“Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we’ve just stopped noticing,” writes Roman Mars in his first post for the first 99% Invisible podcast, “a tiny radio show about design.” Tiny perhaps, but also playful, informative, and, indeed, highly designed.

From an interview with Mars, by Debbie Millman on the Design Matters podcast:

Millman: Would you say that there is a bit of a formula to how you organize and construct your storytelling?

Mars: A little bit. I make this joke that the show is two anecdotes, one big idea, one takeaway fact — and it has to be funny.

True to the podcast’s name, the best shows reveal the otherwise invisible, like the design of check cashing stores, steering wheels, the Plimsoll line — and this one below about “the arsenal of exclusion,” the tools that architects, city planners, policy makers, and developers use to restrict spaces and the flow of movement.

Two mysteries in this Google trends search for the phrase “systems thinking”: why those peaks in 2004 (perhaps a big conference on systems thinking in management), and why the relative decline since then?

Despite declining search volume, a 2012 U.S. National Academy of Sciences publication, Science for Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead, which came to my attention via this search, calls for systems thinking at the Environmental Protection Agency.

From the Nature article by Jeff Tollefson (“Report calls on US environment agency to embrace social sciences”):

The US National Research Council has released an overarching review of science at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), advising the federal agency to take a systems view and integrate the social sciences as it tackles an increasingly complex set of issues in the coming decades.

From the report’s final chapter on Findings and Recommendations:

SYSTEMS THINKING
It is important for EPA to try to balance its capacity and resources to address complex environmental challenges, to address potential favorable and unfavorable health and environmental effects, and to apply emerging scientific information, tools, techniques, and technologies. Approaching problems from a systems perspective will allow EPA to meet those challenges and make the maximum continuing use of new scientific tools.

The committee has suggested ways in which the agency can integrate systems-thinking techniques into a 21st century framework for science to inform decisions (see Figure 6-1). That framework will help EPA to stay at the leading edge of science by encouraging it to produce science that is anticipatory, innovative, long-term, and collaborative; to evaluate and apply emerging tools for data acquisition, modeling, and knowledge development; and to develop tools and methods for synthesizing science, characterizing uncertainties, and integrating, tracking, and assessing the outcomes of actions. If effectively implemented, the framework would help to break the silos of the agency and promote collaboration among different media, time scales, and disciplines.

In supporting environmental science and engineering for the 21st century, there will need to be a move from using science to characterize risks, to applying science holistically to characterize both problems and solutions at the earliest possible time. ORD’s [Office of Research and Development's] move toward embracing sustainability throughout its research program is a positive move in this direction.

Finding: Environmental problems are increasingly interconnected. EPA can no longer address just one environmental hazard at a time without considering how that problem interacts with, is influenced by, and influences other aspects of the environment.

Recommendation 1: The committee recommends that EPA substantially enhance the integration of systems thinking into its work and enhance its capacity to apply systems thinking to all aspects of how it approaches complex decisions.

FIGURE 6-1 Framework for enhanced science for environmental protection. The iterative process starts with effective problem formulation, in which policy goals and an orientation toward solutions help to determine scientific needs and the most appropriate methods. Data are acquired as needed and synthesized to generate knowledge about key outcomes. This knowledge is incorporated into an array of systems tools and solutions-orineted synthesis approaches to formulate policies that best improve public health and the environment while taking account of social and economic impacts. Once science-informed actions have been implemented, outcome evaluation can help determine whether refinements to any previous stages are required (see the dotted lines in the figure).

“Every noun obscures a verb,” quips Ray Ison in the book, Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate Change World.

None more so, I would add, than sustainability.

We know sustainability abstractly, like in the Brundtland definition of meeting cross-generational needs, or like in the economy-ecology-equity balancing diagram. Sustainability is often engaged as a set of guidelines for the stuff we produce or build or make. Think 350 or LEED or cradle-to-cradle. As important as these types of visions and guidelines are, this version of sustainability is not a living, breathing thing. It’s a noun, not a verb.

How about if we thought of sustaining as a process? What if we described it in terms of functioning: ways of being and acting that contribute to personal, social, and natural flourishing?

The lingo of functioning comes from the writings of Amartya Sen on the capabilities approach to human development. A similar approach appears in writings on psychological resilience that describe it — not as a trait that one is born with, but — as a competence or capacity to be developed, within social and environmental contexts. (See for example: Ungar, M. 2008. “Resilience across cultures.”)

A sense of personal agency is critical. Capacity development emerges from the interaction of individual agency with social and environmental contexts, whether we are talking about human development and psychological resilience, which are understood at individual scales, or sustainability and (social-ecological) resilience, which are largely understood at community or system scales.

Here are two examples of frameworks for sustainability and resilience that attempt to better account for individual functioning and agency.

For sustainability, from a 2011 paper by Arnim Wiek, Lauren Withycombe, and Charles Redman (“Key competencies in sustainability: a reference framework for academic program development”), which lists five key competencies: systems-thinking, anticipatory, normative, strategic, and interpersonal.

Systems-thinking competence is the ability to collectively analyze complex systems across different domains (society, environment, economy, etc.) and across different scales (local to global), thereby considering cascading effects, inertia, feedback loops and other systemic features related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks.

Anticipatory competence is the ability to collectively analyze, evaluate, and craft rich ‘‘pictures’’ of the future related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks.

Normative competence is the ability to collectively map, specify, apply, reconcile, and negotiate sustainability values, principles, goals, and targets.

Strategic competence is the ability to collectively design and implement interventions, transitions, and transformative governance strategies toward sustainability.

Interpersonal competence is the ability to motivate, enable, and facilitate collaborative and participatory sustainability research and problem solving.

For resilience, a piece from a 2012 publication I developed with my colleagues at Ecotrust, “Resilience & Transformation: A Regional Approach” (pdf), in which we described five bundles of capacities (full-sized image):

Your thoughts?

See also:

• Sustainable development à la Herman Daly
• No resilience without transformation

Biologist Frans de Waal in Science on new research on adaptive learning in animals (“Animal Conformists,” sub. req.):

The early debate about animal culture focused on the mechanism of behavioral transmission. Do animals learn from each other in the same way as humans do? If they copy the behavior of others, does this reflect “true” imitation, that is, do they understand the other’s goals and methods? Apes were said to lack imitative capacities because they failed to imitate human models. But of course, human models belong to a different species. We now know that apes learn from each other in ways that meet all the requirements of true imitation.

With that issue behind us, animal culture studies have begun to focus less on the transmission process and more on the strength of animal conformist tendencies and their effect on survival. From the domain of learning, researchers are shifting to that of outcomes and adaptive significance. The reports by Allen et al. and van de Waal et al. nicely illustrate this new focus.

From the paper by Allen et al.:

We used network-based diffusion analysis to reveal the cultural spread of a naturally occurring foraging innovation, lobtail feeding, through a population of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) over a period of 27 years. Support for models with a social transmission component was 6 to 23 orders of magnitude greater than for models without. The spatial and temporal distribution of sand lance, a prey species, was also important in predicting the rate of acquisition. Our results, coupled with existing knowledge about song traditions, show that this species can maintain multiple independently evolving traditions in its populations.

See also:

• Ed Yong’s “On Copycat Whales, Conformist Monkeys and Animal Cultures”
• Frans de Waal’s TEDxPeachtree talk on “Moral behavior in animals”

Just looking again at the call for abstracts (due next week) to this fall’s symposium on Emerging Contexts for Systemic Design.

“In re-examining the relationship of systems thinking to design we believe it possible for systems thinking and design praxis to develop the foundations for new, interrelated practices.”

Symposium co-chairs are Birger Sevaldson of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Peter Jones of Design Dialogues and the Strategic Innovation Lab at Toronto’s OCAD University, and Harold Nelson, coauthor (with Erik Stolterman) of The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World.

Here are the first few lines from the excellent Design Way:

Humans did not discover fire — they designed it. The wheel was not something our ancestors merely stumbled over in a stroke of good luck; it, too, was designed. The habit of labeling significant human achievements as ‘discoveries,’ rather than ‘designs’, discloses a critical bias in our Western tradition whereby observation dominates imagination. Absent from the conflicting descriptions of Leonardo da Vinci, as either a scientist or artist, is the missing insight into his essential nature as a designer. His practical, purpose-driven and integrative approach to the world — an archetypal designer’s approach — is primarily what made him so distinct in his own time, as well as our own. Through his imaginative genius, augmentations to the real world were made manifest. This has been the contribution of all designers throughout human history. Outside of nature, they are the prime creators of our experienced reality.

Carefully designed artifacts accompany the remains of our earliest ancestors. Designed implements have been found which predate the earliest human fossil remains discovered so far. In fact, it is evidence of design ability, and activity, which allows an archeologist to distinguish between a species that is not quite human and one that is. So, it appears that it is our very ability to design which determines our humanness.

Design is a terbium quid — a third way — distinct from the arts and sciences. In support of this argument we make a case for the reconstitution of sophia — the integration of thought and action through design. We make a case for design as its own tradition, one that reintegrates sophia ratter than following the historical Western split between science and craft or, more recently, between science and the humanities.

H/t to my colleagues at the Collaborative Design MFA program, where we hosted Harold Nelson earlier this year.

“I’m not worried about being right; I’m worried about learning,” says former marine colonel Mark Mykleby in this interview for The Conversation podcast.

Mykleby is co-author with Wayne Porter of “A National Strategic Narrative” (pdf), written in 2011 for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and currently works with the New America Foundation’s Smart Strategy Initiative.

In reference to George Kennan’s famous Mr. X article, Porter and Mykleby wrote under the pseudonym Mr. Y.

Mykleby:

All our strategies … are focused on how we’re going to keep something away. They’re all focused on how you’re going to control things. And we said we weren’t going to do that.

We wanted to write a strategy based on opportunity — on where we’re going to go, and what we’re going to create, and who are we going to be, and what are we going to look like as a nation in the future. …

We really have to approach the world as an open system. And in an open system you have to start thinking in ecological terms. That’s why Wayne and I started calling it a strategic ecology. …

You have to have credibility — credibility about who you are and what you are. That means the strength of your nation. … That credibility is going to give you influence.

There’s a great line in Beowulf that says, “Behavior that’s admired is the path to power among people everywhere.” That’s just human dynamics 101. …

What made Kennan one of our greatest strategists is he focused more on potentials and tendencies than analytics. He synthesized things. …

Because we were thinking about strategic ecology, and we were reading those types of things, the concept of sustainability kept coming up. We’re not friggin’ tree-huggers, and I’m no poster child for sustainability. I’m trying to figure it out.

But sustainabiltiy seemed to fit and here’s why. We looked at the ecological definition of sustainability: an organism’s ability to remain diverse and productive over time. Suspend your [dis]belief for a second and consider that the United States may be an organism in the greater ecology — the strategic ecology.

So if our enduring interests are prosperity and security, look how that maps to the definition, given our current context. Diverse means depth, means redundancy, means resilience. That part of it is your ability to take a gut punch and come back swinging. That’s security — 21st century style.

There’s no amount of bubble wrap we can wrap around every American’s head to keep the bat shit away.

In the preface to the strategic narrative, Anne-Marie Slaughter describes it as advocating five shifts:

1. From control in a closed system to credible influence in an open system;
2. From containment to sustainment;
3. From deterrence and defense to civilian engagement and competition;
4. From zero sum to positive sum global politics/economics; and
5. From national security to national prosperity and security.

In Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, educational reformer Ken Robinson quotes Robert Witkin’s twist on Descartes: “I feel therefore I am.”

In conversation today with James Reed, he and I enjoyed another twist: “I feel therefore I may become.”

Here’s the passage from Robinson:

Descartes said, ‘I think therefore I am.’ As Robert Witkin pointed out, an equally powerful starting point would have been, ‘I feel therefore I am.’ Feelings are a constant dimension of human consciousness. To be is to feel. ‘Feelings’ encompass a wide range of subjective states, from calm intuitions to raging physical furies. Feelings are evaluations: for example, grief at a death, elation at a birth, pleasure at success, depression at a failure, disappointment at unfulfillment. Feelings are forms of perception. How we feel about something is an expression of our relationship with it. We experience a wide range of feelings precisely because of the complexity of our perceptions of events, other people and ourselves. …

Throughout the history of state education there has been a contest between the mainstream view that ‘reason’ and ‘objective’ knowledge should dominate education, and those who have argued for forms of education based on personal development and the expression of feelings. These views have come respectively from the rationalist traditions of the Enlightenment and the expressive traditions of the Romanticism. They have led to two different concepts of individualism. Both have compounded the division of intellect and emotion. This tension is not only in education. It bubbles up in many different ways in Western culture at large.

[Update: A related piece, from Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity.]

[P]eople ‘happen’ as wholes in process. Their ‘minding’ processes are simultaneous functions, not discrete compartments. You have never met anyone who was ‘thinking,’ who was not at the same time also ‘emoting,’ ‘spiritualizing,’ and for that matter, ‘livering.’ When the old progressive educationists spoke of teaching ‘the whole child,’ they were not being idealistic. They were being descriptive. Teachers have no other alternative than to teach the whole child. The fact that teachers exclude ‘the emotions’ and ‘the spirit’ from their lessons does not, of course, mean that those processes are unaffected by what the teacher does. Plato said that, in order for education to accomplish its purpose, reason must have an adequate emotional base, and Dewey spoke often of ‘collateral learning,’ by which he meant most of the learnings that occur while the teacher is dealing with ‘the intellect.’

Educational theorist Ken Robinson, whose 2006 TED talk has garnered over 16 million views, takes a more conversational approach at the 2012 Future of Learning Conference, where he concludes with a synthesis of design principles (shortened here without ellipses):

There are some principles that we might observe here.

The first is that education will only work if it is personalized. We have the tools now to contour education to every single student in the system. We never had that before.

Secondly, we have to customize education to the individual communities where it is actually taking place. If you’re a teacher, you are the education system — for those kids.

I think we need to accelerate the shift in the curriculum from subjects to disciplines. A discipline isn’t just propositional knowledge, it’s about skills and processes and procedures.

This supports a shift from knowledge as being static to knowledge as dynamic. We need to engage with the flow of knowledge and with the evolution of understanding, and we therefore need forms of curriculum which are open and dynamic.

We need to move from education being seen as a solitary activity to being seen as a collaborative process. We still teach children in groups — but too rarely do we teach them as groups.

[Another] shift is in assessment. We have to see assessment as moving from judgement to description. We achieve best when out expectations are raised and when we are encouraged and supportive. We need forms of assessment that are empowering.

Four years ago, on May 3rd 2009, Paul Hawken came to Portland, Oregon, to deliver a “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful” commencement address at the University of Portland (pdf).

“Civilization needs a new operating system,” he said, “you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.”

Hawken’s metaphor of transformation — along with its ascription of agency, charge of responsibility, and invitation to opportunity — fit perfectly the tone I sought for the Ecotrust publication “Resilience & Transformation: A Regional Approach,” and we used it as a pull-quote with the introduction (pdf or magazine).

As the metaphor implies, current operating systems — the institutions of social, political, and economic relations — leave the peoples of the world vulnerable to deep-rooted social and ecological stresses. There can be no resilience without transformation.

I sometimes think of the resilience-transformation relationship as binary, like man-woman or black-white: the existence of each dependent on the other. No resilience without transformation.

And I sometimes picture resilience and transformation interacting across time, in an unfolding resilience-cum-transformation narrative. System resilience following system transformation.

For programmers or designers, these interactions are visualized in a figure redrawn below, from a paper by Frances Westley and 12 coauthors (“Tipping toward sustainability: emerging pathways of transformation”).

In this figure the programmers or designers are labeled institutional entrepreneurs, and the new operating system is described as an innovation regime. But the patterns of change are similar.

Consider our usual practices as part of a regime: our gardening, eating, and such as part of a food regime; our needs for mechanized mobility as part of a transportation regime; and so on. These regimes are defined by the worldviews, the rules and norms, the business models, the infrastructures and technologies that support ways of existing and interacting — while shaping and being shaped by ecological interdependencies.

In this view, a new operating system is more like a network of operating systems (i.e., regimes), each fulfilling a particular need and each, potentially, operating closer to home. The basic three-step of resilience-for-transformation design becomes: nurture regimes that better support wellbeing, undermine maladaptive regimes, and help to bridge one regime to the next.

Does this conceptual framework fit or inform your own practices?

Which factors are most significant in reducing energy use: personal attitudes toward the environment, social norms around conservation, or availability of key infrastructures and technologies?

One study into this question was a 2011 paper comparing electricity use at four Colorado high schools (“Reducing Energy Consumption and Creating a Conservation Culture in Organizations: A Case Study of One Public School District”).

The paper highlights the fact that energy conservation efforts can achieve dramatic results — especially in a community-based context like a school. Moreover, as EnergyStar.gov reports (“For K-12 School Districts”), U.S. K-12 schools spend more on annual energy bills than on purchases of textbooks and computers.

Chelsea Schelly, Jennifer Cross, and coauthors examined 2000-07 data on four high schools in the Poudre School District of Fort Collins, Colorado. One of the four, Rocky Mountain High School had achieved electricity savings far greater than the others, prompting the question: “What did Rocky do that was different than the other schools, and can we replicate this across the district?”

From the case study:

Rocky was able to reduce its energy consumption by 50% because it is in a district that made a commitment to energy conservation and sustainability, supported leaders in all organizational levels, and provided policies and incentives in support of schools making a commitment to sustainability. In this context, Rocky made unprecedented change; it reduced its electricity consumption to levels below a newly built and certified LEED school. …

In this school, perceived efficacy, behavioral expectations, and organizational culture all motivated behavioral change, but no participants described changing their attitudes. Respondents indicated that even without a sense of environmental concern and without engaging in environmentally responsible behaviors at home, they participated in energy conservation and other efforts (such as recycling) within the organizational setting. This suggests that setting new standards is more important than changing environmental values.

Furthermore, different motivational factors were important for different participants. Charismatic leaders were motivated by their personal environmental values, whereas students and staff members were motivated by feelings of efficacy. Participants at all organizational levels responded to communication, particularly comparative feedback, and the district and the school made concerted efforts to communicate both expectations and successes.

[Update: This post led to an email discussion with colleagues about the authors' use of the term "efficacy," which is similar to what I often call a "sense of agency." Additional excerpt below.]

Efficacy and beliefs. Students and staff at both schools discussed the importance of feeling like their efforts make a difference or perceived efficacy. At Rocky, sense of efficacy was related to having the opportunity for responsibility and decision making. … One student said,

‘I felt like that at first when I heard all this global warming and stuff; you think about it and it’s such a big problem, there’s nothing I can do. Once you start doing things and seeing the difference it makes, I think that’s just so important.’

H/t to Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez of the Garrison Institute’s Climate, Mind and Behavior Program, who discussed these findings at the 2012 Ecodistrict Summit.