Social Innovation Meetup: “Exploring Labs for Social Change” – presentation notes

• What to do if you’re faster than the rest? “If you want to go quickly, walk alone, if you want to go far, join others”. Find people who want to go at a similar speed.
• Social change really takes time, but the problems don’t allow time. As Ushahidi shows, sometimes things CAN move quickly when they have to.
• The elections in South Sudan showed that you can have a mapping project even though there’s a situation of high conflict and low resources. Most important are the partnerships, technology is only 10%: outreach, training, credibility are what really matters. We’re beyond just the technology, our priorities now are conversations about strategies and methodologies.
• In crisis situations there’s often an information overload,  or “filter failure”. The Swiftriver platform helps people to make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time by filtering and verifying real-time data from many different channels like Twitter, SMS, e-mail, and RSS feeds.

Marco Steinberg (Helsinki Design Lab, Finland)

We’re trying to innovate within a “dominant culture”. We can no longer understand our society, are enabled and at the same time imprisoned. How do we change values, etc. when we’re in bureaucratic organizations that don’t want to change? Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, has an endowment to innovate government.  It focuses on “strategic design“: “Our idea is to shift it right to the beginning of the process. Our concept of design is much broader too, and we want to apply our expertise across traditional boundaries to problems of health care, transport and the ageing population, for example.” One of Sitra’s activities is the Helsinki Design Lab.

The Helsinki Design Lab aims to bring innovators together, provide a community development platform, codify practices, do experiments, etc. One output is Brickstarter, which “is about 21st century social services. We are sketching a system that would enable everyday people, using everyday technology and culture, to articulate and progress sustainable ideas about their community”. Another initiative are their Helsinki Design Lab Studios.

There are many, large, interconnected crises. We are aware of many of the issues, but don’t know how to think about them. We need different perspectives and logics. Politicians create visions, while technicians and experts help realize the visions. Many of their ideas are fundamentally flawed. For example, at the beginning of the financial crisis, President Bush gave shape to decisions about problems he didn’t understand. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan had relied on financial data and models for over 40 years, only to then have to admit how flawed these constructs from “the dominant culture” were.

The mission of innovation has gone from “things” to “systems”, like health and the environment. However, we  (as government) are not set up to deal with this. We need to understand the interconnected nature – the “architecture” – of issues, solutions, and decisions. Innovations begin by asking the right questions. Strategic design is just as much about the problem as about the solution space. If only focusing on problem space, we stay in the abstract, if only dealing with the solution space we risk optimizing bad designs. Interconnectedness is key, however, disciplines and bureaucracies like ministries have “anti-interconnectedness” mechanisms.

It’s not really a purely technical, but a deeply cultural problem, sometimes even requiring the rediscovering of practices lost. A Helsinki Design Lab Studio provides an environment for people to think differently from the dominant culture. How do we speed up innovation? We start with an in-depth brief. We bring in eight people for “deep collaboration”. We use a “Noah’s Ark” approach: you can’t talk to everybody. We choose  experts that provide the critical eight perspectives. Six of them are foreigners, so that they will touch taboos and bring in different frameworks. Two designers help bring about synthesis. What are the Top 10 things to do NOW? A session lasts a week, with day 2 being a field day, and at the end of the week a review session with policy people, concluded by an informal dinner. This way, government officials get a “strategic conversation”, instead of the usual report tomes. Afterwards, the results need to be shared with people in other forums, through publications, etc.

Integrated approaches are key, and an HDL Studio is a good way to start. How to deliver this? It should happen from within government, which can then use its muscle to move quickly. However, is it big and fast enough?

Questions:

• One of the biggest challenges in social innovation are not the creative ideas, but how to scale their implementation in society. How does the HDL Studio approach help accomplish this, it seems very top-down? We’re a government agency. All we can do is lower the barriers, show that new stuff is not so scary, select the key players at conception who can take it forward
• Doesn’t this lead to overly prescriptive/constrained approaches? We need to codify the right things: the preconditions for making the studio process work.