Just like the study of the cosmic and the cellular, it takes time to zoom in and out, sense patterns, and unearth connections. Kudoz isn’t the solution it’s an anchor for a constellation of interactions. Our working hypothesis is that having a reference point for a different social contract serves as the ‘thing’ from which to zoom out to family, community, employers and government procurement, and zoom in to identity, motivations, and sense of self and future.
Unlike traditional volunteer programs, we’re not turning community members into mini-professionals and we’re not creating role dichotomies. Co-learning is the basis for reciprocity not caregiving. Users of the platform aren’t recipients of help anymore than community members are givers of help. Designing roles with the same underpinning values helps to create a more equal basis of exchange, and shifts the typical helper-recipient dynamic. Giving users autonomy over what experiences they choose on the platform also means giving community members autonomy over what experiences they offer. (That said, we do have some minimum standards: all community members undergo a criminal records check). That’s significant because programs typically centralize risk, deciding what’s best for all users, whilst our platform tries to thoughtfully re-distribute risk by enabling users to make informed choices using vetted information and peer reviews. How so? Well, Kudoz actually isn’t a program it’s a platform connecting users to hundreds of learning experiences hosted by passionate community members. Look again, and just like the couple in the park, see it as a jumping off point from which to re-imagine risk, safety, roles, relationships, expectations and accountabilities.
At face value, Kudoz might look like just another program for people with developmental disabilities. We’ve spent much of the last five years using these methods to co-create a new reference point, which we’ve called Kudoz. Co-design and prototyping, in turn, are methods for closing the gaps - by experimenting with how policies, metrics, resource flows, platforms, services, tools, spaces and rituals can shift beliefs, logics, powers, structures, and behaviours. We must defy the temptation to get lost in the bigness of problems or the smallness of already defined solutions, and instead ground our understanding in that which is tangible and from which we can begin to grasp the intangible.Įthnography is one method for mediating the distance between the tangible and the intangible, between what people say and do and what they think and feel between people as autonomous agents and social constructs between the psychological and the environmental. We must start where we are at – with a man and a woman on a picnic blanket basking in the sun – and reimagine relationships and connection points from there.
#Eames the power of ten Patch
When people wonder (as they did in a workshop last week) what ethnography & co-design have to do with systems change, my mind returns to that patch of grass.
In a mere nine minutes, the Eames remind us, that as wholly insignificant as humans are, we are a frame of reference from which to grapple with both the vast and the microscopic.
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