The Vine

Here’s a wonderful story about the power of one passionate, dedicated individual to engage a community.

After losing his grandmother to cancer, Joe LaBelle wanted to create better access to cancer-screening equipment for women in rural locations. His initial idea—staging a girls’ high school basketball game—was stifled by bureaucratic red tape. So with the support of his employer, Ashland Health Center, he went bigger.

On October 31st, a who’s who of women’s basketball stars arrived from all over the country to stage a charity hoops event in Ashland, Kansas—a town so small it doesn’t even have a hotel; players and coaches stayed in the homes of local residents.

What began as a fundraiser is now growing bigger still. Five neighboring communities and two hospitals have partnered to form WEPAC Alliance, a non-profit organization that provides resources and education to encourage local women to take active responsibility for their health. The partnership has earned national media attention and is becoming a model for other communities around the country.

“Lack of size and/or resources should not hinder [small communities],” the organization declares on its website. “With the state of the economy, it is easy to find reasons to complain or excuse low performance. These are five rural Kansas communities (totaling approx. 2,500 people) that are finding solutions instead of excuses.”

At the Urban Land Institute’s Fall Meeting a couple of weeks ago, I attended a dinner for one of the councils, a group of 100 or so homebuilding executives.

The conversations, for the most part, went something like this:

“How you doing?”

“Hanging in there. This market’s just brutal. You?”

“Yeah, brutal.”

“Yeah.”

I commented to one colleague that in times like this, my work actually gets more interesting. That’s not to say I enjoy the plunging revenues, slashed budgets and layoffs. But we’re now trying new things and moving in new directions that we never would have risked when the money was pouring in. And that’s a lot more interesting than simply riding the wave.

My colleague gave me a funny look and said, “You must be comfortable with ambiguity.”

I’m not sure he meant it as a compliment. But I sure took it as one.

Last week’s salon at IDEO was, well, pretty much everything you’d expect from a day with the world’s preeminent design firm.

One participant called it “The most stimulating, thought provoking exercise I’ve experienced in a very long time. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around all the concepts we explored.”

It was so successful, in fact, we’re doing it again.

On March 2, 2010, we’re holding a second installment of The Vine Salon at IDEO. This will be, once again, a collaborative workshop on User-Based Design Solutions created and hosted by IDEO at their Palo Alto headquarters — a rare opportunity to go inside “Imagination’s Playground,” as the Wall Street Journal has dubbed it.

Attendance will be limited to 65 people, and seats will fill up well in advance, so you’ll want to sign up early. Registration and program details can be found here.

What went down on our first visit, you ask?

Our day began with a series of short presentations — “provocations,” in IDEO-speak — by a team of designers from a variety of disciplines. By exploring examples of design-driven change through different lenses (individual, organizational, behavioral, attitudinal, among others), we got insight into IDEO’s acclaimed design thinking process, which we then applied to the afternoon’s Town Design Challenge.

Breaking into small, cross-disciplinary teams, we were first given a town profile (based on actual cities throughout the country) with details about population, geography, demographics, economic conditions, and challenges facing the area.

Next the project got human…as it always does with IDEO…and The Vine. Each team was assigned a specific user (whose profile was drawn from in-depth interviews with an actual person), and we were challenged to create solutions that would address both the needs of the town and our user’s unique circumstances. For example: a retired high school teacher with limited means but a deep desire to continue educating and shaping lives; a single mom struggling to balance the demands of work, money and time with her kids; or an aging nurse practitioner who’s committed to staying active and helping others, while at the same time coming to terms with her own physical limitations.

Considering we packed what would normally be a multiple-week prototyping process into a single afternoon, the exercise was obviously frenetic — and very taxing, I was surprised to find. And yet it was an extraordinary learning experience that, even a week later, continues to unfold for me. Three things in particular stand out.

1) Constraints can be a good thing. It’s remarkable how deadlines and competition (solutions were reviewed and voted upon by peers) will sharpen your focus.

2) Our team’s diversity of backgrounds (by design, of course) greatly enriched the process. And the two most seemingly dissimilar members, the engineer and the artist, yielded the most interesting and symbiotic results.

3) Small details matter. The solution that our team ultimately chose to put forward was drawn from a single comment in the user profile that, when we first read it, seemed idiosyncratic and irrelevant to the task at hand.

By the time we got to wine and hors d’oeuvres at the end of the day, my brain was exhausted.

I can’t wait to do it again in March.

Here’s an insightful and amusing perspective on behavioral norms from Jessica Hagy.

Funny how conformity takes on different meaning in different contexts. When did A become B without our even noticing it?

(Yes, I realize there’s a distinction. Teenage drinking = bad. Adult social constructs = for the most part, good. But let’s at least acknowledge that we’re assigning separate names to the same phenomenon. And that “being a team player” is not automatically a good thing.)

As the French playwright Albert Guinon once said, “When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong — or absolutely right.”