Hacking Life is a presentation my colleague Dina Mehta made at Microsoft SCS 2012 in January. The session was “Unintended Consequences and Unexpected Practices” organized by danah boyd and Mike Ananny.

When she first told me she was going, we started talking about hacker culture as an early question pointed to looking at file sharing, pirated copies and more. In this presentation Dina makes a nice case viewing “hacking” as a generative construct for thinking, and an organizing principle for life … hacking life and living … rather than it being just about hacking infrastructure to do different things. In other words think about how hacking empowers the user and betters their life, rather than the technical approach or the work around. And this presentation is not about the much-touted concept of Jugaad!

Watch the video. Frankly my favorite examples come towards the end.

What happens when people reach for more… and see the advantage of “hacking towards a better future”? Consider what you have hacked recently, or your kids, or something you’ve seen that was unexpected? Hacking often has the connotation of geeky, rather than creating something new. Yet many of the simple examples above show how people are “hacking” the environment, the public and private space around them. Example – if you have no space or privacy then how do you hack life for intimacy?

Download Convo Kids Brochure

Join us in 2012 in India for a learning and co-creation program; a deep immersion into the lives of 12 to 21 year old highly connected kids and youth. Secure at least 10 break- through insights to help marketing and innovation teams make better product and branding decisions over the next 2-5 years. Come and find out how they are going to change the world.

This longitudinal immersion and co-creation program is designed to help you:

Very rarely do we get the opportunity to showcase our work!  Our Wikipedia Mobile Strategy Project – Taking Wikipedia Mobile – is now online and free to access.  It is part of a broader global research program covering India, Brazil and the US.  You can review all materials we used, and view the final report. It’s a work in progress – we are still to publish the entire Blography with all raw data in it and a set of key videos from our fieldwork and workshop.

The Research was conducted across Bangalore & Delhi to provide us the opportunity to cover several Indic language readers and editors (English, HIndi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, perhaps Malayalam as well). A combination of face-to-face in-home/in-office ethnographic immersions, a blography (online pre-tasks and diaries) and a participatory co-creation workshop.

Here’s the table of contents and a few key slides: 

Visit the project page on Wikipedia.

Discovered a link to an old blogpost I had done in 2008, when we were just beginning to refine our Learning Journey offerings. Three years later, its more true than ever!  Updated some links and reposting here:

versus

Great piece on Social Learning titled Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. The supercool text illustrations are by Susan E. Haviland.

Some snippets I really enjoyed:

What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.

There is a second, perhaps even more significant, aspect of social learning. Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field.

In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field.⁹ But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.

Although this article has been written in the context of education, there are some great learnings for researchers, ethnographers and for business too. One of the greatest challenges and often a dilemma is how to leverage social tools into research and marketing that would create a shift from a much hyped must-do model based on explicit learning (yeah – lets go build a social network or lets start a Facebook community for our brand) to a more intuitive method grounded in tacit knowledge and real experience.

One reason why we believe researchers experimenting with these tools should immerse themselves in using them first, one reason why we believe all brand managers should build their own social media toolkits through actual experience! One of the problems with this is the time commitments required for these personal explorations, which could then morph into professional insights. I cannot emphasize more the importance of being touched at a personal level for developing a learning-to-be mindset. That’s what good Learning Journeys can accomplish.

For the right job, in the right situation there’s nothing more powerful than getting the client to come to grips with a persona they don’t know or understand well. We know that personas can help organizations have the conversations they need to have. Over the last few years working with technology products in particular we’ve seen this first hand. The engineers who are designing products and services sometimes don’t know or  understand how people really live, what conditions they live in, what work they do, what stress and painpoints exist in their lives. We believe Personas help in creating effective value propositions for a representative user group by understanding them in depth.

What’s a Persona: a description of a representative user.  Personas tell us who the user is, what they wish to do with your products or service, why they buy and use – what their motivations and drivers are, how your product/service fits into the context of their lives.

Examples of Personas we have co-created with our participants and clients in the last year. Categories we studied ranged from tech products, mobile phones, wikipedia, naturals based personal care product ranges.  You will notice that some of the personas are “kaccha” (unfinished) and deliberately so.  And in some cases, we’ve brught in a designer to help us create an impactful visual representation of the persona.

Earlier this year, we organized a learning journey for a group – a multi-client exploratory team from the computing, telecom and banking sectors on participatory service networks in India. It was quite a challenge to cover both depth and width of how they manifest themselves in India, in a week and in just one city, Mumbai. We identified themes of interest and devoted a day to each theme.  The Client had originally asked for 10 interviews with people involved in Participatory Social Networks during that period when they were visiting India. We talked the Client out of the idea of restricting the program to Interviews with 10 people – instead, we recommended this program:

We had theme days, all in the context of the subject under study:

• Networking and PopCulture
• Community, the Slum and the BOP
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Connected Youth – how they live, work, play
• Enterprise and Networks
• Migrants and their Networks
• Taking it Home

Do write to us if you’d like more details on Learning Journeys with Convo!  Dina@convo.org or Stuart@convo.org.

After a recent workshop we were having a discussion and admiring some pictures of what looked to be a wonderful workshop on social media. For a moment I was reflecting on my own bad handwriting; frankly a scrawl that produces legible readable flipcharts but hardly art. Yet it’s an important lesson and one to understand. I’m very proud that our CONVO WORKSHOPS we run don’t have Graphic Illustrators or Graphic Recorders in the room. For me there’s a number of good reasons why not.

1. Engage the Group in the Conversation by helping to facilitate the product of the result by them.

2. Resort to large pens and big oversized post-its early so “little”, writing is quickly banned. I usually manage this with the introductory exercise.  In other words give the group from the get go the power to scribe, and draw and don’t ever confront them with “oh they are so good I will never draw like that”.

3. Participants draw and then often act it out. Many times I’ve had them become design co’s, or agencies creating ads and posters. For a good conversation – you really want people to get into their work. And that may be the most important part to stimulating a conversation.

So… how do we help the process. Well beyond facilitating it, we have a pretty good idea on how to help spec and generate outputs that will add value. A conversation is cumulative. Every so often there’s a reset. Still that’s all about accelerating learning and creating a virtuous circle. Innovative ideas feed on themselves. All we can hope to bring is questions, stimulus, and positive energy. Then we make sure to quietly video the real moment – and capture in images work as it progress. More often then not… at the end of the day the pictures tell the story.

And back to the graphic recorder. Yes they have a place and are awesome to watch. Yet be wary for the work is owned by the graphic recorder and not necessarily by the audience although I’m sure they will be very enamored by the experience.

Blographies add to the conversation! We’ve been using the term “Blography” to help explain how we capture information for clients on longer ethnographic research projects in a real-time immersive and agile way. As all our team members are using blog it was only natural to consider where they fit in a research program today. For the client (reader) it’s a great and transparent way to see how our field work is progressing. A typical project today combines direct inputs from participants; typically forms (mobile or PC enabled) which result in blog posts and updates to the common database. This creates a number of benefits.

Discussions with the client can become real-time. This is particularly important when doing more longitudinal studies. Our client blog-space remains completely private. Which means we can have an ongoing conversation around everything from transcripts, interview summaries, emerging themes, planning and scheduling, to diary updates, questions of the week for participants etc.

There’s a second aspect. Blographies can save money and get greater depth. We find we are using them more and more to screen participants, target further areas for inquiry. We are also using them to set up and get to know participants before running co-creation workshops with them.

It also means – at the end of the job you also get a repository of information that is accessible, searchable, and readily sorted into new categories or tagged to be looked at in different ways. If required we can even turn it into a “book” for you.

A long time ago (almost 10 years) …. two people began blogging. Stuart started first naming his blog Unbound Spiral and using the tagline “an unbound place for inquiry, conversation…. feed the spiral“. Spiral referred to innovation and accelerating feedback loops required by organizations to learn faster and a deep curiosity about the future. A few months later Dina, who ran her little company Explore Research & Consultancy, began blogging. She called her blog “Conversations with Dina – Creative Chaos” and rapidly became one of India’s well-known blogs. Blogging at the time was pioneering, it was going to revolutionize the publishing business (it has although slower than we thought at the time) and it gave people a voice. We both did it because we wanted a conversation that crossed boundaries, and together we built a new network of remarkable people who continue to inform us today. Our business today is truly global because the Internet made the conversations and relationships possible.

Over the years independently and as a team working together we’ve been in the middle of understanding and innovating aroundt the change brought by blogging, social networks, social media, communications and VoIP, and the acceleration to mobile centric lifestyles. In 2005 we created Mosoci together. The Mo—So — being short for mobile social. We’ve always been more flexible on the interpretation of the last too letters. We started by bringing our research and strategy skills together and launched Brand 2.0 workshops in 2005.  We learned two things… we were about 3 years ahead of the market and almost no one ever says Mosoci the way we intended. Mosoci continued to grow into the strategic research company we found we were building. We continued to collaborate and supported other ventures at the same time particularly around social networks, and increasingly mobile apps.

All good businesses are embodied in a conversation. We realized we needed a name that we were really passionate about, that people would just get, and embodies what really switches us on when it relates to business and getting things done. “Convo” is something we are very proud to launch and be a part of. Every organization can improve on the conversations they have. It’s a very easy brand for us to keep focused on that promise too. At Mosoci we had the promise “We engage you in agile conversations to grow your business.” Today we think a little harder about how we can help you “nurture the conversations you need to have.

We’ve moved more of our business development into longitudinal ethnography, blographies, and co-creation workshops with the help of a fabulous team including Shubhangi, Aparna, Dipti, Vinita and Andre. We’ve set up real-time reporting systems for fieldwork, and designed methods that should lead to better conversations with your customers, internally and we trust with us. Convo is more than just an idea – using the brand is stimulating and helping us grow in new ways.

We registered Convo in 2010. It’s effectively been in stealth mode since then. For the last 9 months we’ve been rolling out our approach. We’ve had wonderful clients over the period and the work has just kept growing.  Really for us… Convo is a very old idea although it is now a very recent statement about who we are. Finally we have something that really merges Explore Research with Mosoci. We hope you will join us in this new adventure.