News and blog posts from our students and faculty

“When a male ballet dancer lifts and carries his partner around the stage in a pas de deux, he looks as strong as Atlas, but any ballerina will tell you there is a good deal in knowing how to be lifted.”

Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“How can I help” isn’t necessarily a simple question, and there isn’t always an easy answer. For much of my life, I’ve been observing a little something out there in the world. There are people who are porous to help, and there are people who are impervious to it. The ability to ask for and receive help is life changing. If you possess it, you have a big giant OPEN SESAME into connection, collaboration and belonging. And if you don’t, you are ever so slightly S-O-L. You’ll probably get by in life, but you’ll be at a high risk of being brittle, isolated and pretty worn out by the end of it.

In the first semester at AC4D, I dove into a design research mission. I wanted to see where the ability comes from and whether or not it can be taught. Here in the second semester, I’ve been in the trenches with the unflappable Eric Boggs taking the question ever farther. Can a digital system can work as training wheels for a person who needs help asking for help?

The Pilot

To recap for newcomers, Eric and I are building CareWell, a digital tool to help caregivers while they tend to aging loved ones.
Eric has spoken in a previous blog post about the mechanics of the pilot. I’ll address the outcomes and next steps.

1) Caregivers responded well to the task categories / bucket system we’d invented. They added a few, but by and large our initial impulse was correct. Good news for us as we are attempting to show that we understand the caregiver’s world.

2) It takes a minimum of 5 exchanges (text, call, email) for a caregiver to completely hand off a task and receive necessary updates. 5 exchanges multiplied across the numerous tasks a caregiver undertakes each week is an immense amount of communication to manage. There is benefit to having CareWell serve as the traffic controller. And it’s encouraging to see that we nailed this back there on day 1 of our project when we put up our first design pillars.

3) We knew from our research that helpers want to know exactly what they can do to help. What we did NOT know until we ran the pilot is that helpers often don’t help because they are afraid of burdening the caregiver. And there was no way of knowing, until we ran the pilot, something that is kind of a big deal. Our helpers prefer interacting with a text-based, digital system in place of communicating with the real live caregiever. They felt less intrusive, less burdensome, and less liable to be operating in a vacuum. They trusted our system more than they trusted their caregiver human to log their contributions and communicate updates.

This is kind of a big deal. Well, it might be kind of a huge deal. CareWell will always manage the tasks of caregiving, but it may center around something else. We’re considering the idea that CareWell isn’t task management as much as help management. CareWell may be a digital prosthesis for those who have trouble asking for and receiving help.

This new direction / refinement will require more research, and I’ll feel a lot better writing blogs on pilot results when we are generating consistent results instead of new directions. Eric and I have to talk more about all of this, but to me the concept is getting clearer and more exciting.

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:

I thought about Marsden’s article “People are People, but Technology is not Technology” and applied it to my team’s research into aging in place and elders and technology. Here is my distillation:

As part of our Service Design class at AC4D, we were asked to complete a series of exercises that map the various touchpoints a user / customer will experience as they interact with the services and products attending to the business we are developing. The most recent artifact we created is a service blueprint, which can be defined as a “a customer-focused approach for service innovation and service improvement.”1

We conducted extensive research into areas of life in which people are regularly and reliably able to enter a state of flow. Flow can be loosely defined as a state of deep concentration in which a person is fully involved in overcoming surmountable but challenging problems. Our group believes that teaching people how to regularly enter a state of flow is absolutely essential in educating people who are creative, resilient and able to grapple with the complex, wicked problems of society.

Our findings taught us that a certain set of physical and behavioral elements must be present for a person to enter the state of flow, and to derive the full benefit of having gone there. After exploring a number of options of how to create a product that could teach flow, we decided that a learning tool kit / building kit was both the ideal product and the ideal business model for us at this time.

Moving from our design insights into a customer journey map and, ultimately, a service blueprint was a surprisingly helpful exercise. Which isn’t to say that it was surprising that it was helpful. We knew it would be helpful. If we’ve learned nothing else here at AC4D, we’ve all learned to trust the process implicitly (even if we grumble about it occasionally). What was surprising was the practicality of the insights that emerged from the service blueprint.

It seemed likely that the service blueprint would illuminate places where we could finetune the actual, well, service we are providing. That is, the non-physical elements surrounding our product; marketing, messaging, user interfaces and actual customer service. And we did unearth helpful insights in all of those areas. Things got juicy, however, when the blueprint started showing us where we should probably take a look at some core assumptions about our initial product. A few helpful suggestions from the blueprint include:

-        The triumph / failure cycle that is critical to supporting a state of flow can begin the moment the user receives their box. Unboxing can become a prominent part of the experience, It’s a place we can leverage to get immediate user buy in.

-        There are unexpected locations where people are likely use our kits. We’d originally thought of homes and schools. We now see backs of cars, grandparents’ houses, parks, hospitals and offices.  This opens avenues for special edition kits and reasonably priced add-ons and modification kits.

-        We’d defined a number of user reactions and interactions that seemed likely to emerge in our product ecosystem. We now see that these responses, such as reflection, sharing, referring, collaborating, are likely to take place in unpredicted places and with unexpected combinations of people. We are now able to design our platform to offer logical solutions for user response in a wide variety of situations.

-        We discovered additional combinations and re-combinations of people with whom our users can be expected to utilize their kits. Because our kits privilege both solitary and collaborative flow, being able to develop products and directions to accommodate a wide mix of ages, developmental stages and group sizes gives us a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace.

We have been reminded frequently that the service blueprint is a living document. While it answers a great many questions, it is also of immense value in shining a light on future questions. We are increasingly clear on questions we will need to answer at various stages throughout our product development, launch and subsequent processes. We are refining our vision and shared ethos, and as we do so are looking at the blueprint to see where we should weave that into the specific interactions under our aegis. Additionally, we have noted places where we need to be on alert for customer feedback, strategic reviews and additional development.

And that’s the update from the play pen! Over and out.

Service Design
The emerging focus on user experience will be the key to companies’ success as we move from an industrial to a service-oriented society.  Service Design focuses on the methods and processes of a service from the point of view of the user.  The goal is to make sure that when a client or customer interacts with the service, from branding to customer service to any point of contact, there is room to make the service more useful, efficient, and effective.

How it Differs
As an industrialized society, we have produced too much stuff. This is evidenced by the serious problems we are facing: pollution, global warming, landfills, and water scarcity. Companies have seen design as a means to make products more beautiful and more stylish.  When you look at most types of design, such as graphic, packaging, and branding, the focus and goals are more product driven and based around physical appearance.  What about the intangible areas of design? This is where a customer interacts with a company not in a physical space.  Those are the points where service design can play a role. The companies that are looking at new innovative ways to create an experience through a service are going to excel in the new economy. As we move from a product focused society to service driven economy, companies need to retool and add service design to their entire model.

Methods
Service Design can start to address the entire journey of a customer instead of one isolated piece.  By using the methods of design thinking and service design, companies can gain key insights resulting in new solutions.  Insights come from research and investigation into the customer needs, wants, and behaviors.  This type of behavioral research is different from past forms of quantitative statistical research. What do Woolworth, Syms, Blockbuster, and Lehman Brothers all have in common?  The obvious is that they were all companies that failed in the last five years, but they also missed an opportunity to adapt to a changing economy.  A drastic redesign of their service, such as a service blueprint, could have saved them. Companies need to adapt to the new economy, by focusing on the user first, and creating a “moment of magic”.

Distinct Value
Even though more organizations would benefit from service design, it still finds itself in an uphill battle to become recognized as a strong anchor of an organizations’ design focus. Service designers are currently creating the language and networks that legitimize and empower its future use.

Traditional services such as retail, financial, telecom, and healthcare can benefit from designing a blueprint to look at all of the points of intersection with the customer.  Unlike a physical product, a service unfolds over a period of time through various steps and events. Professional consulting is a great example. The experience begins with learning the problem, defining the problem, creating a framework with which to dive into the problem, and producing a series of deliverables that will be met over a period of time.

Processes
Service design focuses on the whole system, including the customer as well as the staff within an organization, and from the front of the house to back. The company has to take into account all of the players.   In more traditional product driven design, the entire ecosystem or ecology is not as holistic. This is noted in Service Design as an Emerging Field: “Service designers take a deep dive into the ecologies of services, into the world of needs and experience of the users and providers.  They visualize, formulate, and choreograph solutions to problems that do not necessarily exist today; they observe and interpret requirements and behavioral patterns and they transform them into possible future services.”

Based on a study from the UK Design Council “41% of all producing companies regard design as an integral component of their company they found that companies that use design are 200% more successful on the stock market”.

As seen on the Service Design Network, service design has many benefits; service designers

• help identify areas for improvement.
• improve the way customers interact with your service
• redesign spaces so they can be more efficient
• create wayfinding and better communication tools such as branding

In conclusion, if a company begins to adapt service design into its framework, it can begin to differentiate themselves from its competitors in order to create value.  Companies that provide better services will be ranked more highly by their customers and will build better relationships.   People are expecting more and more from companies and this type of focus will help companies keep up with the demands of their customers.

Taking from the feedback from user testing with the last iteration, I redesigned the course selection module. Users wanted a simple view of “What are my options for required classes?”

I broke that down into four steps, starting with days of the week classes are held on, typically MWF and TTh, then a level down from that to Morning and Afternoon classes.

You can see an annotated walk thru of the iteration here:

Iteration Version 4 Presentation Slides

While the internals of the module work well, there are still many things lacking in this iteration. In presenting this version lots of question were asked about why those were the only classes offered. Was this just a small school, or what filters were applied to the course listings.

What I learned is the value of a scenario or back story, a way to tell the audience why they are looking at what they are looking at. In the case of the user, a way to tell them what filters have lead to this list of class options. In the case of clients / an audience, you need to give some credible story about both why the student is left with just these six class options and why the student would find value in that.

Lesson learned!

For the 3rd set of wireframes I worked through a lot of methods for the search system. Some of the feedback I received said that the elements seemed to float about the screen, so I made a sorted effort to make them feel more embedded into the frames. There were a few questions about how to get information on the actual class so I added a few elements to make it easier to get quick access to class synopsis’s.

Click HERE to view the full set of Wireframes.

This blog post explores a few topics:

1. My AC4D group’s design research into aging populations and computing technology
2. “Old People Everywhere”
3. Family’s ability to teach seniors technology
4. Black-box aging

My AC4D research group is studying aging populations, technology and “Aging in Place.” All four of us are in our late 20s or early 30s and have Baby Boomer parents and grandparents in the Greatest Generation (born before 1944). Right now we’re completing design research with people from the Greatest Generation who use technology and we’re also researching with those who surround this population- their Baby Boomer children or grandchildren, and people in the rest of the ecosystem around aging (pharmacists, social directors at senior independent living complexes, etc.) who can give us more of a sense of the needs of aging populations.

Throughout this research I’ve been mulling over a section in A Pattern Language called “Old People Everywhere” that is aligned with the “Aging in Place” our group has been studying. This stood out to me most:

The fact is that contemporary society shunts away old people; and the more shunted away they are, the deeper the rift between old and young.

…The segregation of the old causes the same rift inside each individual life: as old people pass into old age communities their ties with their own past become unacknowledged, lost, and therefore broken. Their youth is no longer alive in their old age- the two become dissociated; their lives are cut in two.

It goes without saying that this cleaving away of one’s youth when one moves into a nursing home or retirement village makes one “older.” This is part of the argument for “Aging in Place”- when in your own home, surrounded by your life and identity, one is able to stay younger because of those ties to the past.

Family Makes the Black-Box Transparent

We’re noticing in our research that often it’s the Baby Boomers and grandchildren of “Greatests” who usually give them tech devices (iPhones and iPads mostly) and personally show them how to use the devices. So far, usually this is driven by a desire to stay in better touch with the grandparent. Most often it is the grandchildren teaching the grandparent how to use the computing device and getting called for help/advice when something isn’t working.

The grandchildren effectively act as the agent that turns the black-box design of tech devices into transparent-box design that the grandparent can use. All the talk about intuitive to use tech products amounts to nothing when there isn’t a kind and trusted younger family member there to show the grandparent how to use the device. The grandchildren are cracking open the black-box and showing the grandparents the inner workings, teaching them this new language of use.

These grandchildren, mostly millennials, have taught themselves how to use technology through intuitively playing with it; their mental models allow for it to all make sense. Often this is not the case for their grandparents and parents, and instead they rely on these younger generations to walk them through. (A system designed to support this tech-teaching relationship between grandchild and grandparent would be of great use. Additionally, a system designed to encourage and support a teaching relationship for the grandparent to teach their mental model to the grandchild would broaden the horizons and creative thinking abilities of the grandchildren).

Black-Box Aging

Aging in nursing homes versus aging in place, as integrated members in one’s community, is black-box aging. Our contemporary society has increasingly done this- with specially developed retirement communities, nursing homes, assisted living facilities.  When elders are shunted away from the rest of society, hidden from view and secluded in homogenous nursing homes or retirement communities, (or even just isolated in their own homes and less mobile), their wisdom and the role-modelling they provide is partitioned off. The respect for elders in those who are young, is unable to develop. This has the effect of a whole society that doesn’t respect elderly people and society/cities as a whole that don’t adapt to suit the needs of aging people.

Through our research and ultimately through the services/systems we design, our group aims to change this.

My research partner Kevin and I have been researching Education, but most importantly the role that technology has been playing in education. We have found that high school has changed a lot in regards to technology, from when we were once students in the public school system. We are particularly interested in what uses technology currently plays, and it what ways it could potentially be improved. We sat down with our participant, a 15 year old male, currently enrolled in the public school system. We spoke to him in regards to his current classes, what pieces of technology he uses, and in what way he found them useful and in what way he found them to be a hindrance.

We learned that many kids these days are more in tune with their cell phones than they are books. The participant used his cell phone for multiple different purposes. It not only was used a calculator, but as a note taking tool, a reminder system for homework, and also a means to take pictures so that he could have visuals for his at home studies. The participant was extremely knowledgeable about modern day technology and its multiple uses. He was also extremely proud of his 42″ flat screen tv, which he mentioned multiple times in the interview. It was interesting to talk to him and explore how he has adapted modern day technology to help assist him in his school work. He mentioned a few different phone apps that help guide the learning process that both Kevin and I were unaware of.

One of the main things that we found to be extremely interesting was how much a simple smart phone, can help with the learning process. He mentioned that he wished, he could use iPads in class more often, and that one of the teachers had actually implemented them into his class, but with a limited access to the app systems. With the knowledge we walked away with, Kevin and I both had multiple ideas swimming through our heads on ways to capitalize on these needs in the classroom. There is still a lot more to learn about what happens with technology in the classroom, but for now Kevin and I both have already learned a lot as to where we can step in to make a change for the better.

A couple weeks ago, our class learned first-hand how to conduct a form of research called Contextual Inquiry. In this approach, the researchers partner with a participant to see them in action as they work. The goal is to observe and ask questions to understand why people do what they do–all within the context of their working environment.

Contextual Inquiry is a great way to notice workflows and breakdowns, but it’s not necessarily as helpful in revealing the participant’s hopes and wishes for what their work could look like.

That’s where another research method, the Participatory Interview, can come in. Participatory Interviews go beyond a typical interview by inviting the participant into a creative process. The interviewer offers tools and stimuli that grounds the participant in their current experience while helping them dream about what the ideal one could look like.

For our Participatory Interviews, Eli and I refined our research focus. When we visited Special Education classrooms for our Contextual Inquiry, we heard from at least one teacher that incorporating assistive technology at home could make a big difference in the classroom. We also observed technology used for education and communication with a student diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum. We also thought parents likely have high hopes for their children and would be very vested in seeing them learn and develop. On top of this, we discovered a network of organizations in the Austin area that offer support services for families of people diagnosed with Autism, so we decided to focus on interviewing parents of people diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum who use assistive technology to communicate.

The Participatory Interview process itself was exciting, fun, and pretty natural. We spent time preparing some activities, words, and images to help facilitate the conversation. As anticipated, the interviewees had a lot to say, and the main task was guiding the conversation to go deeper into understanding not only what the person wished for, but why.

Here are a few things we learned along the way:

1. Participatory Interviews are fun. We thought it might seem uncomfortable to ask someone to talk through images or words (or have another person type out copious notes), but the conversation felt natural. We learned a lot, and the interview was an enjoyable and energizing way to better understand our focus.
2. This method takes time, preparation, and flexibility. We spent quite a bit of time revising our focus, lining up interviews, developing a journaling “homework” assignment, developing key questions, finding additional image and word stimuli, and practicing the interview. Plus a couple hours with each participant. And even with all the preparation, the conversation sometimes took a different direction than we anticipated. (Which is probably a sign that the method works!)
3. Pictures are powerful. We were excited to see how an abstract, simple photograph provided a springboard for deep, thoughtful conversation about what the person wished and hoped for.

We still have a couple more interviews to complete and are considering reworking the journal a little bit to make sure the language and approach is understandable and it’s easy for the parents to return. We could also do a better job preparing the participant to know what to expect before the interview. During the interview, we can be more directive and interject with follow-up questions and summaries to make sure we understand what the participant is communicating. And finally, we continued to refine our focus as we started searching for participants, and having that established sooner probably would have made it easier and faster to line up the interviews.

Overall, though, we got a sense of the challenges and hopes that some parents have when it comes to technology helping their children communicate and learn. And I’m convinced that Participatory Interviews should become a regular part of my research as I’m working on new products or services.