Do I listen to what I say I do?

Anyone who studies behavior knows that what people say is not what they do. More evidence reported in the NY Times shows that what people report listening to isn't what they actually listen to.

Visualizing You.... leveraging the internet to break down your name

This shows 3 iterations of "Wendy Castleman". It is a pretty cool visualization from MIT:

It combines all of the data on the internet related to your name and creates a "digital DNA map". It seems to change every time I do it... and it combines me and at least two other "Wendy Castleman"s out there. Still... it's pretty cool.

Why not solve for everyone?

I consistently get push-back from teams when I encourage them to solve for only a subset of people. I explain to them that if they want to really delight someone, they need to focus. That if you try to solve for everyone, you end up making choices that make it non-optimal for anyone. The experience for customers is like the difference between getting a gift that is absolutely perfect for you ("you know me so well! This is perfect! Wow!") and one that could work for anyone ("oh, how nice").

One of my colleagues just pointed me to a rather old video that I think I can use to help make my case:


What do you think?

Understanding Customer Values

Understanding customer's values is key to getting to delight.

How often do you identify what your customer's values are? How do you use that information when designing solutions for them? If the solutions to customer's problems don't mesh with their view of the world and their values, they won't find the solution delightful. If they do... wow.

Examples of companies that focus on values:

• Harley-Davidson designs everything to support their customer's underlying values of experiencing freedom, adventure and community.
• Boon designs things to support their customer's underlying value of style and whimsy.
• The Body Shop designs solutions to support their customer's underlying values of being sustainable, natural and unique.
• Lego designs things that support their customer's values of play, creativity and community.

The better you are at recognizing a customer's values, the more likely you will be to delight them.

Here is a wonderful video of a small business customer talking about his business. Watch it and try to figure out his values. Then, look at the first of the "comments" on this blog entry for my assessment. How close are you?

Deeper Empathy Through Reflection

One of my passions lately is in understanding how we can get deeper understandings of our customers... if we can establish "Deep Customer Empathy", then we can develop better solutions for them. I'm not alone in my recognition that we need to get deeper. Companies are starting to hire more ethnographers and specialists to help bring those understandings to the company. However, that's not enough. Everyone at the company needs to have the empathy, not just the researcher. Matthew May just wrote about this a couple of days ago. There is a WONDERFUL new book on the topic by Dev Patnaik, called "Wired to Care". Both are well worth reading.

To researchers and designers, this stuff might seem like it is old-hat. However, I've found that even researchers and designers don't necessarily go far enough in their investigations. I think an important step, when studying people who aren't you, is "reflecting" what you have heard and seen and how you are interpreting it. The customer can "course correct" you if you are slightly off.

For example, a team I was recently working with was trying to come up with new ideas for a market they hadn't really focused on before - young adults. I had them do some ethnographic research and some interviews, and when they analyzed the data, they determined that the area where the most opportunity seemed to be was in planning for the "mid-term". This market was great at managing near-term events (things in the next few weeks) and very long-term (retirement), but not really the time in between. The team identified a problem around planning for the time between 4 months to 40 years. I then brought some of the participants from our earlier research in to review the insight. Their reaction was lovely. They absolutely agreed on the problem, but they couldn't agree with the time frame. For this market, they couldn't really comprehend 40 years. They corrected the time-span of the problem to 4 months to 10 years...

This was just one of the things they dug into with the customer. But, it illustrates the importance of clarifying and getting deeper with customers. It isn't enough just to observe customers and understand where they are coming from. Since you are filtering things through your own eyes and experience, you should go the extra step to reflect with the customer to make sure you have it right.

New article on being a better manager... via Design Thinking

There is a lot of talk about Design Thinking lately. What is it? It is applying the methods of "thinking like a designer" to problem solving. And it works so well that very legitimate sources of information in the business world are starting to embrace it.

The latest article on the topic is from MIT Sloan Management Review: How to become a better manager... by thinking like a designer. The article covers a variety of topics, from simplicity to experimentation, from effective team size to communications.

One of my favorite quotes in the article is from Nancy Duarte:

"[Managers] rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning." (p. 40-41)

People can interpret things very differently, even when it is concrete data. We tend to filter our understanding and interpretation of the world based on our own perspective, values and assumptions. By creating a context around the information and redefining the meaning of it, you can build a persuasive and compelling story - which can result in a shared vision.

Not doing things we know we need to be doing

I need to get on a regular exercise routine. I have great intentions, it's the follow through that is lacking. I know how to do it, I just don't. Why? I'm busy, it seems like it will be a lot of work, I'm kind of tired... for some reason, although I need to do it, I don't.

I've noticed the same thing happening with customer research in product design. We know we need to do it. We know how to do it, at least to some extent. But, we often just don't do it. We skip over the research in understanding the problem and empathizing with customers, we skip over bringing customers into our design process to get feedback and direction on our concepts, we even skip over usability testing and validating that the customers can use the solutions we design to solve their problems. At the end, we release a product and wonder why on earth it doesn't delight our customers.

I decided to tackle my exercise issue head on. I signed up for a publicly visible exercise diary that reported my exercise on my Facebook page. You might ask one of the following three questions:

1. Why on Earth would you want to publish your exercise behaviors on Facebook?
2. How will signing up for a diary tool get you to actually exercise?
3. What does this have to do with design research?

To the first point, it makes me accountable to others. Okay, others aren't really looking over my shoulder, but if I don't track, it will be like a public confession that I didn't exercise again today. If I do, I may occasionally get encouragement from others. By doing this, I get myself to be honest to myself. Frankly, I'm much more likely to do something appropriate if I know I'm being watched.

I'm not alone in this. There is strong evidence that tracking your behavior, or knowing that your behavior is being tracked, can actually change your behavior. The effect of just measuring can get this result. It has been shown to be effective for getting people to eat better, exercise more, study more, and even drive more evenly.

Finally, what does this have to do with design research? The same effect is likely to work. Logging your customer research activities in a publicly visible place (okay, maybe just visible to other employees at your company) will result in more customer research activities. Tracking can help you see how far you've come and recognize the value in the interactions you are having with customers. You might even find that you are able to improve the quality of your interactions based on this information.

If you try this out, let me know how it works.

No *** for passwords!

At the recent UPA conference in Portland, I attended a session that was on best practices in the registration process. The talk was okay, but the conversation around it was more interesting. One of the things that got raised was how users had problems creating passwords when the system changed the password text to ****. People thought it was for security if you were in a public place, but then Stephanie Rosenbaum piped up and told us the real history. Apparently, this was a holdover from old word-processing machines that created a paper receipt of everything you typed. In other words, we've developed a standard based on an old, out of date technology!

Jakob Nielsen commands that we stop using password masking in his most recent alertbox article. He points out that as we are moving to a more mobile device-centric world, misspellings and mistyping becomes more common. This is a real problem for masked passwords because the user won't know that they've made an error until the password fails. He does offer a carrot to those who want to keep masking: make it optional and let the user decide.

The best advice I think I've gotten in my career

Next to my desk is a yellowing sheet of paper that I treasure. On it are 3 rules that I live by in my career, and I thought I'd share them:

1. Say NO
2. Keep standards reasonable
3. Take time out for thinking

These rules were written down on this paper during a conversation with a colleague, Pete Amico, who was brilliant enough to see through my frazzled state and offer me such sage advice. Pete left the company years ago, but the rules are still up on my wall where I look at them frequently.

Say No.
Here's the thing. I tend to be one of those people who really wants to help. So, I say yes. The problem is, it isn't really possible to do everything. In order to be at my best, it is important for me to make choices and say no to things I could do, and even things that I really should do. Saying yes to everything means that I have way too much going on to handle well, which brings us to rule 2.

Keep standards reasonable
I have high standards for myself. I tend to hold all of the work that I do to this high standard. That's great when I can pull it off, but not when I am trying to juggle multiple things. It isn't possible to do "great" on everything. I have to prioritize what is absolutely critical to do really well, and what will work if I just do okay. To do that, I need to follow rule 3.

Take time out for thinking
When there is a ton of stuff on my plate (because of my tendency to say yes) and I need to put in a lot of time to do it right (because of my tendency to hold myself to unreasonably high standards), I find myself with no time for thinking. Thinking, though, is critical to produce high quality work and to figure out what my priorities are.

So, the three rules are rules that I need to live by. Maybe they'll help you too.

(ps. consider applying these rules to designing products too... )

Business + Anthropology = nirvana, or something else...

Navi Radjou blogged last week about R&D 2.0, which he suggests is more about anthropology than engineering. His blog on the Harvard Business Publishing site was focused on R&D in emerging markets, but is representative of a trend I've seen in the business literature lately.

I'm intrigued with the recent business "crush" on anthropological/ ethnographic methods. It seems that people are thirsty for real stories and deep understanding to give them direction.

I fear, though, for the impending backlash. If businesses don't apply those stories and lessons to improve their products and services, the role of ethnography may be seen as a passing fancy, a waste of precious resources. I think the key will be to have people who can translate meaning into direction and business implications.

If we do succeed in making businesses more sensitive to where customers are really coming from, it could be a beautiful thing. Business people will benefit from having the deeper customer understanding that comes from ethnographic research, and researchers will benefit from having to apply rigorous business thinking to their findings.

But... part of me is thinking back a few years to when the crush was on psychologists and usability. It isn't that usability isn't critical to businesses these days, it is often cited as one of the more important elements of the success of products. Many companies now have usability professionals on staff or regularly hire usability consultants to conduct research for them. However, in an era of limited budgets, I'm not seeing much growth or even discussion of the need for adding more psychologists to the payroll. (Maybe I'm not looking in the right place). I think that the problem is that usability is often thought of as a quality assurance step, instead of a strategic goal. Psychologists and usability researchers help perpetuate this by focusing on "usability problems" instead of the cognitive principles that can guide the direction and design of usable and enjoyable solutions. Our time hasn't past, but we have kind of dropped the ball in focusing so much on such a small piece of the picture.

For anthropologists and ethnographers (and user experience researchers who have a broader skillset than just usability testing), I hope that you can leverage your current moment in the spotlight to show real business value and differentiation through the work that you do. If so, everyone benefits and we will continue to see growth and excitement around the integration of ethnographic research in business.

Research Traps: 7 ways of thinking that keep you from doing great customer research

An updated presentation that I made at UPA last week about "traps" that we can fall for in doing research.

Research Traps: 7 ways of thinking that keep you from doing great customer research

View more OpenOffice presentations from Wendy Castleman.

UPA 2009 in Portland - Day 2

This was a really long day. But a good one. I started off with a great talk from Susan Weinschenk on crafting presentations. It focused on telling a compelling story and was very engaging and fun. I went to it because I was following her talk with my own talk on presentation slides and I wanted to make sure I knew what she was covering to ensure that mine didn't overlap too much. Her talk was full of tips about giving the presentation itself. I was safe.

My talk was about how the slides you present affect your credibility and influence. I structured it so that it would be kind of an "evaluation" session where we'd evaluate slides from real findings presentations. It was kind of an experiment. I wasn't sure how it would go. In retrospect, I would have done a few things differently... I would have offered more examples of good slides and best practices to counterbalance with the not perfect examples I used. Some people in the audience loved it. Others hated it. I guess I can't feel too bad about that type of reaction.

Later in the day, I gave my talk on Research Traps. It went very well... (slides are up on Slideshare). This was pretty much the same as the talk I gave last fall, but this was a much shorter speaking window. I had 30 minutes and it filled the time, but it wasn't too rushed and the audience seemed to get a lot from it.

I went to a talk on having a "Field Day" at Yahoo... kind of a customer intimacy experience for non-UX people based on the "Hack Day" concept. It was pretty cool. Mark Wehner and Tom Wailes talked about how they got multidisciplinary teams of 3 to go into the field and spend time with a customer, focusing their interaction on something that interested themselves. Then, they returned to the office and constructed posters to illustrate their most interesting insights. They had 2 minutes to share what they'd learned and prizes were awarded for good research behaviors (best artifact, best quote, best poster, etc). Very nice twist on "teambuilding".

I also went to a talk from Peter Roessler, from Salesforce.com, about a Graffiti wall that they'd put up to collect qualitative data from target users at a user conference. It was kind of cool. They had moderators man the wall so people could come speak to them if they are "auditory" thinkers, people could draw if they were "visual" thinkers, and... could collaborate on answers or not. Kind of cool. Got me thinking about some of the benefits of collecting data in public spaces.

UPA 2009 in Portland - Day 1

It doesn't really feel like day 1 of the conference, since the past two days were tutorials and workshops and lots of meet and greet time. I stayed up last night talking until past midnight with old colleagues/friends from the Bell Labs days. That's one of the great things about conferences... catching up and sharing memories.

This morning the conference kicked off with a talk from Jared Spool. He's usually entertaining, but I usually don't completely agree with what he has to say. Today, though, was a different story. He was talking about how the field needs to grow and change. He pointed out that usability is not the same as user experience, and that as a field we need to transform ourselves. He talked about how we need to move from being just "usability practitioners" who smooth out the bumps to being "user experience professionals" who focus on delivering delight through the end-to-end experience. (Preaching to the choir).

Then, he talked about the difference between critics and coaches, and encouraged us to "Stop alienating people!" (wow, this from Jared???). He shared some research about successful and not successful teams. How successful teams were flexible and relied on tricks and techniques, whereas unsuccessful teams relied more on methods and dogma. Very entertaining and oh-so-true.

He talked about how we needed to broaden our skills and to specialize more deeply at the same time.

He talked about 3 core UX attributes (for teams):

• Shared vision of the future of the product
• Regular feedback by observing customers
• Rewarding failure.

He said that it was our job to curate the failure process because "risk-adverse organizations produce crap." Okay... it was Jared.

Jared also did two STAR moments in his presentation (aka very entertaining parlor tricks):

• He had 40 people in the audience fill out a survey then use their bodies to plot a visual graph of their data for the audience (we did similar things at VizThink this year and now I'm a big fan)
• He had someone hold up a 67 foot string to illustrate a proportion and opportunity chart. Very dramatic illustration of the 3 inches of string representing the number of people who generated 80% of revenues versus the 67 feet representing people who come to the e-commerce site...

I went to several other talks during the day, but I'm much too tired to summarize right now. I'll get to it later... tomorrow I have 2 talks and will upload slides and commentary as soon as I can.

Tailgating and Innovation

This morning, on my way to work, I was tailgated by someone. Not an altogether unusual situation on a northern California freeway, by any means! The tailgater finally gave up on me and changed lanes, where he sped up until he reached the next car, which he then tailgated.

When I was a young driver, I used to drive that way too. Somehow, it felt like if I could take up all the space, I'd get there faster. Over time, though, I realized that not only was this generally unsafe and rude, but I had to slam on my brakes pretty frequently. If I was just to back off a bit, I would have a much smoother ride and would end up where I was going pretty much at the same time. Now, I drive pretty much at my own pace. There usually is a nice buffer in front of me, so when I see red break lights I can assess the situation and react calmly.

This morning as I watched that tailgater speed up and stomp on the breaks over and over again, I realized that I was seeing might be a great analogy for innovation.

Let me explain.

Following the person in front of you too closely doesn't allow you to respond. Instead, backing off and consistently assessing the lay of the land can help you see new opportunities and react calmly to what you see in front of you.

Most startups are like tailgaters. They speed up quickly to follow the guy in front of them and then stomp on the break (or crash). Maybe even repeatedly.

Great innovations don't tend to come from following too closely. They often appear to be things that take a new angle on the problem, which can only happen if you back away and look around. Think about a a few things that really were game-changing:

• The Nintendo Wii - Nintendo had been playing with the pack for quite some time, but they stepped back, assessed the situation, and took a new angle on the problem. This allowed them to "find a new lane" and speed out in front of the pack.
• The Apple iPod - MP3 players had been around for some time, but Apple held back and looked at the lay of the land before launching in with a solution that had fewer features, but a much more integrated experience, including the revolutionary integration with an online music store (iTunes). Their new angle blasted them so far past the rest of the pack that all these years later, no one has caught them.
• The Ford Model T - earlier models at Ford and all other companies were crafted one at a time. The Model T was created using an assembly line. Rather than continuing to follow the pack, the folks at Ford stepped back and reframed the problem of building a car... broke it into it's component parts and then strung it together . The result? 93 minutes to build a car... over a million cars built in 7 years (RADICAL acceleration over the way all other vehicles were built).
  

So... to come up with a game-changing innovation, it pays not to be a tailgater.

An experiment in guerrilla brainstorming

I wanted to see if I could start up brainstorming organically to help build in fun and creativity into the workplace. So, I bought some really bright flipchart sticky paper and put up a new activity on the wall each week. No explanation, just a felt-tip pen and a simple instruction (like: add to this).

Open brainstorm on a general question

Result: not much action.

Thoughts… just too open, too scary to contribute to. Happy about the drawings, but that wasn’t a result of the prompt as much as it was having a blank piece of paper up on the wall.

Mind map

Result: incredible organic participation

Thoughts… The effort for the mind map was pretty clear: word-association. People jumped in and added without prompting because it was relatively anonymous, and after a while there was almost an implicit challenge to come up with something witty or silly to contribute. Low effort. Low risk.

Thought Bubbles

Result: mediocre, but creative contributions

Thoughts… really didn’t know what I’d come up with here. Didn’t come up with much, but found myself contributing random thoughts when I walked by. I think it might have been intimidating to “share a thought”. Somehow, less anonymous.

Octagon

Result: not much action (but I sure had fun with it!)

Thoughts… loved this from a thinking perspective. But, it didn’t elicit much participation. Too constrained?

Phase II of the experiment: Amping it up.

Mind map at a company event

We had a site social on the topic of innovation, with all kinds of “booths” on some of the great innovation work that is going on around the company. We put up a big blank piece of paper on the window and drew a circle in the middle with the word “Innovation”. Initially, everyone who walked by the area was handed a sharpie and asked to add to the mind map. It started off slowly, but evolved into a rich point of discussion and laughter.

Thoughts….Leveraging the success of the “Visualize” mind map, which was in a rarely used hallway, I had hoped that this would work, and it did! Some people were more literal than others, but some people jumped in and got really silly and creative. Made for a good interactive element at the event, while being low-tech, low-cost, low-effort. It was a collaborative, “social contribution” activity… and look how incredible it became! (Actually, it evolved much further after this photo, but I didn’t get a later picture).

Next Step

Anonymous mind map in a public space, without “prompting”.

User experience and the much neglected non-profit sector

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox today was on usability of non-profit websites. It is a wonderful summary of a large-scale usability study on numerous non-profit sites in different sub-sectors. He found that about half of the sites had usability problems that kept prospective donors from getting around the site effectively, and more than half lacked the content that donors were looking for.

It made me think of the online user experience for non-profits in general. Every year, I hunt down non-profits that support causes that I think family members believe in, then donate in their name, as a gift to the family member. Usually, I come up with about 10 different causes that I need to research. I was not surprised by the results of Nielsen's study, but I think that it neglects to focus on a couple of other things (see caveat below):

• Passion is lacking in the design of most non-profit sites. I don't know why, but many non-profit sites look amateurish, busy or generic. This is so sad, because the people who work for these non-profits are amazingly passionate about their causes. Here's an example: Paws with a cause is a non-profit organization that trains guide dogs for people with disabilities. Really great, right? Their site, though, looks unimpressive. The home page is not convincing, and many of the content pages are huge text documents, really, posing as web pages. Compare that with Charity:Water, which is a non-profit that raises money to build wells in poor countries. Charity:Water has a very rich, visually compelling website. It benefits from the fact that the founder is a photojournalist. Most non-profits aren't so lucky. But, I would argue that the people who founded Paws with a cause are just as passionate. It's just their site that is lacking passion.
• Design... color, fonts, layout. Many non-profit sites end up using really, er, interesting choices. Compare the New Hampshire Food Bank with it's grey, purple, green, blue (at least 4 shades of blue on the home page) to Second Harvest of Orange County with it's black, orange, khaki and yellow. I don't love either of these sites, but the latter is more "professional-looking" because of it's choice in colors and imagery. I'd certainly trust my $ to them.

Non-Profits, like other companies, should consider the user experience when designing their websites. They should have a deep understanding of the customer's (donor) needs, create content that gives the customer the right level of information and interaction, and leverage all the best practices in design to deliver an experience that delights.

I think I know how I'm going to try to spend my volunteer hours this year... helping a non-profit with their online user experience!


caveat: I read Nielsen's Alertbox, not the full report, so there may be information like design and passion in the findings.

Handcuffs and Forcing Functions

This morning on the way to work, NPR did a really quick blurb on something going on on the space station. Apparently, the astronauts put in a pin backwards yesterday, which is causing some kinds of problems that they are trying to resolve today. Such errors can be avoided by creating a forcing function... making it impossible to put it in any way other than the correct way.

Forcing functions have been on my mind lately, ever since reading the Fast Company article on "Make it stick: Build Handcuffs" in the April 2009 issue. The article talks about people's desire to have mechanisms that force behaviors for the things they feel they "should" be doing, but aren't necessarily. They give examples, like a "piggy bank" and the guy who sent resignation letters five years in advance. I have some of these forcing functions myself. For example, in my Quicken file, I have "fake" accounts that I "transfer" money in and out of for saving for vacations, childcare, property taxes, etc.

It is an interesting angle to take, but a risky one. Remember Quicken Financial Planner? No? That is because while customers "said" they wanted to do financial planning, they really didn't. So, they didn't buy the product. On the other hand, there was no forcing function to ensure that they would do the thing they thought they should be doing.

Are you trying to solve for something that people feel they "should" do? Is there a way you can leverage a forcing function in your solutions?

ps. If you can figure out an effective forcing function to get me a daily workout, I'd love to hear it!

Environmental Influences on Creativity

Does where you work make a difference to how creative you are? I started thinking about this a while ago when I contemplated the differences between different corporate workspaces. Way back in 1999, IDEO touted it's flexible and playful environment as being necessary to encourage the type of creativity that is needed to be innovative, in the famous Nightline "the Deep Dive" episode. The Stanford dSchool has adopted this practice and has a very flexible environment consisting of red IKEA couches, whiteboards and tables all on casters. There are so many examples of really creative places of work. What do they have in common? Does it really matter?


A peek at some places:

• Lego
• Google (Canada)
• Redbull (London)
• Pixar

Getting beyond the obvious

Try the following experiment. For each of these words, write down the first word that comes to mind.

Table
Cat
Shoe
Left
Black

Now take a look at your list. Let me use my powers of intuition and guess that your list will look something like this:

Chair
Dog
Sock
Right
White

That is because the patterns you have become accustomed to have build strong associations with those words. The associations are obvious. Obvious patterns come to us quickly, and most people come to the same answers.

Let me share a different set of word associations to that original list:

Frog
Sweater
Pin
Veil
Death Star

Were any of these words on your list? Why not?

Here was my thinking process that created this list... I went beyond the obvious to hunt for a unique association. In each case, this required looking at the original word and thinking about different aspects of that word.

From table to frog: Things with legs

From cat to sweater: Things related to yarn

From shoe to pin: Things related to bowling

From left to veil: Things related to weddings

From black to Death Star: Things related to Darth Vader

As you can see, unique associations usually aren’t the first things that come to mind. They generally become clear only after you have the additional information about the lens to think about the word. Even then, I'd imagine that you wouldn't have arrived at the same unique associations that I did.

Why is this important? Well, when we are trying to come up with new ideas, we should keep this distinction in mind. When we go with our initial ideas, we are usually going with the obvious. Innovation is unlikely when coming from that point because it is likely where everyone else goes too. When we spend some time looking at the problem or solutions from different angles, we're more likely to arrive someplace unique.

Take the time to brainstorm. It will get you beyond the obvious.

WSU Design Conference Notes

Design and Cultures:WSU Interdisciplinary Design Institute – 5^th annual design conference January 14-16, 2009

About the conference

The design conference was an intimate conference with about 200 attendees, 2/3rds of which are students, bringing together different design perspectives from multiple disciplines and industries from around the world. Attendees were from all over the US, Canada, Germany, Portugal, Australia and India.The conference is held each year in Spokane on the Washington State University campus. In addition to the conference, they hold a student design competition each year that the conference speakers judge.
The general tone is upbeat. People are accepting, welcoming, curious and challenging.

Key Questions

I went into the conference trying to absorb as many ideas as possible, and as much of an understanding of the similarities and differences in design that I could. I had three primary questions. Here they are with some of the answers I collected during the conference:

What is design?

• Creatively bringing things together

• Brainstorming and Prototyping

• Ideas for solving problems (functional, short-term)

• Madness

• Intuitive problem-solving

• Conceptual blending

• A stochastic, dynamic thinking process

• A really complex vision integrating different elements

• Reframing

• Combine concepts

• Lots of interaction with experts and target users

• Trial and error

• Brainstorming

• Chance (implicit connections)

How do you know when you have designed well?

• Feedback from users

• Feedback from peers

Conference Highlights

Perhaps the richest conversations happened outside of the conference sessions, where conversation flowed freely over all kinds of topics relating to design, research, teaching and experiences.

Opening Plenary

The opening plenary speaker was the mayor of Spokane. One might think this an odd choice for a design conference, but Spokane is in the midst of a massive urban renewal project, so her discussion was about the process of designing the modifications to the city, including a good deal of background around what the problem was they were solving for. She had the head of her planning commission also talk to add details about the progress on the project thus far. It was clear that they had enormous pride in the city and in the design program at the university. Apparently, there are actually 3 universities in Spokane and one of their goals is to increase cross-pollination of the campuses through access corridors and shared spaces. The talk solidified my original impression of the conference being a very different kind of design than we do, yet somehow familiar in process.

My Talk

I gave a talk on how various corporate cultures can inhibit design-thinking and creativity. I proposed an idealized cultural environment: one that embraces diverse perspectives, expects experimentation and iterative prototyping, values customer involvement throughout the process, and is fun to work in. Then, I spelled out 5 cultures that violate at least one of these elements, and how to address them. I left them with the point that no-one designs in a vacuum, and asked them what they could do to make their culture a better place to design in. I wasn’t too sure that this would be a relevant topic, since the audience included primarily people from academic departments. But, the room was packed. People were standing and sitting on the floors. They were really engaged and asked tons of questions. It was clear that they recognized their own experiences in the cultures I discussed. The students related to it from a working in groups perspective, and more than one person said that I’d crystallized something they’d been trying to get their heads around. The feedback I received was all positive, and people said that they now felt empowered to address their cultural barriers. They added another “culture”… the culture of “Advancement”, where you need to take credit for the work you accomplish. The barrier comes with turning away from the diverse perspectives and FUN, because everyone becomes pretty ego-involved and possessive. I suggested that they go ahead and take joint credit for any project they are involved in, regardless of whether they were the one with the great idea “I was part of the team…”. I suggested that they might want to focus on building relationships to progress, rather than rely soley on the output of their creativity. Someone backed me up when they mentioned that IDEO’s bonus structure is based on humility, how much help you asked for. One question asked whether I thought these cultures and tactics would be true in other cultures. I admitted that I didn’t know, and then did a running thought experiment about Japanese culture: the juxtaposition of the culture that looks down on self-promotion (told the story of the Facebook equivalent in Japan that is very popular, but that people all put up cute pictures of their pets, rather than touting themselves) with embracing brainstorming (TPS). It was great, we filled up the hour, even though my talk was only 25 minutes.

Introducing design thinking to engineering students

This was a talk from Micah Lande, a PhD candidate at Stanford. He went through the evolution of a capstone project-based course from the mechanical engineering program at Stanford. He points out that traditionally, engineers and designers think differently because they ask different questions. Told the joke about “how many ____ to screw in a lightbulb”.

• How many Engineers? The engineer says, “it depends… how many feet off the ground is the fixture?, what’s the wattage of the bulb?”

• How many Designers? The designer asks, “does it need to be a lightbulb?”

He started by proposing a “Ways of thinking framework”.

Projects in the class used to be in the bottom two quadrants, but now more and more are in the upper two. Activity in the projects spans Future, Design and Engineering thinking... with more design and future thinking upfront, but going back and forth between engineering and design thinking activities.

The Culture of Design

This was a very controversial talk by John DeMao, jr. He presented a very academic treatise, analyzing the culture of design practice, weaving in perspectives from psychologists and artists. He says that the design process isn’t one that can be dictated, because it is, by its nature, contextually changing. He points out that there are inherent contradictions in design thinking, particularly between the clarity of thought versus the freedom of thought. He points out that a good deal of design creativity comes from intuition, which he says is not independent of prior experience or knowledge, but is below the conscious level. He defined design as conceptual blending – a partial match between two inputs resulting in new mental constructs, and suggested that conceptual blending itself cannot be taught. This led to a great debate in the room… He ended with the idea that we can only describe what the design process is after the design effort, not before. He said this is because you can’t describe where you are going because any point you can learn something that changes your trajectory. So, he points out, design isn’t really iterative because the cognitive acts modify at each step.

Informal Conversation

One of the best things was the informal conversations that we all had during meals and breaks. One of the themes that came up had to do with teaching creative design . After John De Mao’s talk (above), there was a desperation that came from faculty about what could be taught if conceptual blending (i.e., design) is subconscious. As the resident cognitive psychologist at the event, I pointed out that you have lots of skills that were taught that are currently primarily subconscious, like the skill of driving a car. At first, it was all explicit, so it was overwhelming. Now it is mostly automatic because it is implicit, so it is very difficult to describe or teach to someone else. What got you from the first state to the second state was experience. So, giving students practice and new experiences can help them be more effective designers. So then, someone asked what types of experiences to provide people with. John described design as conceptual blending; so the more exposure you have to different concepts, the greater chance you’ll be able to design. I mentioned a talk that Philip Shaw gave about awareness quotient, and suggested that a good experience to have would be slightly uncomfortable, something you wouldn’t normally seek out. We talked about the differences of having the “critic” mindset when going into an experience versus the “designer” mindset. The critic will find problems and complain about things, where the designer will strive to understand why. All of this was particularly interesting for me because I’ve had this pet theory that the human mind is basically a pattern recognition machine. We find patterns where none exist… so, if design is the blending of disparate concepts, then design should come naturally to us. The more experiences we have, the more connections we can make.

All in all, it was an interesting conference to be a part of. I’m glad I went.

WSU Conference on Design and Cultures

I'm attending a conference at Washington State University Spokane on Design and Cultures. The conference is interdisciplinary, and it is wonderful expanding my thinking about design. I gave a talk today on corporate cultures that inhibit designing creative solutions. Here are the slides.

5 Corporate cultures that inhibit designing creative solutions

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