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)
- Intuitive problem-solving
- A stochastic, dynamic thinking process
- A really complex vision integrating different elements
- Lots of interaction with experts and target users
- Chance (implicit connections)
How do you know when you have designed well?
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.
