A good initiative to support

Soita Mummolle (http://soitamummolle.wordpress.com) is a campaign aiming to sensitize people about the issue of seniors’ loneliness. Its “communication weapons” are street campaigns, flash-mobs, guerrilla marketing and PR.

Started as a group project in summer 09, Soita Mummolle is now the one-(wo)man social and research effort of graphic designer and researcher Stefania Passera (MA Graphic Design Aalto University School of Art and Design/ Decode Research Group). So yes, Stefania is one of us “Act Differently Promoters”, but this doesn’t change the fact that the campaign is clearly an attempt to act differently! 🙂

Some of the research quetions behind the project are:

“Can a private citizen spread a good idea for society and eventually start a movement?”

“What are the small, easy, daily actions that we all can do (such as calling our elderly relatives) and have a positive impact?”

“How social media can support a more dialogic communication, in opposition to a unidirectional one?”

“How communication can be different to push people to have a different behavior?”

So, if you are searching for more opportunities for acting diferently, stay tuned on Soita Mummolle blog this summer, because there are going to be plenty of occasions to participate in flash mobs and design interventions for a good cause! 🙂

Find each others and go to change the world!

Your idea+finding your true believers helps you creating a tribe… that can make big changes!

A very inspiring talk by Seth Godin:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html

A snowflake can cause an avalanche

I guess you all know the story of Rose Parks, the black woman that on 1st December 1955 refused to stand up from the bus to leave the seat to a white men. Back then in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, as in all the deep south of USA, there were segregatoin laws. Rose was supposed to stand up, but she refused and she was arrested for violating the law.

The black community mobilized a boycott of the bus system which lasted for 381 days and resulted in the ending of segregation on Montgomery’s buses.

The boycott also brought national attention to the civil rights cause and to a young minister, Rev. Martin Luther King, who was appointed as spokesperson for the Bus Boycott and taught nonviolence to all participants. At the same time, other protests sprouted throughout the south and the country. They took form as sit-ins, eat-ins, swim-ins, and similar causes. Thousands of courageous people joined the “protest” to demand equal rights for everybody.

This, all started from a bus seat. And the refusal of a woman of accepting a wrong and degrading status quo.

Small things

One common assumption, if we don’t stop and think for a moment, is that our needs are big. We have a lot of needs. Our needs are important and scream for attention. We like to be spoilt.

Instead we could overturn the whole thing and recognize that our needs are actually small, and basic. We should make an attempt to use just the minimum amount of what we need, avoiding being greedy or simply careless. Personally, I get happiness and satisfaction everytime I manage to live in a minimalistic and humble way.

This perspective, in my opinion valid in many fields, is especially valid when we think about environment and resources. There are just so many daily actions that we can do to minimize our consummistic impact. We actually need less of what we think.

I recently had an experience that taught me something and inspired me to start to act differently. For the last ten days in my building water was cut off daily from 8 to 15, due to some pipes renovation. It meant filling up bottles and buckets to have water resources available during the day. Using containers actually helps to quantify the amount of water you use, while taps are implicitly pushing you to let things run and flow indefinitely. The fact that I had to survive with just a certain amount of water made me think what was the minimum amount of water needed for certain tasks.

Now the pipes are ok and I have running water again. But I started washing my teeth using just a cup of water. And I try to close the taps in each possible moment while showering or washing my hands. I also collect the water used to shower in a bucket, to reuse it to flush.

Yes, my life is a bit slower and “complicated” (but where am I supposed to run to, anyway?). And probably I am not really having a positive impact on the planet. Still, I get the inner reward from being more aware of how little I need: having the feeling that after all I am simple and I don’t need much to live well is a very good medicine against everyday’s complexity, stress and induced artificial needs. Less is more.

Stop complaining!

A great example of acting differently: In a shop in Helsinki the personnel were so bored to hear customers complaining about the weather that they launched a 10% discount for the ones who did not complain! (See a Metro article below, unfortunately in Finnish only)

Photos that changed the world

How images can change our view and hopefully push us to act:



Inspiring conversations with a friend: good fuel for mood and ideas.

Today I met my friend artist, illustrator, graphic designer, teacher and wise-guy Jani Ikonen. We had one of those interesting conversations that make you think “Oh, then I am not crazy! There are also other people out there that want to change the world!”. The theme of our conversation was how to reorganize master education in graphic design (which is what we are both studying): the problem is not mainly how our specific subjects are taught, the problem is that in designers’ education there’s a real lack of teaching how-to-think in a general sense. We believe we are the heroes of creativity, but if we look at our outcomes from a wider perspective we are the creatives that others expect us to be: innocuous, aesthetic-driven, detatched fom the content. We are taught how to use our visual skills, but not much how to tackle hot issues with them.

In front of our coffee cups, some ideas that I particularly liked – because they imply experimentation and change – came out. They are mainly ideas about how to teach, rather than what to teach. So it’s about how to act and make people react. Here are five experiments in design education that I think it would be interesting to try out sometimes:

– Speed-date workshops: all the departments of the design school should have interdisciplinary 1-week workshops together, trying to experiment all the possible matches (e.g. graphic design+new media/sound design, graphic design+fashion design, graphic design+interior design, etc.). People would learn better -and in practice- how to work with others who have very a different professional and human perspective. And it would push all the students out of their “comfort zone”, toward more hybrid solutions and mediations.

– Destroy the comfort zone: when working in teams of 2-3 people, draw from a hat your role in the project. If you pick something you are notoriously good at, put the paper back in the hat and pick something else. For instance, we have a very good illustrator, a very skilled guy in layout and typography and a digital media guru. Mix their roles, so that they learn to do something new and unfamiliar. The fact that there is going to be anyway an expert in the group to ask advice from will stimulate self-learning and dialogue. The team will, in a way, self-tutor itself.

– Reiteration: kickstart the projects making the students do it in a short period of time. If you have a tight schedule, you are going to do the best you can in that time anyway. Make a presentation of the results (that have to be as finalized as possible), evaluate what is good and what can be improved. Then give some more time to reiterate the process and develop the weaker parts.
It’s better to have a real, imperfect basis on which build up a better result, rather than plan forever the perfect solution (which is never gonna be perfect and would need corrections anyway). And people can do amazing things under a tight schedule.

– Learn how to REALLY build up on others’ ideas: one problem of designers (and everybody, in general) is to fall in love with own’s ideas. We are endlessly preached that we have to be able to work in teams, and so we do, but in the end usually one idea/direction from one member is gonna prevail. We accept compromises, but they have a bitter taste sometimes. Well, this shouldn’t happen. We should teach real interaction, real dialogue.
One idea is to make students work on a project, then present it, then hand out all the working materials and files to the student to their right. Everybody will go on developing a project started by somebody else. You can change something, improve, develop, but you cannot completely destroy what has been done before. This method would also teach 1) how to develop a critical sense on artworks 2) how to see what is good, and hopefully learn how to do it as well 3) how to work with existing materials that are assigned to us and get the best out of them 4) how to get inspired by others

– Challenge the status quo: which traditionally in education is the assumption that “The teacher knows more than the students. The students learn from the teacher”. But maybe students can also create value and knowledge for each others. At least every student is really good or really interested in something: have each of them give a short lesson on that topic to the others. Maybe it’s not going to be anything new, or maybe yes. In any case, you will train communication skills and the underline the importance of having a personal opinion on certain matters.

104 agents and counting!

So far -since October 2009- we had 104 agents joining our struggle to act differently and create positive impact around us!

Thanks everybody!

In this occasion, we would like especially to thank our “platinum ambassador” Kalevi “Eetu” Ekman (who introduced enthusiastically the Licence to all the visitors of Aalto Design Factory, Espoo) and our “golden agent” Michele Johnson (who has been constantly reporting to us about her “acting differently” and has been spreading the message in Belgium very actively).

“Have the courage to follow and to show the others how to follow”

Having the courage of acting differently sometimes is not enough. We have to inspire others to become followers, who enthusiastically and bravely would join us in our idea. So leadership doesn’t belong completely to the first person, it is a matter of sharing the responsibility with the ones who follow you and treat them as equals.

In this TED Talk Derek Sivers illustrates leadership from a new point of view, and with a twist of humor:

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html

Thinking about rethinking your impact…

Found a nice and simple – yet powerful- visualization of a potential situation for acting differently (meetings, meet ups…).

Preserve people’s amazing resources, don’t allow anymore waste of potential in soo many daily situations: time to act!

Yay!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davegray/4254866950/in/photostream/

(Image by Dave Gray)

ROCK BAND coffee break in Design Factory

We’re trying to organize this small event – an alternative and playful coffee break – in Design Factory, which is the structure where we are located.

Here in DF there are many teams working on different things at the same time: we have startups, research groups, the coordination staff of the Factory itself, students involved in several programmes and so on and on.

A huge bunch of people. Interesting people. But busy people.

They could have a lot to share, not only about their work, but also the feeling of being “army buddies” in the same place and in the same community. But as I said, everybody is really busy with their projects, so it just sadly ends up that networking and sharing is never enough.

Our impression was confirmed by DF Coach Andy, so we decided to go for this idea (that can actually be a small pilot for future wilder and bigger playful sessions).

Having a nice room in the underground level, with comfy chairs, a huge screen, Playstation and all the instruments to play Rock Band, we decided to invite DF people to join there and have an alternative coffee break.

They just need to grab their cups and join us in Kino. Then the fun part comes: we’ll make them team up with other DF people for a Rock Band team challenge, where the teams will have members from different organizations in DF.

And if they don’t want to grab a microphone, guitar controller or drumsticks, they can come around anyway to
team up, have fun and talk to new people.

We believe in the human factor as a positive resource in every activity and we’d like to promote all kinds of micro-actions aiming to change the attitude of people towards each others in workplaces. In this case, we would like to offer an occasion of relax and networking to all the people working in DF, so as to increase the feeling of belonging to this great community.

We sent the invitation to everybody through the internal mailing list (which is actually boycotting us, because a moderator should check it first… so we’re actually waiting for it to be posted) and the he event is also on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=170184939653&ref=nf).

Let’s see how it goes, wish us luck! 😉

An Inspiring Situation: Y Combinator

During our trip to Silicon Valley, we had the chance to visit the headquarters of Y Combinator, a venture firm specialized in funding early startups in the field of web services and software.

I immediately thought it was an interesting place, because it is different from the “regular” startup incubator. And in different practice resides innovation.

First point, they fund the startups as batches: since many of the problems at this early stage are similar, they are efficiently faced in the same moment. This works out better both for Y Combinator, in which the staff is kept at the minimum necessary (being a bit underpressure pushes to always try to create new approaches to do things), and for the startups that end up in helping each other. It is an environment that promotes networking, with the positive effects that you might find help for whatever you need (from beta testers to advice on how to solve some problems). Y Combinator founder Paul Graham told us that it even happened that more successful startups ended up hiring people from failed startups, because even though the project didn’t work out, they have recognized the skills of the teams.

And yes, another great thing about Silicon Valley’s culture in general is the acceptance and the respect of the failure: they live it as a normal situation of life and not like the endpoint. “Having scars” is valuable, because it’s the only way to really learn and grow. In Europe this understanding is well far to be reached. Since elementary school, going up through sport activities, university and working life, who makes mistakes is ususally punished and his/her own skills are put in doubt. Too often the value of a person is dangerously overalpped the value of a specific idea, so that in the end the identification of the person with his/her work success rate is complete.

And if the possibility of failing is banned, then – as any tabu – it generates fear.

And fear prevents you to think clearly.

And if you don’t think clearly, the possibility of major screw-ups increases.

So you are even more scared and you don’t dare to do anything good, brave, innovative.

In Silicon Valley they understood that this witch circle of fear is harmful to good ideas, and it would be time for us to understand it as well.

 

But let’s go back to some more specific aspects of Y Combinator.

Usually funding and time resources are not very loose: each startup is given not more than 20.000 bucks and the batches are incubated for around 10 weeks. This recipe aims at finding the more synthetic solution and teaches the teams how to work in economy and efficiency. Mainly the money is used to cover the living expenses of the team, who is asked to move to the Bay Area (investors, resources, venture capitals and networks are there), and the support is defined especially in terms of help, support and mentoring. All this programme-for-success is payed back by the startups giving a 2-10% of the stakes to Y Combinator.

Anyway, when the teams are asked to come to the Bay Area, they aren’t asked to go to the same place: they have to indipendently find a workspace for themselves, because at YC that incubators where people work in the same building are not good. You ebgin to feel like an employee and this doesn’t support the correct growth of the ideas and of the company.

Last but not least, I think is significative to think about how YC was born, because this tells very much about the culture: it was actually the (good) fruit of a unpredictable prototyping. The concept was born as an alternative to summer jobs (from here the 3 months circa lenght of the programme), which are usually crappy and don’t really provide responsibilities and growth for the students. The founders of YC tested and learnt “how to be investors and coaches” on the skin of their first batch of students’startups, which actually didn’t have many expectations (and so once again failure was a possible part of the “family portrait”). They got their hands dirty being near to their “users” and this is also something they ask from their incubated startups. Luckily and skillfully enough, the experiment was a success and working with 2 batches a year, they managed to fund already 118 startups with their “dynamic” and lightweight formula.

And actually most of the companies manage to produce a demo by the end of their work with YC.

So prototyping, dirty hands (for the work), right networking, determination and enthusiasm are the drivers of this interesting environment.

 

To read more about Y Combinator: http://ycombinator.com/index.html

 

Posted by S.

Reflections from San Francisco: Think=Do=Tell?

Hei dudes,

at the moment our team is in the USA, travelling with fellows from Aalto Enterpreneurship Society, students, start-up enterpreneurs & future enterpreneurs. We actually belong to the last category, since we won Aaltoes Pitching 2 weeks ago with a business idea in the field of social enterpreneursip. We’re trying now to discover more about suitable models and strategies, meeting interesting people and hearing stories, so as to come back to Helsinki fully loaded with new knowledge and energy.

 

But that’s just the framework, let’s go back to our on-the-road management innovation research.

 

We are particularly proud because we managed to put under contract some people from Silicon Valley. Monday all the Aaltoes group sat down in the nice Yerba Buena Gardens together with Marie Domingo and IdaRose Sylvester to discuss the use of social media and how to create -for european start-ups- a coherent media presence in the US. Marie has a long career in public relations and Ida runs a company called the SiliconValleyLink.

 

Apart from being able to have a nice time with them and putting the ladies under contract (they really liked the idea and kindly listened to our ideas), a couple of interesting things came up during the discussion.

 

One of the key points in the debate was that is important for europeans to have visibility in Silicon Valley, even if they are somewhere else.

(And here came the interesting episode of  a business guy who created a Skype american number in order to appear as he was still here, even if he was back in Europe).

IdaRose said that, even if it sounds incredible, there is always a “lack” of interesting stories, meaning that if you succeed to build and tell your/your company’s story in a different way (and keep the storytelling coherent), people will listen to you. The important thing to be interesting is to make your differences be your strength.

 

So, I think, acting differently becomes a strategical resource, a “strength” as we’ve seen: it affects the management and how you operate your company, but also how you communicate your story. It has a double action, in-house and towards the environment around you (customers, partners, investors, competitors, media…).

Acting is, anyway, a way of communicating.

A person who doesn’t talk to you is still communicating a lot through this voluntary action.

And so communicating is also a way of acting.

 

It seems that different stories have to be communicated in a different way. Communicating differently is a way of acting differently, so it might as well anticipate and trigger the purpose of thinking innovative stuff out of the box.

To be really innovative we should perhaps undermine even the logical (dogmatical?) chain “I think -> I do -> I talk about it” and create new, more personal approaches.

Approaches in which actions (DO) are statements (TELL)

and ideas (THINK) become sudden actions through faster, instant prototyping (DO),

and your actions (DO) become immediately, transparently transformed in contents and shared outwards (TELL).

 

Posted by S.

Theme of the 1st period; MIND YOUR COLLEAGUES

To inspire your actions there will be a special theme for each period to stimulate you to act differently.
The theme of this period is MIND YOUR COLLEAGUES.
Give credit to someone you don’t normally give credits but really deserves it! Be a nice colleague and (hopefully) get treated better yourself too.

Want to be a “licenced agent”? Now you can!

Hey!

The licences to act differently arrived and you can get yours today. The only thing you need to do is to be very committed in bringing on positive changes with your actions and sign a small contract with us (you can check it from the page “contract” here in our side menu).

By signing the contract  you engage yourself to act differently and report us about it:

1. Any moment you feel bored, fear, embarrasment or suspicion… act differently (aiming at creating a positive impact)!
2. Then report it to us: it’s not bragging, it’s sharing knowledge! In the report describe the situation you were involved in when you acted differently (or were just thinking about to act differently but you actually didn’t). Please describe also the out come of the act, what were the impacts, what status quo you think you challenged.

Just post your brave deed here on the blog
or http://www.facebook.com/groups.php#/group.php?gid=290049060402
or at act.differently@gmail.com

The format of the report is free (text, video, comics, a song etc.), whatever helps you to better make your point.

And no need to report in English either, you can use a language you feel comfortable with (our super-team speaks English, Finnish, Swedish, Italian).