John Thackara
is Director of the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam. He inaugurated the influential Doors of Perceptions conferences on the design challenge of interactivity; sits on the Dutch government's "Virtual Platform"; and is an advisor to the European Commission. Mr. Thackara wrote "Winners! How Today's Successful Companies Innovate By Design" (1997), "Design After Modernism" (1987), and numerous other books online design and media. http://www.thackara.com http://www.doorsofperception.com http://www.design-inst.nl The Edge Effect My lecture combines three things. First, a general argument about the way we are beginning to understand the change of success factors in the economy, and in society, by reference to biology and complexity theory. Second, it presents examples of how innovators in business, education and government are acting in new ways to meet the challenges of continuous change - forging new connections, and developing new ways of working, outside their traditional domains. Third, it looks at these emerging innovation practices as design processes, and explores the broader consequences for the way we design new knowledge systems, processes, and organization. In biology, they describe "the edge effect" as the tendency for a greater variety and density of organisms to cluster in the boundaries between communities. As in nature, so too in a networked economy, variety, density and interaction are success factors. The trouble is that most of us live and work within traditional environments - not between them. We live and work in boxes: our company, our profession, our market, our university. Specialization is one of the great achievements of industrial society - but it doesn't work in an information one. Stuck in boxes, we miss what's going on at the edge. To be successfully innovative, organizations need to stimulate interactions at the peripheries between traditional professional, market and organizational environments. They - we - can either exploit the edge effect as a means to innovation - or wait passively for the edge effect to affect us. We have to make that choice because a revolution is transforming the way our products, systems and cities are designed, the way we use them - and how they relate to us. As yet, this revolution is barely visible on normal personal or organizational strain gauges: that is, because it is bottom-up and outside-in revolution - the result of change processes on the periphery of our normal worlds - and therefore easy to miss. For me, what to do about the edge effect is a design issue. I believe it is possible to design the edge effect into an organization or project. Design is a process to make the connections. A new kind of design - I guess we have to call it design for emergence - increases the flow of information within and between communities. Such a design process does not deliver finished results; its purpose is to stimulate continuous collaborative innovation by the group. Designing for emergence, designing for the edge effect, is not principally a technical matter. Computer networks carry data - but humans, interacting socially, still create meaning. The design challenge is to decide what inputs to plumb into a particular context: what questions? which people? what experiential qualities? To do this well, two things are necessary: the ability to think or design backwards from a desired outcome - "back-cast" - in order to frame the issue to be worked on; and peripheral vision - the ability to think across boundaries, to spot opportunities at the juncture between industries, to imagine relationships and connections where none existed before. In the edge effect way of designing, questions are more powerful than answers. One of the simplest-sounding tasks of an edge organization is agenda-setting, when innovation is simply a question of putting and item on the agenda - preferably before somebody else does - and letting the knowledge-making process go to work. But agenda setting is of course not a trivial process. It must reflect not only the potential of particular inventions, but also the competencies of the organization. Success on the edge is also about the experience of real projects, in real communities, with real companies, using new technology. We need to learn about collaborative innovation at first hand, when we think and do together. A final point: (I will not try to cover all this in a talk!): the logic of the edge effect is pervasively unsettling. Variety, density and continuous interaction may be success factors if you are a bacterium - but running a business, a school, or a city, we do not experience the results of the edge effect as benign. The ground rules of competitiveness are shifting. The business story here is that by definition, "business as usual" no longer exists. For companies it is no longer enough just to do things better than the next guy. In an economic world dealing in knowledge, the secret of success is the combination of different types of expertise in a productive manner. Information vs. meaning? Meaning comes from actuality. The real world, and making users the subject, not the object, of innovation, is where the real action is now in product development. Using such techniques as scenarios, stories and visualization, new ideas are tried out as "social fiction", not as science fiction. The most interesting design projects today are based among real communities, or in real businesses. This live context brings process issues, such as coordination theory, or knowledge management, to life. In its original use, an "entrepreneur" was someone who brings people together. That is the most important skill that designers of tomorrow will apply and develop in their work - bringing people together to model the issues, not the answers to rehearse for the future. See schedule.	program BILL BUXTON ANDY CAMERON MATTHEW CHALMERS DANIEL DÖGL BILL GAVER NEIL GERSHENFELD ANDREW GLASSNER PAUL HAEBERLI TOM HEWETT BREWSTER KAHLE PANU KORHONEN DOUG LENAT JO LERNOUT RALPH MERKLE THEODOR H. NELSON CELIA PEARCE MARK PESCE HANI RASHID BILL SCHILIT DAVID SMALL MARCO SUSANI JOHN THACKARA MICHAEL FREEDMAN TURNER WHITTED ANTON ZEILINGER
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