We have an established practice when it comes to designing things. But what does design look like when applied to the messy complexity of human communities? Hannah du Plessis -- Pittsburgh based designer and lecturer in the "MFA in Design for Social Innovation " program in New York City -- is part of this emerging field. This talk is about the shift from designing when your material is physical to when your material is social. It looks at three scales - community, team and individual.

1. from designing
buildings
to facilitating
transformation
Hannah du Plessis
1

2. From
designing
buildings
to
facilita4ng
transforma4on
Hannah
du
Plessis
|
Fit
Associates,
LLC
www.fitassociates.com
hannah@fitassociates.com
|
@hannahdup
Presented
February
and
March
2014
at
University
of
Pretoria
Green
Side
Design
Center
University
of
Johannesburg
Cape
Peninsula
University
of
Technology
©
2014,
Fit
Associates
LLC
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2

3. hannah@fitassociates.com
@Hannahdup
Hello!
MFA in Design for
Social Innovation
I had my first career in the world of interior design and architecture.
Today, I’m teaching and practicing design – but my materials have
changed radically. I’m now working in the field of “design for social
innovation.” This talk is about the shift from designing when your
material is physical to when your material is social.
I co-teach a course called “Fundamentals of Design for Social
Innovation” at the School of Visual Art in NYC and work with Fit
Associates in Pittsburgh. I do both of these with Marc Rettig.
3

4. Fifteen years ago, I started my career in interior design and architecture.
4
House van Dyk, Pretoria 2002
Cushala Game Farm, North West Province 2005

5. I worked on three continents with great clients and in wonderful teams. I loved seeing ideas take on
concrete shapes. Later on I had my own business … things were going swimmingly.
5
Plascon Color Pallet Launch, Decorex Johannesburg, 2008

6. BUT
6

7. Honestly,
I don’tdeeply
care
7

8. …that your offices are more collaborative
8

9. … that your art gallery has an amazing shape
9

10. …or that your customers find it delightful to select their paint colors
10

11. ?
careless
relationships
Like yourself I grew up in South Africa where we are not sheltered from the raw
realities of this world. From an early age I was dumbfounded by the careless
relationships human beings seem to have between
- Man & man = Oppression, segregation, the have/have not divide
- Man & nature = We’re consuming and discarding at unsustainable rates
- Man & self = Why do so many of us have self-destructive habits? In 2010
more people died of suicides than wars, murder and natural disasters
combined. (Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation)
I wanted to make the world better.
11

12. First question:
How can I
change
the world?

13. attempt # 1
“How can I
change my
community to
act kindly?”!
!
Leadership
During my school years I was in leadership
positions in both my school and church
community. Every year a new leadership team
would be selected. Every year we had the best
intentions and would start of with great gusto,
poised to change our world…
13

14. Tip o’ the hat to Peter Senge
But, every year around April or May we would
see a decrease in our enthusiasm and, well,
things would go back to normal. Nothing
seemed to really change.
After living through this curve for 8 years, I had
enough of that. I was done with leadership. But
not with making the world better.
14

15. attempt # 2
“How can I
help close the
economic
gap?”!
!
Interior Design
I found the world of design and fell in love. Here is
a discipline that has the ability to make the world
better on a very practical level.
Most of my clients were mainstream, not socially
minded. But I used every project to build a bridge
between financially stable clients and emerging
artist and crafters. It was lovely to see a moment
of financial relief for artists and crafters…
15

16. But I was not creating sustained change. The larger economic system was unsupportive of a dream to see a
more equitable world where there is enough for everyone, not mere moments of relief.
During that time I had done work for Coca Cola. “What would happen,” I thought, “if Coke saw themselves as
part of the health of their communities and not just purveyors of sugary drinks? Surely a big corporation can
create systemic change?”
16

17. attempt # 3
“How can I
influence
corporations
to do good?”!
!
Business strategy
I went back to grad school to obtain my
masters in design research and strategy. And,
guess who was my first client? Pepsi. There I
was in their glass and marble offices over-
looking the Chicago skyline, bristling with
excitement as we presented to their innovation
management team.
17

18. GR E A T !
F A BU L O US !
My excitement was short lived. As I was standing there reading their corporate values in golden
letters, looking at my clients whom I had gotten to know and respect, I realized I was in the
wrong place. Again. I was back in my role of advocate. I was an external voice, a dusty chicken
from Africa asking a big organization to be different that what it is. Good luck with that honey.
18

19. Why are we repeating
our uncaring patterns??
Needless to say I was disappointed. Why in the world is it so darn difficult to change? Why, more
than a decade after Mandela became president, has so little really changed in South Africa?
And why have I not changed? You see, when I left South Africa, I left my firm and my marriage
behind. I knew I needed something more life-giving. Two years later, I had a new career and a new
relationship. Even though the form had changed, the essence had not. My new career was not
making the world a better place, it was just increasing the waistlines of white middle-aged men.
And my new relationship was not as new and great as I wanted it to be – I was still repeating my
old patterns of busking for approval.
19

20. I began to inquire into the nature of change. I came to see that we as humans are less like building
materials and more like plants.
20

21. If I cut a piece of wood, it will stay in that shape for the rest of its life. But I I cut down this field of flowers…
21

22. Next spring, they will come up again in more or less the same shape.
22

23. The same is true for humans. We can attempt to change our behavior, but if we don’t change
the invisible inner world that gives rise to our actions, we are fooling ourselves.
23

24. Tip o’ the hat to Peter Senge
Arc of a typical organizational change effort
This diagram is from Peter Senge, who works extensively in organizational learning. He says we
make great plans and have great aspirations and everyone wags their tails with excitement, but
soon the “organizational inertia” sets in. Peter Drucker says “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
– we commit to working more effectively or going to the gym, we select a new president, we
make a strategic plan, we pledge to end poverty or act as equals – but our conditioned way of
being is much stronger than our rational intentions. Who we are, not what we wish for,
determines where we go.
24

25. “’The universe is made of stories, not atoms,’ poet Muriel
Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves
and each other are how we make sense of the world and our
place in it. Some stories become so sticky, so pervasive that we
internalize them to a point where we no longer see their story-
ness — they become not one of many lenses on reality, but
reality itself. … stories we’ve heard and repeated so many times
they’ve become the invisible underpinning of our entire lived
experience.”
Maria Popova (Brainpickings)
25

26. Unless we
change our story,
we will not
create sustained
change in our
behavior.
26

27. But changing
our story
is not enough.
27

28. Behavior, stuff, words, actions
Organization, process, regulations
Identity, culture & relationship
A model of change in human communities
Marc Rettig
Our stories create our structures and then result in our shared reality.
Apartheid is a great example of this. At its root was a story of inequality – white being superior
to people of color. This belief was then expressed in physical structure: think about town
planning that separated white and black, and economic and educational policies, and so on.
story
structure
form
28

29. New question:
How do we
transform?
Asking “How should we change?” was the wrong question for me and working with what I can
see (behavior) was at the wrong level.

30. the “s-curve” model of innovation…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
You may recall the ‘s-curve’ model of innovation. If we would think of long distance travel, the
first S represents sailing ships. Sailing ships were displaced by steam-powered ships, then
steam ships lost popularity as commercial aviation took off.
30

31. Model: Berkana Institute
Image: Chris Corrigan’s video, “Dynamics of Living Systems”
At the same time, some people
begin to question the old and
jump off. We call them pioneers.
Change happens similarly in living systems. This model describes the cycle of living systems.
Corporations, schools, institutions etc. are all living systems.
A system is born, it thrives and
grows and then reaches its
apex at which point it begins to
decay.
The pioneers start out as solo
players, but soon connect to others
to form networks which evolves into
communities of practice.
Eventually this group
become the new system of
influence and the old
system decays. Think about
the middle ages being
replaced by the
enlightenment.
31

32. The old
The new
If you look at change in families from a systems perspective, a family dynamic doesn’t change because
one person tells everyone around him or her to change. A dynamic changes as one person becomes
aware of the current relational dynamics and chooses to engage differently. He or she might say, “I’ve
had enough of this social pantomime, I stand for something different.” And as they proceed to live their
new values a new dynamic is introduced and becomes the new norm.
Even for ourselves: our habits do not change because we kill our old habits. From a neurological
perspective, our old neural pathways will never go away. But as we make different choices, choice by
choice we begin to grow the new and after some time our different choices become our new normal.
32

33. How can I
change/fix the
world to be more
like I want it to
be…
I’ve made peace with the world as it is, I am no longer interested to ask…
33

34. How do we create
the conditions for
more thriving life,
resilient
communities,
a self-healing world
um...to grow?
I want to know…
34

35. Design is an
excellent teacher
in creating the
new when your
material is
physical or digital
35

36. Understand CreateReflect
The discipline of design has taught me to create a different future. I’ve learned:
1. To really listen to all the voices comprising the current reality: clients, budgets, spatial constraints etc.
2. Reflect and allow the future possibility to emerge
3. And then iteratively bring it to life through drawings, conversations, concept boards, models until it
becomes the new reality
36

37. …but I don’t find
design on its own
to be adequate
for transforming
social situations.
37

38. new reality
How we work together
How we live together
current reality
How we work together
How we live together
Who we are
What we believe
How we relate
Who we are
What we believe
How we relate
What do I mean when I say “transform social situations?” I’m not talking about “design for good,” where
people need a water pump and we design it for them. I’m referring to a group of people who want to
change their reality. Yet, THEY are the ones who make up their current reality. And so, their better future
will emerge from them having transformed their own stories, relationships and structures.
38

39. 1.
understand
the
challenge
2.
rely on best
practice
3.
“fix” this
4.
impose
strategy on
an accepting
environment
5.
agree on
a solution
When we work with physical materials we can…
We can’t
understand
the invisible
& connected
We can’t
determine
‘becoming’
There is no
cause &
effect
Humans are
intentional
Multiple
stakeholders
= diverse
interests &
perspectives
Design is notorious
for showing up in
situations and
creating more
harm by providing
shallow point
solutions.
We thrive when we
have agency and
are seen as
competent co-
creators of reality.
We wither when
we’re seen as
order takers or
replaceable cogs
in wheels.
Design is couched in a traditional problem-solving mindset, which has several assumptions baked into it.
But when we work with humans…
We’re working
with a living
entity with a will
and intelligence
of its own.
Beliefs, fears,
power
relationships etc.
are far below our
radar.
39

40. An expanded
practice is
required
The logic needed to create with physical material
doesn’t apply when working in social complexity
40

41. The kind of work has social structures
and situations as its starting point.
The materials of this work are
relationships and human depth.
The tools of this work are collective
experiences that touch people deeply, and
dialog that’s open and deep enough to
transform beliefs & relationships.
You can’t affect this directly. There is no 3D printer that can print peace or an injection mold that can
change perceptions. Therefore …
41

42. “You cannot predict the outcome of human development;
all you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under
which it will begin to flourish.” Sir Ken Robinson
Leave the old
…become the new
At Fit, we see our work as helping people move from the old to the new. That process is not a choice but
a matter of becoming. It is a question of creating the conditions for transformation to happen.
42

43. Individual
Team
Community
And transformation is fractal in nature. The change of a big system is intimately tangled with changes in all
its sub-systems and individual members. Our work focus on three scales:
…on three scales:
community, team, and individual 43

44. scale one
How do we help
communities
become the
new?
44

45. Approach # 1
Nurture seeds and sprouts
“The future is already
here — it's just not very
evenly distributed.”
William Gibson, writer
Asset-based approach:
identify what is right,
and amplify it.
45

46. In Vietnam during 1990, three out of five of children under the age of five were malnourished. Monique
and Jerry Sternin were asked to see if they could help. The “Let us go in and give aid to communities”
approaches were unsustainable. The Sternins wanted to find a way for the community to solve this
problem for themselves based on the resources already available.
Positive Deviance
Child malnutrition in Vietnam
46

47. The Sternins created a team from the local community to be the design team / experts on this project. In
this case the problem was already defined. But in their other projects they ask the community to identify
the problem they want to work on.
1. DEFINE A PROBLEM
Invite the whole community to a meeting
Let them identify an issue that they deeply care about
Create a team that represents the community as best it can
47

48. 3. DISCOVER EXISTING
UNCOMMON BEHAVIORS &
STRATEGIES
If the community self-discovered a solution,
they are more likely to implement it
2. DETERMINE POSITIVE DEVIANCE INDIVIDUALS
Identify the positive deviants in the community
“Are there people in your village who have the same set of circumstances as everyone else, yet their kids
are well nourished?” It turned out there were. This was good news to the villagers! Who are these people
and what can we learn from them?
The villagers went to visit the folks whose kids were healthy despite their
low income. They were asked to spend time with them and observe what
these “Positive Deviants” were doing differently.
The team identified several things the families did differently. They cooked
foods that were seen as inferior or even dangerous (like snails and the
greens of sweet potatoes); fed their kids more frequently and cared for
their kids differently.
The team was excited. They had identified behavior that could help the
rest of their village have healthier kids! Now, all that was left was to teach
the rest of villagers a better way.
48

49. 4. Design and develop initiatives to leverage these
solutions in the whole society.
Best practice solutions often rejected by the “natural human immune
system.” How can we design a practice based on doing rather than
‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’?
We say that people resist change. I don’t think that is so. If I win the lottery today, that will be a big
change for me and I’ll welcome it. We don’t fear change, we fear loss. If you have done something in a
certain way for a long time it is your normal. If someone tells you “to change”, you might hear
something different like “your old way is no longer good enough; you need to leave your comfortable
way and take a risk.”
Risk = failure = fear. It is only human to protect ourselves when we feel afraid. People’s strategies of
disconnection include making the other person look stupid, avoiding the matter altogether, or
becoming small and invisible. You can’t have a generative conversation when someone is in a fearful
place.
It was good that the Sternins knew that telling someone to change won’t work. They developed a two
week clinic in each village where the caretakers of the undernourished kids worked alongside the
villagers who had done the research. The underlying assumption was that “It is easier to act your way
into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting.” As they worked alongside
together – catching crabs, cooking meals, feeding kids – this new way of working was becoming easier
for the caretakers and they could see their kids’ health improving.
49

50. 5. Discern the effectiveness of the initiative
By the end of the year, 80% of the malnourished kids were healthy again and this initiative continued in
the rest of Vietnam for the next 7 years. I told a short version of this story – please visit the Positive
Deviance website for more information (positivedeviance.org).
What I like about this approach is its belief that a community contains the capacity to solve their own
problems and it is our work is to create the space for them to discover and apply it for themselves.
50

51. Approach # 2
Social prototypes: test-
drive life across the gap
We can often be stuck in our old story, talking extensively about “the way things could be” and finding
101 reasons why it will never work. This is not helpful. What would happen if we create a sample taste of
the future, helping the community experience a different reality, learn from it and work from there?
You can’t plan and
execute the future. But
you can experience
parts of it and have that
experience affect your
present.
51

52. Better Block Jason Roberts in Dallas, Texas
Jason Roberts lives in “the bad part of town.” Inspired by the thriving European city life, he wondered
what a thriving community life could look like in his town.
52

53. Yet, the zoning laws crippled the potential of this neighborhood. They were not allowed to have fruit stands or
awnings, no crowds, and you needed to pay high licensing fees if you wanted flowers or street cafes. Jason
and his friends asked
“What would happen if we
break every law we possibly
can over a week-end?”
53

54. They decided to find out ….
54

55. They created pedestrian walks.
55

56. They created bike lanes and brought in bikes
56

57. They created street cafes & pop-up businesses.
57

58. They printed out all the laws they were breaking and
pasted it on the windows. They invited the
community and members of the city council to this
week-end, and they came.
58

59. This story’s magic lies in how a weekend experience can change people and relationships. It changed the
perceptions of the residents about what their neighborhood could become. It changed the relationship
between the residents and the city council. It changed the city council’s perspectives on their laws and the
type of future their laws were creating. They said “We don’t know why these rules have been in the book
for so many years; we can change these things.” One of the stores became permanent and an anchor to
the community.
An experience such as this has the power to change a community’s perception of themselves and the
future that they can create together. And it can give any group of people great clarity and momentum
towards the future they’ve all experienced.
59

60. Approach # 3
Deep co-creative journey
Things, words, actions
Organizational structures & processes
Relationships, values, purpose
Based on C. Otto Scharmer’s Theory U
Understand
together
Create
together
Reflect
This work is based on Otto Scharmer’s Theory U. Scharmer’s organization is the Presencing Institute. They and
a separate consulting firm called Reos Partners do really great work based on Theory U, both worth looking
into. The change architecture of this method is the closest I know to the design process and underpins most of
our work at Fit Associates.
60

61. See the story, “Collaboration and the
elephant that sat on it” on the Fit
Associates site
http://www.fitassociates.com/elephant/
Fit Associates
Redesigning a Quality process in Corporate America
One day a global consumer products company contacted us with a request to help them get better at
understanding their customer’s world and communicate it internally. Their quality process – the flow
between the customer’s world and organizational decision-making – was not working so great.
When you tell me that something like process can be better, the designer in me jumps up and wants to fix
it. Thankfully we didn’t take that route. Instead we created a five-day workshop with the intention to
reconnect the people working on the quality process to the world of their customers, to each other and
then to create from there.
61

62. Our participants came into the workshop with very specific perspectives representing the points of view of their
departments. We started by mapping out the process from their different perspectives – it is important for
people to say how they see things and feel heard.
After some training in suspending judgment and deep listening, we took them out of their offices and into the
homes of their customers. Over three days they experienced a mini ethnographic research journey.
62

63. We visited customer homes together.
63

64. Then we watched all the videos together.
64

65. We used a lot of sticky notes for analysis & synthesis.
65

66. People from all over the system, together
making sense of what they’d seen
66

67. … as they worked together the
conversation deepened and
something happened
67

68. The elephant in the room stepped out. People were able to speak honestly and say things they
couldn’t say before. “We are divided,” said some, “We don’t feel seen in this process,” others said.
Many agreed that “We don’t trust each other.” Once the elephant was out, the participants collectively
agreed that there was something bigger that united them. They all cared about creating really great
quality products for their customers.
68

69. Designing ways to use the pent-up heart for quality.
Working from what they cared about, people from across the process re-designed their own quality process
together.
69

70. This image is from a different workshop. Here we spent two days generating ideas and roadmaps for
becoming the new. I get excited when I see people from different perspectives leave their old differences
behind, find their shared purpose and work together to create their new together.
70

71. scale two
How do we
enable team
transformation?
Social innovation is a team sport and one of the most dangerous. We as humans are approval-seeking
machines, we can operate smoothly and safely within the existing power dynamics and social norms.
But that is exactly what is keeping us stuck. We need to learn to create a team space that can
transcend our social conditioning and create the new together.
71

72. Find
Shared
purpose
Story: Fit Associates
Working in their neighborhood
A great design has at its heart a strong and clear concept – an underlying essence that gives the building or
product its coherence and story. Great teams share something similar. One can call it intention or purpose.
72

73. This story is set in the neighborhood that we live
in, Polish Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
THE CONTEXT: We share a similar history to
Detroit. In the last hundred years our
neighborhood has gone from 10,000 residents to
just over a thousand. Now, for the first time in
decades a new development is going to be built
on a prominent site in the neighborhood.
THE MIX: Our neighborhood has three very strong
groups in it. The first is the original Polish folks
who have lived here all their lives. The second are
the anarchists who moved into the neighborhood
when things were still rather grim about fifteen
years ago. And the last group are the
professionals who started to move into the
neighborhood about eight years ago.
THE CHALLENGE: People don’t really like those
outside their own tribes, yet we need to work
together. The old folks distrust the anarchists and
accuse them of vandalism. The anarchists have no
time for the older folks’ closed community. The
professionals feel unwelcomed by the anarchists,
and the anarchists feel the professionals are
gentrifying their neighborhood. The old folks resist
changes the professional people propose. Get the
picture?
73

74. Behavior, stuff, words, actions
Organization, process, regulations
Identity, culture & relationship
Marc Rettig
story
structure
form
While my colleague Marc and I were sitting in one of our neighborhood meetings, we realized that the
disagreements were all about the form – how big, for whom, how expensive … But we were not asking
the important questions such as why do we do this and who are we as a neighborhood?
We decided to get a representative mix of people from the neighborhood together so that we can focus
on our identity as a community. It was not easy to get people to come. The anarchists were disillusioned
by endless meetings and all the talk, and the older people were hard to approach.
On the day of the meeting none of the artists showed up…
74

75. …until about twenty minutes into the meeting. I was grateful - we had a representation of our
neighborhood in the room – a team of people that can talk on behalf of Polish Hill.
During the first half of the workshop we told stories aimed at reconnecting us to what matters to us all. We
went around the tables, and each person describing, “how I got here and why I belong in Polish Hill.” This
gave people the opportunity to hear each other’s stories and listen to the things they value.
Next the conversation needed to go deeper, to the place beyond your stories. But how do you get a
group of people to tap into their intuition?
We went for a walk in the neighborhood (in our minds only – it was freezing outside!) We walked past the
landmarks we loved – the church, our coffee shop, the open spaces, the three bars... This simple
visualization helped us get to the right side of our brain. I then asked them “What is the soul of our
neighborhood? Can you listen for it?”
75

76. When you work with intuitive things like soul and purpose, people fare better when they can use artistic
means that represent the essence they can sense, but not necessarily say. Each person stayed in silence
and built a model that represented the soul of the neighborhood.
We went around the table, each one saying what their model represents. Some good stuff came out. One
older lady built a model of two streams. She started to cry when she spoke: “This is the old soul of our
neighborhood, this is the new soul… I am so afraid that we will not get together.” The conversation
opened and people talked about the things they feared, the things they shared in common.
The group built a collective model that represented the soul of our neighborhood and the reasons why
they live here, like our sense of belonging, community and safety, our green spaces, the diversity of the
residents and the gritty worker-class character of our neighborhood.
76

77. Looking towards future developments, we continued to refine what we value about by filling in a matrix. It
helped us clarify what is
a) ideal for us,
b) acceptable and
c) just downright out
Of course there wasn’t agreement on all the issues. We documented disagreements, which made the
conversation richer and allowed for different opinions to live side-by-side.
When a team of people work together, it is essential that they come from a place of shared purpose and
a sense of identity. Without the basis of who we are and what we collectively care about, it would be
close to impossible to move towards a collective future.
77

78. 78

79. Communicate
the deep
Story: Organization unbound
Kufunda Village
One thing I am tired of seeing is gorgeous fire-side moments where people openly speak about what matters, and
soon after their conversations flatten to normal niceties. The following story is from a village in Zimbabwe as told
by Warren Nilsson from Organization Unbound (in Cape Town)
79

80. Kufunda Village is an eco center and learning village in Zimbabwe that asks,
”What does it mean to live sustainably: both environmentally and socially?”
Warren en Tana attended one of their village meetings. The issue on the
table was the financial management of the village. The village believed in
collaborative self-governance, but in certain technical areas people with
previous experience were taking responsibility. This was limiting the
project’s growth and not easy to address – group members were from
different racial, language and educational demographics.
The village decided they need a financial team to share the financial power
and enable people to participate. When the time came for volunteers to
raise their hands, no one volunteered to be part of the new team. There
was an awkward silence. People were getting frustrated and you could
almost hear the normal projections: “Ah, people aren’t really committed….”
But then it was suggested to take a moment and just hear what everyone
was feeling at that moment.
They went around the room, with each person airing their internal
experience. In many teams this would be hard to do, as people don’t feel
safe to share their experience. But at Kufunda, people knew honesty would
be appreciated and not held against them.
Things came out like, “You know, I am excited about this, but I’m not
qualified and this would be a learning curve for me, you’ll have to be
patient.” Someone else commented that “I’m sensitive to the financial team
becoming the boss of the village, and I’m not comfortable with taking on
such leadership.” “I’m over committed as it is, but I would like to support
the team in such and such a way.”
This conversation took about 10 minutes, but it was profound.
Kufunda village – image taken from
Warren’s presentation: Social innovation
from the inside out
80

81. "The reason things stay
the same is because
we've been the same. For
things to change, we must
change!"Eric Jensen
It is easy to forget that we are the world. The beliefs, patterns of relating, power structures that inform our
current reality are embedded into us. The thing is, we are blind to our own beliefs. They reside inside
ourselves as implicit knowledge and we don’t know about them until we bump into them.
In this story, people bumped into their own fears (“I am not an expert”) and limiting beliefs (“the financial
team will dominate the village”) and were given the opportunity to air them. If they remained unspoken,
they would continue to have a limiting effect on the group. But once people were able to be honest, they
could see that the things they believed were not true enough to keep them from moving forward.
I imagine the rest of the conversation going something like this, “Yes you might be slow to learn, but there
is no rush here, we’ll help you!” “Ah yes, we understand that finances can tend to dominate the world, but
this does not have to be so here. We can all work together to value the life of our community above
financial constraints.”
81

82. 1.
Sense what
you feel
2.
Communicate
honestly from
I-perspective
3.
Hear the
other’s needs
4.
Respond
honestly from
I-perspective
This diagram depicts a communication cycle essential to any team involved in social innovation. The cycle
seems deceptively simple. But in practice it requires us to be sensitive, vulnerable and gracious. This
goes against the grain of our “be strong, assertive and perfect” culture and is a new skillset to learn.
“You mean hungry
and tired are not
feelings?” (student
of mine.) As a
modern culture
we’ve lost the ability
to really sense and
understand what
we’re feeling. What
does sadness,
anger, fear feel like?
I’m well-trained to say the
socially acceptable thing.
Vocalizing that I feel
frustrated, disappointed
or scared is difficult.
It takes practice to
hear what someone
is actually saying and
to to read their need
as a demand or
accusation.
Based on Non Violent
Communication by M Rosenberg
and the work of Dan Siegel
82

83. And of course we are all human and this cycle will break and people will get hurt. That is to be
expected. The invitation is not to be perfect, but to acknowledge when something goes badly and
to repair that rupture. This is key to building robust relationships.
1.
Sense what
you feel
3.
Hear the
other’s needs
2.
Communicate
honestly from
I-perspective
4.
Respond
honestly from
I-perspective
83

84. Basis of
trust
creativity
co-operation
transformation
This cycle of honest communication is the
84

85. scale three
How do we
enable
individual
transformation?
You can be a jerk and design the greatest buildings. The same is not true for design for social innovation.
What you do flows from who you are. To the degree that you're involved in your own transformation, you
can help other people transform. We can't give people what we don't have ourselves.
85

86. Engage in
transformation
Mostly, we don't grow up to be who we are, we grow up to be what our society asks of us. As our
approval and the acceptance of our (family, school, work, religious) group is mostly hinged on us doing or
saying the right thing, many of us have lost sight of who we are. Life coach Martha Beck describes the
steps to living an inauthentic life:
a) We go dumb by not speaking our hearts
b) We go deaf refusing to hear our souls
Repeat.
86

87. Individual transformation is about moving from living your culturally-expected story toward becoming your
true and authentic self. It is about moving from a world view that sees yourself as fixed and the world as
controllable to adopting a way of being where you can navigate uncertainty and complexity and develop
the sensitivity to work with emergence.
At the School of Visual Art where we teach Design for Social Innovation, our course has three tracks.
Community, group and personal transformation. This image is from a group of students acting out the
Transtheoretical model of behavioral change. We looked at several transformation models.
Create a felt experience of a transformation cycle
87

88. Fear keeps us in our current patterns. Here our students did an exercise by Martha Beck. They jotted down
their inner lizard's top ten tunes and made drawings and models of their fearful selves. We talked about our
fearful beliefs in small groups. Feeling like “I am a failure, I am not good enough, I will never succeed…” does
not make us flawed. It just means we’re deeply human. We don't overcome fear, we befriend and question our
beliefs and gradually they lose their power over us.
88

89. “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and wounded. It is a relationship between equals. Only
when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes
real when we recognize our shared humanity.” Pema Chödrön.
This is student drawing, made after we’ve invited them to work with their past pains.
89

90. The first step towards transforming a system is to become aware of its patterns. Here we are
in class, about to do exercises aimed at developing interpersonal and personal awareness.
We’re using a framework from neurobiologist Dan Siegel and complimenting it with exercises
drawn from the world of mindfulness and theatre.
90

91. Design is a wonderful discipline to help us create something new inside uncertainty. We can work iteratively
towards something we sense. Uncertainty can be really uncomfortable. You’ve all been in social situations
where the dynamics feel wonky and you’re not sure what to do next. In this image we are doing some improv
games – they’re great to help you develop the muscles necessary to lean into uncertainty and discover
something new – moment by moment.
Improvisation – a great tool to lean into uncertainty
91

92. Get the
best out
of your
material
As designers we are really good at doing this: helping the material come to life in our designs.
92

93. How we see
people = how we
work with people
“We fare best when nourished deeply and well by the
simple, daily nourishment of genuine acceptance of
who we are, mercy for who we have been, and
unconditional love for who we will become. Under
these conditions, the fields of our soul are set free to
provide a rich and abundant harvest” – Wayne Muller
When we see people as somehow defective, broken, incompetent, broken, lazy… (you make the list)
we tend to want to fix them, change them, distance ourselves from them. But what if we can choose
to focus on the innate goodness inside the person standing in front of us?
93

94. Come from a place
of worth.
“Your biography is not
your identity”
– John O’Donohue
In design for social innovation, you don’t have a singular client like you often have in design. Our client
is the unborn future. This asks of us to act with integrity, to act on what we know is deeply true, even
if that goes against the cultural grain.
Cultivating a space of unconditional love and acceptance within ourselves enables us to stay strong
amidst criticism. And it helps us to be generous towards the people we are working with, regardless
of their past history and present labels.
94

95. the
great
turning
Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown invite us to step into the future. There we will find our great-great-great
grandchildren telling the story about “the great turning.” In this story, our society was hell-bound on destroying
the life support system we depended on. But then, right about now, something began to happen. Through the
countless choices of individuals and groups things started to shift. Our society changed from an industrial
growth society to a life-sustaining society.
95

96. FIX PROBLEMS:
Design for…
SYSTEMIC WELLNESS
Design with…
SYSTEMIC SELF-
HEALING / RESILIENCE
Nurture the
conditions for life
NATIONS,
GLOBAL SYSTEMS
ORGANIZATIONS,
CITIES,
LOCAL SYSTEMS
INDIVIDUALS
TEAMS,
FAMILIES,
…
SELF-HEALING
NATIONS
GLOBAL SYSTEMS
HEALTHY NATIONS
GLOBAL SYSTEMS
FIXING PROBLEMS
AT NATION
GLOBAL SCALE
SELF-HEALING
ORGANIZATIONS
LOCAL SYSTEMS
HEALTHY
ORGANIZATIONS
LOCAL SYSTEMS
FIXING PROBLEMS
IN ORGANIZATIONS
LOCAL SYSTEMS
SELF-HEALING
PEOPLE GROUPS
HEALTHY
PEOPLE GROUPS
FIXING PROBLEMS
FOR PEOPLE
GROUPS
We are living this shift. As a design profession we are asked to move from fixing problems
on a small scale to nurturing the conditions for a systemic self-healing world.
96
Marc Rettig

97. “The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to
save the world but to fullybelongto it. It’s not
possible to save the world by trying to save it. You
need to findwhat is genuinely yoursto offer the
world before you can make it a better place.
Discovering your unique gift to bring to your
community is your greatest opportunity and
challenge. The offering of that gift – your true self –
is the most you can do to love and serve the world.
And it is all the world needs.” Bill Plotkin
And as individuals, we are invited to leave our cultural scripts behind, cease our efforts to
change what is not ours to change and become the life we long for in this world.
97

98. Thank you
Discussion
98