News and blog posts from our students and faculty

“What’s your schedule look like this week?”

I ask Jesse this question as least once a week as we build Kites & Ladders, a business to amplify the voices of people with autism through tools that support self-expression and communication.

Why do I constantly pester Jesse about his availability? (And spend too much time in Google calendar?)

Our first Kites & Ladders product is the Harmony wristband, which uses biofeedback to help people on the autism spectrum become aware of their emotional state and express it to others. Getting to that point where people can purchase the Harmony wristband, though, requires collecting a bunch of biometric data, testing various wristband form factors, and validating the concept with kids on the autism spectrum, their parents, and experts in the field. Not to mention drawing on the wisdom of a number of engineers and industrial designers.

This means our calendars have been quite full over the last 6 weeks.

Early on, we discovered that we couldn’t find the right combination of sensors or get access to raw data using commercial fitness trackers. So Jesse soldered and sewed and hammered and coded and tinkered to create our own prototype. We can now collect data about the wearer’s heart rate and stress level and process it in a number of ways. Meanwhile, I sketched shapes, interfaces, and buttons to figure out what the device could look like in a more polished form down the road.

On top of building, we’ve had weekly meetings with at least two or three engineers, industrial designers, and leaders in autism or educational organizations to continue learning more about autism as well as hardware development.

Then there’s the testing…

Testing the Harmony wristband prototype.

So far, we’ve visited 9 homes and worked with 11 kids (both autistic and not) who tried out the wristband. As the device captured biometric data, we hung out and watched Annoying Orange videos (you’ve been warned–they’re annoying!), went to the library, observed piano lessons, paged through countless photos of ventilation systems, sat through frustrating homework assignments, and witnessed everyday life while taking notes about the child’s emotional state and environmental changes.

Heart rate and stress level data captured during a test session.

Through this process, we’ve become incredibly passionate about and committed to working in the autism space. One expert we spoke with said an autism diagnosis is often treated like a lid, not a ladder. Through Kites & Ladders work, we’ve met incredible individuals with autism who have a lot to offer the world. The challenge is how Kites & Ladders can support these people in reaching their potential.

So we carry that into the final weeks in our program. Our calendars are still filling up as we reach out to new people, test and refine our prototype, develop our business pitch, and figure out how to produce the Harmony wristband.

But those blocks of time encourage us, propel us forward, and remind us that we’re doing meaningful work.

Willy and I are developing an app that simplifies the paperwork side of adoption for families and agencies: Adapt Solutions. Ask anyone who has adopted: paperwork is a headache and amplifies the vulnerability, frustration and emotional turmoil that comes with the territory.

Currently, adoption paperwork is agency-specific, analog and a complete pain. Documents are scanned, mailed, faxed, lost, forgotten and never in the right place. Adoptive parents are burdened by lugging heavy stacks of paperwork to places like the DMV, airports, or even on a roadtrip. Take a look at the image of a users’ to-do list below. He and his partner re-write this list each morning. As you can see, four out of the five tasks relate to paperwork management.

Here are the two big questions put to the test of our pilot: do people feel secure managing personal documents online and is there something comforting about physical paper that adopting parents wouldn’t want to give up?

First: security. When we asked users if they already house secure documents online they at first said no then realized that they are emailing not secured PDF’s on their smart phones daily. The iOS app, as it’s currently envisioned, will have the most recent and up to date security measures.

Second: validity of digital paperwork. The answer here, according to the adoption lawyer we spoke with, is a bit more complicated. There are certain documents demanded in original, notarized form by the courts. There are other documents that are often shared in scanned form. The new politics brought to question by developing technology are still clearing these waters. (For instance, did you know there are now online notaries?) The person who brings this app to life, (see below), will have to keep their fingers to this pulse.

The professional team behind Adapt Solutions is myself, Melissa Chapman, and William Morgan. I’m leading the business and brand development (crafting the narrative, reaching out to pilot participants and community leaders) and Willy is lead on design (in charge of the interaction design, graphics and usability). Over the course of the last 4 weeks we have piloted with 13 users including adoption lawyers, redesigned the entire application 5 times, and presented progress in a client-like setting each week.

Our goal is a clean user interface with basic document sharing functionality. See the latest homescreen below.

We have learned a lot in terms of discipline, working fast, iterating like hell, and the importance of staying flexible.

The biggest takeaway, however, is validation of this need-based technology. * It’s known around these parts that Willy nor I plan to launch this as a business. There have been times, however, where we meet eyes and realize the reality: nobody is doing this and everybody needs this.

That leaves us with an overwhelmingly strong feeling to give this to someone who will bring it to fruition.

For this position diagram, I focused on the following three articles:

Edward de Bono. “Serious Creativity.” Journal for Quality and Participation Sept. 1995: 12-18. Print.

Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking.” Organization Science July/August 2005: 409-421.

Donald A Schön. “Problems, frames and perspectives on designing.” Design Studies July 1984: 132-136.

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Through the lens of these three articles, I laid out a diagram of the process of designers changing their surroundings. The color overlays indicate important junctures in this process. Each is explained/laid out in quotes below the accompanying detail images of the diagram.

The full project with details and quotes is hosted on my website, a preview is below:

And here’s one detail image as a teaser just because it’s my favorite part of the diagram:

For this position diagram, I attempted to translate “The Three Cotary Propositions,” a 1931 lecture by Charles S. Pierce, into contemporary language. I wanted Pierce’s views, which I consider quite transcendent, to be accessible to someone with a modern attention span and understanding of language. This is why I chose to illustrate a few of Pierce’s points, generously seasoned with my own views, in the format of a comic strip. Given the nature of the argument Pierce makes, I feel comfortable not only modernizing his points, but adding to them, as the frontier of these concepts have expanded considerably since 1931. Nonetheless, his work continues to be relevant and clarifying the polemics’ stance was a refreshing, fun, and engaging process.

Above is a random sample snapshot of Pierce’s lecture, which, at around twelve pages,  demonstrates the need for translation. Fortunately for me, my grandfather, the poet and St. John’s professor Charles G. Bell, who was friends with Einstein and was barfed on by Dylan Thomas one wild night, actually spoke like this. I was exposed to this type of language from an early age and understand it. However, in an effort to not default into the same highfalutin wordage, I translated the lecture, paragraph by paragraph, into Spanish and then back into English using Google Translate. I knew that translating it this way was crude, but I wanted to see what other word choices surfaced and be forced into articulating it myself.

My favorite part of this process was that “Abduction” consistently becomes “Kidnapping,” which is hilarious because I don’t think I could define the intended meaning of the word anyway. This process made distilling paragraphs into sentences very simple, I suppose because it was now a foreign language, the essence of which I understood. Like listening in on a Scottish conversation about something you are familiar with. I then started a comic strip from the paragraph sentences and presented it to the class last Tuesday.

The feedback was that it was too verbose (STILL!) and could better utilize illustration and the comic strip medium. It was also going to end up being insanely long and meandering. So, I continued the distillation process and came down with a few points that I wanted to illustrate. I got braver about my illustrating and more particular about the execution. I became clearer about my ideas and more comfortable sharing them in this way.  I would love feedback about the work and continued editorial suggestions from anyone who is interested in giving it. The final product is below….

Our class recently read a series of articles that dealt with the relationship between creativity, knowledge, sensemaking, and strategy in design. As I went through the articles, a theme kept jumping out at me: Innovation happens in hindsight.

More accurately, I should say we recognize innovation and consider the design solution to be logical and straightforward (or as an obscure failure) when we look back. In Serious Creativity, deBono writes that if an idea does not appear logical in hindsight, we won’t appreciate it. However, he argues that this post-hoc reasoning means we place too much emphasis on logic and not enough on lateral thinking and creativity as the way to develop new design solutions.

In Discovering Design, Nigel Cross writes that, in contrast to fields like logic and science, “design initiates novel forms” through abductive leaps. The “solutions” a designer proposes don’t necessarily answer the “problem” in an expected, straightforward way. Good design is often surprising.

I wanted to create a simple visualization to process my thoughts around the place of hindsight, surprise, and logic when it comes to designing product ecosystems. I’ve mapped out the current state of a number of products and services in Google’s ecosystem in the current state, but many of these products have moved down the Y-axis since their initial launch as the surprise factor wears off. I could see using this kind of tool on my own projects in the future to evaluate components of a product system–and to remind myself that time judges innovation.

Innovative design solutions often come through surprising leaps of reason and make logical sense only in hindsight. Over time, the surprise factor drops as solutions either fade into obscurity or become more ubiquitous and utilitarian.

As always, the readings were the inspiration for tonight’s post.  I was particularly affected by Don Schon’s writings around reflective “practitioning”, as well as Cross, who both indicate that a designerly problem solving process is both reflective and iterative in nature.

The relationship between knowledge, strategy, and creativity is a fluid one, which is hard to demonstrate in a static 2 dimension artifact – however try I must!  To me, creativity is really a combination of intuitioned problem framing (what “feels” like the right way to look at a problem), verbal provocation, and making/modeling.  These things constantly are happening inside my head as I work toward ill defined problem solution “jousts” around our Care Share product.  While I may have many creative ideas, that actual strategy that I choose to employ is first cleared by my existing knowledge – of what worked before, or what definitely did not work.  Creative strategies then must go through a filter of logic at some point.

After trying it out, I have to review what I’ve done and see if it “worked” which for me, is a rough sense of it.  As the sensemaking article explains, generally in design we are looking to understand if the solution leaves the problem at least in a more desired state then before; always with clues on how to proceed in subsequent iterations.

Below is the 2nd iteration of Position Digram 2 for ISDE 302. The image is based on a quote from the assigned readings. Using competitive innovation, as opposed to competitive imitation, designers are able to create better products for the end user. Which in turn will result in greater buy in from the users.

There are things you can control and those you shouldn’t. There are things in a design setting that are in flux and those that are fixed. For this last round of position diagrams in Chris Risdon’s Theory of Interaction Design and Social Entrepreneurship class, I attempt to parse out these concepts in relation to where creativity and strategy intersect.

Nigel Cross, in his essay Discovering Design Ability, talks about the importance of creativity and intuition and how the missing ingredient is the designers’ input – that which he calls the ‘ordering principle’. Others refer to this as the ‘design magic’. Another tenant of his argument which I find compelling is how closely the problems and solutions are interwoven. Both can change dynamically, but are tied. We can decide as designers that the solution a client is asking for is answering the wrong question and in turn, design around the proverbial starting point as opposed to an ending one.

In the essay Strategic Intent published by Gary Hamel and K.C. Pralahad, the authors discuss lots of smart ways to arrange a successful team dynamic. They unravel the magic of “motivating people by communicating the value of the target, leaving room for individual and team contribution, sustaining enthusiasm by providing new operational definitions…and using intent consistently to guide resource allocations”. This falls under the ‘not up for debate’ and ‘fixed’ part of the whole in my mind.

In the diagram below, I’ve attempted to show the relationship between operational procedures, the in-flux states of problem and solution and the four standing pillars of any design equation: this ‘team enthusiasm’, constraints, strategic intent, and the ‘ordering principle’.

In a business setting, it would be natural to first think about controlling the amount of staff time and resources spent. In a design world, while those things need to be managed efficiently, it’s not where we look first.

This is my recipe for attacking design situations with a balance of creativity and strategy, both necessary parts of the concoction.

The second set of readings in our Theory class revolved around creativity, strategy and design, and how those three concepts are practiced in design education versus business management education.

In my position diagram I used the two extremes of Objective and Subjective approaches to education. Where Business Management education typically focuses on a strict system of how companies and organizations operate “most efficiently,” the practice of Design is much the opposite; relying on subjective insights, intuition and abductive reasoning.

What I try to develop in the linked slides below is what the strict school & practice of Business can learn from the rapidly evolving character of Design thinking.

Bringing Design thinking into the Business world, I believe can contribute to much more innovative and agile business models for a world that is more and more user driven.

Position Diagram Presentation Slides

The prompt for this presentation was “argue for technology’s role in society.” The inspiration for this keynote came from the first set of readings, listed here, as well as my own thoughts.

Technology’s role is to help us humans achieve our wants and needs.  It is purporting to do so with its benevolent march into ubiquity.  But technology can help us achieve so much more than heating up potatoes (yes, my diet has taken a hit as I spend more and more time at AC4D!).

We need to think about how to make this transfer most effective and meaningful.  I conclude that successful interactions of these new products will be judged through how well they can play nicely with our existing worlds; namely, if they are equitable, pleasant, and engaging based on culture and current context.  If they can be so, we can share a dialogue – specifically, we can grow to trust and value their contributions to our lives over time.

See the presentation.