Onboarding and Week One at the Collaboratory
by Hannah Koenig
I’m happy to finally report that last week was my first full week of work at the Collaboratory! On my first day, I successfully navigated the maze of buildings associated with the U.S. Department of State (DoS) in the Washington D.C. humidity and was officially sworn in as a Franklin Fellow. This was a pretty cool experience, as I took an oath to the U.S. Constitution itself alongside another Fellow. Here’s a nerdy picture of me (middle, trying not to mess up the words) by the American flag taking the oath. Three cheers for public service!
My team at the Collaboratory surprised me by showing up en masse to my “onboarding,” which is DoS-speak for swearing in and first-day-of-work paperwork. They also decorated my cubicle (which I’m trying to treat as a studio space) and threw me a surprise welcome/birthday party at our daily team meeting. This, I’m learning, is par for the course at our shop, where we operate according to a people-first principle that is particularly prominent on team member birthdays.
My time so far has largely been spent doing research and data-gathering, where I’m getting up to speed on the work and culture at the Collaboratory, the ECA Bureau, and DoS at large. I’m swimming in an alphabet soup of acronyms; for example, depending on the context, PD may mean Position Description, Professional Development, or Public Diplomacy. I’m getting to know my team and interviewing them individually to understand their experiences, goals, and portfolios as users working within the Collaboratory. I’ve begun consulting with a long list of other people working at DoS to understand their experiences and interactions with the Collaboratory as well.
The Collaboratory can be a little difficult to understand at first, and that’s partly because it is iterating so quickly that its self-understanding is sometimes changing month to month. In November 2013, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) announced the launch of the Collaboratory, a new shop that was to be focused on virtual exchanges. ECA runs the Department’s 150+ cultural and educational exchange programs for Americans and foreign nationals, of which one of the most famous is the Fulbright program. This is part of a larger mission of public diplomacy, where education diplomacy has been a major focus and strategy to reinforce mutual understanding across cultures.
In this context, the Collaboratory quickly grew from a team dedicated to virtual exchanges—which use technology to augment in-person exchanges by connecting people virtually—to a team equally interested in collaborative techniques and innovative approaches to government. The Collaboratory also wanted to serve as a network, connecting people within ECA to one another, to other bureaus at DoS, to other government agencies, and to organizations outside government, like NGOs, tech companies, and higher education institutions. Today, we are active on all of those fronts, and continuing to grow and “rewire,” as my boss frequently says.
Prior to my onboarding, the Collaboratory team (of which I am now the sixth member) drew a chart to express their latest take on their mission within ECA. It’s in all of our workspaces (you can see it in mine below) and also in our studio, a former conference room built from big dreams, donated decor, and no budget. This is where we run virtual programs, hold meetings, and brainstorm new ideas on a variety of fronts. The post-its on the wall are crowd-sourced ideas for an Education Diplomacy Toolkit that will be sent to posts (embassies and consulates) overseas to help them build their education diplomacy initiatives.
Over the coming weeks, I’m eager to begin compiling and sharing insights gained from my interviews with the Collaboratory team as we begin to think about refining our brand and visual identity. I’ll be jumping in on some ongoing projects and begin training on connective technologies for virtual exchanges. My quest for Creative Suite software will progress. I’ll also continue to accumulate design thinking resources—books, articles, videos, websites, etc—to share with my team and add to our cumulative reading list for our Tuesday reading period. I’m lucky in that my team is excited about design thinking and eager to know more. We are definitely the odd ducks in federal government, but hopefully not for long!
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, the U.S. Department of State.
Speaker Series and Security Measures
We kicked off our first Resiliency Speaker Series event on Monday. We had a great turnout with over 60 attendees. Susanne DesRoches (Assistant Chief, Resilience and Sustainability) came to speak from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey along with John Boule (Vice President) from the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff.
The speakers gave engaging presentations and answered dozens of questions from the audience. The discussion ranged from the effects of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey to resilient strategies for Boston and Massport facilities. We heard about Sandy’s disruptions to New York’s PATH Transportation System and ongoing complications that include salt’s pervasive and corrosive effects. Over 30% of our audience completed Speaker Series Surveys, giving us some great feedback as well as an average success rating of 4.4 out of 5 for this first event.
Completed Speaker Series Surveys.
Questions filled out by the audience for our Q&A session.
The event was a success, but it wouldn’t be an internship experience if it went off without a few bumps. The highlights included me barging into someone’s office while looking for a storage closet and accidentally leaving some of our guests languishing at the security desk before the event began. This was a problem because the doors, stairwells, and elevators on the first floor are blocked by security checkpoints. You need to scan your badge and your fingerprints to get through. It’s like something out of the Bourne trilogy. As a result, guests from outside of Massport have to be escorted through the building.
Unless, of course, you’re Jason Bourne…but I haven’t seen him in East Boston yet.
–Adria
Regicide and the swelling summer
As the summer reaches its peak my colonies of honeybees continue their diligent work, building new comb, rearing new brood, and storing surplus honey for their upcoming winter. The warm New Hampshire days encourage them to not only continue consuming the sugar syrup in their hives but also to forage for pollen and nectar in the clover and wild flowers blooming around the hives.
There was a set back in the last two weeks. Two of the three colonies had lost their precious queen. Having the initial inclination to allow these colonies to rear their own new queen I allowed them to start develop queen cells. However, after speaking with Master Beekeeper Erin MacGregor-Forbes, I was encouraged to introduce a northern raised queen before the colony could finish creating their own. With this advice I visited Chris Rogers in Windham, ME (backwoodsbeefarm.com) and purchased two queens raised in Vermont. It is suggested that hives in the north east have a northern raised queen as she is more likely to be able to handle the drastic temperature changes than the southern raised queens that come with the original package of bees.
The queen comes in a small wooden box with a screen over it. The white square at the end is made of sugar and serves both as a food source for the queen and her attendants as well as a wall to prevent her from being exposed to the colony too quickly. When the new queen is introduced to the colony she must stay inside her cage for a couple/few days to allow her scent to become familiar. If she is introduced too quickly, the colony will kill her. Before introducing these new queens the cells that were being built needed to be destroyed. This is done so the colony has a higher likelihood of accepting the new queen. Queen cells are built on the bottom of the frames as they are irregular in shape, needing to be longer to accommodate her larger size. Removing these cells is quite intense as they have soft white larvae enclosed inside that burst and ooze white liquid when scraped from the frame. Killing infant queens is messy.
Of the fifteen or so queen cells that were destroyed in the removal process, I was able to save four from being ruined. I froze these four to allow for dissection. Opening these enclosed cells shows the metamorphosis the bees are undergoing from a larva to a mature honeybee.
The northern queens are now out of their boxes and laying new generations of larvae with genes suited for our geographical location. The colony will build comb where ever there is space and needs to be inspected every couple days to prevent them from using energy building comb in undesired locations (like this one on the inside of the cover).
Mapping a space, a neighborhood, a community
My arrival in Delhi and Adhyayan takes place after most of the other fellows are half-way through their projects and its been really fascinating reading about their experiences while getting ready to start my own.
My first fortnight at Zamrudpur has been quite an overwhelming experience, getting to know the neighborhood, its residents and the fantastic group of children studying at Adhyayan, who are the core group of individuals I will be working with over the next two months.
These first two weeks I spent walking around the village, getting to know its streets and its residents, my personal mapping of its physical spaces and stories. At the same times, I was introducing the concept of “mapping” to the children at Adhyayan, through a series of design charretts aimed as ice-breakers and to understand their feelings and hopes for their community and village. Each day we drew, sketched, wrote and narrated to each other on a variety of topics ranging from what was someone’s favorite spot in the village, how would we invite a friend to our house or give directions, what was our least favorite space on our walk home from school or a route that was avoided. Through these, we explored graphic representations of way-finding tools and a much deeper study of our everyday surroundings that we often oversee or ignore but in fact are extremely important stimuli for an outsider, unfamiliar with this space. This concluded with the children creating directional maps to their own homes, which will be taken forward in the coming weeks to collectively map their whole neighborhood.
One of the toughest and most important things I had to learn early itself, is that as a designer, conceiving and executing an idea individually might be a challenging enough experience, but it requires a completely different strategy to instigate and inspire someone not constantly immersed in design thinking to explore for themselves.
A major problem that came to light through both the interactions with the children and my personal experience was the huge amount of garbage and trash in the streets, which was leading to un-navigable paths, clogging of drains and thus water logging during the ongoing monsoons and the general unfavorable conditions of a public space caused by sight, smell and flies induced by such waste. When this is factored to the community, which comprises mainly of low-income tenants, who find it easier to through trash out the windows of the houses they don’t own into a street that they don’t feel any ownership towards rather than walk a long distance to dispose of weekly garbage in the municipal dumpsters far away.
But the solution to this is not merely a cleanliness drive, that the NGO and its students have engaged in, time after time, but the lack of ownership of common public spaces and the inaccessibility of a systematic garbage collection system for the community. Our steps going forward need to address this vital need of community ownership, making the public spaces and accesses usable by the community itself first.
– Zoya
Beyond the Buzzwords
– Allison Wong
The unrecoverable situation we’ve all faced
Being thrown into a new environment (the law) has forced me to think a lot about communication, specifically – how to talk about design. As one of my mentors from the NuLawLab, Dan Jackson, was telling me today, it’s probably an extreme environment in which to practice talking about design, because for lawyers, words are really, really important.
As you can probably imagine, I am frequently faced with situation inside and outside of my internship:
Me (right), at my Fourth of July potluck.
Other variants of this question: What are you doing at a law firm? So what are you actually doing? You’re studying design – so what do you want to do with that?
Although I consider myself to be pretty knowledgeable about design and practiced in bringing design to different contexts, this question and the subsequent conversation still tend to make me stumble. It’s been especially hard since a lot of my work so far has been trying to define a set of parameters for what I can actually accomplish. And I still have a lot of questions about the role of design in law. If I was more quantitatively-minded, this internship would be a great opportunity to collect some hard experimental data about successful communication. What words work? What explanations leave people confused? How frequently are certain questions asked? Nonetheless, it has been a great testing ground for me to hone how I talk about design: what am I doing, what is the role of a designer, why should anyone care.
Why should we care so much about language? Isn’t the product of our work – its physical existence in the world – the only thing that matters? While words are superficial, I’ve learned the superficial can be very important. Striving for clarity is important in itself, but language can easily turn people off. As a first entry point into deeper discussion, surface explanations can either make people excited and invested in hearing more – or confuse and alienate.
Especially since design has become so visible in popular culture, the risk of using design buzzwords is substantial. It’s great that a wide range of people have heard about “design thinking.” I love when people ask me, “Do you know about IDEO?” However – while I think designers should capitalize on this excitement for new approaches, I’ve learned firsthand – through Design for America – that it can be really hard to earn someone’s trust and respect if you aren’t communicating on the same wavelength. Buzzwords get in the way more often than not, but they can be very hard to avoid.
So, what AM I doing this summer? Here’s a version of the words I’m currently testing out (it’s a work in progress):
I’m bringing my point of view as a designer to the formation of a new public interest law center in RI. As I see it, designers are skilled at understanding how people interact with the man-made world around them: services, products, systems, and institutions. We discover what’s not working, look at what’s working well, and think creatively about how things could be improved to better work for people. To do so, we try to deeply understand people’s needs, desires, and experiences.
In the context of the new law center, I’m hoping to do research that builds a greater understanding of housing related needs (the law center will be focused on housing in the first year). To do that, I am observing community work and legal proceedings already taking place, and I will be having conversations with individuals about their experiences. My work can inform the future work of the center and show a process for how similar work can occur in the future. I believe this kind of design approach can create a legal system that is more responsive and accessible.
Here are some of the key things I’ve been learning so far about communication:
1. Tailor to different audiences.
If at all possible, relate what you’re doing to the experience of the person you’re talking to and gauge how much they already understand. For some people, I have to start by explaining what industrial design is. For others who already somewhat get design – but might be confused about the legal context – I like to throw out something like: “So it’s become a popular thing to put designers in hospitals to come up with creative solutions to making the hospital a more patient-centered place that works better for humans. What do patients see when they arrive? Where do they wait? How do they take home information? Instead of designing for health care, I’m looking at how the legal system can be a more responsive environment.”
2. Use concrete examples whenever possible.
Most people will not understand when I say “observational design research methods.” They will understand if I say, “I’ve been sitting in on utility clinics held at the George Wiley Center. Individuals who are falling behind on utility payments come in to meet with a woman from National Grid. I’m watching and listening to learn more about people’s experiences with utility issues – how they arrived at the Center, what other issues they’re dealing with, and where they’re directed to go after. Are there similar opportunities for me to observe the work of your organization to better understand the needs of the people you work with?”
3. Design is not new.
Some people get confused because what you’re describing has been happening for a long time – but just hasn’t been called design. Perhaps it is a new application of tried methods, or a new bridging of people who didn’t used to work together. But people have been engaged in creative problem solving for forever, and it’s important to respect that when communicating. It might look more like policy, or ethnography, or public health – but we need to consider where our practice fits into a history of people who understand, challenge existing structures, and critically make. In being passionate, optimistic innovators, we risk sounding like we think we can use design to solve everything fast, or that design is always the right answer (it’s not).
—
Though I’ve been thinking a lot on this matter, I think social design as an emerging field still has a lot to work out about language and framing. I certainly, am no expert. When I worked on A Better World by Design last year, I helped plan a panel titled “Beyond the Buzzwords: Examining the Limits of Social Design.” Clearly, you can see a lot of people were as excited about engaging in this topic as I still am –
Awesome panelists included Briony Hynson, Kyla Fullenwider, Joe Zinter, and Gilad Meron
If you’ve conquered the design jargon pitfalls, mastered the way of communicating elegantly about design within other sectors, have other thoughts on this topic, or just want to ask me what I’m doing this summer, drop me a line! I’m always down to talk about talking about design.
Resiliency, Redundancy, and Reshaping the Landscape
It isn’t enough to design spaces that operate efficiently under ordinary conditions—we have to consider their ability to weather extraordinary conditions as well. The keys to resilient design include seemingly contradictory concepts: both diversity and redundancy. A resilient system should include a variety of spaces or structures, but it also needs enough of them that they don’t fail all at once during a disaster.
The first, and perhaps most obvious solution, is to elevate anything built near a shoreline. Raise existing buildings, put everything on stilts, and be sure that new construction includes a first story parking garage or an open public space. This makes sense: we should be designing spaces that are meant to flood, rather than fruitlessly hoping we’ll be able to keep water out during a storm.
But designing to ensure the resilience of a single structure doesn’t solve the problem. What about the houses next door? The rest of the town? The state? One answer lies in working with the landscape. Designers and city planners are widening beaches, restoring marshes, and constructing wetlands: they’re letting the landscape act as a buffer zone. These constructions offer active public spaces during nice weather, and wetlands are incredibly diverse ecosystems that can also filter runoff from urban areas.
I took a stab at designing such a space during an advanced architecture studio this past semester, and it was this project that led me to the Maharam S.T.E.A.M. Fellowship and my proposal at Massport. The studio was focused on developing proposals for the Greenway Connector, which is a series of public parks and paths in East Boston managed by Massport and the Boston Redevelopment Authority. My proposal was sited in the Wood Island Marsh, directly across from Massport’s Logan Airport runways. The idea was to create a space that celebrates the marsh’s existing conditions while protecting it from future erosion. During nice weather, the space acts as a public park and is designed to partially flood at high tide. During poor weather, the marsh acts as a buffer zone and absorbs storm surges before water can reach the MBTA tracks that run along the site’s periphery.
A sectional site analysis of existing plant and animal life in the Wood Island Marsh.
A plan of the proposal, at median tide.
An exploded axonometric at high tide. The design includes contoured steps and seating, a constructed path, a graded bank, and a series of canals.
A site model of the proposal.
To see the full project, click here.
–Adria
A Visit to Projeto Âncora
I arrived at Porvir through my uncle’s work with a school on the outskirts of São Paulo that encourages learning by doing. Projeto Âncora (which means “anchor”) is an experiment where students meet learning benchmarks by putting their questions to the test. Their educational model is focused on creating a stronger connection between what is taught in the classroom and real-world applications. As a part of my internship at Porvir, I am visiting schools around São Paulo that propose alternative education models. I want to learn about pedagogical styles that engage students in different ways than the traditional classroom model. My first visit was to Projeto Âncora.
My visit to Âncora last week was refreshing and enlightening. I was able to experience an education model that is unlike traditional schooling, yet students seem even more engaged in what they are doing. In a project-based curriculum, students define their own learning goals and develop separate projects in order to accomplish them. This is very similar to RISD’s approach, as skills are taught through individual projects, and students must manage their activities according to priorities. This method also encourages collaboration, as students realize that many endeavors might require assistance—and also that other students might also be interested in learning the same skills.
Âncora’s next step in its education model is to integrate more computer-based skills into the curriculum. In the world of education innovation, this is called “blended learning,” where students mix online resources with physical interactions and experiments. They are currently developing a website where students, educators and parents will have access to track the progress of each project.
Something remarkable about Âncora is that even during their vacation, students wish to come to the school’s campus to continue doing research for their projects. Âncora has no tuition fee, and they offer invaluable resources to students who may otherwise not have access to schools. With this experience in hand, I am able to imagine the application of alternative education models in various situations. With schools like Âncora popping up all around the world, it is important to document experiences and learning outcomes in order to take each initiative to its full potential. For those opening new schools, documentation of existing projects such as this one is key to creating “unique but reproducible” experiences.
Projeto Âncora is definitely a candidate for the 100+ list, which is in the works here at Porvir!
Check out Projeto Âncora’s website HERE!
Tracing the Fallout: Interviewing Locals
Gabriela Epstein
These past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to research and interview a number of locals about their personal experiences with Three Mile Island, the accident in 1979 and how that inspired them to speak up about nuclear power in the Middletown/Harrisburg community. What makes these individuals so interesting is their, for lack of a better word, utter ordinary-ness. Their lives were emblematic of classic americana culture: small town, blue collar townspeople who kept their heads down and worked hard to provide for their families. Middletown was, and is, still a quiet, heavily conservative town in which ‘normalcy’ is aspired to and activism is not. So, one can only imagine the magnitude of confusion, panic and utter disillusionment that must have ensued from the day of the accident that managed to galvanize a loose collection of concerned neighbors into a movement of organized activists.
It was so interesting to learn about these people: mothers, daycare workers, farmers, whose lives were turned upside down by the accident, and how they tried to make sense of it all. Many had had little to no education on nuclear energy, but with determination and hard work, they began to do their own research and became bonafide experts in their own right. Despite inner turmoil in the affected areas, these concerned townspeople gathered the confidence needed to question the actions of Metropolitan Edison, the NRC and the government– even taking the NRC to the Supreme Court in the mid ’80’s. Again, these were working-class folk– not lawyers or well-connected white collars– but they stood their ground against a collection of agencies. And sometimes even their own neighbors. Questioning the incident earned many of these folks the title of ‘radical;’ a term that engendered a bit of tension and fear in the affected areas surrounding TMI. To understand the evolution of thought brought upon by a single accident that could lead an individual to go from your average ‘Joe the Plumber’ to a radical (on both a micro and macro scale) has been an extremely engaging experience.
Below are a few photos from my travels through Middletown and Central PA. As you can see, it’s a rural setting. Included (from left to right) are: Doris Robb, an activist now based in Lancaster– she helped conduct health surveys & radiation monitoring around TMI, Mary Stamos– a woman who became an activist after evacuating and noticing her children’s hair fall out; she’s spent years conducting research and collecting mutated specimens of local fauna (where radiation is the prime suspect), the stacks of boxes pictured below contain her collections which might be evaluated for inclusion in the Smithsonian, and finally Jim Hurst, a member of the activist group PANE (people against nuclear energy) that took the NRC to the Supreme Court; he and his wife are proud of their garden, though, much to their chagrin, you can see the plant’s cooling towers through the bushes.
Can Port Authorities Save the Planet?
I’m shamelessly borrowing my title from a recent New York Times article. The article begins with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, moves on to talk about the importance of estuaries and wetlands, and ends by pointing out the meaninglessness of geographical boundaries when issues like sea level rise don’t end at a single state’s border. The article wraps up with this statement: “What we need are port authorities…These authorities are typically concerned with transportation infrastructure, but they can be reformed and placed in charge of overseeing development at the intersection of land and sea.” The author suggests that Port Authorities could become leaders in environmentally conscious planning and restoration. Read the full article here.
One of my main projects this summer involves designing a series of webpages about resilience, to be hosted on Massport’s official website. During the last two weeks, I’ve been working with a web content manager to get my layouts and materials onto a test server for review before the site goes live. We had a meeting last week to introduce the site and get feedback—it was the Massport equivalent of a crit. Despite a brief, last-minute panic while setting up for the meeting (the projector wasn’t working! We couldn’t access the test server link! The department’s IT expert was out of the office all day! Senior staff members got to the meeting early and witnessed everything!) the meeting itself went well and we got some great feedback. In response to that feedback, I’m working on another round of editing before the site is introduced to Massport’s CEO, after which the webpages will go live mid-July.
An updated draft of the Resiliency Website homepage, now on Massport’s test server.
Now that my work on the website is further along, I’ve started researching existing resilient building standards in preparation for drafting a new set of resilient guidelines. I’ll post more on that later, as the project evolves.
We’re also ramping up for our Resiliency Speaker Series, which begins on July 14th. I designed a survey (keeping RISD’s end of semester evaluations in mind) to be handed out to attendees so that we can get feedback on the Series and on our Resiliency Program.
Resiliency Speaker Series survey.
And I’ll end this post with a great interactive map produced by Sasaki, as part of their Sea Change Boston project. The map shows the impact of different sea level rise scenarios in the Boston area: http://seachange.sasaki.com/map/
–Adria
Around the World in 13 Schools
This past weekend, I read a book titled Around the World in 13 Schools, where a team of educators, researchers and designers traveled to four different continents in search of the most innovative pedagogical models. My conclusions after following their journey through this documentation of their experiences are that there is no single method or formula for education, and that the most appropriate education style varies not only by culture but also by the needs of each student. Most importantly, I learned that students should not be treated as a whole, but as individuals and that ultimately everyone is a student.
On this week’s reading list are the works of Paulo Freire, which can be found online (and in English!)
The entire book, Volta ao mundo em 13 escolas, can be found (in Portuguese) on this link.
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Opressed can be found here. This writing is a little more traditional than what we are looking at today, but gives us a sense of the concepts were are still grappling with in terms of education and development.
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