Bryan Boyer's Posts from Helsinki Design Lab

Weeks 148-149

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:14:00 +0200

Three polite words that begin with F: frozen (temperatures), and freedom (from fossil fuels), and food. Let's see how these unpack.

Now that winter has set in, we are regularly experiencing temperatures in the range of -10º celsius. This makes for treacherous sidewalks but otherwise adds lots to the quality of life in the city: cross country skiing, sledding, new things on the ice, and plenty of light reflecting off the snow.

Recently Dan, our colleague Karoliina, Nina the intrepid interpreter, and myself spent a day in Hamina where it was also very frozen. Located 1.5 hours east of Helsinki, Hamina used to have two industries: a port and the paper mill but the later closed down in 2008.

Luckily for them, the mill premises found a new tenant who values cheap energy and the location's essentially limitless supply of cool Baltic water: Google purchased the property in 2009 and set up a data centre shortly thereafter.

Although the Google story is interesting, it's not the core of why we went to Hamina. We were there to learn about the way that the city has successfully fostered green energy, both as an energy source and as an industry. Early indicators point to Hamina as a positive example of how a community de-industralizes itself with as little long-term pain as possible. They paid attention to larger structural changes in Finland's economy and reacted decisively to find a new way forward. Google's data centre was one positive outcome, and the other is WinWind who manufacture wind turbines. In parallel with these new developments in the local economy, Hamina's municipally owned energy company also courageously set up a modest wind farm.

Hamina is known for having a circular town center

We wanted to understand how this happened. How does a community make decisions about its future? Or in other terms: how do communities make shared decisions from a shared value perspective?

Shared decisions are those which are bigger than any one person. Things like building a new road or rail, cordoning off a nature reserve, or passing a law. And shared value is measured in financial as well as social and ecological capital. Although the term is borrowed most recently from Michael Porter, the basic concept is by now quite generic—you might even argue that figuring out shared value is the challenge which underlays all others.

Our trip to Hamina was the first bit of research into this. How did they get the idea to build a wind farm? And how did it get negotiated in real space, with real euros, real local politics, and real personal opinions? How did Hamina decide to open its port area to new industries? How did Hamina propose for itself a new future?

In the coming weeks and months we'll be visiting other communities that have made—or failed to make—shared decisions as we try to better understand how we might help these processes flow more easily and productively.

One of the areas of focus is a phenomena called Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) and how we might crack open more opportunity for Please In My Back Yard. In essence, we're interested in how communities balance the right to express negative opinions with the civic obligation of participation in the public realm, in local economies, in politics, in society. So how do we make it more meaningful and easier for people to engage in shared decisions? That's what we'll be focusing on in the area of work we've been calling Brickstarter internally.

A collection of NIMBY archetypes by Miquel Hudin drawn by Loren Purcell

Justin, Marco, and Johanna spent most of Friday in Lahti working with the city planning department there as part of our Design Exchange Programme. Things there are off to a good start with an ambitious timeline. We are also working on a new website for the exhange participants to share their experiences regularly.

Internally at Sitra we continue apace with work on tools, systems, working culture, and spatial resources. The first three involve lots of meetings in conference rooms, the latter involved one meeting in a design studio. It's also worth noting that there's a new Sitra.fi website!

Dan was over in London this weekend giving a presentation at The Design of Understanding. It's a safe bet that you can expect a write-up of some 10,000± words from him in the nearish future.

As always, an update on the food work. We spent a bit of time in Tukkutori with Elina and Ville, sharing notes on what we're up to and the same from them. Tukkutori is Helsinki's wholesale market and will be opening to consumers in the fall. Lots of exciting stuff planned there and we're seeing how we might be invovled, particularly with an eye towards strengthening the pathways for good ideas to grow up to be good businesses and good regulations and policy.

You never know what you're going to find in Tukkutori

And yes, some mockups for print. The food booklet we're working on may or may not come with a poster.

Weeks 142-147

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 10:33:00 +0200

And... decloak!

Hi, we're back. Closing out all of the work and accounts before the end of the year became more hectic than any of us expected and that means we ended up with nothing more than crickets on this blog.

The Design Exchange Programme was announced in December and is now off to a promising start

In the interim, perhaps the biggest news is that we launched a new project called the Design Exchange Programme. At the moment it's a small and modest with just one placement. We'll have a full introduction to the chosen candidate in due time, but for now we would like to congratulate Sara Ikävalo on her successful application and thank her for taking this leap with us. We look forward to beginning in earnest in February.

Sara was the winning candidate out of a pool of nine applicates, four of which we had interviews with just before the holidays. With our Lahti placement now specified, we're beginning to look at the second partnership with another government body here in Finland. Updates when we can share them.

Otherwise: much of the same here. Dan and I are continuining to crunch on the street food booklet which we are now a bit late one. We're learning the hard way what it's like to bite off more than you can chew. Then again, the up side of never promosing a specific delivery date is that you're never late. But all jokes aside, we do hope to have a draft available for download imminently. At the moment we're doing the dilligence of clearing publication rights for archival images and other fun feats of legal maneuvering.

We have also been doing quite a lot of internal 'consulting' work on two fronts. First and foremost to work through our in-house strategy for internationalization, an update to our shared ways of working, and this inevitably means also looking at internal culture. These are mostly about behaviors and practices, but are always bound up in the artefacts and tools as well. So we find ourselves sketching out new document types, interfaces, and other bits of the internal Sitra workflow. We're interested in moving these into paper prototyping at some point, and then hopefully further into light weight software prototyping.

Marco and Justin are busy as ever with Low2No. Marco has also been spending time lately in discussions about potential upcoming work. Since we're not a commercial firm we don't have business development, per se, but we still spend a fairly good chunk of time exploring opportunities with a variety of potential partners to make sure that the projects we take part in are ones where we feel we have something useful to contribute.

And to close I'll leave you with nearly identical snapshots from two Nordic capitals near the end of the year:

Week 141

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:39:00 +0200

As I write this post there's a bubbling hive of activity behind me inside the Flanders District of Creativity in Leuven, Belgium. I've come to sit in the back of the room while the government of Flanders hosts a studio on child poverty. But more on that soon. This is the culmination of a particularly hectic week with two book launches in the US, some fast-paced work on a handful of projects in Helsinki, and now Belgium.

Let's start in New York. Justin, Marco and I were pleased to host a launch party for In Studio with Amb. Ritva Jolkkonen, currently the Consul General of Finland in New York. She very kindly welcomed a group of designers, NGOs, and public sector people for a gathering at her residence which features a rather stunning view over central park. Naturally, this is the one time (seemingly) when I did not have a camera on me. You will have to imagine the view.

On Tuesday Marco spent the morning presenting at and moderating a discussion for an event hosted by MIT's Collaborative Initiatives. I wasn't in the room, but from what I hear he did a bang-up job keeping a group of big-wigs on track.

Just to make sure we're not being lazy, we also hosted a book launch in Cambridge, MA that evening, seeing as we were already in the neighborhood. Turnout there was good and it was nice to see some familiar faces.

Back in Helsinki, I had a brief meeting with the Helsinki Ympäristökeskus (Environment Center) relating to our ongoing street food work and Dan and I had the pleasure of meeting Stuart MacDonald. Stuart was in town from Glasgow for an event hosted by the British Council. He alerted us to some of the strategic design work that is bubbling up in the UK, particularly around community planning. We'll be digging into that more in the future as Brickstarter ramps up.

Oh right, Brickstarter is ramping up.

Speaking of the UK, Dan was in London for something less than 24 hours to participate in a meeting of the minds that attempted to merge neuroscience with... urban planning!

Amidst all of this Aalto University reversed an earlier decision about the name of the school which contains the departments of art, design, and architecture. Previously they had announced that it would be called the School of Arts and Creativity, but after significant public uproar it will now be called the School of Art, Design, and Architecture. Personally I see this as very positive. Claiming 'creativity' as a namesake was not only a little greedy, but also rather devaluing of the disciplines that the school represents.

The studio here in Leuven is getting ready to make their final presentation so I will hastily close this weeknote and leave the details of what's happening here for the next post.

Week 138: Mostly about food

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:10:00 +0200

Roll call! Johanna is mostly pitching in on Synergize Finland projects, Justin is holding down the fort in Boston, Marco is in Moscow giving a talk at Skolkovo, and Dan is somewhere in Australia running at a breakneck pace with a full slate of talks, workshops, and meetings there. For more on that, follow Dan's Twitter account or look for the mentions of @HDL2010. And this leaves me, alone in Helsinki, spending the day out and about and writing.

Between bouts of project planning and other exciting administrative duties we've been continuing to drive our research into the street food of Helsinki. Below is a snippet of that, one of four narratives that we open the booklet with. They're meant to give snapshots of different key moments in the development of Helsinki's food culture. As you might guess, we're much more interested in the stuff around the food than the victuals themselves.

Ullanlinna, 1960

The woman shifts nervously from foot to foot outside the restaurant’s doorway. Above her, a green neon sign sputters into life, casting the restaurant’s name in flowing script across the elegant square, although the sun seems to have no intention of disappearing anytime soon. Still, it was late, and he was late.

She dares not go into the restaurant without him. This is not simply a matter of etiquette, or timidity on her part; it’s the law. In Finland, women are not allowed in restaurants unless accompanied by a man, so she waits. She finds this faintly offensive, as she’s heard that the reasoning is that women in a restaurant or bar on their own could only be there for one thing, and it wasn’t the food.

Dancing isn’t allowed either, for similar reasons; this she finds more ridiculous than offensive. There had been some progress, however: after the Helsinki Olympics, Alko, who set such rules, had deigned to allow the introduction of something equally licentious: the bar stool.

That the new owner of the restaurant is a woman, Mrs. Paukka, is an irony also not lost on her, but it makes no difference. For all her progressive attitudes, the woman had never been to a restaurant before, just as no-one in her family had. But she’d heard about Mrs. Paukka’s new menu—in particular the crispy fried Baltic herrings—and had pestered the man about going for weeks.

The sharp new kiosk across the square, owned by the restaurant and the only one in the country with an alcohol license, is full of men sitting, smoking, drinking, eating gelato, workers from banks and docks alike gathered around the small tables under the trees. She feels their eyes occasionally upon her. The woman pulls a copy of Kaunis Koti from her bag. She’d just bought the magazine from the R-Kioski on Korkeavuorenkatu, and had intended to save it for the tram ride home, but it would prove more useful as a screen to hide behind for the moment.

A skid of leather shoes on the cobbles behind her, accompanied by “Anteeksi, olen myöhässä!” …

Simultaneous to the writing, we're also doing some light data mining. I spent part of yesterday doing a bit of very light scripting to help us more easily pull data from the local restaurant website, Eat.fi. That process looks like this:

Left to right: 1) a map of open restaurants at a particular time, as provided by Eat.fi 2) the code on Eat.fi that makes this view possible 3) a small script that takes a bunch of copy/pasted HTML code and returns a count of the open restaurants 3) collecting that data by hand in Excel 4) visualizing it in Illustrator using a polar graph. Much faster than counting all of the dots on the map 24 times.

We wanted to make a simple point: at the moment when drinking activity on the typical weekend is spiking, food availability is crashing. Restaurants stop serving food and there is very little of a night time economy to speak of. So we made a diagram showing the opening hours of all 569 restaurants in central Helsinki. That's the red line of this diagram:

Red: # of open restaurants at each hour, as detailed in the records of Eat.fi (peaks at 422). Blue: anecdotal observation of public drunkeness (intensity & volume) on a typical Helsinki Friday

The blue line is interpretive, a sketch. It's not based on data at all. As we evolve this diagram we'll figure out a way to handle the discrepancy between these two (one based on data and one anecdotal observation) but for now it's shaping up as a way to illustrate the point. The fact that the red hoop and the blue hoop scarcely overlap is one (small) part of the reason why saturday morning the streets are dotted with puddled of vomit and why alcohol related injuries and assaults are high.

Of course this has a direct impact on the individuals whose health is impacted or who are the victims of violence or property damage. It also indirectly effects the efficacy of Helsinki's tourism strategy that seeks to make this a globally competitive destination. So here too the details matter.

The primary offering today in Helsinki street food. Photo: Kaarle Hurtig for Sitra

As you can see, to make at point that sits at the intersection of governance, business, and culture we're starting to pull together a range of different sources as well. Mixing ephemeral narratives with the historical development of the market and its regulation from 1900 onwards; bits of data with rich imagery; interviews with close observations.

Mid afternoon coffee at Camionette

We've been moving between conversations and interviews with organizers and activitists like Olli Sirén, who has been the public face of Ravintolapäivä or Tio Tikka, who started Helsinki's only current food truck to The Public Works Department, who Dan and I visited this week.

Snapshot from one of the restaurants open for the first Ravintolapäivä

In our booklet we're pulling together a bit of the history, current evidence, and indications of where there is untapped potential for innovation. Ultmately we are looking into the past before speculating about the next hundred years of everyday food in Helsinki and how we can make them even better. And in that regard we're focusing on how the dark matter, all the bits that situate food within our everyday lives—or not.

And to end, an observation about the color of milk packaging in northern Europe, provided by the ever amusing and insightful The Kaspar Stromman Design Blog.

Week 137

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:48:00 +0200

First, a note from one of Sitra's other projects called Reviving Village Within A Town. In an effort to enable young people to have a more active role in co-designing the services that are available to them (like sports programmes), and therefore also getting more out of these services, we find two intertwined lessons. One about time and one about scale.

“People are active themselves instead of waiting for others to do things on their behalf. After all, local well-being is built on the people’s own initiative and activity,” [project manager] Mira Sillanpää points out. “You must also remember that it is not always about creating all-embracing solutions for the long term. Small changes can also have a huge impact. If the needs of the local residents change, the services provided by local authorities must change accordingly.”

In Mira's observations as quoted above, there are familiar tones of the ethos of prototyping, of beta, and of iteration. But perhaps more profound is what she gets to at the end: that times change, needs change, and that our public services should be similarly agile. In other words, being able to end programmes gracefully is as important as starting them intelligently.

And this ties to another aspect of the project which is embeded in the very name of the work: Reviving Village Within a Town. Lurking here is a recognition that scale matters too. The project is located in Hämeenlinna, a town that includes a number of smaller villages. By making room for local communities to conduct low-risk experiments in their own areas, we gain the ability to test and iterate at a more manageable scale before growing or replicating what works to other communities.

In other words, early innovations are not for everyone, and not for everywhere. Utilizing the small scale—in both time and space—allows us to be more sophisticated about our risk assessments. More of this please.

Twelve thousand kilometers away, in sunny Buenos Aires, the government there is also thinking about the power of the small scale, albeit in different ways. While in Argentina to give a talk as part of the CMD international design conference, I noticed that some of the parks have signs which implore residents to visit a Facebook page like this one. One finds a brief bit of history about the place, an invitation to share stories, participate in events, and to use the public space to organize your own functions. Smart, simple, cheap.

CMD is housed in a large building that used to be a fish market. It's vast!

But to CMD, the main point of the trip. The Centro Metropolitano de Diseño is a facility sponsored by the city government of Buenos Aires in an attempt to boost the creative industries. It's a bit similar to the the Design Forum here in Helsinki, except CMD also includes incubation space for young design-led companies. Under the ambitious leadership of Enrique Avogadro, CMD are expanding their focus to look at the potential for design-related business and programmes that are able to generate social capital in addition to financial capital. Being located next to one of Buenos Aires' villas provides extra imperative. This is the context in which I was there to share Sitra's work on strategic design, and particularly what it means to practice design in a public sector context.

Back here in Helsinki, as we continue to develop our work on the mysterious exchange project, we've been looking at things like this Bloomberg Innovation Delivery Fellowship. And then for no particular reason other than the fact that we saw it from a couple different people on twitter, also MIT's Atlas of Economic Complexity.

Dan spent a couple days in Sigtuna, Sweden where he was part of an international workshop hosted by MISTRA, The Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, who are undertaking an ongoing indea development programme to identify new areas of research. After that he and I were consolidating thoughts on some small renovations to the Sitra tower.

Marco was in Finland but in and out of the office, including giving a talk at a Fortum event as well as taking part of the ongoing World Design Capital public sector working group.

Justin took a day trip from Boston down to New York to meet with the consulate there and begin preparations for an upcoming book launch later this month. He's also taking care of logistics for a launch in Boston, so if you're interested in either of these, check back in a week or so for further details.

And daylight savings time happened, so it's officially dark here. This was week 137.

Navigating the No-Man’s Land

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:06:00 +0300

Note: This piece was originally written and published in OK Talk, a book produced by OK Do that is based on a series of conversations they organized around Europe. I'm sharing here because it dips into an essential question: what kinds of qualities should we look for in strategic designers?

If one visits a design book shop they are likely to walk away with an impression that these fields are becoming more and more embedded in work outside the usual cultural territory for which architects and designers are more commonly recognized. The politics of space, the economies of place, the sociology of material, and topics along these lines are increasingly the focus of publications. But is there practice to back up the rhetoric? Yes, some—but not enough of it.

As part of our ongoing work under the banner of strategic design at Sitra, The Finnish Innovation Fund, we have been attempting to address looming issues such as demographic shifts and climate change by developing new roles for designers beyond the comfortable confines of cultural production.

There’s currently a significant gap between the activities of government and most of the design world. Our practical experience has shown that these two realms mostly exist in a current state of indifference. Governments are largely unaware of the positive implications of design as a way of working that is separate and distinct from the arts and humanities, on one hand, and science or engineering on the other. At the same time, the communities of architects and designers are largely still oblivious to the pragmatic realities of government. Publishing a book is a far cry from shaping policy.

Posters by Mark Clintberg

These parallel ambivalences combine to result in a situation where working between government and design means being outside of both. There is not much of an ‘in between’. Rather than permeable borderland, we find between design and government a “no-man’s land”.

The question of the moment is who will be the intrepid intermediaries who make it their role to bridge the gap and take the first-mover advantages of doing so? As we are in the occasional habit of recruiting these kinds of individuals, we have begun developing a way to identify the skills that it takes to be successful between government and design.

What follows is v0.3 of a skill profile of the successful interloper:

Comfort with Uncertainty & Ambiguity

London, Uk

It’s a fact of the ‘in between’ that one will often find themselves in situations that are uncertain or ambiguous. Being comfortable in such situations is perhaps the most important criteria that we look for. In practical terms this means having the confidence and humility to take part in a conversation about topics that you do not totally understand and being able to wade into situations, contexts, and cultures that you have little or no experience with.

Paul Nakazawa, Lecturer in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, uses the term “pre-factual” to describe situations where there is an incomplete or contested base of facts, thereby leaving those who operate in that territory without stable reference points or established practices. It’s an apt term for many of the pressing issues that advanced governments today are facing, such as financial difficulties, climate security, demographic shifts, and global interdependence just to name a few.

As a society we are now reaching a point of awkward maturity where we are able to understand the potential of humanity to impact large scale systems such as the Earth’s climate, yet we are still without tried and tested means to reverse those negative effects. In this pre-factual condition, those who work at the pivot between thinking and doing have to be comfortable with ambiguous and uncertain conditions if they hope to avoid paralysis by analysis. This implies a different attitude towards risk taking, one that has a sophisticated approach to understanding the probability and likely costs, so that calculated risks can be taken.

Translation

Lahti, Finland

Whether between languages, cultures, professional cultures, or mental models, the ability to translate things that happen in one situation to be useful in another situation is a core skill of the 21st century, where the pre-factual nature of many contexts makes native expertise and experience hard to come by.

Arbitrage—the use of unique position within the marketplace to buy in one place and sell in another at a better return—is ultimately a success of translation motivated by personal gains. But there’s also an arbitrage for the common good: how can models, concepts, and experiences be borrowed from one context and put to good use in another? And more importantly, who is best positioned to accomplish this?

For this reason, individuals who have experience between multiple cultures (either literally or professionally) tend to have more advanced translation abilities and therefore more to draw on in moments of true uncertainty.

Intellect & Emotions

Rovaniemi, Finland: civic structure or giant guppy?

One of the realities of working in the public sector in many contexts is that it does not pay as well as the private sector. Because of this, working for the public good tends to involve some degree of moral compunction, which is very good and important because it’s a sign of commitment—until it gets in the way of judgment.

It’s a fine line between doing good and being a ‘do-gooder.’ The latter tend to have cloudy judgment when tough decisions come their way, while the former can maintain a critical edge even when things are rosy. But going so far as to operate without an emotional ability means being devoid of the essential ability to empathize, so there’s a balance to be sought.

Opportunism & Ambition

Copenhagen, Denmark

Striking a productive balance between intellect and emotions on a personal level is closely tied to pursuing a useful equity between opportunism and ambition in one’s work. We look for individuals who are able to see the big picture and think about redrawing it, but know that huge changes start with small steps. In real terms this means being able to seize opportunities when they arise, even if those opportunities are not perfect (they never will be), because one is able to find a place for them within a more ambitious plan. This is what it means to work today with the future in mind—to straddle a border we’re always, all of us, in the process of crossing.

Get your copy here to read the other contributions by Åbäke, Martti Kalliala, Zak Kyes, Markus Miessen, Karen Mirza, Anni Puolakka, Jenna Sutela, Teemu Suviala, Finn Williams and more.

Week 135

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:07:00 +0300

Logistics first: Justin and I were in the office all week; Dan spent half of it in Tallinn presenting at Creative Entrepreneurship for a Competitive Economy; and Marco was around until today, when he left for Tapiei to give a pair of talks at the IDA World Congress. This upcoming week Justin will be at the Design Management Institute event in New York and I will be at CMD in Buenos Aires to give a presentation there. We all have some copies of the book in our luggage, so say hi if you want one.

Fall in Helsinki's Kaartintori

Back at home, we enjoyed hosting Norway's Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi) who came to visit on Thursday. Together with Sitra colleagues Sari, Ossi, and Marja we had a good conversation about the challenge of balancing the need to change public sector culture with the realities of having to do so in a non-disruptive way. This conversation echoed some of the things we discussed in our meeting with the UK Cabinet office mentioned here, as well as the general tone of MindLab's How Public Design? seminar in September.

Budgeting exercises continue, as does the ongoing process of shaping a portfolio of projects for 2012. More about this when we have something stable to share.

I had a fight with the label printer and it won

We're happy to announce that we've added two more bookshops to our fledgling distribution network for the book. Booklounge in Cape Town, South Africa and the SFMOMA Museum in San Francisco, USA will shortly have copies on sale.

Meanwhile, Marco has been steadfastly making his way through out mailing list, sending out copies to some of our stakeholders. His signature-singining fingers are getting a good workout.

Last week Dan entertained us with a quirky video from Finland's history, this week we go to Canada where they've created a creepy origin myth out of Marshall McLuhan's famous line "the medium is the message."

And then, perhaps, to New York, where the Occupy Wall Street protests have become a focal point for contemplating contemporary democracy. Lots of good writing on this, but I particularly enjoyed Michael Kimmelman's analysis in the New York Times:

It so happens that near the start of the protest, when the police banned megaphones at Zuccotti Park, they obliged demonstrators to come up with an alternative. “Mic checks” became the consensus method of circulating announcements, spread through the crowd by people repeating, phrase by phrase, what a speaker had said to others around them, compelling everyone, as it were, to speak in one voice. It’s like the old game of telephone, and it is painstakingly slow.

“But so is democracy,” as Jay Gaussoin, a 46-year-old unemployed actor and carpenter, put it to me. “We’re so distracted these days, people have forgotten how to focus. But the ‘mic check’ demands not just that we listen to other people’s opinions but that we really hear what they’re saying because we have to repeat their words exactly.

“It requires an architecture of consciousness,” was Mr. Gaussoin’s apt phrase.

Recently I happened to spot a micro-protest in a different medium in the subway tubes of Helsinki. Someone has posted EI KIITOS ("no thanks") stickers on most of the advertisements. I like that in both examples there's a politeness to the protest, even if a bit facetious. OWS is by far the more interesting of the two because of the infrastructure that the community has had to build now.

While they are definitely saying no to something, they protestors are also obliged to prototype a constructive example of how to organize human society. And not just the mic checks described above, but an entire miniture society including its own food service, sanitation department, library, and more.

Like any society, that one that has bootstrapped itself in Zuccotti Park has its own issues. Chris Cobb describes in Domus the group's creation of special women-only sleeping areas, for instance, which seems to imply that it's no oasis.

Lately I've been reading a lot of materials from open source movements and feeling as though we're living through a moment similar to the birth of the hippies in the 1960s, and the specific of the OWS story underline this thought. It also strikes me as a particularly American form of protest: complain, sure, but mostly just build the thing you want somewhere else. When you're condemming the global financial system, however, I'm not sure there is a somewhere else. And that's the problem.

Regardless of how the occupation plays out, I hope that one of the more lasting outcomes is an enhanced recognition of the need to develop a new culture of decision making. There are issues when the decisions of 1% outweigh the other 99, as there are when one form of value, such as finacial gain, dominate all others, like environmental and social returns.

A new culture is already emerging as public outrage, social media, and generally high levels of complexity begin to intersect. The real question is whether our formal democratic forums—our parliaments—will be able to handle it in a constructive way. Or if they end up in fisticuffs.

Note: We've had a bit of a technical problem with this post so it disappeared for a better part of Sunday. Sorry about that!

2011-10-22

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:42:52 +0300

a:56:{i:0;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1534";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_1";}i:1;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1536";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_1";}i:2;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1538";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_1";}i:3;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1391";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:4;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1394";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:5;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1392";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:6;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1397";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:7;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1393";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:8;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1396";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:9;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1395";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:10;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1418";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:11;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1425";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"5";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:12;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1419";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:13;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1420";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:14;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1421";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:15;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1426";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"5";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:16;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1427";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:17;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1429";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:18;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1428";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:19;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1430";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:20;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1415";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:21;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1416";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:22;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1417";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:23;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1408";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:24;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1411";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:25;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1413";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:26;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1409";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:27;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1410";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:28;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1412";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:29;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1414";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:30;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1431";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"3";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:31;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1432";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"3";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:32;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1390";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_8";}i:33;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1370";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:34;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1371";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:35;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1372";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:36;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1373";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:37;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1374";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:38;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1433";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:39;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1434";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:40;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1435";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:41;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1436";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:42;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1398";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_1";}i:43;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1375";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:44;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1387";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:45;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1368";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:46;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1367";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:47;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1369";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:48;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1378";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:49;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1377";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:50;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1382";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:51;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1380";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:52;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1381";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:53;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1385";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:54;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1384";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:55;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1383";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}}

intro3

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:42:52 +0300

Sitra staff Marco Steinberg, Justin Cook, and Bryan Boyer acted as tutors for the workshop. The work you see on this page is that of the student team and does not necessarily represent the views of Sitra/HDL.

2011-10-22

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:42:37 +0300

a:55:{i:0;a:3:{s:2:"id";i:1536;s:8:"box_size";i:3;s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_1";}i:1;a:3:{s:2:"id";i:1534;s:8:"box_size";i:3;s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_1";}i:2;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1391";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:3;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1394";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:4;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1392";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:5;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1397";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:6;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1393";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:7;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1396";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:8;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1395";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:9;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1418";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:10;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1425";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"5";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:11;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1419";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:12;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1420";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:13;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1421";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:14;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1426";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"5";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:15;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1427";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:16;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1429";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:17;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1428";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:18;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1430";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:19;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1415";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:20;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1416";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:21;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1417";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:22;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1408";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:23;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1411";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:24;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1413";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:25;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1409";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:26;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1410";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:27;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1412";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:28;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1414";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:29;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1431";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"3";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:30;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1432";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"3";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:31;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1390";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_8";}i:32;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1370";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:33;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1371";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:34;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1372";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:35;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1373";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:36;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1374";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:37;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1433";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:38;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1434";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:39;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1435";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:40;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1436";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:41;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1398";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_1";}i:42;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1375";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:43;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1387";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:44;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1368";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:45;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1367";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:46;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1369";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:47;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1378";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:48;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1377";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:49;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1382";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:50;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1380";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:51;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1381";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:52;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1385";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:53;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1384";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:54;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1383";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}}

intro2

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:42:37 +0300

Working with the County of Västerbotten which is home to Umeå and the university, we asked the students to develop ideas that help Västerbotten attract and retain its current and future residents. Starting with a small pile of PDFs and a day of lectures the students jumped in head first to make sense of the structural issues at play in the county and develop a set of ideas to expand the potential of the region.

2011-10-22

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:41:31 +0300

a:54:{i:0;a:3:{s:2:"id";i:1534;s:8:"box_size";i:3;s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_1";}i:1;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1391";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:2;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1394";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:3;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1392";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:4;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1397";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:5;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1393";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:6;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1396";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:7;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1395";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:8;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1418";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:9;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1425";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"5";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:10;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1419";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:11;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1420";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:12;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1421";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:13;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1426";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"5";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:14;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1427";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:15;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1429";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:16;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1428";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:17;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1430";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:18;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1415";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:19;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1416";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:20;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1417";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:21;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1408";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:22;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1411";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:23;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1413";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:24;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1409";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:25;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1410";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:26;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1412";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:27;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1414";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:28;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1431";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"3";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:29;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1432";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"3";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:30;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1390";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_8";}i:31;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1370";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:32;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1371";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:33;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1372";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:34;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1373";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:35;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1374";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_7";}i:36;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1433";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:37;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1434";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:38;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1435";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:39;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1436";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}i:40;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1398";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_1";}i:41;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1375";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"6";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:42;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1387";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:43;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1368";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:44;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1367";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:45;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1369";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:46;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1378";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:47;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1377";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:48;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1382";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:49;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1380";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:50;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1381";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:51;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1385";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:52;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1384";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:53;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1383";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}}

intro

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:41:31 +0300

Umeå Institute of Design invited us to lead a workshop as part of the school's Prototyping the Future experiment, a week where the school is trying out new design practices. We jumped at the opportunity to try out the HDL Studio model in a much different setting and to expose a new group of young designers to the possibility of strategic work.

Thoughts from Connection

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:11:00 +0300

If you look closely, you’ll see many of the rooftops of Bucharests’ Lipscani quarter glimmer in the sun, reflecting newly applied copper and tin back to the sky above as if to suggest that first and foremost this metropolis is rebuilding itself under the eyes of god. While this city is indeed dotted with its fair share of sites bearing religious importance, there’s no mistaking the zeal with which modern Bucharest is being rebuilt by the people on the ground. It’s a place where one encounters making and re-making almost at every turn and it's a great coincidence that the neighborhood at the forefront of this change is one with a long history of trades and guilds. Romania is not waiting for any heavenly bodies to anoint them, if the organizers of Connection have anything to say about it the focus here is on linking up the market and the citizenry into a society that is sustaining and sustainable. I’ve come here to keynote Connection, a conference on social innovation put on by an ambitious group called Ropot. More on this in a bit, but first: the city.

Lipscani plays the part of a familiar European tourist district, replete with terraces sponsored by beer companies, street vendors, and the steady thump-thump of Euro beats oozing out of cafes with more neon than customers. On the surface it can be generic, but with a closer look one finds moments of genuine and endearing locality. Many of the wares on offer at the street market, for instance, appear locally produced and this includes the sweets (which are very sweet). Pockets of the 19th century, such as the popular brewery restaurant Caru' cu Bere offer a hospitable glimpse of the pre-communist city, not to mention a hearty meal to beat back the chill of an autumn Sunday.

A local wedding amidst the tourists that fill Caru' cu Bere to the rafters

According to locals, the original dream of the reinvigoration of this neighborhood was to create an artists’ quarter. Although the current iteration is more gentrified than this—and it’s no Postdamer Platz, so this gentrification is very relative—gems like the small bar Atelier Mecanic shine through. It’s a sort of high style junkyard where the local cool kids drink amidst a setting various mechanical trinkets repurposed as thoughtful decoration. The communist-era leftovers lining the walls are strong material symbols and it’s tempting to see them as trophies of the conquest, now drained of their robotic animation and relegated to watch from their perch on the walls as contemporary Bucharest thrives. It’s the kind of place where one imagines a new generation of intelligentsia congregating, like the editorial staff of Decat o Revista, an upcoming local magazine on the model of “Wired meets the New Yorker”, or the group of architecture students sketching across a narrow table while I visited.

Sunday afternoon in Atelier Mecanic

But one does not come to Romania without thinking about Dracula, and so to his castle we go. Three hours north of Bucharest is the town of Bran, the population of which has just grown by 80 for Connection, a long weekend focused on building social innovation capacity within central eastern Europe. Initiated by the enthusiastic four-person core of Ropot and executed with a network of partners, the event brings together a wide range of people from Romania and neighboring countries to bring new ideas to the conversation. Carefully crafted as a multi-day event, it’s also designed to build connections and spread knowledge laterally.

Don't let the looks fool you, although the atmosphere was decidedly relaxed, Connection was carefully orchestrated

Blindly-drawn portraits posted as a who's-who of the event

In the spirit of the many social entrepreneurs in attendance, I came to make a simple pitch: details make or break big picture ambition, and design approaches are a useful lens to pursue the details and the big picture concurrently. Under this umbrella I took the opportunity to share Sitra’s work on projects including HDL, Synergize Finland, and Low2No. The latter containing an excellent example of the big picture/small detail balance in Sitra’s efforts to remove barriers to large scale timber construction in Finland. This is driven by the big picture goal of a carbon neutral built environment but involves to specific (but unexpected) actions such as working to change fire codes so that large scale timber construction is possible, not just for us but for others as well.

But I started my talk with a simple observation from the streets of Lipscani: we live in a world of multiple overlapping systems and yet these are all too often sub-optimized in isolation of each other. In just about any European city you can observe this for yourself in very concrete terms by paying attention to the downspouts. Often you will find that downspouts and other external plumbing takes a less than direct path to the ground, and occasionally one that involves significant conflict, such as the photo above with a drain violently puncturing through the decorative plaster work of the building. This is a visible symptom of the architect and plumber not agreeing on which system will take precedence and which will gracefully defer.

The rigidity of different systems becomes extremely apparent in moments of forced intersection

It’s an example of the impossibility of agreeing to disagree when decisions are involved. We can agree to disagree on a philosophical basis because this stays in our minds, but when it comes time to do something in a world of finite space, time, and material, action requires agreement—or violence.

Function piercing decoration, or: the hard considerations of gravity, flow rates of water within a pipe, and the threat of water damage against the soft factors of the cultural value architectural form, symbolic meaning of a building, and connotations that a physical structure conveys onto the organization that sits within it

At the core of this observation, and my pitch that design is positioned as a lens to help us make sense of it as a practice, is the observation that we’re still often clumsy in bringing synthesis to hard and soft factors. In the example above, rain water, flow rates, gravity, etc. vs. architectural form, cultural meaning, social connotations.

To resolve these two into a harmonious whole, as one is able to observe in more considered acts of architecture, requires a synthetic approach that balances the demands of hard and soft factors. This is something that the best businesses do as well. Nokia had touch screen phones much before Apple, after all, but the technocratic approach they took to conceptualizing a phone as a gadget inhibited full consideration of the softer side of the cultural role of a cellular phone. (For what it’s worth, this is demonstrably different now that Nokia Design is under the leadership of Marko Ahtisaari).

And so one of the central aspects of the conversation at Connection was the difficulty of bringing hard economic costs and soft social benefits onto the same ledger so that an attractive investment case can be made to appropriate investors. As groups across Europe are currently struggling with this issue, I was not surprised to see the same here in Romania. What encouraged me, however, was the verve with which some of the attendees took up the challenge.

As groups which aspire to support and enhance local communities increasingly look to social investment rather than grants, an important bit of mindset change is occurring. The more we as a society are able to entertain social returns on investment the closer we are to obtaining one of the basic mechanisms of a healthy social society—one that neither forces each individual to be a self-sufficient island nor forces the state to make unrealistic promises.

Investments come with investors, and investors have a moral obligation to put their money to best use. In the past this has more often than not implied the best annual return in financial terms. Looking forward, the notion of returns will slowly become more open, perhaps also including social returns expressed in monetary equivalent in a manner similar the cap and trade of carbon emissions.

The reason why I gave up my weekend to participate in an event in the middle of Romania is because I wanted to see how this part of the world was thinking through these issues, and what I might be able to bring back with me to our work in Finland. There are a handful of leads I will be following up, but the thing that came through most clearly was the drive and commitment of the participants to devise new ways of addressing the issues they’re concerned about—be it corruption, poverty, social exclusion—with a constructive eye towards the future. Connection itself is a testament to that by virtue of the fact that it eschews the typical conference format of individual grandstanding and hands-off consumption of presentations and instead delivers a weekend of capacity building.

Romania's native carmaker, Dacia

We took turns sharing experiences in finding the right product, developing a business case, and what to look for in policy EU developments that will affect social innovation. But also about very pragmatic skills and tools such as learning how to hone a pitch and how to skillfully use media—both traditional and non. These how-tos were anchored by a mix of stories on the ground from individuals such as Chris Worman who is developing an innovative community ‘loyalty card’ scheme in central Romania and Dr. Anna Burtea who is exploring new commercial opportunities to enhance her foundation’s reach and impact. As examples of social innovation in development they were not all easy-breezy success, and that’s what I appreciated most. The Connection team managed to create an environment where frustration and failures were just as much a part of the conversation as success and scale.

Ropot and their co-organizers take a moment to regroup and adjust plans for the next session

So when I write that I left the event feeling optimistic it’s for the same reasons that I enjoyed my brief time traveling the landscape of Romania: it’s a place that is still in the habit of making things, but equally one that can remake and repair when needed. Perhaps because of the relatively high levels of contrast visible even on the street—I did, I must confess, nearly escape a pack of angry wild dogs—I detected in my fellow attendees both a shared sense of responsibility for the future as well as an imperative to find one’s own specific contribution.

Back in Bucharest, as I type this blog post I am using a wifi network with the password “2030wifi”. An eye on the future, indeed.

Week 133

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 03:09:00 +0300

It's happening again. The timeline between the end of week and our weeknote going live is slipping. This is mostly due to the fact that we're at a wonderful moment in the year: budgeting. At Sitra we're crossing our tees and dotting our eyes on the plans for next year, playing out scenarios at different investment levels, and having a conversation about how to best manage the portfolio of projects.

In light of the above-mentioned focus soaking up a lot of our attention, a random sampling of Things We Looked At.

Still from Social Life of Small Urban Places, a film by William H. Whyte. More on this below...

Today we're flattered to see our efforts highlighted in a piece in today's edition of the UK's Guardian. The essay by Justin McGuirk does a great job of explaining how we approach situations which are often difficult to make sense of, let alone gain traction on. Justin's explanation of the way that specific, tangible entry points allows for new forms of consensus is a refreshing read. We are often struggling to put these notions into clear words, so it's nice when someone else does your job for you.

A trickle of feedback is coming in from the book. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share your thoughts with us already. We've taken to saving these emails to a folder and in some cases printing them out and dropping them in the impact box, a tattered cardboard container filled with tokens that help us trace the impact of our work.

It feels a bit funny to revert to such a low tech solution, but the palpable sense of accumulation is a nice psychological side effect. One of the things we're trying to be better about is understanding the feedback and responding to it as we shape future plans. So by all means, if you're keen to give us feedback on how you see HDL as useful to your work, or how it might be more useful, we're all ears.

Another still from Social Life of Small Urban Places, a film by William H. Whyte

Speaking of books, I will be in Romania this week delivering a keynote and a workshop at the Connection 2011 conference. I'll have a couple copies of the book with me so if you're interested in having one, just ask.

Film break! Careful... you're in for a full hour.

How excellent is that? Dan and I have been digging through some archival materials (including the Social Life of Small Urban Spaces) as we explore the notion of "legible practice." What does it mean to carry out a body of work and to self-consciously do so in a way that makes it easier for others to follow or to join in?

In some sense this has been a discourse about what it means to be "open" but we've gravitated more towards the word "legible" because it speaks to the difference between just doing something where people can observe, and doing in a way that opens up and documents the tacit decisions for others to understand.

William Whyte's work checks the usual boxes of sitting at the intersection of design and social sciences, but what inspires us is the blunt, thorough approach to observation as an evidence base for design principles. The video is still refreshing from the vantage point of these 23 years on. It's this kind of spirit that we are subtlely trying to bring to our work (and yours?) through tools like the Design Ethnography fieldguide.

If you're into this kind of design practice, I highly recommend that you take a look at the Young Foundation's Head of Design job posting. It's a good post at a great outfit but applications close this week.

Finally, I'm happy to have the opportunity to point to work by Seungho Lee, our superstar intern from last year, who is doing great stuff through the venue of his company About:Blank which makes excellent products with local craftspeople here in Finland. This video is about one of About:Blank's chairs, a humble process that nevertheless is pursued with an excruciating level of detail and care. Congratulations to Seungho & team.

One more thing. It's fall time here and the many courtyards of Helsinki are, for these few weeks, some of the best kept secrets of Europe.

2011-10-06

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:44:43 +0300

a:9:{i:0;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1529";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:1;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1125";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:2;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1358";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_2";}i:3;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1346";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_6";}i:4;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1126";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_3";}i:5;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1324";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_4";}i:6;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1276";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:7;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1400";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"2";s:9:"box_color";s:7:"color_5";}i:8;a:3:{s:2:"id";s:4:"1446";s:8:"box_size";s:1:"1";s:9:"box_color";s:9:"undefined";}}

Shift from thinking of solving problems to framing the right kinds of questions. Then problem solving will take care of itself.

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:44:43 +0300

Week 132

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:36:00 +0300

The air is increasingly crisp as autumn falls upon Helsinki. And yet summer is not giving up without a fight. This week we enjoyed one of the warmest September days on record. It does feel warmer than last year about this time.

We have been taking advantage of the weather by getting in a few last exploratory walks for lunch or mid-day coffee. As winter sets in the radius of lunchtime possibility closes down and the daily rituals change. We try to take as much advantage of the warm months as possible, often working in cafes, libraries, or other nooks around the city for half the day or so. As it cools off we'll be spending more time in the mothership.

Autumn

Beyond the niceties of a good lunch, food has been a focus lately because of a bit of work we're doing. Street food, in particular, though we're taking a rather wide interpretation of the term. More on this soon, as we are preparing a slim publication on the topic. But the gist is that we're interested in how food cuts right to the nexus of so many interlocking systems. While it is deeply cultural, ephemeral, and literally a mater of taste, food is also an essential current in the hard flows of economics, health, and logistics.

As we pursue ways to positively affect the systems that shape daily life, we are searcing for entry points. The essentialness of food makes it a great candidate to act as a tangible pivot or hinge which allows us to research, observe, and design simultaneously at a very minute level where execution is direct and feedback loops are quick, as well as more abstract and systemic levels which on their own lack immediate feedback. More on this as it develops.

And it used to be a real picture of the Fiskars Slow Food festival held this weekend. That was until my camera decided to reformat its memory card.

University of Helsinki have recently published a video. It features a herring and it is a nice video.

From food to space. The other topic on high rotation within the team is community decision making. How do we make decisions together? And more specifically, how do we make decisions when it's not possible to agree to disagree, such as when there's a chunk of the city involved. A park, a disused lot, a nice corner, a store front. That kind of thing.

Borrowing from Nolli and thinking about more rigorously pursuing his technique of mapping the public realm.

Although this is a very nascent topic for us as yet, we've been doing some sketching. This one in particular is a quick study of the 'hidden' courtyards of Helsinki. Although the city is full of wonderful interior courtyards, they're mostly out of sight and really quite out of mind. How could these spaces become more of an asset to the city?

Both of these projects are orbiting around ideas that we explored with Clues to Open Hesinki, a pack of 'postcards from the future' that we created with the help of OK Do last spring. And while both the food and the courtyards have come back onto the radar through their own paths, it is interesting to reflect on the fact that they were also amongst the dominant themes of the conversations we had when developing Clues. I suppose I should say that it's gratifying, actually. The small bet we made with that project is now repaying its dividends and proving to be useful preliminary research for two projects which have their own focus at a new scale of ambition.

A small note about the book: I've updated the page to include information about where to find it in book stores. Currently there are only two, but I'm hoping to have time to work on expanding this list a bit. If you have suggestions for appropriate shops in your neck of the woods please leave a comment here.

Other projects: Justin continues to tweak the Low2No website, which is overflowing with details about the project; Marco had some promising meetings relating to the exchange, as well as work related to World Design Capital; Dan has been wrapping up some essential elements of groundwork for the smart systems aspects of Low2No as well as writing about food; I was out half the week on a mini-break and then handling the technical bits of the Low2No site; and Johanna is handling logistics and administration steady as ever.

Justin enjoyed the Herring Fair three years ago.

To close this weeknote I'll leave you with a link to MindLab's wrap up summary of their How Public Design? event that Marco and I enjoyed last month. Have a look—we'll be doing the same, perhaps after a visit to the Helsinki Baltic Herring Fair.

Facilitator or Host?

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:35:00 +0300

In response to a difficult question...

"Why would you ask em that?"

"I'm trying to elevate small talk to medium talk."

—Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 8 episode 6

What does it mean to be a facilitator?

We tend not to put ourselves inside the studio team, preferring instead to work more as the curling sweeper, clearing the way for the studio and keeping the engagement running relentlessly towards the target. This often begs questions from the participants: “why aren’t you facilitating this process?” And that is followed by the equally important question, “does this really take five days?”

Being Quick But Not Rushed

It’s hard to find that much time in a contiguous block, no doubt, but if we’re serious about tackling something as important and complex as a national carbon neutrality strategy, for instance, then it’s probably worth five days effort!

The Studio Model is designed to allow a group of eight people who do not know each other and come from very different worlds to work together to formulate a single (yet diverse) deliverable. To accomplish this goal they must not only converse together, but actually do together. Everyone has to get their hands dirty.

This requires an appropriate amount of time to ensure that the group is able to come to some conclusions. And before such useful outcomes are possible the group has to—well, it has to become a group.

Context and Conditions Matter

We revert to a rather basic interpretation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs when thinking about collaboration. If high quality outcomes are the result of a group of people being able to self-actualize together, this pre-supposes a group that feels mutual esteem and belonging, and one which is free from concerns about physical or mental comfort. These are issues beyond the typical scope of meeting facilitation, but they’re critically important.

That’s why we put a bit of extra effort into considering and then tweaking the space of the Studio. It’s also why we build into the schedule opportunities for individuals to get to know each other on a personal as well as professional level. These need not be particularly special, and in fact it’s better if they’re the result of subtle choices. For instance, choices of transportation you use to get around will shape the opportunities for the group to get to know each other, either encouraging engagement or not. We pay close attention to these kinds of details because they’re free opportunities to align basic choices with the strategic intent of the endeavor.

But gelling socially does not happen under rushed conditions, nor in generic contexts. It often takes a few days to slowly build a scaffold up the pyramid and a few more to construct a group dynamic that is able to do together. Five days is just enough time to come out the other side with a useful product of collaboration at the level we’re striving for.

Sitting, Talking, Agreeing, Doing, Achieving

Facilitation as it’s usually practiced operates within the given box, be it meeting room or otherwise. At the highest levels, such as the work by The Value Web who contribute much of the facilitation muscle behind the World Economic Forum, facilitators are able to wring every last drop of intellectual opportunity out of a meeting. What we’re striving for is to reach the ability to work together.

This means that agreements must be durable and sustaining. They must survive being articulated multiple times, in different media, and in different contexts. We’ve observed that occasionally two individuals may appear to agree on something until they actually start to hash it out in greater detail, for instance by committing the ideas to paper. Such transition points are telling moments of truth.

This is not to assign a value to doing rather than agreeing. It all depends on context. Getting two sides of a tricky border dispute to sit together can be even more difficult than getting two amicably talking parties to make an agreement.

When considering the different levels of engagement we use a loose framework that goes something like this:

Sitting: Are the parties able to sit at the same table?
Talking: Is the host able to create an environment where conversation flows?
Agreeing: Can conversation be facilitated to reach an agreement?
Doing: Can this agreement lead towards singular outcomes that are executed together?
Achieving: Does this lead towards positive sum change as a sustained collaboration?

Giving Up Control

One of the peculiarities of the way we conceive of the studio is that we very consciously give up direct control over the outcomes. This happens most visibly by virtue of the fact that we do not ourselves typically fill the role of design lead.

Our role is to set the conditions (including recruiting the right team), to respond to request and needs of the studio, and to make the expectations clear.

The way that Sitra uses the Studio is as a sort of ad-hoc consultative machine. To ensure that the advice of the studio is as potent as possible, we leave them to their own devices. Within earshot, should they need us, but legitimately on their own. This is to allow them to function with the independence that we desire.

Doing so also communicates a high degree of trust—trust we’re comfortable offering since we’ve carefully vetted the participants—and illustrates the stakes. More often than not, the participants respond to a high stakes request with high levels of thought and output.

Within each studio we’ve recruited a Design Lead whose job it is to nudge everyone towards the eventual synthesis that is expected at the end of the week. It’s a tricky role to fill because this requires a very special designer with just the right social skills. But it’s also importantly different from facilitation by virtue of the fact that the Design Lead is part of the team.

Whereas the typical facilitator works from the outside to smooth communication between others, the Design Lead is expected to catalyze the group from the inside. This happens by guiding the studio through the design process. More often than not it means listening, but also making active contributions. Particularly when it comes to connecting the intent of the Studio’s ideas to a wide range of alternative possible formats or mediums.

Allowing ourselves to be comfortable with giving up control over the studio outcomes is as much about trust in the studio participants as it is trust in ourselves. The outcome of the studio is powerful in that it represents an independent, outside view. But it’s also just a starting point. As the hosts of the studio, ultimately the burden is on us to ensure the work moves forward. This is an important thing to remember.

The Good Host

Like the host of a good dinner party, we do not attempt to anticipate where the conversation will go and what it may entail. Rather, we concentrate on making sure the right people are around the table, that they’re comfortable enough to spend a good amount of time, and that our expectations as hosts are clear.

To be sure, this approach leaves a lot of open questions. But those are the risks of an investment in new knowledge and they’re a part of true collaboration. If we can anticipate the risks it means the bar hasn’t been set high enough.

Week 130

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:31:00 +0300

When the calendar looks like this you know it's going to be a steamroller of a week.

Names blurred to protect the innocent

The easiest place to begin is with the book that we mentioned last time. One week on from launch and we've had a modest bit of attention on that. So far a lot of encouraging feedback, so we are happy to hear that it is finding its way usefully into peoples' lives.

On Wednesday we held a launch event here in Helsinki to discuss some of the broader innovation challenges that the Studio Model was designed to tackle. And of course to give away copies of the book. We were humbled by the fact that About 60 people showed up on a rainy and blustery afternoon. Kiitos, kaikki!

Colors changed to hide the fact that these were low resolution pics taken on a camera phone

On that note, if you're in London we will be in town this week for some meetings and are taking advantage of the opportunity to have a book launch there as well. See the Facebook page for details and please RSVP (soon!) if you would like to come.

As I was cleaning my desk I came across some sketches done in preparation for the book trailer video. We stayed pretty true to these thumbnails. Not bad for ideas drawn on a sick bag.

Enough with this book thing. Things continue apace on other endeavors. This includes work in-house that Dan and I are doing with our colleagues Olli and Tapio to prototype some of the working environments and habits we anticipate fostering in the eventual new offices which are part of Low2No. More on this soon.

It also means Justin, and to a lesser extent myself, spending late nights working on the new Low2No website which we will be soft launching soon. It should look familiar to readers of this blog.

Because three's a charm, another piece of great news came in for Low2No this week. The project has received an Acknowledgement Prize from the Holcim Foundation. Thanks to our partners at Arup, Sauerbruch Hutton, and Experientia are due as well for this.

Thursday morning while Marco was in Estonia presenting at the Nordic Council of Minister's Modern Eco-Cities conference, the rest of the team had breakfast with Joi Ito and Markko Ahtisaari.

Joi @ Nokia Haus

Markko kindly invited us along to hear Joi give a talk at Nokia. Joi deftly connected many dots and it was a true pleasure to hear him talk about his plans for the MIT Media Lab, which he now directs. I'll keep this brief because the thoughts deserve a more careful bit of writing, but if there's one thing I took away from Joi's presentation it was this:

Because of the declining cost of doing things and increasing levels of complexity in the systems around us, it's often cheaper to prototype (and recover from potential failures) than it is to assess risk.

Update: Joi has posted about this on his website.

This dovetails nicely with some slow burn research we've been doing into what you might call 'cultures of decsion making.' Ultimately the ways in which we perceive, assess, and mitigate risk shape so much of what we allow ourselves to do. Likewise, the manner in which we anticipate, plan for, and recover from failure defines the outer limits of what we allow ourselves to reach for.

When we look at the rise of the open source software movement, agile project management, and the popularity of design these things add up to a new culture of decision making. The better we can coherently articulate the value of these approaches as ways to cope with the GFC and other black swans, the more likely we are to find a way through.

Or at least that's the hypothesis we're prototyping.