Weeknotes #1: Lockdown Learning Edition
Entry 1: Week of 11 January, 2021
Quiet end to this up-and-down week. I wasn’t working when the schools shut down last March, so Lockdown 3 was a shock to the system. Full time grad school + home schooling + juggling schedules with husband + puppy training (naively, I hadn’t factored in the January school closure when we decided to bring a puppy into the house) = working through a destabilising feeling of losing control.
I’m finding it harder to lean on the habits I built in Lockdown 1 (daily gratitude practice, meditation, daily walks) but determined to make my way back to these productive outlets for my anxiety.
My 7-year old son Max is taking this latest school closure with such grace. Here is one of his favourite pieces from this past week of home learning, Max’s version of Hokusai’s Mt. Fuji — it’s part of a unit on mountains.
Here are a couple of pieces I will return to when I need to remember what is really important, and when I need to avoid the obsession with efficiency and control.
- Jill Anderson’s post for Ed., the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s magazine.
- Thanks Immy Kaur for posting this on Twitter. Such a brilliant message to parents. Here is a blurry but hopefully still legible version:
Among the many things I am grateful for this week is a brilliant start to my second term at UCL in the Master of Public Administration programme at IIPP. I’m taking four modules. Here are some key takeaways from my first week:
Module #1: Creative Bureaucracies — focus: how do you build dynamic capabilities inside public institutions so they can have a bolder, more courageous, and more entrepreneurial role in tackling 21st century grand challenges?
Love this Brian Eno quote ‘Bureaucrats are stabilising knowledge, keeping things running, and sometimes innovating quite radically.’
A useful read from Rainer Kattel, the module lead: ‘What would Max Weber say about public-sector innovation?’ (2015)
Need to understand public sector innovation in its own right, rather than relying on private sector processes (competition) to understand public sector innovation’s key features and drivers. Also:
1. Evolutionary processes within the public sector pertain to such phenomena as power, legitimacy and trust (p. 15).
2. Constraints are ‘intrinsic to the public sector’ (p. 16). Political, legal, institutional, administrative, financial constraints lead to innovation.
Module #2: Health and Wellbeing in Cities — focusing on the social and environmental determinants of health and wellbeing in communities, including the role of the built environment.
The course is designed around this framework from ‘Shaping cities for health: complexity and the planning of urban environments in the 21st century’
We’ll also be using the THRIVES framework from the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering (IEDE) which redefines healthy urbanism in new THRIVES framework to respond to pressing global challenges.
Jenny Leonard did this amazing illustration brilliantly capturing our first lecture, all via Zoom.
Module #3: Civic Design
This week’s class was an introductory session, where we explored the course’s approach to civic design. In a nutshell, it’s:
BUILT ENVIRONMENT + PEOPLE
- Relations of power
- Decision making
- Democracy
- Forms of living in community
and UNDERSTANDING THESE PROCESSES…
… IN ORDER TO CHALLENGE THEM
Thinking about alternative, participatory approaches for making decisions and living in community.
Module #4: Transformation by Design — focusing on how public organisations and civil servants can harness new emerging methods and practices of strategic and digital design to create, implement, and evaluate public policies and public services.
Feeling star struck and tongue tied with the module’s faculty. What an amazing privilege to learn from Rowan Conway (the module lead) and Dan Hill. Here’s a visual overview of our course. Excited by how this course dovetails perfectly with my Health & Wellbeing in Cities and Civic Design modules.
I particularly enjoyed our readings and discussion around the role of the designer (From lecture and also Dan Hill and Stuart Candy: ‘Change the Model’, June 2019). Here’s what stuck with me about the designer’s mindset:
- Designers cross between disciplines and boundaries, helping construct a new narrative.
- A designer creates an environment that is fertile for change, changing attitudes with a ‘long-slow release’ of some kind, ‘gently pushing people beyond the bounds of what they’re actually comfortable with’ (p. 126)
- A designer asks questions but also highlights various options or futures.
- A designer is a magpie, constantly searching to try and figure out ‘what is the thing for this thing, what will trigger a response’? (p. 128)
- When changing a model, it’s important to ‘set an intent, a direction, a trajectory — ideally, a positive outcome’ (p. 125).
I find myself reflecting on the tendency to get stuck in the framework or the design kit and to forget these practices or habits of mind. To me there is a danger in blindly adhering to the method and forgetting how to connect and work with people through the process of change, which is what I think good design should help do.
A big shout out to Rowan for leading the lecture and seminar from home. I’m inspired by your unflappable grace as you simultaneously juggled teaching graduate students with taking care of your children and your dog.
