Design for Agency at Hyper Island

As with other exploratory projects, translating ideas and research into tangible material to use with people is a hugely valuable process. And by working with the amazing students at Hyper Island I’ve gained a huge amount of focus on how to make things actually happen—not just in a learning context but also on Redfront’s client projects.

Specifically, designing for agency becomes about reimagining organisations as narratives and mechanisms that enable everyone. But these narratives and mechanisms are crucial. They form the basis of what I’ve been doing at Hyper Island and also how I bring this work into Redfront’s projects. I’d like to give a brief introduction to them here.

Where do we start when we work together? In this regard I’ve been largely influenced by Transition Design and the importance it affords to “visions”. Of course a group of individuals who want to work together in some way need something to align them; and that can be anything from a shared sense of purpose to a strategy (whatever form that might take). But the idea of a vision seems to me to be a far more powerful tool. Firstly, a vision sufficiently far into the future helps us move beyond the more mundane and immediate considerations that might hold us back.

But more usefully, a long-term vision can only really be a shared story. If we project ourselves fifty years into the future (as has been a useful construct in this work) then we need to be telling stories, and it makes sense to be telling those stories together. I don’t need to write here about the importance of storytelling but it’s worth reiterating just how much stories can bind people together and give them shared meaning.

In the case of the students at Hyper Island it’s essential that they’ve already spent some time immersed with clients for whom we’re creating a future narrative. By better understanding the organisation and sector we’re working with we can create better stories, rooted in historical and present reality. But this kind of work can still be tricky: getting the balance right between the feasible and fantasy requires not just knowledge of the organisation and its immediate context but also an ability to scope the wider environment for things that will impact us in the future.

It’s fairly obvious that most of what we look to borrow from elsewhere is either the result of strategy rather than strategy itself, or is some sort of reverse engineering of success that doesn’t really surface the complex conditions that created that success.

So when I talk about (and use) mechanisms, what I mean is how can we take the unique narrative we’ve created—and the unique group of individuals we’ve gathered—as a frame of reference for building our own set of mechanisms for individual agency?

These two approaches—narratives and mechanisms—are the core, practical elements of how I’ve worked with the students at Hyper Island. But they’re also vital to the way I approach projects at Redfront. Over the course of the next few case study posts I’ll talk more about these elements and how we’ve applied them.

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