Back to the grind, but with peace of mind

This year, I decided to use my summer vacation to do the opposite of what I did last year (which was to travel abroad practically non-stop and have drastic misadventures such as losing my luggage for a month and literally almost breaking my back paragliding) - so staycation it was, except for one glorious week in Denmark, having a relaxing cycling trip with my best friends. And it was purely glorious.

I normally self-identify as an extrovert hell yeah-sayer who will try anything new at the drop of a hat and who will sign up for adventure whether it's a good idea or not. But the wisdom of age, perhaps some complacency (?)  and the last few years' "learning by trauma" has taught me this: I have two sides, and the other one* craves alone time, stillness, unplanned days and nights and just time to potter around at home and take care of things, or myself.

Just having the time to meander, move furniture, fix things (like a leaky plumbing thingy in the toilet tank - yeah it's the opposite of glamourous, but whatever, I rock! ;), sleep in, dream, re-stock, plant things, go swimming, practice dancing and MAKE things (I'll tell the story of my multiple unfinished tailoring projects some other time) was just what I needed. I felt like I had enough time to spend with the family at our place in the country and to really enjoy it, too. Also, the home town does a funny combo of simmering down but also livening up a bit in the summer, with outdoor concerts, summertime specials and whatnot. Heck, staying at home this year also had the extra benefit that I was around whenever those rare birds called "returning childhood friends" came back to town for their infrequent visits. :) And as Swedes are so compelled to point out - we were lucky with the weather. I have been outside and at the beach so much this summer that I've turned a shade of gingerbread that I didn't know I had in me. ;) So a big thumbs up to staying home! I actually truly feel rested (although I still enjoy sleeping in... ;)

It looks like an exciting autumn term coming up. I will be kicking off an EU project on Social Sustainability and going to a conference at Penn State in September, attempting a major re-haul of some of my teaching activities, going to several courses in leadership and teaching, and (last but not least) participating in a national competition where several university researchers compete in presenting research to a layman audience in 3 minutes. Particularly the EU project will be an exciting source of studies and collaborations with new international colleagues.

So here's to a challenging and exciting next few months working alongside a bunch of great people! Hope that I can keep the energy level up to carry it through :) After this summer, I'm feeling positive...

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* At the leadership course I attended in May, where we focused on the handling and care of personality types, we were taught that according to Jungian typology, our rare penchants to act the opposite of how we normally do is called our "shadow side", and that we should embrace and nurture it so as to gain access to all our 'modes', and to become less judgmental of other personality types. So all summer long, I have been giving my dark side cookies ;)

Creativity = reinventing the box

I'm not a big fan of the expression "think outside the box".

I gradually realized this at a recent workshop, where we were requested to do just that, in order to be creative and come up with new ideas for a project in the coming year. Although we were split into groups and requested to be 'wild and crazy' with our ideas, we were also asked to answer a list of questions in order to make our ideas "actionable", which (in my mind) put us in another box. The result of this was that within the group I was in, much of the discussion ended up being focused not on ideas, but on what 'the box' was, because each person in the group saw different limitations for giving ideas depending on their role; also, one person took it upon himself to make us stick to answering the list of questions (which objectively speaking was perfectly sensible leadership), but of course that moved focus from freewheeling to delivering. This same person at one point said that the group depended on me to "be the creative one", which kind of dismayed me (even though I believe he meant it as a compliment). That statement revealed a perception I don't believe in - that "creative" is a personality trait, rather than a mode of thought. In other words - the exercise was not really the best breeding ground for our group as a whole for any form of brainstorming.

One major reason "think outside the box" doesn't sit well with me is that I have a feeling that the box appears very differently to different people. More than that, its importance and function, as well as its right to have power over us, are very different in people's minds - what is its purpose? Is it meant to offer stability, security and a safe boundary demarcating who belongs and who doesn't? Is it a useful mental barrier to stop us from doing things in an entirely haphazard way? Is it meant to contain us, and be an instrument of control in service of the powers that be? Is it a provocation meant to inspire rebellion? Or is it a neutral support structure that we may crawl into, bat around, climb on top of, wear as an armour, punch holes in, crumple, or use for the sole purpose of making funny percussive sound effects? (for more on that subject, see internet cat videos)

In my experience, the request underlying "think outside the box" in a job-related situation is often "please produce something beyond our normally expected performance". However, leaders requesting this without establishing a commonly agreed-upon perception of what 'the box' means (or at least explaining their own view) may be setting themselves up for some degree of disappointment. It might not always be clear to the group what they are expecting, and somewhere embedded in the role of being a (formal) leader, is a feeling among followers that the response is going to be judged somehow (whether or not this is the leader's intention). Intelligent people who have worked hard for a long time to establish their position are often risk-averse, in the sense that they need to make sense of a problem and their level of expertise in relation to it before spinning off any wild ideas - they want to determine what they can contribute, as well as what is at stake. Especially for researchers, being this meticulous about the background check is part of our craftsmanship.

I am fairly certain that the only people who find it easy to disregard boxes of any form already  intentionally make creativity part of their life's practice. And as so many wise people have already proven via research or philosophizing, creativity is a lot about playing and not fearing judgment. And how ready are most of us to play while we work? (In my mind, that's what the luckiest among us do).

We all relate to the box differently, because it has different functions for all of us - some of us happily stay safely inside it, confident that its dryness, symmetry and exact measurement will help to produce something asked-for and useful. Others up-end it, demolish it (see internet cat videos) or stand on top of it to change their own (and everyone else's) point of view. The reason why I have a problem with "think outside the box" is that our relation to the box loses its meaning if we abandon it entirely, and then how do we ever know whether we thought outside of it? We will still need something to relate our accomplishment to (if we don't have that, we will at absolute best be given the epithet "being before our time").

I am rather fond of being asked to be creative within some form of limitation. For example, the Sock It To Me design challenges limit me to using five or six colours - no more. Once I've made a design work within that limitation, I'm usually more satisfied than if I had drawn something on a whim, because I know that I haven't just drawn something, I had to use my brain to make it producible. Or in tap dance, I'm tickled if I have to improvise to an uneven time signature (particularly 3/4 or 7/8). At the same time, perhaps this heart+brain partnership is just something that motivates me in particular, and might not spur another illustrator or dancer as much. But limitation gives me two prerequisites that motivate me deeply: permission and trust to take on a non-trivial challenge, and also some kind of framework to relate my accomplishment to (regardless of whether the intent is to helpfully conform, or to question or destroy the framework). Kind of like how a creeping vine doesn't make sense on the ground, but will thrive and grow when it climbs and twists around what's given, whether it's a rock, a fence or another plant (usually to the detriment of that other plant, which is akin to how some of us crush the box). I was probably an ivy in a previous life. ;)

Of course, different people are stoked by different challenges, and for some, being given free reins is the ultimate motivator for wreaking creative havoc. However, some of us are only spurred to be our most inventive selves when we are given the right combination of prerequisites that give us 1) the assurance that any and all ideas will be accepted as relevant, 2) a guarantee that judgment belongs with the idea and not the person, 3) the feeling of being among equals (especially including any participating leaders), and 4) the feeling of a before and after as a result of our creativity; the feeling that being asked to go out on that limb has made a difference. That last point has something to do with follow-up, so that the creativity exercise does not end up just a one-off in a Narnian workshop environment never to be revisited. 

 That was also what we said at the end of the "think outside the box" workshop - that in order for this brainstorming session to be meaningful, we wanted to follow up on these ideas some time later, and perhaps also make a point of practicing creativity as part of our job more often. So as not to fall out of practice.

There is a paradox here - there is no box unless we say there is one, but we rarely talk about what box we mean when being asked to think outside of it. Still, questioning the box may be a source of looking like a fool, and risking to reveal that the basics (for some) are not evident to us. This brings back the point that creativity needs a supportive, nurturing and accepting environment to truly develop. The downside of never questioning the box explicitly is that we may all end up thinking inside and outside of entirely different boxes, much to each others' frustration.

The material that makes up a box, though, is a tangible entity, or a material, with facets, surfaces, barrier qualities, material rigidity and/or bendiness, a source of exposure or protection, of absorption or brittle dryness; innumerable possibilities when we play with it, beat it up, and expose it to some juxtaposition (i.e. placing it where it shouldn't be just to see what happens to it or to our relationship to it).

 So in light of all this, I'd like to present a very relevant short film that some friends and I made in a 3D modeling class when I was doing my masters degree at Industrial Design Engineering almost 10 years ago. We had been given free reins to make a short film about any 3D-modeled object (in most cases a product we'd designed) using the animation, surface texture and lighting modules in the software.

Shortly before my group decided on what to model and animate, the three of us went to the theatre and saw a dramatized stage version of The Full Monty. The rest is history... My only request was that we stick to a beat. And to be honest, I'm pretty confident that in terms of questioning what the box is - we kind of nailed it. :)



If it doesn't float your boat - see internet cat videos. ;)

Changing and tracking behaviours, Part 4: Motivation and rewards

This is part of a series I'm writing inspired by a behaviour-modification course I've taken online, called "Sluta Skjuta Upp" (Stop procrastinating). My writing is not affiliated with the course itself, I'm using these blog posts to channel what I've learned into something I can revisit later.  

For me, this course theme provided the most food for thought.

 I like to think that I can't fool myself or anyone else, in terms of fairly and honestly judging the duration and quality of any work I put in... So for quite some time I have been telling myself the following:

You do not deserve to be rewarded for getting work done, that you're supposed to be doing anyway. 

Despite this no-nonsense internal dialogue, it should surprise no one following this series that it wasn't making me procrastinate less (...how's that for a triple negation). Indeed, perendinating* was more like my M.O.  For at least two days in a row. ;)

Still, I previously didn't make the connection between rewards and the ruling power of gratification. My attitude was somewhere between "I don't deserve rewards" and "I can't be bribed".

So, the third and final week of the SSU course was about motivation and rewards, which initially brought out the cynic in me, but my interest was pretty soon piqued thanks to the articles our course leaders were sly enough to throw at us in barrages, and after reading this one and getting this summary on realistic goals on youtube I found that perhaps my current way of looking at rewards and motivation wasn't helping me forward (similar to my epiphany regarding  unsuitable techniques for long-distance running).

An interesting thing to examine (especially for a skeptic) is how the brain chemically signals gratification, and how that signalling can override logic and/or be suppressed. It turns out that unless there is an overhanging threat to our well-being, it (and our instincts, as this article angles it) has a tendency to prioritize immediate gratification. The delayed gratification of completing a large task (or even dividing it into manageable chunks) is never as great as the possibility that something else that requires less effort could be more immediately rewarding - hence the frequent beeline for some form of online light entertainment or another more satisfying activity. This article goes for a laboratory rat explanation which was a huge eye-opener for me, because it posits that we don't even need a guarantee for a reward everytime we push our easiest buttons.

So how did I apply this? For simplicity's sake, let's do a BEFORE/ANALYSIS/AFTER thing on me here:

Attitude towards rewards/motivation BEFORE:

1. "I don't deserve to spoil myself additionally for doing stuff that I'm getting paid to do"
2. "I take such small steps that [...insert previous point]"
3. "OK, if I complete this entire [insert large, un-broken-down project], I can reward myself by finally taking some time for [insert fun but vague-in-duration activity, usually sewing, yoga, rearranging furniture or other creative mammoth projects] ...when I get home"
4. "I think that I'm motivated by completing huge, complicated projects, and even if things heat up near the end, I can always put in the extra oomph and complete the task just within the deadline"

If we dissect these thoughts, they hide a lot of traps that I was setting up for myself by refusing to acknowledge that rewards might work on me. Point by point, this is what I learned to see:

ANALYSIS:

1. Seeing rewards as "spoiling" myself reflected a shaming stance, which discouraged any attempts at trying the idea and literally presented a catch-22, because on one hand, I didn't want to be seen as a spoiled person, but on the other hand I'm denying myself permission to enjoy anything other than the gratification of getting paid for my work at the end of the month. 
2. This thinking (as well as point 3) revealed that I tended to focus on my disappointment with slow progress, valuing it as worthless in comparison with completing huge chunks of work  (which is the ultimate result of pulling all-nighters). I am rather impatient, so hello self-fulfilling prophecy.
3. This point was especially revealing! My tendency was to promise myself that if only I would first complete something 'big enough', I could reward myself by giving time and space to a passion project... but with a delay. The result was that a) no reward ever felt logically connected to any work-related progress, b) all my promised rewards were in effect a new task to take on and complete (which in turn could be postponed indefinitely!), and c) I would often end up doing them anyway regardless of how work had gone.
4. This sums up rather neatly the consequences of not chunking the work into small, achievable steps and feeling no motivation to complete the steps: I would wait until my brain signalled a greater avoidance of panic and discomfort than the gratification of postponing the task any longer - i.e., deadline crunch panic would become the only motivator. There was a slight problem though - I saw this as waiting until inspiration struck.

Attitude towards rewards/motivation AFTER:

1. I can push myself to complete what I'm supposed to do if I chunk the task into smaller bits and see each small completion as a victory worth celebrating. 
2. There's a helluva difference between intentionally planned small steps and 'smaller steps than I imagined' - the second stance sets one up for constant disappointment because it's so vague and yet so judgmental. However, practicing that 'chunking' intentionally makes even a skeptic like me recognize that I am making gradual process. As with almost anything, it's a question of attitude.
3. I have to stop rewarding huge tasks with new huge tasks. ;) Because chances are that I'll postpone the huge for-fun task so much that it has no logical connection to the victory of completing the initial task. 
4. I'm thinking that if I exercise points 1-3, I won't end up locking myself into last-minute cramming so much, which has hitherto been my most obviously rewarding method of completing tasks (spiced with an adrenaline rush) - but only because it ends up being my only successful method of working. So developing a more chunk-and-immediate-reward method may not only make my work more enjoyable, but also earn me some extra sleep hours ;) Also, as this article says - you can't wait for motivation. You have to jump start it yourself, because your brain is often going to feel apprehensive about giving up the gratification of remaining comfortably passive.

I'm not gonna call this a magic quick-fix just yet, I obviously have some changes to practice if I want this to stick. But I see the promise of intentional rewards solving much of the initial problem (my procrastination) a lot more clearly than before. I'm willing to call that recognition definite progress, and go reward myself now with a coffee break. :)

This concludes my mini-series; I wrote it mostly to reflect on and digest the learning points for myself, but I hope it might have helped anyone who has a similar tendency to think/procrastinate/perendinate like me to discover a few new techniques and tools to increase clarity of goals and deviate from the path of least resistance.

Thanks for reading! :)
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* And Thanks Eva, for that brilliant new piece of vocabulary :)

Changing and tracking behaviours Part 3: Running?!!

This is part of a series I'm writing inspired by a behaviour-modification course I've taken online, called "Sluta Skjuta Upp" (= Stop procrastinating). My writing is not affiliated with the course itself, I'm using these blog posts to channel what I've learned into something I can revisit later. 

I need to bring up a parallel story that has nothing to do with the SSU course, but somehow it seems significant to the lessons I've been learning. First some backstory:

For the entirety of my life I have LOATHED running.
Don't get me wrong, I love exercise - I've been very physically active since childhood, but mainly with high-intensity and/or complicated coordination-type movements (mainly dance of all kinds, but also jiujitsu, swimming, climbing and powerbocking (=jumping stilts)). I simply equated exercise with the swedish word "training" in a very literal way, meaning that I had to be in the process of acquiring a specific skill all the time. Or at least pushing myself to a limit very quickly and then needing/deserving recovery. I did have a positive outlook on sprinting, because I could see the immediate usefulness of being able to catch up with an approaching bus (a skill I have mastered to the point of calling it a superpower, although I'll admit that it's more because I'm almost never present at the bus stop in time).
I just could not buy into seeing myself just exercising for its own sake without it involving a skills challenge, so certain types of workouts would always get the cold shoulder from me: working out at a gym, swimming laps, medium-difficulty aerobics classes, and running all ended up in that category.  (And yes, ^^ snobbery alert ;)

But above all I loathed running.
There was another side to it, I discovered whenever I did give it a whack: I didn't know how to run. (At least not without the incentive of catching a bus.) I'd never be able to run for more than 3 minutes at a time without stopping, after that I was just too burned out*. Because I'd spent all of my active life 'maxing out' and then needing rest, I ran that way too. And probably as a result of too much dance-related flexibility training, I would try to use my muscles the way they'd been trained: maximum extension, huge strides, prioritizing look over feel (because that's how dance teaches you to think - image above all, it's supposed to look effortless but be really difficult to pull off).

[I invite myself to pause here for a reflection on the similarities with how I work...]

However, my passionate disinterest in running changed when I realized what I wasn't doing. I wasn't giving myself the possibility to last long. So after some trial and error, I found a mental image that worked for me:

Run like you're wearing a pencil skirt.

Oops, gotta run! (image from sew-simple.com)

Giggle-inducing mental imagery aside at my presumably more short-stepping gait, it had never occurred to me just how much energy I was expending on 'form over function'. I got my theory validated when I  tried using the app Runkeeper to track how far I could go if I stuck with this technique... and wouldn't you know it, in the space of two days I proved to myself that contrary to what I'd always told myself, 1) I could run 2km in a row without stopping, and even do so several times in a row (totaling 7 km, personal record!), and 2) I could run over 5km in a row without stopping, too (another personal record!). After that spurt (warning bells ringing) I declared a rest day, but now I'm raring to go again every so often. :) Just to see how far I can take this... This has never ever happened before. And so far I've been feeling weirdly but comfortably energized by it. Like I'm a bit smitten. :)

So in the end, what's changed most importantly is my attitude towards running; because I thought it couldn't teach me anything, and that it just wasn't for me. Thankfully, it turns out that I'm still not too old to learn a new trick - and coincidentally, learning to run seems to just fit so well with what I'm learning about pacing myself in my work. Sometimes it's important to learn that what you value highly about your abilities may be just the things that are limiting you.

Having had this slow eureka moment, I'm going to see what I can do about taking smaller steps with my work now ;)

To be continued! (a little more back on track regarding the course, next time)
_________________________
* I also had a tendency to run only when I was really, really mad about something and needed to blow off steam. I'd always end up running furiously in one direction (Away! Away! Arrrgh!) until I was almost ready to pass out, and then realize that I was REALLY far from home and still had to get back somehow. Which eventually led me to equating running with feeling spent and sheepish.

Changing and tracking behaviours Part 2: About Focus

This is part of a series I'm writing inspired by a behaviour-modification course I've been taking online, called "Sluta Skjuta Upp" (= Stop procrastinating). My writing is not affiliated with the course itself, I'm using these blog posts to channel what I've learned into something I can revisit later.  

One of the myths of modern office work is that multitasking is a good thing.
My course leaders have tried to make us see the other 'evil' side of this, judging by the articles, videos and lectures they make us read, watch and listen to. There are some downsides to working too many parallel tasks, particularly the following:

• It decreases our efficiency, so even if may of us do several things at once and thereby seem productive, we use more time mentally switching between them than actually working on them
• It perpetuates behaviours where it is difficult to truly prioritze the most important thing to do (since you're already working on it, but alongside 5 others), so you end up making feeble progress
• It involves so much start-up-time that very little time is spent 'close to the finish line' - several of the articles we read on the matter presented research showing that for every distraction to a work task, it takes roughly 20-30 minutes to return to that task. (I can only imagine that those articles measured this clinically, because empirically it must be hard to tell whether any of the multiple open windows on our desktops is "the" task to return to, when they all need doing...)

Most of us participating seem to agree that focusing on one single thing at a time is a dwindling skill among many of us - we have so much to do that we are becoming experts at taking the path of least resistance on a 5-minute basis, and most of us agree that that road leads to online procrastination (more on that in a future post about motivation and rewards...).

As a way out of this,  many of the little exercises we have been challenged with are geared at chunking off undisturbed time slots to do our work tasks in, in a focused a way as possible. This goes for taking breaks too, we have a recurring 'challenge' to register a dedicated 5-minute break every day where we do something intentionally restorative (instead of continuing to check email or sneak in more splintered work efforts into something). This can include feeding our social media addictions, as long as we limit them and are intentional about taking the time for it.
There's a bunch of timer-based ways of doing this, the famous Pomodoro technique is really the iconic mother of them but my version has been to use a Tabata timer app to chunk work into 30-minute segments followed by rests ("recovery", as it were). For a struggling distracted mind, whatever works is good enough ;) The trick, I've found, is to signal clearly to the surrounding world that you need to remain undisturbed during that time - because making your co-workers commit to not reaching you at that moment, means you need to honour the commitment of making use of that time.

I have to say that getting these little everyday prompts has been super effective. This would never have sunk in as well if this had been a once-a-week thing that you could ignore until the last minute.

So so far, the 'little bit every day' is beginning to prove effective in the fight against postponing progress. :) It seems to mainly be a question of changing my attitude and re-evaluating the worth of small steps, rather than giant (panic-fuelled) leaps forwards. I'd say that paying money for that insight feels worth it for me so far - because if left to my own devices, I'm sure I'd just postpone that lesson too ;)

To be continued! 

Changing and tracking behaviours - Part 1

Since I'm a firm believer in outing myself, I thought I'd say a couple of things about an online behaviour-modification course I'm in the middle of taking. The name of the course (translated from swedish) is "Stop Procrastinating" (Sluta skjuta upp, henceforth referenced as SSU).

For a long time I've had feelings of impending doom regarding how I handle my myriad mess of work tasks... They tend to vary a lot since I have roles as a teacher, researcher, co-author, reviewer, coach, workshop leader, personnel caretaker (informally, by virtue of having been around for a while ;), administrative dabbler and general volunteer for stuff (like moving furniture). Needless to say I sometimes spend more time changing hats than actually wearing them, meaning that I'll start several work tasks at once but rarely make any good progress on them until time is critically running out (you'd probably always catch me awake the entire night before a lecture, tweaking and adding things...). So I decided that I should get help, which happily coincided with running into a blog post about Psykologifabriken.se, the consultancy offering this app-based course. They specialize in "behavioral economics" - i.e. practicing and training new habits. A lot of the process of the course is about reflecting on what you do when you work, how you mentally and physically structure the work you do, and which behaviours to be wary of in order to maximize concentration and focus. Pretty useful stuff, in other words!

The course is based on the app Viary, which works kind of like a portal for my 'coaches' in the course to share articles, videos and lectures to us course participants. Furthermore, there's a progress tracking element to the course, as we're offered daily assignments or challenges (most of them directly aimed at helping us structure our work tasks or reflect on how we do them or think about them).
You can register assignments as completed and write reflections on how you think it worked out for you. Also, there's a social media element to interacting with the coaches and the rest of the participants - you can comment on each other's reflections, share tips and tricks and generally be encouraging. Like a very, very niched beige version of facebook for scatterbrained multitaskers trying to reform ;)

So to keep this series digestable, this concludes the first part - the following episodes will focus on specific themes of the course and what I've been taking home from it... :)

To be continued!

Beijing, in a phew words

Apparently the pictures I added to the last post fell off somewhere between transitioning from an email into a blog post, so here's a more wordy taster of my new (temporary) life in China's capital city.

I'm visiting close family friends (M. and A.) who are living here as German auto-company expats, and I'm alternating between going off on sightseeing adventures and assimilating into their walled-in expat compound life (with little kids) outside the 6th ringroad (i.e. really far out from the city centre). It's so nice staying with a family, I think if I'd been staying in the city I would have felt a constant urge to be out and about all the time - now, the tempo changes are doing wonders for the relaxation bit.

I've been crazy lucky with the weather, everyone tells me - in a city that this past January had air pollution so bad that the readings were "beyond index" on the charts (flights had to be cancelled and the Canadian and Australian embassy personnel requested to be evacuated to other parts of China), I've had mostly blue skies and sunshine since I arrived. However the air pollution is evident whenever the wind isn't blowing - and the stereotypical image I had of Chinese people arbitrarily wearing masks and spitting everywhere turns out to be legitimate measures against letting the bad air take over your breathing organs. Being a shy European with phlegm inhibitions and no spitting skills, I seem to be handling my single day of bad air exposure (1 day in the Olympic park with 154 air pollution count, which translates to "unhealthy") by developing a sinus inflammation... Ugh. Hoping it'll stay small and demure...

For the record, I've so far happily spent my time so far:

• Marvelling at Beijing's: 1) Vastness and the city planning's alignment to Feng Shui principles, 2) Downright kerr-azy mix of architecture, 3) Impossibly calm-yet-chaotic traffic flow; A. tells me there is a rule that if your car's wheel is behind the other party's in a collision, you are responsible for the accident... this explains some of the driving behaviour… and 4) Extremely rapid transition into spring! A week ago I was freezing out and branches were bare, now all the leaves and flowers on the trees have exploded and temperatures are up by about 5-10 degrees extra... Wow.
  
• Hanging out with M. and A.'s two sweet kids (F., 1 going on  2 and H., 4 years old) and being called 'Auntie Cessie' - being with kids certainly helsp you stay in the moment, for better or worse. And for the record, having a 1-year-old imitate your yoga stretches is way more fun(ny) than actually doing yoga :)
• Biking Beijing! This was a fantastic adventure and I warmly recommend bikebeijing.com for excellent city tours by bike. I was the only one on the tour so I had the immense luxury of having a guide to myself all day. His name was Hiro, he was a local ("from within the second ringroad") and he gave a very interesting and rich guidance not only to the city's history, but also about current living standards and sociological developments (such as the trend of older people doing a LOT of outdoor exercise, and from what I've seen the older-generation Chinese are evidently quite limber! ;) . We got round to most of the historical Imperial sites of inner Beijing during about 7 hours, doing so very comfortably by city bike (and don't worry Mom, the bike lanes were WAY broader than in Toronto - and I wore a helmet!)
• Visiting the Forbidden City - with a bunch of small plastic stowaways.
• Trying out the Beijing subway - by far the cleanest subway system I've ever been in! Not a speck of litter anywhere and no funny smells. What is the west doing wrong?? ;)
  
• Learning odd phrases in Mandarin - the most complicated ones I've been taught so far are "I've already bought that" (by Hiro) and "Sunshine? How nice!" (by F., who will be 2 years old in 2 weeks and is already speaking the best chinese in the family!)
• Shopping at the Pearl market (which to a great extent involves looking at all kinds of insane knickknacks, odd technological toys, and logic-defying sculptures made of jade)
• Traipsing around the Olympic Park - the Bird's Nest Arena was almost empty, which in itself was a very cool but eerie experience. The Water Cube Aquatic Center, the site for the swimming events, has since the 2008 Olympice been turned into a very elaborate water amusement park complete with giant jellyfish decorations in the ceiling! And they have a fish feeding facility in the entrance hall where you can feed carp fish... with milk. From a baby bottle. I still can't believe my eyes...
  
• Climbing the Great Wall at Mutianyu and marvelling at the gorgeous landscape dotted by blooming cherry trees - I also took the luge down, it's a loooong slide with a toboggan that you can use to get down the hillside in a more fun way - Wheeee :)
  

So I've kept busy - which means a ton of pictures, which I unfortunately can't show just yet because the internet is a bit strangled and slow here; not sure if it's due to sheer numbers of users or if state control of certain sites does it - anyway, when I try to access sites like Facebook, Youtube or Blogger, there is no grandiose "warning sign" that big brother sees what you're trying to do (as I imagined somewhat cartoonishly) - the sites simply won't load.

More adventures to come, since I just signed up for a cooking class before I leave :)  An update may appear later but I am indeed alive, and beginning to feel that way again after a gruelling period of work. :) 

Zai jian for now, and Yay for vacation!

Ni Hao from Beijing

I'm on vacation in China (Beijing) and having a great time. :)
Just wanted to give a shout that I'm alive and share some pics (hope this'll work because I'm blogging via email... if not, all the more mystery!)
Today I took the subway to the Olympic Park (it's HUGE) and the stowaways and I had a good look at the Bird's Nest and Water Cube.
Tomorrow - off to the Great Wall.

Zai jian for now! :)


Forbidden City


798 Art District


I can warmly recommend biking around Beijing! :)


Trying to stick out vs. blend in at the Bird's Nest


A very appropriate family picture

SoSus - then and now

I held a dedicated Social Sustainability lecture in my course (Production Ergonomics and Work Design) at Chalmers last Monday*, and wanted my students to see some examples of companies that have been recognized for their efforts in strengthening their employees' work-life balance, which is one of many ways for companies to work with Social Sustainability (usually via the related term Corporate Social Responsibility).

To liven things up I decided to show some videos. This one is from Fortune Magazine's yearly roundup of the 100 best (US) companies to work for. Normally, Google tops the list every-frickin-time, but in 2010 they were actually beat by the company SAS (note: NOT the airline). The perks of working there include on-site healthcare, daycare, training facilities and counseling for achieving a better work-life balance, as shown:

What I immediately found interesting was that several of these thoughts are not new, in fact I'd seen several of them expressed in the [...fantastically corny, badly scripted, badly acted and hilariously politically incorrect by today's standards] US war propaganda film "Manpower" from 1943. I'd shown this early in the course to illustrate the beginnings of industrial manufacturing companies showing concern for the muscular use of their factory workers (shown at 5:55), but as it turns out, many of the on-site perks that win corporations today awards for "best place to work", are actually using ideas and provided benefits that the US war industry during WWII used to attract women, elderly and disabled to production. (Ideally, start at 5:00 minutes)

So SoSus may be hot stuff right now but many of these ideas have been around for a long time. Perhaps the new-found interest is just a testament to the fact that the societal spirit of the times needs to be just right for all the good ideas to assemble and gain momentum. As it is, humanity seems to need to tackle them one at a time.

---

*which, if you ask me, was not easy - I think I ended up giving them the message "there's no real consensus on what it means yet, but the world is working on it!"

Sock it to Me 2013 Design Contest!

I just have to share this because I've participated twice before (leading to a periodical collaboration with the world's most awesome sock company - I'm so proud to be asked to draw for them each year! :) and it's really fun, and open to a global public! The 1st prize is 1000 US dollars and a bunch of FUN socks (and the 2nd and 3rd prizes aren't so bad either!)

Every year Sock it to Me of Portland, OR hosts a sock design contest. You can draw anything you want (last year's winner featured sloths!) and hopefully it'll be possible to produce in knit form.

Check it out!

http://www.sockittome.com/cart/index.php?dispatch=pages.view&page_id=10

Tip from the coach: SITM  really like colourful, funky, humorous designs. You can see my socks too if you want ;)

A sustainability contest and examples from home

Just a short post this time.

I just stumbled over this, but apparently there is a sustainability awareness competition for students called the Sustainergies Cup, organized by HSB and Riksbyggen (two swedish national organizations for housing co-operatives) which encourages students to suggest solutions for how tenants can become more interested and aware of sustainable behaviours and practices.

As stated in the case description: "The vision is residents changing their behaviour at home and influencing their local housing co-operative into taking more actions to e.g. decrease the energy consumption, improve the waste management or improve the safety of the living environment. "

It may seem almost too simple, but the winners this year came up with a project called ”Den glada lappen” - specially designed post-it-notes that are meant to encourage residents to encourage and compliment each other's good habits and actions. The jury applauded the fact that positive psychology is used to cement healthy practices and that it is a reaction to the typically swedish passive-aggressive practice of complaining in public places by using "Arga lappar", or angry notes (which usually berate someone's bad behaviour anonymously. There are even compilation books about these!) I also have to crow  a little bit here - the winners are from my Master's programme at Chalmers, so of course I'm proud and biased ;)

The funny thing is that we have an example of a "Glad lapp" in the laundry room of my house, and mind you, laundry rooms are often the hellspring from which "Arga lappar" are born in Sweden. But in my house, tenants are treated to this sight, alongside the potted plants that are there to give the room a homey feel:

 Translation: "Don't water us, leave it to daddy"

More of that! :)

Report from Brussels and an exciting SoSus project

On short notice I was sent to Brussels last week for a Friday morning meeting for EU project coordinators - delivered by the EU commission, no less ;). The meeting had been postponed from an original date due to a Belgian general strike, so I was there to fill in for my boss (a.k.a. the coordinator) who couldn't go. Since my life right now mostly revolves around lecturing and grading papers in my course (and frantically running on errands to buy electric screwdrivers, but that's another story), the change of scenery was welcome - even if it was a really short trip in total.

The reason for the meeting is actually pretty neat - we (a collaborative group of researchers from all over Europe) have gotten EU funding for a project entirely centered on Social Sustainability in manufacturing in Europe 5-10 years from now! It's very exciting news and we're currently negotiating with an EU project manager to work out all the details of how, where and when to carry out the project's pre-research activities (it's not pure research at this stage but a so-called CSA, Coordinated Support Action) in order to strengthen the awareness of SoSus and contribute to the definition of what it means and how to stimulate and sustain meaningful job creation. The project is at present geared at creating a 'roadmap' of how manufacturing industries in Europe see, speak of, measure and take heed of Sosus in their current activities.

To put it clearly, my job for the next 1.5 years or so will most likely involve meeting social sustainability experts, organizing and moderating workshops with industry representatives, designing different forms of data collections via questionnaires and interviews, and at the same time disseminating/spreading our results via workshops and conferences so that the various takes on Sosus will be transmitted from company to company and country to country. As I've said in a previous installment, much focus will be on future scenarios of who will be working in factories, age-wise and origin-wise. But all content formalia aside - this sounds like it's going to be so much fun. Travel seems to be a large part of it too, in order to work effectively with all our international consortium partners. I'm glad that I thrive on meeting new people, travelling and enjoy being a beginner at things, because I think that attitude will be useful in the various learning (and moderating) situations that will ensue.

However, while all the euphoria of getting funding for our nifty project cannot be denied, I was at first fairly skeptical to the EU/Brussels practice of calling all these people in from all over Europe to Brussels for a 3.5-hour run-though of how to coordinate a project. It seemed to me originally that one-directional communications of this kind (where the EU commission representatives tell you everything) could just as well have been held online, to save resources and money. My late notice made the flight and hotel booking pretty pricey, which I luckily don't have to pay myself, but still it feels slightly economically irresponsible - let's just say that for that money I could practically have gone 'back home' to Toronto!)

Also, in a fit of rebellious attitude I did some complaining about having to dress in Business Attire (which nobody actually told me to do, I just assumed things...) which meant finally sewing back a button on my one-and-only blazer (which looks awesome but is super movement-restricting) and removing my bright blue nailpolish, even if E suggested that I could get away with it if I painted the stars of the member states on my nails...

The brush was too wide so I didn't have room for all 15.

Actually, if I'm honest, I think some part of me was secretly a bit thrilled to travel in disguise... Which really is just a testament to my inability to take business attire seriously if I'm in it.

 Still, it turned out to be a great experience, both from a pure experiential (= touristy/nerdy) and learning perspective. It has to be said, there's a special feeling to entering a carpeted room decorated with the EU flag, encircled with translator booths, with rows upon rows of curved benches complete with individual monitors and headphones, plus a little language-selector for simultaneous translation. All these attributes that I've only seen on TV looked kind of 80s-antique (?) in real life, but the totality of the international EU-atmosphere was tangible. ( I may have geeked out for a millisecond thinking "well hey, I'm one of these serious-looking people now!")

The translation selector. From a human factors point of view it's pretty charming! 

 I was actually helped immensely by the headphones - since I'm so easily distracted by ambient sounds (such as my very talkative spanish neighbours who couldn't whisper), the english speech was transmitted into them and I was really happy that I could get the commission's message clearly in-ear.
The meeting itself was delivered from the commission members to the audience (the supposed coordinators) in 20-minute Powerpoint installments mostly geared at how to not repeat mistakes from previous years.

What dawned on me as I furiously took notes was that coordinating EU projects seems to involve an entire mini-internet of forms, articles, annexes, supplements, definition lists and agreement signatures. It was like a parallel universe of administrative trickery... In light of that, I'm really glad they make us budget for pure administration work.

The biggest surprise though came at the end, when the agenda point "Conclusion" was revealed to be not only a series of closing remarks, but also a stab at finishing off lightly with a sense of humour - which I applaud and appreciate, but the actual message was a bit baffling because if you know your pop culture (or like me, spend waaay too much time on Youtube), some of the choices actually disproved some of the points.

 The Swedish Chef suddenly appeared on the screens! True story. 

The commission's message was delivered using popular culture greats such as:

• The Swedish Chef, to imply that our project reporting needed to be according to recipe, done promptly with no delay, and thus we were advised to "get the chicken in the pan quickly" to ensure freshness. (I'm not entirely sure that the commission envisaged this or remembered the SC's propensity for sportive violence...) 
• Konrad Adenauer, the former German chancellor whose re-election campaign had the slogan "No experiments", was brought up to remind us that... well, go figure. But I suspect the commission only meant the actual EU project reporting and not the actual research...? :/ 
• The Third Man, a Graham Greene-written movie served to remind us that we shouldn't forget to identify and validate ALL third-party project participants in the reporting. And finally...

 

This guy. True story. (image from borg.com)  

• In order to remind us that this is the last year that the EU funding program "Framework 7" is running, Arnold here was to help us remember that this is the last year of FW7, and then - it ENDS. (But I think the commission forgot the most important detail...)

Baffling finishes aside, the day was really informative and just sitting in that atmosphere made me look forward just a little more to starting the project - although I dare say, I think I'm all right with not having another run-through like that for some time. One administrative vaccine dose of this magnitude should do it, hopefully... ;)

To finish off, I should mention that I barely saw the city of Brussels, but I do know this: after an unintentionally long walk (trying to find your hotel), a belgian waffle with chocolate syrup is AWESOME.

Lent, the pope and SoSus

As of tomorrow I'll be observing lent, which I've written about before but still the reasons behind my choices of what to "sacrifice" change every year, or seem to come from different directions as I get older.

But first I want to comment on the fact that Pope Benedict XVI is resigning.

Being a bit of a TV and newspaper recluse, I tend to find out about current affairs through friends' Facebook comments (*blush*). This time the news reached me through a friend who works with PR and publicism (if that's a word?) who thought the whole thing was a big yawn and that the media were making a big deal of an old guy retiring. However, a pope retiring voluntarily has been unheard of since the late 1200s, and the reason is (to a large degree) that in the catholic tradition, any priest or clergyman is considered to be 'called' to serve, rather than doing so by choice. However 'romantic' (or less appealing adjectives) this may sound to people of other persuasions, it's a viewpoint of many serving clergymen that their vocation is not their choice, but God's call - which they cannot refuse. Therefore, some catholics have reacted to the pope's announcement with bewilderment, and I think that Mussolini's granddaughter (who apparently gets to say stuff in italian media) even accused him of abandoning his flock.

As for my own opinion - I have great respect for anyone who honours their limitations, pope or not. In my mind it's wise and commendable to step down from a position of global leadership if you are aware that your mental and physical strength do not allow you to (refuting the to-the-death hardlinership I might have expected from this pope, seeing as he was known as "God's rottweiler"). Though the main objective of many a religion is to salvage souls for the afterlife, I'm personally convinced that as long as we are alive we cannot prematurely separate the soul from the body and still claim to be honouring the gift of life. So I consider listening to what the body tells us an act of respect and faith in itself, because physical pain hurts our souls too.

Hence, I feel that this turn of events is colouring my resolve this year. I believe that it's possible to respond to this change in the higherarchies of the church with hope, respect and compassion. Plus, I'm kinda rooting for a more progressive pope (as far as that's possible, given the selection that pope Benedict elected :/), and I'm all for greater representation of the perspective of those large, poor nations where catholicism seems to be an important part of people's lives. I'm sure a pope with that background can potentially be a better steward of faith in what the current pope described as "today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith". 

I don't keep it a secret that I'm a struggling/conflicted catholic, having been brought up in a society and country that largely doesn't care for the limitations the church imposes - I'm in clinch with a lot of what the church says about who to love and how - anyone who asks me will find that I'm pro-contraception and pro-LGBT rights, for example. Still, what many of my sceptical countrymen miss out on is that I get a lot of strength and courage from caring about my spiritual sides, and live out a lot of my faith in the form of 1) feeling gratitude, and 2) trying my darndest not to judge others. Still, that last point is difficult if you want to appear to have any values of your own, and deciding what you think is right is not easy.

At the same time, being/acting catholic is my "dialect" of faith, as I like to call it. It is my accustomed language and pathway to look beyond myself, my life events, my pain or creature comforts and perceive a bigger picture that includes hope, gratitude, mercy, gifts I can't claim to deserve, challenges I don't think I deserve either (but often end up growing from), and the merciful concept of not actually having to have all the answers or understand everything, but in some cases, to just trust. To surrender. To embrace an opposite to certainty that is not doubt (to paraphrase Anne Lamott). Having had a language for spiritual matters has legitimized their importance in my life - there's a lot of truth to the saying that when someone or something is denied a name, their dignity ceases to exist.
I'm of the opinion that any dialect of faith is meaningful, as long as we can practice in mutual respect and not demand to change each other. (Easier said than done, I'm sure, but it's a grace that respectful humans are perfectly capable of.)

What this means for my choices in observing lent is that I notice a decreasing need to 'prove' myself' or appear like my discipline is stellar, or that I should 'sacrifice' something because it would be tautologically good for me - all of those reasons may have been driving forces for me at some point, but the showiness of them kind of loses their appeal when you spend year after year practicing this and always re-evaluating your reasons. But this year, I've actually chosen two things that haven't been a problem or a great vice of mine before, but I've recently come to notice that I take them for granted and have become increasingly careless about how I handle them. One is alcohol.
I rarely drink unless I'm with friends, but when I do, I do, and I'm usually the one mixing drinks for an unreasonable proportion of the evening. And while it rarely gets out of hand, I do notice that I end up physically affected (i.e. can't walk straight) without realizing when the line was crossed. Another thing, which is almost embarrassingly juvenile considering that I'm 32, is that I say F* a lot. Not more than the next guy buy still, even while I say it I know it sounds awful and is entirely unnecessary (generally the spice it adds is... totally not worth it), but I find myself saying it more often because a) swedes throw it in casually into their swedish as a joke because nobody takes it seriously, and b) we have more native english-speakers at my department now and they seem to conjure up my foulest vocabulary. Although I shouldn't blame others, so Fine, I'm dirty-two ;).

So those two have to go, in my mind. But what does all of this have to do with SoSus?

Well, coincidentally, today I had my yearly development meeting with my boss (where we discuss my current activities and goals for the year, with measurables). One of the things we discussed was why I was so overworked and sleep very little (which is ironic considering that I'm supposed to be working with social sustainability and healthy work practices, d'Oh!). I jokingly made a reference to the fact that I routinely work nights at least twice a week (meaning at least an extra 4-hour cram between 10 pm - 2 am)- my boss didn't think it funny. He issued as a challenge (or rather, a measureable goal) that I should entirely stop working nights, by this Thursday.

While it's not a lenten practice, it strikes me that this challenge kind of falls entirely in line with my other 'sacrifices' - I've been careless. We even discussed this to the point where I said that I'd been living with this bad habit as a kind of safety net / noose - because as long as I've gotten by on routine night work, I've been convincing myself that this only affects me and nobody else since I'm single, and hence I've locked myself in a bad catch 22. I would trust that no matter how late I start, I would get it done and any sleep-related repercussions would be my own problem (and probably well-deserved, too). However, this often meant that I would also postpone starting until the night shift was a fact. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy, even if I really did have time to do it earlier.

Today I finally got a gentle reminder that this doesn't affect only me - I'm responsible for sending out signals of what it means to work committedly but in a healthy way. I'd be setting an impossible precedent for my PhD students and undergrads if I keep telling them it's important to spare yourself and your body, while at the same time not honouring my body's and mind's fatigue limits and hence creating a version of myself that wavers between focus and zoning out. (I have reason to blush...)

I feel that my practicing lent this year is appropriately coloured by the combination of current events and personal wake-up calls, and is an opportunity for sustaining what I believe in and putting in the practice, even if I'm often conflicted about it. To caring. (And honestly, I think that may be one of my best reasons to date.)

Excuses, excuses, and Social Life-Cycle Analysis

...so what happened was that in the end of January, I started teaching my course "Production Ergonomics and Work Design", which is geared at teaching Master students in (mainly) Production Engineering how to take heed of human needs and capabilities in production. I enjoy teaching it and my students seem very bright (and at least some of them seem happy about learning these things). However, a downside of my course is that teaching on Mondays (3 hours) and Wednesdays (2 + 4 hours(!)) totally wrecks my rhythm of writing about SoSus on Mondays. So in the interests of... well, my own social sustainability mostly, I'm going to be (or already am) more arbitrary about when to post during the 7 weeks that the course goes on.
(And oh, in parallel with that I'm also co-instructor for a PhD student course in Systems theory. While I fortunately have the luxury of not lecturing there until May, I'm still in charge of leading a workshop every time. But at least I get to learn a lot about a subject I'm pretty nerdy about! :)

However, I do have a small report to make about SoSus. Last Wednesday morning (before a 5-hour lecture in my own course, phew) I went to a seminar that had the interesting title "Social Life Cycle Analysis". I was intrigued because I've understood that LCA has a pretty high standing in the engineering world as one of the pillars of Sustainability, and with that I mean largely on the Ecological side.

Crash course: LCA is a mapping method that looks at products and product development from a "cradle to cradle" perspective, visualizing how much resources (ecological and economical) the product consumes at different stages of its coming into being, use, and disintegration and (hopefully) re-use or renewal by being broken down into its raw components = useful material for re-creating products (either of the same type or somethinhg entirely different).

So when it was advertised that a PhD student at the Royal College of Engineering (KTH),  in Stockholm (Elisabeth Ekener Petersen) was going to present a kind of LCA with "Social" tacked onto it (S-LCA) I was of course intrigued - and a bit doubtful. But I went to see what there was to see (or hear, rather).

I'll link to where you can read more about it (in swedish and english), but the gist of it all was that this version of "Social" sustainability was built on a case study of the social impact of a laptop (brand not divulged) during the different stages of its cradle-to-cradle cycle:

• resource extraction
• refining and processing
• manufacturing and assembly
• marketing and sales
• use
• recycling and waste

 This was done by "translating" the different component materials (from the Bill of Materials) and lifecycle phases of the laptop into participation of more or less ethically well-reputed countries, based on ethical "hotspot" statistics of various NGOs.

For example, during the resource extraction phase, the relative weights of the copper, cobalt, aluminium, gold and crude oil became the "weights" of the countries that had the greatest social impact on the laptop. The time spent in each phase and the relative importance of each phase was also weighed in somehow (not sure I understood that part very well), but the end result was that the laptop was pictured as coming into being because of a "supporting cast" of countries who have different statistical indicators for their ethical 'well-being'*, if you will. So the S-LCA tells you which countries have the greatest social impact on the product, in terms of having high and low indicators according to social/ethical statistics.
Examples of such social statistics include percentages of the working population that are women, social security expenditure, safe and healthy living conditions, corruption, community engagement (or lack thereof), working hours, respect for indigenous rights, etc. Certain countries have particularly "bad" statistical levels on these indicators, and if a certain country has a lot of those and is considered a major 'component' of the product's S-LCA, the method deems that country a social "hotspot" worthy of further scrutiny. I'm not entirely sure what that that means in more decipherable terms, but to me it reeks of blacklisting. To be sure, this is what a lot of ethical consumer rights groups may be looking at as indicators when they call for boycotts of products made from e.g. conflict minerals, but in such cases the materials themselves are clearly part of the problem - in this case, the connection between the indicators and the Bill of Materials is sometimes fairly loose.
Still, the S-LCA claims that it "promotes transparency and more detailed knowledge on social impacts" this way.

One interesting phrase that Elisabeth used was that this was a way on putting "a global scale on the misery*" (or in Swedish, "en världsskala på eländet") - the weighting of the different countries responsible for the different phases of product according to how much "misery"* the product involves is interesting, but at the same time any manufacturing involvement in the laptop of the 'offending' countries  seems to be taken as a broad indicator of the [laptop industry's] support for their dubious ethical status.

I'm not entirely thrilled at this take on social sustainability, even though I will agree wholeheartedly that the connection between ecological and social sustainability in product development and manufacturing is not entirely evident right now, and sure, it needs work. But I find that this is a kind of 'blame game' method, because I believe that denying certain of these countries the involvement in manufacturing technological products - and hence, denying them some perhaps well-needed job opportunities -  may actually exacerbate some of the social sustainability problems, particularly the ones caused by a lack of jobs and livelihood. This too may be a naïve interpretation, of course, since certainly outsourcing may be a matter of exploitation. But still, the alternative of refusing a country the piece of the pie (the Apple pie, perhaps?) because of social injustices that are so loosely coupled to the product? I think that activism in the form of ethical sourcing needs to be VERY, very clear about what the protest is about. Otherwise, the country is probably just left to its own devices and ethical malpractices can go on if the connection is not made.

So in my mind, this method, even if it's interesting, S-LCA in its current form runs the risk of pasting a warning label of the countries' ethical downsides as a whole onto the product, regardless of how near or far to the actual process of making it those indicators are. This may of course be relevant regarding some factors, but can also be difficult to take seriously if the connections are too loose.

So it was an interesting field trip, so to speak, but this particular method doesn't seem completely convincing for the time being... and to be fair to Elisabeth, she seems to feel the same way in some respects, and also she brought up the downside that the method in its present state is very time-consuming and a lot of improvised adjustment of the statistical indicators was necessary.
Still, interesting to see that these things are popping up and taking shape, even if that shape is for now an ugly duckling. But as everyone knows, when given time to develop, those birds may have potential.


* my wording, not hers.

Monday SoSus musing

In my continued efforts to wrap my head around Social Sustainability, I am currently ploughing through a book that seems to have all the answers and aspects of it covered:

Thankfully, it's a total dream to read! Beautifully clear prose and good illustrations of sociological structures that the different ideas operate within. Since SoSus is a pretty big bite to swallow in and of itself, this book does the favour of chunking the umbrella term down into more reasonably sized aspects of what it takes to create work systems where people want to stay, can develop and use their skills to greatest effect.

Also, one important thing this book does is to explore the subject on stratified levels of personal concern (What the hell does that mean??) - meaning that it looks at what SoSus means on the levels of individuals, teams, enterprises and societies. Those levels each have their own value sets and goals (e.g. the individual may hold personal health, life balance and career development in highest esteem; an enterprise/company may be focusing on reducing personnel turnover costs, recruiting and retaining superior knowledge resources, and having a good and symbiotic relationship with its surrounding community; and the society may focus most heavily on SoSus aspects such as keeping as many people employed and in good health as possible).

Another thing that tickles me is that one chapter is exclusively devoted to the social sustainability prerequisites of Chinese workers - this is something that my colleagues and I sometimes end up speculating in (thowing in the odd, out-of-context statistics we may have snapped up along the way) but probably none of us knows very much about the general context of working there. I haven't gotten further than skimming but it looks promising. One section is about the situation for professionally working women and how their working conditions are affected by the one-child policy and the cultural views on how to maintain a successful career. (I'll be getting back to that in a future post for sure).

Finally - it's a book written by a bunch of cross-disciplinary researchers who wrestle with the same methodological challenges as me (i.e. = convincing other scientific disciplines you're not just producing crap research because you can't plot it all out in graphs) - so each chapter has a small defense-of-chosen-method-section. I think that in itself will leverage a huge chunk of learning for me :)

If any of my thesis workers or PhD students are reading - guess what I'll be bringing up time and time again the next 4 years... ;)

Drinks on the house

Allow me to breach my own code by introducing some chemistry to the blog. Last night's events (=having some lovely friends from work over for drinks) revived my dormant hobby of mixing cocktails. :) I felt a bit too busy to get really improvisational and creative, but some old favourites were unearthed and that felt like plenty enough. Sometimes it's just nice to have a limited but functional repertoire.

The first revival was Ulf, invented at Olga's cocktail party in 2007, although some of his original glory had to be sacrificed as there were no plain (=Earl Grey) tea bags in the house.

So yesterday's version was:

ROOIBOS ULF
1 part vodka, enought to soak
1 bag of rooibos tea (red)
ginger ale for volume
4 sprigs of thyme
A squash of lime

Normally (i.e. 6 years ago ;) I'd have insisted on a cognac glass, but since I own none, the tea bag was steeped in vodka and then bathed in ginger ale, sprinkled with thyme and topped with the lime juice in an arbitrary glass.
This cocktail was a bit less 'manly' (?) than was proposed in the original recipe from 2007, but gained approval from the guests. It also inspired a lot of bad puns involving the greenery ("It needs a little more thyme" and the like...)

Revival #2: E, L and I have for a long time been on a quest to re-create our favourite found-on-the-town cocktail ever ("Gin and Ginger" from Heaven 23 - swoooon) and thanks to a blender and some juice filtering cloth, the result was pretty close this time (although this version includes elderflower juice, which is a sidestep from the original). I actually ended up making a whole pitcher because the blended ginger + pineapple was almost painfully strong and needed to be soothed... Although the guests seemed fine with that :)

GIN AND GINGER (...and fläder, to be fair)
Chopped fresh ginger root (a handful)
1 small can of sliced pineapple + juice
juice of 1 1/2 lemons
elderflower juice for volume
Gin (a slosh)
Slices of the remaining 1/2 lemon 

The ginger and pineapple were puréed in a blender and the juice was filtered using the cloth (this mixture has quite a sting if tasted). Then it was mixed in a pitcher with the lemon juice, filled almost all the way up with elderflower juice, and topped with a 'lid' of gin and lemon slices.
Happily, the resulting cocktail had a pretty good zing (and is probably a royal acid attack on your teeth, but such concerns are worldly. ;)

This and the good company (plus a slew of off-colour conversations) made for a great evening. :) Although the coat rack in the hallway got torn out of the wall (!) due to the weight of people's coats... So I see a date with a hammer drill in my near future.

Totally worth it. :)

Monday morning SoSus musing

Rather than go ahead and define Social sustainability (which I like to abbreviate SoSus) head-on, I'm going to spend a portion of most Mondays (does this reek of New Year's resolution? ;) mulling over bits and pieces of what it means. It's a pretty big puzzle.

My body of research so far concerns Human Factors and Ergonomics, but as part of my Assistant Professor position I'm meant to expand the scope of my research to "Social Sustainability" - this makes it ever so much wider, and starts to concern policy, workforce, human resource management and a slew of other things that smack of... well, politics. Although this makes many researcher-type people that I talk to cringe, I personally feel that these are important issues to tackle even in the research community.

When asked what SoSus is, I usually rattle off the triple future challenges that are posed to (European) factories in the immediate and far future regarding staffing. Those challenges mainly regard how those future factories and production lines need to be designed in order to:

• Accommodate what will most likely be an aging population, given our demographic forecasts in Europe - this means challenges regarding technology acceptance, physical and cognitive limitations and general entitlement issues ("I've been here so long that I don't want to change how I've worked for so many years")...
• Entice and retain young people to work in production, in terms of offering viable career development, meaningful and accessible on-site learning, technology adaptation that suits their level of habitude regarding communication and sharing, and offering such a good working environment that some young staff will eventually choose to stay and become senior...
• Address the issue of an increasing population component of non-nationals in the workforce, i.e. people who may have migrated for working purposes and can be expected to have some obstacles with the national language and customs. How does one design the factories of the future so that these people are still enabled to work efficiently and productively?

So I rattled this off during a conversation with E yesterday, and she replied with some interesting observations from her research field (control room design and HF methodologies for nuclear power plants) that set a nice prelude for these questions.

E had done some interviews with some swedish nuclear power plant personnel and asked (as one of many questions) whether they had begun to notice any staffing differences in recent times. Interestingly, the answer was that the company had had to overstaff recently for a number of interesting reasons, which I suppose are at present an indicator of Swedish society, but may be a hint at European societal expectations of the future:

•  An increasing percentage of men in the workforce are taking out equal parental leave
•  There are more women in the workfore than before, and as a populational consequence of the first point, they are also taking out  equal parental leave
•  Current societal trends regarding career development make it very uncertain that staff will choose to stay in the same company (or even industry) for any longer period of time, as it is considered a good career move to diversify one's experiential portfolio by changing jobs ever so often (a rumour has it that in China, two years in a row begins to look suspiciously staid and comfortable...).
•  In total, this means that a greater number of the workforce go missing from work at some point (either by absence or leaving entirely), so the company has to accommodate this by having more people on staff.

 At the same time, long-time experienced staff is a high commodity in the nuclear industry,  because some operations cannot be performed at all without senior staff on-site. So the nuclear compaines are extra loath to dispense with people once they have been hired and trained for some time, as the staff who have several years of experience become a very valuable asset to the company's ability to operate safely (or at all) and according to regulations.

E also offered another angle - at a Human Factors Network course in control room design, she had listened to a lecture including a recount of nuclear power plant work in South Africa, where the nature of staffing problems has had a more sobering limitation. There, the AIDS epidemic has made it likely that many in the population won't survive past a certain adult age, which means that there is a demographic setback to reaching the same levels of "staff seniority" as in western countries. This bleak outlook has a consequence that the demands that can be placed on nuclear staff knowledge and seniority becomes limited, since there is always a risk that older workforce members will per definition be scarce. As a consequence,  the nuclear industry has tried to counteract personnel (= competence) losses by designing as much 'smart' behavior as possible into interfaces and methods. Although this makes any system (i.e. a company) less person-dependent, this also presents plenty of challenges that instead have to do with documentation, slow change processes regarding equipment and technology acceptance, and masses of administrative tasks which in themselves don't contribute to the core production, but are necessary to 'harvest' the know-how of potentially transient human contributors...

For me, this conversation was enlightening and confounding at the same time (as SoSus conversations always are) - how can people be encouraged to stay in one industry to accumulate enough knowledge to reach a level of expertise, craftsmanship and/or authority to retain some form of operational stability and basic level of knowledge transfer between members of the workforce? And what are the advantages and drawbacks of increasingly 'designing' this wisdom, knowledge and system of best practices into user interfaces, methods and procedures? And where does the free will of the individual workforce member come into the picture?

Mmm-mm. So many interesting things to untangle… :)

EDIT Jan 8:  E asked me to correct a couple of points that I didn't get quite right, so some text has been changed.

The xmas card

Just to clarify, here are the plastic animals that reside in my office.



This was my first try ever at doing stop-motion and I'm actually pretty pleased with how this year's xmas card turned out (even though I had a mad spree and started making it at 1am, finishing roughly 3+ hours later from being in sheer play-mode...) And yes, fun it was! :)

A renovation

You are at the blog formerly known as Variations in the Key of Cb, which has moved.

I think it's safe to say that the the way I used to write my blog lost its purpose for me over time. It used to be intentionally aimless so that I could practice creative writing and sort of report on what was going on to a not-so-sharply-defined group consisting mostly (in my mind) of my cousins when I was home in Sweden, and my friends back home when I was in Canada.

I think that I still thrive on needing to write to collect and clarify my thoughts, so this overhaul is me taking a whack at writing again. But this time, I'm focusing more on research musings and my doodle (=creative) projects.* For a long time I had kind of an antagonistic relationship with my research, but now it's so much a part of who I am and want to be that I feel very blessed and fortunate to be allowed to do what I do, and maybe do myself the favour of logging those various processes here.

So (as is probably evident) I'm archiving Variations in the key of Cb , and will look upon it fondly as my collection/elephant graveyard of experiential treasures.

Here at my namesake blog it's more likely from now on that you'll find conundrums regarding Social Sustainability research, the odd illustration job, and sometimes the awful Pun-guins (a plastic menagerie consisting mainly of penguins, residing in my office window at work).

Until next time, I am faithfully yours, and still answer to /Cb.


* Although I won't swear on being able to stay entirely on the subject if anything else needs exposition...