Menalab3 start-middle-present-re/start
Tutor James Piecowye’s observations
This is the 1st time Giorgio Ungania and James Piecowye have taken the idea of sharing ideas, as embodied by www.ted.com, and applied it to a small intimate working group, it was a runaway success.
WHAT WE IMAGINED.
When Giorgio and I were approached to apply to be
MENAlab tutors we had just completed TEDxDubai,
www.tedxdubai.com, and we were very excited to explore how one might take the TED idea and apply it to a more intimate community context.
Our idea for MENAlab3 was to create a micro TEDx experience based around ‘ideas in unexpected places’.
What and how we would realize this imagined lab was completely up in the air depending wholly on those participating in the lab.
THE START.
From the beginning this lab was all about using the technology at hand to communicate, engage and provoke questions.
At the intro evening Giorgio and I presented our shell of an idea and with the help of PREZI,
www.prezi.com, set out to get people enthusiastic our idea.
8 labs presented their ideas on day 1 and there was no question the diversity and depth of possibilities was overwhelming.
DAY1.
At 9am we met our lab participants, a very interesting group of women, who were from the UAE and Bahrain.
The group was comprised of designers, artists, architects, teachers, students and even a high school student.
Our group, at the start had 10 people involved.
What was interesting about the process from day 1 was that it was about the group not the tutors. The tutors brought the format experience to the equation but the idea or more aptly where it was going was group generated.
Very quickly the group began to focus its discussions around the concept of the idea of change with the task being to come to terms with what it was we hoped to do on day 5. At the end of day one there was no path to day 5.
Extensive brainstorming took place, ideas about what to do and how o do it were wild! No ideas wee excluded.
From the beginning social media was embraced as the way this project would be displayed, presented and advanced after the lab ended.
Twitter (#menala3), facebook (menalab3) and a blog were created (http://menalab3.blogspot.com) to collect the thoughts and potential data generated by the lab for the group and those engaging or observing the group the engage with.
Ideas in unexpected places was becoming visible physically via the social media and psychologically by those who were engaged in the lab themselves.
Day2
The theme of MENAlab was ‘designing change’ and our group realized that this was where we wanted to go, explore the very idea of change!
What is change? How do we articulate it? What can we learn?
From the outset the fact that change is ambiguous was very interesting to the participants.
We realized that what we needed to do was seek out respondents to the question and collect the answers.
Using the tools at hand the group set out to do 2 things! 1 record an intro to the question what is change and in the immediate environment seek answers to the questions as a sort of trial.
The end goal was still unclear and several of the group members were uncomfortable with not having a clear plan. What we did have was an objective but no clear path to reach it.
Task in hand the group set off!
Day3
The group spent a lot of time reforming the plan, what were we doing, why and how were constantly returned to.
With the trial questions in had the group realized that the answer to the question is not really as important as is the reaction to the question!
What was being revealed was that there are some who are ready for change and some who are not.
Those predisposed to embracing change seemed to be able to answer the question ‘what is change’. And those who were not so predisposed to change seemed to not know how to answer.
But in all cases the physical reaction was very clear and apparent and proved to tell a great story.
Off to the metro we went to collect more interview data.
Even walking from the metro to the Bastikia generated some interesting responses! People at a bus stop, in a saloon, and on the corner became idea generators in very unexpected places.
Upon our return it became very clear that there is a distinct possibility that you cannot really design change.
Change we were discovering is something you have to be willing to engage or be ready to engage.
But what might be possible is to design an environment to begin to prepare people to think about change, interact with the idea ad ultimately plant the seed for change.
Upon reflection it is very clear that what we were doing in MENAlab3 was exploring how to create that very environment for people to begin to think about the very idea of change.
Once the thought process begins, a designed process, it is possible to expect people to become willing and ready to accept change.
DAY4
MENAlab 3 decided that they had enough data and did not need to go out and collect ore information BUT that they did need to look at what had been collected and consider the best way to load it into the virtual environment for global consideration.
The blog was now being populated with the information from the lab as well as interviews and ideas.
It was hoped that those being interviewed about change would not simply be passive interviewees but go back to the site and engage in the evolving conversation about change.
Again the idea was that you cannot design change BUT you can design an environment to predispose people to want change or be ready for change and that is exactly what the goal of TEDxDubai was, www.tedxdubai.com, was to create an environment to predispose people to the idea of change.
In the case of MENAlab 3 ideas were being found, at the grassroots level in the community and then transposed into a blog creating a cyber community.
It became clear that change exists on many levels:
Micro
Macro
Emotional
Physical
Psychological
And each of these sites of change is part of the greater conversation, unfortunately when we think about change we tend to restrict ourselves to one piece of the answer, usually the words, ignoring the other components of the greater answer.
MENAlab 3 sought in general terms to demonstrate how you might be able to get around this by allowing greater interaction with the raw data on change and thus provoking greater interaction.
DAY5
The lab set out to document the journey via a video journal, clips and a cascade of pictures, and by displaying the physical discussions that took place over the 5 days.
The group spent a significant amount of time uploading materials to http://menalab3.blogspot.com and then preparing the physical presentation for the reviewers.
What differentiates MENAlab3 from the other labs in the MENAseries is that this lab does not end!
While the group who participated in the lab have dispersed the ideas continue to live at http://menalab3.blogspot.com and what has become clear is that the end of the lab is actually the beginning!
Te question ‘what is change’ was posed, approached, explored, answered and it is at the point of the answers that the question is reposed for those who answered and new visitors to consider and comment upon.
RE/START
MENAlab ‘Designing Change”
What MENAlab3 did was practically demonstrate HOW the idea of designing change might be approached in a conversational community context.
This is what TEDxDubai succeeded in doing and what MENAlab3 also succeeded in doing.
