The idea of creating successful partnerships can be illusive, but it’s power to translate basic research into practical applications is fundamental.  It’s often hard to know the difference between a collaborator and competitor, so there is a natural hesitation to share information.  However, in today’s world of increasing complexity the necessity for partnerships is greater than it’s ever been.  There exists an overwhelming body of evidence that complex problems are rarely solved by one person’s “eureka moment.”  Steven Johnston illustrates this point eloquently in his book; The Invention of Air.  Johnston focuses on the 18^th Century discovery by Joseph Priestly that the air we breathe is a combination of gases, primarily nitrogen and oxygen.  Many scholarly sources will credit Priestly with the discovery of oxygen, but the story is much more complex.  It’s true that Priestly was able to identify that there was an air purer than the air we breathe through a series of physical experiments in his laboratory in Leeds, but he inaccurately identified this air as dephlogisticated air and had a fundamental miss-understanding of the process he had discovered.  Luckily Priestly was well known as a frequenter of the English coffee house where he shared his ideas with a group called the Honest Whigs.  Steven Johnson contends that the English coffee house, and the culture created around it, fuelled what we come to call the Age of Enlightenment.  Priestly was a strong believer the concept of sharing knowledge to advance science, so when he explained his discovery to Antoine Lavoisier at a dinner conversation in 1771 he passed knowledge to a person with a much different skill-set.  This transfer of knowledge would eventually lead Lavoisier to more accurately name this substance Oxygen and discover the process we now know as oxidation.  Johnston writes:                                                                    

“Discovering that there was an air purer than pure air required qualitative analytical skills – an improvisational style – that Priestly possessed in abundance.  But defining the chemical composition of that air took a different toolkit, both mental and technological.”

The irony of this story according to Johnson is that by 1779 Ben Franklin, a fellow Honest Whig member, would negotiate to purchase 800 tons of French gunpowder for the struggling Continental Army.  This gunpowder was made with saltpeter directly from Lavoisier’s Laboratory which capitalized on the process of oxidation.  Johnson quotes Joe Jackson on the Battle of Yorktown:  “British solders complained that they could not get close enough to shoot colonials before they themselves were blasted from the garters.”  As architects we can  illustrate the importance of wide ranging functional space that supports collaboration, but the cultural mindset to share ideas must be encouraged at an institutional level and through actual stories of discovery rather than the eureka myth.

Tags: Behavior, Collaboration, Communication, Experience, Imagination, Inspiration, Labs, Learning, Research
Posted in Cool, Innovative, Lab Planning, People, Science, Technology/Innovation

“Imagination is more important than knowledge” Albert Einstein.

Like Tim Brown from IDEO, we have found that it is more effective to initiate the act of design by taking design out of the hands of the designer and putting it in the hands of those most impacted by the design.  On a recent project we were faced with a challenge that changed my method of initiating, envisioning and conceptualizing a project in collaboration with those it impacted the most. 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAinLaT42xY

The challenge was put to us by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center when they asked us to create a new experience for the child patient, their family, and their caregivers in the design of a new satellite hospital. The essential ingredient in the process of putting design into the hands of those most impacted it was to find a way for children to be active participants in the design process.   

To do this, we created a process tool we call “Imagine.” In this case,  where we utilized narratives to lead children through a series of visioning sessions to uncover the qualities of their favorite places, the places that make them happy, feel good and most importantly not scared.  We then worked with the kids to do sketches or “ideagrams” to diagram or “draw what they saw” while listening to the narrative.  The process, taking no longer than 30 to 40 minutes opened a new way of working together that fully engaged the creativity of the children.  We then worked with the children, core project team and parents alike to apply those favorite qualities to the design of new space and the experiences they would have when receiving or giving care.  In his terrific book Inner Game of Work, Timothy Gallway puts it this way.

“It is more effective for a golfer to “see” the trajectory of his golf ball rising into an arc against the sky, then falling onto the green and rolling into the hole, than it is to say to himself, “I want to hole this shot.”  Likewise, if your goal is better teamwork with your colleagues, it contributes to mobility to envision what that might look and sound like.  When you use pictures, sounds, and words to project a desired future state, more parts of the brain are involved in the goal setting.  This increases the likelihood that more of your brain will be used in the process of fulfilling the goal.*”        

When we used this process with parents as well as kids we found it worked equally well if not better than what we were using to engage adults in collaborative design thinking.  We use this method today with a wide variety of groups, including business and community leaders complete with crayons and construction paper.  Though occasionally we find, especially serious executives, skeptical of the idea that you can do effective work with a crayon in your hand, this has tool has made the sometimes ethereal process of visioning immencely practical, leveraging the power of the imagination.

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Tags: Books, Experience, Imagination, Pictures
Posted in Cool, Design, Generations, People, Tools, Workplace

 I am allergic to unproductive meetings.  I tend to break out in a rash and need to leave immediately to seek relief.  The author Scott Hunter is particularly poignant in describing the problem with meetings.

Because of what typically happens…people mostly hate meetings. What happens: as soon as someone presents an idea, everyone else listens to see whether or not they agree with what was presented. Since it’s pretty unlikely that they do, someone invariably makes the idea presented wrong or unworkable and presents their contrary view.  

Once this is done, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and the meeting turns into a series of conflicting points of view, with everyone arguing why their solution is the right or best one.

We will often schedule meetings to solve a particular problem or make positive progress on an issue facing a team.  It may be necessary to brainstorm to find a solution. The challenge is how to collaborate productively in meetings to achieve results.  It helps to be aware of how we frame issues and leverage the power of creative imagination by learning to listen differently.

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Tags: Communication, Imagination, Learning, Meetings
Posted in People, Workplace