Design / Redesign

Not the Monterey! That's what the mechanics at Specialty Motorwerkes will say when they hear its going away. Anyway, that's what they always say when it shows up as well ...

Yes, the 1973 914-6, worked on since 1988 and sporting Ferrari's Fly Yellow since 1993. Multi-year autocross champion, great HP/weight ratio of nearly 1/10 (~190/2000 lbs. empty). I keep trophies, but plenty of parts to go with car (struts, 911 calipers, torsion bars, etc.)

Handling, lateral g, and SOUND of this car has to be experienced. The picture shows the max lean in a fast corner.

914-6 conversion, clean 1993 - Autocross & track champ, street legal. Beach Boys Monterey body w/ 930 airdam, slant nose, 916 valance, box rockers, Euro lights. 2.7 CIS w/ upgrades (fuel, injection, tensioners, headers, oil tank. Full welded cage, Momo seats, wheel, Rennline pedals, shifter & linkage, rebuilt 901, 930 axles, S alloy brakes, 911 struts, bars, stiffeners, CamberTruss. Bartosh leather dash & 911 gauges, 911 door inserts. Fuchs 15" Kumhos.

Featured in 1993 European Car. See the article images: Page 1 Page 2

The original conversion was done by Mark Bartosh of SoCal, who had done a nice job of making a 914 touring car for his wife. Mark made 914 kits, and his shop also made the custom leather 911 gauge set dash, and the 911 style door inserts. Its a cool interior, with Rennsport pedal set, good shifter kit, Momo seats and D wheel, 5 point harnesses.



$13,250 Email me: (peter@poetics.org), look up my phone #, or contact via blog post.

I have a new blog called Design Dialogues on Wordpress.

The Blogger service "lost" my blogs during their December re-launch of Blogger. My wife Patricia's blog (http://slowlearning.org ) was affected as well, but I literally lost my access to editing the blog. Perusing other blogs to see what I could try to reinstate my service only revealed I was not alone, it was a major bug that gave the appearance of having no existing blogs.

And as you'd expect with Google, there is no customer service for their free service. (Maybe only for advertisers ...)

Patricia and I did some research and found Wordpress to be a great fit for her blog - Slow Learning. so I followed suit. The real driving factor was the opportunity to shape the new blog around the new venture of Dialogic Design, both the practice and the business. Since the scope of dialogic design embraces my design values and it conceptially integrates design tools and outcomes, its the overarching theme that finally lets me rail on social, political, media, and large system design without compromising the original focus on my "day job" professional practice of user experience research.

Thanks for visiting, and please change your feeds accordingly!

Lao Tze imagined a way of serving others and giving up your own ideas:

In caring for others and serving heaven,
There is nothing like using restraint.
Restraint begins with giving up one's own ideas.
This depends on Virtue gathered in the past.
If there is a good store of Virtue, then nothing is impossible.
If nothing is impossible, then there are no limits.
If a man knows no limits, then he is fit to be a ruler.
The mother principle of ruling holds good for a long time.
This is called having deep roots and a firm foundation,
The Tao of long life and eternal vision.

Working in Dialogue means giving up your role as expert and engaging with all others as if they were the only voices that matter. Dialogic design is our process of designing social systems and complex services in participatory design dialogue.

Dialogue enables people to listen to each other on issues of common concern, going beyond what they personally think is important, to find common roots the deep issues that dynamically influence their situation. Informed with the knowledge of what is really driving their situation, people move forward with enthusiasm and commitment, working together in a designed future co-constructed by dialogue.

We bring the Structured Dialogue Process (SDP) to the table to facilitate deep and disciplined dialogue. SDP honors individual autonomy in the group dialogue, respecting everyone’s words, and allowing their careful clarification. It does this in such a way that every stakeholder participant is on an equal level. Hierarchies of power, expertise, and personality are marginalized. When everyone has submitted their answers to a triggering question and clarified them, the tension goes out of the room as everyone feels that they have been heard. The group has formed in mutual respect and with an agreed upon vocabulary.

The intellectual underpinnings of our approach to Dialogue can be found in the work of the following thinkers:

Socrates Socratic Dialogues

H-G Gadamer Horizons of Understanding

H. Ozbekhan Toward a general theory of Planning

J. Habermas A Dialogue on 9/11

David Bohm Dialogue - A Proposal

J. Warfield Galleries of Interactive Management

Aleco Christakis A People Science

As cognitive / usability researchers we have been interested in information overload for a long time. For me, at least since experiencing the info-whelm of an undergraduate, and realizing that it would only get worse. (And that was long before email!) As the online experience consumes more of our attention and with it our time, all of us notice the acceleration of overload. And with very little guidance from research, we are left with a range of practical time-management options from the Pickle Jar to scheduling your email. But none of these address the fact of information overload, which threatens to significantly diminish the value of the web and email. As demonstrated by the situation of too many choices.

Jared Spool recently posted (and podcasted) an interview with Barry Schwartz where they discuss his book and the recent line of research into "choice overload," which starts off with the Iyengar and Leeper Jam Study:

"... that showed when you present 30 flavors of jam at a gourmet food store, you get more interest but less purchasing than when you only show six flavors of jam. All of a sudden, it became an issue, or at least a possibility, that adding options could actually decrease the likelihood that people would actually choose any of them. More and more, because of that study, people have actually tried to study it in the wild, in the field, by getting companies to vary the variety that they offer and tracking both purchasing and also satisfaction. So that’s starting to happen, but there are not very many papers that are actually published on that. This whole line of work is only about five years old."

There may be a common phenomenon underlying choice and information overload. Neither of these surfeits of stuff are problematic unless we're interested, unless there's an opportunity. Since information is neutral until deemed interesting, information overload is not problematic until we admit ever-larger boundaries of interest and attention. When we overwhelm short term memory and task attention, we're forced to stop and change the focus of attention. The same with choice - I don't care whether there are 5 jams or 30 unless I really want jam. Otherwise, like the overload of celebrity stories in the public media, the overload is easy to ignore.

Once we evaluate email and user experience with the concept of opportunity overload, the angle of insight shifts from technology itself to the idea of value. While 90% or more of all my email I could ignore, I also have extraordinary opportunities presented by way of this communication channel. Not only most of my consulting projects, but collaborations, new tools, great ideas to work with, answers to questions I did not think to pose. Its opportunity "push," with the Web as opportunity "pull," a nightmare of opportunity overwhelm if you let it.

As a research issue this interests me as it entails hermeneutics (individually and not externally interpreted) and economics (as in the cost/value of opportunity). We attend to the extent we are emotionally engaged with the perceived value of the opportunity represented by a choice (a product or a message in an email). But attention is only the intial draw. There are significant cognitive requirements demanded in processing the value (what is this worth to me? How cool is that?) and choice (Which one do I want, or is it worth my time to evaluate further?).

To finally make a decision may require additional learning (which one really is better? do I know enough to choose this opportunity? What are the costs in time and lost business/opportunity?). It may require communication (who should I ask about this? Wouldn't Nick want to know about this?) Next thing we know, the day is gone!

So nobody except Miles the Marketer seems to be onto opportunity overload. (And Miles means to make you money, and I don't, so go there if you want marketing opportunities!)

I've been thinking about Don Norman's articles (Activity Centered Design) a lot recently, because of his influence on a lot of non-designers who read his pieces and start thinking along these lines. That is a lot of leverage, and we can all learn and benefit from that. He picks up on the right emerging trends and gives them a good push into broader awareness. Now it's up to all of us to make the memes sing! Which gets me into some follow-up on activity.

If we are to design to activity, then what IS activity? Is it a type of task, such as setting up and completing a stock purchase? Is it an ongoing series of inter-related work activities, such as the "activity" of software development? (Coding a single program?) Who should define what the activity is that we are designing to? The designer? Or the person engaged in action?

In activity theory research the identification of activity is not straightforward - the specification of an "activity" is not activity-centered itself, as the coinage of activity-centered design suggest. The components of activity - action and operation - seem better defined, and they are observable. Activity and its context, not so much.

Activity is based on purpose and motive, what the Soviet school calls "object." Read "object" as "end result" plus "motive" and that's what activity design should be centered on.

This requires pre-design research into the activities and context of action. It is not user-centered, because there is no "thing" yet to be a "user" of. This pre-design research into activity conflicts with Don's other recent and influential essay, "Why doing user observations first is wrong." If you are doing activity-based design, based on activity theory, you have to conduct "user research" before designing to activity. I put that in quotes, because, more specifically, this is research into the unit of analysis called activity from the a person's perspective, a person that we hope to recruit as a user once done with our design.

These "levels of activity" are confusing, especially to the instrumental thinking of American industrial tradition, from which user experience is derived more than we might imagine. But they are valuable in identifying the most critical components of a user's practice and their information use cycles related to that practice.

The activity of "centered" should be based on the person engaged in work, not on a task or function we believe we are designing to. In product design, we always already have a set of resources in mind - a product concept, a labor-saving tool, a body of valuable content. These resources are typically the starting point for what WE consider "activity" to be, and our prior work with these artifacts may bias our ability to formulate the big picture, the activity and its purpose and outcomes.

Something I've been working on:

Failed knowledge management initiatives are common, if not legendary. Obviously failures are not as widely publicized by firms as successes, which are often merely those projects succeeding by fact of their completion. From the very start, KM technology suffered difficulties with organizational adoption and business purpose. Chae & Bloodgood (2006) report a meta-analysis of KM-related initiatives (including IT and organizational change initiatives), finding more reports of KM failures than success. Also citing Malhotra (2004) and Mertins et al (2001), they report a study across more than 1200 European firms that fewer than ten percent were satisfied with their KM initiatives.

Some critics in information science consider the appropriated concept of knowledge in KM as a meaningless glorification of information. Wilson (2002) exhausts the literature in a critical meta-analysis deconstructing the value and meaning of knowledge as found in peer-reviewed KM articles. He finds no relationship between the Polanyi (1967) concept of tacit knowing and the framing of knowledge across the business and information systems literatures. If Wilson is at least partially correct in his analysis, the emphasis on knowledge as a stock/resource may be misleading and widely misinterpreted. He places blame on its highly-visible adoption by management consultancies and the original Nonaka research itself (for misconstruing Polanyi). However, Wilson and other critics also miss the context within which the Nonaka work is represented. The Nonaka knowledge-creation cycle has been lifted from its "knowledge-creating company" and widely used as a general purpose model of organizational knowledge management. Knowledge creation is not a general process applicable to all organizational functions.

Simple explanations readily appear for the failure of KM to take hold. Our management theories of knowledge may be wrong, from Nonaka (1991) to Chae & Bloodgood, (2006), untenable and untested. The focus on KM technology may misdirect valuable organizational attention, preventing organizations from implementing valuable knowledge management theory. Or organizations generally lack the thoughtful leadership necessary to deploy organizationally-centered knowledge management, a critique that emerges between the lines in Nonaka's own explanations of the cross-cultural differences between KM as found in Japan and the U.S.

Knowledge Management as technology cannot resolve or address the paradox of knowledge strategy. In the concept of knowledge strategy, managers recognize the competitive advantage of organizational knowing and learning, guided by strategic goals and constituted in effective internal processes. The paradox emerges when executives envision the strategic value of developing knowledge as a resource of the firm, but have no control, accounting, or valuation of knowledge as an actual asset. The top-down vantage point of (traditional) strategy is unable to generate knowledge exchange within an organization, unlike the control of other assets. Simply put, knowledge does not function as a strategic asset (Venkatraman and Tanriverdi, 2005), it cannot be sold or exchanged like a building or plant. Strategically, firms following this model may operate from an unworkable theory.

Nov. 27: Dave Snowden in Cognitive Edge recently answered the musical question from the 2006 KM World: Is KM Dead?

One of the questions at KM World was the now familiar one question: Is KM dead? My view for about two years now is that it is on its last leg as a strategic movement (otherwise known as a fad) in management. We also have that infallible predictor that a fad cycle is coming to an end: government adopts it as industrial best practice.

Now don’t get me wrong, the objectives of KM theory and practice persist and will continue to be of great importance. They are clear, simple and important and can be summarised as follows:

1. To support effective decision making
2. To create the conditions for innovation

I still find the "strategic movement" Dave refers to was all about IT, and was rarely if ever about informing strategy with orgnanizational knowledge

(More later)

It may not be quite a movement, but things are moving in that direction. Thanks to the RED team of the UK Design Council, we may be hearing ever more about the interdisciplinary field of "Transformation Design."

RED is a 'do tank' that develops innovative thinking and practice on social and economic problems through design innovation. RED challenges accepted thinking. We design new public services, systems, and products that address social and economic problems. These problems are increasingly complex and traditional public services are ill-equipped to address them. Innovation is required to re-connect public services to people and the everyday problems that they face.

RED harnesses the creativity of users and front line workers to co-create new public services that better address these complex problems. We place the user at the centre of the design process and reduce the risk of failure by rapidly proto-typing our ideas to generate user feedback. This also enables us to transfer ideas into action quickly.

There are few firms that have approached this work in the US. In fact, there have always been very few design firms in the US able to pull off Euro-style Participatory Design, from which much of the social import of Transformation Design has grown.

IDEO comes to mind, with a number of service design projects, including their well-known redesign of healthcare environments. However, the US does not fund a public sector think tank in design such as the Design Council, that I know of. The UK's RED group has the liberty of making excellent use of public funding to explore and experiment in public service provision. Its clear that, regardless of whether these projects evolve into new public services or not, the use of participatory design as social experiement will wake people up.