In a previous post I mentioned my exploration of the notion of design patterns and speculated on the possiblity of using a patterns approach to creating better live experiences and events.

I sketch one out as a first stab.

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Name – Rapid, Auto-Forward Presentation

Problem – Presentations are poor ways to communicate information when more efficient methods that allow the receiver to consume information on their own time, in a formate that is most convenient (such as email, wiki, video, etc). Some people are poor presenters and go on for too long. Powerpoint presentations, specifically, are often badly designed and executed, which bores and/or overwhelms the consumer with too much information. There are not enough resources (money, time, space, contenct) to execute a full length presentation.

Context – There is the opportunity to present a limited amount of information in a novel way.

There is the technological capacity to present a Powerpoint presentation.

Presenters should be willing to prepare and rehearse the format or their struggles may become more engaging than the information they are trying to convey.

There are limited resources (time, money, space, experience, content, etc)

Forces (influencing the design) – Need to present information to live audience.

Expectation that an event feature a speaker.

Not every presenter has appropriate content knowledge or is an engaging performer.

Audience is bored with typical presentation formats, is looking for novelty, and/or wants to have fun while they learn.

Limit on amount of time to present because of costs.

Desire to use Powerpoint technology.

Solution – Limit the presenter to set number of slides, which will auto-forward after a set amount of time. The auto-forward feature is standard to Powerpoint-type presentation software.

Set up video projector and screen. Connect projector to laptop with presentation software and the specific presentation loaded onto the hard-drive. Setting up the laptop off stage, away from the presenter will discourage the presenter from fooling with the presentation during the presentation (ie. backing up).

Set up lights and mic/speakers for the presenter if they need it to be seen/heard.

Have someone at the laptop start the presentation, and load the next when it is done.

Often a series of these presentations are presented together.

Introductions between presenters is discouraged because it drags out the event and is contrary to notion of rapid advancement.

Too many presentations grouped together can exhaust the audience just as quickly as a single long presentation.

Examples – Two popular methods at the 20 slides for twenty seconds each (20x20 or Petcha Kucha) and the Ignite format.

Resulting Context – A satisfying amount of information can be quickly transmitted to a live audience. Presenters are relieved to have gotten through the experience. Audience may be interested to learn more and to talk with presenter further. Presents enough information to form the basis of further conversation and debate. Entertainment. Provides concise experience for audience to relate to friends as stories.

I have been fascinated by the notion and culture of "design patterns" of late. For those of you late to the game like me design patterns is the notion of capturing and communicating contextually relevant rules-of-thumb about a field of knowledge.

Rather than a set of abstract principles, best practices, or things like style guides...the key difference in the approach is that a design pattern is a typical solution to a specific, recurring problem.

It also seems to me that it is a great way to capture bodies of knowledge that are infused with a decent degree of subjectivity and complexity. It is also theorized that a bunch of patterns might fit together not just as a set of data but make up the units of a language for communicating a kind of design thinking.

Here is some wiki knowledge: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogical_pattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design_pattern

Now is turns out that this approach was famously fleshed out in architecture by fellow named Christopher Alexander in a series of books that attempt to capture a humanist approach to building, that can be applied by even a novice. Alexander seems to have a bit of a cult following. The design pattern approach apparently set off a big movement in computer science, user experience design, game design, and even education.

There is also a fun notion of the anti-pattern, which is what not to do.

I came to this originally when I was talking to a user-experience designer earlier this year and he made an offhanded comment about UX patterns...I was curious about how he seemed to think you could capture the rather subjective issues we were discussing but I forgot about it until I was recently reading The Art of Game Design (a good one) and the author mentioned it and so I stumbled into a rather interesting world.

It seems like it is one of those internet conversations that has seen a flurry of activity but reached a dead end and has faded away. Particularly in the early 00's it seemed there was a bunch of discussion on the UX side but then it stops...see this discussion as a prime example: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?347

What seems to be happening is that the language and the logic is easier to talk about than the subjective intangibles which then is smothering the fundamental insight. This is a typical anti-pattern I think best known as "There is nothing less funny than talking about comedy." In the blog discussion linked about you see that much of the debate is supposedly about what patterns are useful for and such but the currency of the debate is really about what makes up a good pattern and what categories make the best template for writing them.

An interested bit of internet culture aside the thing that intrigues me is the capacity for this mode of documentation to capture elusive things like performance and live experience design best practices.

On the art side for instance, performance art struggles as a discipline because it doesn't have a clear body of practice yet...it is more of a interdisciplinary hodgepodge which is interesting from an innovation perspective but less so from a credibility standpoint. How do you teach something for instance that has no fundamental set of skills?

On the live experience side of things, I have been struggling to find a way to capture this as a body of knowledge that is broad enough to approach any kind of live event...from a birthday party, to a corporate conference, to a day at the park. Seems like a series of live event patterns might be an interesting approach.

The participants your choose to be a part of a brainstorm are obviously important, but the there are numerous ways to decide who to include.

A Half & Half is a ideation and problem solving format that I use for small groups. The basic idea is a pretty simple and might be a way to add a new dimension to your next brainstorm...give it a try.

1) Invite a group of curious people together (I suggest no more than 8).

2) Make sure at least half are new faces

3) Try to include at least one “creative” (an artist, designer, etc), and at least one person who is radically outside your industry.

4) Have just one cental topic or question to explore.

You can run the discussion freestyle or use something more formal. Typical meeting/collaboration challenges will apply. It can help to have a facilitator and a note-taker.

Depending how you tweek the meeting, different outcomes can be reached. Perhaps you want to raise issues...asking broader questions might be in order. Perhaps you want to look at new angles of a problem your team is stuck on...have the old-hands describe the problem in a short 5 min presentation and then spend 20 minutes silently listing to the ideas of the newbies. 

There is a lot of talk about bring together interdisciplinary groups to solve problem but it is tough to execute. Often are networks are not as broad as we might think. You might consider inviting someone else to curate the newbie half of the meeting. 

As long as the participants are generally curious and open minded, good facilitation should be able to make the group work. If you don't have good facilitation, it still will be inclined to new ideas because of the new people. The main contribution of a Half & Half is in making a conscious curatorial decision to bring in new perspectives and to bring in enough of them that they have a voice in the room.

- There are a few principles at work here will encourage new ideas.

1) Having new people who are not versed in the social dynamics and history of the problem you are trying to solve forces the old-hands to look at each other and the problem anew.

2) Sometime there is already an appropriate solution available and in common use in a different industry.

3) Conflicts are good when trying to generate ideas, as long as they support the meeting goal. New perspectives introduce new conflicts of interest and vision that encourage the participants to be creative.

4) Participants from outside your industry will have a harder time seeing the kind of specific applications your group might be jumping to already. When trying to generate new ideas, holding off on looking for application is your friend.

I use these principles often when putting together Double Happiness Workgroups.

Good luck.

A few weeks ago I attended Social Change Camp in NYC. I led a session discussing on the merits of iterative vs. revolutionary/holistic design approaches. I asked if there are any other approaches to creating change.

This topic came up for me while I was watching the President's health care speech to congress and noticed that one of the big applause lines had to do with the idea that they would not make radical change. I recognized at that moment that I think there needs to be significant change, not only in health care but a number of areas of society. The question is how do you get there.

As a citizen, it worries me that perhaps we don't have the communication/collaboration tools, the political process in place to achieve real change. David Brooks makes this argument to Gail Collins in the NYTimes:

...there is a broad consensus on what we need to do to solve many of our major problems, but no political way to get there. Most experts of left and right believe we need a gas tax in order to address our energy problems. No political way to get there. Most believe that we need a flatter, fairer tax code, probably based on a consumption tax. No political way to get there. Most agree that the fee-for-service system drives up health care costs and the employer based insurance system is unsustainable. There is apparently no political way to change these things. Most experts agree that teacher quality is crucial to the schools and that bad teachers need to be fired. Again, no political way to do this. - David Brooks

As we now approach the endgame of the health care reform debate I think there will be a lot of rewriting of the recent history. There was a lot of fear around the tenor of the public debate with people talking over each other and questions raised of President Obama's capacity to keep a hold on the debate.

I found the degree of public investment in this debate interesting and appropriate following the degree of interest there was in the presidential election. I found it refreshing that the debate wasn't managed from the top for the most efficient and politically tidy outcome.

This line stuck out to me in the book "Washington's Crossing", by David Hackett Fischer:

Our republics cannot exist long in prosperity. We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed. -  Benjamin Rush

Rush is a lesser known Founding Father. He felt it was a national habit to avoid dealing with difficult problem until it was nearly impossible. It is interesting that this was apparent even at the founding of the nation.

I also remember the Winston Churchil line - America will always do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other options.

America seems to have a reputation. I assume it is at least in part due to our geographic location which insulates us from much of our conflicts and our short election cycle...but as a creative it seems like creating change is also a design challenge. 

You can witness this same debate on how to create change also being fought in the development of websites & software applications. It is a debate between iterative Open Source development and more holistic design driven approaches...with the design of user experience being a main point of contention. You can tap into one such debate here at the Mark Boulton blog.

Mark Boulton is an interesting designer with a modernist, top-down, holistic midset. Perhaps not unexpectedly, when he took on the challenge of working with the open source Drupal community he encountered some challenges getting buy-in from the community and figuring out how to communicate his process openly but also maintain ownership. There seem to be reactions to the tone of some of his communications. But in the end there is a fundamental struggle between worldviews going on here. Does change need an architect or can it effectively be crowdsourced. Sounds a lot like the old Modernism vs. Postmoderism debates to me.

Now-a-days, I typically explore these question in designing events and live interactions. In my work at Double Happiness and putting on participant-driven events like Goodmeets, I am very attracted to open, collaborative approaches. Fr one thing they are effective and for another they are more affordable.

On the other hand when I make performances, I appreciate the importance of owning your ideas. It allows for you to work towards a kind of perfection.

I think the clash of worldviews here is tough to resolve but I am wary of defaulting back to a Modernist, holistic planning scenario despite the pleasures of seeking perfection. I wonder if there is not another way.

In our discussion at Social Change Camp, we ended up discussing a kind of "incremental revolution" approach to change. Saying that building consensus in small steps is important but with an eye toward reaching tipping points were real change takes place.

Some kind of incremental revolution seems like a interesting notion to me and it makes me aware that the key is still transparency...transparency that is often politically and personally challenging. 

One reassuring argument I saw in the midst of the health care debate came from Michael Pollen. He argues in the NYTimes that even if a weak healthcare bill passes that it would change the power dynamic in the food industry. That by placing the incentives on preventive care you place the health care industry on the side of reform and create a powerful counter-lobby to the entrenched food biz lobby. It would be easier for me to swallow incremental change in things like the health care bill if there was a clearer path to these kinds of tipping points laid out for me as a stakeholder.