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DESIGN | ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT | ART
An artful framework for work
(Austin & Devin’s Artful Making, revisited)
Artful Making, by Robert Daniel Austin and Lee Devin, appeared in 2003. We were all in a different mood back then. Even the language we spoke was different. Organizational design and process design were not even really “fields.” Businesses were not really “organizations” yet — and workplace learning was “training.”
I remember that year so well. The Agile movement was spreading like a bushfire. It was crisp and sparkling and excitingly full of promises. Meanwhile, I was in India most of the time. I spent a few months in the coffee plantations in Coorg, now Kodagu — and from there, I moved into the Nilgiri mountains, the Blue Mountains, where I lived for some time with the Toda indigenous community, studying their language and textile crafts. Later in the year, I returned to Damascus, which was still the wonderful and culturally diverse metropolis it had been for at least two thousand years, and where my partner Michaela Broeckx, energetic and courageous as ever, was doing an extended course in advanced Arabic for non-native speakers at Ma‘had ta‘lîm al-lughat al-‘arabiyya li l-ajânib.
There it was, in Damascus, that I first became familiar with Artful Making. I had come across a…
