from entrenched positions? ⁴

What we need is language to bridge epistemic divides, where opposing sides of the divide re-write themselves when building bridges to the other side. And in doing so, both sides learn and grow.