You can even make your own: http://www.bamboobikestudio.com/ 

They have been made mainly in the far east over the years e.g. by http://trevang.com.vn/. My prefered though are the African ones:http://www.calfeedesign.com/BambooOverview.htm http://www.bamboosero.com/

Why bring in designers and their tools? Who else would you bring in to redesign if not the designers - and the experts they rely on? Designing requires design thinking that uses a set of tools useful far beyond its own industry. If you are familiar with the term ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ or value innovation then that would be an example of design thinking applied to business strategy. Now we need to apply this innovative design thinking to our political governance structures.

Design thinking is best described by as being abductive, a term created by the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sander Peirce.  Abduction differs from deduction and induction, the two classic paths to knowledge. Deduction is the process of deriving the consequences of what is assumed. Given the truth of the assumptions, a valid deduction guarantees the truth of the conclusion. It is true by definition and is independent of sense experience. For example, if it is true that the sum of the angles is 180° in all triangles, and if a certain triangle has angles of 80° and 30°, then it can be deduced that the third angle is 70°. Induction is the process of inferring the probable outcome as a result of observing multiple antecedents. An inductive statement requires empirical evidence for it to be true. For example, the statement “it’s snowing, so it must be freezing” can be induced from the experience of the two being true together. Abductive reasoning takes place when an inquirer considers a set of seemingly unrelated facts and has an intuition that they are somehow connected. An abduction is the process of inference that produces a hypothesis as its end result. Abductive knowledge is interesting because it differs from the two other by generating new hypothesis rather than discounting the past. Before converging data into one answer it diverges into many possible scenarios – scenarios that don’t necessarily follow analytically or from empirical observations at first. This is the type of knowledge that sets visionary leaders apart from managers. Alarmingly our educational system has a strong emphasis on managerial type of knowledge.

That some see the financial crisis as the result of a system that allowed a few unmoral to profit from other’s demise was apparent at Davos and was reflected in Sarkozy’s appeal for a ‘moral capitalism’. The present environmental sentiments also appeal to a renewed morality. This calls us to revisit our morality and even its ethical foundation. If you look at today’s main ethical challenge you will probably find it to be out of tune with multilateralism and cultural relativity, this was surely one of the challenges of reaching an accord in Copenhagen’s COP15. By starting to look at these issues you are at the starting point of any design process.

A prototypical design process goes as follows: Inspire - Investigate – Ideate - Iterate - Implement:

Inspire:

First you need to decide what issue you are trying to resolve – what’s your inspiration? In the case of ethics my point of inspiration is feministic. Women were not really included in philosophical debates until the 1970’s. They then voiced that what men had held for ethical didn’t describe their moral.

Investigate:

The two main male ethical paradigms are deontology and utilitarianism. Deontology says you are ethical by obeying rules given by God or nature.  Utilitarianism says you’re ethical by maximizing value to your next. None of these described what women had been doing for the 4000 years or so while men had been discussing ethics. When women had been taking care of kids they did not do so because of some God given law ordered them to, nor had they done so to maximize utility. They did so because they simply felt for their kids. Was this then not ethical in itself? The reply from the choir of male philosophers was that these feelings could not be the foundation of ethics because they were particular, directed towards particular persons. Ethics needs to be reproducible like all good science, this requires universability.  That’s roughly were the discussion ended: That having particular feelings for a particular person did not fit scientific standards and couldn’t make for a viable ethical theory. This puzzled me and was where I found resolve.

Like most design studies, my research was low key, anthropological and practical in finding out what do users of ethics do by simple observation.  I started to take notice of the feeling I had when I thought of myself as ethical. Once I walked down the street, some young guys had started beating up some dude. I intervened and wondered why. I felt close to the victim somehow, despite not knowing him. This feeling of proximity reproduced itself each time. However the type of proximity would be different, geographic like the guy that almost got beaten up, or genetic – I would stump a spider, but no cat. It seemed to be a universal thing. Proximity would be different, e.g. some people chose to weigh the relation to the working class above their family in the 1930’s when joining the Spanish civil war against fascism, Melanesian cannibals would not eat people of their own tribe, but whether proximity related to race, religion, class, flag, songline, totem or other, there would be some feeling of moral duty relative to perceived proximity in all cultures.

Ideate and Iterate:

Happy with my results I started to prototype a gender neutral ethical theory; soon to discover that I had tumbled on a fundamental challenge of ethics: David Hume’s ‘Is-ought problem’. Just because it is so, that people favor proximity does not mean it ought to be so. Proximity was not moral in itself. The ideas to a solution came to me as I studied quality control at Berkeley. I thought ethics could be comparable to the quality crisis in the 80’s of American manufacturing. The West had defined quality unilaterally as a fixed quality. Japanese manufacturers had defined quality as a process of continuous improvement rather than a fixed quality. This meant their products eventually became superior in quality. Analogously, being ethical today represents a given we either abide to or don’t; we abide to the U.N. Global Compact, we don’t improve towards it. By thinking proximity as a process towards something that could be improved on one could also reframe ethics for a multilateral world. So instead of telling people what’s good or not they could define those values individually or within their culture and improve on them. Resources need to be taken into account when you deal with business ethics, yet philosophical approaches to ethics are depleted from this fact. By having an incremental approach you are not only open to cultural diversity, but you can adjust effort to your capacity. By quantifying those increments, registering and comparing ethical mishaps and policy changes this should allow us to gather statistical data and eventually sufficiently so to create a statistical process control for ethics.  

Implementation:

Nicolai Peitersen with whom I had completed the prototyping process started a company around the theory we called Actics. Ethical Economy, the company, chose an online strategy. A prominent feature of the new web is how content is created and shared. New powerful  ways  of  producing  and  re-producing content  have  consequences  for  innovation and  production  such  as massively  distributed development of products to new  demands  for  the  transparency  and ‘humanization’  of  communication.  One-way marketing has been replaced by two-way conversations.  People are no longer merely ‘consumers’, ‘end users’, or ‘spectators’.  Another important feature that makes the web ideal for launching a redesigned ethical tool is that it is inherently quantifiable.

The web can turn stakeholders into partners through the co-creative means of web 2.0.  It is no longer advisable let alone smart to try to uphold  a  thick  membrane  around companies and only  reach out  in carefully  planned  ethical (CSR) projects  designed for PR. Stakeholders will  increasingly ‘move  in’  and  the  smart  organization turns  the  new  intimacy  into  cooperation. Web-technologies  make it  possible  to  engage  directly  with people  themselves  and  attribute  them due credit for helping out. Keywords for embedment within ‘Ethics 2.0’ are co-creation and co-ownership.to.  Proximity  to  what  matters  locally has  become  an  art  to  learn  and  being in touch with communities is crucial. With the possibility of anyone communicating with anyone and being organized in a split second, the general ethical issues will be replaced by a plurality of issues and values.  Together  with  the global  reach of small  initiatives,  it becomes more ethically sound  to be creative and find personal ways  to make  the greatest  impact,  given  your  resources: Going from doing the ‘right’ causes to doing it your way. Many politically driven standards, code-of-conducts, and charters, are off beat to the pace of today.

So?

This is an example of a given take on the ethics, but a good indicator that the issue can be revisited. If even ethics, a thousand year old tradition guarded by some incredibly smart philosophers, can easily be revisited, then every part of our society is open for redesign. Design thinking will get you there.

sugardane posted a photo:

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- Taken at 1:50 PM on March 06, 2010 - uploaded by ShoZu

sugardane posted a photo:

- Taken at 1:50 PM on March 06, 2010 - uploaded by ShoZu

sugardane posted a photo:

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]]> http://www.skibsted.net/2010/03/05/new-search-results-from-technorati-and-ingboo/feed/ http://www.skibsted.net/2010/03/04/youtube-doritos%c2%ae-crash-the-super-bowl-2010-winner-snack-attack-samurai/ http://www.skibsted.net/2010/03/04/youtube-doritos%c2%ae-crash-the-super-bowl-2010-winner-snack-attack-samurai/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:53:46 +0000 Jens Martin Skibsted http://www.skibsted.net/2010/03/04/youtube-doritos%c2%ae-crash-the-super-bowl-2010-winner-snack-attack-samurai/ http://www.skibsted.net/2010/03/04/youtube-doritos%c2%ae-crash-the-super-bowl-2010-winner-snack-attack-samurai/feed/ http://www.skibsted.net/2010/03/04/jens-presenting-the-wwwhaydk-chairs-tube-n-expo-with-the-kibisi-guys-wwwkibisicom/ http://www.skibsted.net/2010/03/04/jens-presenting-the-wwwhaydk-chairs-tube-n-expo-with-the-kibisi-guys-wwwkibisicom/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:23:42 +0000 Jens Martin Skibsted http://www.skibsted.net/2010/03/04/jens-presenting-the-wwwhaydk-chairs-tube-n-expo-with-the-kibisi-guys-wwwkibisicom/ presenting the www.hay.dk chairs: Tube n Expo with the @kibisi guys: www.kibisi.com.