Categories

Category Design Thinking

Entries 12 Total

Introduction to UX Research: Conducting Focus Groups

Jan 31, ’12 12:46 AM

This is an introduction to the fundamentals of doing customer research with an emphasis on Focus Groups. This is part of the introduction to ux research series. In this talk we walk through the basics of focus groups, types of focus groups, as well as an in-depth explanation of process and pitfalls.

Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product. In addition, focus groups seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences in using existing products and brands.

Introduction to UX Research: Conducting Focus Groups

View more presentations from Will Evans
Comments (0)

Hacking for Change

Jan 30, ’12 11:54 PM
Hacking for Social Change

Hacking for Social Change

 

Hacking For Change

Calling all developers, creatives & artists:

You are invited to the first annual Rapp Hack-a-thon, an ideation lab where creatives of all walks come together to build the next big idea that could change the world.

Details

February 13th – 10AM TO 10PM
Hosted @ RAPP
437 Madison Ave, 3rd Floor

Register by email: rappathon@rapp.com

Comments (0)

Design Studio for AgileUX

Jul 20, ’11 9:38 PM

Draft

This post was co-written with my co-worker, Jeff Gothelf, a fellow UX Designer who has been writing and speaking about both Agile and Lean in the context of user experience design for a while now.

“I’m curious, when you are using [design studio] during the Agile process. Iteration 0?” is a question that was recently posted by Virginia Cagwin (@Vcagwin), to my article on “The Design of Design Studio“. She brings up an interesting question, and one that Jeff (@jboogie) and I have discussed at length, so we teamed up to write about some considerations when deciding to use Design Studio in an Agile company.

The description of design studio written about in “How to Design the Design Studio”, was really meant more to serve as the canonical example, and is best suited at the beginning of a significant series of projects focused around one or a set of themes. The output of such a session may span many iterations in an Agile UX company such as TheLadders. Labeling it “Iteration 0” intimates that we follow the “staggered sprints” model popularized by Desiree Sy and Lynn Miller at Autodesk  – which we don’t. Instead we opt to solve problems as whole scrum teams and bring the ideation, design and development phases as close as possible to the same kickoff point.

Design Studio For AgileUX

Design Studio For AgileUX

Sometimes, a rapid 3-hour design studio will happen on a Friday afternoon, immediately followed by story gathering and estimations. Sometimes design studio may happen weeks before the scrum team is ready to begin estimating or developing the solutions. It really depends on the scope and nature of the problem statement.

As described in the article, the first thing that happens even before iteration planning or design studio is a definition of the problem statement and its scope; who will be involved; which scrum team; as well as which stakeholders will be able to provide the most insight and direction. After this problem setting is done, usually involving the director of product or a product manager and a UX designer, a decision is made as to the possible need for a design studio. For some larger projects, e.g., kicking off a completely new product, we have held multi-day design studios where day one focuses around various brainstorming techniques so that all the stakeholders and team members are able to explore the nature and scope of the project to be undertaken as well as to generate many ideas about the potential market, audience, and business goals that will need to be addressed. Day two of a large project kickoff may include an all-day or partial day design studio with a post mortem. We’ve also used these larger efforts to tackle multiple “slices” of the same problem statement looking at it from different product lines’ points of view.

For much smaller efforts, especially ones where the potential scope is a solution that may span two iterations to accomplish, a half-day design studio has proven to be more than appropriate to achieve the primary goals which was explain in “Introduction to Design Studio Methodology,” which includes:

  1. Collaboratively work to understand the nature, opportunities, and constraints of the articulated problem space
  2. Allow ideas from various perspectives and insights to percolate up between team members.
  3. Turn “ideas” and especially unstated assumptions from tacit or verbal states into cognitive artifacts that can be shared, evaluated, and iterated upon.
  4. Create a culture of shared ownership around future product vision.
  5. Generate a lot of ideas in a very fast time frame – usually no less than 3 hours, and sometimes as long as 10 hours.
  6. Allow open and honest critique of various concepts.
  7. Engage participants to defend their concepts and negotiate with other team members.

As important as it is for us to tie design studios to the beginning of an iteration, there are many pitfalls that can diffuse the positive effects and success of this tactic

Potential pitfalls

We have witnessed a number of instances when design studio was a failure, or at least a huge waste of time for all those participating in it. We also admit that some of those failures were ours in not properly educating stakeholders as to when design studio is and is not an appropriate way to explore an opportunity and generate new ideas.

“Successful organizations have discovered that shared and collaborative leadership, rather than heroic and authoritarian management, is what unlocks the potential of organizations. Organizations that operate from the authoritarian, hierarchical, command and control model, where the top leaders control the work, information, decisions, and allocation of resources, produce employees that are less empowered, less creative, and less  reductive.” - Journal of Strategic Studies, Creativity and Innovation: The Leadership Dynamics.

Pitfall 1: Having a solution before design studio starts

Product Management and UX have already explored the problem space and designed a solution, and are only running the design studio to gain development buy-in to the process. Why is it bad? If the ideas generated in the design studio don’t manifest in the solution itself, development will lose trust in their contribution and resent product and ux for wasting their time. #ProTip: Developers love to solve problems. Don’t waste their time, and don’t disenfranchise them or you will lose their respect. the goal of design studio is to include the entire team in solving the problem. Anything less and the design studio becomes meaningless.

Pitfall 2: Not adequately scoping design studio to meet the problem

Another pitfall I have run into is when the design studio is improperly scoped for the problem statement being addressed. More often than not, design studio is shortchanged. This can happen for a number of reasons, but the most prevalent is difficulty scheduling. “We really should do an all-day design studio, but it’s impossible to schedule all the necessary people for an entire day.” Think about this for a moment. If you’re addressing an opportunity that could generate a new product concept with the potential to upset your revenue streams or create an entirely new product generating millions in additional revenue, what’s one day in the grand scheme of things? You don’t design the scope of design studio to match people’s schedules; you scope it to address the market potential of the solution you hope to create.

Pitfall 3: Introducing blockers and business rules too early.

This pitfall is when members of the team, sometimes well-meaning stakeholders, block or critique ideas at the beginning of or during design studio based on existing business rules serving existing business needs according to old or current market conditions. This should be highly discouraged during design studio itself. It guarantees that no innovation happens in the design studio, though this is not nearly as bad as opening a design studio by stating that the goal of the day is to create an X solution as dictated by Y organizational stakeholder (who happens to not be in the room). Begin design studio with a clearly articulated problem statement, and then let ideas percolate up, refining them throughout the course of the day. At the end of the day, when refined ideas are being articulated to stakeholders, is the appropriate time to discuss potential business rules and make decisions about whether the designs should be changed to accommodate the rules, or whether the rules are no longer important. I have seen a number of situations where hard-and-fast rules turn out to be not so set in cement and were in fact completely flexible or arbitrary. Enter design studio with an open mind lest you crush the opportunity for innovation.

Pitfall 4: The invisible hand of the absent stakeholder

If you’re not part of design studio, you don’t have much voice in the ideation process to a solution. If a business stakeholder has already defined the solution to a problem that was explored offsite by an executive team, design studio is not appropriate and in fact can be counterproductive. Executives should simply hand the designs to a product manager who drafts up detailed requirements and lets the product/development teams implement. This goes back to the principle of not wasting people’s time. I have seen instances where a team is gathered across the organization, problem space explored, new and creative ideas hatched, all to be crushed by a stakeholder who isn’t even in the room, and has not participated in any of the discussions, brainstorming or ideation phases. This disenfranchisement crushes morale and ultimately means that the project, while potentially successful, ends up nowhere near as disruptive or innovative as some concepts explored during design studio. It also sours team members to the value of future design studios and creates a culture not only devoid of the passion necessary to innovate but one that is, in essence, afraid to innovate.

Will you always be successful in avoiding these pitfalls? Of course not. We work in the real world and navigating the minefields of organizational dynamics is a difficult and complex skill set. We just hope that by sharing these with you, you will be able to get the most out of your next design studio.

Conclusion

The Design Studio methodology provides a collaborative, pragmatic process of illumination, sketching, presentation, critique, and iteration leading to a shared vision of the problem space, uncover tacit knowledge, as well as discover unique and potentially elegant solutions.  Design studio can also save time and effort because there are less meetings to discuss designs that were done in a black box or an offsite – the team is empowered to actively collaborate on the solution, versus the old process of passively absorbing the completed design specifications.

Are there any rules, then, as to how far ahead and how large the design studio should be? The short answer is no. The scope of the problem space, the number of scrum teams involved, and the potential number of stakeholders across the organization that will need to provide some level of input are all salient issues that will impact how you choose to run the design studio. Use your best judgement, knowing that you will fail a number of times in the process, but at least keep in mind the the pitfalls innumerated above as you plan your next design studio.

Good luck and we hope to hear from you.

Comments (2)

Kinesthetic Ideation for UX & Service Design

Jul 12, ’11 9:37 AM

I read Marshall McLuhan years ago when I was knee deep in media theory and cognitive psychology, but it took a trip to the IA Summit in Memphis to bring that back – and I immediately began thinking about the materials, medium and methods we choose to use in our ideation and exploration phases and how it impacts our designs and solutions.

We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.
~ Marshall McLuhan

Overlap10 - Kinesthetic Ideation

Innovation requires the framing of a problem space with a solution that is unique – whether latent, disruptive or incremental. Value resides in a solution to the problem that is novel, relatively unexploited, or difficult to replicate because, more than likely, it resides solely in the creator’s head.

I think that design materials, methods and problems are all tied together in a mutual intertwingularity. Consider the example of an online training for an interactive system. The material is set to be HTML,  and perhaps Adobe Flex. This controls what the designers can do and how they perceive the problem. There are some things the designers cannot even imagine to do. To give another example, if it is decided that we build a computer game in 3D, I have already reckoned what some of the problems are: for example, modellers and animators are needed rather than a HTML-coders, but what activities and practices would we use to imagine the problem space and conceive various user narratives? Would sketching make sense?

But why not architects? Why not model train builders? I got this inspiration while visiting the National Building Museum, where the local Washington DC Lego Train Club was showing off their extraordinary creations. I realized that when we are framing a design problem, we shouldn’t choose the material, medium or method first – this might limit our possible solutions. It was only a few months later I was introduced to Lego Serious Play, specifically the use of legos to explore complex systems problems.

Overlap10 - Kinesthetic Ideation

During Overlap10 last summer in NYC, a group of architects, technologist, hedge fund anthropologists, and creative strategists got together for a weekend of play around the notion of “Scalable Actions.”

What I had written about in the description of scalable actions was that:

An effective Scalable Action depends upon taking the tacit idea, or framed problem space paired with a unique solution, and communicating it so others understand, are mobilized to then help execute that idea on a large scale.

The key to designing a Scalable Action is understanding that it is a solvable problem, then codifying and scaling tacit knowledge into well-defined business processes, technology enabler or other assets that others can use consistently, effectively, and cost-efficiently.

One of the activities we engaged in one Saturday afternoon on the Pratt campus was “kinesthetic ideation,” using Lego Serious Play as the method to our madness, which Michael Leis wrote about in his blog, “Overlap 10: Scalable Actions.” This is one example of conceptual repositioning of problem space using a different set of tools and methods to re-imagine our relationship to the design problem itself, as well as at a meso-level, our mindset in positioning ourselves vis-a-vis the context of the problem. This is similar to the research on what is called Embodied Interaction discussed in “Kinesthetic Creativity in Participatory Design,”

“Embodied Interaction is: “the creation, manipulation, and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artifacts” (p.126). For him, embodiment is an approach to understanding human artifact interaction that appreciates its contextual, situated and social nature.

Embodied Interaction means taking seriously the fact that all experiences of interaction with man-made artifacts are bodily, andthat the resulting “user experiences” are meaningful at a very basic corporeal level.”

Later, I found myself using Legos to explore multi-channel experience design with a group of executives at a major international banking conglomerate. Although we could have just as easily used “Design Studio,” to imagine the various touch points of the consumer experience – Lego’s provided a much richer means of engaging all stakeholders with the problem space which reaches far beyond the traditional screen.

When designers decide which method to use (i.e. how to approach the design work), they also perceive the design problem in a certain way. The method (whether Agile or User Centered Design or Activity Based Design) blinds the designer to some aspects and it highlights others. Methods are nevertheless necessary, but in order to get the whole picture I must recognize these blind spots from the outset, and perhaps explore the problem space using multiple methods. Otherwise the method is pressed upon and enframes the material and the problem,  and their very beingness becomes a manifestation of the tool and method.

“when we are framing a design problem, we shouldn’t choose the material, medium or method first – this will limit our possible solutions”

Overlap10 - Kinesthetic Ideation

This has been a problem with the design of many applications and websites. Management decides on a method and it is imposed on the problem as well as on the material. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, and it doesn’t matter what material the project is working with, they still use the same method (probably one that is also trendy as #LeanUX currently is). However, its seems perhaps irrational to try to use the same ideation, design, and development method in web store projects as in space shuttle projects. We should not think that there is one material and one method that works for all problem spaces, and this is especially important in the early ideation phase when we should be engaged in divergent thinking – how much divergence can their really be when the medium, material and method are already set? To really engagement in generative abductive reasoning, placement, juxtoposition, and contradiction can highlight unknown aspects of both the problem as well as highlight new and innovative solutions.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the web. I hope to be working with the web in 10 years, in 20 years. But the web is just a canvas. Or perhaps a better metaphor is clay — raw material that we shape into experiences for people. But there are lots of materials — media — we can use to shape experiences. Saying user experience design is about digital media is rather like saying that sculpture is about the properties of clay. That’s not to say that an individual sculptor can’t dedicate themselves to really mastering clay. They can, and they do — just like many of you will always be really great at creating user experiences for the web.
~ Jesse James Garrett, IA Summit 2009 The Memphis Plenary

What is our clay? How do we explore and create great user experiences when we always go back to the same well, use the same materials and the same design method – how can we not always arrive at the same solutions?

When you have a hammer goes the old cliché. But what if you used clay? Legos?

Overlap10 - Kinesthetic Ideation

In my view, a design method consists of a complex set of techniques tied together by a common, underlying philosophy. Every designer has a repertoire of methods and examples that make up his or her experience. The experience is of course tied to what sorts of projects the designer has been working on. The examples that a designer has seen influences how design problems are framed; they also embody the designer’s knowledge of the design materials. Someone who has worked only with web projects has a repertoire of examples from the web, but also has  knowledge in design materials like paper, Omnigraffle, XHTML, Photoshop, JavaScript, et cetera. As user experience professionals charged with designing information,  spaces,  and interactions between people, people and spaces;  people and objects;  and people and systems,  I think we need to step back and try other media, materials, and methods in the problem space exploration phase of our engagement. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to doing what we´ve always done, with the materials we´ve always used, according to a methodology handed down by management because it is the latest three-letter acronym.

“We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” McLuhan´s simple maxim is more relevant to today’s user experience designers than ever before. We need to explore new ways, new materials, and new methods if we really want to innovate and create fantastic, crafted, playful experiences that engage our audience.

Comments (0)

The Design of Design Studio

Jul 10, ’11 10:59 AM

Art Bin with Design Studio Materials

This is Part 2 of Introduction to Design Studio Methodology. While Part 1 was an explanation of the Why and What of design studio, this post deals with the logistics and mechanics. I highly recommend you read them in order.

The Design of Design Studio

“When good designers talk about innovation, they mean, “the successful exploitation of new ideas.” They don’t stop with the invention. They turn their inspirations into reality.” How Good Designers Think, Simon Rucker (HBR)

Materials for success

You will need to following materials to conduct a design studio:

  • Post-its: multiple colours, multiple sizes
  • Index cards: multiple colours, large size
  • Drafting dots
  • Sharpies – multiple colours
  • Pencils
  • Sketchboards: 1-up and 8-up (download)

You will also need to have the following:

  • Quick 15 minute Introductory PPT explaining what the deal is
  • Persona(s)
  • Inspiration (Artifacts from other contexts that help people think about the problem space)
  • Research – Any video, audio, interviews, contextual inquiry, design ethnography to better understand the people for whom the designed solution should work
  • Overhead Projector
  • Audio – to play music during sketching
  • Caffeine

For the Introductory Power Point, Sample Personas, and sketchboard templates in Illustrator or PDF, just request them. You’ll have to select your own music. I’ve been using Dubstep and Ambient Techno – preferably without words.

Designing the teams

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Most design studios require a minimum of 15 people. I have run them successfully with groups as large as 75. Participants are broken into teams of 4-6 participants, but no more. Teams should be designed to have some balance representing various disciplines. Mix up key stakeholders representing various functions within the company. I have found that it’s crucial to include participants from sales and customer support. They bring a unique vision of the customer as well as the market to a process. Ideally, design studio should cut across executives, sales, customer support, product management, development, marketing, as well as experience design.

Why? Glad you asked! In his book the Medici Effect, Frans Johansson encourages innovators to “live in the [i]ntersection” where different ideas, concepts and cultures meet. “The Intersection represents a place that drastically increases the chances for unusual combinations to occur.” This is why design studio works best with interdisciplinary teams.

So how do you get started?

Introduce Design Studio

The first requirement at the beginning of a design studio is to adequately frame the problem space or the design challenge. Actually, the first part of design studio is informing all participants to return their laptops to their desks and turn off their cellphones. This must be a shared exercise and everyone’s complete attention is required. In all the years I have run this, not one participant has missed the birth or death of a loved one. I shit you not.

Once those rules are set, participants are introduced to the research and output from any brainstorms which are taped up on the walls so that everyone has a shared understanding of the boundaries of their work for the day. One way, advocated by Adaptive Path, in their article, Sketchboards: Discover Better and Faster UX Solutions is:

“On this large sheet of paper we roughly organize our problems and constraints. We might paste up personas that we’re designing; stages of a user process; functional requirements; research findings, or screenshots of relevant real-life examples. This brings whatever elements that should be driving or inspiring us onto the same playing field.”

The point of the introduction is of course “for the team to gain a shared understanding the business context, customer, challenges and market opportunities.” The problem space should be distilled into one sheet of paper with no more than a few paragraphs called the Design Challenge. This prevents the problem of when all the teams are supposed to be solving for a sustainable hydration problem, and one or two rogue teams go off and design a “mobile Groupon for hookers application.”

Iteration One: Solitary Design, Team Critique

Time: 50 Minutes

Sketchboard: 8-up

After introducing design studio to participants and allowing them to familiarize themselves with the background and research; which should never take more than 30 minutes; the first iteration begins. It’s important to print out any background materials so that all people have sketchboards , as well as copies of the design challenge, personas, and hardcopies of important research findings. Although all the participants are broken up into teams of 4-6, they will be sketching on their own the first part of the day.

Participants are told they will be working on their own, and informed that they have exactly 8 minutes to sketch as many concepts as they can on the sketchboard with 8 boxes. The notion to embrace is that quantity is better than quality, but that all designs will be critiqued against their ability to articulate an argument that meets the customer’s needs. I turn on music and start the clock.

#Protip During the 8 minutes, it’s important to walk around and remind people not get hung up filling out 1 box with perfect detail. Also important is to make sure people uncomfortable with sketching don’t start writing bulleted lists of requirements – it happens, so nip this in the bud early. At the 4 and 7 minute mark, I announce how much time is left, and at then end, participants are required to place their pencils or sharpies down.

Now participants are instructed to present their concepts to team mates. All team members place their concepts up on the wall using drafting dots, and team members stand around it so they can understand what is presented. A designer should have no more than 3 minutes to present their core ideas. After a participant presents, their team members critique.

Critique should follow the pattern of: “here are two concepts that are really interesting – interesting enough to steal. Here are two concepts that could be interesting, but there are issues that need to be further fleshed out.”  Their team has no more than 4 minutes to critique meaning the entire cycle for a team is no more than 35 minutes.

#ProTip: Teams should use the inspiration board as well as personas to interrogate the design with questions like “How does your solution meet Persona A’s needs?” Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But this is a reminder that the ideas articulated should solve for the audience reified by the persona standing in for a real user – no one else. Issues of feasibility and meeting stakeholder/business needs come later when potential solutions are being prototyped and validated.

After the first round of sketch, present, critique, everyone is given a 15 minute break. Now they can turn on their cellphones, check email, or have a smoke.

15 minute break

Solitary Design, Team Critique

Iteration Two: Solitary Design, Team Critique

Time: 50 Minutes

After a brief 15min break, everyone returns to their respective tables for second iteration. Participants are encouraged in the second iteration to take the feedback from critique, as well as concepts presented by others, remixing and reinterpreting ideas to arrive at a more solid argument. Concepts should be extracted, stolen, re-combined and transformed on another sketchboard with the same 8 boxes. This time they should focus not just on discrete ideas, but how those ideas fit into a a larger picture as well as a flow.

I think it’s important to remind participants that they should explore what happens throughout the lifecycle of the engagement and have a more clearly articulated vision of the solution’s narrative. The second iteration ends with another round of presentation and critique. Each presenter now has 5 minutes to present their more refined ideas. Critique should take no more than 5 minutes – but at this point, you will start to see some convergence in ideas.

#Protip I’ve found it very valuable for team members to use colored sharpies, post-its, or colored drafting dots to indicate winning ideas that will be preserved in the group sketch portion of the design studio.

The total amount time for the second iteration is no more than 50 minutes, and each cycle should again be timed with a stop watch. If possible, project the countdown timer on a wall. Time boxing and demand for physical manifestations of concepts as sketches keeps teams focused on generating and refining ideas. This is the heart of design studio. Try to keep discussions and idle chatter to a minimum. Discussions can happen over lunch.

Solitary Design

60 minute lunch break.

Participants should all eat together in the same room, exploring the walls to see what other people have come up with. Breaks are also the time people can use cell phones or laptops to check back in with work. Lunch should be approximately an hour.

#Protip Turkey sandwiches aren’t the best lunch food to order-in. It contains Tryptophan which induces sleepiness.

Iteration Three: Team Design

Time: 90 minutes

Each of the teams will now collaborate to produce one unified design that captures the best concepts from the individual sketching sessions in the morning. There are a number of ways I have seen this happen, sometimes with individuals producing single 1-box sketchboards and then working to integrate them. Other times choosing a large scale post-it to design a single concept, and then iterating with multiple large post-its until time is called. Teams get only 40 minutes to produce a single design that a spokesperson will need to pitch to the other teams as their shared solution. All team members, however, must stand up with the spokesperson, since this is a shared design.

#Protip Its important that the moderator walk around to the various teams to prevent a few things from happening. Collaborative design can sometimes be difficult. Try to encourage group participation, to ensure one loud participant doesn’t take over the team. It’s also important to provide reminders to teams that the designs should meet the original goals of the design challenge.

Team Design

Another risk is that a team can spend too much time discussing alternatives and integration of various concepts, and leave only the last 10 minutes to sketch. This tends to not produce the best results. Encourage teams to get sketching as quickly as possible and discuss while doing.

After the 40 minute group sketch, each team places their large post-it sketch on the wall and presents. They have only 5 minutes to tell a compelling story of how they attacked the problem space and how their concept solves for the needs of the target persona. Each team then critiques the other teams highlighting the best 2 concepts, and 2 concepts that require further elaboration. Only 7-10 minutes is allotted for group critique per team. This iteration should take no more than 90 minutes.

Note: During this critique session, other teams can ask pointed questions to challenge the assumptions and possible flaws in the teams design. It’s appropriate to use colored drafting dots or post-its to indicate great concepts and concepts that clearly miss the mark.

Team Presentation

15 minute break

Iteration Four: Team Design

Team Design

#Protip: After returning from break, teams are again encouraged to steal ideas from other teams. I have also found it useful to remix the teams to introduce discontinuity, and to increase cross fertilization of ideas. Remixing teams also helps shake up any power dynamics which may have formed in the previous iteration.

Following the same format as the first session, teams have 40 minutes to sketch another complete solution. They are informed that they won’t just be presenting to each other, but executive stakeholders as well. Often teams will choose the strongest designer/sketcher of the group and guide them through a few iterations until the team can produce a single unified design. At the end of the session, teams again place their designs on the wall and present in only 5 minutes and then critique each other, as well as receive critique from executive stakeholders.

Jeff Gothelf presents his teams concepts

Post Mortem

At the end, all participants are guided through a retrospective of the days activities. A whiteboard is divided into columns of “Great” “Bad” and “Try” and participants are encouraged to talk about anything from concepts to solutions to the design studio itself and make a plan as to how they might prioritize turning at least 2 team’s solutions into a prototype for market testing in a rapid fashion.

#Protip Find a shared space where all the designs from iteration 1 through final designs can live for at least a month so that people within the organization that didn’t participate in the design studio can start to gain a shared understanding of the problem space and possible solutions the teams will be creating over the coming weeks or quarter.

If you have any comments, questions, or criticisms, I would love to hear from you.

Cheers,

@semanticwill

Resources

How Good Designers Think, Simon Rucker, Harvard Business Review

Criticism as an Approach to Interface Aesthetics (PDF)

Better together; the practice of successful creative collaboration (Cooper)

Playing well with others: How to create effective design teams (Cooper)

Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, Richard Buchanan (PDF)

Shades of Grey: Thoughts on Sketching (UXMag)

Shades of Grey: Wireframes as Thinking Device (UXMag)

Comments (3)

The Hyper-Social Design Studio

May 26, ’11 8:47 AM

Hyper-Social Design Studio

Hyper-Social Design Studio Overview

A thoroughly new remix technique: combining a focused UX Book Club idea with Design Studio Methodology. Starting with the book “The Hyper-Social Organization“, participants including designers (service, experience, interaction, organization), creative technologist, strategists and product managers will read the book. On the day of the studio, each partipant will present key concepts to one chapter, having only 5 minutes to do so, with no more than 5 slides in power point. After a quick break, participants will break into teams and explore concepts introduced in the book to a specific business case study and have a limited amount of time to explore, ideate, sketch and deliver innovative solutions to the problem space which is broken into seven separate functions within an organization.

Saturday, Fall 2011 1PM – 530PM

Location: SoHo, New York City

Price: Free, but a commitment is required.

Interested? Contact me

Schedule

100 – 115      Introductions

115 – 230      Lightening Presentations: 5 Minutes, no more than 5 slides (template to be provided) All slides due 1 week before Saturday

230 – 245      Break

245 – 300      Game Storming – Intro to 3 techniques

300 – 400     Design Studio

One case study will be presented – a company with background information on their structure, management, customers, and suppliers. Additional information about the company’s brand and product lines, as well existing customer touch points will be presented as background material. All teams of 2 will break off to take that shared problem space and use design studio to explore potential solutions enframed by their topic area, i.e. PR, Product, Innovation, Leadership, Customer Service, Sales, etc. Each team will, at the end of the time, present designed artifacts of processes, concepts, and strategies to the problem space using the book as the framework.

415 – 5PM     Team Presentations

Post Mortem and Lessons Learned.

Goals

  • Gain a solid understanding of the book, especially the SEAMS Framework
  • A collaborative exploration of the problem space
  • Explore a framework for organizational change addressing multiple vectors
  • Design compelling and differentiated product solutions

Considerations

All Slides from Lightening Round will be combined into 1 Power Point deck and socialized on Slideshare.

All Designed Artifacts from Design Studio will be captured and posted online.

Session will be photographed.

Still Interested? Contact me


Background on The Hyper-Social Organization


The book starts with a simple explanation: “Human 1.0″ is the way that people have interacted and worked together for thousands of years. Only recently (the last few decades) information technology has forced people into working in much more constrained ways. Mass media brought the rise of companies that communicated with the masses through a corporate voice, which has had the advantage in telling people what they want and what they can have. Social media flips the mode, and brings us back to communicating one-on-one. This is not a new way of working, it is actually the original way that people worked, it is just that social media allows this to happen on a scale never before contemplated. A Hyper-Social organization is a return to the natural way of interacting, which is why the authors make a compelling argument that it is inevitable.

After the introduction, the first half provides four pillars of hyper-social society:

  • Forget market segments. These were just constructs to allow corporations to coordinate their approach, offerings and message to the market. Instead, you need to think about tribes and humans. A tribe is a group that identifies in some way with each other, and will be the most important way of influencing purchasing patterns. Identifying tribes is the secret to success.
  • Forget company centricity, and think human centricity. Hyper-social organization can be more personal at all levels, and engage customers to focus on and satisfy their needs directly.
  • Forget information channels, and think about knowledge networks. Companies could prepare mass market messages to push through well known channels such as media and events. This communication was the only option that the consumer had, and corporations could control what the public knows. But in a social world the customer already has contacts to other members of the tribe, already is finding out accurate information about your products from others online. Pushing a company line will not work. Instead, share knowledge well, and work to gain trust.
  • Forget process and hierarchies, and embrace social messiness. They recommend something they call SEAMS: sensing, engaging, activating, measuring, and storytelling. The processes will be less and less pre-defined, but embrace that, and allow people in the organization to interact as humans.
Comments (0)

Introduction to Design Studio Methodology

Apr 30, ’11 12:00 PM

(I first learned the Design Studio methodology from Todd Zaki Warfel, founder of Message First, and perhaps one of the best designers I’ve been fortunately enough to learn from. While originating in architecture and industrial design schools, I believe he was the first to apply it to collaborative design of complex software systems.)

This is a two part series on design studio. Part 2 was just published.

Introduction to Design Studio

“It is hardly possible to overrate the value… of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.”
~ John Stewart Mill (1806-73)

Framing

The early stages of product innovation can crucially influence the success and direction of any product. Yet these stages tend to be fuzzy, highly politicized and under-documented. This brief article is to give you a high-level overview of how teams can use Design Studio to explore opportunities and innovate products to better serve customers needs.

Design Studio is conducted in a highly interactive, fast-paced team setting following a methodology, commonly used in architecture and industrial design, with some important twists. It has been called the “Iron Chef,” of ideation. It can be intense, focused, and chaotic at times; but for those lucky enough to have participated, they understand the power and effectiveness of this tool.

Getting Started

Coming on the heels of market and customer research, contextual inquiry, as well as open brainstorming sessions to fully explore the “problem space,” teams use the Design Studio methodology to achieve a few key goals:

  1. Collaboratively work to understand the nature, opportunities, and constraints of some articulated problem space. If you imagine your current state, and then some positive future state – the problem space, sometimes called the Design Gap, is the place between those.
  2. Allow ideas from various perspectives and insights to percolate up between team members.
  3. Turn “ideas” and especially unstated assumptions from tacit or verbal states into cognitive artifacts that can be shared, evaluated, and iterated upon.
  4. Create a culture of shared ownership around future product vision.
  5. Generate a lot of ideas in a very fast time frame – usually no less than 3 hours, and sometimes as long as 10 hours.
  6. Allow open and honest critique of various concepts.
  7. Force participants to defend their concepts and negotiate with other team members.

Why Collaborative Design?

There are no rockstars in collaborative design. Stephen Klocek in “Better together, the practice of successful creative collaboration,” states the problem:

Ninja. Rockstar. Gifted genius. Many of the ways we talk about creative work (whether it’s design or development) only capture the brilliance of a single individual.”

Having spent time in some larger digital agencies, it is often the case that the Account Planner, Strategist, and Creative Director spend time around a conference room with the client trying to suss-out requirements. The process then moves to the ivory tower (or black box, if you will) at the agency’s office where a few select people lock themselves away until they generate “The Insight,” often followed by “The Solution,” which is then communicated to the art directors and technology teams responsible for execution. I could, and will, write an entire article about how fucked up that is, but not today. Needless to say, those days of the black box Rockstar/Ninja/Douchebag Creative Director are quickly coming to an end. Thank God!

The reality of designing modern digital solutions is that no one individual can possibly capture all the complexity of creating a truly vibrant social ecosystem with various customer engagement points, different usage patterns and behaviors based on different needs, goals, and customer backgrounds all interwoven into an emergent ubiquitous engagement tapestry. This is why innovation really is, and should be, a team sport.

How It Works

The Design Studio methodology provides a collaborative, pragmatic process of illumination, sketching, presentation, critique, and iteration leading to a shared vision and hopefully more coherent and elegant solution – but this is not “design by committee,” by any stretch. The Design Studio guides participations through an evolution in experience ideation. Just like business school, it uses a case study approach to solve a unique and clearly defined problem which the assembled team has agreed upon and which also aligns with the business’s strategic roadmap as articulated by the executive team. This ensures that teams don’t wander off the reservation and create the next great snack delivery platform.

Process

The goal of the design studio is to arrive at some solid design solutions in a collaborative setting. Using the following process of illuminate, sketch, present, critique, and iterate, multiple cycles at first individually, and eventually as teams, which allows us to arrive at some solid concepts by the end of the day. Along the way, the process helps develop greater trust amongst participants, and surfaces unknown requirements from key stakeholders.

“Co-creation needs externalized material. Sharing the fuzzy, early, raw concept gives your partner material to work with, to respond to and evolve. Externalizing ideas allows for closer collaboration, earlier input, and deeper thought partnership. This is true when generating and proposing ideas, and equally important for synthesizing and evolving concepts.”
- Klocek,  “Better together, the practice of successful creative collaboration“

Importance of Sketching

Illumination

Illumination in Design Studio

The key to the illumination phase, sometimes less than 45 minutes, is for the team to gain a shared understanding the business context, customer, challenges and market opportunities. What is important is that this helps enframe the articulation and exploration of the problem space, but shouldn’t be the only thing. Too much emphasis should not be placed on the so-called “voice of the customer,” since this is rarely a good source of insight. Simon Rucker articulates this very well in his article “How Good Designers Think,” in the Harvard Business Review when he writes:

Good designers aim to move beyond what you get from simply asking consumers what they need and want. First of all because they understand that most people when asked don’t say what they mean or mean what they say, but also because people often don’t know. Good designers want to unearth what consumers can’t tell them: latent & emerging needs and motivations; actual behaviors and attitudes; and, crucially, barriers to as well as drivers of change — or simply put, what your competitors don’t also already know.

Simply put – your competitors are talking to the same customers you are – do you really think disruptive and differentiated ideas will come from listening to your customers in focus groups? Another important consideration is that potential solutions should never be brought to design studio, and most certainly not introduced during the illumination phase.

Generation

Through rapid sketch-boarding activities the teams focus on getting as many ideas (good & bad) down on paper as quickly as possible. I have often thought that the activities such as sketching can best be described as modalities of decision analysis. This is the essence of abductive thinking – a generative exercise of exploring what could be, as opposed to what is. With each new design decision explored, new constraints are introduced as new opportunities arise. Sketching, by its nature is fast, transient, and has a tempo which allows us to not become to attached to a particular solution.

Generating sketches in Design Studio

Why Sketching?

Importance of Sketching

But why is sketching such a fundamental part of design studio? Externalizations of different kinds (sketches, wireframes, paper or code prototypes) are most useful for communication & reflection where we want to present ideas to our design team, to the client, or to a customer – sketches are rhetoric instantiated, because every sketch is an argument, and every design argument must have a form. For a complete exegesis on the importance of sketching, read my article “Shades of Grey: Thoughts on Sketching,” published in UX Magazine.

Presentation

Participants learn to sell their ideas, accept change, negotiate positions to arrive at the strongest set of potential solutions worthy of further exploration and iteration. Cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon says “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”

It is through the articulation of design concepts in the Presentation phase that participants argue for what the preferred state is, and potentially how to get there. As Richard Buchanan says, “products are vivid arguments about how we as humans, situated in social context, should lead our lives,” and taken another step, sketches in design studio serve the same purpose – to make a clear argument for solving the problem space being explored.

Presentation in Design Studio

Critique

Critique in Design Studio is a formal but flexible framework used to highlight strong ideas worthy of further expansion while discarding weaker ideas in a safe, friendly environment. The aim of critique is to provide actionable and positive counter-arguments to those being made in the sketches presented. A simple framework for design critique Who, How, What, and Why.

Starting from the problem space and goals articulated at the beginning of the design studio, the critique should focus on the 2 or 3 strongest or most compelling concepts in each sketch addressing these questions:

Who:  Does the sketch solve a problem for the intended audience? Does the solution speak to the customer or does it speak to the designer’s ego?

How: How does the concept solve for the problem and more importantly, how can that solution be simplified?

What: What is the argument being made by the solution and is it effective in achieving it’s goal – is it an compelling argument? And finally,

Why: When sketching potential solutions, each participant will choose different angles of attack based on their own stance (or prejudices); understanding that stance, the focus of attention – in essence, the Why, is as important as the What.

The specific insights from critique will provide the participants with an increased understanding of the assumptions and biases of fellow participants. The criticism will feed back into design in the Iteration Phase, specifically by pointing to inconsistencies between the solution and its surroundings, context of customer use and business constraints. Finally, the criticism will give the designer feedback for concepts that, while brilliant, may not be fully fleshed out.

Iteration in Design Studio

Iteration

Concepts from each round of the design studio are then extracted, stolen, re-combined and transformed within teams and across teams. Participants are encouraged to take the feedback from critique, as well as concepts presented by others, and engage in another round of sketching – remixing and reinterpreting concepts to arrive at a more solid argument. Refined ideas will be honed, with the strongest ideas chosen by each team gathered and distilled into a unified group solution. It is at this point that the teams pitch (Present) their solutions to other teams, and the process of Present, Critique, Iterate, starts all over again until only 1 or 2 solid concepts survive.

———-

Next Up

In Part 2, I will explore the logistics of designing a Design Studio including how to select participants, design their respect teams, provide just enough background information for the illumination phase, as well as the the most important element – the timing of each phase and setting the guardrails and ground rules.

Thanks,

@semanticwill

Resources

How Good Designers Think, Simon Rucker, Harvard Business Review

Criticism as an Approach to Interface Aesthetics (PDF)

Better together; the practice of successful creative collaboration (Cooper)

Playing well with others: How to create effective design teams (Cooper)

Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, Richard Buchanan (PDF)

Shades of Grey: Thoughts on Sketching (UXMag)

Shades of Grey: Wireframes as Thinking Device (UXMag)

Comments (9)

An Executives Guide to Sparking Creativity in Teams

Apr 14, ’11 1:27 PM

Sparking Creativity in Teams

“Nemo igitur vir magnus sine aliquo adflatu divino umquam fuit” ~ Cicero

Right on the heels of Bruce Nussbaum declaring that Design Thinking was dead, and Creative Intelligence (CQ) becoming the next great bubble in management thinking (with the rush to publish more pablum before the bubble bursts into vapour) as it relates to increasing organization’s competency in generating not just incremental (N+1) but disruptive innovation within their respective market, McKinsey released a new report this morning called, “Sparking Creativity in teams: An Executive’s Guide,” (PDF) to which I can readily admit that I opened it preparing to be underwhelmed by the audacity of the report’s mediocrity. I was not disappointed, though I will refrain from an excoriating exegesis on the topic and just give some quick thoughts.

My sentiment might be because just yesterday I read Robert Fabricant’s “3 Things Wile E. Coyote Teaches Us About Creative Intelligence,” and was really inspired by the notion he proposes that creativity exists ‘in-between,’ people and is not necessarily an innate trait divino afflante spiritu. It requires context, yes, but more important, it requires the “other,” to borrow a term from social psychology. Creativity – especially of the disruptive kind, requires friction and interactions between people because most interesting problems, most problems worth thinking about, “wicked problems,” as Richard Buchanan calls them in his article published in 1992, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” are bigger and more complex than any one person can hope to solve on their own. What’s particularly insightful about this notion is that it reminded me of the  ideas of power explicated by philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault in his book L’archéologie du savoir – that power is not an innate trait of individuals, but instead arises and exists in-between people within a social group. It’s more a friction and a flow, depending on the ever changing dynamics of interaction. A person standing alone in the forest exerts no hegemony within a social group – because there is none. S/he has no power except as it arises in a social context.

McKinsey doesn’t follow this path, instead focusing on how executives can, dare I say it — design a context, culture, and environment, where individual creativity can flourish – but even that is overstating things (wishful thinking on my part), because really, the report doesn’t focus on a strategic framework, but on 4 simple tactical considerations. While the article is about teams, they come from the perspective of ‘creativity as innate creative trait’ possessed by the rugged individualists that Ayn Rand wrote about in Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. We’ll let that slide down the left side of the IQ bell curve into the cesspool of failed ideas, and move forward. McKinsey identifies 4 practical (read: tactical) ways executives can make teams more creative.

Immerse Yourself

The article argues that “would-be innovators need to break free of preexisting views. Unfortunately, the human mind is surprisingly adroit at supporting its deep-seated ways of viewing the world while sifting out evidence to the contrary.” The antidote seems pretty straight forward, and actually one practiced by great design teams as a best practice – design ethnography.

“The antidote is personal experience: seeing and experiencing some-thing firsthand can shake people up in ways that abstract discussions around conference room tables can’t. It’s therefore extremely valuable to start creativity-building exercises or idea generation efforts outside the office, by engineering personal experiences that directly con-front the participants’ implicit or explicit assumptions,”

This is actually one of the best recommendations, because it allows teams to understand their customers, embracing the UX notion that “you are not the user.” Great – good start, I can feel a tingling in my soul. Remember – this doesn’t mean just executives or product managers – this means the entire team being immersed in the daily lives of customers to understand their context – for generating insights into problems the team would never uncover sitting at their desk or in a conference room – no matter how many white boards, post-its, or sharpies are present. Insight is extrinsic, it comes from going out into the world.

Overcome Orthodoxies

The second way the article argues executives can design an environment for more creative teams is by overcoming orthodoxies. The funny thing about orthodoxies is that they can’t be seen when you are inside the bowels of the beast – you don’t know you’re living in the Matrix until you step outside the system and that kind of re-framing of perspective is important. From the article:

Exploring deep-rooted company (or even industry) orthodoxies is another way to jolt your brain out of the familiar in an idea generation session, a team meeting, or simply a contemplative moment alone at your desk.

Okay, yes – I agree that challenging orthodoxies is great, in theory. Problem is, most organizations don’t even realize what their orthodoxies are because they are the intrinsic rules embedded within the DNA of the organization. I would argue that only through engagement with outside help, or bringing in fresh blood with strong personalities willing to challenge deep-rooted beliefs, is this possible. I don’t think it’s as easy as the report seems to imply. Liberation is only possible if you first understand and accept that you are a slave to entrenched organization culture.

Use Analogies

This could just as easily be called “Use Metaphors.” Since Lakoff and Johnson published “Metaphors We Live By,” we have come to realize that metaphors aren’t just a poetic devise, but actually a way we understand and make sense of the world around us. It is through the use of analogy – or metaphor – that teams can reframe a problem space, or better understand unmet customer needs, desires, or fears. Use of metaphor is a common brainstorming technique in creative user experience design teams – one that is used rather explicitly (For a great read, check out Dan Saffer’s CMU masters thesis “The Role of Metaphor in Interaction Design.” The report explains the benefit by stating that,

“As we’ve seen, by forcing comparisons between one company and a second, seemingly unrelated one, teams make considerable creative progress, particularly in situations requiring greenfield ideas.”

My only caveat to use of analogy or metaphor in brainstorming is that you want to have facilitators skilled in this process. It actually is an art form to create an environment where people can engage in open ideation that is positive, generative, and exploratory. There are many other great techniques that will allow teams to achieve the goals of open, abductive, generative ideation, Check out Dave Gray and Sunni Brown’s fantastic book “Gamestorming,” for more activities and methods of focused play to spur creativity and innovation.

At a high level, this may be what Nussbaum is alluding to in the article he just published today called “3 Reasons You Should Treat Creativity as a Game,” and he introduces the notion playground as metaphor, or the  “Magic Circle,” and explains that:

The playground is the place where we leave behind the usual hierarchies, procedures, statuses, and behaviors to act out “as if…” games of discovery. I even have a name for this playground of creativity — the Magic Circle.

Create Constraints

It is only after you understand and have embraced some of the activities above, must you remember the importance of constraints. In a process I have used for years to good effect – the Design Studio – we impose design constraints across different parts of the process. The most explicit of which is time. For instance – your team has 1 hour to go out on the streets of NYC and interview as many people as you can in the pouring rain about their vision, goals, and intent as it relates to their professional development. This was actually an activity I participated in just 2 weeks ago. It was cold, hostile, and exhilarating.

“Imposing constraints to spark innovation may seem counter intuitive—isn’t the idea to explore “white spaces” and “blue oceans”? Yet without some old-fashioned forcing mechanisms, many would-be creative thinkers spin their wheels aimlessly or never leave their intellectual comfort zones.”

Another example of introducing constraints is saying, “Your team has 10 minutes to generate 8 unique concepts that solve for some clearly defined problem. These concepts must be sketched – no bullet points – ready – GO!” Time boxing team-based ideation narrows the field of view and forces participants to focus and flow. It’s a beautiful thing to watch 5 people act as a single unit to generate ideas as music plays and the clock ticks down.

The article ends by stating that “creativity is not a trait reserved for the lucky few,” which, given Fabricant’s article yesterday in Fast Company, I am forced to disagree with. Perhaps artistic creativity is an innate trait, but creativity in the context of business innovation is a friction and flow that arises between people in teams working towards a common goal of solving a problem in a unique, compelling, and differentiated way. As Peter Drucker once said, “the purpose of business is to create a customer,” and what better way of doing that than immersing yourself in your customer’s lives; completely understand their context; and uncovering insights that can generate elegant solutions that make a person’s life better. Else, why the hell are we doing this, anyway?

Finally, in the beginning of this little blog post I mentioned that I was underwhelmed with this article, and perhaps I should explain that. While I am happy McKinsey published this report, I expected more. There is really nothing new that hasn’t been covered in most of the Design Thinking books to come out in the last five years. The four recommendations are actually activities and methods practiced by many user experience design and product teams, including my own. Nussbaum’s article about treating the creative process as a game actually backs up my argument when he says:

“Designers are the interface between science and society, technology and people. Because of this, design uses ethnographic tools and methods, but its use of sociology, anthropology, and sociolinguistics is shallow. Deliberately framing creativity within a social model pushes it to embrace the rich social-science literature on charisma, calling, sharing, risk, aura, ritual, and, of course, play to deepen our understanding of the making of innovation.”

The biggest benefit, I suppose, of an article like the one published by McKinsey is that perhaps these ideas will find more traction in the C-Suite and ultimately lead to more disruptive, not just incremental N+1 innovation. Less ‘me-too’ products which seem to litter the digital noosphere like cockroaches after the Zombie Apocalypse would be a good thing for society as well because it would free up capital to invest in projects and products that actually make the world just a little better.

My opinion is that the greatest failure of the McKinsey article, which they might have learned if they had decided to consult people in the design or user experience space is to know your damn audience! They are highlighting 4 tactical considerations for spurring creativity and providing them to C-Suite Strategic leaders within organizations (operations and production resources within organization tend to not read McKinsey). Does that make any sense whatsoever? Anyway – let’s cut to the chase and I will let you decide if you think there are any worthy nuggets in this report.

How any of this is *not* design thinking (or simply Design) still confounds me, but I’ll keep slogging through like a banana slug moving across a salt bed in July.

@SemanticWill Out.

Articles Cited

Sparking Creativity in Teams: An Executive’s Guide

Design Thinking is a Failed Experiment

3 Things Wile E. Coyote Teaches Us About Creative Intelligence

3 Reasons You Should Treat Creativity as a Game

Gamestorming Website, Dave Gray & Sunni Brown

The Role of Metaphor in Interaction Design

Comments (0)

Design and the New Rhetoric: A Review.

Apr 9, ’11 12:55 PM

Design and the New Rhetoric

Soundtrack: Philip Glass, Koyaanisquatsi “Prophecies”

This morning, after having let my coffee steep in the french press for as long as I could possible wait (approximately 4 minutes), I stumbled upon a somewhat older article by famed design theorist and professor Richard Buchanan. entitled, “Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philosophy of Culture,” (PDF). I pounded the first 2 cups of black sinful brew and dove deep.

(Here is Richard Buchanan’s keynote at IxD11 Conference.)

Design and the New Rhetoric

The typical view of design was once as a styling of the appearance of products. A view which many have, over the past few years, come to realize as a serious misconception of the actual work of designers. Buchanan argues that stance, ensconced in ignorance, is comparable to the popular view of rhetoric as the mere styling of verbal expression, often for the purposes of propaganda or insouciant embellishment. Buchanan’s article argues that for both arts (design and rhetoric), the deeper work lies in the invention and disposition of form and content. This is the major thrust of the article, and he moves forward to draw the conclusion that design is the new rhetoric.

Buchanan states that in approaching design from a rhetorical perspective, the hypothesis should be that all products – digital and analog, tangible and intangible (like service design and software) – are “vivid arguments about how we as humans, situated in social context, should lead our lives.” It’s a positivist argument for use of design to foresee, craft, and impose a set of values upon a culture. One fundamental value Buchanan argues for, not in this article, but later in his speech to the IxD11 crowd was that the principle behind interaction design, in fact, all design, is human dignity.

It is no surprise then when cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon says,

“everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,”

Simon identifies cognitive processes of decision making as the key to understanding design, and it’s predicated on a modality of ethical judgment as to what one defines as “preferred,” hence design as a political act through the use of argument and not simply the styling of an ersatz object.

(For an excellent article that further explores this, read “The Known Unknowns: Exploring the evolution of design education in response to the industry’s expanding role” by Ian Curry at Frog)

Buchanan also posits that the design of products can have a persistent consequence in the behavior (think recent definitions of Interaction Design) of human beings, whether we consider a product’s style or its deeper synthesis of technological reasoning. He argues that this is why the establishment of criteria for successful products is one of the central “wicked problems” of design thinking today (Nussbaum’s recent screed against Design Thinking not withstanding).

I especially appreciated the way Buchanan finds the consanguinity between Aristotle’s four causes and compares his definition of rhetoric with a formal definition of design such that:

  • The creative capacity of individual designers as an efficient cause;
  • The sequence of goals around which the methods of design thinking and practice have taken shape as a final cause;
  • The outcome of the design process in products that serve human beings as a formal cause; and
  • The subject matter of design as found in any activities and purposes of human beings as a material cause.

However, in exploring this notion further, Buchanan states that “traditional rhetoricians have been slow to recognize their intellectual resources for exploring the new directions of technology,” and says that, as an example, rhetoricians have:

“not considered the possibility that designers are the agents of rhetorical thinking in the new productive sciences of our time.”

He amplifies this statement by saying that they have not considered the way in which design – as the intellectual, aesthetic and practical craft provides discipline in the creation of the human-made world  – and employs “rhetorical doctrines and devices in its work of shaping the products and environments that surround and persuasively influence our lives to an unprecedented degree.”

Design of Barack Obama

Design is essentially a political problem of competing values and priorities that designers must learn to navigate with integrity. It is no small surprise, then, the importance that design played in the 2010 election of Barack Obama – where design itself became a major component of the campaigns political rhetoric.

I highly recommend reading the entire article, especially when it delves deeper into the ideas of logos, ethos, and pathos from a rhetorical perspective and then recontextualizes it to better understand the positioning of design as argument. This he further extends – placing design in the center of a triangle of logos, ethos, and pathos, what he calls his “Triangle of Doom,” at the IxD11 conference.

@semanticwill Out.

Sources

Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philosophy of Culture

Design Thinking is a Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?

“The Known Unknowns: Exploring the evolution of design education in response to the industry’s expanding role”

Richard Buchanan’s IxD11 Keynote Speech “Who Are We? Where Are We? Where Are We Going?”

“Form in Design,” by Dan Saffer

Richard Buchanan Bio

Richard Buchanan is Professor of Design, Management, and Information Systems at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Before joining the Weatherhead faculty in 2008, he served as Head of the School of Design from 1992 until 2002 and from 2002 until 2008 as Director of Doctoral Studies. While at Carnegie Mellon, he inaugurated Interaction Design programs at the Masters and doctoral level.

Comments (0)

Bruce Mau on Co-opetition & Education at Compostmodern

Apr 6, ’11 5:59 AM

“Education is the point at which we decide we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.”

I really loved this talk by Bruce Mau, the visionary, innovator, designer, and author, Bruce Mau gives a great talk about education, sustainability, and designing sustainable futures. Imagine – only 1% of the world has a college education. He asks the question, “what about the 99%? What if we moved that to 2%?” A fascinating question to ask as we think about the design of a positive future.

Mau talks about the 10 Key Ideas for his Massive Change Network:

1. Purpose Inspires Learning
2. Worst Equals Best
3. Public Is Critical
4. Design is Part of Our Future
5. Experience Deepens Knowledge
6. Renaissance Teams Are Best
7. Real Can’t Be Faked
8. Experience Is The Content
9. Design of the System, Not the Object
10. The Future Will Be Beautiful (If we have one)


Bruce Mau at Compostmodern ’11 from AIGA San Francisco on Vimeo.

Comments (0)