The last session I went to at #p4a16 was ‘Culture Coding’ from Ari-Pekka Lappi was great. He explored how you can use the notion of ‘coding’ with its ‘function’ concepts to build design routines into your practices. In the same way that a kid could use Scratch with its drag-n-drop code snippets to form loops and such, you can do the same when trying to generate new ideas, or to build upon other ones that you already have. This was something I’d not thought about before and was just ‘so cool’ that I’ll need to use it with CityLab students this week and see how it works in practice.

The basic idea goes from the observations noted in the Tweet from @cuxdu during the session:

With ‘code’ snippets on Stattys we can easily move the concepts around to try different ideas. The concepts came in different formats. There were ‘functions’ like ‘define main function(s)’, ‘contrast’, ‘polarise’, ‘overlap’, ‘oscillate’, ‘compose music/make a constallation’ and others likes ‘loop’, ‘repeat 3 times’, ‘combine’ and similar. There was also a notion of conceptual layers like ‘family’, ‘criminal mind’, ‘work’, ‘business’, and others which you could pull in as context as needed. Another group was around objects with concepts like ‘pick an object’, ‘pick another object’, ‘define main function(s)’, ‘eliminate the main function’, ‘think of the use of the product’, ‘why would anyone want it’, ‘how it feels’, ‘swap the core essences’, ‘substitute the main function of one with the main function of another’, ‘add something to the object to make it impossible (surrealise)’

The best(?) bit was using examples like this ‘pick an object’, and ‘pick another object’ whereby you’d pick someting in the room and take something away so that it doesn’t work. For example, take a chair and remove a leg and while it maintains the shape, it won’t work the same way anymore.

This was real cool as with this process you should be able to take a group of people and have them run through a few of these exercises and generate a number of possible product or service ideas without too much trouble. With a bit of practice delivering this as a workshop one should be able to guide them to useful ideas.

It will be interesting to do this with a group of students on Wednesday for the Aberdeen CityLab project and see how they are able to apply this to their current ideas.

UPDATE 5 November 2016: I used this in a workshop at #creakix 2016 which went well, and helped me as this  ‘culture_coding‘ workshop .