I almost never re-blog what others have already blogged. I have no ambition of becoming a meta-blog or congregator of other stuff. But this next quote is totally amazing. I saw it first at metacool last week and it is a quote from John Meada. Somehow John Maeda seems to blow my mind once a year:

To create is to potentially embarrass oneself in front of others. It is about the courage to be oneself and to be seen as oneself. Putting ink to a page, or pressing one’s fingers against clay, or typing a line of computer code, or blowing glass and realizing mistake. Or success. With everyone watching. But most importantly, you.

So it dawned upon me how important it is to be creative. Because it means you have within you infinite capacity to experiment. You are unafraid to go somewhere new because you are creating a new thought process about your own creativity. You know that if you stop and no longer challenge yourself, you cease to be creative. You become still, silent, and the bow no longer connect with the strings and music is not made. And you do not exist. You show you do not have the courage to exist.

Creativity is courage. The world needs more fearless people that can influence all disciplines to challenge their very existence. Creativity is reflection aimed not at yourself, but at the world around you.

So, get to work people. Change the world.

The Integral theories of Ken Wilber simply blows my mind every time I get into contact with them. Or more precisely they invigorate a deep sense of hope, potential, energy and synchronicity. Because when such ideas can be put together, then what more is possible?

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.

I got a son in January almost 9 months ago. This is, of course, very nice and a blessing. But it also was the reason why I stopped meditating. I know a lot of people are considering meditation and wondering what it could ‘give’ them if they gave it a try. So here is an account of what happened the day I stopped myself.

When a little guy like that arrives and your couple becomes a family, a lot of things happen. First of all you start going to bed earlier because you start getting up really early and wake up in the nights too. So you have less time in during the day to sit down by yourself, simply because of all the practical things that need to get done. Furthermore you need to put more time into your relationship, since they two of you must deal with a large number of new things: new roles, new relations with other family members, new demands for separating work and family time and so on and so on – the list is long. At one point I even argued to a friend of mine that when you become a parent it is an illusion that you are the same – you simply become a different person. I have changed in so many ways that, at that time, it seemed I had changed completely. Not totally true but the change is considerable.

The point is that all these changes, natural as they are, seemed to be in opposition to the time I could take to meditate.

So I stopped.

Maybe I sat down once or twice a month, which is like nothing. One core demand in meditation is that you make it a daily practice – something you do as a part of your daily routine. There are many different ways of explaining why this is important according to which tradition you have as background for your meditation, but the bottom line is that it just is important. Do it daily if you mean it. Make it part of your life-practice.

Since I stopped I have experienced an increased sense of stress. I became increasingly more difficult to distance myself from daily, weekly surges of tasks and thoughts, considerations and choices. I guess most people know how it feels when there are too many items like that in your perspective. However, I had just recently felt how it feels when you are not in that space.

This stress silently creeps up on you exactly like that frog in the pot on the stove. You don’t really notice it, but suddenly it is too much. Of course you feel various sudden increases in stress, but at one point I simply discovered that my overall capacity to deal with/ignore stuff is too low. Either my limit has gone down or I have gotten myself into to many things. Actually in my case - as it would be to most other people in this situation, I guess - it was both. My new job is more demanding than anything I have tried before. Even though I am on 75% paternity leave I carry the stress around for days. More and more details become obstacles in your hands, not simply because you limit you perspective, but also because you do thing too fast and loose touch with them.

This picture is from today when I had to hurry and get my headset for my phone out to make a call. I was really trying to do it fast, while doing a few other things – and the picture shows the result.

Overall I have recently been working to refind my alignment to the world. I guess that this is what meditation can do for you. Alignment. I don’t know if I am especially prone to stress or I just work in a stressed environment, because I basically like it, but I know that the meditation was one of the ways I have previously made a foundation underneath all the thoughts and choices.

Tomorrow I am getting up at 05.45 to meditate before the little Lauge wakes up. He is reaching an age where he is getting into a routine himself, so everything considered – now seems like a good point in time to get back to the routine.

Recently I have been receiving news and questions from people who are staring to use parts of my dissertation work. This is fantastic, since when you write such a thing you will inevitably at some point wonder if anyone will ever read this stuff - apart from the comitee and your advisors.

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.

I just remembered how an old friend once told that on some days he just hated the internet: He would read stuff and think of how anoying it was that people were smareter than him and he would get stressed with the mere thought of all the new good stuff that would get out there, that he had to read, know about reflect on and maybe even be smarter than. I get that feeling to sometimes too. There just too much junk out there - and what’s worse: there too much good and interesting stuff out there too. Just browse around Facebook and look at what people I like are doing. Or see what the best people are doing in my feed-reader. Or surf the papers I would love to read and theorize about. It is just too much - some days.

But that’s then when we need to remember Stowe Boyd: One of his many points is that living like this on the edge of the internet - in web 2.0 (old hat) - is the indication of how the future will be. right now there is a general rule of thumb that one person can have a certian number of friends, a certian size of social circles and even a high number of things/issues we can focus on without getting stressed. Boyds argument is that all this is changing and growing through how we use the web today. Or you could say: don’t mind the fellng that you can’t oversee the whole and be calm that way - just dive in to uncertainty, share everything that you do, think, feel, blurp, see and then these blurps might just connect to other blurps and become an intelligent conversation possibly even with learning potential.

So the point is: share more than you can think is needed.

I can’t fully live up to that myself, but it is an interesting ideal

How can we define design? design is such a contended concept that it might not even hold any relevance to try and make a good efinition of it. Design is always in flux anyway so why even bother? Onthe other hand design is such a wide spread activity that making good definition of it might enable better design and better design teaching. So I have been struggling a bit with a good definition of design to see if it could be contained in one simple sentence:

Design is the conscious exploring of potential futures

This definition actually contains some of the most important aspects of design, in my humble opinion. Compared to Herbert Simon’s “Design is devising courses of action aimed at changing current situations into preferred ones” it contains the exploratory aspect of design which I think is important. Both definitions point to the fact that design is an activity focused on the future. “Devising courses of action aimed at (…)” means that the actual activity of designing means to work on a future plan that will achieve a particular outcome. In my definition I try to emphasize that design is not only to lay plans, but entails the testing of these plans, somehow. Simon’s definition also contains, what he has later been heavily criticized for, the notion that design is problem solving. I don’t agree with this since there many designers designing e.g. clothes who are not faced with an actual problem, except if we define yet another trendy top as a problem with a more desired situation - namely a new successful collection for the manufacturer.

Neither of these definitions, however, have a built in exclamation that design has to have an aesthetic edge. This is because there are so many people working with design from various perspectives, and a good definition needs to be able to contain these perspectives. People often want to use a definition of such a field to exclude others from the field. That’s OK. But in the specific situation of designI think I think it is counterproductive.

“Design is the conscious exploring of potential futures” also tries to convey what is known as “the imaginary leap” or “the design gap”. Design is an activity taking place in present but directed towards the future. At the same time design is taking place in the future and directed towards moving a potential future towards the present. Looks like this.

The big dark arrow is design process in present time. At some point the designers needs to imagine a possible future - no more research or asking users will grant the design idea. This means that the designer takes an imaginary leap and jumps the gap into the future. The design work from here is then to reconnect this future vision with reality in the present. This might involve sketching, prototyping, calculating models etc.

What do you think?

Check out the new and updated website of the design, interaction and architecture lab Kollision.

Kollision is made up of probably some of the nicest people in the design industry. My former colleagues Tobias and Andreas are now fully devoted to making the lab a real design office. Over the years they have made an impressive amount of interactive and visionary projects ranging from interactive art over architectural proposals to hardcore consulting for contractors.

Update: The Kollision group resent the connotations to ‘nice’, which I used in the first part of the post.

We are not at all nice people. We are the best, not the nicest

as partner of Kollision Thomas Delman (tall guy in the middle) states. Here we see 3/4 of the team ready to play hardball. Notice the cool cleanness of the artist studio behind them.

Just stumbled on the Kitchen Budapest group from Hungary. a colleague and I share a test-user access to one of their beta-products ZUI Prezi - a (pretty cool) non-linear presenting tool.

The Kitchen is a research group doing both screen-based stuff like the ZUI prezi and physical interactive installations and prototypes - check out the ‘projects’-section:

Kitchen Budapest, opened in June 2007, is a new media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space and are passionate about creating experimental projects in cross-disciplinary teams.

It is super cool to see new places emerging to push the edges of this design and HCI field.

At Reboot a few of the best talks circled around the conference theme of FREE by talking about the individual freedom. And they are right in saying that the level of freedom we enjoy in western societies today are important: they give us opportunity to create value and thus add to our societies, they allow us to express our opinions in direct opposition to the institutions of power, they safe guard us against crimes etc. etc.

Furthermore they are also right when they say that the extreme level of freedom that we enjoy on-line, where we can create, share and rearrange information freely might very well be good model for how we should deal with problems in organizations, in politics and so on.

The individual freedom is a cornerstone of the society we live in the western world, and which billions strive for in the rest of the world.

So why talk about collectivity and why design interfaces, services product for the collective user?
It’s a simple and yet complex question.

Complex answer part one:
Collectivity and collective intelligence sounds to some as the system talking over control with the free individual. Based on experiences of oppressive political or corporate structures, surely communism or raging capitalism is the opposite of freedom. Within such perspective the skepticism is valid.

But we have to look at collectivity in at least two ways: in this first way collectivity contains and constrains the individual, but in a second perspective collectivity is that which builds on the free individual and goes beyond the free individual.

The simple answer to the previous question is that the experience of radical freedom one can have when participating in a well-tuned collective is freedom beyond the individual. If you have ever experienced or participated in a successful brainstorm or ideation process, you might know what I mean. This type of collectivity is not only powerful but also explosive with evolutionary potential - the stuff that points to solutions that brings us forward as a whole…

Complex answer part two:
It all has to do with structures of consciousness. And one day I will be clever enough to explain what that means in a blog post.

Just finished my talk at Reboot 10, got of stage and sat at the next talk by Lee Bryant (brilliant by the way).

I notice a guy looking at a picture of me on Flickr. And then also from twitter.

It’s crazy how fast stuff’s out there. And magic how it just evolves by individuals just adding stuff up there.

And the talk went.. well, not too good. I got nervous because this is a subject that I am not altogether certain with. I haven’t presented it that many times and it is still in the loop of creation. AND I really think it is important.

Collectivity is definitely the next big step in our mutual evolution. I think it is important that we make interfaces that have intentions in them. Not that I as a designer wants to decide what people should do, but I think it is important to notice that we are at the brink of a large scale change. And we can’t just rely on the creative impulse of random individuals to make the solutions themselves. We should have interfaces, services that help people contribute more to getting the change moving in the right direction.

How do we facilitate positive change on the global scale? How do we make interfaces that get people to work on important subjects faster, better? Social tool beyond entertainment?

How? It is a difficult subject to address, because I am not out to bad-mouth social softwares, I am here to demand more of social software. I do agree that linked infrastructures are the best - possibly only way to work with the current levels of complexity… How do we get more…

I’d love to participate in these design processe - because they are important.

Well, lets Reboot some more and see what happens.