What I have in mind is a design brief: Can you design a learning (etc) space or event, with only a few rules, lots of degrees of freedom, a measure of background safety net, and keep a few disruptive bollards behind your back to throw into the mix where necessary? And can architects, town planners, traffic designers (see Naked Streets), festival organisers, social software designers, playground designers, unconference designers, organisational developers (Dave Snowden), story tellers, etc do this too?If so, are they doing ‘the same thing’?If so, how do we keep all these CANs from going ferral? (e.g. micro-global finance, micro-global terrorism)I am dispositionally averse to case studies, but … Are there interesting cases (retrospectively coherent ones, if you must) in:
Traffic roundabouts
Txting
Naked Streets
Social software
Hole in the Wall project
Grameen Bank
Workshops
LOGO/ Mindstorms
Life (computer simulation)
Montessori materials (see Trinomial Cube)
I think I design learning spaces online as CANs, and I think the basic design for online simulation games are CANs.
The riposte, of course, is:
If you can design CANs, can you design for inclusivity/ equity? (pardon the bad puns).
The best I’ve got so far is “CAN Design?” Perhaps the question is: how can we create/design ecologies in which CANs are likely to emerge (that ‘design’ word keeps creeping in).
Posted by roy 