I have just started reading, but here are some of the most interesting quotes I have gathered so far:

One of the assumptions implicit in all this local food stuff is that we farmers are dying to make a connection with our customers. In many cases, nothing could be further from the truth. All we want is to sell corn and be left alone (xvii, Blake Hurst).

Indeed, more trade and ever improving technologies remain to this day the only proven ways to lift large numbers of people out of rural poverty and malnutrition (xxvi).

There is, however, still no agreement on the true meaning of ‘local food’ (or ‘foodshed’ or ‘regional food system’) among its various proponents (5).

In fact, if modern-day activists were to cling to any consistent notion of ‘local’ food, a truly ‘made in the USA’ agriculture diet would be limited to turkeys, some farmed native fish and shellfish (including Atlantic salmon and Brook trout), sunflowers, blueberries, cranberries, Jerusalem artichokes, and some varieties of squash (6).

More to come as I get deeper into the book!

-Kelly

Something we’ve come to realize in the last couple weeks, is the increasing subtle distinction between co-creating and transformative design. After reading Kelly’s post about transformative design and the article she sited, we began to understand the roles of the different stakeholders at the library.

We held an action research session in which we spent 3 hrs with different groups of 50 teens at a time at the library. In that session we ran the teens through a design process of generating ideas, sorting and categorizing them regarding different resources they have access to and would like access to in their communities. The categories we outlined were Food, Fun and Find Out. As the groups of teens moved through we realized that some of what we were trying to do was more transformative than co-creative.

We led the teens through a process that they might not have understood completely because it is such a diversion from what they are used to in a school or outside of school setting. This unfamiliarity was detrimental to their participation. Even though we suggest that everyone use the design process, it can be a huge departure from the regular way that people give information to an authority figure. Upon analyzation, we realized that our time might have been better served by running the staff through a process like that to familiarize them with a different way of working. There must be a better way to have more of a co-creative atmosphere when working with the teens.

Although the sessions went well and the teens were responsive for the most part, we learned a lot by being critical of our methods and tools when addressing teens. It is hard to quantify the effect that we’ve had on the teens and the validity of their responses. By using current library staff to run an event like that we would be able to get the co-creative input from the teens while doing transformative design with the staff. This is important because it allows our role to be that of facilitator and preparer while leaving the staff who the teens are familiar with to interact with them. Our understanding of the distinction of these two ways of working are crucial for moving forward when engaging the staff and the teens at the Library.

In starting this library research we are discovering the difference between outcomes and outputs. From what I understand, outputs are the more concrete deliverables that are consciously constructed and produced by us, whereas outcomes are more intrinsic, theoretical abstract changes that take place as the result of our actions. Both outcomes and outputs are done with intention and guide what actions we take when looking to measure a certain outcome or output.

The outcomes are hard to measure but are often asked to be quantified by organizations who have numbers to consider at the end of the action. It is a way to quantify the value of the quality we are bringing. This is often a difficult task because it requires the foresight and knowledge of what will be most important to measure throughout the process. This is at odds with our design process because it forces metrics and outcomes of things that can’t necessarily be determined before the start of the project.

In our work with Good Company Ventures we are also learning the business world. Metrics and outcomes are definitely engrained in the language of business. It has proved a nice compliment to the organizational structure of the Library and helpful to the way in which we approach the library interventions and actions. It can be difficult to predict which of the variables we are changing will have the greatest effect on the final result.

In the next few weeks, Kelly and I will be working through a logic model to give us a look into the measurable aspects of our work at the library. This will give us some insight into the areas that we should measure in the work we are doing. As for the outputs, documentation continues!

To add depth to our primary research, we have been gathering and studying secondary research sources that are relevant to our current understanding of the project scope. These include texts such as: “A New Culture of Learning” by: Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown, “Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out” by: Mizuko Ito and team, and YouMedia’s resource bank for all grantees of the MacArthur Teen Learning Labs grant–all pertaining to studies conducted around new ways of learning for teens. In addition to material focused on the user group, we also have many references for design-specific research methods that we have gathered over our first year, but I wanted to share some key quotes from one that I feel is particularly applicable to our work with The Free Library: “Transformative Services and Transformative Design” by Daniela Sangiorgi.

The paper goes into depth about the recent shifts in service design: ”Service design practitioners have been moving from providing solutions to specific problems, to providing organizations with the tools and capacities for human-centered service innovation” (Sangiorgi 31). Our practice throughout most of our graduate work reflects this shift, and we have created an approach that uses the specific “problem” as an entry point to engage with the organizations and communities in a transformative way. We find that this method differentiates us from other consultants because “the emphasis is therefore not only on developing external ‘mechanisms of involvement,’ but also on implementing internal ‘mechanisms of change’” (Sangiorgi 35). Instead of working with an organization and leaving the relationship with only a set of specific recommendations on a piece of paper, we engage in a co-creative, collaborative process that works to build methods and tools that the organization can use when implementing current and future initiatives. One essential aspect of this transformative process involves something Alex mentioned in an earlier post–action research. Sangiorgi highlights the outcomes of this practice: “Consciousness-raising or ‘conscientization’ is the central concept of community action research. It is intended as a self-reflection and awareness process that leads from seeing oneself as an object responding to a given system to a subject that can question and transform the system itself” (Sangiorgi 33).

As our summer work with the library continues, one of our greatest challenges will be to measure and communicate the impact and value of transformative services and design. In the paper, Sangiorgi specifically speaks to five metrics for measuring action research: ”Quality in action research is measured looking at five types of validity: outcome validity, democratic validity, process validity, catalytic validity, and dialogical validity” (Sangiorgi 37). All of which we need to  explore further and adapt to our specific work.

We look forward to collaborating with the Free Library of Philadelphia in this capacity, and believe that it will help to position them as a leader in establishing what the new role of libraries is in the future.

The exterior of the Village of the Arts and Humanities.

Last week at the library was quite eventful! Tuesday morning we met with K-Fai, the library staff person who runs the Hot Spot at the Village of the Arts and Humanities on Germantown Ave in North Philadelphia and supervises the teen space after school in the central branch of the Free Library. She gave us a lot of great insight into how she sees things working at the library and ways to engage the teens we would be working with. We got a great tour of the Village space, heard all about the programs it offers to the local community and its plans for the future. Since K-Fai works at the Village but through the Library she has a nice perspective with a foot in both worlds, the Library system and the outside organization.

Teen space in Philbrick Hall before the installation.

After meeting with her, we traveled back to the Library where we met Andrea, the head librarian in the Popular Library in Philbrick hall where the teen space is housed. We told her about our plan to create and installation in the teen space with hanging images of possibilities that the teens could see in the space and collages made by the teens. They would be able to vote using red or green stickers on things they liked or didn’t like about the images presented and created by their peers. We wanted to talk with Andrea about the set up of the installation and how it would work. She was very excited and receptive to our ideas and willing to give us a try.

Kelly cutting and compiling images for the installation.

Next we move on to Teen Tuesday. After speaking with Aurora, the staff person  who runs Teen Tuesday, we arranged to do a collaging activity with the teens. We gathered a bunch of free catalogs and printed photos from the internet of things that were in previous research studies and some assumptions about what teens would want to do in their space. This is where the Action Research comes in because we took an action in order to further our research. That action informs a type of feedback which we consider when moving forward. It is the best way to hear and see what the teens are doing and saying in the moment without looking at secondary research of words on a page.

Teens hanging out at Teen Tuesday.

We didn’t get as many collage participants as we had hoped for at Teen Tuesday. The venue was more of a space for the teens to just hang out, eat and play video games. This is a social time for them that has little to no programming. It was hard to engage teens in that setting, but we still got about 7 to 10 collages out of the 40 or so teens that were present.

Meghan and Kelly setting up the images.

The day after Teen Tuesday we set up an installation in the Teen space at the Library using cardboard stands and yarn to hang the images and collages. We designed signs that were worded clearly for the teens to understand. We cut the red and green stickers into strips of 4 that were combined with a little note that explained what to do with them. After setting up we left all of the materials for K-Fai to create more collages with the teens after school without us being present. She was very excited to be included in the making and engaging of the teens.

Teen post it suggestions on the main sign.

Fast forward one week, and we got a lot of great feedback and responses. The teens even used post its and papers to write specific ideas they could not illustrate. It was great to see the level of engagement. Andrea asked that we keep the installation up into the next couple weeks while school let out and a new group of teens start using the space. The response was great and we are excited to see where this leads. It already has started debunking some of the misconceptions we had about what teens want to see and do in the space.

6.11.12_ActionResearchPhotoProcess

We compiled the images from this process and made a small booklet that illustrates the steps we took to prototype this installation and action research method. We hope it will help others to understand how and why we performed this type of research and what it taught us.

In an effort to both describe what we do as designers, our position in the world and start a collective to operate under, Kelly and I cycled through a million and one different options. It is a hard job to come up with a word or a few that accurately portrays who we are as designers and what type of work we want to be doing. After reading countless books, Kelly came across the word Indwelling in a book, A New Culture of Learning. This word is everything we were searching for and is even described in terms of a Collective Indwelling. Indwelling was coined by Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian/British polymath (according to wikipedia). The word indwelling refers to a “a familiarity with ideas, practices, and processes that are so engrained they become second nature”. It is also an adaptive process in which those processes that have become second nature are flexible to adapt to new conditions. They do not disappear but rather change and evolve as inquiry, and ultimately learning, takes place.

This is exactly what we do. We take knowledge and interest, ask with inquiry in a designerly way to inform decisions and solutions. The notion of a Collective Indwelling is one we hope to bring to those we work with. A truly multidisciplinary way of learning and understanding is one in which every individual has a personal indwelling that can help question and inquire about other processes and relate to themselves for understanding. But together, those indwellings become collective. The group forms inquiry and understanding around a central topic in which individuals share a common goal.

- Alex

We have officially kicked off our thesis exploration! The research we will be doing this summer will help us to evaluate the direction we want to head at the beginning of the fall semester.

Our main focus, as well as the topic of upcoming blog posts, will be the work we are doing with the Free Library of Philadelphia. We previously collaborated with the Library to plan and host a community workshop to generate spatial, experiential and service-related ideas for a newly renovated space in the Central Branch. For our work this summer, and hopefully into the next school year, will be developing a new teen space with programming.

Specifically, we will be conducting research with the internal Library staff, the “extensions” staff–branches and hot-spots (internet access in areas without a library branch), and the users of the new space–the teens. In addition to our primary research, we will also be referencing two main secondary research sources. The first is a recently published study by The PEW Charitable Trusts Philadelphia Research Initiative titled: “The Library in the City: Changing Demands and a Challenging Future,” which outlines six main areas in the Libraries’ strategic plan that we will be incorporating in our work. These broad themes are:

• a commitment to new technology
• a redesign of the library Web site to increase virtual access to library resources
• a reorganization of staff to increase accountability for discrete initiatives
• greater branch specialization to respond to specific community needs
• a focus on intra-staff communication and staff training
• increased marketing and promotion of library services

The second is a study conducted by Mizuko Ito and team, titled: “Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out, Kids Living and Learning with New Media.” It discusses the new ways in which kids/teens are interacting and learning with new media technologies and how this can be leveraged in spaces such as the one we will be designing with the Library.

We look forward to sharing our thesis exploration with you and appreciate any feedback or comments you have along the way!

It was very interesting observing the students as they talked through situations where they felt that they had no choice in how they reacted to the adversity. The training teaches the students to realize they have a choice, understanding how to recognize their inherent beliefs at the time of the adversity and by choosing to react more responsibly they in turn become more resilient.

As we sat through this training we realized that although resiliency can be a natural character trait, it can also be taught. If this is true, how could resiliency training be translated into a larger scale with entire communities? When presented with adversity–like an economic crisis–how could a community employ resiliency tools and skills to recover quickly and adapt to the new conditions at hand?

Last Thursday night we had the opportunity to attend the Design Management Institute’s Night Out at the Bressler Group in Philadelphia. It was a surprisingly applicable and helpful. The varying perspectives from all aspects of the design field brought a new and different view of the work that’s being done in the real world and validated my expedience here at UArts in MiD regarding collaboration in the design field. It was fantastic to find a professional group that values our work and is established that we can enter and feel connected with. It was refreshing to see such a diverse group of professionals agree that not only is collaboration important, but how to foster it across generations, cultures and spaces.

It was particularly interesting to hear Julie Lorch, a graduate student in Penn’s Integrated Product Design Studies, explain to a group of mostly generation x and baby boomers, how aware millennials are of their stereotypes and why they are or are not true. Julie pointed out that millennials are stereotyped as needing instant gratification, constant feedback but also sensitive. They are technological natives, having grown up with computers and the internet. They feel for the world and want to make it a better place and believe they can. They feel that the problems handed down to this generation are solvable and are extremely optimistic about solving them.

With the discussion that followed, a peer millennial suggested that gen-x and baby boomers allow millennials to be experts on some things that they do no understand (twitter, technology in general) and not even contribute to the conversation on topics in which they feel they are the experts, even though millenials might offer new insights to that topic or discussion. This makes collaboration very difficult and she suggests that they be open minded and more accepting. The discussion then turned toward facilitating collaboration through an atmosphere and physical space and people who know how to mediate conversations between different types of people. This is where the skills we are learning in MiD would be valuable, to bridge the gaps between the generations, cultures and work spaces.

(Photo courtesy of Dominic Prestifilippo)

Long standing frustrations with standardized testing have always inspired me to consider some realm of educational reform in my thesis exploration and although l have yet to figure out the way in which I will do that, Alex and I had a conversation with her roommate, Willa, and Willa’s co-worker, Areisha, the other evening that offered some new insights. They work at YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School, a unique, one-year program that provides high school dropouts with a chance to earn their diplomas while learning vital job skills and providing valuable community services. We discussed academic learning vs. character building and how most educational institutions focus almost solely on book learning without much emphasis on creating self-awareness and learning character building skills (which most relevantly apply to obtaining and sustaining a job). Areisha mentioned a recent movement to enact a “character report card” alongside the typical academic report card and talked of a program their school had started called “resiliency training.”  In this training, students go through exercises to become more self-aware of their actions when confronted with conflict or tragic events and learn of behavior-changing tools that help them to be more resilient. Although it is still early for concrete statistics, research completed by the school has shown promising outcomes and graduates are better prepared for the professional world. What if schools (kindergarden through college) placed the same weight on character building and job skills training as they do on academic learning and standardized testing prep? Would graduating seniors be better prepared for the “real world”?