Changing the Change

Design Research Agenda for Sustainability

Monday, July 28th, 2008 by Ezio Manzini (conference coordinator)
5 comments »

“A conference may generate a final document: a text that captures the
“conference spirit”. Changing the Change did it too. It produced a document
where themes that appeared to the conference participants to be relevant (in the
perspective of sustainability) and demanding (in terms design knowledge) are
indicated. This document, the Design Research Agenda – Draft 1, clearly could
be considered as another “next step” of the conference: the possibility to
use the emerging issues that the conference has produced as “attractors,”
capable of orienting a multiplicity of on-going and brand new design research
programs.

Maybe this document could be seen as the most evident next step of Changing
the Change. But its meaning has to be attentively considered and its possible
practical implications discussed.

Please, read the following text and let us know what you think. Thank you!”
(Ezio Manzini, Jorge Frascara, Carla Cipolla)

CtC – Design Research Agenda DRAFT 1:
ON-LINE version [download HERE]
PDF version [download HERE]

Leave your comment here in the blog
or if you prefer send us a mail [HERE]

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 12:30 am and is filed under Newsletter 12. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Design Research Agenda for Sustainability”

[...] it has produced this draft. Now, the next step is to see if this idea could work. Please, read the Design Research Agenda for Sustainablity text and let us know what you [...]

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Changing the Change » Blog Archive » Post-conference. Next steps? says, on July 27th, 2008 at 11:59 pm:
[...] this paper] [Changing the Change website] [DESIGN RESEARCH AGENDA for SUSTAINABILITY] [...]

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Ezio Manzini’s blog » New design knowledge says, on July 29th, 2008 at 3:17 am:
[...] BLOG « Design Research Agenda for Sustainability [...]

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Changing the Change » Blog Archive » New design knowledge says, on July 29th, 2008 at 3:25 am:
[...] [DESIGN RESEARCH AGENDA for SUSTAINABILITY] [...]

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Ezio Manzini’s blog » New design knowledge / Design Research Agenda for Sustainability says, on August 6th, 2008 at 2:06 pm:
The Changing the Change conference in Turin, in July 2008 had many parallels with the World Café model; I don’t know if these were intentional or simply a happy coincidence. For those who know of the World Café conversations, you will have perhaps recognized the similarities with the structure of Changing the Change.
Juanita Brown and David Isaacs are the co-founders of the World Café, which is based on living systems thinking and ‘fed’ by Appreciative Inquiry’ and other approaches to effective dialogue and collective thinking. The World Café is a process for bringing people together around questions that matter. It enables people, who might normally not meet, to engage with one another through conversations that matter and work towards common goals and outcomes.
It struck me, on reading The World Café (2005, Brown, J. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. San Francisco), that this was the goal – intended or not – of Changing the Change. More than in other conferences, there was a real attempt to engage people in shaping the direction of dialogue, of creating themes and posing questions to be collectively addressed throughout the 3 days.
Conference participants were encouraged to place sticky notes with a thought, question, challenge or word important to them on a variety of notice boards, creating, through placement by association, six or so major themes that would be discussed in break-out sessions towards the end of the conference. Exactly as with World Café conversations, the individual idea is shared – through a sticky, on a café tablecloth, in a conversation with 4 or 5 people in the café setting. This idea is then disseminated to other groups, cross-pollinated with individual ideas from other tables and new “hybrid” and combined ideas begin to emerge. From these are formed the “larger questions” and themes that concern the whole group.
So, the Changing the Change notice-boards were used to shape and direct the larger discussions, and this was where the conference really came alive. People found their voice and listened with attention to those of others – as stated in the World Café, they `gathered attention` and were `heard into speech.` These were the sessions in which people were asked, and were more than willing, to contribute rather than participate – `When you`re offered the opportunity to actively contribute, it suggests having more responsibility and opportunity to make a difference than when you`re simply asked to participate (p101).
In World Café there is an interesting comparison made between the formal `congreso` (conference) and the less formal `foro` (interactive forum). It is my sense that Changing the Change envisaged itself as a foro but stayed largely in the confines of congreso, with:
- experts bestowing knowledge
- participants asking questions of experts to elicit `right answers`
- formal and rigid physical setting
- time constraints also prohibited real conversations
Attempts to overcome these restrictions were made in the break-out sessions with participants` comments on the boards molding the discussion groups, but these too suffered from the physical and time limitations. It certainly seemed that the foro style of generative, discussion-based forum was anticipated. Participants were encouraged continually to contribute their thoughts and reactions to what they were hearing. Unfortunately, the desired requirements to hear key notes and a vast number of plenary sessions resulted in little time for questions and effective discussion. The physical context was also one that discouraged conversation, being traditional lecture theatres and classrooms, where the `audience` gathers to listen to the ‘expert’. This issue is, of course, difficult to address when searching for facilities that will comfortably accommodate 300+ people in various configurations. But therein lies one of the challenges of Changing the Change and its successors: How can we do it differently?

Changing the Change was well titled in that it takes careful planning, as well as original thinking, and open-minded notions of what might be, to change the way things are done. The intangible outcomes of building relationships, sharing knowledge, and addressing questions collectively were, it seemed to me, very evident in Turin; similarly, these are all of prime importance to the World Café approach. Changing the Change went some way to affecting change and opening the door to a new way of coming together as academic designers, and as people, who in a spirit of open dialogue, will be increasingly willing to `bring more of their whole person to the conversation.` (p31) New and conducive formats, along the lines developed by the World Café, could take this much further.
In spite of the academic parameters set by research output expectations and accountability structures, perhaps it will become acceptable in the peer-reviewed, `publish or perish` world to be a `contributor` and gain the recognition currently ascribed to presenters. It is essential to leave behind the notion that experts have the answers, and to embark on a series of conversations, in which our individual concerns and knowledge become intermingled, blended into new forms and directions, and produce larger, collective questions and challenges to then be addressed together.
Changing the Change planted the seeds of change in a very brave and forceful way. I believe it will be difficult for anyone who attended the conference – and contributed to it – to revert comfortably back to the congreso form. It only makes sense to embrace even more fully the notion of meaningful conversations for the `Change` to become reality.
One of the World Café`s key questions is `What would happen if we thought about this differently? What questions are we not asking, that if we did ask, might make our situation better?` (p90)
Changing the Change challenged many conventions and ideas. It is now up to us to keep asking questions and ensuring that future gatherings allow for, indeed, ensure, conversations that matter.
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Helen Walker says, on November 24th, 2008 at 10:49 pm:

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Design Research Agenda for Sustainability

5 Responses to “Design Research Agenda for Sustainability”

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