Design and more | Hinakiduniya
WHO AM I: Design geek | Design thinker | Perpetual nomad | World citizen
WHAT I DO: Design meaningful products | Environments| Strategies & Facilitate Ideas.
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Recently I read an article about ‘maulvis’ and their changing relationship with Pakistanis. what caught my attention was the fact how oblivious pakistanis are to the dramatic change they have undergone as a nation.
“A senior journalist, Ghulam Farooq, agrees: “In the 1950s and 1960s, no…
At present I am taking a course called Design Futures, where we are in search of future narratives; possible scenarios. With 11 other class members I spent a week on selecting a topic, ranging from water, food, museums, concept of quality to brand, branding and advertising. Through voting and debate we ended up with museums, my initial reaction was disappointment that we were not working on the big world issues of water and food but instead museums. Well that only lasted for a few days for we were told to write our most current museum experience, or a museum experience that moved us greatly. As I sat down writing my initial museums experiences and the most recent once, a new meaning of museums started to emerge.
Before I talk about the change in my perception of museums and what it means, let me tell you what my previous perception has been. I have always been fascinated by history and that has been my motivation for museum visits. To me visiting museums was like being a kid in a candy shop. Coming from Pakistan most of the museums that I have visited are historical (no surprise there, considering the appx. forty thousand year old history). Having seen exhibits on one of the oldest civilizations in the museums of Moen-jo-daro and Harappa, Taxila to the dinosaur fossils in the Baluchistan University museum. For me museums were curators of history, culture and heritage. They seemed like big tombs of the eras that had passed by, tombs that both sparked curiosity and were fascinating.
But this definition of museums altered after my visit to the Natural History Museum in New York, although it seemed no less than a metaphoric tomb, old, grave, silent, bespoke of the history, of creatures and civilizations gone by. It’s been two years since I visited the museum, they had two special exhibits, one on the first expedition to North Pole and the second was the Silk Route. They were the best designed experiences I have ever had in a museum; it changed my definition of a museum from curators of history to avid story tellers. The narration combined with the artifacts, the visitor’s journey, the engaging of senses with sight, sound, smell and tactile.
The exhibition of North Pole expedition had speeches, newspaper clippings of its eras, the biographies of the people. The images of the people and the conditions, the artifacts (their equipment, clothing, maps) and mostly the environment that surrounded the exhibit tied the story together. The Silk Route was another exceptional experience. The various regions, cities and towns spread on the route was represented by music, smells of the traded goods and the tactile artifacts that could be touched, the daily scenes of the area, histories and achievements of that particular city or town, it’s people and their craft. The visitors moved from city to city as if travelling on the silk route and coming across its wonders and diversity.
Since then I have visited several museums of art, history, science but nothing has topped the experience I had in both of the previously mentioned exhibits. But now I see museums in a relatively different light, I see them as narrators, they tell stories of the past, of art, of science depending on what museum’s concentration might be. In the end, the museums have the power to evoke curiosity and ignite imagination through their ability to tell narratives and stories.
Have you seen the latest TED edition of Ted-Ed. An open source network for educators, animators, designers infact anyone who is interested in spreading knowledge. You can nominate an educator or recommend an animator, the lessons are made in to engaging videos. Check out their website and learn more!
This is a relatively easy but never the less insightful read on strategic planning for un-fore seen futures and on the use of scenarios as an effective tool of communication for strategic planning. Examples from Schwartz’s past experiences working with companies like Shell and later on for his own consultancy are great case studies of success and learning from failure.
He cautions the readers against treating scenario building as a tool to predict the future. Rather than predict one certain future, scenarios intend merely to describe and simulate multiple plausible futures. The goal of scenario-based strategic planning is to free people from conventional wisdom and what he refers to as “the official future” organizational groupthink encourages. This freedom allows people to see many plausible futures, their causes, their consequences and their signs, empowering people and organizations both to be appropriately prepared for the future, regardless of which one actually arrives and which one they want to work toward.
Schwartz’s strategic scenarios are based on the tensions between driving forces, predetermined elements and critical uncertainties, which he collects by collecting primary data and then interviewing (secondary) the key people in the concerned fields.
His methodology STEEP which stands for society, technology, economics, politics and the environment. It is a great frame work to look at future trends on a Macro level, although it can be filtered to micro level through iteration process. It’s the relationship of STEEP with the Predetermined Elements and what he calls the Critical Uncertainties create the holistic picture.
As of his 2025 scenarios most of which are quiet plausible and we hear of them in segments, but he identifies a pattern and builds up the narrative, scenario around it. In my humble opinion some of the societal scenarios are more general, the economic scenario almost seem China-phobic, India and Brazil are mentioned again and again as growing economies but are extremely different from each other and vary from China as well. They all face different challenges and have different strengths. Political future scape seem to be void of a certain depth. What’s missing from these scenarios is the regional politics of Mid-East, the tension between India and China, complete invisibility of Russia from the picture and the question of definition of East (from Mid-East, South Asia to China all of them consider them as The East, and none of them share either culture or history).
