Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Rebecca Ackermann: “…But in recent years, for a number of reasons, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. And they have maintained that by centering designers—mainly practitioners of corporate design within agencies—it has reinforced existing inequities rather than challenging them. Years in, “innovation theater”— checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts—had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects. Meanwhile, the #MeToo and BLM movements, along with the political turmoil of the Trump administration, have demonstrated that many big problems are rooted in centuries of dark history, too deeply entrenched to be obliterated with a touch of design thinking’s magic wand. 

Today, innovation agencies and educational institutions still continue to sell design thinking to individuals, corporations, and organizations. In 2015, IDEO even created its own “online school,” IDEO U, with a bank of design thinking courses. But some groups—including the d.school and IDEO itself—are working to reform both its principles and its methodologies. These new efforts seek a set of design tools capable of equitably serving diverse communities and solving diverse problems well into the future. It’s a much more daunting—and crucial—task than design thinking’s original remit…(More)”.

Mapping Civic Measurement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars: “…a comprehensive civic measurement landscape review and a first-of-its-kind framework for mapping civic readiness and opportunities.  

The report features a collection of measurement tools, rubrics, and more than 200 resources in use by practitioners across education, business, philanthropy, community institutions, media, government, and civil society. You’ll come away from the report with new ways to think about measuring civic learning impact, new research to inform your work, and new opportunities to connect with other practitioners. 

Now is the time to come together to cultivate people as informed, engaged, and hopeful citizens. Creating a common knowledge base and practices to measure civic readiness and opportunities will enable us to chart the course to a healthy and robust democracy that works for all…(More)”

A Happier Internet: Searching for creativity in a profoundly uncreative medium

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jonathan D. Teubner: “Twitch is a social media platform where people can livestream themselves playing video games. Its streaming stars, who seem to dress mostly either in cosplay or for a day at Miami Beach, bring their fans directly into their homes and, in many cases, actual bedrooms. Twitch encourages its streaming stars to engage more personally with their followers. These “fans,” as they are called, can start to feel as though they have an actual relationship with the stars.

Connecting with others while playing video games apparently has its appeal, and monetary rewards. Top stars make as much as $120,000 per month. Twitch streamers with more modest followings can easily earn a living wage playing video games in full view of the world online. As one streaming star, Sweet Anita, told a New York Times reporter recently, “I laugh every day. I get paid to play video games. It’s a surreal world.”

Surreal doesn’t quite seem to capture it. Occasionally fans don’t see it merely for the money-making conceit that it is. Stalking is a common problem. One streamer known as DizzyKitten had the understandably alarming experience of one of her followers traveling from Washington State to her small town in Arkansas on the pretense that they were married. Others have received death threats against themselves and their families for considering moving onto a different platform. The online world rarely, if ever, stays online.

By now we are all accustomed to the problems presented by social media. The mental health maladies associated with heavy use can give one pause—depression, memory loss, sleeplessness. But perhaps the more disturbing consequences occur when social media erupts into our everyday lives: stalking, death threats, violence. This, too, is the world social media has wrought.

It’s become somewhat standard to say that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and smaller platforms like Twitch are a novum—something completely new our society must grapple with. Our best psychologists, neuroscientists, and epidemiologists are on the case. But as Kevin Driscoll charts in The Modem World, social media has a history. The premise behind his book is that this history is worth reconstructing, if for no other reason than that it discloses a different way to be online, one that is less corporate and more participatory….(More)”.

Effects of digitalization on the human centricity of social security administration and services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ILO Working paper 87: “Human-centered social security administrations keep the human dimension in control of decision-making. This is made possible through the insight to be gained from digital data-driven innovation in policy and governance and managerial reforms. Moreover, there are risks associated with collecting and analysing people’s digital data analysed and using it to further automate business processes. Human centricity is examined in this paper, through a human + machine approach, starting with social policy through to service delivery. Machines using AI and related technologies are designed to aug¬ment rather than replace human decision-making capability. This augmentation approach is essential in matters where discretion, compassion, reasoning, judgement, and empathy are essential for equity, fair¬ness, and fiscal responsibility within social security administration. This working paper presents a series of vignette style case studies (13) as examples of digitisation and/or digitalisation in the context of human centricity in social security administration…(More)”.

Handbook on Adaptive Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Sirkku Juhola: “The interconnectedness of global society is increasingly visible through crises such as the current global health pandemic, emerging climate change impacts and increasing erosion of biodiversity. This timely Handbook navigates the challenges of adaptive governance in these complex contexts, stressing the necessarily compounded nature of bio-physical and social systems to ensure more desirable governance outcomes…(More)”.

ESG data governance: A growing imperative for banks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article and Report by Daniel Heller, Andreas Reiter, Sebastian Schöbl, and Henning Soller: “The banking industry is facing mounting pressure to meet fast-changing demands in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. New and evolving regulations call for greater transparency and disclosure of ESG-related data (see sidebar, “ESG regulatory and disclosure requirements”). Stakeholders and investors are increasing their scrutiny of the effects investment decisions have on the climate and society. Consumers are holding banks to higher ESG standards as well—in 2019, about 14 percent of total client-driven revenues were controlled by consumers whose banking preferences were influenced by concern about purpose and sustainability.

To meet these expectations, banks must adapt their IT systems to systematically collect, aggregate, and report on a broad range of ESG data. However, many financial institutions still do not have a comprehensive approach to integrating ESG data into their existing risk reporting.

Moving toward this goal will require significant changes to the IT infrastructure, from applications to data integration, architecture, and governance. New applications include not only the management and capture of ESG data but also financed emissions models, climate risk models, ESG scorecards, climate stress tests, and climate-adjusted ratings. ESG data must be woven into existing processes, such as credit approvals and decision making. And banks will need to adjust their data architecture, define a data collection strategy, and reorganize their data governance model to successfully manage and report ESG data.

Investing in the right priorities from the beginning will enable banking IT leaders to quickly build these new capabilities and solutions without accumulating technical debt…(More)”

“How Dare They Peep into My Private Life”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Human Rights Watch on “Children’s Rights Violations by Governments that Endorsed Online Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic”: “The coronavirus pandemic upended the lives and learning of children around the world. Most countries pivoted to some form of online learning, replacing physical classrooms with EdTech websites and apps; this helped fill urgent gaps in delivering some form of education to many children.

But in their rush to connect children to virtual classrooms, few governments checked whether the EdTech they were rapidly endorsing or procuring for schools were safe for children. As a result, children whose families were able to afford access to the internet and connected devices, or who made hard sacrifices in order to do so, were exposed to the privacy practices of the EdTech products they were told or required to use during Covid-19 school closures.

Human Rights Watch conducted its technical analysis of the products between March and August 2021, and subsequently verified its findings as detailed in the methodology section. Each analysis essentially took a snapshot of the prevalence and frequency of tracking technologies embedded in each product on a given date in that window. That prevalence and frequency may fluctuate over time based on multiple factors, meaning that an analysis conducted on later dates might observe variations in the behavior of the products…(More)”

Public Management in an Information Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Albert Meijer, Alex Ingrams and Stavros Zouridis: “New information and communication technologies have drastically changed public management. Public managers are increasingly dependent on information gathered form complex systems and they need to be able to put in place sound IT and communication structures.

This accessible text, aimed specifically at those studying and working in public management, offers readers a comprehensive understanding of ICTs and their implications for public management. It provides aspiring and current public managers a framework for the development of strategic public information management across the full range of public organizations.

Written by leading experts in this area, Public Management in an Information Age offers:

– A thorough grounding in the latest research
– Examples of issues and practices from different contexts and types of organizations around the world
– A range of tools and techniques to help readers analyse concrete situations and develop appropriate solutions
– Summary boxes on key ICTs in non-technical language..(More)”.

Making IP a force-enabler for solving big problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Hossein Nowbar: “The world continues to confront compounding health, economic and humanitarian crises. We face urgent challenges like carbon in our atmosphere and declining growth of the working age population in developed countries. Microsoft believes that technology – particularly artificial intelligence (AI) – has great potential to help address these problems. The ability to uncover new insights in large datasets will drive new advances in climate science and improve workforce productivity. But success requires more innovation in more fields in less time than any other technological era in human history. And this innovation will be distributed. No one person or company will invent all of the advances in technology necessary to solve these complex problems. It will take collaboration and the fostering of community.

To address these challenges, we need an IP system that promotes pragmatic and practical mechanisms with a focus on how the system can enable innovation, not impede it…

I suggested some ideas the IP community can consider in evolving our IP systems to enable faster progress towards a better future:

  1. Adopt new licensing mechanisms to enable widespread and friction-free use of technology to solve important problems and help inventors obtain economic benefit for their IP. For example, there should be a rate court that establishes license fees for standards-essential patents that would eliminate the ambiguity and uncertainty around licensing such technologies.
  2. Promote exceptions to IP that improve knowledge-sharing, collaboration and development of new technologies like machine learning, such as the text and data mining exceptions adopted in Europe and Japan.
  3. Improve transparency and information flow about IP, including improving patent quality, standardizing licensing models, promoting multiparty cross-licensing, and making economic terms of licenses transparent to everyone in the innovation ecosystem.
  4. Provide economic incentives for collaboration, rewarding those who make their patents freely available for use to address important social problems. We need to promote widespread and friction-free use of technology to take on these important challenges…(More)”.

Farmer-Centric Data Governance: Towards A New Paradigm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report, six Deep Dives, and nine Case Studies by The Development Gateway: “..provide user-centric approaches to data governance that places farmers and their communities at the center of data gathering initiatives and aims to reduce the negative effects of centralized power. The findings are based on literature, interviews, and workshops, to gather the experiences of change-makers and aims to:
• Raise awareness around the current political economy of agricultural data and its implications;
• Identify user-centric data governance models and mechanisms, particularly in LMICs;
• Demonstrate the purpose, value, benefits, and challenges of these models for all stakeholders; and
• Identify appropriate and relevant actionable principles, recommendations, and considerations related to user-centric data governance in the agriculture sector for the donor community…(More)”