Design: going local

Here's how design, education and change go together, according to Emily Pilloton. Get local. Enough said!

Local design is most sustainable when it’s an educational process, nurturing new sensibilities from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.

...The work that is possible for a designer to do in a rural community is completely different than what’s possible in any city or design firm. Design as a means to overcome challenges is nonexistent, so the possibilities to inspire change abound. But design is also misunderstood and scoffed at as “fancy stuff for rich people.” That’s why we decided to move to Bertie County permanently and create a design-build high-school curriculum with Dr. Zullinger. We didn’t want to just be “creative consultants.” We wanted to build something from within and teach the young people of eastern North Carolina that design is first and foremost a sensibility that allows individuals to solve problems in different ways [my emphasis].

...Local design has an identity beyond a program’s branding because it has an ownership by real people and it requires person-to-person communication. Local design is wood and metal and eye contact and handshakes.

Views from the inside: A heuristic inquiry

Time flows on... Evan Leeson (Flickr)

This whole train of experiencing, and the meanings that I have thus far discovered in it, seem to have launched me on a process which is both fascinating and at times a little frightening. It seems to mean letting my experiences carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience. The sensation is that of floating with a complex stream of experience, with the fascinating possibility of trying to comprehend its ever-changing complexity. --Carl Rogers, 1952

I like this note from Rogers' essay. For me, it goes to the heart of what we experience and how we learn through our experiences (given experiential learning theories are most often based on Rogers' work). It also reminds me of one of the presentations from the ALARA conference held in Sydney last week, where Joy Murray, one of the presenters, talked about her use of Cybernetics to best describe her own experiences in the world. She made the point that we knit our use of theories and research to our direct lived experiences as a way to help us explain, or give some language to what we experience and how we make meaning of those experiences. We can only ever really account for our own experiences, others account for their own, in their own way, as they need to.
Joy was co-presenting with three community members with whom she had been working to develop a leadership program that was built on community needs and driven by community wishes (i.e. a community steering group was set up to "manage" the program itself). The project was a great example of supporting emergent community needs, developing empowered people and addressing issues at the local level.
As I've worked on this Aboriginal mental health service provision project over the last 8 months, I've come to focus more and more on my personal journey as a "researcher". I remember saying early on in the year (e.g. Brown's TED talk resonated strongly with me) that I expected to be changed in some way by working on the project. And as Rogers says, realising the "sensation ... of floating with a complex stream of experience, with the fascinating possibility of trying to comprehend its ever-changing complexity"!
We cannot ignore our experiences, most especially when we "research". Dave Hiles begins his 2001 essay, "Heuristic Inquiry and Transpersonal Research", with a quote from Braud and Anderson (1998, p.3):

Many of the most significant and exciting life events and extraordinary experiences - moments of clarity, illumination, and healing - have been systematically excluded from conventional research.

I have heard it said that to do research that is sustainable and transformative, the research must "own us".  Bruce Douglass & Clark Moustakas (1985) call heuristic inquiry "the internal search to know".
And so I enter - more knowingly than ever before - a journey of heuristic inquiry.

Further reading
Smith, MK (1997, 2004) 'Carl Rogers and informal education', the encyclopaedia of informal education. [www.infed.org/thinkers/et-rogers.htm. Last update: May 29, 2012]
Rogers, C & Freiberg, HJ (1993) Freedom to Learn (3rd edn.), New York: Merrill
Joy co-published a book with the abovementioned community members, which captures their own experiences of the community leadership project:
Murray J, Rash J-L, Creaton R, Cooley P and McClelland D (2009), Views from the inside: Participant Perspectives on Community Leadership. CommonGround Publishing Pty Ltd., Victoria.
More about the book:

In so doing the book explores the relationship between: one person's theory; a community development program in practice; and real life experience. It does this not through a voice of authority commenting on people's lived experience and attempting to relate this to the theory, but by showing what the program meant to the project leader and what it meant to each of the four participants. It tries to demonstrate, but not explain, how these disparate meanings connected, or otherwise, with the theory that the project leader believed she was applying; and how in the end all knowledge is personal, built up over a life time and stitched together with the threads of our relationships in whatever environment we happen to inhabit.

Hiles, D (2001), Heuristic Inquiry and Transpersonal Research, paper presented to CCPE, London UK, October 2001. Available: http://psy.dmu.ac.uk/drhiles/HIpaper.htm
Braud, W & Anderson, R (Eds) (1998) Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences: Honoring human experience. Sage
Douglass, B & Moustakas, C (1985), Heuristic inquiry: the internal search to know, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, SUMMER 1985, vol. 25, no. 3, 39-55
Moustakas, C (1990) Heuristic Research: Design, methodology and applications. Sage

In reading mode . . .

It's tricky to post whilst caught in a heap of reading and process - it is a liminal place to be really! Until there's a "pit stop" or the journey reaches some sort of conclusion or pause, it's not always apparent to write one's thinking until one has thought it out some more :o)
So, here's what I'm reading / watching:
1. Bessarab & Ng'andu (2010) Yarning about yarning as a legitimate method in Indigenous research, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, Vol 3, No 1, 37-50.
Why? The research team has been discussing the idea of yarning and whether or not it should be a specifically articulated practice engaged with in the Community Steering Group sessions. More and more yarning is seen as a legitimate and rigourous data gathering method and implies a connection between researcher and participants, where both acknowledge a transformation can occur in each other. In prticualr, and as I'm just reading now, Bessarab and Ng'andu discuss collaborative yarning, one of four forms of yarning a researcher should be cognisant of when undertaking research wth Indigenous peoples. As we conclude our reading of this text, the team will come together to share our reflections and see whether or not we move forward with this method in some way (of course, then discussing it with the group participants).
2. Brene Brown, The Power of Vulnerability (TEDx Houston June 2010).
Why? I'm exploring and reflecting on the role of researcher especially from a PAR perspective. The notion of engaging the whole self in the research is powerful for me and I expect to be transformed by this experience. I'm also highly aware of my white fella role and baggage I bring with me, at the same time, I must own this rather than dismiss it, as it informs who I am and how I be. Brown's talk lends some further words and thinking around this.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
3. Closing the Gap Clearinghouse - Council of Australian Governments (COAG)
Why? Sifting through a range of published articles, reports and project websites that seek to address Indigenous disadvantage in Australia and include health and wellbeing in particular, provides me with the landscape in which our project operates (at least theoretically for the most part). Some articles I've sourced so far include:

• Tsey, K; Every, A (2000) Evaluating Aboriginal empowerment programs: the case of Family WellBeing, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, v. 24 no. 5 Oct 2000, 509-51.
• Walker, Roger; Cromarty, Helen; Kelly, Len; St Pierre-Hansen, Natalie (2009) Achieving cultural safety in Aboriginal health services: implementation of a cross-cultural safety model in a hospital setting, Diversity in Health and Care, v. 6 no. 1, 11-22.
• Nagel, Tricia, Robinson, Gary, Condon, John, and Trauer, Tom (2009) Approach to treatment of mental illness and substance dependence in remote Indigenous communities: results of a mixed methods study. Australian Journal of Rural Health, 17 (4). 174-182.

There's more, but this is the stuff I'm most involved with right now. And, as Brene Brown says in the intro to her talk:

Lean into the discomfort of the work.

More reflections to follow!