The Design of Design Studio

Jul 10, ’11 10:59 AM

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

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

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.

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.

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.

15 minute break

Iteration Four: 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.

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)

Shades of Grey: Thoughts on Sketching

Jun 26, ’10 7:26 AM

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
- D.H. Lawrence

Shades of Grey: Thoughts on Sketching

In designing mostly interactive systems (spaces, processes, and artifacts for people to use), I must increasingly stretch the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things I create. Artifacts used in communicating design create an inherent frame of experience between the subjective response of the person for whom I design, and my expectations of their response. There is a divergence of meaning in that the audience can only experience the communications artifact, not the object being communicated.

Read the entire article on UX Magazine.

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Shades of Gray: Thoughts on Sketching

Feb 10, ’10 10:24 AM

“Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.”
D.H. Lawrence

Increasingly, as a Big “D” designer, mostly of complex dynamic systems (spaces, processes and products for people), I find myself stretching the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things I design, which by their nature creates a ‘frame of experience’ between externalized object and the intersubjective experience of the person for whom I design. In an upcoming workshop at Interaction10, “The Right Way to Wireframe™,” four friends and designers explore design through each of our approaches to problem space definition and present shared commonalities we see in our processes even while specific tools vary. We chose wireframing among many other design communication activities because of it’s contentiousness in the user experience (UX) community – at least as it relates to religious arguments of tools over craft, or indeed, principles.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
Kahlil Gibran

I have described “wireframing” as a form of design communication that enables stakeholders, team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or future problem spaces and solutions. Wireframing can be considered first order: the wireframe itself; second order: the process of creating a vehicle of design communication; and third, the cognitive process of envisioning, external actualization and reflection through the selection of a cognitive artifact which expresses a dialogical subjectivity between the Ego and Alter and a multiplicity of positions which they can take with respect to one another.

While “wireframes” are representations of a design made before final artifacts exist, their formalism over sketching makes them problematic. They are created to inform both the design process and design decisions, but they can be conceived as more reified than sketches, and therefore considered more final, which is unfortunate.

“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.”
Dr Edwin Land

I have often thought that the strategies of both sketching and wireframing can best be characterized by modalities of combinatorian decision analysis. What do I mean by that? At an abstract level, a particular problem space is defined and enframed by the tools we feel most comfortable with: problem space, domain, expertise, theme, context of problem, bias towards types of design tools and documents, timeliness of artifacts created. While I believe I effectively reflected upon wireframes in Shades of Gray, while working through the design of our workshop, it seemed necessary to step back and discuss the role of sketching in my personal design process.

I see sketching as an important pre-wireframing technique for doing divergent and transformative design, something that fundamentally differentiates what has been called “big D,” and “small D” design – not to put to fine a point on it – it is what separates the Designers from the wireframe monkeys. This is the argument that I have made, and base it in part on how Buxton defines design in “Sketching the User Experience,” when he writes:

“What I mean by the term “design” is what someone who went to art college and studied industrial design would recognize as design. At least this vague characterization helps narrow our interpretation of the term somewhat. Some recent work in cognitive science (Goel 1995, Gedenryd 1998) helps distinguish it further. It suggests that a designer’s approach to creative problem solving is very different from how computer scientists, for example, solve puzzles. That is, design can be distinguished by a particular cognitive style. Gendenryd, in particular, makes clear that sketching is fundamental to the design process. Furthermore, related work by Suwa and Tversky (2002) and Tcerksy (2002) shows that besides the ability to make sketches, a designer’s use of them is a distinct skill that develops with practice, and is fundamental to their cognitive style.” (Buxton, 2007, p. 96)

Amen. I think as designers we must go out of our way avoiding intra-mental thinking and instead use sketches to restore presence so that we can work interactively by seeing and doing in the recursive, iterative manner sketching seems more suited to than wireframing. As I wrote previously in Shades of Grey: Wireframes as Thinking Device:

“I think of “D”esign as an exploration of the conceivable futures. I use my sketches and wireframes as means to make explorative moves and assess the consequences of those moves. As I explore the problem space, I could relatively easily keep the design models in my head, but I would fail in my primary objective to create a framework for a conversation among the stakeholders, the intended audience, and me.”

My sketches are a model I employ to be able to conceive and predict the consequences of a certain design arguments (for to sketch an interaction, we are making an argument – even one that will be tossed away) within an unresolved problem space whose borders have not been fully defined. Representational means such as sketches, wireflows or physical models like paper prototypes are important tools for my design since they help in assessing and reflecting on the details of a solution in relation to the whole problematic context in which it is situated. Using pencil and paper speeds up my doing-seeing loop of creation, judgment and reformulation. Few other tools are as fast as pencil and paper in this respect. As a designer, I can draw a line and immediately evaluate it. This conversational process between myself and visualization of the design situation has another effect in that it generates new ideas.

As I draw sketches, I see the problem in another way, perhaps because a line came out slightly wrong on the paper. Taking a step back or looking at a sketch from a different angle may also lead to new ideas and thoughts. New ideas are then nothing but old ideas in new combinations or old ideas looked upon or interpreted from a new perspective – sketching than becomes what Goffman calls “framing.” This is also what Laseau calls “a conversation with ourselves in which we communicate with sketches.” It is also related to Schön’s concept of a reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation, where I as the designer shape the situation in a way that is in me, so that I can respond to that back-talk. Schön writes:

“In a good process of design, this conversation is reflective. In answer to the situation’s back-talk, the designer reflects-in-action on the construction of the problem, the strategies of action, or the model of the phenomena, which have been implicit in his moves.” (Schön, 1983, p. 79)

The sketches also form a documentation of my design process without adding any administrative overhead. As a designer, I can learn much by browsing back in old sketches; watching the evolution of an idea as my understanding of the problem space is explored, and refined, and this documentation can tell a narrative of design decisions to be shared with internal and external stakeholders who can then see why certain moves where taken, others discarded. Externalizations of different kinds (sketches, wireframes, prototypes) are then especially useful for communication purposes where I want to present ideas to another member of the design team, to the client, or to a user. The presentation sketches are usually not as rough as working sketches are and their purpose is not only to communicate an idea, but also to persuade the other part that a particular design alternative is better than other alternatives.

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer (יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער)

As noted above, the sketch can be rapid and spontaneous, but it leaves stable traces in contrast to conversation, which is evanescent. Conversation (or Talk) is, however, important for the argumentative assessment and communication of design alternatives, which is at the core of my design activities (sketch, present, critique, regine). As designers, we employ a language of talking and sketching in parallel. Schön describes the work of an architectural design professor named Quist in a session with a student:

“In the media of sketch and spatial-action language, he represents buildings on the site through moves which are also experiments. Each move has consequences described and evaluated in terms drawn from one or more design domains. Each has implications binding on later moves. And each creates new problems to be described and solved. Quist designs by spinning out a web of moves, consequences, implications, appreciations, and further moves.”

The quote above is a clear statement of what much of Design work is about. In terms of distributed cognition, it describes design work as distributed over designers and my representational means (e.g. sketches). The representational means (sketches or wireframes) are, in turn, physical embodiments of the culture and history in which they have evolved through the lifecycle of a project I am working on. I think the cultural practices of designers, including the spatial-action language, provide therefore the structural resources for performing experimental design moves. It is part of this ‘knowing-in-action,’ the know-how revealed in spontaneous and I would hope skillfully performed actions. The spatial-action language is also constitutive of our professional community of practice to which I belong in the ways in which we communicate both with ourselves, but also with our teams, clients, and now to you as well.

Photos (on Flickr) by Michael Leis

References:

Buxton, Bill (2007). Sketching the User Experience. Boston, MA: Morgan Kaufman.

Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

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