Metadesign Tools Emerging from the Attainable Utopias Project
21 Metadesign Tools
The following tools were chosen from more than 90 that we developed between January 2005 and September 2008 as part of a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The tools are intended to operate as an integrated set of methods and techniques that could help society to become more ecological in its ways. This is not a simple task. The discourse of ‘sustainability’ emerged from an industrial mindset that is mechanistic rather than ecological. This is unfortunate, because it also informs some of the specialist training given to designers. The separation between specialist design practices is convenient for those who market specific goods and services within a consumption-driven economy. Sadly, it renders it virtually impossible for individual designers to change the fundamental tenets of how we live. In our view, rather than improve efficiencies or reduce waste at specific points within the whole system, designers must now find ways to harmonize many apparently incommensurate processes at the same time. In order to do so, they need to upgrade design to work at a higher level, i.e. as ‘metadesign’. Here, by ‘metadesign’ we refer to processes that are still under development. In comparison with traditional specialist design practices – or even with a more ‘strategic design’ – metadesign is intended to be more flexible, self-reflexive and comprehensive. This is not just a quantitative difference. Where design characteristically prefigures a desired future state, its consensual (therefore non-hierarchical) nature means it must operate as an adaptive ‘seeding process’ that establishes the conditions for unforeseen opportunities to emerge. Its main task is therefore to orchestrate many levels of synergy, so that human society causes less damage, while proliferating increasing levels of wisdom and fun.
Again, this is not a trivial task. Although many synergies are already recognizable at different scales or orders of existence they may transcend familiar disciplinary boundaries. Where some work at the physical, microscopic level – such as in metallurgy or biochemistry – others may operate at the macroscopic level – say, at the social or cultural level. There are probably countless numbers of other synergies that need to be mapped and understood. However, unless they are joined together appropriately and effectively they may clash or even cancel one another out.
What this means is that the designer’s task is far too complex to be undertaken by individual designers. On the other hand it will require new team skills that reconcile intellectual, emotional, intuitive and procedural faculties. This is a key aspect of synergy because it influences many other modes of synergy. All of the following 21 tools are designed to support synergistic, collaborative processes. However, optimizing teamwork is an art, not a science. Our 21 team-tools should not, therefore, be seen as autonomous recipes that guarantee instant success. While they have all been tested with design teams, some may require more special expertise, training, sensitivity and creative insight than others.
1 The Dream Exchange
Our beliefs are always hindered by our assumptions. This tool encourages participants to ‘think beyond the possible’.
2 Team Roles and Action Types
Education tends to encourage individual development. This tool helps teams to find and orchestrate their complementary strengths.
3 Casting for Team Members
Team members relate in many ways – skills, emotions, personalities, seniority, etc. This tool helps to balance these factors within the recruitment process.
4 Cultural Props
Designers relate to objects and ‘things’. By playing with personally meaningful ‘props’, colleagues quickly develop good interpersonal relations.
5 The ‘I-to-We’ Cycle
The balance of self-awareness and selflessness is important to team-play. This tool helps participants to monitor and orchestrate their shifts from one state to the other.
Competitiveness is endemic in many corporate cultures. Asking players to empathize with colleagues can boost confidence and optimize a team’s potential.
7 Building Team Identities
New teams sometimes take time to ‘bond’. Getting the team to choose values offered by individual members helps it to define itself quickly.
8 The Team Turns Inside-Out
Concentrated teamwork can lead to collective myopia. Asking individual members (one by one) to observe the others ‘from the outside’ helps the team to remain selfreflexive.
9 Mapping Team Evolution
Teams do not always have a clear model of their own evolution. This eightfold template of suggested values enables the team to monitor its own development.
10 Synergy Mapping
Synergy is not always expected or noticed. This chart of values helps teams to document whether participation is as effective as it could be.
11 Mapping Role and Scale
Agreed values may not always stay within their expected position or scale. This tool enables teams to map the dimensions and relational position of each agent.
12 Mapping Relations in Systems
In a given system we seldom consider all the possible relations between all of the parts. This tool helps team players to notice many otherwise hidden possibilities.
13 Mapping the Equilibrium in Systems
Mapping the salient components and their relations may not be sufficient. This tool helps teams to log the directional effects of dynamic relations between agents.
14 Collective Storytelling
Narrative can be a useful vehicle for enriching the shared understanding within a team. This tool offers guidelines for making this process work effectively.
15 Metaphors Be With You
Teams of designers sometimes become limited by the peculiarities of specific metaphors. This tool helps teams to ‘steer’ decision-making away from the conventions of a given language.
16 Using Bisociation in Preference to Conflict
In a culture of competition it seems logical to use conflict as a way to find preferred solutions. This tool uses differences of view to locate unexpected opportunities.
17 4-Way Thinking
The human mind is not very good at conceiving highly complex, interdependent situations. This tool offers a simple, multi-purpose topology (the tetrahedron) that can be used to address this problem.
18 4-Way Innovation
Sometimes, we need single artefacts or propositions that satisfy many requirements at once. This template for manifold innovation uses the tetrahedron to offer sufficient complexity.
19 4-Way Ethics
Ethical systems tend to reduce the number of relations that pertain to the designer’s task. The tetrahedron is used to offer a simple, shareable format that makes relational ethics easy to apply.
The idea of ‘environmental sustainability’ is usually depicted as a ‘lose– win’ offer. This tool maps a number of abundances in a way that can be clustered and named as a unified (positive) outcome.
21 Team Diagnosis
It is hard to maintain the positive spirits of a non-hierarchical team, indefinitely. Used with caution and some training, this tool is intended to offer diagnostic methods that can, sometimes, be applied in a more creative way.
Source: Personal communication with John Wood, 30 September 2008.
Acknowledgements: These metadesign tools are an outcome of the ‘Benchmarking Synergy-Cultivation within Metadesign’ research project at Goldsmiths, University of London, details available at Attainable Utopias, http://attainable-utopias.org/m21. The project was funded by the AHRC between 2005 and the end of 2008. The regular Attainable Utopias team comprised: John Backwell, Jonny Bradley, Hannah Jones, Julia Lockheart, Anette Lundebye and Professor Mathilda Tham, with administration by Ann Schlachter. John Wood was the principal investigator, and there were contributions from scores of consultants in many countries.