It was with William Lidwell’s mantra in mind that I came to the recent Enabled by Design-athon, a first for Australia thanks to the Cerebral Palsy Alliance who brought the event to Sydney following Design-athon events in London and Washington DC.

Bringing together a mix of people from design and engineering with those from the healthcare, social care and disability sectors, 120 of us gathered at University of Technology in Sydney over two days to design and make products and services for and with people living with disabilities – all in the name of universal design. While my team’s prototype did not take out the coveted first place, the event proved the potential that healthcare and design have when paired together, teaching what we – from both of those sides – can learn from one another.

Learning from designers

From the event’s launch by Joanne Jakovich (SOUP Labs) until the last team’s presentation, the inherent optimism associated with design was clear in its ability to imagine different, and better, futures. As the healthcare specialists engaged with the problem-solving, brainstorming minds of the designers in the group, this optimism spread, and after 48 hours we had 12 teams with 12 prototypes that took everyday challenges as opportunities for creative problem solving. For instance, how can university communities be more inclusive? How can public space better consider those with vision impairments?

Learning from specialists

Dominic Campbell (Futuregov) started off the event with a call for designers to stop creating more and more ‘stuff’, exemplified by Denise Stephens, who, after being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), found that her household furniture and products now did not meet her new needs. Denise went on to influence the landscape and meaning of accessible design through co-founding UK non-profit Enabled by Design.

Image: www.enabledbydesign.org. When Denise Stephens was diagnosed with MS, her home started to look more like a hospital. She began to question why aesthetics and accessibility generally don’t exist together.

With repositories of failed designs now emerging, such as architecture’s own Deadprize, Victor Papanek’s call to “stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures” is still very relevant 40 years later. While the occupational therapists (OTs) in my group explained with elation the huge potential that 3d printing has in replacing the crude moulds that OTs are tasked with handcrafting, a view of the objects in Thingiverse or Shapeways shows that the majority of what people are making with 3d printing tool MakerBot are cheap plastic novelty items.

Images: www.hivemodern.com. Philippe Starck’s Hot Bertaa kettle for Alessi (top)  has poor functionality. ‘Paul’s kettle’ (bottom) is a prototype for a universally designed kettle, produced at the London Enabled by Design-athon.

Learning from the end user

Spending two days with my group’s ‘muse’ Melanie Tran (check out her Tedx talk) gave us the ability to develop empathy with someone living with a disability like Mel. Yet it was the ability to involve end users as designers that was a crucial part of the process. Bridging the distance between the designer and the end user allowed us to question our assumptions, to test concepts and to quickly iterate on prototypes, ensuring that what we developed was highly useable and responded to the all-important criteria: designing for desirability.

A team at the Sydney Enabled by Design-athon tests the usability of their prototype, which aims to make gripping weights easier for people like Mustafa (centre).

By the end of the 36 hours, I felt I had understood why the term ‘design-athon’ derives from the word ‘marathon’ – we were exhausted. Yet unlike a marathon which moves along a linear path, “design is the redirection of flow” (Roberto Unger) that seeks to challenge existing models – of production, policy and service delivery – to create improved futures for everyone.

Charlotte Fliegner (charlotte.fliegner@archtam.com) is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Sydney. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter.

The post Enabled by Design-athon Sydney appeared first on Blog.

As work leaves the confines of the office, organisations are looking to the workplace to be an anchor of collaboration that connects people and ideas. In a workplace landscape replete with huddle spaces, whiteboards and meeting rooms, collaboration is king. Whilst this is particularly relevant to the knowledge worker in the head office, what about the rest of the organisation? The back office is often relegated to outer suburban locations, considered ‘second class citizens’, and the work environment reflects this.

In recent research led by Strategy Plus, we looked to understand where the workplace is heading for this sector. We took a deep dive into the offices of a major financial services provider to give insight into how call centre, operational and IT project teams function. What we found was a culture aimed at bringing a highly motivated, recharged and inspired outlook to process-based workflow. Recognising that these values, attitudes and behaviours are fundamentally different to the brainstorming, meeting-centric, flexi-workers over in the head office, how might a future workplace experience look for these groups? We can look to a number of global trends to give some clue as to the direction we are moving toward.

Self-appropriation

In a workplace where decoration is an integral part of office expression, the maker movement provides an example of how technology is transforming the traditional DIY movement to cross the physical and virtual realms.  Environments, objects and services are being ‘hacked’ or improved to create new or highly customised uses and functions from a bottom-up approach.

Empowered employees

Traditional motivational tools such as leaderboards, performance statistic displays and team boards are getting social. Social networking platforms such as Mozilla Open Badges show how people are using online tools to freely curate one’s own professional identity in order to be publicly recognised for achievements and skills. In turn, organisations are using gamification concepts as a performance management tool to motivate and recognise employee achievements. Think LinkedIn meets FourSquare.

Mozilla Open Badges (Image: www.blog.mozilla.org)

Connected organisation

In the same way that museums are connecting with visitors through creating immersive and interactive experiences centered around visitor engagement, the office environment can be a mechanism for developing two-way communications between the organisation and the employee. Jake Barton from Local Projects calls this act of listening and participating ‘collaborative storytelling,’ and I think that organisations can adopt this concept to rethink how they converse and share with their workforce. In this way, traditional signage and messaging can be re-imagined to be a conduit through which staff can actively share and layer their own personal stories and ideas to the broader organisation.

(Image: www.jasonbruges.com)

One example is The Bloomberg Connects project at Tate Modern, which invites visitors to learn and contribute their own interpretations of the art to the gallery space.

Health

In a homogenous job centered around sedentary behaviour and shift work, opportunities to recharge both mentally and physically is a priority in keeping staff productivity high and turnover low. The value of natural environments has been shown to aid patient recovery times in hospitals, or to rejuvenate passengers on long-haul flights. Amsterdam-Schiphol’s Airport is one example which combines physical movement – indoor and outdoor gardens, stationery bikes double up as mobile phone chargers – with mental stimulation – an interactive virtual butterfly enclosure, public library, access to natural light and air.

Amsterdam-Schiphol Airport Park (Image: www.inhabitat.com)

While these examples provide brief glimpses into the future, they paint a much greater picture in which the workplace is a platform for people to curate their own authentic and customised experiences. In this way, I envision a workplace which responds to the unique needs of different employees, allowing people to create personal fulfillment and meaning through work, regardless of organisational level or department.

Charlotte Fliegner (charlotte.fliegner@archtam.com) is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Sydney who worked at a call centre during her years at Architecture school. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter.

The post Meaning through work appeared first on Blog.