Sounds like you need a combination of social capital development, participatory action research, and some insight gathering. A local person might definitely be a good idea, though off the top of my head, I don’t know anyone who would fit that bill.

Best of luck!

I am a forester, land use planner, and community organizer. I facilitate informal collaborations/groups/partnerships of people to improve their success in the field of land protection and land planning at the regional and landscape scale. Think groups of 30 towns, several counties, thousands of square miles, a couple of states, etc.

Many participants are excited about the possibility of achieving great things from working together and the innovation that will follow. They are also focusing on how to achieve a really big and bold vision: half of Massachusetts (as an example) in protected forest as both large wildland reserves on mostly public land nested within a matrix of protected woodlands on private lands managed for all the services and values we get from forests like clean air and water, carbon storage, recreation, fuelwood, timber, etc. The vision and effort is described at http://www.wildlandsandwoodlands.org

So in a sense we have a design to follow, to shoot for, but we believe to succeed we need innovation. Because we believe the vision will be realized from grassroots efforts not by government regulation, the team for making this happen is made of citizens as well as conservation non-profits and academics. In this informal effort, where people are encouraged to hook their dreams to the W&W wagon, innovation is both our fuel and the bricks upon which we will build the foundation for the solutions to follow. This is a 30 year vision I am talking about. Solutions for how to achieve the vision are being designed and cultivated by practitioners in the fields of conservation, finance, community organizing, policy, etc. We are learning through practice and sharing our lessons to evolve faster, or at least that’s the idea.

I am interested in learning how might we inject the capacity for design thinking into our effort. One idea I had was to locate someone in the Massachusetts area that might be interested in helping to not only shake up our thinking but bring a whole other community of people to the “partnership” to innovate in order to protect society’s green infrastructure.

Design and the presence values – I would like to recommend an enlightening book related to the topic: Löwgren, Jonas & Stolterman, Erik (2004). Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The book provides (among other things) illuminating insights related to the role of the designer and her responsibilities regarding the design process.

I think it boils down to fearlessness. Believe that if you teach with compassion and integrity, your students will still perform well on the test. And believe also that if you create and sell a wonderful product or service, delivered with integrity and authenticity, you will still make money.

Is this possible? Perhaps not in all cases. But I would venture it’s more possible than we know, mostly because we’re afraid of “The Test” or “The Bottom Line.”

Business can reframe questions that address both the profit motive and the need to treat customers and employees as human beings. But it ain’t easy, and it takes time and it requires business to see beyond the next quarterly report. I said it wasn’t easy.

Sadly, opportunities rarely exist in K-12 education to reframe the problem so that we not only increase test scores, but we deliver on our primary objective to help children be happy, productive, thoughtful and engaged members of a greater society.

Thank you for making me think.

In so far as we’ve had “change that is deceivin’” rather than “change we can believe in”, I’d hate for the manipulation of public sentiment toward a seemingly different yet only less horrible alternative to be associated with ‘that which designers do and that which business can consider as an important asset in its mixed bag of tricks.’

This is not to say that design is not used as a political, propaganda and perception management tool of choice, but that positioning it proudly as such — to me — is a dangerous game to play. Design (in all its manifestations, be it thinking or doing) is a powerful force that can be used for good, or evil. We’ve seen what it can accomplish in the employ of tyrants (See “Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State” by the prolific Steven Heller at http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Fists-Branding-20th-Century-Totalitarian/dp/0714848468).

This is *not* the way to position the ‘value’ of design to the world of business… LOL (leading to the slow drip of a single tear).