[c]

Towards a Meta-design for Social Service

posted by [c] on July 30, 2009

Many in the business community are turning to design thinking¹ as a means of revitalizing existing practices and finding new ways for staying competitive in a time where rapid change is the only constant. As a result, many exemplars currently exist that show the successful implementation and ongoing practice of meta-design within the domain of commercial business enterprise.² In varying size and application, these enterprises run the gambit from a small MIT software licensed³ and open source CMS⁴ program like Concrete 5, to the broadly based integrated online application systems of Google, one of the most successful and profitable businesses in the world. Where business has played a significant role in how meta-design can be utilized within a commercial context, it has also contributed to social service. Today, many free and open source products and services are enabling users from diverse socio-economic backgrounds to develop skills and knowledge in a variety of technical areas. This in turn is enabling mash-ups of blogs, video, and image applications, all tools that are extending communication opportunities for users previously unable to access expensive communication technologies. Business centred meta-design has already created a paradigm shift with respect to democratising access to knowledge and services, and yet we are just at the early stages of its development and utilisation.
The design discipline and individual design practitioners have also begun to direct their practice toward service design. Perhaps the most notable design company in the area of design thinking, methodology and overall innovation is IDEO. This design consultancy is regularly cited as an example of how a successful practice should operate and now they’re taking a leading role in the area of social service design as well. In 2008, as a project for the Rockefeller Foundation, IDEO developed Design for Social Impact. This project included a comprehensive guide for designers who wanted to participate successfully in designing for social impact and even included a supplementary workbook to help facilitate the process. Through the utilization of working practices that are also found in meta-design, design practitioners are returning to the traditional domain of social design praxis, where design is seen as making things better for people. With the recent focus on service design, the traditional view of design as centred “around the creation of tangible artefacts” (Pinhanez 3) is slowly opening up to alternative perceptions. The new social design practitioners are often from the industrial and communication disciplines and their work has garnered significant attention, particularly in the United Kingdom. RED, which is a unit of the Design Council, the UK’s official design agency, is “an interdisciplinary team of designers, policy thinkers and social scientists” (Steffen, http://worldchanging.com) who are re-envisioning existing and future public services. Designers are taking on a wide variety of socially directed projects, working both in the system modelling stage and as facilitators within the ongoing projects. For example, RED developed a project in the county of Kent called Activmobs, which discovered new ways to encourage and maintain healthy living choices. In this project a system was designed whereby individuals could link up by way of a website, creating “self-organised groups of people with a shared interest” (kent.gov.uk) in their own type of healthy activity—they could also share tips among the network of groups, connect with trainers, and develop their own group appropriate routines. This successful co-creative project was then turned over to a social enterprise that is now developing the system as a broader and ongoing concern. Part of a project titled dott07, or Designs of the Time, Activmobs was just one in a number of significant service design projects that ranged from urban farming and working happiness to community planning of a new school. These projects, to varying degrees, all shared a methodology that emphasized user-centred and multidisciplinary design, collaboration and co-creation, which resulted in early enthusiasm within the participating communities and a greater public awareness of what design could achieve in the area of social service. However, none of these projects fully embraced the conceptual framework of meta-design that emphasizes the creation of “social and technical infrastructures [which ensure] users become co-developers or co-designers” (Fischer & Giaccardi, Meta-Design: A framework for… 1). A system that empowers users with the capacity to grow⁵ the project at use time seems not to have been fully developed, resulting in an uncertain future for some of these projects⁶. In describing the principles behind another RED project, Cottam and Leadbeater refer to an organizational model called “communities of co-creation” (24) that gets closer to meta-design. They envision this model as one that needs only “a minimum level of external, professional design to allow bottom-up initiative from within society” which is possible “through concerted reforms to create more distributed capacity [and] provide spaces in which people can collaborate and devise co-created solutions” (24). Meta-design concerns itself with designing the “enabling systems” (Manzini 2) that ensure a distributed capacity, but where co-creation emphasizes users working together with designers, meta-design emphasizes enabling users to ostensibly become the designers. This distinction provides the best opportunity for creating a sustainable project that can continue to evolve in spite of a changing environment, parameters, and exigencies.
The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is a particularly good example of a project that, from conception through continued operation, adheres to the meta-design framework. Participant groups include a governance body, the DLESE Program Center (DPC), and the community. The governance body includes a steering committee that is responsible for guiding overall policy for the project, the DPC is responsible for developing the core infrastructure and provides a coordinating role⁷, while the community is made up of participants that involve themselves in the project through either personal activity or by participating in committees, discussion groups and events (Wright 5-6). The projects framework is based on two “facilitation mechanisms to support the collaborative process: a social facilitation of participants; and a technical facilitation of communication infrastructure and technical artefacts” (6). Online forums, emailing, teleconferencing and face-to-face workshops all work to facilitate an interaction among the geographically distributed user-participants who contribute directly to the ongoing development of the project⁸. As a check to ensure the project is developing effectively, “a level of formalization” is done on user-seeded modifications and overall system changes through usability testing by the DPC in collaboration with the community⁹. The result of this meta-design project is that, thanks in large part to the “distributed effort and energies of [the] broadly engaged community” itself (3), the DLESE is continually providing new services and knowledge to the Earth Systems community (7).
Meta-design is not just a practice in design—it’s also a pedagogical practice. Whether in the form of teaching design methodology, related research practices, or technical proficiency, part of designing an enabling system involves the transfer of knowledge. As a result, centres for learning, and institutions of design in particular, could prove to be excellent incubators for the development of social meta-design projects. One institution in particular that’s making a significant impact in the area of service design is Stanford University’s Institute of Design, or d.school, and with their existing emphasis on multidisciplinary collaboration and co-creation, they are well positioned to take a leading role in this incubation. Headed by IDEO founder, David Kelley, d.school is bringing together leaders from diverse domains of knowledge and experience such as sociology, business, economics, philosophy, engineering, and design. The emphasis on collaboration, co-creation, and design thinking has resulted in a number of innovative pedagogically centred projects within service design, from campus bike safety to participation in developing Bhutan’s new education system¹⁰). Another pedagogical project that corresponds to meta-designing methodology is Project Peru, based out of NSCAD University. This multidisciplinary project involved students collaborating “with professionals in business, marketing, web development, fundraising and textiles” (www.projectperu.ca) to come up with a framework that would see improved commercial opportunities for indigenous weavers in a Peruvian highland community. By providing a local NGO with design-centred skills and knowledge, students created a sustaining situation where facilitators could continue operating the project long after the students have left. This project has great potential to evolve into a systems-centred meta-design project, with many opportunities to extend the pedagogical benefits both to the community and the university. Through their research, NSCAD students discovered that “initiatives such as weaving groups [also] aim to provide [the community’s] women with social networking opportunities, childcare and forms of education concerning health and hygiene” (ibid). The students’ skills in research, collaboration, communication and design thinking could be engaged to develop a framework that addresses some of the above mentioned social benefits and, by networking with other disciplines and institutions, empower the community with a distributed knowledge and skill set to act as designers themselves and tackle some of these issues directly.
Then there’s Barefoot College, which in 1972 was started up by Bunker Roy in Tilonia, India. Barefoot College’s mandate is to address problems of discrimination, injustice, exploitation and inequality by creating a place where the dispossessed can talk and be heard with dignity and respect and be given the tools, training and skills to improve their own lives (www.barefootcollege.org).

It’s a place where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher. It’s a place where people are encouraged to make mistakes so that they can learn humility, curiosity, the courage to take risks, to innovate, to improvise and to constantly experiment. It’s a place where all are treated as equals and there is no hierarchy. (ibid)

Perhaps like no other institution, Barefoot College operates by principles very similar to those of meta-design, providing a social, technical and pedagogical environment where owners of problems become the problem solvers. Today the college has 20 campuses throughout India with nearly 1,000 trained experts in 1,000 villages, providing half a million people with basic services such as solar energy, clean drinking water, health care, and education (Vilaga). Whether further afield or in our own backyards, educational institutions are recognising the significant contribution that design can play in social service. They are immersing themselves in experimental research, multidisciplinary networks and traditional teaching, all with an eye toward making things better for people through design.
Whether within commercial design practice, pedagogy or institutional implementation, recent practices in collaboration, co-creation, and community-centred design are opening up new possibilities for design practice and bring us closer to the place where a meta-design approach to design practice can have a positive social impact.

1. 1. The term design thinking is one that has been adopted by many within design research to describe not just the thinking but also the processes and methodology behind design practice. It has become a particularly popular conceptual framework for implementation within the business community and often emphasises a variety of approaches that include but are not limited to multidisciplinary collaboration, co-creation, user-centred design, and iterative processes in design practice. [↩]
2. 2. These enterprises are regularly documented in design, technology and business journals such as Wired Magazine, Fast Company, Design Issues, the Economist, to name only a few. They are ubiquitous and are widely recognised as the new face of business and innovation. [↩]
3. 3. The MIT software license is an Open Source Initiative that grants, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of the software to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to [also] do so. [↩]
4. 4. CMS stands for content management system. Blogs typically operate on a CMS platform but it is becoming more common to see commercial web sites developed on CMS platforms as it enables users easy access to site modifications and updates without necessarily having the traditional requisite web design and development skills. [↩]
5. 5. Refer to the evolutionary growth stage of the earlier described SER model. [↩]
6. 6. The dott07 website has overviews of the various projects and the “What’s Next?” sections tend to reflect an uncertainty and lack of ongoing results, and further searching found very little in the way of documentation showing a continued user engagement with any of these projects. [↩]
7. 7. The DPC can be compared to the multidisciplinary developers in shown in the design time stage of Figure 1 (also represented in the SER model shown in Figure 2). [↩]
8. 8. This can be compared to the evolutionary growth stage of the SER model in Figure 2. [↩]
9. 9. This is the reseed stage that takes place after evolutionary growth in the SER model of Figure 2. [↩]
10. 10. Students from d.school worked with the Royal Education Council of Bhutan to incorporate design thinking approaches into the curriculum in order to “help them develop citizenship skills and 21st century illiteracies, like innovation and creativity, while remaining true to their [“strong Buddhist ethical core “and] heritage.” (Pferdt http://www.pferdt.de/archives/608 [↩]