January 21, 2021

Inter-designing

(Intra-designing)

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” African Proverb

Who will we have to become in order to be capable of dynamically adaptive creative collaboration? What will it take to collectively address our shared challenges via design? In Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation, influential design strategist, educator and theorist of Milan Polytechnic, Ezio Manzini describes emerging practices of open co-designing on community, institutional, city and regional and global levels. Manzini develops useful distinctions for the complex interactions between “expert design” (by professional designers), and “diffuse design” (by everybody else). In so doing, he defines emerging roles for professional designers who wish to foster novel inter-sector and intra-entity design collaborations. (MOVED TO STAKEHOLDER ALIGNMENT)

The mainstream design industries, having swung to the extreme of the individual-collective polarity, and having come to emphasize individual agency over collectivism, are beginning to balance this dynamic polarity better by embracing various models of collaboration applied to the context of design. Nevertheless, the modern archetype of the designer-author still dominates and co-creative intelligence-in-action is a human potential more than an actuality at present. Our cognitive habits tend toward differentiation and separation. We are predisposed toward interpreting relations and achievements as singular, authored, owned, and competitive. But what if the designed and built environment stands as a record of an unwitting but collective collaboration with all of existence? From this standpoint, we humans actually know more about collaboration than we tend to give ourselves credit for. Ideally, we cultivate an agile and dynamic balance as author — collaborator. This offers us the challenges and rewards of individual autonomy as well as the healthy ego development that results from the kinds of challenges that we can only encounter among others.

Conscious inter-designing is visionary, co-world making and co-world disclosure. Enhanced capacity to self-author ones life direction goes hand-in-hand with capacity for collaboration. Inter-designing gains momentum as we come to understand teaming as essential for meeting social, technological, and logistical complexities of our times. Teaming and collaboration are essential to delivering quality design work at any scale. Yet effective collaborations don’t just happen spontaneously, but rather they have to be learned and practiced over time until they become embodied skillful means. Our current mental models of collaboration are not as sophisticated as our models of creative practice. Challenges to overcome include design industry norms, and pedagogical and disciplinary norms particularly cultures of competition that deemphasize cooperation. Practices of effective teaming in collaboration are not yet part of the conventional design educational toolkit. In expanding criteria of salient skills and capacities needed of creative professionals to effectively meet the challenges of our complex world, progressive design educators are making co-designing and collaboration explicit objects of analysis by creating learning rubrics around a range of methods of collaborative practice. Understanding discursive analysis as a necessary and crucial, but insufficient mode of knowing, a growing number of groups are action researching collective iterative creation.

One of the things that makes collaboration so challenging is that establishing a truly shared vision is an essential and often overlooked first step, and trust and respect have to be actively present in the collective field. Trust and respect are earned in intersubjective relations so it’s necessary to invest time for trust building, whether team members have known one another for years, are strangers to one another, or represent adversarial positions. It takes courage and generosity to collaborate. The function of the design team can be described as that of a clearing, a spacious holding of all the contingent factors, competing needs, and possibilities. These principles are reiterated from a slightly different frame of reference, that of ideation of value propositions; “It doesn’t matter what you do, it matters Why you do it” by Simon Sinek, in Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action and Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, two TED related talks are also available; ”How great leaders inspire action” and “ Start with why”

The individual designer and the design team are social holons with different capacities for efficacy at individual and collective scale. The holarchy model of social organization depicts social holons as nested within hierarchies of interdependent wholes which are in turn parts of greater wholes. In applying this model to the spheres of professional design we can see that human beings perform diffuse design as social holons. Professional designers interact with complex webs of collective social holons comprised of clients, stakeholders and beneficiaries. The terms “user” or “ideal user” have lost valence because we understand that all design is interface. There are no unilateral relations in a holarchy. There is always reciprocity. Co-design, in emphasizing the “user” as active collaborator, activates more potential within the social holarchy. For example, the self emancipatory potential illustrated by the work of Paul Polak (Out of Poverty, 2008) and the late C. K. Pralahad who have taken hybrid innovation for The Good one step further by conceiving of disruptive business models that treat people experiencing poverty as co-collaborative partner-stakeholders. The late C.K. Pralahad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, controversially linked frugal engineering with user collaborative design and innovation, as well as profits as a means to co-collaborator self empowerment.

Inter-designing takes responsibility for, yet also surrenders to, the gift of emergent co-creativity. Inter-designing teaches us to move fluidly as an independent-interdependent self; as an author - collaborator self. It invites us to be willing to be anonymous and also willing to show up and shine. It invites us to share and claim authorship and intellectual property. It invites us to explore what is beyond the seeming contradictions of competition and cooperation, in service of greater collective achievements as a learning organization. Through shared adaptations to challenges our learning organizations slowly became hardier and more synergistic - and so do we. To create a true vision, some creative chaos and loss of control must enter into the process. That too requires mutual trust. In sharing my perspective about collaboration I want to stress that both individual and collective experience, through the dynamic process of embodied dialogue and practice, transform the creative self and the greater community.

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