The Design Problems of Brexit

The UK Government paper titled: The future relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union, otherwise known as ‘The Chequers agreement’, after the Buckinghamshire country manor house where the agreement was first made, is as much a work of design as of policy.

The UK Prime Minister, Teresa May, delivers a speech on Brexit to the EU. Photograph: Associated Press

The foreword is by the UK Prime Minister, Teresa May, who begins:

“In the referendum on 23 June 2016 – the largest ever democratic exercise in the United Kingdom – the British people voted to leave the European Union.” [1]

She goes on resolutely:

“And that is what we will do – leaving the Single Market and the Customs Union, ending free movement and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in this country, leaving the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, and ending the days of sending vast sums of money to the EU every year. We will take back control of our money, laws, and borders. And…”

And after ripping it all up:

“… begin a new exciting chapter in our nation’s history.”

Who is the author of that chapter?

Teresa goes on:

“It now falls to us all to write that chapter.”

Ah! This must be a huge exercise in democratic and participative design, where we can all pitch in our ideas and a solution seamlessly emerges, as if shaped by an invisible hand.

Well, not quite. The ‘us’, of course, is really ‘not us’. The authors of the chapter will be the lawmakers: politicians and others who will codify our future. The ‘us’ may get to say yes or no, but this isn’t an exercise in participative design.

The front page of the UK HM Government’s Brexit Proposal.

The Chequers agreement is a 98 page document, presented in 4 chapters, laying out (in order) the economics, security, cooperation, and institutions of Brexit. The document mentions the word design (or its variants) thirteen times, but they are significant mentions about significant things.

Designing, in Brexit terms, means designing new relationships and partnerships, new proposals, new arrangements, new institutional arrangements, new rules, new policies and policy tools, new systems, and new committees.

That is an awful lot of ‘new’, and an awful lot of designing. What kind of designing is it exactly though? and who will do it? Or more pertinently, does the ‘not us’ have the necessary experience to come up with good designs? (And how will we know they are good designs?)

Taking out each mention of design in the Chequers agreement, and turning it around, makes Brexit read like the curriculum for a new kind of design school [2]:

Design an institutional framework that facilitates dialogue [i]
Design a new trading relationship that ensures frictionless access to each other’s goods [ii]
Design a proposal based on principles of reciprocal commitments [iii]
Design a facilitated customs arrangement [iv]
Design a common rulebook [v]
Design an agricultural policy that delivers market relevant outcomes [vi]
Design a migration system that works for all parts of the UK [vii]
Design a system to promote domestic production and preserve cultural identity [viii]
Design ‘horizontal’ rules that ensure open and fair markets [ix]
Design a global rule for new and disruptive technologies [x]
Design a partnership that makes tracking crime across borders efficient and reliable [xi]
Design an effective sanction [xii]
Design a Joint Committee to prevent disputes arising [xiii]

Or perhaps this a very old kind of design school, because agriculture, trade, and disruptive technologies have been around for at least 5000 years.

The problems above are reducible to designing two other kinds of thing that are mentioned in the Chequers agreement: systems (62 mentions), and rules (110 mentions).

But perhaps most of all Brexit will be about designing systems of rules.

The design of these rule-based systems will take imagination, to think out the particularities and the consequences that might develop. So does the ‘not us’ include people with this kind of imagination? People that can exercise a sophisticated design intelligence in meeting practical, political, ethical, and aesthetic [3] constraints?

I’m not sure that the UK has these kinds of people, or at least doesn’t provide systematic (that word again) ways of training and educating them. We are good at producing political analysts, policy advisors, economists, journalists and philosophers. And they are all good at talking a good game.

But changing the rules of the game requires systematic imagination and creative integrity that should be open to question. It shouldn’t be ‘ta da – here’s a solution’, it should be ‘here is the design process we went through to arrive at this proposal’. The people are not trained in how to make design decisions and consider the possible consequences of those decisions (though they may consider consequences from previous decisions of others). Rather than learning from failure during their education, they learn by very real failure in practice [4].

Perhaps the design of Brexit needs first to include the design of curriculum that can deliver this kind of knowledge and develop the missing designers of today. Game Design 101 might not be a bad place to start.

 

Notes

[1] To be precise 17.4 million people voted to leave, out of an estimated population of 65.6 million (and a population of those eligible to vote of 46.5 million – 19.1 million people being under the voting age of 18).

[2] Actually not unlike the one proposed by Charles and Ray Eames’ India Report that I described in a previous post looking at design education.

[3] The word ‘frictionless’ (11 mentions in the Chequers agreement), for example, suggests something aesthetic. What do you think of when you think of something frictionless? I think of air hockey. It also suggests that clever interaction and service design will be necessary.

[4] Indeed Article 50 of the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, consisting of five paragraphs, and formulated to allow any member state to withdraw from the EU, could well be an example of this failure. In this case the rule designer was John Kerr, a Scottish Member of the UK Parliament.

 

Design references to the UK Government’s document on Brexit

[i] “The institutional framework should prevent disputes arising but in the unlikely event that they did, it should be designed in a way that facilitates dialogue.” (page 92)

[ii] “In designing the new trading relationship, the UK and the EU should therefore focus on ensuring continued frictionless access at the border to each other’s markets for goods.” (page 7)

[iii] “These principles, together with strong reciprocal commitments on open and fair trade, and propositions for a new institutional framework, inform the design of the UK’s proposal.” (page13)

[iv] “The Facilitated Customs Arrangement is designed to ensure that the repayment mechanism is only needed in a limited proportion of UK trade, and to make it as simple as possible to use for those who need to use it.” (page 18)

[v] “The UK would also seek participation – as an active participant, albeit without voting rights – in EU technical committees that have a role in designing and implementing rules that form part of the common rulebook.” (page 20)

[vi] “The UK will be free to design agricultural support policies that deliver the outcomes most relevant to its market, within the confines of WTO rules.” (page 24)

[vii] “The UK will design a system that works for all parts of the UK. The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) report, due in September 2018, will provide important evidence on patterns of EU migration and the role of migration in the wider economy to inform this.” (page 32)

[viii] “European Works is a system designed to promote domestic European production and preserve cultural identity.” (page 37)

[ix] “Some horizontal rules are not primarily designed to ensure open and fair markets. Nonetheless, it is usual to include commitments on these areas in Free Trade Agreements (FTAs).” (page 37)

[x] “The UK will be agile enough to provide thought leadership on the shape and design of new global rules for new and disruptive technologies.” (page 50)

[xi] “As the UK and the EU design a new partnership, maintaining efficient and reliable operational capabilities will be vital, including but not limited to:

• a. the efficient extradition of criminals and wanted individuals between Member States and the UK;
• b. cooperation of judicial, police and customs authorities in different states; and
• c. delivering cross-border criminal investigations and prosecutions.”

(page 59)

[xii] “Sanctions are a key foreign policy tool and are most effective when designed and applied alongside international partners.” (page 65)

[xiii] “Through regular and structured dialogue, the Joint Committee would be designed to prevent disputes from arising, whether related to implementation, enforcement or compliance.” (page 88)

The Design University and the Current Order of Things

Tim Blackman, the Vice Chancellor of Middlesex University in the UK, has written a well-argued paper on how Universities could be much less selective in the students they take. The paper begins:

“Most secondary schools in the UK do not select their pupils on the basis of prior academic achievement. They are deliberately comprehensive, with this principle based on a positive education argument that it is best to educate young people of different abilities together. Almost all universities are based on the opposite principle: academic selection and stratification by ability into different types of institution. This contrast attracts little public or political debate.” (p.11)

The title of the paper is The Comprehensive University: An Alternative to Social Stratification by Academic Selection [1] and it convincingly uses statistics and scholarship to make the case that a greater diversity of student talent at the beginning of a degree course would make for better outcomes at the end. Those outcomes are not only for individuals but benefit society more generally through growth, innovation and (though it sounds a bit cheesy) better understanding of other people.

Whereas highly selective UK universities such as Oxford and Cambridge essentially recruit students who are very similar in class and achievement, the key idea in Blackman’s report is diversity. This is the diversity that occurs through opening up Universities to a greater range of abilities.

At present Universities operate as end-points, finishing schools for already able students. They could be starting points: an opportunity to level out the playing field by teaching differently.

Teaching differently involves taking advantage of diversity, and especially the understanding that occurs when different perspectives and experiences are used in learning [2]. This type of learning depends on a shift from a ‘cognitive’ approach – where knowledge and reason are prioritized in teaching and assessment, to a practice or ‘competence’ approach – where opportunities are created for students to develop and reflect on a range of skills and abilities [3].

Where diversity works best is when groups collaborate in constructing and defining problems, questioning the current order of things, exploring scenarios, and imagining solutions and consequences. All things that designers do well [4].

It is the environment of research intensive universities that reinforce the broken cognitive approach [5], Blackman suggests, when the type of environment that is needed is one that (to quote Blackman):

“encourages ‘design thinking’: practical, creative problem solving that explores alternative solutions for better future designs, whether products, services, policies or artworks. This iterative, experimental and user-led approach is behind much industrial and professional innovation and although it draws on academic research – which is still very important – it is in many respects a different practice and is embedded in practice contexts.” (p.56)

Perhaps Blackman is thinking along the lines of how Arizona State University have used Design Thinking approaches to redesign their educational programmes and indeed the operation of the University [6]. Perhaps, after a few false dawns, the time for design to play a greater role in higher education has come? Blackman’s paper is certainly a compelling read in this respect though the true difficulty for design remains in upsetting the design of the current order of things.

References

[1] Blackman, T. (2017) The Comprehensive University: An Alternative to Social Stratification by Academic Selection, Higher Education Policy Institute Occasional Paper 17, http://tinyurl.com/yajfjwze [accessed 16th November 2017]

[2] As the originator and chair of the online Open University course Design Thinking: Creativity for the 21^st Century the idea of diversity is central to its operation and success. For further details about the ideas behind the course see: Lloyd, P. (2013) Embedded Creativity: Teaching Design Thinking via Distance Learning, International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 23, pp 749-765. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-012-9214-8

[3] This is not a new suggestion of course. Donald Schön in Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987) makes similar arguments. It is also an approach that has been embraced (at the moment, and ironically, in theory) in the strategy of ‘Practical Wisdom’ at the University of Brighton, where I work: http://tinyurl.com/y8stmdt6

[4] See previous my previous blog post: Stop talking, start thinking: The architecture of reasonable doubt

[5] Previous blog posts have been about how Universities are teaching outdated theory and knowledge in a world that is changing rapidly:
What’s Real in the Real World? Or The Economics of Intangibility
Design Education in the Wired Weird World

[6] Arizona State University’s transformation and growth through using design methods is described in Crow, M. and Debars, W (2015) Designing the New American University, Johns Hopkins University Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/38428

 

A Dialogue with the Future: Design Thinking and the 21st Century Imagination

I gave my inaugural lecture at Brighton University in December 2015. It draws on a few of the blog posts I’ve written in this blog* and sums up my current thinking about the idea of  Design.

Here is the blurb:

Design, the ‘D’ in TED*, has well and truly broken out of the Design School. In fact it made its escape some decades ago but still retains its potential to develop our collective imagination and enrich inter-disciplinary dialogue.

In this lecture Professor Lloyd will draw on over 20 years of research and teaching to trace a journey from the cognitive activity of the brain to the architecture and politics of democracy, and from Bitcoin to football to education. The linking thread is design thinking and he will argue that understanding design as a process of dialogue is not only fundamental to an ethical engagement with the world, but vital to securing an equitable future for all.

*Technology Entertainment Design: Ideas Worth Spreading When one considers the sheer range of talks that fit under these three words, you realise how important the idea of design has become.

Here is the Video (42 minutes):

Here is the Transcript (opens in a new window):

A Dialogue with the Future: Design Thinking and the 21st Century Imagination (pdf)

*And here are some references:

1. The story of Aaron Swartz is a compelling one. You can see the documentary about his life here: How to Kill a Designer

2. The mystery surrounding the inventer/designer of Bitcoin has been going for some years. I talk about it in Nakamoto’s Last Theorem. However, in the past six months the story has developed considerably. The Australian computer scientist and cryptographer Craig Wright has claimed convincingly to be the originator of Bitcoin and his ‘coming out’ tale is excellently told in an extended piece in the London Review of Books by Andrew O’Hagen.

3. I talk about how Design relates to football here: Dolphin or Shark? Designing the Beautiful Game

4. Design Education in the Wired Weird World starts with architectural education but moves on to talk about the possibilities of Design Education more generally, it also discusses The India Report by Charles and Ray Eames which I touch on briefly in the lecture.

 

How to Kill a Designer

In a past post I wrote about the mysterious design genius of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and on BBC television recently was a documentary about another internet shaper – Aaron Swartz, who played major parts in developing RSS feed technology, Creative Commons implementation, and the social news website Reddit. The documentary is called The Internet’s Own Boy and is available (courtesy of Creative Commons) through The Documentary Network.

I urge you to watch this to gain an account of how global politics is lumberingly, awkwardly, waking up to the democratic power of the web and how that, paradoxically, is threatening democracy, or at least what passes for democracy in the western world, post Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. It is a hopeful, then utterly heartbreaking, account of how someone with technical genius and political skill, someone devoted to democratic ideals of openness, and with the energy, creativity, and organisation to really achieve change, is slowly and deliberately brought down.

I hadn’t heard of Schwartz before I watched the film but it is clear how much hope was invested in him. What I was struck by was a T-Shirt he wears in a brief scene about half-way through the film (shown below):

Aaron Swartz’s T-Shirt: “Design will Save the World”

“Design will save the world”, it says, and it’s easy to see why he might have seen design as a key force in the projects he was involved with: creating forums for knowledge exchange, making ‘private’ research information public, and allowing creative outputs to be used by all. But designing at this level is becoming a dangerous and political business, which probably means it is absolutely vital that we try to protect and support those people who know how to do it.

Design’s Political Agnosticism

At the Victoria & Albert museum in London at the moment is a very good exhibition called ‘Disobedient Objects‘ [1]. The exhibition shows examples of things produced for protest: against governments, against organisations, against building programmes, against injustice. Wandering around the show sparked lots of ideas, but not only for me; I overheard one girl knowingly saying to another, just in front of me: “are you getting blog inspiration here?”

She could have been talking to me, because that is what I was thinking too. The exhibition made a link for me that had previously been a bit hazy. It was brought home when I read the following quote, describing one of the exhibits. Try and work out who the ‘they’ is at the beginning:

“They have to be strategic with how they deliver their message. This can mean engaging tactically with the media, or finding ways to circumvent it and speak directly. Today, this involves immediate hands-on forms of expression alongside appropriating cutting edge technology and social media.”

The ‘they’ could be a Barak Obama political campaign – or any politician’s for that matter. It could be Facebook or Google or Vodafone, or any new start-up. It could be David Beckham or Victoria Beckham or even Brooklyn Beckham.

It is, in fact, a general description of how social movements voice dissent and hence how objects can be appropriated for ‘disobedience’.

The use of all manner of objects in civil disobedience shows how creativity and design is essential to form an effective protest. Police using tear gas? Make a gas mask out of a 5-litre water bottle (see below). Need to lock yourself to a post to stop a road being built? Make a lock-on device using a metal pipe with nuts, bolts, and chains. Need to distribute information quickly to avoid censorship? Make a pamphlet bomb.

An improvised gas mask from ‘Disobedient Objects’. The original caption reads: “The Turkish Government used record amounts of tear gas to disperse the 2013 Istanbul protests. Protesters devised homemade gas masks as a form of protection” (p.48)

The quote was interesting to me because of my teaching in the area of Design Thinking. Rewind to 2009 and I was working for The Open University to put together a new distance-learning course called Design Thinking: Creativity for the 21^st Century. Currently over 4000 people of all ages and abilities have studied the course – most with no previous experience – and learned about the many ways in which the methods of design can be applied [2].

In putting the course together, and arguing for the University to invest a considerable amount of money in a new area, I justified it in one primary way: that teaching design methods to people who wouldn’t normally have access, or the confidence, to undertake such an education was empowering; a way of engaging more with the world around and consuming less. Design to self-actualize, in other words, not design to produce more pseudo-useful stuff.

Of course there were other aims too. Giving people a foot up to study Design in a Design School, for example, or using Design Thinking to contribute creativity to an organization or service. And that is where the link I made above comes in; Design Thinking is an ability that can be used equally effectively for business or, bizarrely, for protest against business. In fact, ironically, the strategist planning an effective protest probably has a lot more in common with the strategist in politics or corporate business than they’d like to think.

It does perhaps reveal the strength and weakness of having a Design skill too – its political agnosticism. Design can be used for good or ill, protest or profit, obedience or disobedience.

Resistance! Original caption reads: “In December 1981 martial law was imposed in Poland in a crackdown on Solidarnosc, which was declared illegal. Supporters wore tiny badges with the Solidarnosc logo, which signalled their support for the movement in a way that could be easily concealed. A more oblique strategy was to attache a ‘moc rezystor’ (power resister), taken from a domestic radio, to your lapel – a play on words which indicated resistance to the government and support for pirate Radio Solidarity.” (p.116)

I like to think that my teaching in Design Thinking produced, if not outright disobedience, then a measure of resistance (as one of the objects in the exhibition nicely exemplified, see below). I mean resistance in the sense of a questioning of the world around.  But that may no longer be the case, if it ever was. The Design Thinking course is now being offered as part of the Business Studies degree, and they’ll be no Protest 101 any time soon I’d wager.

[1] Floor, C., Grindon, G. (2014) Disobedient Objects, V&A Publishing.

[1] As a nice piece of Design Thinking in itself, the description about how the mounts to display the disobedient objects were put together is worth reading.

 

Design Education in the Wired Weird World

I was at an interesting talk last week at the Royal Society of Arts and Manufactures in London. The talk was on ‘Design and Democracy’ and was given by Alistair Parvin, co-founder of WikiHouse, an organization that promotes open-source construction (in opposition to the developer-led variety). It’s well worth watching, as he brings the threads of modern architecture and market economics together, and you can see it here.

Trained as an architect it was enlightening hearing his views on design education in the Q&A following the talk (also in the video above). In the UK, architectural education is regulated by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) who set out the basic requirements for curriculum. Becoming a qualified architect takes six years. Part 1 involves 3 years of study at a University, there then follows a year of working in architectural practice, and finally Part 2 involves a further 2 years of study. At the end of all that you can just about call yourself an architect.

Parvin remarked that, for his peer group, coming back to study for Part 2, following working for a year, was a strange experience. The general view was that the world that they thought they were being prepared for in their Part 1 qualification didn’t really exist. The commercial business of architecture had completely overridden their fledgling theoretical and ideological concerns. Architecture, as they had been taught it, seemed like a figment of imagination; a flight of fancy.

What has changed? Like many creative professions there is a paradox at the heart of architecture. While espousing free-thinking, and indeed helping to create large scale changes in society, the institutions that educate and regulate creative professions are themselves deeply resistant to change. The institutions are institutionalised! Old and established traditions and methods are rehearsed and repeated year after year as wide-eyed graduates emerge, blinking, into a wired and weird world.

So the web has changed the world; in terms of information, communication, connectivity, global consciousness, social mores, you name it the web has changed it.

The real question is how has design education changed? The answer is, not much at all. The design-tutor-sitting-across-the-table-from-the-student-and-critiquing-their-work model is alive and mostly well, albeit played out in slightly different environments – at the computer rather than the drawing board, though, even now, often still at the drawing board.

There are signs of wear and tear. Expertise, it seems to me, is so distributed now, and insight so available, that tutors are fast becoming institutional ciphers; the necessary but increasingly ignorant gatekeepers to qualifications. If, for example, I wanted to teach you about democratic design, why would I not direct you to Parvin’s video and ask you to critically examine the concepts he talks about? We could talk about that thing about ethics at the end – who is responsible if an open-source structure falls down? Or his idea that democracy is problematic – does that hold water? and is democracy an unalloyed good thing anyway? Or I might ask you if the commercial business model he sketches at the beginning is reasonable and viable?

In short, Parvin has already done a lot of my teaching work, there on the web. My task as a modern teacher is more curatorial – to select, explain, criticise, and interpret – rather than to attempt to transfer knowledge (my out-of-date knowledge!) from my head to yours. Design education, rather than teaching technique, is finally free to think about larger issues of value, connectedness, system, responsibility, or maybe just how the wired world is such a weird place.  Perhaps design education is scared of the freedom?

Another thing that you can find on the web (right here) is a well-worked blueprint for a different kind of design education.

In 1957 Charles and Ray Eames were invited by the Indian Prime Minister Nehru to make recommendations about how the poor quality of consumer goods could be addressed through better education. They spent six months travelling around India trying to put their fingers on the problem and came up with one of the most elegant and spare solutions I know of: an institute and curriculum for design education.

Charles and Ray Eames 1958 India Report

Their 1958 report, at a mere 15 pages, outraged many in the Indian government who had expected a rather thicker tome. The long-but-short size, at 272 x 145mm, suggestive of legal documents, is about as far away from a golden section as you can get but adds a modern integrity to the contents. Its structure, though graphically not strictly consistent, is a model of economy and clarity. In its sparseness is its beauty and in its beauty is its longevity; each sentence – each phrase – carefully constructed to address the local context but to sound overtones of general, and still relevant, significance.

Part 1 outlines the problem:

“the change India is undergoing is a change in kind not a change of degree. The medium that is producing this change is communication; not some influence of the West and East. The phenomenon of communication is something that affects a world not a country.” (p.3)

Take away ‘India’ and place ‘the UK’ or ‘the US’ or ‘China’ in its place and you’ll see how up-to-date this analysis remains.

A well-chosen example of current practice illustrates the potential. The Indian Lota, a drinking vessel, is deconstructed to its constituent parts – size, materials, use, transport, manufacture, heat-transfer, cost, pleasure, aesthetics – parts, now consciously itemised, but never consciously designed. The potential is the transfer from unconscious to conscious.

Part 2 outlines the solution:

An Institute for Design – students, staff, projects, methods, estate, and impact – of which the Eames identify only architectural education as a precedent for the type of educational experience they have in mind, and then only a poor one:

“As a group, young architects are apt to be involvable in general social problems and in theatre, dance, music and other aspects of communications. They tend to have a higher than average potential for enthusiasm. This is important because if they are enthusiastic enough they might discover some of the values that exist in the commonplace things that surround them. There are some good clues in the everyday solutions to unspectacular problems, in vernacular expressions that are so often ignored” (p.7)

Mostly, however, they advocate a mix of disciplines for both students and staff. Possible students could be engineers, economists, mathematicians, philosophers and (yes) housewife, while staff should teach physics, physiology, music, graphics, logistics, statistics, and demography (to name a few). The Eames are clearly framing the institute as a place of further learning where existing disciplinary and professional knowledge is brought in to service through the lens of design. Proto Design Thinking in other words.

And then there are the projects: A, B, C, and D. Each a little off the beaten track, but all complexly connected.

Project A is aimed at understanding what is valuable in the world around us; what would you take from your house when it burns down, for example? What do you keep in your purse or wallet?

Project B is an open-ended study into a design theme, shelter or lighting for example, with the aim of producing prototypes, histories, models, future visions which can then be communicated through exhibitions, films, and literature.

Project C is to look at the design of a system, in terms of its values, identity, components, dress, technology, relationship to government. The post office is chosen as an example (note: I would include a discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 59 on this project!).

Project D is to design for an occasion: a parade, investiture, or sporting event, and illustrating the Eames’ analogy of the designer as a host. An occasion is a tricky problem, they write:

“it seems light but demands a knowledge of prime objectives [and] demands unity” (p.13)

And that is the report in a nutshell. You think it is light, but it states objectives clearly, provides an integrated solution, and has a unity and depth that belies its presentation.

There is a brief section outlining how the institute should engage industry and government, jointly working on contemporary problems, and that’s pretty much it.

What stuck me is that what the Eames advocate is pretty similar, across almost six decades, to what Parvin advocates: design is about understanding the world, and making good connections in that world. He said something that I thought was valuable and to which, I think, the Eames would have assented. So, as the wired weird world demands, I Tweeted it to the community.

A Tweet is not exactly a Lota, but it’s not far off, so maybe it’s a good place to start for tomorrow’s design education.

What’s Real in the Real World? or The Economics of Intangibility

Three articles in close succession caught my eye last week. The first article was on the discipline of Economics and how students are demanding that the subject be taught differently, following the financial crises of 2008. Their claim is that their subject, ignorant of the increasing disparities in wealth distribution, is out of touch with the realities of the modern, networked, conflicted, and frankly greedy world.

“The real world should be brought back into the classroom” they argue, “as well as debate and a pluralism of theories and methods. This will help renew the discipline and ultimately create a space in which solutions to society’s problems can be generated.”

The intellectual space that the new Economics creates, they argue, could prepare the ground for real change. The students want interaction and engagement between disciplines; they want up-to-date and relevant. No more Nash equilibriums and neo-liberalism for them then; beautiful minds or not.

That economics is out of date is ably illustrated in the second article about Gerd Gigerenzer, whose work on the limitations of human rationality followed that of Herbert Simon. Sorry, Nobel prize winning economist Herbert Simon. The problem of many of his peers, Gigerenzer notes, is that they:

“begin from the assumption that various ‘rational’ approaches to decision-making must be the most effective ones. Then, when they discover that is not how people operate, they define that as making a mistake: “When they find that we judge differently, they blame us, instead of their models!” ”

Oh dear, another black mark for models, this time in Psychology! No students revolting their yet though.

Gigerenzer illustrates this with reference to Goldman Sach’s executives blaming their firm’s 2008 collapse on a ‘25-sigma event’ – something as likely as winning the national lottery 21 times in a row; i.e. something very, very, very, very (keep adding ‘very’s ad infinitum) unlikely.

Certainly not the type of event that would happen, as the aforementioned executives subsequently claimed, five times in five days.

The outdated models of the economists, coupled with the outdated models of the psychologists, have produced a quicksand unfit to generate any type of solution on. A fine old intellectual mess, in other words.

Which brings me to the third article about how to value intangible assets. The article begins:

“The link between economic growth and building things – preferably big things – is irresistible to politicians, but it makes it easy to ignore the less camera-friendly assets, from brands to intellectual property that make a modern economy hum. Spending on intangible things such as intellectual property, brands, software and design now outstrips spending on buildings and machinery in Britain.”

Is it now politicians, with their GDP obsession, who have got their models of growth (possibly given to them by the economists) all in a muddle? Most likely (with a probability far from a 25-Sigma event).

The ‘problem’ that is now slowly being solved is how to accurately value intangible assets, like Intellectual Property.

It is an algorithm that comes to the rescue, not us infallible humans (aren’t alogorithms created by humans? – ed.). Software called Yongle searches worldwide patent databases to work out if an idea is a novel one. Once this novelty is determined the idea can be valued economically. That means that not only can a market in intangible assets start achieving steady growth, but also that a truer picture of what actually keeps the economy ticking along can be gained.

This all sounds suspiciously like another way of making money to me, and I think that is what the students were objecting to in the first place. There are things that are happening now that can’t be valued because they are about the value system itself, not a value in a system of value.

I shall leave Robert F. Kennedy to elegantly express the problem in his 1968 address to the University of Kansas (16:20 – 18:10):

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

The first paragraph has a similar structure to the last paragraphs of James Joyce’s short story The Dead, but it is the second paragraph of the Kennedy speech which strikes the stirring chord.  To me it is about better education.  How can we appreciate the qualities of life that Kennedy refers to except through better education? The students seem to realise this, and perhaps they are right; it’s time for academics to catch up with the real world.

In 1968 a certain Nobel prize winning economist called Milton Friedman was also giving an address. This time a presidential address to the American Economics Association titled: ‘The Role of Monetary Policy’ in which he concluded:

“By setting itself a steady course and keeping to it, the monetary authority could make a major contribution to promoting economic stability. By making that course one of steady but moderate growth in the quantity of money, it would make a major contribution to avoidance of either inflation or deflation of prices. Other forces would still affect the economy, require change and adjustment, and disturb the even tenor of our ways. But steady monetary growth would provide a monetary climate favorable to the effective operation of those basic forces of enterprise, ingenuity, invention, hard work, and thrift that are the true springs of economic growth. That is the most that we can ask from monetary policy at our present stage of knowledge. But that much-and it is a great deal-is clearly within our reach.”

Hmmm, ‘steady but moderate growth’ – we’ve not seen that for a while have we?

 

Panini and the Design of Experience

As the 2014 World Cup creeps up on us, a favourite from my youth has returned once again – the Panini sticker album. Based in Modena, Italy (though long since bought and sold themselves and stuck into a multi-national portfolio) Panini have masterminded the pre-world cup lives of schoolboys worldwide since 1970. What a good, simple, and long-lasting idea this is: produce a blank album and sell the stickers to fill it up. Once you’ve started sticking it’s difficult not to get obsessed with filling every empty slot, particularly if you are predisposed to a collector mentality.

Panini World Cup 2014: The partially complete England team.

The first world cup album to be produced featured 271 stickers and was for the 1970 Mexico world cup that England were fancied to win, but didn’t, losing an early 2-0 lead to the Germans in the quarter finals. The numbers for the 2014 world cup tend to work against you though. With 32 teams taking part that means a total of 639 stickers to collect and at 50 pence for a pack of five stickers that means £64 if every sticker was unique, but therein lies the problem. In reality you’re likely to spend well over £100 to get anything like a full album.

Fortunately, a whole e-cottage industry has grown up, helping you to get just the stickers you need far beyond the school playground. Swapping forums, eBay, and Amazon all come in handy and even Panini helps you out: “using the internet to order your missing stickers is quick and easy”, the back of the 2014 album states, although the maximum you can order is 50 stickers.

The sticker album idea relates to design and education quite well I think, after all, in a superficial way education is nothing more than collecting a series of grades from assignments that are set. You need the knowledge and experience of course – that is where the teaching comes in – but essentially you are sticking stickers into an album.

That makes the design of the album interesting. Panini strike a nice balance with their album design. Although it looks fine without the stickers, you realise that as you add stickers, the pages take on a nice weight, like a medieval document. Through adding stickers the album itself becomes more substantial, which makes the activity inherently motivating .

Panini World Cup 2014: The not-too-far-from complete Italy team.

The album/sticker combination is valuable in another way because, as the stickers are collected over a period of time, it naturally implies an extended time-based, experiential element. You learn about making deals, about markets, about scarcity, and about strange attachments.  Unlike other kinds of designed product, the final product is only officially complete if the users put the right things in the right places, the ‘things’ being tokens of a deeper level of experience.

Another collection experience this weekend illustrates this further: a cycling randonee, or series of checkpoints on a route around the Isle of Wight.

Completed 2014 Isle of Wight Randonee Check Card

The image above shows a stamp for each checkpoint I visited along the route. The first checkpoint gives you the card (or album) and the each subsequent one gives you a stamp on your card – six stamps for a full-house! And between each checkpoint you have an experience; a riding-along-a-road experience that takes in landscape, odd processions of motorcyclists, brief conversations, cute dogs, nailed-on tudor houses, overgrown gardens, and leafy woods saturated in birdsong.  Behind the stamp is experience, and behind experience is wonder and learning.

The sticker album is a framework for learning, and that should always be a well-designed framework.