Some years ago a friend of mine, Finn Voldtofte, was hosting some meetings that he had decided to call CIPI – collective intelligence practitioners initiative. He wanted it to be a forum for sharing experiences with reaching that place with a group where the group is smarter than its components – where are sort synergetic high energy occurs. The participants were mostly facilitators and process consultants, but the idea of facilitation was expanded a little, which allowed a researcher such as myself to join them. First time I was there, we were sitting four people on floor in front of Finn’s fire place for a very intense and deep conversation.

I don’t remember the course of events precisely, but the CIPI meetings was the bed from which the Moving the Edge convention sprang. On that link you can read more about it, but the site itself is defunct. The CIPI meetings went on after that, but ended haltingly when Finn died in December 06.

Now the CIPI has been reinvigorated by Martin Ehrensvärd and Maja Rottbøll, and I am happily participating again. The new life that has come to the new circle also invites me to think about the experiences and impact of the first round of CIPI, and how it has influenced present and future.

As I said, CIPI was a life-navigating circle to step into. This was because of the strong theme of our work together – Collective Intelligence. Ever since this series of sessions of conversations, where we were able to reach a very strong shared ‘field’ of intelligence, I have had a vision of working more to develop this capacity in myself and others. I has become a deep part of my identity. It was a massive experience to be able to intentionally create a space where you can know more than you usually can, and see more and reach for more than you usually can.

CIPI was created in order to explore the principles and practices that would create a field of collective intelligence. These principles and practices were collected and explored through observing the social energy in the group and how this energy shifted around and which actions triggered which changes. I think we laded on a list of social and personal practices, which is what each participant in the circle should watch in himself while also atending and remembering the readiness of the social practices. In one way the work was never finished, because it cannot be fully described. But I remember a distinct feeling of going in circles back to revisit the same basic principles over and over again. A feeling of “maybe we actually have a good-enough image of what we need”. A feeling that started a impatient build-up in me. “What would we be able to do now with this insight?”

When I talk about collective intelligence I talk about a intentional practice of personally engaged encounters. Not random stuff happening on the internet. Sure a lot of activity on the web and at large social events can be seen and described as manifestations of a form of intelligence that is beyond the individual. Like wikipedia or linux etc. In my view it is confusing the concept of collective intelligence to spread it over such broad subjects, but right now I do not have a better word for the experience than that.

Basically our explorations were done as a group of people sitting down in a circle and exploring what would emerge. The concept of “magic in the middle” guided us to reach into a shared field, and from there explore any concepts and ideas that would emerge.

As a designer I can see the enormous potential for this form of collaboration in working with solutions to future potentials. We could create circles were people could collaborate from their highest possible capacity. Design is inherently about exploring the unknown or the not-yet-known. It is a curious practice. I see the ideas of collective intelligence as hinting at a new way of doing design. As design spreads into new sectors of life and business, I would love to see this kind of processes unfold in innovation team, in organizational development and ideation processes. The simple but challenging process of brain-storming is actually a kind of collective intelligence practice. Without much demand on the inner work of the participants.

Collective intelligence, in the way we worked and still work with it, can be linked to spiritual practices,  is highly applicable in organzations, innovations, ideations and any other kind of creations – processes where the end point is unknown and the participants must lean forward to reach for new insights and this is best done when building energitically onto what we all bring to the circle.

For those who read Danish you can see more on the current facebook group – some of it is in English, actually

I have just (again) spent an evening on YouTube watching whatever I could find on Ken Wilber and “integral politics” – try it, very interesting. Previously I have read his books “A Brief Theory of Everything” and “A brief History of Everything”. You can borrow my copies if you want.

To those who have not yet bumped into Ken Wilber yet, I can tell you that he is one of the most popular philosophers in US today. His books have been translated in a multitude of languages and he has written a fair number of books already.

Integral thinking and integral theory is a way to describe how there are differences between people and what these differences are. To see these spectrums unfolded is very interesting, and Ken Wilber is then also excelent at explaining how the theories can be applied to understanding politics, sex, science, spiritualty etc. If you want to get yourself a blast and connect it with your interest in the upcoming American election, then I can reccomend:

• Integral “Third-Way” Politics
• Ken Wilber – Integral Politics
• Clinton at Davos

The question for me then becomes: since I am so in-tune with Wilbers’s thoughts, and since I have this big interest in design and innovation, then what is the overlap between the two? Is there a way to think about design in terms of integral thinking? Has it been done already, and I am just unaware of it?

I can see integral thinkings application primarily in terms of the processes of design: When involving users and stake holders from different levels and gravitational points of development. This would mean to integrate integral thinking into areas such as participatory design, innovation facilitation, service design facilitation, process design and other consultant-esque design fields.

But it might actually also work in the “internal” design process – that part of the design process where the designers are creating something for the market. Would it hold any value to think about how a product or a service should be designed according to the level of development of the audience that you are designing for? Maybe it can be conected to the work on Design for Making Meaning…

I have no clue whether I am on to something here. The only hint is that I resonate with these theories, and there must be a reason for this.

First I was contacted by Therese Hansen, a student from the computer science department at University of Aarhus, who was doing something with social software for her master thesis work. Here is her post about it – in Danish. She is using my frame work describing different levels of social interaction to be designed for, and interestingly enough she has given it a name: DSDC from them beginning letter of each of the four levels: Distributed attention, Shared focus, Dialogue and Collective action. And here I had just called the framework “levels of social interaction” plainly without thinking about the branding effect of giving a framework a real name. so DSDC it is – and hooray for user participation. Therese and I met to talk about the framework and round a few design ideas. She is now experimenting with an integration of wordpress and twitter, as can also be seen in her blog, and she might be aiming this mashup to profesional conferences.

I guess I should make a page explaining the key features of the DSDC framework…

A few weeks later George Por told me he is working with a colleague on a working paper about collective learning and the collective learner, in which he is using one of the other key concepts in the dissertation: the collective user. The collective user is a way to describe a shift in focus in the design process. Normally a social design concept, service etc. would be aimed at a single user participating in some kind of social process (at certain levels – DSDC :-) ) The concept of a collective user twists the idea of the user away from the individual towards a focus on the social gathering as a whole. As an example you could design a service for the whole family – its dreams, goals and needs – instead of designing the service for the individual family members. This shifts a different set of design objectives into the foreground. Basically introducing collectivity and interaction beyond individuality is going to be one the next interesting things of this social web (2.0) that is emerging right now.

Erik Stolterman’s The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research from International Journal of Design, 2(1), 55-65 - and

Research Through Design as a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI from the SIGCHI proceedings from last year.

Whenever I read research in this field – as good as the above – I get enthusiastic and eager to participate in the discussion. I made some arguments in my dissertation about the nature of design research, and I am going to expand and pursue these further in the coming months.

But when reading Stolterman’s paper on design practice I also miss being in practice and doing design for clients full time. Although the research projects I work on have practical issues and require design work, it is very different from doing client work. The goal is different and the criteria for success is not necessarily that a design has success in the market place. The goal is often that we explore some interesting form of interaction based on its theoretical implications. This makes for a much more free and undefined design task, and in design (consulting) work it is often the constraints in the project and the direct interactions with a client that make an interesting project.

So, like many other design researchers, I have this dual focus on participating in leading edge discussions of the foundational concepts of design, research and interaction, and at the same time a desire to get out of research and into the dirty reality of designing for clients and the market place.

Thirdly I also have a strong desire to work with social change and collective intelligence in an organizational and social way – disregarding design and technology, and just focusing on facilitating healthy and evolutionary gatherings of people who can make a real difference right now. I tried to combine these foci last year while being an independent consultant, but it was too difficult to explain the span to potential clients.

Having three core interests can be a good thing for being able to see and approach the world from these three different perspectives. But it can also be an unhealthy state, as it it can lead to a state of wanting – regardless of where I am and what I am doing, I want to do something else, which might be able to better fulfill my highest potential.

A clever friend of mine once told me that I should think of the goal as “where my highest potential meets the needs of the world”. So either stay focused and on the edge with whatever one is doing, or look for where one’s diverse interests overlap and create your perfect platform.