Process Knowledge

"Process knowledge is more sustainable for much longer periods of time than
any form of content knowledge."

GK VanPatter

Co-Founder

Humantific

Art puts us to sleep

"ART HAS GOTTEN SO....I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK ART IS ABOUT NOW. IT DOESN'T DO ANYTHING. LIKE MALCOLM X SAID, IT'S LIKE NOVOCAINE. IT USED TO WAKE YOU UP BUT NOW IT PUTS YOU TO SLEEP. I THINK THAT ART NOW IS PUTTING PEOPLE TO SLEEP."

David Hammons

Transformation Design Watch: Mission Pie

WANDER INTO MISSION PIE, a corner café in San Francisco best known for its namesake baked goods, and the place looks familiar enough. The 10 or so wooden tables, all in close proximity, are filled with pie-eating, warm-beverage-sipping customers. Some people chat, while others read leftover newspapers or peck out e-mail messages from their laptops. Swap the pie for bagels, and you could be in another San Francisco café.

But stick around awhile, and the peculiarities of Mission Pie become apparent. First off, roughly half of Mission Pie’s 14-person staff is young – really young. But they’re not the usual grad-school Lit majors or aspiring musicians working in so many of the city’s eateries. They’re either current or former students from Mission High, a nearby public high school with 68 per cent of the kids eligible to receive free and reduced-cost lunches. San Francisco native Karen Heisler, Mission Pie’s owner, is largely paying the kids to understand where their food comes from and its impact on their bodies, their neighborhood and the world at large.

There’s a surprisingly complex system behind a slice of Mission Pie’s plum frangipane or mixed-berry tart. Mission Pie is part of a larger system: Pie Ranch is a 27-acre parcel about 90 minutes from the café and well positioned above the historic Steele Ranch. Named for its shape when viewed from atop a nearby ridge, it operates as an educational non-profit with the goal ofinspiring urban youth to transform their relationships to food, and to work with their communities in building healthier local food systems. Not only does Pie Ranch supply the café with berries, pumpkins and apples, it welcomes the café’s Mission High staff to work the land, contemplate the crops and sample the fresh food.

As both Mission Pie and Pie Ranch have found, the simple task of showing people where their food comes from and pointing to the impact of industrialized farming touches off all sorts of big system challenges, from obesity and education to sustainability and personal food-related attitudes and behaviours.

To design compelling, effective solutions for challenges of all sizes, an organization must consider the overarching system it hooks into. Heisler is a firm believer in the necessity of the human element – the community as a manifestation of the system. “Lose the human aspect,” she says, “and the system falls apart.”
In our work, we see system disconnects around us all the time. As networks grow and mutate, designers are forced to tackle issues of scale, legacy and influence. This reminds us that life is complex, and as designers, business people and other creative thinkers, we must resist both the seduction of simplicity and the safety of Byzantine networks that allow good ideas to fade and humans to be lost or forgotten.

When tackling major challenges, we think about ‘systems at scale’, which involves two distinct elements: designing systems that work and influencing people’s thinking at mass scale. The best design solutions do both.

Source: Rotman School of Management Winter 2009 Issue - "Designing Systems at Scale"