Chautauqua Auditorium, Milwaukie c.1895

I’ve been getting more involved in my adopted hometown of Milwaukie by volunteering for a few different organizations and working to meet more of my neighbors and community leaders. I am the kind of person who gets interested in too many things and has a hard time deciding what causes to focus on and devote a substantial amount of time to. But one of my new year’s resolutions is that I would do just that – concentrate. This year I’ll be reading in schools for SMART Oregon and will soon become a member of the city Arts Committee.

As I look around for best practice information about community building and urban development I’ve been overwhelmed by the many great organizations and programs devoted to these issues. Some are design-focused but all of these orgs are interested in generating, implementing, and sharing good ideas. So on the eve of the GOOD Ideas for Cities Event at Ziba tomorrow night, here are some of the things I’ve found. Perhaps they’d be of interest to you, too:

GOOD Ideas for Cities – pairs creatives with civic leaders to address urban issues.

CEOs for Cities – a civic lab of today’s urban leaders catalyzing a movement to advance the next generation of great American cities.

OpenIDEO – an open platform for creative people of all stripes to crowd-source inspiration for solving civic and humanitarian problems.

Sustainable City Year Program – a partnership between the University of Oregon Sustainable Cities Initiative and one city in Oregon per academic year in which students from planning and architecture bring energy, enthusiasm, and innovative approaches to difficult, persistent problems.

Living Labs Local – Copenhagen-based non-profit that encourages collaboration among the world’s cities.

Community Built Association – furthers the theory and practice of involving volunteers in the design, organization and creation of community projects that reshape the physical environment.

More? Let me know…

My son is currently preoccupied with marching bands. Specifically tubas. He’s 2. When he asked me the other day for a white tuba, I politely told him I didn’t think we had one around the house, and perhaps he could think about how to make one.

He disappeared to his room, retrieved an old gray vacuum tube, and started walking around the house with it pretending to play it as a tuba. Then he took his baby sister’s Fisher Price walker and put it over his shoulders and played that for a while. He then settled on a tuba made from large Lego bricks, which he has been playing morning, noon, and night for the past two days. He hadn’t been very good at building with the Legos until he got the idea to make the tuba. His skill level quickly went from zero to hero in the matter of a few hours.

The point is, he was obsessed. And that’s an important thing we can learn from children.

At some point we learn to get bored with things. I’m not quite sure when that transformation takes place, but I have a feeling it comes around those tween years. I remember saying “I’m bored” a lot around the ages of 9-12. I think that corresponds to the age when most of us have spent enough time in school to figure out the rest of our lives are going to be spent abiding by rules, reaching benchmarks (or feeling bad about our failures), and minding the clock. I was “good” at school. That is to say, I was good at completing my homework, good at taking tests, good at behaving well in the classroom. As for the content that I took away from all those years of school, I’m not sure much persisted beyond how to “be good”. Sure, I remember my multiplication tables, but there are many other hours of my life that I spent being filled with information that I didn’t care enough about to remember today.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how we educate our kids. Naturally, having two myself I’m interested in the subject. I’ve been talking with parent friends lately about preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school. We’re all comparing notes about what the best path for our kids might be. We’re sussing out school reputations. Some are concerned about the lack of math and science strength in schools, others are concerned about the lack of arts and music. And in general, everyone is concerned about the reality that they will probably have to send their kids to public school.

For the most part these parents attended public schools themselves, and believe in public education. They aren’t necessarily wealthy people. These are friends that work as baristas and public high school teachers, grad researchers and designers. Household incomes probably range from $30K-100K. It’s safe to say most of us can’t afford $5-15K of private school tuition annually, let alone double for two or more children. But they are involved people. They have the capacity, through their interest and care, to make a major difference in multiple kids’ lives, not only their own, because they will put the energy into making sure their kids get a great education wherever they end up going to school.

Why are we afraid to send our kids to public school? How can we change that? If all these families do manage to figure out ways to send their kids to private school, the parental brain drain and missing involvement on PTAs and other school committees will make their neighborhood schools that much weaker.

It’s not just the lack of certain programs that make these parents nervous, it’s the way children are taught. To the test. By the clock. In a room with 30 other kids. Oregon high schools graduate fewer than 70% of their students. Oregon has the highest rates of unemployment and food assistance in the nation. Perhaps these things are connected.

How might we create public schools that we can be proud to send our kids to?

Let’s come back to my obsessive toddler. Kids have skills – important ones – that we adults have forgotten, or learned to forget. They have a focus, a clarity of purpose, that we find hard to achieve. They have the ability to stick with something until they master it, because they choose their tasks and are unequivocally interested in them. Some alternative educational systems, like Waldorf, endeavor to create learning environments where children are valued as contributors and leaders of their own education and are not simply empty vessels to be filled and then tested. These are mostly private institutions where the price of admission ensures parental involvement.

In a rapidly changing global economy, the definition of “skills” seems to be at the forefront of the debates about education. Certainly we want our kids to have the basic math, science, and language skills needed to take part in today’s world. But how to we prepare them to be prepared for anything? Looking back at the past 20 years things have changed so rapidly, do we expect that to change? How can we prepare them to be creative problem-solvers, stewards of our environment, imaginative entrepreneurs?

What are some examples of schools you’ve found that are doing a great job of preparing students to learn outside the traditional system (public or private)? Here are a few I’ve become aware of in my research:

Southwest Charter School, Portland – hands-on learning
Vittra Schools, Sweden – open learning environments
Urban Montessori Charter School, Oakland – design thinking
Sojourner School, Milwaukie – multiple intelligences

What are the new economic realities being faced by Americans? Right now we’re viewing the downturn as a sharp dive, but is it the new normal? And now that more people are relying on social services to get by (Oregon is #1 in food stamp recipients per capita) but donations are down, how can non-profits and other agencies maintain a high level of service with fewer resources?

This article by Diahann Billings-Burford of NYC Service about the new ways non-profits are recruiting skills-based volunteers provides one view on how organizations might do more with less.

Kickstarter has a microsite up to highlight the main themes of 2011, their second year. Crowd-funded projects are thriving in Portland but I especially like the fact that one of Kickstarter’s main themes from 2011 are civic projects being funded through the site. Another theme is DIY manufacturing, like my friends over at Nortd Labs and their open source laser cutter, the Lasersaur, which was originally funded through a Kickstarter campaign. I can’t wait to see what Year 3 brings.

I am an interdisciplinary designer with an artful and strategic approach to challenges and opportunities.

My main research interest and practice is centered in social design – using design as a process to create change in areas and systems not normally served by design. I employ ethnographic methods to get at the heart of a person or organization’s needs and believe that a collaborative approach to problem-solving is most effective. Involving stakeholders in the design process from the beginning can produce tremendous results, whether the task at hand is rethinking an educational model, developing a communications strategy, or working with a rural family create new sources of income. I believe the future will ask designers to be instigators and collaborators, not stylists or directors.

Everyone in my circles has been re-posting this 1980′s ad in response to Lego’s new girl’s line, called Lego Friends. As well as identifying with the girl in the ad (we really all used to wear clothes like that – and yet we still knew how to be women!) I totally agree with the sentiment and make sure my own daughter has access to gender-neutral toys. But the truth is none of Lego’s previous marketing campaigns geared toward girls have worked. Either parents won’t buy the toys for their daughters because they aren’t pink, or girls really will only play with things they think are for them. The insights from Lego’s in-depth anthropological research into how girls play differently than boys (e.g. boys want to build what’s on the box, girls want to get into role-play right away) seems to have led them in the current direction. Does that mean I’m going to buy pink Lego Friends for my daughter and regular Lego for my son? Certainly not. I’m of the “if it was good enough for me it’s good enough for them” camp. I’m more apt to believe that all of this gender/princess stuff is coming from the people who buy toys rather than those who play with them. Here’s to experimenting on your offspring.

I participated in Dachis Group’s Visual Thinking School on December 1st. Our “client” was the Occupy Wall Street movement. See some of our conclusions in my write-up.

I can’t wait to see the SFMOMA show about the prolific Dieter Rams when I next visit the Bay Area. I was assigned a project in design school that had me struggling to find good research on his history and products. In the last 5 years awareness of him a quiet icon and influencer has increased exponentially. There are now numerous books (the best in English is probably this one), interviews, videos, and now this fantastic exhibit showcasing his work.

Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams at SFMOMA, now through February 20, 2012