2. The far-out. Participants are asked to push every idea and every thought to the extreme. By listing even the most far-out suggestions, participants realize that it’s much easier to moderate an extreme concept than to belatedly nudge a safe idea in the other direction.
3. 100 ideas. As fast as possible, brainstorming participants write out and visualize one hundred ideas without any judgments, in a maximum of fifty words per idea. Each idea should be accompanied by a quick sketch, photograph, or other means to help visualize the idea.
4. Archetyping. Participants are asked to dig deeper than the problem at hand, into what it represents. They might consider, for example, that shoes aren’t fashion accessories or a product but covers for feet. Breaking the issue down to its most basic archetype is the point. From there, participants build a new method of thinking about it.
In its design-focused brainstorming, the IwB reminds participants to stay positive in all discussions, to keep a record of all ideas, and to look for opportunities to combine concepts, but not to elaborate too deeply on any given train of ideas, because good brainstorming seeks quantity over quality.
In February 2016, the IwB continued the discussion in a second charrette, bringing hundreds of students together in Toronto to discuss the issues affecting rural and semirural zones in general. The Kerry-specific design process concluded with a “Dean’s Charrette” in the spring. As teams developed and reshaped their ideas, there were frequent communications between them and the Iveragh officials, residents, and, in particular, Jean and Michael.
A BETTER WAY TO BRAINSTORM
Announce a brainstorming session and you can expect groans from a substantial portion of your audience. We have all suffered through the “How many uses can you come up with for a paper clip?” approach to brainstorming, which leaves the Georges among us tongue-tied as we stare at the blank piece of paper or flip chart in front of us. Design thinking approaches brainstorming differently, as the IwB’s method demonstrates. First, it is data driven. It takes the information we learned about our users during What is and uses it to inspire our creativity. Second, it provides trigger techniques—like flipping—to help encourage new ways of thinking. Third, it facilitates quick, iterative rounds that allow us to build on the ideas of others.
The final report, delivered in June 2016, described five concepts. At the center of the final proposal was what the IwB called Weave, a location in a now-closed elementary school that would “foster collaboration, community building, and an entrepreneurial spirit in the Skellig Kerry region.” Besides encouraging “entrepreneurs, students, community advocates, scientists, artists, and researchers to come together and create new initiatives and businesses,” Weave would house offices and provide support for the four other potential projects.
Map of the Skellig Kerry pathways.
The first project, Skellig Kerry—a response to the “County Kerry as a destination” area of opportunity, identified at the July 2015 workshop—tied County Kerry to the world-famous Skellig Michael monastery just off the Iveragh Peninsula. It sought to encourage longer tourism stays by utilizing key natural, cultural, and historical assets along a series of pathways for cycling, walking, and kayaking. Although the Skellig islands are only a tiny part of the Iveragh Peninsula in south County Kerry, the IwB hoped to connect their international reputation as a World Heritage Site and Star Wars filming location with the area’s famed Wild Atlantic Way to promote site using rather than just sightseeing. The Skellig Kerry concept developed out of an original “outdoor museum” idea that took advantage of extensive but dispersed archeological sites from prehistoric periods, such as the famous ringforts, and the water resources of the Atlantic Ocean.
The Cosan project took adventure tourism along a technological path by providing tourists with wristbands and a phone app that could act as emergency signals, if needed, while highlighting and promoting local restaurants, hotels, attractions, and maps of the pathway system. Helping to build the Iveragh’s adventure tourism brand, Cosan drew on the electronic health tracking trend (e.g., Fitbit devices) to monitor human health indicators while adventurers cycled, climbed, or paddled.
The next project, Innovation Iveragh, housed in Weave, coordinated five outdoor pavilions originally referred to as “Pearls.” The concept built on prior discussions highlighting the value of modern farming—including the new industry of harvesting seaweed—and south Kerry’s “dark night sky” preserve (the only one in the Northern Hemisphere), which regulated light sources to enhance stargazing. Designed to encourage visitors to bring their own transformative projects and innovative ideas and to collaborate with local experts, Innovation Iveragh sought to create a regional gateway for investors looking to incubate and launch new industries.
Finally, the Muinin (“pride” in Irish) Project developed a “Transition Year” process in Iveragh’s school systems to keep local high school graduates in the area. The components of the Muinin Project were linked with the other proposed projects. For example, the transition students would work at Weave, help build the Skellig Kerry pathways, and aid international mentors in Innovation Iveragh. Promoting a sense of belonging and Iveragh identity in these students would, the IwB students projected, address the long-term desire to repopulate the area with young families and achieve the greater goal of keeping the new generation in Iveragh.
The concepts were all interrelated, both conceptually and geographically. This arrangement allowed for flexibility and adaptation to ever-changing local reality, because Iveragh officials could select among concepts, combine them, and develop sensible timelines—important, given the reality of budgetary constraints. Fixed solutions, the IwB believed, could quickly become obsolete in a changing environment.
Diagram of the Imagining Iveragh project system.
The Evolution of Ideas
The final proposals received input from a number of sources throughout the year and evolved through a combination of curriculum modules, the November and February charrettes, and further iteration and collaboration with partners and key stakeholders. The outdoor museum, for example, began with a cable car that would soar over a hard-to-reach archeological site. It transformed into using gondolas for transportation over the MacGillycuddy’s Reeks mountains and a dozen archeological sites. Later, recognizing that the cost and environmental and time factors rendered this idea impractical, students settled on a single gondola to the top of one mountain with phenomenal views of the Skellig Islands. In subsequent iterations, the gondola concept disappeared, but the idea survived in the Skellig Kerry pathways—an on-the-ground system that allowed active tourists to find and enjoy dozens of hidden archeological sites.
Another idea that initially generated buzz during the November charrette was the Pearl project. The team’s original idea of a single research and visitor center had morphed into five satellite Pearl domes, each highlighting a different aspect of the area’s uniqueness but able to be combined with other groups’ concepts. Though the word Pearl had disappeared by the final report, the concept lived on in another form, the Innovation Iveragh concept, with its five pavilions.
Keys to Success in Collaborative Design
The IwB team identified several factors as key to the success of the Imagining Iveragh project, in particular, and to the success of charrettes in general.
Working Face-to-Face
The first success factor was putting everyone physically together in the same room. The charrette, like design thinking, is essentially a social tool. As Luigi expressed it:
Face-to-face works so much better! The charrette is about breaking down sequential specialization methodologies and bringing in collaborative creation methodologies. The most sophisticated tool to do that is not necessarily mechanical or digital; some of the most sophisticated technologies are social. So face-to-face is a super powerful technology. Face-to-face, with all the knowledge in the room, is one of the principles of systems thinking. Get all the knowledge in the room.
Visua
lization
As is true in so many of our stories, visualization was a constant. It was used throughout the charrette, providing multiple ways for people to talk with each other. In Imagining Iveragh, teams used drawings, computer designs, mapping (of both geographic and economic realities), and literal models to communicate with each other and with local stakeholders and policy makers. Visualization helped people of different backgrounds and nationalities, or different sensibilities, ages, and experiences, to understand each other’s meaning. During the Kerry charrette, for example, it was common to see silver-haired, buttoned-down Michael peering over a rather less formal but equally dedicated young student to view an animation on the student’s laptop. As Michael suggested improvement ideas, the student responded with nods and fingers flashing on the keyboard.
Prototyping
Prototyping is one variant of visualization. It enabled participants to interact in more concrete ways with the ideas proposed. Luigi explained:
When you prototype, it is a simulation. Everyone thinks simulations are these powerful computer things, but simulation is when you grab a Kleenex and fold it. You are making a rough version that is an imitation of the final version. It is important to visualize, simulate, and then interact. But interaction is most important, because then you can really see whether a concept behaves with people in the actual environment the way you hope it will.
He elaborated:
The tendency is to try to preplan everything and have the answer ahead of time, but if you can see an answer already, you haven’t created anything new. You are still in the world of the known, not the world of the unknown. By prototyping, you enter the world of the unknown. You learn about it, and then you can actually reiterate and perfect your solutions. Most things fail for details. Not because their thing was wrong but because the details were not worked out. And the only way to work out the details is to prototype, get it in use, revise, reiterate until it actually works.
PROTOTYPING
Prototyping early and often, one of the core tenets of a design thinking approach, involves creating rough visual representations of an idea. A prototype tells a story, allowing team members not only to ensure their own alignment on a new idea but also to seek more accurate feedback from stakeholders. Prototyping forces design teams to pay attention to details they might otherwise overlook.
Setting Timelines
Timelines were an important part of the IwB’s process. By visualizing the timelines for each project, with the details of implementation beachheads clearly specified, residents gained a plan that could be worked on incrementally. Luigi explained why timelines are critical:
Considering things in time is very powerful. We don’t leave people just a design; we leave them a set of actions over time. That’s what they start to follow. That’s why timelining is such a powerful process. When you visualize the timeline with the action steps and the small designs that you have to get done, that together would change everything, people have something to work towards.
All of the final Iveragh concepts came with both a timeline by project and an overall timeline that illustrated how the ideas interacted. The Skellig Kerry project timeline, for instance, began with a traditional guidebook in 2017, added an electronic guide in 2018, and specified that the actual “wayfinding” (electronic signposts) would be added in 2019, when the pathways were projected to be finished.
Timelines for proposal implementation.
Timelines also helped communities figure out how to make small bets fast in their efforts to reinvent the economy, which often is challenging for most people to envision. Certainly, Iveragh would need to renovate the closed elementary school to transform it into the Weave centerpiece. But smaller experiments also were possible, as the timelines demonstrated. Skellig Kerry, the adventure tourism concept, began with branding. The assets for this adventure tourism concept—mountains for downhill cycling, the Atlantic for kayaking, the winds for surfing and parasailing, and the famous walks—already existed on the Iveragh Peninsula, and three trails similar to New Zealand’s famous treks were already on the drawing board. The initial actions involved combining existing adventure tourism guides and seeking cooperation from small hotels, restaurants, and facilities to offer multiday stays, and then communicating the packages to the targeted tourists—generally young, professional, and risk-inclined young couples from Europe and America, rather than the older, sedentary tourists who circled the Ring of Kerry and the Wild Atlantic Way in buses.
Creating Champions
A final element, perhaps most critical to implementation of the IwB’s ideas, was finding champions among community members. These champions emerged early on in the design process and became the connectors who forged the other relationships required to actually build the new future. These connectors helped galvanize the community to action and maintained the momentum after the charrette.
In fact, it was the impact of the charrette on the lives of the people involved, above and beyond any specific actions taken, that was Luigi’s dominant measure in evaluating the success of a charrette:
I actually think the proof is in how people’s lives are changing. That’s really hard to capture with metrics. And it takes time. A lot of the things we’ve accomplished in charrettes have taken time to gestate before they come true. The most powerful part is what they do to the people who have been in them. Sometimes I am not even worried if change happens. In fact, when I started I thought we had to finish all the projects. But what really needs to come from a charrette is that people are given agency and that things start to change—that people are empowered to change.
Reflections on the Process
Noreen O’Mahoney, economic and tourism officer for Kerry, reflected on what made the design thinking experience powerful:
For economic development in rural areas like Iveragh, the rural area has many opportunities, many attributes, but needs some fresh thinking and maybe outside perspectives. Design thinking and action research bring collaborative thinking with the researchers, the communities, the local governments, the locals to act together to come up with actions and solutions. In a more traditional process, you’d have hired a consultant and gotten recommendations. The consultants would interview the community, but only about that project. This was more environment based. The researchers are involved with the community. The community is the one who, at the end of the day, has to be invested.
Luigi concurred:
To create and implement solutions over time is to imagine the unfolding of a solution, not a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. It’s not one thing; it’s an interaction of things, of people working together. The reason collaborative design is so critical at this moment is that we’ve spent five centuries developing specialization as our methodology. We solved problems by acquiring knowledge. This process towards specialized, abstract knowledge has been critical. But having reached higher and higher levels of specialization, and achieved that intense domain of knowledge, our next step becomes how to integrate across specialized knowledge to solve the increasing complexity of the world, to take the world forward. Wicked problems have always existed, but it has become clear that we can’t solve problems within a single specialization. Everything is interconnected. Today we need people working together.
Whether it’s called user-centered design, service design, or design thinking, this process of thinking together, of interaction and insight seeking, using tools such as a charrette, makes possible a new kind of conversation and a new future.
After ideas blossom and stakeholders align around a particular set of opportunities, then fiscal and political constraints are added to the mix and assumptions are scrutinized. Some possibilities may confront realities that impede their implementation; any given idea may or may not be financed. But, by ensuring creative thought, by working in intensive collaboration, we believe that exciting possibilities capable of surviving the What wows and What works tests will emerge.
In Iveragh, it all st
arted with a few forceful folks: a catalyst, Jean, with a strategy for problem solving, and a leader, Moira, with the courage to try a new approach. “Jean found the opening, and she pushed it very hard,” Michael commented, “and we are all better off because of that. If Jean was easy to say no to, this would not have happened.”
Jean acknowledged:
Sometimes you have to be a good bit “bulldozerish” to change mindsets. Hopefully, like the US decided to put a man on the moon and then did it, perhaps Kerry can use and harness the IwB’s results and perhaps go to the moon.
Back in Cahersiveen, town librarian Noreen O’Sullivan would settle for more-modest change:
For a group to include us, to consult with and involve local people, it helps the community buy in and support the project. Everyone got so enthusiastic. We had a full house listening to the proposals. We’ll embrace whatever projects are finalized. Whichever ideas get selected, it can only be a huge positive, if the project helps people to stay here and not have to leave. We have such a wonderful quality of life here for those who can stay.
Design Thinking for the Greater Good Page 16