The project
An ontology-for-change
This project is born with the intent of starting a conversation and an investigation about co-design practices that have as main aim a declination of the term "change".
*this is a work in progress, feel free to consult the repository on the top right of this page
Main Assumptions
Change or transformation?
Transformation is for sure more unpredictable then changing, that is set up with a clear goal in mind. The word "transformation" indicates an action during an unknown amount of time, and therefore unpredictable. In an international scenario, interest towards change in agencies or other types of organizations have been increasing in the last years, so that we can talk about "Change management".
Nowadays we're obsessed with change, innovation and everything that has to do with 'getting better at things'. In the performance society, it is easy to talk about failures with respect to the goals achieved, but it's deinitely more complex to talk about change in different communities set ups, together with all the environment assets involved. In co-design and service design practices, one thing is taken for granted: never take just one point of view when you're looking for a solution. As you will read later, the approach here follows the DRY claim, "Don't repeat yourself", taken from the devops world.
Wy it is important to talk about change
In todays's concerning of agencies and corporations, co-design and partecipative practices are more than an "ornamental" structure that goes after the design system. Talking of that, it is easy to delegate this practices to a little part of the design process. What we want to say is that, among with other issues, that of "low efficacy" seems strictly related to the adaptation of design strategies. Co-design practices, therefore ensure the concepts of inclusivity and sustainability.
Frame for change
Framework for Change, ideated by Tesserae, provides a basic logic framework to understand the complexity of factors influencing the development of inclusive, participated and integrated projects. It is a conceptual map to navigate transformative processes at large, completed by a set of questions that you should ask yourself along the path and a collection of tools to inspire visionary and inclusive solutions.
The framework is based on four basic dimensions of change (fields), four essential variables and eight key moments.
At the centre of the scheme is the function of alignment, which represents the key role of those in charge of steering a transformative process: facilitators, managers, planners, project coordinators, community activators . Their essential responsibility is to enhance the alignment of different perspectives and variables and to coordinate tasks and responsibilities.
Maps, diagrams…
Aoart from that of communication, the fields of research are moving towards a visual and impactful way of representing concepts. Maps, diagrams and networks are by far the most used words in content creation in and outside academic circles.
See for example Dr Nicolas Figay explainining the difference of System Design Language (UML2/SysML) and Enterprise Architecture (ArchiMate): "If UML is a software system design language, relying on object and component paradigms, ArchiMate is an architectural description language (as defined by ISO 42010), aiming at describing enterprise working environment and planning its transformation”. These two methods clearly they do not support a layered architecture.
Furthermore, dealing with the discourse of knowledge graphs, there’s also a whole scenario about Enterprise Knowledge Graphs (EKG), where the passage from the field-taxonomies to the very heart of the ontology is clear. Of course, as we can see, supply chain is involved in all of this. This means having some things produced and some things consumed. Let's dive into this conversation.
An ontology for codesign: pro and contra
PRO The idea of a Linked Data Infrastructure to support actions of citizen curation is not new, see spice project of the Horizon 2020, for example. Nevertheless, here we intend to investigate what professionists that work with co-creation practices can do, regarding the various outputs.
In the case of co-creation practices, more precisely of practices leading hopefully to a change, is obvious that 1) certain results are not guaranteed, and some will never be reached 2) user involvment in planning, implementation and evaluation of projects takes a lot of the available resources from the actors and the environment itself.
Sure is that codesign practices represent an established way to give voice to different communities, addressing multifaceted issues and dealing with power flows in the contemporary city.
The intuition for the project came after providing prototype panels of the F4C into the Transition Pathways.
This can be a way of giving ontology development a try and also having the possibility to rewrite the narrative of a cross-disciplinary team in ontology modelling.
The idea of an ontology dealing with the concept of change is thrilling: “change” can mean a lot of different outputs regarding the situation.
CONTRA Ontology mapping provides the possibility to move from a two-dimensional, relational database to the visually appealing knowledge graph. A knowledge graph represents relations among classes and abstracts reality. However, this could result in an underrepresentation of certain ecosystem dynamics and their communities' interests. Co-design is also a complex process. Furthermore, since design is in itself a process of changing current situations in favor of a solution-based one, it can be difficult for designer to know where to start and how to approach a knowledge graph creation.
The visual rendering of the zeitgeist: from data to co-design
Visual means are used in and out of the academic walls to ensure faster learning processes and better performances in terms of learning requirements.
Diagrams, maps and in general, icons are able to switch on concepts in our memories. That’s why knowledge graphs are more than ever popular and are destined to be used, both in the context of semantic web and in the general information retrieval process.
But we know that an ontology is developed to ensure first of all interoperability and open science practices for a common knowledge domain: dealing with codesign practices involves a great amount of effort, too, in terms of knowledge organization and setting up the best conditions to “make it work”.
Practices of self-data visualization are just one of the forms of dealing with evolution-in-time-and data-fetching, alias storytelling with data, or “semantic cartography” as said by Figay here.
Even if this change-during-time seems to be difficult to display in ontological terms, we rely on the abstraction of concepts, starting form nothing less than the F4C. When developed, the ontology will be a tool to approach other designers and professionists to deal with this piece of open knowledge.
Research Questions
(What we want to inspect and our expectations)
As a starting point for our research we started from the Framework For Change Developed by us.
The Framework for change is also a tool used in the Transition Pathways in the occasion of the European project Horizon2020.
When adopting the Framework For Change, main goal in the context of a project is the development of: - inclusive - participated - integrated projects.
Therefore, we asked ourselves:
0) Why do we want to develop an ontology? Because it’s an interesting investigation. Because this could be a way to develop a vocabulary for semantic mapping (link= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_mapper) and community dialogue.
An ontology is the formalization of a classification gathered from a precise terminology, belonging to a precise domain made by textual and machine readable definitions rif
1) What aspects of the ontology development we want to use to enhance the concept of change in co-design practices? Co-designing for a common environment inhabited by different actors is an integral part of the organic procedure for change. Therefore we want to enhance a better cooperation and trust building between stakeholders and citizens.
2) What are the liits of past works that we can hopefully work on? [in progress]
3) Are we interested in developing a simple Domain Ontology or a Top-Domain one? Of course, a top-domain ontology is a long and interesting process. As stated before, this project starts as an investigation.