Heller Communication Design

The energy, enthusiasm and talent at the iHub in Nairobi is both disarming and infectious.

In a colorful, modern light filled space with a balcony and awesome coffee never more than 20 steps away, the most inventive technological minds in Africa huddle over laptops and intense conversations. Nairobi has been called the Silicon Valley of Africa, and iHub is its pulse.

Last Saturday I participated in an event there sponsored by ADA – African Digital Arts. Fifty five or so designers and social innovators gathered to hear presentations by Kuweni Serious, a small team dedicated to social awareness by empowering youth to action instead of apathy: Nathan Collett of Hot Sun Films: a film maker working & training youth in the slums about filmmaking: and Yvonne Owour, a writer / Film Fest Director / Liberal Arts Educator take part in a workshop based on our new MFA program at SVA, Design for Social Innovation.

Thank you iHub, thank you ADA, thank you to all the wonderful participants who taught me so much about the passion and commitment of African designers. I hope this is the beginning of many conversations to come.

For most of my life I have been a fairly unremarkable participant in the capitalist economy in America – evolving, as I matured, from being paid for time worked to being paid for what I know and what I can do. That’s the typical progression for people in creative fields who make a living by helping businesses and other organizations fulfill their visions. It is an economy of exchange, value created for dollars earned. It’s the old-school-what-made-this-country-great economy where both parties benefit from the exchange, in contrast to the one we know from Wall Street where the dollars traded and the profits earned are the only outcomes, with value realized only for those doing the trading.
There is still another economy to be found in the world of social enterprise – an economy of scarcity. It is evolving as it matures as well. In the beginning of the explosion of mission-driven organizations, many people expected help would be given for free. It was noble to donate one’s time to people who were working to “save the world”. And so many of us did. Until every second person we knew decided to save the world.

It stands to reason that we will not ever, regardless of right-minded missions, make the social enterprise economy sustainable or scalable if we expect everyone to work with only soul-satisfaction as payment. Moreover, if help remains free, we lose one of the most important measures of its potential to ever become self-sustaining.

Reason aside, I have continued to strategically give about 25% of my time for the past ten years to people and organizations that I believe will have significant positive impact for others. I have done this without expectation – or frankly much hope – that things would ever change. I did this because I couldn’t think of anything more or better to do.

Something remarkable has happened, though, that I would never have noticed were it not for the fact that at this moment I need help myself that I could never hope to pay for with money. I find myself on the receiving end of this “kind” economy – helped by people I know and many that I don’t.

The realization that there is an enormous networked resource to draw upon that is real, available and willing can’t be called a surprise but somehow is. There are people who will stop what they’re doing – some just for a moment (thank you Malcolm Gladwell), and others over an extended period of time – to become partners in the endeavor. This is value that no amount of money could buy because it is spontaneous and fueled by passion to contribute. Some of it comes from the people I have dedicated time to, and some from out of the blue.

It is a bank account that should never be balanced, should never be abstracted in the way that we treat or count money. Accountants have no role in it, and deposits cannot be made with the expectation that they can be withdrawn in the same form. It is an economy of relationships, of giving. The degree to which it is fungible makes money look as inflexible as it has in fact become.

Gwendolyn Hallsmith and Bernard Lietaer, in Creating Wealth, Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies, wisely wake us to the possibilities of new systems of exchange by matching unmet needs to underutilized resources. Exciting ideas indeed, but how long will it take for all the local economies to add up to global impact? Gar Alperovitz writes in America Beyond Capitalism that our current economic system, in which a very small number of people make all the money and are encouraged to share with everyone else, simply does not work and never will. Gar argues for a worker-owned model, with ownership shared by all participants. But a shift in our culture from greed to a willingness to share will not happen until we change our relationship with generosity first – recognizing, prototyping, honoring, enjoying, appreciating it so that it assumes a real and present value.

I’m not an economist, which is amusingly obvious to anyone who knows me, but I’m willing to be laughed at here and ask some questions of those of you who are.

Instead of trying to measure the value of everything we are and do in cash, what if we recognized a “pre-cash” economy and studied it as a legitimate on-ramp to money-generating enterprise?

How can we make it part of our mainstream economy? How can we spread it to people in the base of the pyramid who we can’t see, can’t talk to, and who don’t have obvious value to give in return?

What if we could evaluate its useful trajectory to making people and individuals financially solvent? Not all help is equal, after all, some of the kindness circulating in this economy is as useless as money poorly spent.

Could it ever become a kind of bank? Would the corporate world join this experiment and could it ever help them see the value derived in their quarterly earning statements?

What I now see all around me is that this economy of kindness is already gaining traction.
So what if we treat it like it’s real? What if we recognize it as the beginning of something; not automatically discounting it because it is the almighty dollar inchoate but not yet pocketable.

To those of you already heavily involved in this economy of kindness, thank you. I am humbled by the help that has been offered and delivered.

Invest in kindness. It pays.

Susan Cain’s article in last Sunday’s Times, “The Rise of the New Group Think”, was like a breath of fresh air for me – no wait – it was like that moment of euphoria when someone sitting on the subway next to you spilling head-splitting base ten feet in every direction through their ear buds gets off the train and leaves you with your own thoughts once again.

The point of the article is that CREATIVITY DOES NOT HAPPEN IN GROUPS. It’s an important read for everyone in business or education – and one that holds support more than surprise for those of us who spend our lives creating on demand.

It’s why, at MFA Design for Social Innovation, we‘re building a quiet room into our facilities – a place for meditation and uninterrupted thought, deep or otherwise.

It’s why my husband and I attribute our long and wonderful relationship to the fact that we consider it perfectly civil to say, “Would you do me a personal favor and shut the …. up?”

It’s why we named our dog “Ray” after Raymond Carver and his short story, “Will You Please be Quiet Please”.  Which he is not.

It’s why Ric Grefe, Executive Director of AIGA called me a “failed introvert”, and why I loved it.

In truth, it is inaccurate to say that groups are not important and don’t have their role. But it is absolutely critical to dispel this notion that everyone needs to participate in everything trying to be new. As for the adage that “none of us is as smart as all of us”, I have always felt it was at least equally true that “none of us is as dumb as all of us, either”.

Deep understanding of the creative process is required, but scarce in business. There is a rhythm to creation and collaboration – coming together, iterating, going away, using silence, solitude. There are certain components of the process best done in groups, others best done by individuals or pairs. Each has its place, but insensitivity to the natural rhythms is counterproductive and frustrating. Also it’s important to understand every member of the team. Some people aren’t comfortable in white space, when you don’t yet have the solution, which is such a critical part. They need always to know the next step. They can disrupt and shut down progress. Facilitators rarely do the homework to think through who is in the group, what their needs and temperaments are, but it’s a critical part of the process.

I hope that everyone (and there are billions of you) who organize brainstorming sessions and can’t figure out why you are left with nothing but a bunch of post-it notes takes note of  Susan’s article.

There is an African proverb that says, “Alone I have seen many marvelous things. None of which are true.” I would only add, for all of us solitary dreamers…”yet”.

Here’s to loners and introverts. Let us acknowledge the contribution of generalists next.

It’s difficult, on the first few days of a new year, not to think about time. And it’s a missed opportunity for deep connection and learning not to be aware of place, wherever it is we are at the time.

As a society, we are strangely unaware of the multiple dimensions of time, and therefore of its full power. The accepted cliché, that time is money, inclines us to treat it like a commodity – assuming that it’s all the same when it’s not. We buy one silly appliance after another because we believe they will buy us time, always wanting more of it like we want more money. But they don’t.

Time can only be appreciated with longevity as it were, time over time.

It is when we’ve worked on something for years or even decades that we appreciate the depth and heights that patience and considered efforts reward. We are able to see things with perspective that only distance and a long road awards. We see the results that continually working to make something better can bring – different from the fast win, and so much more satisfying. It’s the simple, quotidian truth of cooking, named and championed by the Slow Food movement. I see it all the time with my students, who fight reworking or rethinking something until the turning point comes, when they realize they’ve done work of which they didn’t know they were capable, something far beyond their first idea or instinct. It is true of every deep relationship that doesn’t seem like it could get any better and then does, year after year.

And not all time is equal. Some time is meant for contemplation rather than action – from the Tao, “The sage does nothing and everything gets done”. Other time is right for full throttle action, abandonment of balance and rest in the service of building and creating. Knowing the difference makes all the difference in the world.

These deeply satisfying and illuminating truths about time, like so many other important aspects of life on earth, are rarely discussed in our give-it-to-me-fast-or-not-at-all culture.

Place is nature, community, history, culture, earth, air and water that is specific to one spot and no where else in the universe. Some First Americans believed that you simply could not tell a story without including where it happened, because the place had so much to do with the event itself. At one time the world was filled with, and honored by, indigenous people who recognize the unique sacredness of every river, mountain and prairie.

In 2012, we are mostly abstract in our thinking about place, just as we have become about time. The extraordinary collection of essays edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson, Rooted in the Land, makes the point that nature has become an idea; nature is national parks, something somewhere else. Yet a paltry number of Americans know where the water they drink comes from. We ignore or at best intellectualize rather than sense. We live in bullet points, top lines, executive summaries, goals and agendas. In all of that empty busyness, we tragically lose the things that place has to teach us.

Which is everything. Mark Goldman, in his book about Buffalo, City on the Lake, writes about the horrific “urban renewal” projects in American cities in the 70’s. Communities uprooted from their homes and businesses, gardens and fruit trees flattened and left deserted, all to fit a trendy “idea” of what an American city should be, and politician’s and real estate developer’s neat personal agendas. I imagine people sitting in windowless conference rooms high above the city making decisions based on opinions completely unconnected to the places they destroyed. This kind of slaughter of place simply does not happen if you listen to it, and involve the people who live there. But it is our repeated history.

Elif Batuman’s article on Gobekli Tepe, “The world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization” reveals a religious sanctuary of megaliths built by hunter-gatherers around 9,000 BC. There are several facts contained in this one statement that completely smash our assumptions about hunter-gatherers and the dawn of civilization. Until now, it was presumed that hunter gatherers didn’t make art, they didn’t have religion, and didn’t have the sort of structured societies that would supply a work force for building something so monumental – over such a long period of time. The discovery of this site may upend our ideas about how our modern culture began – from an assumption that agriculture and a hierarchical society came first, then art and religion. Here, Batuman proposes that the desire, or the need to create a monument to their religion may have necessitated the settling of land and structuring of a society with the requisite division of labor to build it.

That’s a big revelation, but one again that, as with any truth, feels like common sense. It is always and inevitably a vision, and the desire to create that drives change. If we could now learn to design change with time in mind, listening to place, we’ll be making progress: To start now, taking the long view, and listening to earth and the needs of community. That would be a happy new year indeed.

In early August I received an email from Francisco Noguera, asking if I’d like to work together. He explained that he was, until recently, Co-Managing Editor of NextBillion, and said, “Together with my colleagues at Columbia University and NYU, I’m co-organizing the 2011 Social Enterprise Boot Camp, a weekend-long event targeted at current and aspiring entrepreneurs offering workshops and sessions that focus on skills critical to succeed in this effort. This year will see the second version of the Boot Camp and we are hoping to bring together 150-200 attendees on November 19 and 20.”

Our three schools partnered on the effort – the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, Columbia SIPA (School of International and Public Affairs, and SVA Design for Social Innovation.

Last weekend, the Boot Camp attracted a sell-out crowd, and was a truly inspiring event, with a character all its own and qualities that many “professionally” run events miss.

By students, for students.
The content was driven by what the participants want and need to know. It was not somebody else’s idea of what should impress them – it was their own self-designed, self-help session.

A hunger to learn.
Students acted like students. They weren’t afraid to ask questions, to push to understand things that didn’t make sense. During Jeffrey Hollender’s wonderful opening keynote, the questions were personal (for them, not him) and practical. There was a no-nonsense quality to it – of an audience filled with people who have an agenda to start something good and big, and no time to waste in getting to it.

A model of collaboration.
It raised a few eyebrows outside our group that NYU and Columbia were working together, let alone inviting an MFA program to play among all the MBAs. We can all learn from the way that these students put differences aside for the benefit of all.
Gratitude.
There was joy in the room, appreciation for the speakers, and for the event itself. Even the somber atmosphere of the NYU School of Law where the first day’s sessions were held did not diminish the smiles and head nodding that spread through the rows of participants all day long.

I would like to add my gratitude here, for the inclusion of Design for Social Innovation in this wonderful effort, for the chance to learn from students as I always do, for the opportunity to design with MBAs, for the extraordinary effort the whole team put into making this so awesome. Thank you Francisco Noguera, Dan Pargee, Catalina Spinel, Fallon Casper, Natalie Tang, Valerie Varco, Erin Hersey and Despina Papadopoulos.

It took me a while to figure out why I had such a bad gut reaction to “Design Thinking” from the first time I heard the words. Full disclosure, I have written about it before (Design Stinking). Feelings happen first and instantly for me, and while I inevitably trust them, the logic of why I feel a certain way often takes time to unravel.

Upon further reflection, and after hearing a thousand more people using those words to contain the entire history and potential of design, additional reasons for this expression’s insidiousness have occurred to me.

1. It’s a 900 lb. Gorilla’s marketing ploy to rebrand and therefore own the creative process. Hooray for them, it seems to be working.
2. It converts too easily into a business book to be trustworthy
3. It’s a sign of design’s insecurity to need the word “thinking” attached to it. Do doctors feel the need to remind us that they think about health? Do MBAs? Inventors? Do designers feel they have to announce that they think? Really?
4. The process has become an inadequate substitute for the real question we should be asking, which is “what is the real question we should be asking?” In other words, as I have seen it practiced, it often presupposes as correct the existing definition of the problem to be solved.
5. Branding what we do as design thinking implies that creativity, instinct and experiential wisdom are not part of design, and even inferior.
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Academics in Austria, a young man with no hands at the boat doc in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book “The Idea That Is America”, and a distinguished group of people role playing scenarios of innovation in Thomas Jefferson’s library.

These are the ideas and images that converge in my head after a few weeks of intense travel as I head to Camden, Maine for PopTech.

Talk of innovation is everywhere. Businesses, foundations, entrepreneurs, government, institutions of every sort are all fixated on it, wanting to own it, map it, master it. Americans are, as always, addicted to the new – but now with an air of desperation. We look for the killer app to fix the broken institutions that kill creativity and block progress, and to clean up the mess we’ve made.

The DOM5 Conference in Linz, Austria was heady and loosely facilitated.  My fellow speakers and attendees were there to talk non-stop about ideas, and how change comes about in organizations.

My time in Sierra Leone was spent working with an NGO to facilitate a conversation about innovation in maternal and child health. Real, personal, passionate and close to home. About as far from the conversation in Linz as could be.

Then to Darden, the University of Virginia, for the Jefferson Innovation Summit – a thoughtful program, carefully put together, attended by a remarkable group of diverse people who have come from all over the country to talk to each other about innovation and entrepreneurship in America. Literal bus loads of brains as we are transported from mountain top to mountain top in Charlottesville to try to think together.

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More evidence that design is at the center of social innovation, and social innovation is what the world needs now.

Two inspiring authors have surfaced recently, one wrote thousands of years ago, one is an observer of our own time.

Gary Younge, has just written a book about the massive consequences of identity, and the role it plays in every aspect of our lives. Distinctions formed by identities that define “other” include racism in Britain, ethnicity in Rwanda, Islam and Christianity, gender as it’s played out in all its varieties, liberal, conservative and radical politics or religion anywhere, real estate in Israel and Palestine – to name but a few of the deadly distinctions. But those are just the extreme and easy-to-name examples. Identity creates “others” in far more seemingly benign ways, such as every enterprise that’s part of our capitalist system, every club, network or community on the internet, every city or town in the world, every family, nationality, generation and individual creature on the planet.

Identity, of course, is a good and necessary thing. Meg Wheatley describes it as one of the three dimensions of a living system and says, “Life organizes around a self; organizing is always an act of creating an identity… Identity is the filter that every organization uses to make sense of the world. New Information, new relationships, changing environments – all are interpreted through a sense of self.”

Identity has also traditionally been one of the mainstays of design – an unquestioned area of expertise that belonged solely to designers and could be counted onto bring in hefty fees – the bigger the company, the more they expected to pay for their identity. It became, before it was eroded by open source quick and dirty logos, a fairly standard process that delivered a fairly standard product, and the lasting outcome the client got for their money in the end was a logo and guidelines for how to use it.

I think about identity almost constantly, and it grows and takes on more importance for me all the time. Much of what I do with organizations now is about identity, but it rarely ends up as a logo. It has to do with helping them define, or remember, why they matter in a culture where the things that used to count don’t and where none of the old rules apply. It’s understanding how to inspire behavior through clarity of values and the communication of them in a way that makes people want to join in. It’s helping them align in more engaging ways with the identities of the people they count on to support them.

The name is the same but the challenge has shifted as our businesses and community leaders wake up to the need to engage society in their plans for the future. The stakes are higher, and it’s still design.

The other writing is an ancient poem that Steven Greenblatt brings back to life in the New Yorker. “On the Nature of Things” was written by Lucretius, who was born about a thousand years before Christ. His principle vision was “of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe”, and if that were not prescient enough, he went on to argue that, “In a universe so constituted, it is absurd to think that the earth and its inhabitants occupy a central place, or that the world was purpose-built to accommodate human beings….There is no reason to set humans apart from other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature. Instead, he wrote, human beings should conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.”

Lucretius’ wild notion about atoms became scientific certainty 2,000 years later. On the other hand, his advice to us to see ourselves as part of the ecosystem of all creatures around us, stop fighting, conquer our fears and embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world is something that, as a species, we have so far failed.

The “living system” definition of identity has application far beyond the world of logos. It can be applied, as a design process, to all the potentially deadly forms of identity listed above. And it has the power to help create a larger and more diverse identity in which we can see others as part of ourselves.

It’s easy to forget beauty and pleasure when we’re trying so hard to create impact and change. But what a wonderful reminder from Lucretius that one of our greatest pleasures – creating beauty – is also one of the most powerful tools we have to create positive change.

Insights from from two writers 3,000 years apart, which none can address more successfully or fully than designers of social innovation.

Meg Wheatley said that “So much of human behavior is habitual. And behind every habit is a belief – about people, life, the world. If we can know our beliefs, we can then act with greater consciousness about our behaviors.”

It appears a growing number of people agree that if we are to have a different future than the one we are heading towards, it will require changing our behavior. In other words, no amount of green buildings or consumption of green products will suffice to reduce the environmental destruction and social inequality we are inflicting on the planet and each other. Stands to reason.

What this points out is a fundamental truth about humanity that we have pretty much been able to avoid thinking hard about until now. Of course it’s more comfortable to place the responsibility elsewhere, but it is dangerous. That’s why I cringe whenever I hear someone use the cliché that they want to “change the world”, since it so clearly isn’t the world that needs changing, it’s us.

The implication for Design for Social Innovation is that the most important design of all is invisible. It’s not the “stuff”, not the artifacts, not the technologies. It’s the beliefs, the ethos, the values, the systems behind the campaigns and products and events that form them. It’s designing events and products and behavior before they happen. And that is precisely where we need to be designing.

Design for social innovation begins with the design of conversations themselves – it requires treating a conversation with the same care, and the same planning, that would be appropriate for the design of a product. Conversation starts everything – and yet we rarely think of them as an opportunity for design. This is not only the most important, upstream part of the systems that we need to change, it’s the fastest way for a designer to become a vital part of a strategic initiative. It’s where things begin, and where the most important things are decided.

On the hard side, it doesn’t provide much of a portfolio. Nothing to enter into design competitions, few samples to put on your website, harder to explain at a cocktail party just what it is that you do. In fact, most of the invisible things you’ll be designing are private and sensitive to CEOs and leaders of all types of organizations. You can’t even talk about them. This can be a tough shift for designers who are loathe to give up the artifacts of their work. Of course it doesn’t mean that you won’t design any artifacts, it only means that they will be the last thing you design, not the first.

New Scientist (sorry they won’t let me link to their articles) ran a story on hydrothermal vent mining. It’s the next frontier of mining rare earth elements from the deep ocean floor, and needless to say there is competition building for the best locations. Also needless to say, we risk damaging remarkable ecosystems of which we know very little about (sound familiar?) – mysterious ecosystems of giant tube worms and unknown species of shrimp and who knows what else. The point the author was making is that before we have another gold rush like we did in California in the 19th century, we should put in place the legal frameworks that will help avoid the potential destruction of still untouched ecological riches.

But is that enough to change our behavior and prevent us from repeating history? Isn’t this a process that would benefit from the involvement of Social Innovation Designers? Isn’t this one of the big conversations that needs thoughtful architecture to gain alignment around what’s best for the planet and not for the same rich countries that always prevail? Wouldn’t it be an important thing to design communication so that everyone understands the risks as well as the benefits? What about integrating all the wisdom we have about these places into our actions?

This is design at a point where it can significantly impact the future. The most important design challenges in the world are the ones we can’t see – until they are upon us. The answer is yes, let’s get involved.

This is about people and things that lead us to new lives, new meaning in the lives we have, and help us build things beyond what we ever imagined possible.

Ten or 11 years ago, I was smack in the middle of one of my tormented career crises (there have been many, just ask my husband). Jaimie Cloud was a neighbor who, over a bottle of wine, told me about her organization devoted to sustainability education which she called SEC (Sustainability Education Center). Appropriately horrified that anyone doing what she was doing would risk being confused with the other SEC, I volunteered to re-think her identity. The next morning was Saturday, and she dropped off a stack of reading (Peter Senge, David Orr, Donella Meadows, Paul Hawkins) so I could start getting up to speed. I remember saying “this is going to change my life, isn’t it?”  And Jaimie said, “yup, usually does”. All those voices, and the real truths of nature did change me forever. Once you know a truth, you can never not know it again. It made me crazy trying to figure out how to apply the principles to my work in communication design at a deep level – because the awareness of principles so big and important made the work I’d been doing seem small and ephemeral. I wanted my work to matter at a planetary level, not just a client level.

But I was clueless as to how to connect the power I felt in sustainability and systems thinking to design in a systemic way. It was the most exciting problem I had ever considered – purposeful, intentional, connected to the world: A design opportunity bigger than I had ever contemplated.

Yet as we know, when one is successful in business, the success defines you no matter how hard you try to stay loose. Clients tend to hire you based on what you’ve done in the past, and that’s a very tough thing to change if your parents forgot to set you up with a trust fund. The crisis came at the end of a huge project – an identity design and launch of a new global television network for Discovery. I had been working intensely 7 days a week for almost a year. Whether or not I could ever develop a design career in sustainability or social innovation (not in anybody’s vocabulary back then) I knew my current trajectory was unsustainable.

We engaged David Baker of Recourses to evaluate our business and help us figure out what to do. His advice was unforgettable. He said, “I would take away your big fancy computer, say good bye to your employees, and have you become a writer and strategist”. At the time, he might as well have said he’d like me to walk off a cliff. The thought gave me vertigo.
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