Artefact 241
Look, Mum, I’m on the telly
A short edition of the newsletter today, driven mostly by the fact that I received an email on Wednesday this week.
It said that a wee film I made will be shown on Gardeners’ World on BBC2 tonight, Friday 26th July, at 8pm. And repeated Saturday morning at 9am. Then on iPlayer thereafter, I guess. On the actual BBC. I still can’t quite grasp the idea.
It all started with a blog post I wrote last year, which a researcher from the BBC found and suggested it would make for a good viewers video. To be honest, I thought originally that just meant it would be on the website somewhere. Turns out not.
Anyway, I have written more about this here. If you happen to tune in tonight, let me know what you think. And I’ll then let my Mum know too.
The Product of Design
Somewhat related is a new talk that I’ve spent the last few months working on, and which debuted at UX London last month.
It is a direct follow-up, nine years later, to Metadesign for Murph, a talk I wrote for the same curator, Jeremy Keith of Clearleft, and delivered at dConstruct in 2015.
Alongside lots of other subjects in the talk, I use what the ‘garden rewilding’ project has turned into as an example of a new iteration on Zenko Mapping that I’m calling Zenko Systems.
As you will see in the talk, it’s a fusion of the original Zenko Mapping axes, fused with Dan Hill’s map of Strategic Design (which he shared with me a while back, and he talks about here).
Toban Shadlyn and I have also recently used this as part of the Innovation and Future Thinking course at IED Barcelona that wrapped up last week.
There is seemingly something really useful in being able to root a form of system mapping (which can often become unwieldy and sprawling) in a more object-centred perspective that splits out the social and the material components.
Basically; how do you reveal what ‘a thing’ is, so that you might make decisions around how you would change it.
If this is interesting for you or your team, I’ve sketched out a one or two day workshop format around the approach. I will be able to run a few sessions from September-October, either online or in-person.
Get in touch if that might be of interest, before all those garden rewilding projects come in… 😂
I will be back with another newsletter soonish, to reflect more of the course from Barcelona.
Right, I’d better go and get ready backstage with Monty Don…
ttfn
John V Willshire