Exploring how our context and surroundings have more impact than we might think, and how we can consciously tap into that

Dr. Alli Edwards is facilitator, researcher and teacher whose design practices challenge the false dichotomy between work and play to create different ways of being together, sharing learnings, and imagining in equitable and sustainable ways. We discuss Alli’s practice and experience with games, her PhD research, and how presenting facilitation tools as ‘toys’ changes the whole experience.

Links to resources

The Center for Public Impact
https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/anz

What is a ‘Journey Map’?
https://www.thisisservicedesigndoing.com/methods/journey-mapping

Adrienne Maree Brown
https://adriennemareebrown.net/

Monster Care Squad
Web app: https://monstercaresquad.web.app/
Get a copy of the PDF: https://sandypuggames.itch.io/monster-care-squad

What is ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’?
http://apocalypse-world.com/pbta/policy

Embodied Cognition
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/a-brief-guide-to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

Daniel Kahneman
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Kahneman

An article exploring extended cognition
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/extended-embodied-cognition/542808/

Karen Barad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Barad

Meeting the universe halfway, by Karen Barad
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/738083.Meeting_the_Universe_Halfway

Jane Bennett
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Bennett_(political_theorist)

The Long Time Podcast
https://www.thelongtimeacademy.com/about

The importance of play according to Dr Stuart Brown
https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/practice-play-dr-stuart-brown
https://www.playcore.com/drstuartbrown

Rosi Braidotti
https://rosibraidotti.com/

Alli Edwards
Twitter: https://twitter.com/allinote
Monash University Bio: https://lens.monash.edu/@alli-edwards

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hailey: This is Amble the podcast where we take a disciplined wander through the borderland between ways of working and games. I’m one of your hosts, Hailey Cooperrider.

[00:00:16] Jason: And And I’m Jason Tampake.

[00:00:18] So Hails, a new episode. We’re completely stoked to introduce our new guest Alli Edwards Alli. Dr. Alli Edwards.

[00:00:30] Hailey: Congratulations.

[00:00:33] Jason: And for

[00:00:33] those of you who don’t know Alli like we do; Alli’s a friend of the podcast, but Alli’s design practices challenges the false dichotomy between work and play to create different ways of being together, sharing learnings, and imagining in equitable and sustainable ways. Alli teaches design thinking for masters of business students at Monash university and is a senior associate at the Center for Public Impact. Throughout her work, and recently completed doctoral research thesis, [00:01:00] a through line for Alli has been exploring how designers do so much more than problem solve and how embracing more playful and relational ways of being together can reconfigure the perceived value of a design process.

[00:01:14] Alli sounds amazing. We are looking forward to dipping into this with you. And you know, I think loosely, what we’ve done is titled this conversation that we’re gonna have this sort of amble, ‘Toys and Tools for Co-creation’. Does that sound about right? Are, are we in the right discussion?

[00:01:30] Alli: Yeah that’s my jam, that’s what I’m here for!

[00:01:32] Jason: Awesome.

[00:01:32] Hailey: Yeah. I’m looking forward to this one. I think we’ve got some juicy explorations to take and it’d be great to talk to someone who has looked so closely, you know, done a PhD’s worth of looking at these topic areas and will have some really informed opinions on all of this.

[00:01:48] but as we often do, rather than dive right into the material, we start with a game or technique or activity that our guest, in this case Alli, has been using or looking at, or just wants to talk about [00:02:00] to kick things off. So what have you got for us Alli?

[00:02:02] Alli: Absolutely. So this is an activity that I like to play with the masters of business students, just to get them up and moving and thinking in ways that aren’t just sitting at a desk and trying really hard. So, it’s based on a game called ‘This is not a stick’ where you would have a rolled up piece of paper and people pass around the rolled up piece of paper and you have to use it in ways where it’s not a stick, it’s a golf club or it’s a telephone or it’s a comb. And usually they’re using it in some sort of way that really reflects the form of the tube. And that’s informed by what previous people have done. So you get to talk about how ideas come up as this part of like social, like based upon what other people are doing and based upon how your body can use it.

[00:02:43] So this is adapted for our hybrid post COVID world. And it’s called ‘Where I come from’. So everyone has to look around their desk or their room. They have to pick up an object, any object, and then they’ll hold it up to the zoom camera. And they have to say like, “where I come from, [00:03:00] this is not a Sharpie. This is a magical zoom writing device. And you write on someone’s face and then they have a face tattoo”. Or “this is a ears telescope where you can hear what’s happening outside from your headphones” or some other use that still reflects kind of the form and the shape and the use.

[00:03:17] And then we try to ask people about like, well, why did you pick that when you could pick anything? And unpack a bit more about how you have preconceived ideas about what these things are and what they do. And taking a look at it could be anything you could make something up, it could be new, it could be completely different and trying to stretch your creativity in that sort of a way.

[00:03:35] So it’s a fun icebreaker. There’s always a lot to unpack and it just kinda gets people sharing and doing stuff together on the computer.

[00:03:42] Hailey: I wanna pull some threads on that, just a clarification. So on my turn, you’ve done your Sharpie. Do I pick up, you know, my candle and say, “this is not a candle, this is a flame thrower of ideas to ignite the creative experience.”[00:04:00]

[00:04:01] Alli: Yes. So, and this is the fun thing about it. So there’s options. You can either have everyone pick up their own object and speak to it. Or if we wanted to, Hailey could keep holding up her candle. And then I would have to say, “oh, that’s so interesting. Cuz where I come from, that’s not a flame thrower for igniting ideas. That’s a simmering pot where you dump your ideas and you let them slowly simmer and boil around.” So you can like add on off of what someone said with the same object as they’re holding it up on the computer.

[00:04:28] and then Jason could figure out, well, what is that where you come from?

[00:04:32] Jason: It sounds like fun where I come from Alli. That’s amazing. So you use that as a platform to have a conversation about, the sorts of prior experience and our preconceptions that we import into material objects. Like yeah, we’ve been given license to say anything. Why did we say what we say? Yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really, really cool.

[00:04:52] Alli: Totally. And why do we tend to say something that makes a lot of sense? So I have a Sharpie and I’m saying, oh, you use it to write on-. And I’m extending that [00:05:00] idea a bit, like I’m imagining what else it could do, but it’s still a function. You’re still writing. It could be anything, literally anything.

[00:05:06] So like, what does it say about us that we’re so ingrained in these ways of thinking that even when we’re told, ‘think so creatively and expansively’, we still tend to start with what we know that it does.

[00:05:17] Jason: Yes. Well, I guess that very neatly leads us into kind of

[00:05:21] why you’re here and what this jam is about today. You know, around the tools and toys, the materials used, or the materiality of co-design. Do you want to make explicit some of that thinking and unpack that a little bit for us, for folks who maybe aren’t as versed in that kind of naming

[00:05:38] convention. Yeah. What does that mean? What does it mean?

[00:05:41] Alli: Oh my gosh. What does it mean? Well, it only took me three years but I feel like now I actually have more questions than I did when I started. So I guess I got into all of this when I started my master’s degree. I really wanted to know how can design fix things, because that’s what as designers, we do.

[00:05:56] We identify problems, we frame them in creative ways and then [00:06:00] using our magic creativity and ability to make stuff, we fix problems. Except that, of course, that wasn’t working and the problems that we’re trying to address as a society are just so complex and they’re wicked and they’re messy and they’re changeable and you can’t fix them, let alone using some sort of process of design fixing. And like the swollen ego of design and designers to think that that is what we can do is to save the world somehow when in reality, oftentimes it just makes it a little bit worse became really evident and really clear as I started trying to do this master’s research and be so serious.

[00:06:33] And what kept coming up in that work is that actually the moments of change and the moments of making things a little bit better were in the moments of playing with ideas and trying to encourage students to be a little bit more creative in their thinking and willing to take a risk in developing games that students could play to figure out how to relate to each other differently and how we feel in a studio space together.

[00:06:56] So even though I went into that master’s degree to be all serious and to fix [00:07:00] the world’s issues, I came out of it with this really, really clear idea about how play isn’t opposed to seriousness. It’s a way of being in the world and engaging in these problems that is sustainable and can be relational and help people play together for important topics. And it can make positive changes and it can help us make positive changes. So that has really informed my PhD research into reframing what co-design tools look like. And what does it mean if we think of them as toys. And like, where is the fun and the play and how do we hold space for that and value that in a process where so often it’s really outcome driven or what are you trying to produce? I got a little bit rambley.

[00:07:43] Hailey: No, it was good.

[00:07:45] because we wanted to talk about what is made possible when we

[00:07:48] consider our tools as toys. I wonder if there’s more you can say, more threads you can draw between the goal of design thinking or what good design thinking looks like and how a more playful

[00:07:59] [00:08:00] mindset. Can you expand on that? Cuz you sort of you drew the line, but

[00:08:03] I’m, I’m not fully there in terms of like why it really matters or how it is we get away from the problem-solution mindset through this.

[00:08:10] Alli: Yes, great. So, that was what was really interesting in looking at how you can kind of reframe the idea of having a co-design tool and like looking at what is made possible when we think of them as co-design toys.

[00:08:23] So how does that help us as designers create experiences that are more playful? What does that ask of us as facilitators in terms of holding space for more emergence? And as somebody that creates games in a studio that is so engrossed in that playful, like how do you encourage people to play? And can you encourage people to play through sorts of structures?

[00:08:44] Cause you can’t tell someone, “Go. Go play now.” It’s like, “I made this for you. You have to go play and have a playful experience.” So looking at, what does that look like as a designer, if you’re creating workshops where it is for purpose, but you’re a bit less focused on the outcome and the product being designed, [00:09:00] and you’re paying more attention to how you’re facilitating ways of being together, what that experience is like and how it holds space for different ways of being that are informed by a more playful approach.

[00:09:10] Jason: Thank you, Alli. Yeah, that’s a really beautiful, I think way of framing it for our designer kind of audience, like folks who are coming from a design or co-design and facilitation sort of space. The parallel that I’m seeing in the game design community in that sort of space is there seems to be the thing that leapt out for me in your description is this idea, how do we consciously choose the play equipment that we bring in that enables some kind of experience. And, you know, game design does that all the time, thinks very explicitly about what kind of play equipment or rule structure or materials or prompts or nudges need to be given to a player in order to enable them to have an authentic experience of play within a set of constraints. So there’s something beautiful. I can’t, I can’t wait to hear more about it. [00:10:00]

[00:10:02] Hailey: Yeah, maybe you could share with us some examples that maybe you’ve found or you’ve done in your own practice of using playful not tools, but toys in the co-design process.

[00:10:14] Alli: Totally. So like Jason was speaking to, when you’re setting up at that sort of a session where it’s for people to play you’re thinking about the sort of experience that you wanna have. You’re thinking about how you invite people in. Maybe I think you’ve spoken about this before in previous episodes of this podcast even. Like how it creates kind of a container and a scaffold for people to be together in ways that are comfortable, especially with people from like different backgrounds and with different comfort levels in social settings. And so in these co-design spaces especially, or anytime really, that you’re bringing together people with different backgrounds and different preferences into the shared space where you’re asking them to work together and to be together, we use co-design tools to help people get [00:11:00] to the outcome.

[00:11:01] So you give people a journey map, or you give people like a set of interview questions to learn about each other, perhaps. So we’re using tools that are pretty established that designers use, and we’re saying, ‘oh, we’re gonna share this with other people so that they too can think like we do by using this tool to get to this outcome that we think is where we need to get to’.

[00:11:18] So what was coming up in my research is that when, and we can talk a bit more about like the things that we think with and what this lets us do, but like when you’re working with a certain material, and if you’re thinking about it as a tool to get to an outcome, it’s a different way of facilitating and relating to what this material can do if you think about it as a toy. So if you show up in a co-design session and you have designed toys that you’ve designed differently with different needs in mind, and also that you’re willing to facilitate with differently. So thinking about how you show up and you share your toys with someone; unless you’re like hosting a session with strict rules, you’re a lot more inclined to be open, to see how people wanna play with it, to change what [00:12:00] you thought is gonna happen as interesting things come out of this playing together.

[00:12:04] So compared to giving someone series of interview cards, and encouraging them to start using them in different ways that doesn’t have to be two people together. You can start interviewing other people. In one workshop, we had people that started using the interview cards to interview inanimate objects. And they were thinking like, well, why are we designing for this person? What happens if we’re designing for this object or that tree outside?

[00:12:23] Jason: Love that, I love that!

[00:12:25] Alli: And I never, like, I wouldn’t have thought like, ‘oh, go, go interview the tree’. That never would’ve been one of my design prompts. But because we’re making it so explicit, like this is a time for us to be together in a playful way, this is to open up conversations. If you wanna reinterpret the cards, if you wanna cut them, use them in a different way, take them outside to go talk to a tree, like opening up that space. Um, yes.

[00:12:47] Jason: That’s beautiful because what it’s evoking in me, or what I’m hearing is that you are approaching this challenge that a lot of folks in professional facilitation practice have with getting people to actually actively [00:13:00] engage with the exercises that they’re running, et cetera. So it’s common, you know, practice. I think anyone who’s in the facilitation enablement space out there in the audience will have run into this. Where if you bring a model of a new community organization into a group for instance, and what you’re actually seeking is for people to play with it, pull it apart, redesign it, if it’s in a fixed form in a PowerPoint doc that sits on a television, people are less likely to contribute to something like that. They don’t feel that they can change it. Whereas what you’re saying is if you explicitly consider the tools that you’re bringing in to enable that conversation as something inherently playful or toys, you’re gonna get a completely different kind of response.

[00:13:42] Alli: Absolutely. And so it’s beyond kind of asking for feedback. It’s actively inviting ways of engaging and changing. And then that’s where the play comes in so that you can change it and improve upon it in ways that you didn’t know were possible at the beginning of the session.

[00:13:57] Hailey: There’s yeah, there’s something else I’m hearing as a theme [00:14:00] about why concern ourselves with this or opening up new possibilities. And it has something to do with the fact that designers can especially, but everyone comes in with sort of zones of possibility that are hidden or obscured to them. That they’re cognitively, they don’t see it’s there, or they have some bias that they haven’t fully reconstructed in themselves that’s preventing them from seeing something. Sort of like they have the spotlight of what they can see and then all the shadow. And then, because we all come from the same culture, our overlapping spotlights are probably gonna leave a lot of shadows in common. And often the reason why a problem is wicked or sticky can be because the best possibility is a hidden scenario that exists outside of our sort of shared overlapping areas of vision. And it’s through play that we can actually find ourselves accidentally stumbling into those hidden and obscured areas. And it’s almost more important for the designers to do this [00:15:00] because they wield so much power over the process and in their attempts to make it easy or engaging or provide an on-ramp or make it fit within what’s comfortable for business, that they can actually cut off possibilities in advance, maybe cuz they’re playing the politics of change or whatever it may be.

[00:15:18] Yeah. So play in that sense of surrender to the total realm of possibilities, bringing in the child mind and the beginner mind, all of that. Yeah, it’s very powerful to breaking through our dead angles so to speak.

[00:15:30] Alli: Totally. And it’s so easy. I would imagine it’s easy for, for anyone, but especially when you’re trained as a designer to think about what the people using something that you design might need, and to try to perform that empathy. Whether or not you can ever fully imagine someone else’s experience you’re trained to consider it. And so there’s this tendency to over scaffold the workshops and the activities so that you feel like you’re helping people get to the outcome that we need. Like you’re saying, Hailey, that just forecloses stumbling into something that’s even bigger and better [00:16:00] and more relevant because that wasn’t previously imagined at the beginning of planning a session. And so it really asks something new of facilitators.

[00:16:07] So like Adrienne Maree Brown talks about having less planning and more presence. And I noticed in my own practice, this tendency to really overproduce and showing, as a designer, like I made this for you. Like, I care, these are bespoke and your company’s logos here and it’s gorgeous and it’s handcrafted and it’s gonna look fantastic when you assemble it together. But it’s so overly scaffolded that it’s hard to use in different ways. And it’s hard to make it work in a new way that emerges when you’re together as a group.

[00:16:36] Jason: And in fact, actually that very awareness may have, been sort of reverse engineered in some business spaces for precisely the opposite effects. So rather than encouraging kind of play. So I’m reflecting on a story that one of a colleague that I’ve worked with in the past, Jay Smethurst, often brings out. He was a responsible senior facilitator [00:17:00] currently in market and has done a lot of work in his past, in the innovation space. And one of the stories that he’s fond of recounting is you know, the material that you bring to a presentation often skews the perception of how well formed the idea is. So if you were to bring a model in clay, an architectural model in clay, for instance, people are like, ‘ah, that’s only a half done model.’ You know, if you bring something in styrofoam or the building foam material and they think, ‘oh, they’ve put a lot of effort into that. You know there’s obviously been a whole bunch of iteration gone into that.’ If you bring something in that looks like fully rendered and you’ve had it 3d printed and stuff like that. ‘Oh, like this must be the model, this is the thing we’ve gotta go for.’

[00:17:40] And what I’m hearing certainly Hailey, you sort of brought this up is; part of our challenge is when we’re facing into difficult challenges, yeah, there’s a whole bunch of assumptions that have been poured into those models. And what we’re faced with is ways of how do we break our assumptions or challenge our assumptions, et cetera. And, huh.

[00:17:59] Hailey: Yeah, there’s this [00:18:00] really challenging thing that happens where you need to bring in a prototype, which is fully realized enough to inspire people or have the penny drop. If they’re not an expert in the field, whether it sounds like we’re using an architecture example. But you also need to somehow communicate to them that there’s still room for it to change because it’s very easily, I’ve learned over my career, to demoralize people with something that’s too finished. They feel like, ‘Well, it’s already sorted. I felt like I couldn’t change that cuz it was too slick.’ So this is, there’s an art there and just bringing in materials that are at the right level for wherever this group is. If it’s too loose, you can lose them as well.

[00:18:39] Alli: Yes. And materials, as you were talking about like architectural or prototyping, but also even materials like the slides that you’re showing or the papers that you’re printing out. Are there spaces that invite participation? Do you instead do it on a Miro board where there’s three post-it notes and you need to have a comment on it before you move on to something else so that it shows that you’re actively inviting [00:19:00] participation. You’re not just hoping someone’s brave enough to challenge something. Like you build that into the way that you present and facilitate the entire session.

[00:19:08] And that’s a different style of facilitation. And I find it more challenging because you do need to be able to adapt in the moment to what’s coming out and what could happen. And you’re a little bit less in charge of the presentation, but then it’s so much more. It can be so much more equitable and engaging as people see that you’re free to have the conversation that needs to happen to improve the prototype, the model, the outline for a way of working together, whatever that material looks like.

[00:19:36] Jason: Yeah, there’s something in that for the game designers out there too. The parallel that’s leaping up in that space is your last point was talking about how do you encourage people to actively engage with the process, through the materials that you present. And it’s the same sort of way. How do we encourage everybody in a, let’s use the simple example, Dungeons and Dragons campaign to contribute, to have [00:20:00] a way in, to be able to tell the story? And oftentimes game designers think very carefully about those sorts of things.

[00:20:06] Just last night actually, the Amble team was playing a game; Monster Care Squad, fantastic game, highly recommend it to anybody, but that uses the Powered by the Apocalypse system. And within that system, what’s characteristic of encouraging equity is the use of these open ended prompts or moves that encourage people to actively take them and apply them in various situations. And what I’m hearing from you is that yeah, designers can do the same sort of thing actively considering what is gonna encourage the right sort of engagement or the right sort of moves for their participants.

[00:20:37] Why is actively engaging or like, I think this is the question I wanna come to. Why is the active engagement and the kind of getting your hands on it and getting amongst it, why is that important Alli, in your perspective? Why is that, ‘playing with stuff’, why is that important for you?

[00:20:55] Alli: I guess, and maybe this even goes back to that first activity, because otherwise things stay the same. [00:21:00] If you don’t have that space for actively engaging and challenging assumptions and really surfacing learning and being willing to learn from other people, things stay the same. We do things the way that we’re used to doing them. And we don’t even know why it is that way. It just feels about right. And so we move on cause that’s close enough. And if you think about all these different materials and the rules or the cards or the structures as actual co-facilitators, then you think about how you’re facilitating, what role you’re playing, what role they’re playing and how you’re creating a different sort of vibe. And so maybe there’s some groups of people where you would bring a certain co-facilitator that you know, is a little bit more authoritative author…

[00:21:40] Jason: Gravity or authority. Yeah.

[00:21:42] Alli: Yes. So in some situations, maybe with some groups of people, you would bring a co-facilitator that has sense of gravitas and more authority in the situation. And then maybe if, as you’re saying, you wanna encourage people, you bring someone that’s a little bit more open and a little bit more flexible.

[00:21:55] Jason: Huh. So people is a part of the environment too. So [00:22:00] this is getting really, really deep cause what I feel we are moving into is that idea of the environment that we create or the environment in which stuff gets done or people do thinking, or people do building or people do designing or creating, is just as important to helping us avoid some of those blind spots or challenging our assumptions as the invitation to play in new sorts of spaces.

[00:22:23] I don’t, I dunno, I’m not saying it very accurately, but there’s something about that idea that the space that we inhabit, the environment that we are in, all of these sorts of things directly contribute to the way we can conceive of and engage with problems. And that’s really, really important. Because oftentimes people think, I think it’s traditional that people think that we think with our heads, right? So you know, what’s it got to do with wherever I am, let’s just get everybody on a zoom call and we’ll do the thinking. You know, we’ll talk it out and that’s it done. You seem to be saying something different. Did you wanna unpack that a little?

[00:22:58] Alli: It [00:23:00] absolutely is. And so like when you start thinking about the materials around us and how that lets us act differently, be differently. Especially in creating, like in creating spaces for play I think we’re all pretty comfortable with the idea that like we’re more than our brain, right. So if you think about embodied cognition, you are not your brain, thinking does not happen in the brain. It happens in the whole body, the whole organism. But also you can think about the environment that that organism is in and the materials around it. So then you’re not just your brain and you’re also not just your body, you’re a body in environment in relation to the things around you.

[00:23:35] Jason: Fantastic Alli. Just to unpack that a little bit. Yeah. So, you know post Danny Kahneman and all the good work that those folks have done, we’ve been challenged to not think of ourselves as homoeconomicus. That is, a perfectly rational maximizer. We think about ourselves as embodied and responding to emotions, responding to our history and depending on whether I’ve eaten, that’s gonna change how I cognate and react to a particular situation. So yes, we’re more than just [00:24:00] our rational brain. So that’s embodied cognition, but then you’re talking about extended cognition. We are bodies in an environment and that environment also determines our thinking. That’s the extended cognition kind of folks who talk about that sort of stuff. And that’s the sort of bit that you’re drawing on?

[00:24:17] Alli: Oh, absolutely. So in the PhD research that I was doing, I was really trying to understand, like, what is the role of materials in these workshops, in these experiences, and trying to get to like, what is it helping us do? What is it not letting us do? And what I actually ended up discovering, and I hope that this is still a good contribution, is that there is no one role of materials because it’s so contextual and there’s so many different ways that it lets you do different things and different ways that it can invite play or not invite play.

[00:24:46] But something that was really important in a way of thinking about this, especially in the design space that I’m in, is that it was a theory from new materialism. And so like you’re saying, Jason, in terms of extended cognition, it [00:25:00] goes almost a level above that to say like, there is no cognition without the things around us. So we are always already in relation to and becoming with the things that we have around us that give us this ability to act. So when we think about the agency that a dungeon master or a player might have, you can also think about the agency that a little reminder of the rules has. Or the agency that a board has in telling us where to move. The agency that a round table has in terms of how we configure ourselves in a space. And so just bringing some of these principles in to co-design workshops and thinking more consciously and carefully about the materials and the environments that we’re setting us up to act in.

[00:25:39] Jason: Sorry, Alli. So yeah, this is so exciting. Like the idea of consciously designing the agents that you bring into a space, but agents as objects. This sort of thing is really personally, very exciting, you can hear it in my tone of voice. But I wonder for folks who may not have engaged in this kind of discourse in the past, or actively thought about it, could you maybe unpack [00:26:00] this idea of how something like a card prompt with a set of rules on it can be conceived of as an agent in an environment? Like what sort of agency does it have?

[00:26:10] Hailey: Can I just add, don’t be afraid to go deep and expand on this and to talk about the authors or the thinkers that inspired you. I think it’s all really good, you know, just really go there on this one.

[00:26:22] Alli: Yes. Happy to.

[00:26:24] Jason: Because you, sorry Alli, cuz you know, you’ve spent three years, three deep years thinking about this and it seems commonplace. But you know, actually only recently has this idea of behavioral psychology and stuff like that really become common parlance. And I mean, I would be challenged to think of anyone who actively in their everyday thinks of extended cognition or bodies in environments as being important for how our ideas and how our function emerges. And you know, what you are actually now saying is the actual objects in environments have agency have active agency. So yeah. Please help us out here, Alli, how do we talk about

[00:26:58] Alli: Happy to, oh my God. I [00:27:00] love bringing these thinkers into conversations. So the origins of this sort of thinking about like new materialism, it’s really inspired by Karen Barad. So she’s a quantum physicist and she was actually looking at the nature of the universe. So in her book, of which I could maybe understand less than 5%, it’s called ‘Meeting the universe halfway’. And she goes into this very traditionally like scientific and mathematically rigorous understanding of how, and I’ll just describe it poorly because this is my way into it, but an understanding that as you look at things, it changes the things. So experiences and phenomenon cannot be examined without changing. So the nature of examining changes the phenomenon itself, which obviously has huge implications for research because there is no objective way of studying what something is. As soon as you interact with it, it changes it.

[00:27:50] So coming from this quantum physics perspective of the nature of the universe, she uses this to describe a concept of intra-action. Which is that no [00:28:00] agent or no thing, no being, no person can act on its own. You’re always already in relation to other things which can make actions possible. So thinking about us here with our internet and our computers sitting in our rooms, on our chairs, it’s a certain way of acting that’s different than if we were sitting outside at a park. Or is very different than if we were all standing together outside at a beach. So it makes different actions possible. It makes different ways of feeling and being in your body and being with other people and acting possible.

[00:28:29] So I was applying this to think about on a small scale, these kind of workshops and the materials, the settings, the ways that we’re configuring ourselves in space and what that is enabling or shutting down, and how to think more consciously with those material co-facilitators.

[00:28:45] But of course it applies also just in the nature of how societies are shaped and formed. So you can think about like guns, germs, and steel, and like how much the material of the world influences what becomes possible as a civilization. You can think about [00:29:00] limited resources and some of the scarcity that we’re starting to face and some of the ecological crisises.

[00:29:05] So, Jane Bennett does a lot of thinking and she is so out there, which I love because it really challenges my thinking. But she talks a lot about vital materials and things as having agency. And she does these fantastic in depth thinking with different materials, like a dead mouse, she finds by the subway and the trash and this leaf from a tree. And she’ll bring them all together, just talking about the materiality of it and how it can not only reflect our culture, but it also shapes our culture and our understanding of the world.

[00:29:35] So this way of thinking has led to some really interesting observations and changes in my practice. It’s also led to things like having workshops where I’m sitting outside with somebody having an interview with a tree.

[00:29:47] So some spaces it might be more applicable and easy to engage with and get into than some others. But just this thinking that doesn’t privilege humans as the top, the end all be all. And that starts [00:30:00] to go a little bit beyond humans to look at the ecosystems in the world that we’re part of. To acknowledge that we are part of and in relation to it and not above it is a really powerful and probably valuable, necessary way of thinking, especially for designers.

[00:30:16] Jason: That’s so beautiful, to hear that. I mean, it sparks so many parallels in things that we’ve probably talked about before. You know, there’s been calls from folks in the environment to step beyond human centered design and into ecological design. To bust outta the frame of ourselves and move into other spaces.

[00:30:34] But if we can sort of pull it back from the really big picture stuff and back into, if we were a facilitator and we wanted to take some of what you’ve learned about this sort of space and say, oh, well, you know, when I’m introducing this particular card with the rules written on it, how might I conceive of that as having agency? What are the things that I’m looking out for when I reframe my relationship with that instruction as an agent? What’s that doing in our relationship?

[00:30:59] Alli: [00:31:00] Gosh, that’s such a good question, Jason. I guess there’s three parts. Well, there’s more than three parts, but I think three really key parts. Which would be:

[00:31:07] 1), As you’ve mentioned before, like how are you selecting or designing these co-facilitators. So before you’re even bringing them into the room, what are you thinking about in selecting, and modifying, in designing these things that you’re bringing with you to help you facilitate.

[00:31:22] Then in the space, the play space, the workshop, how are you introducing them? So because I was doing research, I was really lucky enough to have some workshops with people who were there to kind of play with these ideas with me. And so in some workshops, I actually introduce these as co-facilitators and I said, what we want to do is think about the relations that we have in research and academia. These are our co-facilitators. They are going to help you unpack this. What do we see as the structures in place? And that’s the prompt just like use these co-facilitators to think through and to think with. So that I’m doing less work and every group comes into it a slightly different way, but with some amazing [00:32:00] similarities because of what the materials are facilitating in that experience.

[00:32:03] So the play space itself, how you introduce the materials, how much of a voice you might be giving them and how much space you have for people to engage with them in slightly different ways. But trusting the material is gonna hold that experience and encourage some sort of doing that’s gonna be ultimately towards what you were hoping for, or in a different direction that’s even better than what you initially imagine.

[00:32:27] And then I guess the third like closing chapter of how you might be thinking with co-facilitators that are materials would be in any sort of a workshop where you’re examining the outcomes and the things that were made, the outputs and the things that were produced at the end of the workshop. And again, looking for the influence of that co-facilitator. So if you have an actual person whispering in somebody’s ear as they’re coming up with ideas, then it’s obvious to see the influence of that person. But if you’ve introduced sets of material and you’re trying to encourage people to problem solve, or imagine what could be, then at the end when you’re analyzing [00:33:00] that you also need to look for how did the co-facilitators possibly influence what we were able to come up with. And is that towards a good, equitable and inclusive future, or is it kind of reinforcing more of the same and not allowing us to get to that next step of playfully imagining and thinking differently and learning from each other. So the analysis and the reporting about what’s happened needs to account for that co-facilitation as well.

[00:33:27] Jason: That is brilliant Alli, thank you. Like so, so beautiful. Yeah. This deep intentionality around all of the aspects that go into enabling folks including the materiality. Yeah so, what I’m hearing is that the same sort of care that we put into who we invite along to a session or the questions that we ask them, or the outcome that we’re seeking to drive, the same sort of care needs to be put [00:34:00] into the materials that we are given that we’re enabling this kind of discussion or format with. So the materials that we co-facilitate with, in your words, matter. You know, there’s this sort of sense that this kind of- okay. And there’s heaps of that sort of stuff, but, hmm…

[00:34:17] Alli: Totally. And can I just jump, cuz you talked about like that you gotta care about the materials that you’re bringing. And so this is where, especially when we start getting ideas about what a co design workshop looks like, and especially the higher up you go. The bigger it is, the more it’s gonna be documented and shared as an example of what’s happening, the more it matters how it looks. But within design, if you’re thinking about how it needs to be produced and how it’s gonna be photographed. And there’s almost become like this visual language of what a co-design workshop should look like. Where you see the post-it notes and you’re like, ‘oh, they’re innovating. Oh look, they’re being inclusive.’ Cuz everyone has a post-it note. And it’s like, it’s such a, like a co-design workshop-washing of what it looks like to innovate together.[00:35:00] It’s horrible now. If you Google co-design, you’ll just see post-it notes! And it’s like, it doesn’t matter who’s there or what they’re designing or how it’s actually gonna be used. It’s the fact that they’re writing on post-it notes together.

[00:35:12] So yes, as a co-facilitator, there’s a role for post-it notes, but also it makes us care about what the experience is like and how people are engaging with it.

[00:35:22] Hailey: Can I tie that into a, a bigger thread. I might be pulling us back out into that philosophical zone. But when I heard you talking, especially about the agency of materials and really being with the natural environment and respecting all beings and that sort of stuff, I hear an ideological commitment to partnership instead of domination. And this idea that so much of human history has been who’s dominating. Who’s dominating other people, our ability to dominate the environment in order to get our human outcomes.

[00:35:56] And a lot of I think what’s happening for some people [00:36:00] in the 21st century is this recognition that that approach of domination has reaped the whirlwind, so to speak. It connects up to that. And a lot of the people who might be hiring you as a design thinker to facilitate a co-design process in the context of their institution of their business are still sitting at the peak of the domination kind of pyramid. And so you may be trying to design a co-design process that authentically engages the true scope of possibilities. But nevermind the people involved having dead angles or obscured possibilities, but the authorizing environment does not give you permission to go to certain places, to certain possibilities that might involve dismantling the sort of structure that they sit upon.

[00:36:48] And I think that, to connect it to that co-design washing, that’s a lot of why we end up with that. Is because it’s not actually wanted to do it fully authentically with all possibilities on the table.

[00:36:58] Alli: [00:37:00] Massively it’s a risk. It’s a risk if it doesn’t go well, it’s a risk if the organization doesn’t get what they feel like they needed out of it. It’s a risk. And especially because so many times these people who are commissioning workshops, they are accountable of course to even higher powers and even higher governmental organizations, or founders or taxpayer dollars as well. So trying to show that, like ‘we have used this money in a good way’, and it needs to look like an evidenceable, easy to understand, productive, and that’s the productivity conundrum again, right?

[00:37:31] Is like when you’re playing, it necessarily of by nature, it can’t be productive. It can’t be for purpose. It can’t be for monetary gain. And then in these workshop spaces, at the end of the day, the people who get to decide what happens, the people who decide which of those post-it notes or which of these ideas or which of these models make it out into the outside world, are accountable to this notion of productivity. So how do you incrementally shift that? And can that make a change or do you just have to tear it all down and play a new game?

[00:37:59] Hailey: [00:38:00] Yeah. Sometimes it’s not about power. It’s just about optics or shame or embarrassment or yeah. That the Herald Sun might write that, ‘Oh, the so and so were spending tax-payer money finger painting.” You know, that sort of thing.

[00:38:14] Jason: Hailey’s raising something that is actually an example from the real world that a colleague of mine had to go through. And yes, there is risk and I wonder one of the things is, part of the reason that these sort of game spaces, game design spaces, are attractive to us and sort of the nature of gamers possessing a lot of inherent skills that go into bringing folks together and exploring new possibility and allowing for emergence doing all these good things. One of the things in that space that is encouraging is that we do design. Like game design has come an awfully long way. Not trying to say that game design is, you know, workshop for outcome design. Not not trying to conflate the two together. But the process that goes into making a fun, engaging, inclusive game, there’s a lot [00:39:00] of, I mean, possibly it’s a market response. The fact that lots of people are buying games and there are more games being made, et cetera, et cetera. But there’s been a lot of work gone into thinking about how to bring meaningful experiences to folks using play equipment, certain play equipment. And folks, ie an audience, has a very, very real sense of what’s fun and what’s not. Like, you know, there are games that we like to play, there are games that we don’t like to play. And there’s sort of nuances amongst all of that sort of stuff.

[00:39:27] And it strikes me as what we’re struggling with here and what your work over the last three years with your PhD has been around, is that yeah, how do we begin introducing these kinds of tools in a way that allow us to challenge the authorizing environment? Challenge the kind of cognitive environment, challenge the strategic environment, whatever it happens to be, and how do we do it safely? Because there is a sense in which how do you make something like that worthwhile? We can all go and have free form improvisational play, but for most of [00:40:00] us, if we’re looking for fun or looking to have a game, we’ll choose to pick up some sort of game where we have a shared rule set because it gives us the confidence to engage and play authentically. It seems like what we’re talking about here, just adding another depth to our design and thinking about the materiality of it and the extension of it, it’s just an invitation to be more rigorous in how we bring some of this sort of stuff in. And I’m just interested in drawing on your experience in that kind of space Alli. Like what have you kind discovered, cuz you’ve done the practical research in this space. Haven’t you? I mean, I’m assuming you have like, like, you know.

[00:40:35] Alli: I mean, that’s the hope by the time you’ve submitted a PhD. And it is interesting, cause as you say that, and you’re talking about rigorous and relational as well, because that depends upon relationships. So I guess part of, from what you were talking about is exactly the problem with these sort of like drop-in one-off half-day workshops, and then you summarize what’s happened and you send it back and you say, “here you go you’ve co-designed”, because you’re not building the [00:41:00] capacity. You’re not building the relationship that sort of work takes time.

[00:41:03] So, I guess my best response to what you’re asking about actually comes from my teaching practice, where I get to stay with the same group of students week after week. And you develop a relationship, especially in studio teaching, which is what we do with our master of business students. Where you’re together for three hours, on computer and in person. So, bit of a blended experience these days. And you have time to do things, you have time to discuss, you have one on one time to talk with people about what they’re thinking and why they’re doing certain things. And it’s a totally different way of being together than this kind of short one off workshop with like 50 people and one facilitator and your material co-facilitators. So what I do in my teaching practice is that building of capacity and comfortability.

[00:41:47] So I think we talk a lot about like creative confidence and this ability to trust in yourself and to know that you can come up with new things and to trust this process a bit more. So what I do and what started with my master’s research [00:42:00] especially, was playful interludes. Where you take a break, you do something that’s a little bit fun and a little bit out there, like the game discussed at the beginning of this podcast, and then you debrief about that. So you take a small, small risk, like a comfortable risk. Where it’s a little bit different than normal, but you know what you’re gonna be doing, there’s some clear guidelines and rules around it. Other people are doing it too. And then you have that conversation about why was it important? What was it like for you? How does this relate to the skills that you need to be working on or to the topic that we’re discussing or ways of being together that we feel are important as a studio, or then translating it as an organization or as a workshop. And so it’s that debrief where you’re not being told what the value is, but you’re personally reflecting and hearing your colleagues share what they got out of it. And you’re thinking about what that was like for you. And then next week you come in and you do another activity and maybe that activity just asks a little bit more of you or creates a bit more of the opportunity to reach out and do something with somebody else.

[00:42:58] So in these semesters that I get [00:43:00] to teach with design students and master of business students, you start small. You start small where we’re using objects in a different way. And then soon they’re mimicking what other people have done. And you’re doing kind of like student to student interactions. And then pretty soon you’re doing class things where they’re all together in front of the class and they’re making poses or creating scenes together, like relying on those improv activities. And then by the end of the class semester, you’re able to ask them to do things that you couldn’t have done on day one, because you’ve developed that relationship, you’ve developed the trust. And they’ve developed the confidence and the value in this way of being, that where even if you don’t see the purpose of it right away, when you reflect you’re gonna find something out of it that’s more personally relevant than any sort of like planned instruction or planned outcome from doing that activity.

[00:43:47] So it’s the trust, it’s the relationships. And then it’s building the competence and comfortability of an organization to do that. And you can’t do that when you drop in and do a half day session or a few co-design sessions. [00:44:00] So I think increasingly I’m thinking that it’s more about building that community and their relationship and the trust to be able to do that, which is why people higher up in the organization need to be part of these sessions and not just coming by seeing how it’s going, reading the report. You need to experience it. That’s the play. You can’t watch people play and know what that experience is like, unless you’re in it. And you’re feeling the excitement or feeling the anticipation or the dread of being called on, but then like the excitement at getting something out of it. So more people need to play. That’s my, that’s my takeaway. Invite more people to play. The higher up the better, but keep it small, ease into it.

[00:44:39] Hailey: I’d like to pull on this in terms of what’s valuable in the drop in workshop versus the, and I’m going back to this authorizing environment. It probably speaks to my battle scars about how many times I tried to bring authenticity in, but there’s just not room for it in people’s work lives. Right. And so, yeah, we would often try to design interventions that had more of an ongoing rhythm. I [00:45:00] think Jason, you’ve talked a lot about this as well. Like transformation is often about building capability through time.

[00:45:06] Jason: And having a cohort in relationship for long enough so that good things emerge.

[00:45:11] Hailey: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So with students, it makes sense. They’re signing up for the learning. So how does this translate? There’s sort of two prongs to it; how does it translate? It might be a question as much for you Jase as anything, but also, is there something in that we can educate the next generation or by having people that are already warmed up through their learning or through playful practice outside might then be better, more exploratory, vibey co-designers when it comes time to do it within their work context.

[00:45:40] Alli: Did you wanna jump in on the first question Jase?

[00:45:42] Hailey: Go for it.

[00:45:45] Jason: Yes. And I, I just wanna summarize Alli what you were saying earlier, just to sort of get us to where we are. Because, there is a sense in which we have sort of surfaced two elements to this authentic co-creation. One is yes, we need to think more deeply and more [00:46:00] intentionally about the material environment that we are presenting our participants with, the sorts of agents that we’re bringing in. Then we also need to be realistic about what actually drives the ability for folks to play and generate really good outcomes. And what you were saying from your teaching practice is that that’s building rapport, building empathy, building relationship, and feeling that comfort so that you can begin stretching or broadening our perspectives, et cetera.

[00:46:25] Okay. I mean, this is so deep. This is a beautiful conversation. I feel very thankful that you’re on here, Alli. The one piece I would be interested in exploring, and this is again reflecting on what Hailey was saying, is that yes, authorizing environments require outcomes and we have to be pragmatic when we’re designing for these to balance the difference between challenging assumptions and producing something that is recognizable by the relevant authorizing environment as valuable. And, you know, that’s struggle with power. How do you negotiate value [00:47:00] with leaders? How do you build the rapport with leadership that the C Suite trusts you to go on this sort of adventure with their people, or to invest the amount of time with their people that’s required for something good to emerge.

[00:47:12] And there also is, this is pushing us into the extended cognition kind of piece and into a very, very broad picture bit. The thing that leaps up for me there is that sometimes it’s not just the authorizing environment. It’s the market context, or it is the actual hard constraints of environment. If we had all the time in the world to explore newness and build the rapport that’s required for that newness to emerge, then it would be okay. We could do it organically. The challenge is for some innovation responses, some novelty responses, some kind of alignment kind of piece or setting new direction, there’s a timeliness that’s involved with it that asks us to be moving towards an outcome quickly. And I’m not trying to be an apologist for businesses not investing enough time in [00:48:00] strategic alignment. What I’m trying to suggest is; if you are in a startup environment, for instance, I’m thinking, you know, a new innovation hits the market, unless you can move on that and do stuff with it immediately, you might miss the boat. There’s often an environmental timeliness that drives a lot of this kind of impetus towards pushing us towards outcomes that are valuable and measurable. And yeah, I wonder how we might, in the space that we’re inhabiting at the moment, I wonder if the question is, how do we, as conscious, intentional, empathetic designers begin navigating those sorts of tensions, both with actual, very real effects of power and the authorizing environment, as well as sometimes really hard physical constraints that we have to deal with?

[00:48:45] Alli: I love that prompt and there’s several different things to unravel and unpack. And I guess one of the first things that I wanna pick up on when you’re talking about the time, and you need to deliver something that’s new while it’s still new and exciting and on time. And I guess the [00:49:00] question that I would ask back is, should we? Do we need to? Because there’s an opportunity, do we need to do that? And in what scenarios might it be better to do less? In what scenarios do we not wanna just be reacting to something happening in the market, but taking our time so that we can respond in ways that are responsible and thoughtful, and that don’t have this scale of time where we’re thinking like, what’s the next new thing and how do I get beyond that, but are thinking what does this look like seven generations from?

[00:49:28] Jason: Nice.

[00:49:29] Alli: So that long time thinking, and this is completely from the long time podcast and thinking with those thinkers.

[00:49:35] Jason: Hundred percent. You’re in friendly space. Yeah.

[00:49:37] Alli: Yes. So these ideas are not my own, totally in a community of thinkers. And especially with indigenous ways of thinking where like, this cycle is not just your life cycle. It’s also the cycles of those that come beyond you. And what does it look like to be a good ancestor in that way? And it’s a different set of questions and it goes back to what you were saying about values, where what you’re evaluating is what we value. [00:50:00]

[00:50:00] And this is unexpectedly, probably something I got out of doing the PhD, where I thought I was gonna learn how to be rigorous and get the right research and ask the right question to get the true answer. And all I’ve learned is that what you evaluate is what you value and you can change any evaluation to uncover something different. People will frame it in whatever way is serving their purpose. And so by trying to think about what are we answerable to? What are we trying to say with this way of examining and evaluating? And then just trying to align those values beyond what an immediate market might look like. Or, and again because I don’t work in a hugely market responsive context, I have the privilege to be able to say, “well, we need to be changing the outcomes”.

[00:50:43] So working with CPI as a learning partner, we’re able to go in and say, well, what if one of the outcomes is learning? What if one of the outcomes from this is building the capacity of communities? What if it doesn’t need to be this report or this increase in a certain behavior? What if it looks like learning [00:51:00] because then you’re evaluating for learning you’re privileging – not privileging- but you’re prioritizing mistakes. And so you create, you have to actively create and protect space for learning, for working in that way, where you’re able to ask like ‘should we?’ It’s not how quickly can we get this new thing out, but do we need to? Like, do we need to design this? Does it need to be a thing in the world? Should we be adding another initiative or should we be looking at what we already have and making it work better for people?

[00:51:28] Hailey: Yeah.

[00:51:29] Jason: Alli Edwards! There is so much there that we need to have further conversations about. It just Hails-

[00:51:34] Hailey: Before we wrap up Jase-

[00:51:36] Jason: yeah, please.

[00:51:36] Hailey: one more thread just for the gamers, to connect it back to that importance of building capability. And I’m thinking about one of the possibilities that inspires us as Amble is that people who are gamers and especially story gamers- and I’ll say why in a minute- have the potential to be, in a sense, a role similar to yours. But in a more local context where they don’t [00:52:00] have the resourcing and maybe don’t have the same large authorizing environment and maybe a little bit more agency to actually go and start something up in their local community or solve a local problem.

[00:52:10] Yeah, do you have any thoughts about how the tools that gamers have might allow them to take a risk and try to step into the role of guiding the sense-making a little bit or bringing the materials. And the reason I said story gamers is I think that while board games often have more actual physical figurines and more simulation, they can be quite convergent in order to give that satisfying play experience of someone won or someone didn’t, or we beat the cooperative simulation or we didn’t.

[00:52:38] And everything we’ve talked about has been, you know, expanding our awareness. And I think story games have much more of that ability. Monster care squad that we played last night, it’s so open ended and it’s so expansive and it’s about what can you add or what new direction will this take us in, or let’s play to find out what happens rather than respond to a simulation.

[00:52:56] So do you have any thoughts? Because Jason and I have already spent [00:53:00] hours sharing our thoughts on this.

[00:53:02] Alli: Oh, I love that. And I guess beyond the first place my mind goes is those sort of soft skills, which is established, and like Stuart Brown talks so much about why you should play and all of those skills, which is great.

[00:53:13] Second step from that would be the comfortability in learning through doing and knowing that you won’t know how it turns out until you’ve done it. And then as a team, you can kind of discuss, reflect; did that work? Should we have tried something else? Next time we play it, we’ll make this decision. So that comfortability, learning through doing.

[00:53:29] And then, kind of in a more personal level, what I value about that is recognizing the otherness and holding space for that diversity of what other people are bringing and how it’s gonna make something new. So, Rosi Braidotti talks a lot about how we’re all in this together, but we are not one and the same. And I think play and games, especially story games where you’re creating this together, holds space for that emergence and that recognizing and valuing of difference to create something better than any one person could have come up with on their own.[00:54:00]

[00:54:00] Hailey: Fantastic. Thank you so much. And yeah, I think I’m with you Jase, that’s been a meal. Let’s take some time and digest. But as we often do at the end, do you have a game Alli, that you’ve got on tap either this week for fun or in your practice?

[00:54:17] Alli: I am gonna cheat on this one. Next week we have students making up their own games. So we ask them to start by sharing a favorite childhood game, find elements from that to incorporate and make something new that we can play together online and in person.

[00:54:30] Hailey: And are you asking them to make it a game that has some applied sense for design thinking or is it just make a game, period?

[00:54:37] Alli: It’s just to make a game, cuz that is design thinking, right? So who’s playing it? Students, other people. What’s the constraint? 10 minutes. What are the materials? Whatever you have at your desk or on the computer or using mirror or zoom. The zoom games they’ve created are incredible. We wanna create a collection to share because some of the ones they come up with are just fantastic.

[00:54:56] Hailey: Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, I love it. And just that discovery that it’s [00:55:00] not that hard to create a game that kind of works, you know. So it’s a really great thing to go through. Well, that has been fantastic, thank you so much for coming today. Alli Edwards. We will put links to all the many things we mentioned, including Alli’s work and her research, in the show notes. And yeah, thanks for stopping by folks and for a great conversation.

[00:55:25] Alli: Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.

[00:55:26] Jason: Take care.

[00:55:28] Hailey: And as always, you can find us on social media @TheAmbleStudio on Twitter, Amble Studio on LinkedIn, and amble.studio on the web. And if you like what you heard today, we would love it if you bought us a coffee using the donate button on our website, helps us keep making excellent podcasts for you.