Role change & Mapping

As I’ve largely been working on live briefs independently, with plenty of spaces to verbalise and bounce ideas. It was acknowledged that a lot of the knowledge was held exclusively in my brain, tacit knowledge gained through my experience before running them, but also through growing and building them and the iterative process I went through. With my role switching to academic and being completely rewritten by Hannah my line manager and I, together with enthusiasm from the head of careers and employability Richard Sant and a general sense that this work had really developed into something important for us and that we should therefore think about what it looks like to grow it sustainably.
Something we were very mindful of when going through the HERA process was that we weren’t just writing this role for me but we were also writing it with a view to my two colleagues Ruth and Lewis to transition across too. So that the live briefs offer could grown and reiterate in ways I wouldn’t be able to do by myself. So there became a desire to find a way to ‘download’ this knowledge if you will.

Whilst there were overarching themes and strategic decisions at play, and I definitely had a vision of where I wanted them to go and the shape of them. A lot of the strategies used could be considered emergent, and the ideas in Adrienne Maree Brown’s book Emergent Strategies really align with the holistic and in some ways activist approach I feel I’ve taken to this area of my work. Brown suggests that we embrace complexity and don’t try to over-simplify in pursuit of a solution. That we should be responsive to a diverse and ever-changing world. Brown, A.M (2017) Something I feel I’ve tried to do in the building of this kind of work.

Even within a brief, which could be considered a small world or an eco system, I’ve tried to continue that openness and ability to be responsive to the group needs (Clients, Academics, and Student’s needs) throughout the process. They require a level of flexibility to really work effectively, not least because trying to embed anything into already quite full curriculums is no mean feat, then when you add in trying to align to Client needs and students’ needs simultaneously, there is no one-size-fits-all to be found. And I’m a firm believer that neither should there be. Sometimes an institution’s need for parity can lead to a desire to create frameworks and replicate and duplicate. I personally don’t believe this serves our diverse student population. Different humans, studying different disciplines, with different needs requires nuance and bespoke treatment wherever possible. Frameworks are important but they need to be agile frameworks.

So back to the downloading. As a way to capture this downloading of an approach and a body of work that by now is quite extensive, it was decided that we would have a series of mapping sessions. These sessions whilst quite draining – imagine being asked questions about every aspect of a complex eco-system that really has no straight answers for 2 hours and trying to effectively communicate that to your peers and to also capture it somehow, so that the detail remains long after the questions.
The way it plays out is a lot of seemingly simple questions being answered with ‘well it depends’ followed by as many as upwards of 5 examples of complex models I might utilise depending on the exact scenario and many variables. It’s probably 12 times harder to absorb than it is to explain, and explaining it is enough of a challenge! But nonetheless, we are trying!

Above for illustrative purposes is a screengrab of a miro board where we are attempting to pin down some of the thinking, I’m not going to link the board itself as it is a work in progress but there might be some sharable outcomes later.
The purpose of talking about it here is that it is informing an important part of my ARP in that it is where lots of thinking and ideation happens. It is a space for downloading of my brain, but also a space where the process of people asking me questions to try to understand actually provides new areas of thought and considerations to make, so some of the things we address in these sessions feeds back into the next iterations of the briefs and my ARP. This miro board utilises an approach known as an infinity diagramming, infinity diagramming is a technique, by Jiro Kawakita, a Japanese anthropologist which can be described as “a process used to externalize and meaningfully cluster observations and insights from research, keeping design teams grounded in data as they design” a technique that my team will often employ through our development days and collective work that has been invaluable in the context of ARP
Hanington, Bruce, and Bella Martin. Universal Methods of Design : 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions (2012)

These mapping sessions are a very helpful addition and space to work through the process in relation my ARP. My colleague Lewis explained that for him, it isn’t necessarily the miro or the physical post-its and notes that are useful for him, but the dialogic space. Campbell, Lewis, personal conversation (2023) I agree, as I wouldn’t necessarily visit the miro between sessions but the verbalising is very helpful. I can also see the benefits of having it mapped or diagrammed for someone else who perhaps has a different learning style or as an asynchronous resource. However I think that is because it’s a mapping of my brain because after trying a similar technique in relation to the Home brief it served me in a more active way as I was using it in the planning and development stage rather than an after the effect drawing out of information or as I’ve referred to it earlier – downloading.

Brown, A.M. (2017) Emergent strategy. AK Press.

Hanington, Bruce, and Bella Martin. Universal Methods of Design : 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions, Quarto Publishing Group USA, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=3399583.
Created from ual on 2024-02-08 22:33:11.