#design the brave new world: an owner’s manual (revised version)

Stefano Mirti + Anne Sophie Gauvin
#design the brave new world:
an owner’s manual
chapter next:
on mass-education
Inside the Mirror, Retune 2014
Berlin, September 28, 2014

Today, I focus on one specific theme:
how to educate people in the Brave New World.

How to educate people in the Brave New World is, in fact,
one of the things that fascinate me the most.
I also talk about it a lot in the “Brave New World, a user’s manual”
(for the time being in Italian only)

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real
danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be
unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to
be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right
to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the
right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what
may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be
tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long
silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World

Few thoughts to frame our theme.
Kodak at its peak, gave work to 140.000 people
(only in Rochester, NY).
Thanks to this, million people around the world, could enjoy photography.
Now, Kodak does not exist anymore.
We have Instagram.
Thanks to Instagram, million people around the world, can enjoy photography.
At Instagram, 14 people work.
Where did the (140.000 - 14) = 139.988 go?

Imagine if we had met Jimmy Wales some fifteen years ago.
What’s up Jimmy?
It’s good. I am working at a new encyclopedia.
Nice! How does it work?
It’s kind of easy: imagine random people writing random stuff…
Yes…
Random people, writing random stuff, but how do you pay them?
We don’t pay them, they do it as a pastime. Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousand...
Yes… You mean hundreds of thousands random people writing random things for fun…
It looks like a conceptual art work. Like On Kawara, Alighiero Boetti… ...French Surrealism…
No, no.
It’s serious stuff. This encyclopedia I am talking about is not an encyclopedia.
It will be THE encyclopedia. No other encyclopedia will be able to stand to our intelligence.
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Or…
Imagine we go to a restaurant.
A special restaurant.
When we get in, they take us the kitchen.
And they tell us that it’s a new concept, a new restaurant.
We have to cook.
We have to serve ourselves
and after eating, we have to clean the table and get back to the kitchen and clean the kitchen.
We have to pay good money (nowadays, new concepts are priced quite high).
And we have to feel smart and cool.
This would be a very curious and strange and special restaurant.
I don’t think it would be a good business.
I am not sure people would like it so much.
Or maybe not.
If you think about furnitures and home interiors,
Ikea convinced us that this kind of system works very well and we like it very much….

Instagram vs Kodak. Wikipedia, Ikea…
The list is long, and you know the entries.
A traditional hotel vs Airbnb.
Buying a book written by someone else, or publishing your book via Lulu.
Low cost flights, Uber cabs...

We live in a world where the Maslow pyramid turned upside down…
I wake up in the morning
and I am really worried on how many likes I’ve got on my last Instagram’s pic.
My basic need is related on how many likes I get on my Instagram photos.
This fact that I will never have a steady job or I will never have a retirement fund,
it can wait.
It’s something really faraway.

Undoubtedly, we live in a curious world.
How to transfer knowledge to the younger generation, it is a tricky activity.
This is our theme today...

Now that we framed the arena in which we are,
we’ll show you some teaching environments we set up.
Then,
we’ll tell you a little bit about how we work,
how we see things, etc.

A couple years ago,
the Abadir Academy of Design and Fine Arts
(a school based in Catania, Sicily) and IdLab
(a design studio in Milan) started this
experimental project we called Whoami.
the Etna volcano

We did a lot of teaching experiments in “Whoami”.
After many tests, it is now a format: we use it quite often and keep improving it day after day.

Let’s use the MOOC (massive open on-line course)
“Design 101” as a starting point.
First, some data for you to understand.
A course of 101 days long.
101 video-postcards / 101 pdf-letters / 101 exercises
A modular machine, reiterating itself every day, for 101 days.

Here, the trailer we did at the very beginning...

The system was easy.
For 101 days, every day a video postcard with a brief.
And a letter.
Day after day, for 101 days...

Every day.
One video, and one (long) letter...

Now, some data:
42.895 students enrolled
10.025 started the course
629 completed it
350 asked for the certificate
300 submitted works for the final show
100 came to berlin to the final show

#design the brave new world: an owner’s manual (revised version)

If we think to our MOOC,
the big question should be addressed to the students who finished it.
Whenever you read about MOOCs,
the big question is related to the students lost along the way.
Actually, it should be the way around...
Why did you finish?
How could you make it all the way to the end?
Don’t you feel a little bit strange?

If you think that the previous data was astonishing,
you ain’t seen nothing yet...

Some other interesting data.
How many people? Hours?
How much money does it cost to
produce a course like design 101?

Three people producing conceptual content and entertaining the students
Three people producing visual content
Two people producing videoclips
One person editing sounds
Roughly speaking, we are talking about 6000 hours of work
If we pay these people 10 euro per hour, it makes an impressive 60.000 euro overall
iversity gave us 25.000 euro
Hence, to play this gig,
we lost 35.000 euro from our own pockets.

If we look at the students’ data,
our MOOC was a total failure.
If we look at our work (how many people were
involved, how much we worked, how much
money we lost), it’s even worse.
Why did we do such a thing?
Why we are happy?
Why are we doing it again this year?
Why are we adding a new course?

In the teaser for Design 101,
we said that our goal was to set up a community.
We never said we wanted to educate thousands people.
We never said we wanted to make a revolution (in education field)
We never said we wanted to become rich.
We never said we wanted to set up a start up or things like that.
We were extremely clear with our intended goal.
And this we did.

In a different way,
we tested once more the timeless truth:
In life everything is possible. At a cost.
Now, let’s talk about the Design 101 community.
Again, we give you some data (by now you understood we like data…):
2936 people in our Facebook group
6700 likes on our Facebook page
1429 followers on Twitter
1523 + 1423 pictures with the #Design101 and #design101 hashtags on Instagram

Altogether, we set up a community of some thousand people (from the close to the loose ones).
They like us, we like them, we like each other.
They are waiting for our next courses, they want to help us.
They want to get involved in what we do.
A community. Of some thousand people.
This is quite priceless, isn’t?

How did we manage
to set up a community?

We started with a clear mindset.
To have fun and to share our process.
We spent lots of time/love/energy
communicating all kinds of Design 101-related things.
Conversations started offline,
some were continued online,
some started online and continued offline.
Most of the time,
fueling us up with energy,
sometimes positive, other times negative,
over all, making the community growing.

At some point during the course,
the students asked us if they could become the teachers for a day.
This is what happened on day 98.
And this was the turning point.
Our students became teachers. And they did it perfectly.

Here is the video they made together,
and here is the link to their letter.

Then, there was #blaueblumen,
the end of the year show, party, exhibition at designtransfer in Berlin.
About 100 students came from all around the world. On their expenses.

And two months later,
3 students came to Milan to help us in the office and learn some new tricks.
Together, they made a beautiful archive of Design 101
and worked hard on communicating our summer camp.

here the link to our fabulous archive...

then, we did:
Architecture, Between the Sea and the Sky,
an online / offline summer camp.
This summer, on Google+ and workshop in Siracusa.

To summarize our week in Siracusa...

Another big project we’ve been working on
is the online/offline Master Relational Design.
The first edition started in February 2014.

The first edition started on Valentines’ day,
but we are now preparing a second edition for January 2015

In January, we will have two masters starting:
this second edition of Master Relational Design
and a brand new one called Macchine Pensanti.

Macchine Pensanti
(or “Thinking Machines”)
is about architecture.
Over one year,
the students will build a house together.

For our master programs,
we work in modules. 12 modules over a year.
As a general we have:
12 months
12 courses
12 different partners
12 different places
12 different briefs
When we meet “offline”,
it is always in a different place around Italy.
We travel a lot.

We talked about Design 101.
We gave you a general idea of our master courses...
They are in fact our biggest education-related projects for the moment.
The other ones (either past, present or upcoming...)
are collected on our Whoami website.

Every time,
every course, every master is an experiment.
Improving our formats, making things better at a lower cost.
Step by step,
widening our skills,
widening our network(s)
We are very happy,
at the same time, we are a little bit tired.
Of course we know that a revolution is not a dinner party, but still...

What we’ve learnt so far (1):
We are absolute beginners.
In this field, everyone is an absolute beginner.
People who pretend to know, they lie.

To teach very complex things is fairly easy.
To teach very simple things is actually quite difficult.

If using social media while teaching,
the class needs to be transformed into a community.
New tools require new interactions.
To us, this seem to be common sense, but not many people have got this point right.

Teachers are game moderators.
They set a frame of work and press play.

The success of a course is given by the quality and quantity
of interactions between the students and teachers.
A lot of interaction.
A lot of high quality interaction.
This (we understood) is not negotiable.

We need situations, excuses and opportunities for students and teachers to meet in person.

A school is a school.
A community is a community.
A school is not a community. A community is not a school.
You can have a great community within a school,
you can have a good school within a community…
...but a school is not a community and a community is not a school.
Social media are fantastic tools to develop communities.
They can be used in a school environment, but at their best they are for community making.

Some useful things for you to know (1):
we work on things we really like and we are passionate of
it seems obvious,
but a lot of people around us work upon different lines...

we learn and teach through narratives.
“mythopoeic” is the key word.

we take the complete challenge,
including the financial side

we learn while we do

we learn from mistakes
we accept this (painful) fact that the best way to learn is via mistakes

we go step by step.
a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
it is now five years we are working on this.
and to make it working properly, it will take some other years.

we iterate improving upon time

we work with the network
network is another very important and useful keyword.
how to add nodes in our network (this is one of our obsessions)

we use existing tools
if it exists, no need to invent a new thing

things we do are fun

By the way, here, you can get some more:
The Community is the Message

And here, even more (one of our next courses):

Thank you for listening!
Stefano Mirti / stefi_idlab
on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
Anne-Sophie Gauvin / asgauvin
on Facebook, Instagram

#design the brave new world: an owner’s manual (revised version)

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