Artefact 250
Show The Thing, Change The Thing
This appears to be the 250th newsletter I’ve written.
Sometimes you approach a significant number and you tense up a little. Ask anyone approaching a century in cricket; the runs feel harder to come by, they matter more somehow.
Writing a newsletter should not be like this, though, and it isn’t. So I’ve just decided to just get on with it.
It has been quite the summer so far. To capture the breadth as best I can, I thought I’d try sharing some photos (brand new camera lens, sorry) alongside some newly emerging ideas and directions (same old brain, also sorry).
As such, this is the first instalment of a two-part newsletter. in this first part, I’ll be covering talks and conferences in Norway and Switzerland, and a new way of thinking about Smithery’s work which has been emerging as a result. The second part will talk about teaching Design Futures at the RCA in London, and IED in Barcelona, and where that might go next.
Norway - IxDA Oslo/Bergen
I have a real soft spot for Norway. I gave one of my first proper conference talks in Oslo back in 2011. What’s more, it was alongside actual Kevin Kelly, who was very lovely and had breakfast with myself, Helen and our eighteen-month year old son.
Oslo is also where I discovered proper coffee for the first time, thanks to Toby’s Tim Wendelboe tip.
Side note: Coffee is one of three products - alongside gin and beer - that I find act as an interesting cultural antenna for what’s coming down the track.
All three can be made relatively quickly, and as such are more responsive to contextual trends wherever you are. If you want to find an interesting area to start exploring a new city from, find the most experimental coffee shop.
When Isak and Fredrik invited me to Bergen and Oslo to talk for their local IxDA chapters in June, I leapt at the chance. Not just for the coffee either.
I wanted to do something a bit special, talk wise. The title I gave it was A Thing About Design.
I have been thinking a lot recently about Bruno Latour’s tracing back of the etymology of the word ‘thing’ to its Germanic origin. It originally meant an assembly of people, a gathering where matters were discussed. I find that once you learn something about a word in this way, the world makes just a little more sense.
For instance, the morning after the IxDA Oslo talk, I happened to pass the Oslo District Courthouse, which is called the ‘Tinghus’ - the house where things are discussed.
As Isak told me later, the Norwegian Parliament is called Stortinget, (‘The Big Thing’), the Danish Parliament is called the Folkething (‘The People’s Thing’), and the Icelandic Parliament is called the Althing (where ‘all things’ are discussed, natch).
Over time, and through languages, thing/ting also started being used to refer to material objects or general topics of concern, not just the gathering of people concerning themself with ‘the thing’. In a way, the modern use of ‘thing’, is an entanglement of the social and the material.
When we use the word ‘thing’, we are not being imprecise. Rather, we are being aware, consciously or otherwise, of just how messy and interconnected that given ‘thing’ is.
To use Latour’s language, things are “complex assemblies of contradictory issues“. The best way I’ve found of illustrating the over the last year is with the Zenko Systems process.
In the talk I used examples like the wheelie bin outside our house and (inevitably, nowadays) the Nature Watch project we’ve been working on where we live, as well as my now infamous Gardener’s World appearance on BBC2 last year.
Side note: it turns out that Monty Don is a thing in Norway. Which made that part of the talk go unexpectedly well.
Because of the audience for both talks, I leant more into the designerly aspects of the Zenko System framework (e.g. where service designer as a practice might sit). There is something really interesting for me in shifting what the people, teams and departments who have been shaped by an era of start-up fuelled ‘design’ growth do with their skills now. Given the response in both rooms and afterwards, that seems to be a widely held feeling too.
More broadly, of course, it doesn’t matter where you start with the Zenko Systems approach - it can be up in the systems layer where more strategy works, in which case it helps to step down into ‘well, what might that mean for a citizen or a customer’.
Side note: There will be a video recording of the Oslo IxDA talk going up in the autumn which I can share.
I finished the week in Bergen with Isak and his colleagues in the These Ways team doing am extended version of the talk with more Zenko Mapping examples, and some mapping at the end. We would have played with Zenko Systems too, but there were many brilliant questions and conversations on the way through. Next time, folks!
Show The Thing, Change The Thing
One of the main messages of A Thing About Design is this: at the inherent connective power in showing the thing, in order to go about changing the thing.
I have a track record with the word ‘thing’ which goes back to the start of Smithery in 2011, and the studio mantra of Making Things People Want > Making People Wants Things.
I’ve been meaning to go back at some point to the chapter I wrote on it for 2014’s Hacker, Maker, Teacher, Thief, especially in the light of this talk and the ‘Latour turn’ my thinking has taken.
Just switching out the word thing for its longer form meaning is quite the vibe…
More seriously, there’s something useful in leaning further in to ‘show the thing, change the thing’ as a new encapsulation/mantra/slogan of Smithery’s work.
The (slightly esoteric) combination of strategy, research, design, futures, prototyping (etc etc) makes sense; it points directly to the array of tools, frameworks, methods and approaches we now have falling out of our pockets at every turn. And it focusses (I think) an understanding of what it might mean to engage us for projects.
After Norway, I decided to start thinking about testing this idea out seriously, to see what happened and how people responded.
I wanted to know if it was a thing.
Switzerland - Your 2040
The week after Norway, I found myself hopping on another great train ride, out of Zurich and up into the Alps for Your 2040, a participative futures festival run in the Swiss Alps by Chris Luebkeman & Jonelle Simunich.
It is a regenerative, participative community working alongside locals on the possible futures for the place, and how we might take those first steps towards them.
I also travelled there with our son, James, who had to do his work experience that week. The gang at Your 2040 made sure he could fully participate in the experience too, and he was a member of one of the other working groups.
Side note: imagine meeting Kevin Kelly and going to Your 2040 all in the same newsletter…
Chris & Jonelle had invited Dr Anne Kovachevich and I to be a part of a panel discussing how backcasting offers us a a way to get to a place where we can take action.
There were no slide capabilities when working in tents in the Alps, but thanks to Alfredo Carlo and the team we had some brilliant versions of the Regenerative Triangulation and Assemblage Space diagrams to point at.
More broadly, the work of Alfredo and team was by far the most compelling use of ‘sketchnoting’ approaches I’d ever seen at a conference.
Rather than one great big ‘mural’ approach, where the sketcher knits everything together in one vision, the quotes, images and diagrams of conversation were spread out around the site as they emerged.
It created a fantastic sense of living inside the conversation we were collective creating across the four days.
In addition to the panel session, I also led a little walk around the village, explaining where the idea for the Obliquiscope had come from, and the tool and process that it has evolved into all of these years later.
As a way of getting people to ask interesting questions about anything from a city to a candy wrapper, I’m not sure I have developed a better method for a rapid collective enquiry than the Obliquiscope yet.
Side note: Perhaps at future versions of Your 2040, I shall propose an exercise for everyone at the beginning to do this. It also formed the basis of our City Scanning work for the first Future Days conference in Lisbon.
This mode of enquiry was important when a lot of the participants were in the village of La Punt Chamues-ch for the first time.
This was amongst the most compelling and interesting reasons to come to Your 2040; it was not an abstract futures conference about a made up theme, but created alongside and for the local community for whom it would offer ideas about a future they would want to see.
It brings us back to show the thing, change the thing.
The final presentations from the working groups were open for anyone in the local area (The wider Engadin Valley - “it takes a valley to raise a village” as we discussed) to come along to.
They then started discussing ideas for first steps and actions towards ideas they found interesting.
The very point of any kind of futures work is the provoke and create change in the present.
Given what they see now, what might they change as a result?
I really like the sense of leaving futures projects where the ideas, skills, frameworks and more are left behind afterwards. I’ll talk about that more in the Design Futures instalment of this newsletter.
Show the thing, change the thing
It feels that this is the core Smithery calling now. To help people see things (‘complex assemblies of contradictory issues’) in ways they never have, so that they can start to make the change they need in order to thrive in the future.
And given what Farhana Yamin told us all at Content Rising earlier in June, I kind of feel obliged to lean into it even more.
As always, with working and writing in the open… what do you think? Does this resonate? Does this describe what you think Smithery does? Hit reply, and let me know…
In the next instalment…
Yes, I know, I said it would be a two-parter, but it’s looking like it might be three.
Because the conversations in Norway and Switzerland would inevitably stray into talk of technology and AI.
Then subsequent conversations with other people made me realise that there’s something compelling in being able to see what an LLM is, and therefore how we might change behaviours in how we use them together, or how we can see where we can avoid accruing more Cognitive Debt.
So I’ll talk about that next, before diving into the Design Futures teaching stuff. At this rate, mind, it’ll be twelve parts long and the last Game of Thrones book will be out before I’m done…
Until next time
John V Willshire
7th August 2025