Wild horses sculpture at Drexel

Category: bricolage

  • Designing Social Media Platforms For Online Learning

    Recently, I have been using a collaborative social media platform, designed for online learning, to run one of my classes. The idea was, that as we are studying social informatics, we could study the effect of using social media on our own workflows first hand. I also thought that – in these days of daily Facebook and Twitter use – a social media site would add some relevance to the class. My thinking was that the “right-brain” expression that Daniel Pink extolls as critical to motivation in the 21st Century – the design, narrative, synthesis, empathy, play and sensemaking skills – would be enabled by the use of social media (Pink, 2005). The site has a WIKI, blogs, discussion forums, and an interactive chat facility. I was proposing that we used Google+ hangout for short class discussions by video. For the first week, I set students the task to post to the WIKI, to post to their own blog, to locate some web readings, and to join Google+ if they had not already done so.

    By Thursday (from a Monday start), almost all of the students had posted to the discussion forum. Several had asked me questions by email. But no-one had posted to the Blog or the WIKI. By Friday, two of the more technologically-literate students had made blog posts. But most of the activity was still on the discussion forums – and only three students had provided me with Google+ contact details. Then I started to question my own assumptions. All of the students had used Blackboard for their online course access, which revolves around an asynchronous discussion board. So they were used to interacting via an asynchronous forum. I had assumed that they would be excited to use more “social” media for class interactions or for sharing what they had discovered about the topic. But how did this fit into their idea of how they would behave in an online class? Very badly. Most students sign up for online courses because this provides them with choices about what to do, when. They have a low learning-curve for using a discussion forum. Anything else is hard work.

    Clay Shirky talks about the cognitive surplus that is available from zillions of digitally-literate people with mundane jobs and untapped creativity. He argues that this expresses itself in the groundswell of free, open source software initiatives and in the crowdsourcing phenomenon (Shirky, 2010). But graduate students with a full-time job are already using their cognitive surplus in grappling with new areas of learning. My assumption that they may have some left over for experimenting with social media may be false. The problem is that the learning curve gets in the way of the “right-brain” expression that I wanted to encourage. I may need to rethink how far experimenting with social media is constraining people’s’ ability to express themselves.

    References
    Daniel Pink  (2005) A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Berkeley Publishing: New York.
    Daniel Pink (2005) Revenge Of The Right Brain, Wired Magazine, Feb. 2005.
    Clay Shirky (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Penguin Press: New York.
    Clay Shirky (2010) How Cognitive Surplus Will Change The World. TED Talk Video, June 28, 2010.
    Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink  (2010) Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution. Wired Magazine, June 2010.

  • Design as Bricolage.

    When attending a boundary-spanning design meeting the other day, I was reminded of how important pattern sensitization is to design. When we explore a new problem-situation, we structure it according to the patterns that we perceive in that situation. This is why experienced designers are so much better at design than novices. It is not that experienced professionals are sharper, or better at design — but just that they have a wider repertoire of patterns to call upon. As they recognize familiar elements of the situation, they fit partial solutions to those elements. Problem decomposition is not hierarchical, in the sense proposed by Alexander (1964), but convergent. The problem-space and the solution-space co-evolve, as designers explore these in tandem (Maher and Poon, 1996; Maher and Tang, 2003).

    Back to the meeting.
    A group of strategic managers (including the systems people and the business process change manager) were examining how to revise business process support for a routine workflow. The problem that they faced was that this had been adapted by several workgroups (whose representatives were present) over time. So each of these managers had a different perspective of the problem, depending on what each group was trying to achieve. The customer support group were frustrated that they could not access all of the customer information in the system, but had to call another group to obtain missing information. The order-processing group were frustrated that they could not track the progress of an order without having to run three separate IT applications. The sales and marketing group were incensed that not all of the latest products and services were publicized on the website. None of these people – including the IT group managers – could see that these were related problems. They spent hours debating the fields to be displayed on the screens and the detailed reports needed, without realizing that the workflows were related.
    The breakthrough came by accident, when the Process Improvement Manager was mapping the “requirements” on a whiteboard. He started to link two of the requirements, stood back and then said “So this step is also related to this one, isn’t it?” Then the Marketing Manager said “That comes just before the promotions stage.” As the Process Improvement Manager drew a process diagram, each individual kept adding in pieces of the puzzle, with how they were related.

    Design as bricolage.
    Bricolage involves repeated “trying out” and experimentation until a pattern is discerned that is useful. (The word derives from Bricoleur, a French term meaning “handy-man” or “jack- of-all-trades.”) Claudio Ciborra described bricolage as “the constant re-ordering of people and resources that is the true hallmark of organizational change.” But Bricolage is not random experimentation. It is based on leveraging the world “as defined by the situation” (Ciborra, 2002). Pattern sensitization adds another dimension to bricolage. It can now be seen as an ordering of situation elements until they make sense according to previously encountered patterns. So design is like a jigsaw. Each person carries around a partially-completed set of jigsaw pictures in their heads. The core problem of design is to use a problem-representation that can allow people to communicate the structures in their “mental jigsaw picture” to others.

    References
    Alexander, C. Notes On The Synthesis Of Form. McGraw Hill, New York NY, 1964.
    Ciborra, C.U. The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 2002
    Maher, M.L., and Poon, J. “Modelling design exploration as co-evolution,” Microcomputers in Civil Engineering (11:3) 1996, pp 195-210.
    Maher, M.L., and Tang, H.-H. “Co-evolution as a computational and cognitive model of design ” Research in Engineering Design (14:1) 2003, pp 47-64.