We’ve been hearing for years about “T-shaped people” (with deep knowledge and competence in one or two areas, crossed with wide knowledge across many domains); Microsoft’s Bill Buxton recently wrote about “I-shaped people”:

These have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head in the clouds when they need to. Furthermore, they simultaneously span all of the space in between. [BusinessWeek]

The concept is well intentioned, but who wants to “firmly planted in the mud” when we’re talking about innovation?! Surely there are better letters — or how about numbers? — to use for a derivative analogy.

I’m a big fan of 8.

Rather than being stuck in the mud, let’s continuously circulate from Ground-Level to Blue-Sky — picking up insights at various places along the way, which feed back into the system, converging, colliding, mingling, and remixing in the middle.

Even 0 would be better than I.

The latter resembles a pedestal, calling to mind impressions of permanence and supposed perfection — precisely the wrong way to go.

Anything that suggests static existence has to be tossed out asap. We need images and metaphors that accommodate motion and growth.

Which makes me wonder, what shape are innovation gurus?

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[Update: within minutes I decided to change the title to "Designing Ideas for Democracy" -- replacing "methodologies" with "ideas" -- which occurred to me after I thought about search results, then realized "ideas" is more appropriate anyways.]

This will be the provisional mission for Open/Conceptual.

As usual, “designing methodologies ideas for democracy” is something that spontaneously occurred to me after a a long period of germination. I didn’t sit down and decide “ok, I’m going to articulate the mission now,” but the connotations are nonetheless intentional and specific.

“Designing” deliberately refers to “design thinking” as practiced by the firms like IDEO and promoted by leading consultants and educators. This has been a part of Open/Conceptual’s foundational background since the start, if not earlier.

Design and design thinking, of course, have their own methodologies; roughly speaking (according to my own interpretation), they come down to a fusion of art, science, and commerce:

• Art: Aesthetics and emotions are essential; also, the process is open to spontaneous insights and inspirations.
• Science: It’s a social, reiterative process that assumes imperfection, fallibility, and continuous improvement through observation and experiments.
• Commerce: The ultimate test of merit is, “Are people willing to spend their time, attention, energy, and money on this?”

What’s missing is the Civic element…

While I don’t deny that design can improve (and has improved) things in civic and social domains, I think there are some important ways the civic sphere is inaccessible to current design methodologies — starting with the fact that design tends to be oriented around specific projects and objectives, while civics is endless; it lacks any ultimate & agreed-upon objective.

So that’s kind of where Open/Conceptual comes in: at the level of epistemology, or meta-methodology: the objective is to design an ultimate objective... keeping in mind that “design” infers that the process is reiterative — an endless succession of improving-but-still-imperfect results — i.e. we have to accept we won’t ever arrive at (or even articulate) “the” objective, but it’s the process of working it out that matters.

To put it another way, this is a philosophical enterprise: an attempt to do philosophy — not via weighty tomes full of impenetrable prose, but by modeling it into organizations and institutions that generate analogies and metaphors.

It’s kind of a microcosm for how we should try to conceive and organize the rest of our world. As I wrote last year:

Open Conceptual is where we end up by thinking creatively about everything — or at least that’s the objective. But the notion that creative thinking leads someplace is just a metaphor. We don’t really go anywhere: we grow: we cultivate creative mastery and freedom — which brings us back to the first meaning: Open Conceptual is the enterprise led foremost by creative thinking.

Exactly where it leads is impossible to know at this point, but generally, it’s the best way to go (I mean “grow”), because as long as we’re working this way, we continue to learn — we continue to stay informed and in practice so we’ll be competent and resourceful enough when genuine opportunities and challenges emerge.

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