Helsinki Design Lab helps government leaders see the "architecture of problems." We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working—we call it strategic design.
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On Monday we launched our latest (and last) book, Legible Practises. This post shares the thinking behind the book, but if you just want to get your hands on it you can download the full PDF or order a copy via print on demand.
We wrote Legible Practises because we hope to bring attention to the craft of involved in stewarding institutions towards new new behaviors, new roles, and new purpose. This stems from a hunch that built slowly over five years, which is best explained in the preface:
...We have been lucky to participate in a global conversation with communities spanning from design to public service, technology to activism. Although each has its own set of tools and approaches, what struck us was the degree to which similar themes emerged again and again. The words may have been different, but the nature of the challenges and the styles of response were often remarkably comparable. Yet each spoke as though they were working in relative isolation.
Perhaps this should be no surprise, given the challenge of a world where many things seems to be changing, including the ways we live, eat, communicate, and just about everything else. As our needs span the silos of today’s society, the boundaries of our disciplines and the relationships between them will inevitably also have to adjust. Some are already doing this proactively; they know that it can be lonely on the edge.
To be an effective practitioner during a moment of flux is to be concerned with the discipline of one’s work as part and parcel to achieving better outcomes. The most accomplished practitioners do this naturally, but are often too busy to stand back and reflect publicly on a meta-level, let alone take the time to package and publish their approaches legibly. Sharing tends to focus on the endgame, without much elaboration of how it was played. When we read about promising social innovations in faraway places, we get half the story: sanitised of missteps, triumphant over adversity, effortless.
But hop on a plane and spend a day with one of these practitioners and a different story is revealed, a richer and more informative one. Last summer we had the luxury of doing just that. We listened closely to project teams as they explained their work in detail. We hosted three sessions, each bringing together two cases for a simultaneous discussion, concluding with full notebooks, large audio files, and our heads happily aching.
With this book we have zoomed into the promising practises of six groups to highlight shared tools and approaches, as made legible by concrete examples. In many ways this was a selfish act, one motivated by our own inquisitiveness and interest in learning from the best. More importantly, however, we hope to spark a conversation about the deep craft of social innovation as a reminder that, even when dreaming big, the details still matter.
Nesta, MindLab, IDEO, Community Solutions, Tironi & Elemental, and Government Digital Services were gracious enough to allow us to study their work. They provided the big dreams. We hosted a series of discussions, each bringing together a pair of cases, and then set to work distilling the outcomes into this text. Our work was to make the bridge between the dreams and the details explicit. We did this because we think that it might help others (including ourselves) learn quicker.
Each case is presented with a basic overview, a narrative that's a few pages long, a 'network of practise' diagram, and a series of points of practise that are illustrated by the case in question but by no means exclusive to it. In the one page overview we itemize the goal, theory of change (in our words), and strokes of luck. This last item is particularly important: if there were aspects of the project that would be impossible or extremely difficult to replicate, we've attempted to notify the reader of that upfront so that they can immediately start looking for alternatives.
The narrative does what narratives do: it gives you the overall arc of the story, describes the starting point and the status of the project (at time of writing), and introduces the main characters.
The 'network of practise' is a diagram we've invented to show a web of relationships between the points of practice in the book. This comes out of a taxonometric problem that we encountered when compiling the list of points of practice. On the one hand, it felt like we should divide them into a taxonomy with categories such as tools (data map, project blog, audio interview), methods (create upside, public beta), qualities (work at the extremes, create upside)… but this felt premature given that we've only studied six cases. We could certainly create a taxonomy, but that already implies a formality of knowledge that we were not comfortable with. One of the starting points of the study was the fact that different disciplines were all aiming at the same problem, which indicates that this moment is one of flux more than fixity. Using this network rather than a taxonomy avoids the problems of moving from one set of silos to another, and instead puts the emphasis on the individual points and how they connect.
As an open-ended system, the network diagrams show linkages between items and help the reader come to their own conclusions about the relationships between them in terms of scale, importance, and directionality. The diagrams include a mix of the points in the case in question, other cases in the book, as well as some points which are not covered at all in the book. Again, open-ended. Still in development. Evolving.
We've put our emphasis on decomposing the stories into building blocks: it's up to you to recombine them in whatever way is useful. Twopoints interpreted the networks so that each takes on its own visual form, its own identity. This leads to a good question: might we find a way to draw different kinds of institutional changes as typologies that have similar forms? Could we draw similar challenges in a way that helps an emerging community of practise develop a shared language for 'spiky problems', 'flat problems', 'round problems', etc? We have not engaged with that possibility here, for want to a large enough body of cases to do the idea justice, but perhaps at a future date.
The cases take on their own identity through shape.
Next come the points of practise, which are a mix of tactics, tools, qualities, and probably some other broad categories we've neglected to see. Each point of practice is told through the case it's attached to, but is relevant to other cases as well (as exhibited in the network diagrams).
A subset of the points of practise are illustrated with drawings by Lucia Walter. This decision came out of a desire to add some visual content to the text. Choosing between photos and illustrations was rather simple: people rarely take photos of their process (unless they're like obsessive like the author of this post). But resorting to illustration was also important because it gave us a chance to bring the texture of handcraft into the book. We selected Lucia because her work in pen and ink is obviously rendered as a playful mix of purpose and happy accident. The style of the illustration is an embodiment of the notion of stewardship that we explore in the text itself.
Evident handwork
Legible Practises is not attempting to be a definitive. Rather, we've hoped to nudge the discourse(s) on institutional change, on social innovation, on strategic design in a direction that engages the material practices as seriously as it does the cognitive ones. Like all of our publications, we've taken the liberty to experiment with the formatting and the execution without letting that diminish the thinking. Whether any of these experiments have worked it up to you to decide. We hope you like it.
In parallel with publishing Legible Practises as a hardcopy book on beautiful paper, with two color inks, and a swiss binding, we've also made it available via print on demand using Lulu.com. We have experimented with Lulu in the past and while it's not as nice as bespoke printing, their global distribution is important. By making the book interiors black and white we've also been able to offer it for a very low price.
Black and white interiors mean that the books are cheap. In Studio is $13 USD and Legible Practises only $7.
And while we were at it, we also made In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change available via print on demand.
T-Minus 3 days till HDL 2013.
That means we're on site at the venue doing AV checks, finalizing meals, printing programmes, and the like. Today we moved boxes upon boxes of HDL books, posters, and other material to Kellohalli. We'll be giving them all away to attendees.
The weather is by design, yes it is.
Marco testing the AV.
Justin, Jonna, and Marco finalizing menus.
Apart from that, we're working on a revision to the website that will serve as the final update. There won't be any major changes, but we're taking the opportunity to adjust things like the navigation and organization of the site so that it's as useful an archive as possible for people who happen upon it.
Because Everything Is Connected, redoing the website means also revisiting some of the publications. We've created print-on-demand versions of In Studio and Legible Practises, both of which will be cheap and available globally.
OK, back to event preparations.
Print on demand is pretty convincing!
POD yields little surprises like this image problem on the cover of In Studio. That's fixed now.
In case you missed it, earlier this week we shared the story of the HDL visual language, how we brief photographers, and a few of our favorite spots around town (for those coming to the event and finding themselves with a bit of free time). That makes this a four-post week.
We have about 200 people joining us for HDL 2013 next Monday and a good portion of them are coming from outside Finland. In case you're not familiar with the city, here are some suggestions for things to do when you're not at the event.
Meals
nb. Restaurants in Helsinki can have idiosyncratic hours and often book up quickly. It's best to check online before you visit, or even give them a ring.
Atelje Finne
14 Arkadiankatu
Modern Finnish cuisine in what used to be a sculptor's studio.
Kolme Kruunua
Liisankatu 5
A little slice of Finland circa 1950. Try the meatballs or the salmon soup.
Dong Bei Hu
Korkeavuorenkatu 47
It sounds odd to have Chinese food in Finland, but this is some of the best to be found outside of the Middle Kingdom.
Glass of wine
Latva
Korkeavuorenkatu 25
Occupying a quiet corner in one of Helsinki's leafier neighborhoods.
Open late
Putte's
Kalevankatu 6
Pizza and drinks with grad students and cool kids.
Coffee or a small breakfast
SIS Deli
Kalevankatu 4
Coffee, tea, and snacks in a crisp space.
Fratello Torrefazione
Yliopistonkatu 6 (inside the Kluuvi mall)
Good coffee & good people-watching on a busy downtown street.
Good Life
Kolmas Linja 17
Part of Finland's new wave of coffeeshops.
See a bit of Helsinki
Kulttuurisauna
Hakaniemenranta 17
Relax in Helsinki's newest (and best) wood-fired public sauna. Like none other.
Ateneum
Kaivokatu 2
Go for the paintings by Finnish masters Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Hugo Simberg.
Suomenlinna
Pohjoisesplanadi 39
Have a walk around this island fort just off the cost. Public transport takes you there and back from Kauppatori, the market square.
Bring home something nice
Design Forum
Erottajankatu 7
Selling a wide variety of products by local designers.
Artek
Eteläesplanadi 18
More than sofas, but those are nice too.
Iittala
Pohjoisesplanadi 25
Glassware and other things for the home since 1881.
In the design world there's an obsession with "representation," or the act of representing ideas and concepts in media (be it a poster, a book, or a building). In part this obsession stems from the recognition that an idea in your head is only as useful or as interesting as your ability to articulate it in a way that can be shared with others (in whatever medium suits you and them). How you present your thinking matters. But the term designers use is is "represent", not "present." The former shyly evokes two important relationships: one in time and one scalar.
To "re-present" an idea is to perform its meaning anew. Expressing something in new ways, perhaps unexpected ways, has the potential to help us refine the very thought that we were trying to express in the first place. This is the essence of "talking through" a notion: making successive attempts to explain something helps clarify the thing itself. Representing ideas is not frivolous, it's essential. Representation helps us understand the essence of what we are trying to share.
But "representation" is also important in the realm of political science, where it implies that an elected official represents the interests of their constituents. This is a scalar relationship where one vote effectively represents many, even if the many might each have their own variations if asked directly. Implicit in this one to many relationship is a basic fungibility: because it's impossible for one vote to capture all of the nuance of the many that it stands in for, there's always the possibility that the 'one' can change. The same can be said for any act of visual expression: when a book goes to press, for instance, the cover that is chosen is not some inherently perfect crystallization of the ideas, but it's the right expression at the moment a decision was made, for the people who made it. The selected expression sits at one terminus of a family tree of options (and families of options).
In the spirit of being concerned with representation in both senses of the word I thought it would be interesting to show some of the background thinking that went into the HDL brand itself. Before beginning work on the first HDL website, which would become the public face of our initiative, we invested some time (and a little money) into clarifying our visual language. To help us with this work we hired TwoPoints.net, a Barcelona-based graphic design firm who we've now had the pleasure of working with on multiple occasions over the past four or so years.
When I met with them in their small studio we started from zero. What is strategic design? Having arrived on an overnight flight from California, I was speaking in the weird metaphors that proper jetlag inspires. They giggled when I described strategic design as being concerned with "hairy problems". Even still, Martin and Lupi try to sneak this into our collaborations.
But no, it's not as literal as a hairy McNugget (though that would be problematic). By hairy I meant to imply that the sorts of issues we're concerned with are unclear, they're ambiguous, fuzzy, in motion, and often just hard to grapple with. In short, they're difficult.
The second starting point was the legacy of HDL itself. We had just recently discovered a wealth of photographs and other documents hiding in the archives. In 1968 the first HDL-related event was stylish, but because of its era it was also very paired back, appearing almost minimal to today's eyes. We wanted to evoke this and connect with the lineage of our thinking.
Photos: Kristian Runeberg
Third is the nature of Sitra itself. As an organization that reports to Parliament, Sitra is a serious institution, and our design-related work is no exception. We asked TwoPoints to respect the seriousness of work we were setting out to do by giving it a downplayed visual expression. The result, as you will see, if a visual language that can be rather austere in its most basic applications. We've carefully avoided graphic frills over the years. We've embraced the blank space, the negative space.
After our first meeting Lupi and Martin spent a couple weeks digesting the contents along with Irene Hwang of Constructing Communication, who was also contributing to the project. We asked them to provide us with a style guide that defined a visual language for HDL, including all of the basic such as typography, colors, and a family of layout concepts (expressed as common grids that we use in all documents).
When they finally came back to us, their document, a styleguide for HDL, opened with this:
The driving idea of the visual identity is drawn from the “space” occupied by the strategic framework of HDL, which draws together a diverse group of actors and entities from various fields. These actors, each one a specialist in his field, contributes a unique point of view within a group that can offer a more holistic definition of the problem, thereby creating the opportunity for a more effective range of solutions.
Here you can see the genome of our Studio Model already emerging. The general notion of a collaborative, multidisciplinary, design-led framework is certainly at the core of the Studio, but it's also true of our work in general. So how to express this visually?
In terms of visual representation, this space is filled by heterogeneous visual styles that serve to represent the actors with different backgrounds functioning in a holistic way.
The conceptual framework of this particular visual identity, in contrast to a “normal” branding, avoids homogeneity or uniformity in favor of highly diverse visual styles occupying the same space. Yet, given this embrace of heterogeneity, the visual identity maintains a sense of stability in order that the identity expresses trust, confidence and recognizability.
Thus, the visual identity is both flexible and constant. The identity contains two zones: 1) A flexible image space that may house corporate elements or images that illustrate a specific content and 2) The wordmark space. On the following pages we will outline the different applications of the word- and imagemark.
Facing the challenge of representing HDL as an entity that would constantly evolve as we collaborated with different actors and entities, TwoPoints chose to eschew a static logo and instead designed a visual system that is flexible, yet in all of its iterations remains recognizable.
The system is comprised of five key elements:
1. HDL elements. Shapes abstracted from the letter forms of 'HDL'. We always use at least one.
2. Colors. We are relentless in using HDL blue (Pantone 072 or RGB(0,0,120) for the curious) if you haven't noticed, and that's thanks an initial decision up front that we would use 'blueprint blue' in all of our work. The other colors are used for accent.
3. Network elements. These imply connectivity, intersection.
4. A 'composition zone' defined as a space to be filled with image and typography depending on the application.
5. Grid logic. Basic rules about how to handle negative space keep the logo system from feeling cramped to squashed.
6. Typography. Univers for headlines, Minion for pretty much everything else. No frills.
This set of guidelines provides the building blocks needed to construct a wide range of documents and other visualizations. By spending the time to think about the visual expression—the brand—of our work up front we were able to move quickly at later stages. New publications, new documents, new projects didn't bear the burden of starting from scratch, but they were also not overly-constrained. We had enough freedom to produce a variety of visual expressions that hung together as a family, while each having their own character.
We put this much effort into the visual language of our initiative because that was one low-hanging fruit of differentiation. As newcomers to the market of ideas in 2009-2010 we felt that we would have to stake a claim for ourselves, and while there are a wide variety of very smart people saying and writing very smart things in the communities of social innovation, sustainability, government reform, and the others that we've traveled in, the level of visual sophistication was somewhat lacking.
The ideas are what matter in the end, and I hope the value of our work is determined by the value of nothing other than our thinking and execution. The time we spent on the visual expression of HDL was our way of imbuing what we do with a great deal of care, and in doing so respecting the time and attention that you've given us.
With the trip behind us and the book to press, our focus is entirely on HDL 2013, which kicks off in T-Minus 12 days.
This means our life is a series of checklists, one of Marco's favorite activities.
- Catering? Got it, delicious.
- And they have enough tables? Yup.
- High powered projector? Check.
- Speakers briefed? Done.
- Wayfinding? Working on that one.
- etc…
We have been using Eventbrite to manage registrations for this event and I highly recommend the service if you have not used it before. It just works—and in the process of just working it casts off all sorts of useful data.
The blue spike you see at the beginning there is the first day that tickets were available and we mailed an announcement out to people who had signed up for the launch announcement.
Our conversion rate is about 1/9, meaning that out of every 9 times the event page is viewed someone signs up for the event.
Makes the catered happy. Important.
Data has been on my mind a lot lately. As Justin and I traveled from place to place, the question that kept coming up was, "how do you measure your impact?" We can point to specific successes, such as the number of large-scale timber frame buildings (4) that have taken advantage of the changes to the fire codes that our Low2No project helped unlock. We could (but have not had the resources) to do a business case analysis of the new life that timber construction could breathe into the Finnish wood industry. We could (but have not had the resources) to assess the economic impact of a more fluid food entrepreneurship sector.
What is the economic value currently unrealized because of the quirks of the food service real estate market in Helsinki? These are questions that can be answered on a reasonable timeline with the right skill and time. But when we are talking about systemic changes (like adjusting the emphasis in school curriculums, or even deploying new models for schooling altogether) are we prepared to wait a generation or more for results that allow us to assess outcomes? And will the results come in a form we're prepared to recognize? And while measuring outcomes is one useful activity, it is not the same as learning from activity and refining future activity.
What strikes me is the cost of measuring social and ecological impacts compared to the cost of measuring economic outcomes. We've had more than 150 years of practice (or more) at measuring (and building tools to help us measure) financial results. We'll be lucky if a fluency in measuring other forms of value can be effectively booted up in half that time—not that we should be so patient.
Tech startups offer a useful, yet frustrating, analogy. By virtue of their venture funding, many startups temporarily exist outside the realm of direct market feedback. That is, their founders worry about having a business model and the possibility of making money in the future, but they do not have to worry about finances on a daily basis the way a butcher shop or a plumber might. Venture capital turns income into an externality—for a little while. Yet in the absence of direct feedback from the market, tech startups are still able to make educated decisions based on data: usage data.
By virtue of operating websites and apps via centralized servers, vast amounts of usage data come for free in the form of server logs. The cost of measuring performance is built into the cost of operating an online service.
For instance, I can tell you with a quick glance at the Google Analytics for this website that we've had 4615 visitors in the past 30 days and that 1.72% of them arrived while searching the internet for "Marco Steinberg". The sheer wealth of data available to me, as someone who runs a website, is overwhelming, and this is using free tools available to any site owner. Those who operate their own apps and have their own engineering teams have the ability to further build custom reporting and analytics tools that zoom in on the details they care about most.
Friend-of-HDL Cassie Robinson wrote recently about using data to steward systems. Data, she writes, helps us re-route our actions when needed. And I do agree, but much of what we do is still beyond the reach of useful data. The real challenge is the high cost of measuring non-financial value. How do we make accounting for social and ecological impact cheaper, faster, easier? How can we achieve the same efficiencies enjoyed by services that run on servers for those impacts that only happen in classrooms, on the street, or in a forest for instance? The internet of things is beginning to provide more diverse ways to measure environmental performance by dropping the cost of sensors and making them smaller than ever before. Can we also find ways to lower the cost of measuring human experience, behavior, perhaps even mood? Can we drop the cost and pain of measuring outcomes as a key part of supporting social innovation?
Proving your value is always the obligation of an upstart, but asking social startups to prove their value and invent a way to cost-effectively measure their value at the same time is a tall ask. If you know of anyone who's taking this on as a challenge please drop a note in the comments. We would like to hear more about it.
In other news, Brickstarter was in the Economist last week (week of May 18th issue) and that book is almost done. No, really.
The book we mentioned last time is now—literally right now—being printed. Copies available at HDL 2013.
With two and a half weeks of travel behind us, and just a few more days left on our HDL tour, the most common question Justin and I have been asked is, "are you ready to kill each other?" On the contrary, we're lucky to travel well together. This kind of trip would be impossible otherwise.
Justin is tired.
Bryan is tired.
Today is London, fresh off the plane from Dubai. Later today we will give a talk to the MA Design Futures students at Goldsmiths University. I'm especially looking forward to this, as I hope we can spark a discussion about the boundaries of the applicability of design fiction. HDL has been an attempt to push beyond the fictive and that's one of the things we're most proud about.
Dubai was a quick stop, but we enjoyed a couple of morning sessions hosted by Noah Raford in the Prime Minister's Office. The conversation there was focused on improvement of services, the importance of synthesis (and thus design ability), and prototyping towards solutions. Many thanks to Noah for putting these discussions together. Although it's more recognized for deep spending on hard infrastructure, it was impressive to see the amount of attention being poured into the soft infrastructure in Dubai as well.
Noah and Justin survey Dubai from the PM's offices.
We also managed to zip down to Masdar City, which has long been part of our discussions around Low2No. We've seen Low2No as an alternative model to Masdar, one that's more appropriate for cities with legacies of built form, legislation, and financial regimes that cannot be swept aside. Seeing Masdar in person was enlightening. It's hard for such a hugely ambitious project to ever meet the hype, and there's certainly plenty of room for Masdar to grow into the reputation that it has created for itself. Still, what is happening there now may end up being more interesting than the original Foster master plan. As the planning adjusts to a smaller scope and a smaller budget, perhaps something more modest and more replicable will emerge?
Driverless Personal Rapid Transport unit at Masdar City.
It makes sense to start with small steps, but maybe this is a bit too small?
Generative art 'guestbook' at Masdar.
We arrived to Dubai via Hong Kong, where Justin and I stopped over to meet with Cees de Bont and Alvin Yip of Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design. They shared insights about the current state of design in China that have evolved since our last visit there in 2009, including a growing recognition of the role for designers in social innovation. In fact the Jockey Club, which makes a substantial purse off of track betting, has endowed the Design Institute for Social Innovation. They are just booting up now, but we will pay close attention. It was encouraging to hear about these plans, as it makes the HDL closure easier. HDL is fading out, but the ideas and the practices of strategic design certainly are not.
HKPU's new School of Design building is almost ready. And it's massive!
Hong Kong is currently in love with a giant rubber ducky.
Before Hong Kong it was Tokyo. Justin describes it thusly:
After an overnight from Sydney, we landed on beautiful spring morning in Tokyo. The privilege of arriving at Haneda Airport, close to the center, is that some of the scale, complexity and diverse functions of Tokyo are revealed. From the air, Japan’s industrial base, which is mostly absent in Hong Kong, seems robust, busily making small things very well.
We were invited by the University of Tokyo i.School to give a talk to students, staff and like-minded practitioners on strategic design and our projects at Tokyo Midtown Design Hub. Our gracious hosts Fumiko Ichikawa and Hiroshi Tamura had teed up an engaging facilitated workshop following the talk where the audience was asked to define “what is strategic design” (which we probably didn’t help them with during our talk!) and how could the approach be used to aid in tsunami recovery. With this group the idea of building a rigorous and active feedback loop between understanding the nature of the challenge systemically, and acting to make change via proposals and projects, clearly resonated.
Groups sharing their ideas about strategic design after our talk. Photo: Hiroshi TamuraSimilarly, during a workshop we ran at the i.school on the following day with Tokyo’s leading social innovators, the need to better connect thinking and doing was a popular topic. I was struck by how the tsunami had cracked open the opportunity for individuals to rethink and possibly begin to take on Japan’s structural challenges such as the widespread expectation lifelong employment with a single large employer or the lack of funding for smaller enterprises. The social entrepreneurs in the room seemed well equipped to compel Japan to remake itself as a more resilient society after the crisis.
Photo: Hiroshi Tamura
Photo: Hiroshi Tamura
Photo: Hiroshi TamuraOn our last day in Tokyo, we had the pleasure of visiting ETIC, which has been working for two decades to ignite entrepreneurship among Japan’s youth. Their experience during that time suggests that Japan’s entrepreneurs are heading in the right direction as they are now more professional and impact oriented than ever.
We also visited the Nippon Foundation, which like Sitra, has a broad mandate to spur innovation nationally. Impact, measurement, outcomes, etc. are all ideas that are in the water in their organization as well.
Tokyo was a wonderful stop on our tour. On the one hand, their highly sophisticated culture has produced incredible gains for society, but on the other the dominate cultures of decision making seem opaque and unbendable to many. But events like the tsunami are providing a way in for social innovators like the ones we met at the i.school.
Before that? Australia.
While Justin and I have been traveling, Marco was also on the road with a stop in Amsterdam at a Labs summit and a stop in London at the Institute for Government. Written up here and tweeted here.
Best part of a long flight is that you can write emails without receiving any. It's pure inbox upside.
Amidst all of this, Legible Practises is going to press. No pictures yet of the printing process, but here's a glimpse of what it will look like:
Editing the final draft of the book.
Copies will be available at HDL 2013.
Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney. That was week 217. In other words, a blur.
Some images:
Friend-of-HDL Rory Hyde organized a talk at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture that ended with a great discussion about the future of architectural education + strategic design.
The Difference, a unit of PWC, hosted us for a morning discussion in Sydney. Thanks to Martin Stewart-Weeks of Cisco for the introduction.
Government offices in Sydney, where we gave a lunchtime talk with a group of senior civil servants, have an a very modern building with a thoroughly antiquarian electronic clock. Nice touch.
And we ended a busy day in Sydney with a stop at Arup, who keeps a copy of the Key Speech by the front desk.
Next stop: Tokyo.
The last two weeks have been consumed by the task of finalizing our latest and last HDL publication. It's a book called Legible Practises that contains six stories about the craft of stewardship. Huh? Stewardship, as we define it, is the art of getting things done when many minds are involved in the conceptualization and many hands in the implementation. The six stories we look at are each examples of changing the tires of a car while driving. In other words, changing systems while they're still humming (or clunking and sputtering) along. More on this shortly, when it's actually out the door. Right now a more pressing concern weighs on our minds as Justin and I camp out at a cafe in Toronto: the weather.
Toronto is warmer than expected. Naturally, the day we spend enjoying the city and meeting with groups like The Moment, MaRS Solutions Lab, Ontario College of Art and Design Strategic Innovation Lab, and MASS LBP is the day that's rainy and gray. Today we are frantically finishing work before hopping on the next flight and it's gorgeous. Nevertheless, this has been another inspiring visit to Toronto thanks to the forethought and preparation of Social Innovation Generation. Thanks to Tim and Satsuko!
Hello, Centre for Social Innovation!
A morning discussion about strategic design, ethnography, politics, and more hosted by SIG and The Moment
This is the second stop on our HDL Moi Moi tour. As part of closing down the initiative, we're visiting people in New York, Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Dubai, London, and Dublin to share what we've learned. On Sunday Justin and I met in NYC to give a talk at the Centre for Social Innovation, a newly opened coworking facility catering to social enterprises and others with similar interests. It was an honor to be part of the first event that they've ever hosted in the lovely new space.
Welcome to the matrix... of stairs.
MASS LBP's offices have a CV of sorts on the window. Nice.
In a couple hours Justin and I will load ourselves onto a plane bound for Melbourne. There we have a public talk lined up at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture (see you there?) as well as other meetings around town.
Why we're out and about.
As we move from venue to venue I feel guilty because we keep mentioning the publication that we are about to complete. In fact, if I don't commit all of the final edits before we're airborne, it's going to be too late. So the pressure's on. Justin's working on edits now—very seriously, as you can see.
T-minus 40 days.
This week we hit an important milestone in text. Monday was a long day but we managed to deliver a 100% manuscript for the next (and final) HDL book. We're still figuring out exactly what to call it, but this one is about how people use projects to develop new solutions and new cultures of decision-making simultaneously.
After handing the draft off to the graphic designers I felt an almost immediate sense that we had left out a few things. We'll revisit that after the weekend. In the meantime, things like this are flowing into my inbox:
That's a draft of the layouts (zoomed way, way, way in). I've come to appreciate the shapes of the letters in the typeface Minion, which we always use. Quite a handsome gee, no?
As for unexpected details, here's another one that comes courtesy of the new Finnish passport design:
A pair of upcoming events deserve a mention here. First, Marco will be at the Institute for Government in London on May 10 to discuss design-led policy. More details here. Justin and I will do a similar session co-hosted by the Centre for Social Innovation in New York and the Parsons DESIS Lab. That's April 28th and you can register here.
Hope to see you at one of those events.
Last week Justin and Marco were in Boston to assist MIT's Collaborative Initiatives with a pair of studios. Things up there went well and it ended before the city suffered an attack and subsequent chaos. Luckily everyone is safe and accounted for, but our thoughts are with those who were less fortunate.
