Design_at_the_edge

Hopscotch- diffusion of innovation

Hopscotch
Originally uploaded by Jan Tik

Jan Tik talks of where hopscotch began and spread across Europe. He writes

"Hopscotch began in ancient Britain during the early Roman Empire. The original hopscotch courts were over 100 feet long and used for military training exercises. Roman foot-soldiers ran the course in full armor and field packs to improve their footwork, much the same way modern football players run through rows of truck tires today.

Roman children drew their own smaller courts in imitation of the soldiers, added a scoring system and "Hopscotch" spread throughout Europe."

Around 2000 years later the Economics and Social Research Council published the first issue of Britain Today [ in March, so its taken a long time for me to stumble over it in our local library!). One article, "Britain's Innovation Challenge" , states:
"The rise of India and China and other low cost economics means that competing on cost is no longer a viable strategy. To succees in future, Britain needs to compete on added value - especially in its knowledge base.....Britain spends £21billion creating new knowledge throught the science system in universities, research institutes and companies. Evidence suggests that Britain is good at producing scientific knowledge.....
yet despite its impressive performance in this area, Britain lags behind other developed economiesin converting new ideas into commercial applications. .......
British businesses have not been effective at capturing and leveraging know-how.
This is true both in terms of creating new products and services, and improving processes and practices."

I attended many of the MediaLab Europe's Open House days in Dublin, that ran from July 2003-January 2005. I was inspired by the demonstrations of work that went on there and of their list of prospective and actual partners.In spite of the statement of their founding CEO, Dr Rudy Burger that:

"The question to ask is not 'What does this new technology allow us to do?' but rather, 'What is it that people have always wanted to do that this technology enables them to do better?' "

My view was that there was part of the process. a bridging activity [ getting from a powerful technology demonstration to a concept worth pursuing] that was missing. There is an iterative process that needs to go on to bridge that gap between the future, made possible by the technology, and the innovation direction of the partners- often what is missing is a compelling customer story supported by a demonstration that moves the dialogue forward to another chapter in that story. The role of places like MediaLab is to come up with another challenging technology demo that asks another question; not to flesh out the original question in a more searching form, hence there is no OODA loop in this diagram:

Put this into Design Space, apply Design Fast Action and a bridging process begins to emerge:

We are now thinking about all the eight factors as well as interacting around them.. this does not mean we get all risk adverse and kill ideas and directions but treat the project as a quest with responsibilities on all parties to do something differently: to do some devilling between quest get-togethers in Design Space.

Where the bridging is done is a cultural thing and the challenge is that there is a clash of cultures in partners, who will now worry about sharing insights as there is a perception that sharing can dilute any competitive advantage. It is really an opportunity for orchestration to be introduced to open up the conversations that ultimately yield sustainable competitive advantage. Verganti describes how Italian companies like Alessi, Artemide, Kartell, etc, demonstrate how this can work in practice. Apple is another example of how orchestration of partners can work in a radical way.

So how do we ensure that bridging happens easier so that there can be a "Meeting of Minds".

One part of the how is to identify potential tools, choose the relevant ones, acquire, use and exploit them to achieve our goals. So how do we transform Design Fast Action into an activity-oriented view to aid the choice of tools?

Design Fast Action

MarAir032
Originally uploaded by KevBow.

In my first job as a designer, I had the dubious pleasure of hosting the chief designer as he scrambled up on my drafting table to make the announcement that the company had gone bankrupt (Thursday 10.30 am, February 4th, 1971). The cause of the problem was the RB211 engine was not giving the reliability and performance required to safely power the Lockheed Tristar! So we ran out of money to fix the technologies we were introducing. We were nationalised in all but name (HM Government took all the shares in a new company, Rolls-Royce (1971) Ltd) and our salaries were released from the Treasury every month provided we had achieved certain performance targets in a 45-hr type test. The targets were set 4 weekly and we could run 2 official tests per month so we got two goes to achieve goals and salary.
Normally the paperwork for a new design scheme would take at least two weeks to clear so we introduced a system called Design Fast Action; a component drawing would be done by the design draughtsman and checked by his boss, A clerk would issue a DFA number from a book, or if he wasn't there someone else in the design office would issue it, e.g. the person who drew it! Then two blueprints were run off and a runner would take it over the road to the experimental machine shop who would make the piece, by whatever means at their disposal... onto the engine build it would go with one blueprint going into a boxfile to record what DFA's were on that build; when the build was complete, i.e. time to go onto test bed; the next build started with information from the previous test to drive the incorporation of DFA's and so on. If a build worked on type test and 75% worked first test, then these DFA's were reworked as flight standard designs and every month or so incorporated into the build for a 150hr type test which covered performance and reliability unlike a 45 hr one which did the former only.
So what has this to do with dogfights?
Well Col John Boyd, a US-fighter pilot in the Korean war had the highest success rate in aerial dogfights and when asked how he did it replied that he had a faster OODA loop than his adversary. OODA stands for Observe-Orient-decide-act. There is a full diagram here.
The short version of OODA theory is that it allows you to get inside the heads of adversaries, unsettle their worldview (by disrupting their schemes for observation, orientation, decision making, and action), and come out on top. Boyd developed his ideas in part by dogfighting: he had a standing bet that he could start with any other fighter pilot on his tail and, within forty seconds, be on that pilot’s tail. He never lost the bet. (This earned him the nickname “Forty Second” Boyd.)
Applied to innovation Boyd's loop is a really good conceptual model for Design Fast Action:

The full OODA shows there is feedback going on all the time so this DFA diagram implies that the creation of a scheme- a sketch, model or plan of action will mean that the creator is implicitly networked to give and receive feedback from her/his own affective thoughts.

The Beauty of having a DFA tool in our toolbox is it gives us the ability to act explicitly and implicitly exploring and probing at both what we are thinking and doing and how we are thinking and doing, which is key to recognising the possibility of change- innovation- and actually doing something.

So scheming, prototyping, interacting and reflecting can also be thought of as :

scheming/modelling/combining/recombining, making tangible/prototyping, playing (seriously)/interacting, analysing/reflecting/making meaning.

In innovation one of Boyd's disciples, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, presents a really good thought experiment:

Imagine four scenarios: someone skiing, someone power-boating, someone bicycling, and a boy playing with a toy tank. Break down each domain into its component parts: For skiing, there would be snow, chairlifts, skis, hot chocolate, and so on. Within their domain, the parts have directly identifiable relationships with one another. But scramble together the parts from the four domains, and suddenly it's hard to determine any relationships at all. We are thrown into chaos.

Now, Spinney instructs, take one part from each scene: From skiing, select the skis; from power boating, the motor; from bicycling, the handlebars; and from the boy with his toy tank, the treads. What do these elements have to do with one another? At first, seemingly nothing -- because we still think of them in terms of their original domains. But bring the parts together, and you've used your creative pattern-recognition skills to build ... a snowmobile!

"A winner," Boyd concluded, "is someone who can build snowmobiles ... when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change."

Picture originally uploaded by andrewfjohnson. Used with thanks under CC.