Tag: design thinking

Posted on

Artistic Practice and Artistic Attitude: what do they mean?

The ideas I’m leveraging by using these terms come from “Creative Company” written by Dirk Dobiey and Thomas Köplin.

Artistic Attitude means being curious, passionate/ tenacious, confident, and resilient, while artistic practice embodies perception, reflection, play, and performance. These two ideas combine to be learning from the artistic experience of artists.

Artistic Attitude is about the mindset, and Artistic Practice is about the actual activities of looking at something and considering from all angles/sides, and asking questions, then thinking about it and combining it with what’s know and experimenting through play and ultimately performance. Especially the artistic practice piece looks like iterations of trial and error to see what works and what doesn’t.

Both Artistic Attitude and Artistic Practice also tie into other frameworks and methodologies, like New Work, Agile, and Design Thinking although those frameworks/ methodologies don’t make the connection with learning from artists.

(Note: Creative Company is available in both English and German and I co-edited the English version.)

Posted on

Knowledge vs. Learning vs. Information vs. transfer

I just recently received an email about disaster preparedness, it contained a scan of a document that the person who sent it to me had received. What does this have to do with KM?

Nothing and everything.

The point the person who sent me the scanned document was making was that he had received this document in the middle of summer, while people were away on vacation, it was poorly produced, there didn’t seem to be an electronic version available, and he believed that if any of these floods, fires, earthquakes etc. ever happened (or maybe that should be when they happen), he wouldn’t be able to remember the information in the document (which was about 10 pages long), and if he remembered that he had received this document, he wouldn’t be able to find it again.

Again, so what you say? What does this have to do with KM or learning or information or anything at all?

Well, if we are doing knowledge management, or learning management or information management we need to be concerned about how knowledge/information gets transferred and shared. How do the users want to receive it? What is their environment like? What circumstances will they be using this information/knowledge in? Who is going to be using this knowledge/information.

If we don’t design our systems and processes with the users in mind, all of the users, not just some of the users, they won’t use the knowledge/information and then what good is all the effort we put into implementing our KM/Learning/Information program?