Signals by Public Digital
https://public.digital/signals
Does digital creativity differ from non-digital creativity?
Introduction
In order to answer the question of whether digital creativity differs from non-digital creativity we will explore the definition of the creative act as that of bringing together previously unassociated ideas from within or across domains (Koestler, 1981) and whether creativity is domain-specific (Baer, 1998) in order to understand how creativity in a digital context differs from the traditional.
In exploring how digital media utilises ‘the double logic of remediation’ (Bolter & Grusin, 2000) we see how new media oscillates between immediacy and hypermediacy as it hides and reveals itself, and how it is digital media’s interactivity and multiplicity that results in it surpassing traditional media to become experience for participants.
And to consider how digital technology affects the production and consumption of new media we briefly discuss the foundational technologies and ‘proto-affordances’ (McMullan, 2020) that make new digital media fundamentally different from other forms of media.
The combination of this understanding of creativity in the digital context, modes of production and consumption for new media, and the underpinning technologies lead us to conclude that digital creativity is indeed different from a popular perception of non-digital creativity; different in origin, in format, in production, and in experience.
Defining creativity
In attempting to define creativity, Koestler speaks of conscious and unconscious processes which enact through the three forms of creative activity which he defines and have a basic pattern in common (1981). Describing that all creative activity falls into one or another of three categories: artistic originality, scientific discovery, and comic inspiration, or, more frequently, into a combination of them, we can consider creativity as a context-specific activity, that is to say that the way in which one is creative whilst making a scientific discovery differs from making a work of art. And in describing creative activity as having common patterns Koestler says, “The creative act consists in combining previously unrelated structures in such a way that you get more out of the emergent whole than you have put in” (1981). These definitions help us understand creativity as having categorically-specific and common characteristics.
General or specific creativity
How general or specific is creativity? Is it the same process for artistic creativity as it is for scientific discovery? The domain-specific view of creativity says that content matters, that no one is creative across all domains, that an artist has specific skills in visual arts that allows them to be creative in producing artworks, but wouldn’t be able to be creative in all domains. These domains are broadly defined as cognitive domains, for example mathematical, musical, and visual (Baer,1998). This raises the question of whether traditional arts and digital arts are fundamentally cognitively visual and so within the same domain, and so sharing the same creative processes. Or do we consider digital art to be a different domain to the traditional arts, perhaps less visual and more technical in cognitive processing, in which case we may conclude that digital creativity is within a different domain to the visual creativity that produces the traditional arts.
The computational bisociation of ideas
Creative activity does not create something out of nothing. It is an activity that, “combines, reshuffles, and relates already existing but hitherto separate ideas, facts, frames of perception, associative contexts. This act of cross-fertilization – or self-fertilization within a single brain – seems to be the essence of creativity. I have proposed for it the term bisociation.” (Koestler, 1981). The more unfamiliar and unconnected the joined ideas are, the more creative and original they appear (Koestler, 1981), which poses questions about collective creativity in the digital age. In new media artwork is it only the artist that conceived of the idea for the artwork who is being creative, or in the case of artwork that requires input from multiple people, are they all being creative? And if creativity in the digital age is the process of bisociation, then can computers be creative?
In considering the complex challenge of computational creativity, Dubitzky and Kötter (2012) utilise Koestler’s concept of bisociation to present a framework. They highlight a number of issues that require resolution in order for computational creativity to become a reality. The interoperability of the knowledge bases to allow ideas from one domain to be intersected with another, recognising usefulness and applicability of the idea, and deciding whether a new idea meets the definition of being creative, that is being new, surprising and valuable (Boden, 1994).
This attempt to discover how computers might be creative provides some insight into the complexities of human creativity in the realm of digital technologies. It highlights how the bisociation of ideas to lead to creative insight requires far more than simply joining two previously unconnected ideas together, the resulting creativity must be useful and new. As such, we can say that digital creativity must not only meet the criteria of traditional creativity but has additional criteria based on the limits of the technology being used.
How new media differs from traditional
If the digital creative act can be said to be different to the traditional act of creating something new, then how different can the outputs of those creative acts be? How different is new media from traditional media?
From the development of spoken language, to written language and the formalisation of an alphabet, the printing press and electronic media, to the world wide web, all were built on top of the previous media (McLuhan, 1964). The new media often fails to acknowledge the previous media (Bolter & Gromala, 2005) but arguably could not exist without earlier those versions. McLuhan’s assertions that the “content of any medium is always another medium” and “the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (1964) helps us conceive of the ways in which new digital media differs from traditional media. It is not only the contents of the message of traditional media that become the message of new media, in the way that a story in a book is made into a film, it is also the traditional media itself that becomes the message of new media, such as characteristic notions of narrative and sequential story-telling that are taken from the medium of printed books and become raw materials of new media to be explored, critiqued, disrupted and challenged as the new medium evolves.
Means of comparing media
It is degrees of definition that separates hot and cool media. Hot media are high definition, that is containing lots of sensory data, whilst cool media are low-data, low-definition (McLuhan, 1964). Although McLuhan’s idea of hot and cold media may lack empirical basis (Douglas,1970) it provides a means by which we can compare one media with another. Cool media require higher involvement from the viewer, expecting them to fill in the gaps in their understanding whilst hot media is usually linear, sequential and logical requiring less of the viewer in order to understand the message. (McLuhan, 1964). Writing in the sixties, McLuhan did not have any examples of modern digital media to consider in his definitions but it is useful to consider both of McLuhan’s concepts, that of ‘the medium is the message’ and that of ‘hot and cool media’, together in order understand how new media builds on existing media and may change its nature in comparison to the existing media.
We can consider, as an example, the remediation of the moving image in how online videos took from cinema. Online videos on platforms such as YouTube maintain and reference many of the conventions established by earlier cinema including the rectangular format of the image and the synchronised image and sound. Remediating moving images changed video from hot media to cool, taking the immersive and single-sense experience that cinema provides and replacing it with a low-definition experience that asks of the viewer far more participation in order to gain any value from the experience. YouTube, as a cool media, provides viewers with the means to pause, skip, replay, choose another video; all mechanisms for increasing engagement that do not exist, and are not required, as part of the hot experience cinema provides. YouTube did not invent watching videos but it has accelerated and enlarged the scale (McLuhan, 1964) of the production and consumption of video, making cinema the message of its medium.
New media converges in the minds of the viewer
The idea of convergence offers a contrast with older notions of media spectatorship (Jenkins, 2006) and passive consumption, transforming those who experience the media into participants each at the centre of their own network of multiple media platforms. The experiencers of new media have no choice in this. Convergence occurs within the brains of every individual consumer (Jenkins, 2006) as they interact with media generated by each other and every kind of organisation. Social media, as a pervasive, widely used, and culturally relevant (Appel et al, 2020) means of propagating content in various forms to billions of people, offers an example of the difference convergence suggests occurs from consuming television. Social media offers a multitude of points-of-view leading to what Appel et al refer to as how “digitally enabled social interactivity is shaping culture itself” (2020) by removing the trusted authority of a single source of media. New media, utilising network effects and not presenting itself with singular coherent narrative as in traditional media forces different patterns of consumption.
How digital changed consumption of new media
Having critiqued the position that creativity differs depending on the cognitive domain and that technology creativity may exist within a different domain to the visual, we can consider the medium by which those creative outputs are engaged with to understand how digital media may differ from traditional media.
In traditional media such as painting, artists have adopted the mechanisms of perspective, natural light and shade and the removal of brush strokes from the painting in an attempt to achieve immediacy and cause the viewer to forget the presence of the medium (Bolter & Grusin, 2000). In expressing this cultural need to reflect our reality through the media we consume, media producers have adopted these mechanisms to allow the viewer to regard the medium as transparent. This transparency, whilst not intending to fool the viewer into believing that the medium they engage with is reality (Bolter & Grusin, 2000) has sought to express that reality in ways that enable interaction. Perhaps an artist’s expression of the reality and their emotional experience of the reality can be felt more deeply by a viewer where the interface does not seem to be a barrier.
Digital media requires and creates a different relationship with its viewer. It also intends to make itself disappear and so enable a direct “confrontation with the original” (Bolter & Gromala, 2005), but recognises that this can never be possible. Digital media is interactive and multiple in nature, which requires that it reveals the interface to the viewer. Hypermediacy is a reusing and refashioning of traditional and contemporary media to offer a more authentic experience (Bolter & Gromala, 2005). McLuhan’s point that the, “The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication… is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.” (1951, p.73) expresses a recognition of the difference in intention between traditional and new media. Experience rather than expression is the aim of digital media. In participating, or converging as Jenkins would describe it (2006), the viewer becomes part of a digital artwork, fundamentally challenging conceptions of originality and creative ownership held as essential aspects of traditional art.
The oscillation of media
This oscillation between immediacy and hypermediacy, hiding the medium and revealing it, is what Bolter and Grusin refer to as the double logic of remediation (2000). It expects of the viewer a shifting between interacting with the media through a transparent interface and knowing that the interface is mediating that experience. Bolter and Gromala argue that “remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media” (2005) and as such guides us to consider how remediation takes place within a medium and between mediums, in often contradictory ways.
Stories, the mobile-device full-screen vertical video format introduced by Snapchat in 2012 and adopted by many other products, including Twitter, Spotify and LinkedIn since (Moriarty, 2017), is an example of the remediation of the portrait format from painting and an attempt by digital media to achieve immediacy by enabling viewers to use video in ways that are more natural to their use of the mobile device. Despite the initial barriers to adoption (Glove and Boots, 2012) vertical video has become mainstream and can be expected to shift towards hypermediacy, making viewers aware that their act of viewing is not reality. “If the ultimate purpose of media is indeed to transfer sense experiences from one person to another” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000), then vertical video will experience the oscillation of remediation as the technology that replaces it emerges with increased immediacy.
New media attempts to surpass old media, to replace it with something that better meets the promise of immediacy (Bolter & Grusin, 2000). It attempts to create the belief that digital technologies have passed beyond mediation, that they have achieved such immediacy of experience that the interface no longer exists and the viewer is interacting directly with reality. In many respects new media is on a continuum with old media. All expressions of creativity are remediations of other mediums and digital expressions are no different (Bolter, & Gromala, 2005). But where new digital media deverges and differs is in its interactivity and multiplicity leading us to adopt a position that creativity expressed through digital media differs from creativity expressed in traditional media.
The foundational technologies of new media
McMullan goes even further, suggesting that digital media is not merely a continuation and remediation of older media but that it is based on different foundational technology and so is fundamentally different. This difference is explained through the concept of proto-affordances (McMullan, 2020) which define a technology’s relationship with a culture. The predominant foundational technology in play prior to the digital age was ‘electronic’ from which we see media that is instantaneous in nature and associated with technologies such as television. The proto-affordance of the foundational technologies of digital media is computability, that is, McMullan says, that all digital media has in common that it was produced by computer and as such is determinable by mathematical means. It could be considered counter-intuitive to speak of mathematics when discussing creativity but this only serves to further reinforce our earlier conclusion about the cognitive nature of digital creativity.
Artificial Intelligence has been used to create music since the 1990’s (Deahl, 2018). If any creative endeavour lends itself to being mathematically determinable, then music with its formalised language and relationships must be it. A wide range of methods have been successfully used in music composition including heuristics in evolutionary algorithms, neural networks, stochastic methods, generative models, agents, decision trees, declarative programming and grammatical representation (Lopez-Rincon, 2018) with results indistinguishable from that of human composers (Barbican, 2019). This remediation of music by software into data where production can be automated (Manovich, 2003) is indicative of the effect digital technology has and will continue to have on media production.
The most fundamental of digital technologies; the internet, has and stands to continue to have a profound effect on the remediation of traditional media. The internet combined with other modern technologies such as 3D printing and artificial intelligence has the potential to remediate all other mediums (McMullan, 2020) and generate entirely new, new media (Manovich, 2003). No other technology in the history of our culture has had that power.
Conclusion
Digital creativity differs from non-digital creativity. It differs in the nature of the creative act, in its definition of creativity, in its outputs as digital media, in how new media is experienced by its participants, and in the technology that underpins new media.
Taking Koestler’s definition of the creative act as “combining previously unrelated structures in such a way that you get more out of the emergent whole than you have put in” (1981) and his notion of the bisociation of ideas across domains, we developed an understanding of creativity having common patterns and categorical specificites. Baer’s work on the domains of creativity (1998) builds on Koestler and provides insight into the creative act leading us to conclude that when digital creativity stems from a different cognitive domain to more traditional visual creativity then we can consider this a fundamental difference in the source and nature of the creativity, especially as it pertains to the production of new and digital media.
McLuhan’s oft quoted, “the medium is the message” (1964) began our understanding of the difference between old media and new media, and how new media references what has been before but generates a change of scale or pace for that message. The nature of this change is particularly important for understanding how different digital media in the 21st century is from traditional media in previous centuries as the internet has enabled a speed of change that has been impossible in earlier decades. The ways in which we understand new media as different from old media continued with McLuhan’s definition of hot media as high definition whilst cool media requires more viewer participation (1964). Using this perspective we considered cinema as old media and online videos such as those on YouTube as cool media, showing that for the medium of online video the message of the moving image had undergone a change in scale and pace from how viewers experience cinema. Also, in appreciating the difference between new and old media we looked at the concept of convergence (Jenkins, 2006) which described how old media is consumed in a passive spectator mode whilst new digital media is more of an experience participated in by individual consumers at the centre of a network of media content. New digital media differs in these many aspects from traditional media.
Finally, in considering the effects that foundational digital technology (McMullan, 2020), artificial intelligence and the internet has on new media production we conclude, as McMullan (2020) and Manovich (2003) do, that new media is fundamentally different from traditional media.
We can also put forward the opinion that digital creativity will continue to diverge from traditional creativity as technology becomes more embedded in more creative endeavours.
References
Appel, G., Grewal, L., Hadi, R. & Stephen, A.T. (2020). The future of social media in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(1), pp.79-95.
Baer, John. (1998). The Case for Domain Specificity of Creativity. Creativity Research Journal. 11. 173-177.
Barbican Centre. (2019). 12 songs created by AI – How musicians are already embracing new technologies. artsandculture.google.com
Boden, M.A. (1994). Pr´ecis of the creative mind: Myths and mechanisms. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 17, 519–570.
Bolter, D.J. & Gromala, D. (2005). Windows and Mirrors, London: The MIT Press.
Bolter, D.J. & Grisin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding new media. The MIT Press.
Deahl, D. (2018). How AI-Generated music is changing the way hits are made – The Future of Music, episode 2. The Verge.
Douglas, G. H. (1970). The hot and cold media principle: Theory or Rhetoric? A Review of General Semantics , September 1970, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 339-344. Institute of General Semantics
Dubitzky, W. and Kötter, T. (2012). Towards Creative Information Exploration Based on Koestler’s Concept of Bisociation. In book: Bisociative Knowledge Discovery (pp.11 – 32.) Eds: Michael R. Berthold. Springer Verlag.
Jenkins, H. (2004). The cultural logic of media convergence. International journal of cultural studies. SAGE Publications. London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press.
Koestler A. (1981) The Three Domains of Creativity. In: Dutton D., Krausz M. (eds) The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht.
Lopez-Rincon, O., Starostenko, O., and Martín, G. A. (2018). Algoritmic music composition based on artificial intelligence: A survey, 2018 International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Computers. (CONIELECOMP), Cholula, 2018, pp. 187-193.
Glove and Boots. (2012). Vertical Video Syndrome. YouTube.com. Retrieved 11/02/2021.
Manovich, L. (2003. New Media from Borges to HTML. Introduction to The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The MIT Press, 2003.
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McMullan, J. (2020). A new understanding of ‘New Media’: Online platforms as digital mediums. Convergence, 26(2), pp.287-301.
Moriarty, T. (2017). A Brief History of Vertical Video (So Far). Medium.com. Retrieved 11/02/2021.
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Weeknotes #240
This week I did:
Digital safeguarding
I’ve been working on safeguarding solutions for Teams quite a bit this week. It’s interesting to uncover the assumptions that Teams is built on; things about how people within an organisation should know each other and so be able to communicate and collaborate together. If you then want to use Teams to work in ways that don’t fit those assumptions, what changes can you make to get a high degree of safeguarding controls in place.
What is social design
I started the Service Design short course at UCA. Week 1 was an introduction but had some interesting ideas including the tension between user-centred design and social design, which says that user-centred design, taken in isolation means we don’t see the effect it has on communities, society, and the planet. I hope we get more into the social design approach to Service Design as it looks really interesting.
#BeMoreDigital Virtual Conference 2021
I caught some of the sessions from the #BeMoreDigital conference, but not enough. I would have liked to have been able to be more engaged in it to get a better sense of where the charity sector is in its digital transformation.
Daynotes
I started writing daily posts answering three questions: What went well, what didn’t go well, what could I do different in the future? I want to see if it is a helpful habit to get into and whether it’s useful research for daily standup app I’ve been thinking about.
Working on my website (again)
Did a bit of reorganisation of my website and turned my Now page into a roadmap.
And I read:
Teaming
I started reading Teaming by Amy Edmondson, mostly to look more into the idea of how people can work together effectively when they aren’t a close-knit team with well established routines and relationships.
IoT in the Charity Sector
How the charities could use Internet of Things is something I’ve never thought about, but James’ example of using such devices to help people live more independent lives is fantastic. It opens up all kinds of opportunities for IoT to support and improve service delivery.
BeMoreJanet
I watched the Mr. Strategy & Mrs. Wellbeing video with Janet Leighton. She talks about the culture of happiness and kindness at the Timpson Group and how they use upside down management, random acts of kindness and supporting colleagues with whatever is going on in their lives. The point that Wayne makes is that they’ve shown that it works, it isn’t just a philosophy, is such an important one for taking action to improve working cultures.
And thought about:
Place-based systems and nomads
Abby Covert says, we “turn a space into a place by arranging it so people know what to do there”. And some of the stuff I’ve read in the past talks about place-based thinking as less about the location of the place and more about the systems that interact on someone who is in that place. Which means a nomad might interact with fewer systems or those interactions might be more transitory. I think that changes what a nomad ‘knows’ what to do in a particular place. Even though they are in the same location as a non-nomad, they interact with systems differently and so see the place differently.
Solving problems simply
I’ve been thinking about ways of asking the question, “What is the simplest way we can solve this problem?”. Can we still meet a user need with a simple solution? How simple can a solution be in order to learn from it? Are simple solutions less likely to have unintended consequences than more complicated solutions?
Asynchronicity and learning
I’ve been thinking about the benefits of async working being greater than just less non-productive time spent in meetings. Async working utilises writing and drawing more than speaking and listening, which changes the nature of how information flows and enables those people with different learning styles to contribute in more considered ways.
Some people tweeted:
How to make sense of any mess
Doug Belshaw tweeted a link to howtomakesenseofanymess.com, Abby Covert’s website/online book about information architecture. It’s brilliantly thoughtful and thought-provoking. If I ever get around to writing a book I want it to be like this.
Validate the vision
Rosie Sherry tweeted, “Don’t validate a product, validate your vision“, which is much bigger but I think much easier thing to do. You’re not asking people if a product solves their problem, you’re asking people what kind of world they want to live in.
Levels of listening
Joshua Kerievsky tweeted, “Added “Levels of Listening” to the #PsychologicalSafety cheat sheet.” I still find Modern Agile the most inspiring way to think about modern digital ways of working. Joshua describes it as “a community for people interested in uncovering better ways of getting awesome results. It leverages wisdom from many industries, is principle driven and framework free.”
Weeknotes #239
This week I did:
Where to invest in capabilities
I started working on a big new project that is due to go live in a couple of months. I was brought in to product manage the automation work and it’s been really interesting to get into the problems that exist with the manual processes and figure out how we can use automation technology to improve them. I’m keen that we use tools that can help us learn about automation is ways we can use in the future.
The usual, ‘a roadmap isn’t a delivery plan’ conversation came up again this week. I think the best type of roadmap for us at the moment would be one that suggests where to invest in capabilities, be that building up existing capabilities such as digital delivery or developing new capabilities in self-serve learning.
This is how high-speed project initiation goes: Mon – Opportunity to trial a new product comes up, Tue – Proposal approved & budget allocated, Wed – Put team together & wrote implementation specification, Thu – We wrote design & user research plan, and Fri – Agreed the delivery plan. One of my colleagues remarked that it was a good example of what we want to achieve by having cross-functional teams that can come together quickly to achieve something and disband when they’ve done it.
Thought about:
Organisations of Theseus
The metaphysics of identity have been questioned back to 400 bc by Plato and Heraclitus, and by many more thinkers since. The question is expressed by the story of the ship of Theseus which throughout it’s journey has every plank and rope replaced. So the question is, is it the same ship at the end of the journey as it was at the start?
The same question can be put to an organisation going through change. If all of the processes, people, branding, even the name, change over time, is it still the same organisation? There is lots of talk about strategy and culture for organisational change but not so much about identity. Perhaps organisational identity is tied to more intangible things, things like purpose, values, place in society. But these can change too.
Everyone agrees organisational change is hard. It’s hard to make happen, hard to deal with when it is happening, and hard to accept when the results aren’t what we want or expect. Maybe Heraclitus would have said that organisations are always changing, and and such never had a fixed identity anyway. I wonder if organisational change would be different if rather than talking about changing the old, we talked about building anew.
Out of business
It is not a charity’s job to put itself out of business. I’ve heard a few people say that it is recently. I completely disagree. A charity is way more that just a means of tackling a social issue, with the expectation that it should be disbanded once it has achieved . Over the life of a charity it builds up a wealth of expertise and capabilities, hard won in many cases as charities deal with all kind of difficulties, and to throw of that away when the social issue has been resolved is extremely wasteful. If a charity solves the issue it has been working on, or the need goes away or changes, charities should be able to pivot towards a different issue. They should also be able to point themselves at different problems than what they we’re originally set up to do and contribute to a different cause. I know this is a difficult because of the mindset and legal structuring of charities, but I can dream.
Daynotes
I had an idea for a product to encourage daily self-reflective microblogging. You’d sign-up and set-up your URL, select a template for your posts, and the time of day you’d like to write, and then you get a an email everyday to remind you to login, answer the questions on the template and post it. Each template might have three questions like ‘What went well today?, What didn’t go so well?, What could you do differently in the future?’. Now I just need someone to build it. (Of course the first thing I do is go looking for a domain name to buy…)
Individual, team, organisation
Andy Tabberer’s questions about teams always get me thinking. “I believe in a type of citizenship at work, on teams, that carries both rights and duties. Getting the balance between those two is the hardest bit. What do you think?”, he says. Well, I think it’s pretty complicated. Citizenship in the public sphere is between the individual and the state, one-to-one relationship, easy. But within an organisation there are three elements at play; the individual, the team and the organisation. So there’s relationships between individuals and other individuals, both in and outside of the team. Then there’s a relationship between the individuals and the team, and other teams, and the organisation. And teams have a relationship to other teams, and to the organisation. There’s a lot going on there. And all of those entities have rights, which differ depending on which other entity they are interacting with, and duties towards all the other entities too. Citizenship requires rights and duties, but it also needs a public space, “a shared space for discussion of values and ideas, and development of public opinion” (Habermas, 1964). I wonder if that kind of space can exist within organisations, which makes me wonder if citizenship can exist at work.
What is value?
I’m gradually reaching the conclusion that ‘value’ is purely a construct and doesn’t exist outside of that contextual agreement. Anything that someone says is ‘value’ (revenue, cost saving, time, knowledge) is just a representation of something else that they consider valuable, but that thing thing is just another representation, until the value disappears into nothing. So, what then, do we mean when we talk about organisational value? Maybe we mean it to mean outcomes but we talk about it in terms of outputs. I’m not sure. More thinking to be done.
This week I read:
Standups
The idea of standups as short regular meetings that help teams stay coordinated is a ritual that has grown out of Scrum and adopted by all kinds of teams. Jason Yip’s Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings is the ultimate reference material for everything you could want to know.
Rise of the humans
I think lots of the bigger charities are thinking about how automation how help them be more efficient (some of my work involves automation solutions for things like updating our CRM, setting up meetings, communicating with people). Ben Holt’s post on whether the British Red Cross make people happier and deliver better services by working with machines provides some interesting insight into
Responsible Use of Technology: The Microsoft Case Study
This whitepaper from the World Economic Forum on the responsible use of technology goes into how Microsoft uses tools and processes that facilitate responsible technology product design and development.
Building a copy collaboration workflow
Content is always where websites (and website build projects) fall down. This post from Ditto has some useful advice on creating a workflow for website copy.
And some people tweeted:
Digital skills change
Think Social Tech tweeted, “A thread 1/10: A brief review of research/literature on digital skills and support needs in social sector“. This is now the go-to thread for all the resources on digital change in the charity sector, including this report on Charity Digital Journeys. It’s so important that information like this is collected together and shared because those charities would would probably benefit from it the most are the least likely to even know it exists.
Digital isn’t (just) a channel
Daniel Fluskey tweeted, “Fundraising will need a mix of events – virtual, real, digital, traditional.
- Start with what your supporters want
- Choose the right event for the right audience – square pegs in round holes don’t fit
- Don’t get overwhelmed, you don’t have to do everything!”
Could there be a more digital-thinking tweet that isn’t about digital? I read that as, ‘start with user, meet their needs, work in small batches. That is as fantastic example of digital thinking applied to fundraising.
The 3 A’s of professional learning
John Miller tweeted, “Professional learning should hit all 3 A’s :
- Actual – relate to the real world. Practicality.
- Academic – theory and research behind the learning.
- Aspirational – what could be better by applying the learning. Inspire positive change.”
This seems like a better approach than the 70/20/10 thing, which I think assumes too much about knowledge existing and being shared. John’s approach . The Actual part says to me, ‘learn by doing’, which is essential when in new and changeable situations. Including an academic aspect is important. This doesn’t have to mean ‘scholarly’, it just means ‘read books and take notice of all the existing knowledge from people who have done it before’. Aspirational closes the loop (and I’m a big fan of loops). It says that we should learn about learning in order to improve how we learn and what we apply to the practical learning opportunities.
Reading list
I tweeted, “30 things I’ve read recently about AI, business value, design, remote work, resilience, leadership, innovation, maps, product teams, personas, digital media, cyber security, purposeful careers, organisational change, literacy & complexity.” It followed on from a few discussions about learning digital skills so I thought I’d try to get into the habit of sharing my reading list for the week. As I don’t have any knowledge of my own, maybe people can benefit from me sharing other people’s knowledge.
Weeknotes #238
This week I did
Problem-focused
It’s easy to leap to solutions without understanding what the problem is that you’re trying to solve. This week was busy with trying to get an understanding of what problems we’re actually trying to solve with the products we’re being asked to build quickly for projects with tight timelines. I heard someone say (on a podcast, I think) ‘make the right things to make things right’, and it stuck with me. I also talked quite a bit about us trialing products purely with the intention of learning. I feel like we have lots to learn, so the sooner we start the quicker we’ll figure out the things we need to in order to help young people get effective training online.
Does digital creativity differ from non-digital creativity?
I finished my assignment ‘Does digital creativity differ from non-digital creativity?’ Spoiler: It does. I’ve learned about lots of interesting things in this module, and for this essay, about digital media. I’d really like to have time to go back over some of the ideas and write blog posts about them but that’s going to have to wait until after my dissertation is finished.
I read:
Digital Scotland Service Standard
The service standard aims to make sure that services in Scotland are continually improving and that users are always the focus. I like the idea of service standards. Although they seem quite aspirational and a little immature at the moment with few real-life examples of how standards have been implemented effectively, they are a great way to help others understand what it means to be ‘digital’. I know it’s a very different thing, but the standard that explains how to manufacture a bolt is very specific about measurements, tolerances, etc., but maybe it that’s just my understanding of the word ‘standard’, which isn’t the point here. The point is that even though some of the standards in the Digital Scotland Service Standard feel a bit context specific, overall it’s brilliant.
Climate impact of digital
Don’t watch this video 😉
Our digital world
I feel Like, Swipe, Click, Repeat & Change by Peter Trainor and New Public – For Better Digital Public Spaces complement each other and should be read together. One is about the effects social media sites have on us and the other is a about creating better digital spaces.
Reading list
My notes contains lots other things I’ve read this week.
And thought about:
Measures of influence
I had a thought that maybe a measure of influence is how many times someone has to say something for people to take notice of it. I could repeat the same message time and time again and no one would take any notice, because I have low influence. Seth Godin says something once and thousands of people listen to it, because he has high influence. On a smaller scale, it might be an interesting way to measure your influence at work.
Play jazz
After some conversations with Jonathan Holden on Twitter, I’ve been thinking a bit about how our use of militaristic (and so masculine) language relates to our mental models about work and groups of people organised to achieve common goals. Do creative/artistic endeavors offer a better way to think about it? Musicians can play alone, in perfectly in-sync large orchestras, and improvising in jazz bands.
Affordances and proto-affordances
I’m intrigued by the idea of affordances. An affordance is an object’s sensory characteristics which imply its functionality and use. The idea allows designers to “design for usefulness by creating affordances (the possibilities for action in the design) that match the goals of the user“. It seems like the missing gap between what a product is intended to achieve for a user and the design of the user interface.
Some people tweeted:
Positioning product management
Scott Colfer tweeted, “What do product managers like? No, not Venn diagrams. Quadrants! This one shows the range of what product management can look like (in my experience). Helps me when someone asks ‘how do I become a PM?” It’s a really useful way to think about how product managers move around in there role on the axis between tactical and strategic, and between generalist and specialist. So at the daily stand-up a PM might be a tactical generalist talking about UX decisions for a web page and later that day might be acting as a strategic specialist on the digital safeguarding.
Tweet-Syllabus: Prioritization 101 ⏱
Nick deWilde tweeted, “The most successful people I’ve met aren’t the ones who work the hardest. They are the ones who prioritize the right things to work on. These 7 concepts & resources will help you decide what to prioritize in your work and life” I found this interesting because I’ve been thinking about what we really mean when we casually talk about prioritisation for a few weeks. I’m not convinced by some of the tweets, for example that value is only measured by money, but the one about how every system has constraints and that when projects put pressure on a constraint it causes chaos is interesting. Considering bottlenecks in that way helps us think about the knock-on effects rather than just that one constraint in isolation.
Remote work research
Eat Sleep Work Repeat tweeted, “A lot of people saw that viral thread about remote work last week, chock full of unattributed opinion claiming that the office ‘was over’. Let’s try and use some evidence… what does published research tell us about what’s going to happen to our workplaces?” It’s interesting how the pendulum of remote working has swung between ‘the end of the office’ and ‘get back to normal’ and is finding the middle position between home and office. It’s also interesting how much of the discussion about the future of work centres around the location of people. Is that really the most important aspect about effective working, or is it just because its the most obvious and easiest thing to talk about it?
A capabilities approach to digital transformation
The challenge of digital transformation; to build capabilities in people whilst at the same time moving away from the capabilities that the organisation holds in its processes and values in order to deal with new problems.
Christensen & Overdorf said,
“As successful companies mature, employees gradually come to assume that the processes and priorities they’ve used so successfully so often are the right way to do their work. Once that happens and employees begin to follow processes and decide priorities by assumption rather than by conscious choice, those processes and values come to constitute the organization’s culture. As companies grow from a few employees to hundreds and thousands of them, the challenge of getting all employees to agree on what needs to be done and how can be daunting for even the best managers. Culture is a powerful management tool in those situations. It enables employees to act autonomously but causes them to act consistently. Hence, the factors that define an organization’s capabilities and disabilities evolve over time-they start in resources; then move to visible, articulated processes and values,- and migrate finally to culture. As long as the organization continues to face the same sorts of problems that its processes and values were designed to address, managing the organization can be straightforward. But because those factors also define what an organization cannot do, they constitute disabilities when the problems facing the company change fundamentally. When the organization’s capabilities reside primarily in its people, changing capabilities to address the new problems is relatively simple. But when the capabilities have come to reside in processes and values, and especially when they have become embedded in culture, change can be extraordinarily difficult.”
The processes organisations use are designed to be repeatable with minimal variation, the values organisations hold show themselves in the assumptions decisions are based on, and the culture that organisations promote becomes mono-culture, preventing counter-culture, and holding back change.
What capabilities do organisations need their people to have in order to respond effectively to new problems? Broadly speaking the answer is obvious. They need more digital capabilities. To be ‘digital’ means to be user-focused first and foremost, to utilise internet-era ways of working and thinking, to build on the known success of others. But how do organisations get more digital capabilities?
The usual approach to learning and development is based on some variation of the 70-20-10 model of organisational learning where 70% of learning is experiential or on-the-job. This relies on the assumption that there is sufficient knowledge and experience within the organisation, but in many cases there isn’t and in the cases where there is it is prevented from being utilised by the existing values and culture. Of course, very few organisations are completely lacking in digital capabilities. They have good people everywhere who outside of work are probably as digital at home as the organisation wish they were at work, but when they sign-in each morning they adopt those organisational values and processes that prevent them from using those capabilities.
There is no perfect organisational structure, but there is a lot to be said for decoupling how power flows through the organisation from how information (and so learning) flows. Power flows through hierarchies and traditional org structures and it will for a long time to come. Many organisations have tried flat, holocratic and matrix structures and it never works, so let power and authority flow through the hierarchies. Focus on creating networks for the information to flow. The more people that feel able to share more information and learning the more they all benefit. The more learning opportunities people create the faster people can learn.
Transforming an organisation into a 21st century fit, digital organisation requires breaking down those existing processes and values to put people first.