Educating for Societal Design
A Conversation between Tim Logan, Emily Harris and Martin Lorenz

The following text is a transcript. If you prefer to listen to the conversation, visit the Future Learning Design Podcasts website: https://www.goodimpactlabs.com/podcast/emily-harris-and-martin-lorenz

There are lots of reasons why well-intentioned work, trying to do things differently and shift the way that systems currently operate, often struggle and fail. But one of the reasons that I find most interesting is to look at the “dark matter” or deep codes that are built into our current ways of working. These might be things like the way we do contracts, the way insurance functions, and legal precedents. Or the way that value is defined and accounted for, and the way money functions and flows. Most of the time these things are simply constraints that we are told we just have to deal with in our work. Organisations like Dark Matter Labs are not accepting this status quo and, in fact, are actively trying to work towards redesigning these deep codes. My guests this week, Emily Harris and Martin Lorenz, are taking it one stage further and asking the question: “What does it mean to educate for building the capabilities and sensibilities for this kind of work?”

Tim Logan: Welcome to the Future Learning Design podcast.

Voiceover: What if, actually, everybody is best placed in the things and the context that they know best, to be the person to be the designer? Surely, that’s the place that we should start, but how can we use the amazing, like superpowers of design to bring that about?

Tim Logan: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name’s Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. There are loads of reasons why well-intentioned work trying to do things differently and shift the way that systems currently operate often struggle and fail. But one of the reasons that I find most interesting is to look at the dark matter or deep codes that are built into our current ways of working. These might be things like the way we do contracts, or the way insurance functions and legal precedents, or the way that value is defined and accounted for, and the way money functions and flows. Most of the time, these things are simply constraints that we’re told we just have to deal with in our work. But as you might have heard in a previous episode with Indy Johar and Adam Purvis, organizations like Dark Matter Labs are not accepting this status quo and in fact are actively trying to work towards redesigning some of these deep codes. But then you might say, well that’s fine for those kinds of organizations who get to do that work, but that’s not something that I can get involved with. My guests this week, Emily Harris and Martin Lorenz, are colleagues of Adam and Indy at Dark Matter Labs, but they are taking it one step further and asking the question, what does it mean to educate for building those sensibilities and capabilities for doing this kind of work? They’re calling it societal design, and in this conversation you’ll hear them reflecting on the masters program that they are launching this September in collaboration with Elisava, Barcelona School of Design and Engineering. I’ll let Emily and Martin introduce themselves, but just to say, there are loads of links in the show notes for how you can find out more or apply to the masters program, but also for the broader work that Martin and Emily are doing alongside the Dark Matter Labs team and other partners.

Emily Harris: Hi, I’m Emily. So, a long checkered history is that I’m a chartered accountant. I kind of grew up at Deloitte in London City of London in corporate finance, so had a very corporate start. I was there during the financial crisis and I went on to do international CFO positions around the world and all of this stuff, and then fast-forward to having a massive kind of like, oh my god, nothing makes sense, total kind of dissonance meltdown. And I went to Schumacher College and I studied regenerative economics, and that was my kind of route into working at Dark Matter Labs. And that is where lots of things happened, but very happily I met Martin whilst I was starting to build up the Next Economics Lab. So, I was starting to really look at the deep drivers of the economic system and what we might experiment with, or now I think of it as redesign, I don’t know if I did at the time. So, Martin and I started working together and we’ll tell you about that in a bit, but Martin, over to you.

Tim Logan: Yeah, fantastic. Amazing. Thank you. Yeah, go for it, Martin.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah, I’m Martin, I’m a communication designer, and I worked in the commercial field for many, many, many years. And I always thought I’m a communication designer, but then some day it hit me that this cannot be the way, a little bit what Emily also described as this cannot be how the world works and my function in this world. So, I started to look around, and then happily I got contacted by Dark Matter Labs and they hired me as a conversational designer, and I was telling them no, no, I’m a communication designer, I’m not a conversational designer. And Indy was telling me no, no, I need a conversational designer. And I’m now over three years at Dark Matter Labs and I’m slowly starting to understand what he meant by that. And actually I was practicing conversational design since many years, it’s just I didn’t really value it. I was always looking at the output and never really at the process, or design as a process. And together with Emily, I finally could break out of my design silo and look at the world from a different perspective, and this is where I thought, ah, design can do something. It can not just do Instagram posts and nice posters and campaigns to make people aware of the world on fire, it actually can do something, but maybe more in a dialogue. And with Emily we had this dialogue at Life-Ennobling Economics and then Life-Ennobling Design.

Tim Logan: Oh, so cool. No, thank you so much. I mean, it’s such a pleasure to meet you both and to yeah, to have you here on the podcast. We’ve had Indy and Adam on the podcast before, which many people will know, but the particular reason we have come together today is to talk about the masters in societal design that you are both co-creating, which is just super exciting and I’m really happy to be able to share more about it in a moment. But clearly you’re both involved in some amazing other work which perhaps we won’t get a chance to talk about, but I’ll put links in the show notes to that work because it’s all just incredibly important. And also just to reflect, I think there are a lot of people who have had those similar kinds of existential meltdown, professional meltdown moments, right, of what am I doing and what is the work? I certainly have and you know, I think they’re really important reflections on, you know, where can we contribute in our small ways to the things that are needed now. I feel the answers to that question are not obvious, they’re really often not obvious, and the things that we maybe think are the work are perhaps not the work or even undermining the real work. So, it’s super interesting just to hear you both reflect on that. And yeah, no, thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat. This is great.

Emily Harris: Thank you for having us, Tim.

Martin Lorenz: Thank you.

Tim Logan: So, maybe if we could just give a little bit of a kind of a sense of where this idea of societal design and the need for that is coming from, I think would be useful. I’d love to talk about the course and what you’re trying to achieve with the specific course. But just yeah, perhaps to set the scene a little bit, where is this coming from, do you feel that there is an increasing recognition of the need for this idea of societal design?

Emily Harris: Yeah. Well, maybe I’ll start, we just give you like a little bit of the arc of of how we got here and and maybe that answers some of those questions. So building a bit on I think what Martin was saying at the beginning about the process, not just like the outputs of design. So Martin and I did not, we didn’t sit down together one day and say like, “Oh, you know, we really think that we’re the people to create an entire masters about designing, you know, society.” Like it wasn’t that arrogant and it wasn’t that kind of thought out, if we’re honest. It was more like quite embodied. So we started working together, we can tell you on what, and as part of that process, all of these things came up for us and that’s what led us to here. But the, so there were two things that we started working on kind of as an experiment for both of us. So Martin trying to figure out what on earth conversational design was as his new job. So he was like leading the conversational design studio and me like stewarding the next economics lab and like what does that mean. So we set out on two pieces of work kind of as part of Dark Matter Labs’ journey as well, so I would say some of this like societal design is like a fractal of where Dark Matter Labs is going as well, so it’s quite interesting. So those two things were Life-Ennobling Economics, which we can tell you a bit about and that was you know, what are we shooting for, or what’s the South Star as they would say, what would we create as like a way of stewarding our planetary home, you know if we had free choice. And then also at the same time we were looking at like how does Dark Matter Labs organize with its ecosystem to start building parts of that, like you know how can we actually look at the dark matter like what’s going on beneath the surface and what can we work on. And maybe Martin will talk a bit about our process because it was quite interesting. But I think one of the things that we really started to notice was this massive dissonance that we both spoke of in our own journeys but also with everyone we were interacting with. So we put out a survey kind of the state of design and we were blown away by how many designers answered for a start and then the length and thoughtfulness that they put into their answers was actually quite a big inspiration for us to take some of this work further. But yeah, maybe I’ll just stop for a minute, but I don’t know if you want to talk Martin a bit about like when we first started working on on Life-Ennobling Economics and and how we did that.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah, no, I happily can talk about our process and Life-Ennobling Design. Maybe first of all, just like a observation that I made, we’re talking here and throwing around terms like Life-Ennobling Design, Life-Ennobling Economics, societal design, and sometimes I feel like language is in the way and it’s hard to talk about concepts because you have to name them in a way. But for me the concepts behind Life-Ennobling Design, they are completely equivalent to societal design or many other things that we are doing. And if you want to look at it at the concepts beyond our professions, then you will find as well similar deep codes in other professions that people are struggling with. But maybe that’s also my designer’s perspective and my way of thinking about language and how it limits us and how many more languages, like my language is the visual language, but there are certain things that need to be expressed in numbers, or in words, or in sounds, or through other sensory inputs. So coming back to Life-Ennobling Design and our process, this was also our approach, by having dialogues and looking at a subject or concepts from different perspectives. We were opening up a space in between these two nodes or these two perspectives. And in every dialogue that we had, we were never really trying to create something static, we were trying to create a space, an invitation as well to others. And the interesting things is if you opening up this space for yourself and for others, then you allow as well a completely different things to grow. So when we are talking about the masters as well, this is another dialogue space that we are opening up. Maybe I should shut up now because there’s everything is linked and my mind is going to the to the anti-brief.

Tim Logan: Yeah, I hear that and it would be great to get into more of the, more of that detail, but I just wonder, I guess I’m feeling maybe a little bit more of the context of why. Like, I can hear like the language of design and I would love to talk about that, but like, what is it that you were answering to around why Life-Ennobling Economics or societal design or all these different aspects were coming up where you felt there was need for more of these kinds of spaces?

Emily Harris: Yeah, I can maybe go there, so like into a little bit more detail. So when I was mentioning at the beginning, we were looking at how Dark Matter Labs could organize its work. So for anyone that isn’t familiar, like a big driver for Dark Matter is obviously the dark matter of society and by that we look at something that we call deep codes. And what we’re looking at there is these kind of entrenched systems or norms or structures that stop even the most amazing committed people from being successful in doing things differently. So a specific example might be something like how we determine profit or the fact that we have private ownership rights. When you start to look at those things, you realize that even if you’re trying to like do things that sound amazing, like regenerative investing or whatever else it is, people can’t get out of the system, it’s like pushing them back into the same thing, right? So it links back to this idea of dissonance because all these people, and not just designers, so like lawyers, politicians, everyone that we’re speaking to, would be experiencing this feeling of like not being at home in the world. And then they go to their jobs, and however well-meaning they are, they can’t do things differently and it’s so frustrating, right? So there were two things going on. One is that for Dark Matter Labs itself, we were trying to break it down so that we could actually get precise enough. So instead of just talking and diagnosing and saying, oh capitalism and blah blah blah, provocations here and there, it was like okay, well for me specifically I’m an accountant, so what could I actually go and do? What could I really get into the detail of and test? And as part of that, I kept hitting brick walls as well because I’m not trained like that, right? So you give accountants free will to redesign accounting and they come up with ESG. You know like, it’s just not you know, and so then I started working with people like Martin and it’s just oh my god, the world like opens into this different space and you’re thinking well hang on a minute, actually if I could see this other perspective, what would that mean in the accounts? So it’s this is what we were trying to do, and we were trying to do it just for Dark Matter Labs at the beginning, right, to give us all some structure and some different ways of working with our own ecosystem. And then it occurred to us through like many conversations is like well, obviously we can’t just do this within the boundaries of one organization, nor would we wish to. And so Life-Ennobling Design came out of well, what if actually everybody is best placed in the things and the context that they know best to be the person to be the designer? So not people who are officially from a design background, but people who are accountants, you know who are the engineers, or who are doing whatever it is. They’re closest to the fire, surely that’s the place that we should start, but how can we use the amazing like superpowers of design to bring that about? So it was kind of a logical progression from like what would this economy that you know what would it need to contain, what would need to happen, what would be the shifts, what would be the philosophical underpinning was where we started and then it was like how could people actually get into that, you know rather than it just being another lovely story that you know who doesn’t want a post-growth economy or you know. But then in the day to day how could we like support that to happen in a kind of more scaled and distributed way? And I think the thing that really got us thinking was the idea of a boundary object. So Martin and I were talking a lot about that because you know it was like well obviously we had some misgivings about like, oh we’re going to redesign the economy and you know it’s ridiculous of course. So it was like can we create some kind of loose structure that gives people a sense of pulling together but like really supports their kind of contextual integrity and wisdom? So that’s what we were trying to do.

Tim Logan: Yeah, amazing. Could you just say a bit more about what a boundary object is? Because that’s not necessarily a super familiar phrase to most people I think.

Emily Harris: Yeah, Martin do you want to come in on that?

Martin Lorenz: Yeah, it’s I was seeing the boundary object always as like some sort of cell with a Markoff blanket around that it allows a certain interaction in between the outside and the inside but still there’s an object that can be described. Like Luhmann, the system thinker, he talks about boundary objects as being necessary to describe something. If something is the same as the background, it’s invisible, so you need something that is different to the background. But I really like the Stuart Kauffman reference of self-organizing boundary objects as well because they developed this kind of dynamics where they start sticking together like oil in water. I really like that image as well.

Emily Harris: Yeah. So there’s something about giving enough structure but flexibility and giving that like sense of being part of something bigger than yourself. So it’s like helping people to feel that gestalt of like kind of interconnected embodiment without having to spell it out and say right now we’re going to meditate on this and you know gives you that sense but it also lets you interpret it into your own context is the way that I would describe it. So we tried to set the course up in that way because obviously we have ideas of what we want people to learn and you know ideas that we’d like them to experiment with. But at the end of the day, who are we to say what someone sitting in for example Barcelona, someone sitting in Calcutta, and someone sitting in I don’t know South America, it’s not going to be the same. So we felt very strongly that we never want to be saying right you know this is the way you should work on it and this is going to be your project and but having said that we didn’t want it to be so loose that it just becomes, oh well, go design for good, right? Because people say that kind of thing all the time don’t they, it’s like oh let’s you know design in service of life. I mean great but what does it mean?

Tim Logan: Yeah, absolutely. Oh I mean this is I think what you’re describing is so much the core of a lot of people’s challenges right is to how to do enough but not too much or not how to create spaces but not over-engineer because as soon as you over-engineer you then fall back into the traps of the previous paradigm right. And I I mean it’s everywhere that exact dynamic and I think just a lot of what you’re describing of people with a desire to shift things and then butting up against the dark matter of, in my world, the lesson plan, the curriculum framework, the outcomes, the assessment. You know lots of resonance whether you’re as you said whether you’re an accountant or a lawyer or a designer or an educator. I mean it’s everywhere and again what is the work of trying to help each other navigate those spaces and doing educational work which is so deeply trapped in this obsession with outcomes. I mean I say it all the time it’s boring to my listeners by now but it is such a trap that when we preempt everything and we pre-predict, we pre-plan everything that we want people to get out of it because we need to because we need to create the structure right, then we’ve kind of fallen back into this recipe and this algorithm.

Emily Harris: Yeah. And we do it, we do it all the time, we have to constantly remind ourselves. This is why I enjoy working with Martin so much is because even though I’ve been working on this kind of stuff now for years and I know it, right, I know it deep down, but I’m trained for certainty, I’m trained to be sure, I’m trained to bring it back to something that I can like put into like a concise table and tell you, this is what will happen and this will be the return and this will be the decision you should make, you know.

Tim Logan: That’s why we hire the accountants, right?

Emily Harris: Right. And you want us to be sure, you don’t want us to say, oh well hang on a minute let me just scratch my metaphysical itch and then you know I’ll come back to you. No. So, but Martin is like the the most curious individual that I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

Martin Lorenz: Chaotic.

Emily Harris: It’s impossible for me to stay in there, you know, even if sometimes I’m kind of like ah I just need to you know he’ll just like poke the spot and then and wake up again. So I think it’s really important to be around these people because I’m not sure you can do it for yourself.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah. and it’s what I see as well in you is I mean you also calling yourself the curious econo-us, no? and I think curiosity and trying to create generative spaces already demands a loose boundary objects or frameworks. So I really see a strong link to education there because this is the way as well how I like to teach. I go in a classroom thinking I’m just one of 30 people and now I’m getting older and older and older and there’s so much stuff that I’m not seeing that is visible for them. So it would be totally wrong to go in there with a plan of what they have to do. I mean I have to have, I have certain experience in my field and I know what I think would be useful to them to achieve, but yeah we need this open structures as well to give them the space to develop something that might be even more useful than you thought they should know. And this applies to teaching but as well to the way how we like to work together. So it’s I mean Emily has a much more structured brain and a much better brain than me so she’s always the one who can brings that back to something someone else can understand while my brain is drifting off in so many different directions. But I think we share this curiosity and as well the yeah the need for creating generative spaces. I was just reading yesterday the part in The Systems View of Life from Capra and Luisi and they were writing there, I mean I’m just paraphrasing here but basically that all living systems are learning systems, otherwise they cannot evolve. And in contrary this means that if you don’t generate spaces to learn then you’re creating dead spaces. And I find that, I mean they were saying this from the perspective of biology, but I find that such a good definition of what we try to need to take into account in everything that we create, that we create generative spaces.

Tim Logan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean that totally resonates. I think educators who are asking these kinds of questions are feeling exactly the same thing. We generally, institutionally, we are not inhabiting living learning systems, right? We’re inhabiting institutions that were built for another time, that are, I mean dead is a is a highly pejorative term but they they certainly don’t move very quickly if they move at all, right? They’re rigid, they’re stuck. Many adjectives we could use, right? But just I mean talking of that, I’m really curious you have found a home for this work right in Elisava in Barcelona. How was that experience of finding a home for this work? because that is also a challenge is is finding an a legacy institution that is open to this kind of way of working. That’s not everybody. So I don’t know is there a yeah what’s the story there about finding that home?

Emily Harris: Well that’s actually quite an easy one right? Because Martin Martin’s been working there for a long time so.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah, I mean I have taught at many universities but I’m with Elisava since 2006, so a very long time. And yeah and it’s I have I live now in Hamburg but every time that I come back to teach there it’s like coming home. I meet there people that I know for 20 and more years and there’s a a trust as well in these people and they they know me, I know them. And it’s an interesting space as well because it’s quite traditional in the sense of that they teach the craft of design. And what we are proposing is quite different I think. We on purpose we invite a lot of non-designers because from our experience what has been a problem in the past for designers that design was either commissioned, so they come in with a certain brief and then they have to do something, they have to function within a system that they cannot change, or a design movement is turned into a product, something very rigid as well that you just want to use like like a tool. And our approach seeing design as a dialogue or design as a relational craft needs a different setup. Cannot be commissioned, cannot be a product, cannot be just a tool. It needs to become a relationship, it needs to become something very intimate where you also are able to play with intangible languages that you can’t really find words yet for.

Tim Logan: Yeah, I love that. And I I mean I read in the anti-brief that you shared which I just love, there is so much good stuff in there. But that’s available and I’ll put the link in the show notes. But you talk about, in your section Martin you said talked about design making promises that it can’t keep. And I I mean I think that was a provocation rather than a statement as such, a question maybe it is, but yeah I mean can you open that up a bit? How do you see that design needs to, I mean it’s some of what you’ve already been saying I think perhaps, but I’ve had conversations about systemic design with people and I know Dan Hill’s strategic design and so there’s all these kind of adjectives that you put on the front of design to make it something else, right? So I don’t know how do you hold that? I suppose you’re doing the same with societal design, right, to an extent.

Emily Harris: Yeah. I would maybe just add one thing and then we’ll answer that question, but just in terms of Elisava being the home and how we came to that because Martin was saying it’s quite a traditional craft like university school of design and just for non-designers like me, when he said that he means like it teaches things like graphic design, you know like industrial design, product design, so like very kind of I suppose siloed, I don’t mean that in a negative sense but you know very specific types of design. But a lot of designers are obviously now very worried because of things like AI, because the context is shifting, people are losing their jobs. So part of the need that we’re meeting with Elisava is like what does that mean for the future of design, right? So as everything’s changing, and even the people who aren’t wanting to necessarily create a regenerative economy or any of these other things, they’re still really worried about what’s going to happen. And so what we kind of proposed to Elisava and what we’re obviously trying to do is to really take all the different types of design, so all the different fields and disciplines, anyone’s welcome, and then look at how it can be like reimagined. So it’s like rebirthing design from the inside. So instead of coming in and saying right here’s this new thing it’s strategic design or you know that’s not really the point. It’s like how can we use all of this amazing knowledge and skill set that you know that’s been built over centuries and more, you know it’s not for us to change all of that, we don’t want to, but how can we actually pair people with non-designers and then what happens? What happens when you put a graphic designer with an accountant, or what happens when you put a spatial designer with a you know policy innovation person, or something like that. And so the whole masters has been built in that way. So on every single module we have a design non-designer duo teaching it and they’re like stewarding the arc of that particular module. And that’s been like very intentional, so although the students are designers, they’re like right from the start living the kind of what we would call trans-disciplinary, not just interdisciplinary, so it’s not just oh you know you put this skill with this skill and then you get something else, it’s like no, what actually happens in between those things. So I think that’s probably you know where we’re doing something really quite different, but also just trying to move away from that arrogance of, so strategic design did incredible things and and Martin can add more about that, like they really the Helsinki design lab and you know amazing, we’re obviously standing on their shoulders, but I think it also got to a point for someone like me where I got a bit fed up with people coming in and sticking post-it notes all over my whatever and saying oh you know this is how the financial system should be redesigned and then thinking you know really? Have you ever worked in the financial system? Or so we we kind of wanted to take the best of that and then actually like you know ask the people that do work in that system.

Tim Logan: Yeah, absolutely. Oh, interesting.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah. I can speak a little bit to this as well because you’re Tim you were mentioning Dan, Dan Hill, and Emily you were mentioning right now Helsinki Design Lab. And I I did not say that but I was the visual designer at Helsinki Design Lab, working as 2pts.net, we were designing the visual identity for them and their publications and so we were in close contact with Brian Boyer, Justin Cook, Marco Steinberg, Dan Hill, and they were telling us about their plans to do something else than design thinking, something that is more like design doing and that turned into strategic design. And I think it’s great, I think it’s still super valuable what was developed at the Helsinki Design Lab and also the continuity in the what I saw then in in Dark Matter Labs, but what I noticed as well is that there are a lot of architects in this field. There’s no one that I would call a designer.

Tim Logan: Is that controversial to say?

Martin Lorenz: I’m I’m completely fine with it, but what I recognized is that they have a certain way of thinking about the world, which makes total sense to where architects are coming from. But I think that all design professions they can add something, they can add a different perspective to the world. So I think the the smart architects they see it, the not-so-smart architects with a God complex they don’t. But I I also didn’t mean anything negative by saying Elisava is rooted in the design traditional design crafts, I think craft is very much necessary, I think it’s very important that’s why we wanted to include all of them as well in our concept for the master. But you need as well to either elevate to the meta to have a look an overview about what you’re actually doing there and that you only have partial knowledge and perspective and that you need to work together, or go down to the deep codes wherever you prefer to go, but there has to be a a space where you can meet and organize and collaborate.

Tim Logan: Yeah, it’s super interesting because I would say even in the deep codes and in the meta, they are coming from somewhere, like they are deeply rooted in a tradition or in multiple traditions, in multiple kind of weaving of history, right? And so it that really connects with me because I think too often there’s we do get people with a God complex coming along saying I’ve just figured some stuff out and here’s a new idea and this is going to solve everything. And that’s just that’s just such a pattern that keeps repeating whatever world you’re in, right, architecture or education or whatever. And it’s just I mean it’s nonsense, and it’s dangerous nonsense actually because it leads people to this, well no point going down that rabbit hole right now. But there is, sorry Emily you wanted to come back in?

Emily Harris: I just totally agree with that and I think it’s part of the journey that we’re hoping we can take people on a bit quicker than than ours, right? So like you know my personal journey I actually started in medicine, right? So started in medicine and then accounting and then economics and then you know all of this stuff then kind of into the world of design, and all of the time I was just thinking oh you know if I could just understand this next bit or whatever I could think of something better, I could come up with a solution or and it took me like I’m embarrassed to say almost like 30 years to kind of get my head around the fact that that was ridiculous as you’re just describing. And so I think you know part of the motivation for this is to help other people get there quicker, right? Because we actually need people all of us to be doing things differently and to be really doing it in collaboration, not to pay lip service to collaboration. And so yeah, sorry I just got a bit excited at what you were saying, I think it’s so much our experience.

Tim Logan: Yeah, me too, absolutely. And it takes a lot of people a long time to come to some of those particularly when we’ve been socialized into a particular mechanistic system that is full of the dark matter of we’re just one good idea around the corner from salvation or or something, right? Or it’s just let’s take this part and fix this part and then everything will be okay. And again it’s just it’s dangerous nonsense unfortunately, but it really is sticky and it persists and I I mean it’s it’s fascinating. But I mean one of the things I I read in the anti-brief that you said Emily there was good design can help to slow things down to surface the less visible and unexpected perspectives and helps me to do my work from a different worldview with more curiosity, integrity and richer sense of purpose. Like that’s a beautiful thing to say and if design can do that then yeah let’s have more of that right?

Emily Harris: Yeah. I I absolutely think it can and maybe we can talk because Martin and I are like working on a kind of walking the talk project on the side that which speaks to that exact sentence.

Tim Logan: Okay, oh good.

Emily Harris: But I also wanted to say that I think with the deep codes and everything we’re talking about, our identities are so tangled up in it as well that it makes it almost impossible without conscious like practice of really living a different way in your work and outside and everything to like pull that apart enough to really be able to do anything different. And we had a really interesting collaboration where Martin and I did a conversational publication with Appoline Roger from ClientEarth. She’s an extraordinary lawyer and a very humble brilliant brilliant thinker. But as we were doing that, we were basically doing the anti-brief as you’re just describing with her you know around the topic of lawyering. And the thing that just kept coming up was like this identity, this posture of being a lawyer, that was like making it so difficult for them you know there’s there’s quite a big movement of lawyers now particularly in the kind of rights of nature but then trying to go broader into how they could actually redesign the deep codes of the law, which is obviously exciting because that has such massive leverage points but it you know it’s the same old patterns. So and just speaking to the like surfacing different perspectives and and helping you know obviously me personally but other people to go about their work differently. So Martin and I right now are working on a project with another colleague who’s brilliant, Linnea in Sweden. And that’s exactly what we’re doing so well we got we got funding from Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the the kind of you know thing behind it was like could we find a way of bridging conversational design with what we’re calling poly-capital accounting but new ways of accounting. And bringing those things together to help surface different perspectives, different values, you know not just different outcomes but different contributors and by doing that can we like obviously we’re looking to change the way that that money flows but also how can we have entirely different conversations. And it sounds a little bit esoteric as I’m describing it but it’s a very very like gritty detailed project. We’re working with a municipality in Sweden and we’re like literally kind of having conversations with the social services, with the police, with you know with the teachers, with and like trying to see what’s going on and then visualizing it with all these different languages. So there are numbers involved but there are also going to be like comics and then there’s like you know systems mapping and value like conversational cards and and we’re trying to put it together into a process that other people can use.

Tim Logan: Fascinating.

Emily Harris: So one of the reasons that I feel strongly about that about us doing this kind of work as well is a question that comes up a lot naturally from prospective students is like you know what’s the career pathways for this? because it’s a little bit new, it’s like you know we’re going to what we’re going to spend £14,000 and then you know apart from working at Dark Matter Labs what are you going to do?

Tim Logan: Exactly.

Emily Harris: And so I think one of the things that’s interesting that I feel about this and when we’re describing the boundary object is we’re also trying to push out into future careers, right? So it’s very much reciprocal by bringing non-designers in, so I’m kind of a foot in each camp, but I know that I need these kind of designers in my work. And as this work ripples out, I’m not going to be the only one that needs help with these numbers and so it’s like this kind of push-pull of it’s a very vocational course but we’re also you know threading into the future with it, but not us obviously, with all the different people who are starting to challenge those deep codes and then go, well hang on, I see that right like I I see the systemic issue and I see the deep driver and I see how it’s like making me show up as a professional, but I just don’t know what I can do.

Tim Logan: Yeah.

Emily Harris: So then you know intentionally, so ClientEarth who we mentioned they’ve just recently hired a visual designer which is like a really amazing confirmation that this kind of process is working and is expanding. So I feel that in a way coming out of a like a masters like this, it’s like your career pathways are almost infinite because what Martin’s teaching you is to be a contextual designer.

Tim Logan: Yeah.

Emily Harris: That context can be anything.

Tim Logan: So interesting because then you’re you’re then are in the process of creating the job or co-creating the job your you know your future job while at the same time that’s quite a precarious situation to be in if you’re about to take the plunge and invest a significant amount of money in a masters course. But but I think it makes me think of I’ve done some work with Ray Ison who who’s long time Open University professor of systems thinking and practice, and he talks about the fact that a lot of graduates from that masters course had almost a kind of an existential crisis when they come out of the course because they go back into the job they were doing and they then had to as a faculty really consider and then he talks about it being a design turn actually to bringing in design to say to to take a design turn when you go back into your organization because maybe you already have a job and maybe your employer has funded the masters but then you find yourself meeting up against these deep codes that we’ve been talking about when you go back in and what do you do with that other than have some kind of existential crisis and leave. And so they were kind of forced to engage with this idea of a design turn to say what constraints or what affordances can I work with back in my organization to help to shift the the possibilities of where I am in this often possibly quite rigid space that I find myself back in. So I think it’s again it’s a really common predicament that people find themselves in and so to have a skill set that you’re supporting seems like vital right.

Emily Harris: Yeah right. And I think to embed it, so I think you know some degrees do like kind of put it at the end it’s like and now how will you do this in your work? And that’s good and it’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not possible just to make that transition. So we really wanted to weave that in right from the start so you’re thinking about it right from the first module. So even when you’re thinking about why should I even want to use design maybe for activism or as you’re starting to think about the craft and how that could surface perspectives and but you’re also thinking as you’re looking around your local context because it’s an online masters mainly, you’re also starting to think, hmm but then what would I do with that? and if I did want to do that who would I talk to? and what if they just laughed at me? what would be my you know toolkit for like having a second conversation? and so we want that to be part of not just the process but also almost like the worldview you know it’s it’s okay to keep like looking for different angles and and just listening and then you know we call it listening to the system and zooming out to like what’s happening there and then coming right back in and then having a practice and then obviously talking to your fellow students and just honing down until you find something that works.

Tim Logan: Yeah oh I love that amazing.

Martin Lorenz: I think it would be maybe at this point it would be interesting to talk a little bit about the different modules because in the beginning I was saying that my personal evolution was as well from design as a craft that creates outputs to something that can help in the process. I learned that design there many different ways to work as a designer and maybe the less obvious one is the one that supports processes. And in our modules we are also it’s a learning path that we have built there, so it makes sense from the academic point of view but it also makes sense as a model of the profession where designers could work. So Appoline you were mentioning Appoline from ClientEarth, it’s fantastic that ClientEarth has a visual designer now, but even before having a visual designer Appoline was working with design tools to organize her team and to give them a different perspective and to learn how they can coordinate better. And she was using the horizon model so this is just like one example of how designers could also work within teams and maybe not such an obvious one because we always think about something visual when we think about design. But you could also use visualization to explain something or to understand something or reflect on something. In each module we are dedicating time and classes on understanding where design could be helpful in a group that is mixed between designers and non-designers. So right from the start it’s this kind of searching what would be a new definition of design and where design could be really helpful. And we were also talking about the rigid models and and the God complex and and when you were talking about this I was having in mind like oh shit I’m a complicit in this rigid worldview that we can change the world with a a theory or a model because designers are really good at making something look perfect like something makes sense, no? I mean just look at money you know like you look at a a banknote, no? and it’s so nicely designed it must be worth something not just the the paper. So design can trick you into a lot of things and models I mean Donna Meadows says it that she has a very flexible understanding of a model is, it’s to reflect on something and visualize something explain something but it’s not meant to be like something that we pray to. Um so it always has to be checked as well with reality and false idols, right? Yeah exactly.

Emily Harris: We were always having a giggle about this Martin and I because you know sometimes when we were running workshops about the anti-brief and about our work people would look at us a bit like hmm it’s not really like a tool though is it? you know it’s not really and we were laughing thinking you know between the two of us we could have made such a marketable product right like dream combination right? exactly yeah definitely could have done that but would you really have trusted us or wanted to use it you know? but it was quite funny it’s like we know what they’re saying but it’s almost that’s why we called it the anti-brief.

Tim Logan: Yeah. But I mean there’s so many interesting dynamics aren’t they though because even the good-looking anti-brief is becoming a kind of almost a potentially a co-opted design move to be alternative to the mainstream. And so I mean everything moves as quickly as everything else right and so it’s a fascinating dynamic to be a part of. And just on your point of tools I was with Nora Bateson last week in The Hague and um I see her shudder every time warm data gets referred to as a tool. So, but just one question just briefly I’d love to ask you is how you see this, this is one of the things I find super exciting personally. For example I’ve interviewed Ben Rawlence about Black Mountains College and the amazing work they’re doing, I’ve I’ve interviewed Ed Fidoe about London Interdisciplinary School and there are these emerging institutions that are trying to do things differently and obviously this is part of Elisava and a bigger institution but I just I find it a really interesting thing to notice across the landscape educationally in higher education that there are these people like you doing really ambitious and exciting things to offer different experiences to prospective students. So I don’t know whether you’ve reflected on how this fits into that broader picture but it certainly like it certainly is an exciting thing that I think.

Emily Harris: I mean my first reflection is that I think we’d feel humbled to be part of that ecosystem of people. I mean I’m you know I’m personally not an educator by background at all Martin is. But if anything it just feels confirmatory, it feels like yes you know other people are are thinking about this too, that’s pleasing right? that doesn’t feel like competition that feels like okay good we’ve all arrived at this place and if we can look at it from like different angles and and bring in different students and different interests then maybe we’ve got a shot right? because that’s what all of us are trying to do isn’t it connect these small sparks of something different and you know whatever your beliefs about social tipping points or different ways of understanding that, it feels encouraging. I think that’s my reflection mainly, like I I look at all of them they all look amazing I just think great you know the more people that can experience and and learn in this way then the better.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah. I also don’t really want to define our place, I would like to go back to this image of the oil in the water and I and I hope that we are all can free ourselves of the names that we were given, the name of the institution or the name of the master and we are looking at what we are trying to do what is behind our work, our motivations and we can self-organize like the oil on the water. So I don’t see them as a competition or as a linear trajectory, it’s more like yeah really happy that there is so much going on and so much interesting going on.

Tim Logan: Absolutely. No I mean that’s an interesting reflection because I very much agree but it’s also interesting that in our current situation we need somehow messes with your oil and water metaphor but we somehow need a container to invite people into right? and like the aspiration to help people have the capabilities to self-organize around these kinds of questions like absolutely but I think also currently there’s a real value in having some containers we can point to and say like there’s some really exciting interesting things happening here where people are questioning and trying to stay agile around like not being complacent about that they figured stuff out but staying curious and staying humble and questioning but continuing to collaborate and try and do meaningful work. It’s like it’s not easy but I I think it’s important that we can point to some things actually.

Martin Lorenz: Yeah no definitely. But I would like to see, I feel more comfortable as seeing time as a container. So the master it means that you’re dedicating yourself to something that tries to do things differently in a more purposeful way and you’re it’s the dedication behind it like you reserve this time for building your new future, not the future but your new future. And then this is again like the space that you give yourself the time, no? and you will see what happens in this time but yeah I feel more comfortable using time as a container and not output or outcome as a container.

Tim Logan: Yeah, good. No I love that, keep it absolutely. I had a great conversation recently with Carrie Facer about time in education and it’s yeah super interesting, really really important. We can get trapped in the credentialing right of like oh now I’ve got a masters, who cares? Has the world changed? Has your you know? But but yeah no I definitely hear you, it’s fascinating. And then maybe finally just to wrap up, how can people find out more? Obviously I’ll put lots of links in the show notes but what yeah what is the invitation that you wanted to share with people now?

Emily Harris: I would say twofold. I mean obviously we’d love people to sign up to the masters, it starts in September, so you can have a look we you guys will put it in the show notes but societal designer Elisava. But obviously we also realize that not everybody can just you know stop work for a year or you know do a masters and this isn’t like a one-time thing, it’s not like we’re just going to do this one program at Elisava so if people also are interested and have ideas about how they might want to be involved in different ways then we’re really open to that. So we will create other offerings in different formats as well so yeah just please feedback.

Martin Lorenz: Fantastic. Yeah. And it’s the antibrief website as a book that is a living organism, a boundary object. Yeah it’s I’m making it too complicated, but it’s our home and we are publishing there stuff that we think is relevant and our contributors too and I think it’s a good place to check every now and then.

Tim Logan: I agree. That’s where I really kind of connected with it actually reading some of the stuff you were posting in the anti-brief so yeah I would highly recommend it as well. But no thank you so much Martin, Emily, just such a pleasure to be able to have the conversation.

Emily Harris: You’re welcome. Thank you for having us.

Martin Lorenz: Thank you.Tim Logan: We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.