News and blog posts from our students and faculty

I thought I understood think/make. But I didn’t really understand think/make.

For the last few weeks, we have been working on marketing plan, crunching financial spreadsheets, moving pixels, and entering the matrix doing a lot of git push heroku. You know, the nuts and bolts of starting a business and building a product. The things that will give our potential customers an actual site to use and let investors know how much we have thought through this stuff.

All the right stuff to do. But a conversation with Justin yesterday reminded me of how “we still don’t have anything to show”. After internalizing more, I think the larger point being, if we’re really building on existing behavior, really meeting an actual need, really making our customers’ lives easier – we should be able to show demand with or without technology. If it takes the two of us manually coordinating classes, then that’s what it’ll take. When it becomes too much, we’ll move to a spreadsheet in order to keep track. When that becomes too much, then we’ll figure out something else. But until we get to that point, it feels rather empty that we’re sitting in front of a computer projecting revenue.

Fast Co.Design had an article posted on Monday on “Wanna Solve Impossible Problems? Find Ways to Fail Quicker“:

MacCready’s insight was that everyone who was working on solving human-powered flight would spend upwards of a year building an airplane on conjecture and theory without a base of knowledge based on empirical tests. Triumphantly, they would complete their plane and wheel it out for a test flight. Minutes later, a year’s worth of work would smash into the ground.

Again, nothing we don’t know already, nothing we haven’t been taught. But what stuck out to me in the article was when the author said:

Progress was slow for obvious reasons, but that was to be expected in pursuit of such a difficult vision. That’s just how it was, went the common thinking.

We’re looking to address wicked problems – the large-scale ill-defined complex social problems that have been around for decades and centuries. We expect things to move slowly. We expect not to solve things overnight. But a little re-framing will get the momentum going, like when Paul MacCready built that airplane in half a year after nobody could for 18 years:

He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: How can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours, not months?

So lesson learned (for the nth time):

When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

This morning I sent a bunch of emails to people who have previously expressed their interests in holding/taking classes so we can start having real customers. Fundamentally, our idea holds true with or without Facebook Connect on Rails.

I think I understand think/make a little better today than I did yesterday.

AC4D, along with our generous sponsors frog design and Thinktiv, completed our second annual free Design For Impact Bootcamp. This aggressively-paced boot camp is intended for designers, technologists, marketers, and other professionals who are interested in extending their skill set into the realm of social innovation and design for impact. Participants spent eight hours learning the fundamentals of research, synthesis, and ideation – focused on large-scale social change through new and novel product, system, and service design.

Materials from the bootcamp are available for download below:

Designing for Impact | Jon KolkoIn a group conversation, we will examine the precedents that have been set in the social innovation space, discuss the holistic process of design, and understand why the methods of design are most appropriate for tackling these complex social problems.

A Process for Seeing: Guerilla Ethnography | Lauren SerotaIn the first methods session, we’ll learn how to practice “guerilla ethnography” to engage with and quickly gather meaningful insights from target audiences.

Understanding Insights and Themes | Jon FreachAs we progress through meaning-making, we’ll begin to identify insights and themes through a bottom-up approach. These methods will describe how to capture these high-level takeaways, and how to form actionable design directives out of these conceptual frames.

Rapid Ideation and Forced Provocation | Jon KolkoWe’ll begin to create new ideas, giving form to our insights and finding a way to connect insights to problem solving.

Interface Visualization and Design | Justin PetroThe insights and themes that have been extracted can now be visualized. We’ll use rapid iterative sketching and ideation in order to focus on a breadth of new ideas.

About AC4D | Jon KolkoWe’ll discuss the qualities of the AC4D program, and how they relate to what you learned today.

We look forward to seeing you at our next bootcamp in 2012; if you want to be alerted of events like this, join our mailing list and we’ll be sure to let you know.

* Update: Read the nice writeup of our Bootcamp on Core77.

Meet my first business model canvas. Isn’t she cute?

I was spurred on by our IDSE 401 discussions about income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements—and the ‘oh snap!’ realization that we haven’t solidified our revenue streams. I’ve been using Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur’s Business Model Generation book (recommended by Justin Petro during Q1) to walk through key considerations of a business plan:

• Customer segments
• Value proposition
• Channels
• Customer relationship
• Revenue streams
• Key resources
• Key activities
• Key partnerships
• Cost structure

The Business Model Generation book offers common patterns, examples, and good questions to think through each of these sections in their version of a business model canvas. The authors approach business model generation with a design sensibility and encourage ideation and prototyping to arrive at a proper and/or innovative model for your idea.

I’m gonna go off and do 10 more iterations. See you later.

After 3 months of a dry patch where blogging disappeared into the horizon, I am back with a personal post about my AC4D journey and answers to some personal questions about why I am in this program. My break from blogging was a conscious decision resulting from some chaos and confusion about my expectations from the program, the divergence, the convergence and sense-making. I contemplated for a bit about posting this as this was more personal than being ac4d related. But, maybe, just a small maybe, it will help someone coming into the program when the number of questions prevail the number of answers.

When I started the program, I wanted to change the world. The passion was intense. I could see myself going out and doing several great things. I had figured out the mental visualization part of achievement. Thus, I began my journey with AC4D, hoping to change the world the way I saw it. The journey was sentimental and passionate. There is a great quote by Mary Aster -

“It’s not good to make sentimental journeys. You see the differences instead of the sameness.”

I realized this very late. But, with every step I was taking,  I started seeing things were different than my expectations. I wanted to work on “information” because that is where my passion is. I did not get a chance to work on that. I was working on a different problem. The frustration caught me unaware. I questioned my reason for being in the program. I thought whether I was doing the same thing that led me into the program in the first place. Was I working on something that I didn’t want to be working on? Ah, the peril with a sentimental journey! I argued with my professors, my project outputs varied in quality. Not that I was bad or anything. It was just that, the sentimental journey was telling me that my goals were different than what I was being taught at school. It was chaotic. At some point, I started doing the assignments and projects because they were part of the curriculum. It had to be, because the emotion of not being able to work on what I wanted to work on, overpowered me.

Life was turbulent and chaotic. I had quit my full time job and was excited to work on some neat ideas. It just wasn’t to be. The Karate Kid story comes to mind. The Miyagis at AC4D were teaching me to wash dishes and scrub floors. I was not there for that. I wanted to learn Karate. There were moments where mind was messing with me and telling me that this was not what I was here for. Struggle and chaos had become part of my everyday project at AC4D. My biggest strength through this process was that chaos has always been my friend and I was familiar with it. There is another nice quote I read from ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ -

“One must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star”

I never ever realized how true this was. I persisted with chaos, stuck with my schedules and did the best I can. There were multiple epiphanies which gave a great insight into flaws of my own thinking, which could never have come if I had not questioned everything. I never stopped questioning the things I was doing but not for one instance I let the questions completely over power me and take a wrong step. And eventually, things started falling into place over numerous conversations (with Kat, Justin and Jon – thanks guys!). Today was one such moment. After a great guest lecture from Gary of Union Square Ventures (@gcsf), I went into Justin’s office and asked him what I was doing at AC4D. There were things I cared about that I wanted to work on, and I wanted to find out why I was not doing that. Then came the Miyagi moment. For me, Justin will forever remain as  Mr. Miyagi. He showed me how scrubbing floors (not literally) has made me a better person and entrepreneur. He gave me the famous talk about “leap of faith”. It was a great conversation that brings me back to my original quote that I referred to…

“It’s not good to make sentimental journeys. You see the differences instead of the sameness.”

At AC4D, one is taught to be a better entrepreneur. The emphasis is on making you a better person. That is all it is. Every student works on this. It is not the project or idea that matters. It is the spirit. The biggest thing I have gained out of this experience is that, there is a great person (teachers or students) sitting at the other end of the table, listening with attention because they want you to succeed in your dreams. I learned more about myself. Like Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford speech, “You can only connect the dots looking backwards”. There might be frustration and chaos but if you change the lens with which you view,  you will see a friendly Miyagi teaching you to become a zen master in Karate.

Any future student reading this blog post – Do apply for next year’s program. I guarantee that it will change your life. It has changed mine.

HourSchool is a website that lets you post what you want to learn, and it helps you find someone in your network who can teach it.

Click on the video below to watch us live draw our way through HourSchool!

We’re just starting to get our website up and running… and right now we’d love to hear what you would like to learn.  Please visit www.HourSchool.com and let us know what you’d like to learn.  E-mail us if you’d like to be included in our private Beta.

Thanks!  Ruby and Alex.

I’ve always stated my love of being in design synthesis land. It’s also where some of the most defining moments of HourSchool occurred.

Back in January, we were still thinking that there would be two types of audience using our site: the student and the teacher. We wanted to understand what the student and the teacher would do, respectively, before and after signing up to take/teach a class. As we stepped back from the whiteboard after we were done, we realized we did a temporal zoom. And in that, we found our theory of change. The student and the teacher aren’t two separate personas. They are the same person. Our mission is to transform current students into future teachers – and there is a very specific point in time during the process when that happens.

As we prepared for our final presentation last week, we spent hours trying to find the right balance between talking about problem (our research) vs. solution (our product). After multiple iterations, we ended with a story we were happy with. We stepped back again, and this is what we saw: People’s best part of the day is when they get to teach their peers + old school model does not provide avenue to do that = we will build a platform that allows peer-led social learning.

My original thought was that we used these synthesis methods accidentally. We were simply sketching out what felt right in our heads, and only noticed afterwards that we had used the methods. But as I began blogging and reflecting upon Q3, I concluded that there is nothing accidental about our synthesis.

Insight combination is a method that helps generate design ideas by combining what the designers gathered from research with knowledge from their own past experiences. The method suggests writing down all the data points and design patterns on color post-it notes, move them around, and force relationships between them in order to generate new design ideas.

By constructing stories together, asking hard questions, and walking each other through hypothetical scenarios, we were gradually building our “insight bank”. In particular, I found our impromptu mini-research sessions with others have been the most inspiring, and almost always connected some dots for us. No, they do not replace the rigorous approach of design research. Rather, I think they are one of the most essential parts during design synthesis, as the designer slowly put the various pieces together.

So here’s my new thought: although synthesis may happen unconsciously, it does not happen accidentally. To Alex‘s favorite saying of the year, “Be Intentional”. There’s nothing accidental about our idea, our theory of change, our product, and our business. Our brains constantly drew from the insight bank that we intentionally built.

Design Synthesis, as it turns out, is a process to be intentional.

This quarter was all about synthesizing, making and revising. It is a familiar process to designers, but we were introduced to the concept of business as a layer within the process. We were asked to consider the building blocks of a business as we were iterating our design ideas. This became an integral part of our conversations for research and testing. This led to a more detailed and holistic definition of our design ideas, which came through in the presentations last week and our ability to answer questions from the audience. The audience definitely gave us useful feedback to incorporate as we move forward. Once again this highlights the belief that it is important to go public with design throughout the process.

In the spirit of that idea here is some information about my specific project. The research that we did the second quarter highlighted the invisibility of the fastest growing homeless population, women and children. We learned that there is a connection between homelessness and foster care.

• Roughly 30-40% of the entire homeless population was in foster care at one point in their life and many young women exiting foster care need government assistance to meet their basic needs.

This was of particular interest to me given my history of working with youth organizations. I wanted to design something that would empower the youth to make choices and recognize their achievements. I believe helping them build confidence will lead to future success. I wanted to build on what we learned has been working—positive feedback and choices that allow the youth to establish their independence.

This led to the development of a new online tool that provides action plans for youth as they exit foster care to learn about financial ­planning. The plans help the youth build their confidence while gaining skills. OneUp offers support by providing options to connect with peers and experts.

This is based on the model pictured above. This model builds on current behavior as this is the generation of digital natives. The youth have grown up using computers—chatting with friends online and playing games. The new model removes some of the challenges that current programs face—fear of not meeting expectations, scheduled meetings and no formal way to involve peers.

Keeping this model in mind I began to design the online tool and share it with some 18-25 year olds for feedback. One of the screens is pictured above and highlights the key pieces of the tool.

• choice—youth are choosing action plans based on the level they are on and their personal goals
• easy—steps are kept short to encourage participation
• support—the youth are empowered to reach out for the type of support they want when they want it including online chats with experts for questions that might be embarrassing to ask in person, the ability to invite friends to cheer them on and tips and warnings for more facts
• community—share achievements with social networks, invite friends to participate with you, see what your peers are accomplishing in the feeds

• tracking progress—see progress as steps are completed with the tracking bar at the top
• achievements—earn badges as steps are completed, gain points as entire plans are completed that can be redeemed for real world rewards (ex. itune gift cards), complete enough action plans and move up a level exposing new opportunities

Continue to follow the blog to see how all of us work this quarter to refine our ideas and develop business plans around them. More making and revising….

I was at the RISE conference tonight for the Social Entrepreneurship Keynote and Non-Profit Fast Pitch. 15 non-profits from Austin were selected to pitch to a panel of judges for 1.5 minute + Q&A session. Congrats to @LemonadeDayATX for winning, and congrats to everyone else for doing a phenomenon job.

As we’ve experienced at AC4D, pitching about your story and idea in such a short amount of time and capturing the essence of what you’re trying to do is not an easy task. So I particularly appreciated the Q&A sessions after the pitches that allow the entrepreneurs to offer deeper insights. The judges asked no easy questions though. I captured them so as our class starts to build our stories and pitches over the next 2 months, we have a good reference of things we should keep in mind about:

• What’s the single metric you use to measure success?
• What’s your funding model?
• What traction have you gained?
• How do you find your taget audience?
• How long is the engagement of your participant during and after?
• How do you measure overtime?
• What’s your biggest challenge?
• Who are you and why do you care about this?
• How are you leveraging technology?
• Which cities are you expanding to and why?
• What are your top priorities for the next 12 months and how are you planning on achieving them?
• What’s the impact so far and how do you know?
• Where are you getting your funding?
• Is there a revenue generating component?
• How do you showcase your success so people know where their money is going to?
• How did you get this idea?
• What guidance do you give to your donors in choosing what to give to?
• How have you achieved impact already?
• How are you planning to take this off the ground?
• How far along are you in development?
• How are you going to prove your concept and deserve this investment?
• What is the most innovate way you’ve raised money?
• What would you change?
• How far along are you in your campaign?
• What program do you have in order to support your mission?
• What are the barriers to your growth?
• How do you plan on people knowing about your website?
• How do you maintain a lasting impact?
• How much capital do you need over the next 3 years, and how are you going to get that money?
• What have you achieved so far?
• How are your participants sourced? How do you pick?
• How long is the mentorship?
• What is the fundamental innovation?

The last week of our Q3 studio class was much more informal than previous weeks. It was open work time as we prepared for our final presentations with no structured check-in’s with Justin, though everyone ended up chatting with him throughout the day.

Because of those small changes, I realized a few things about the way I learn:

• I learn through eavesdropping. Because Justin was walking around to groups in their workspaces or meeting with people in his office with the door open, I was able to pick up on various bits of advice throughout the day (including, “if you want people to pay attention to it and remember it, write it down on a slide. Don’t just talk about it.”) I could integrate what I wanted, I ended up learning more, and he didn’t have to repeat himself over and over again.
• I’m nosy and want to know what other people are doing. Because of the structure of scheduled one-on-one’s between groups and Petro (which I’m glad we had because we had given feedback during Q2 that we wanted more of that time with professors), groups ended up presenting and preparing for their meetings with Justin behind closed doors. And the feedback was in some ways trapped in that room because 1) we just integrated our feedback into our own process/project and went along our merry ways and 2) we didn’t have the time or discipline to reflect and share that feedback back via blogging, and 3) we simply didn’t realize what we were missing in not sharing all of that back. We spent the rest of our class times working in our teams (often in separate rooms or corners). While we did catch bits and pieces of what others were doing, notably when someone (inside or outside the class) asked a group about it, there could have been a lot more.
• I wanted coaching about the design process. This clicked for me when I read this in an Edward de Bono article: “I am not suggesting that [lateral thinking] is easy. It requires a lot of careful practice and coaching. But the deliberate steps can be used.” And then when I saw this happen because Kat asked for Jon’s help in walking her through an insight recombination exercise:Feedback is an important part of coaching when you’re trying something new. One net result of the structure of the quarter was that we got a lot of feedback on whatever we managed to pull together to present of our projects, and less feedback on our processes. Coaching is tricky when the process is so messy, but there is value in walking through the methods we are new to in the specific context of the project we’re currently working on—often when the need arises, and in the middle of our individual worktime. It helps gel the individual methods we learned previously floating around in our heads with the context and roadblocks of our current project floating around in other parts of our heads.

Of course, hindsight is much clearer than foresight. It takes a change, reflection, an outsider, and/or the ability to step back to see how things are currently working. Because we’re usually too caught up in the actual work, and we fall into habits and routines, and things just go unquestioned. It’s a struggle new organizations also have to deal with after a few years of operation—how to best use the people and the space that you have to work with.

As interaction designers, we can look at the “touchpoints” of a studio learning experience:

• meetings: open vs. closed, location, formality, who’s invited, who can sit in.
• do you go to the higher-up or does the higher-up come to you?
• do people feel free to come up to you while you’re working and interrupt and ask questions?
• where do people actually work? what’s the space like?
• where are the closed doors? (the physical ones and the assumed ones)
• how public is your process? how visible is it?
• what are each person’s expectations about the space, the time together, the process?
• how do people keep each other updated on each other’s work?
• what’s the dynamic of teams within the larger organization?