News and blog posts from our students and faculty

There is a lot of suffering in human society, and plenty of well-intentioned efforts to alleviate that suffering. But sometimes, a key component goes missing from the problem-solving efforts-  personal well-being and grounded happiness. Social workers are familiar with this concept in the form of “self-care for the caregiver.” Social workers work to maintain their own self-care to ensure they are stable reference points for the often unstable clients they are helping. Like a gravitational field, social workers provide a reference point of stability that guides often wide-orbiting clients back in to a more balanced center.

In a similar way, all of the great social or spiritual leaders (e.g. the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Mother Teresa), radiate or radiated a calming and clear presence allowing those around them to feel that everything would be alright, even if it wasn’t at that moment, it would be someday. That calming presence allowed people to face extraordinarily difficult circumstances that otherwise would have stopped them. It gave them the encouragement to keep moving forward, keep trusting their intuition, and keep working past the fear and challenges into better possibilities. This is basic empowerment, but it’s worth reiterating. Without it, the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the Indian Independence Movement, and countless others, would have stalled in discouragement, unrest and in-fighting.

It’s that supportive, “you’re going to be fine,” way of being with others, that many people tackling “wicked problems” forget to employ as the very foundational way in which they approach the world.  As leaders, when we radiate happiness and calm, we allow those around us to face their problems with a dose of that same attitude and then achieve greater success.

Since, ultimately, large-scale social problems are simply the mass collections of individual human challenges, problems can be addressed by shifting the mindsets of individuals into further empowerment. For example, environmental destruction can be seen as individuals’ inability to conceptualize environmental change and alter behavior accordingly, disease epidemics can be seen as many human bodies individually needing greater care, poverty can be seen as many individuals unable to free themselves from institutional power dynamics, and so on.  It is the pieces, happy or unhappy, empowered or victimized, that make the whole. So as designers approaching social change, it is us up to us to generate happiness as a means to allow others the encouragement to face their challenges and keep moving forward, knowing it will get better over time.

You can feel it in your own life- at times of overwhelm or unrest, taking action is more challenging. At times of joy and calm, taking action is satisfying and easy. The more we can surround individual humans, who are part of these wicked problems, with an atmosphere of appreciation, collaboration, and playfulness, the more we are able to find the threads of yarn within us, and within them, that ultimately unravel these dense, challenging problems.

So that’s my goal for the coming weeks- infuse all that I do, and all that I give, with joy. Realize that happiness, especially in abundance, is an improving force on the world. And each moment we are happy is a gift to the rest of the world. Here’s to being kind to each other as we do this work, and to helping as many individual others as possible (who in aggregate form these wicked problems), to achieve that state as well- in whatever forms they prefer.

There’s a particular process hump that design students inevitably encounter: that of quality. This comes after they have learned particular methods, and they realize that they can make a thing. If the student has been taught critique and self-reflection, they’ll also soon realize that their thing isn’t very good, because it’s the first iteration of the idea. Iteration one is a thinking artifact, not a presentation artifact, and for a new designer, the gulf between thinking and presentation is enormous. In the dialogue between maker and material, iteration one establishes boundaries around a problem space but it doesn’t actually solve the problem. That’s because the level of craftsmanship and finish of the artifact is directly related to the quality of the solution, and for all novice designers, their level of craftsmanship and finish is poor.

This learning moment is inevitable, because it’s a place where method and tacit skill collide. Simply, it’s easy to learn a method, because a method is – by definition – procedural. Just follow the steps, and you’ve applied the method. But tacit skill is neither easy nor procedural; it comes through practice over time.

Once a student has produced iteration one, the best thing they can do next is to produce iteration two. And for most students, this is the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Because producing iteration one was so hard, and took so long, and the results are so obviously bad, the student sees only failure. And they give up.

I think, in my teaching experience, this is a critical fork in the road for learning design. Does the student persevere and practice? Does she “play her scales” or “wax the floor”? Or does she cut and run, internalizing various rationalizations for her poor work? I’ve heard “I’m just not meant to be that kind of designer” more often than I care to count, always at this phase in learning. And I’ve also seen students practice through it, giving up their social life, practically living in the studio, and establishing a sense of confidence both with skill and process.

The separation of method and execution is a learning practice, a pedagogical trick for students to learn both. But in practice, there’s no separation. Methodology integrates with craft-based execution over time to form expertise. Once a student has learned method and learned about execution, the rest relies on their passion to practice. There’s no real way to game this system; expertise comes from practice and experience. And that takes time, personal and professional sacrifice, and a disciplined maturity.

The simple truth is that, for a student that’s gotten to this magical moment in learning, they have only one path towards success: practice.

As an exploration of the role of technology in our lives, I wrote the pieces below:

Recently, Michael Bierut wrote an article about branding, and our cultural tendency to armchair quarterback design decisions. The first 2700 words (or parts I-IV) poke at populist response to graphic design, during which the piece shifts between sarcastically casting the consumers as a lynch mob to casting designers as arrogant idiots. The last 450 words seem to lament the death of graphic design. That’s part VI, which includes a Vignelli quote that seems to contradict everything in the first chunk.

But it is part V that sparked me to write this response. In Part V – How Many Psychiatrists Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb? – Bierut describes his own experience in redesigning the UPS brand. I appreciate his honesty, because it offers an intimate view into what happens in corporate America. An agency is called in to do some “creative work.” They offer concepts and vision. The work passes through endless meetings and a machine of consensus. If the work is not killed during the process, blanding pops out the other end.

What concerns me is the view of design – and particularly identity design (or branding) – as the hammer, where stagnant consumer growth is the nail, and the need to “change consumer perception” is more important than the need to “change our product offering.” Bierut presents the UPS opportunity as a response to marketing needs. As he describes, “We were hired for a simple reason: surveys kept showing the company was inaccurately perceived as being slower, more inflexible, and less technologically adept than their competition.” Yet there’s nothing simple about this reason, and it begs an even less simple question: if the company was perceived as being slower, more inflexible, and less technologically adept, could it be because they are slower, more inflexible, and less technologically adept?

This is a constant and reoccurring theme in design circles. In the well-publicized Tropicana example that Bierut cites, communications director Jamie Stein initially explained the rebrand: “Our intent was to get people to rediscover the benefits of orange juice.” When UC tried to redesign their identity, the stated goal was to unify the UC system. In the recent American Airlines rebrand, the “new logo and livery are designed to reflect the passion for progress and the soaring spirit…”

But a redesigned logo does not make a broken airline better, and a redesigned logo does not make a tired parcel system more flexible. New paint on the outside of a plane does not offer ergonomic support to flyers, who are forced to sit on a “chair” made of metal rods. It does not empower customer service representatives to help confused, tired, or pissed off customers. It does not make right the countless absurdities of random ticketing and return policies, or baggage fees, or headphone fees, or inflight entertainment fees, or change fees. It does not fix the countless broken interactions that occur within the American Airlines service ecosystem, and it will not fix the poor financial state of the company, which is bleeding money.

Similarly, a new logo does not help UPS better respond to the complexities of their customers, who change their mind and need packages re-routed. A new logo doesn’t help educate people about the nutritional benefits of fruit in their diet. And a new logo doesn’t improve the ability for students to register for classes across the UC system, or help them better manage the complexities of course registration and degree completion, or navigate the bureaucracy of the enormous California college system.

We see example after example of branding as band-aid: a new identity will somehow magically transform a company from broken to fixed, from out of touch to empathetic. It won’t. The cited reason for a rebrand, in each example above, should have been addressed by changes to the actual product, service, and business strategy.

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I herald design as one of the most powerful forces of change we have for addressing complicated business and social problems. Part of design is selecting tools, methods, techniques, and approaches that make sense in the context of the problem. Design, like any other discipline, is not “one size fits all.” It is not appropriate for “the masses” to critique the aesthetic of the new design in each case mentioned above, and while predictable, it’s particularly disappointing to see the criticism at such shallow and superficial levels (“it looks like a toilet”; “my two year old could do better.”) But it is entirely fair for those same masses to critique the design strategy in each example, for the design strategy in each example was to put lipstick on a pig.

One of the strategies behind the curriculum at AC4D is to assign more work than is probably accomplishable at any given time. As a class, we’ve discussed what we learn from this. Several theories were floated, and most were confirmed by faculty.

1) Overload makes sure that there are no gaps in creating, delivering, and generally processing information being taught to us. This creates momentum whose inertia needs to carry us through our quarterly breaks and beyond the end of the program. The ultimate goal being that we get used to this level of activity such that it becomes difficult not to be creating or synthesizing most of the time.

2) While we do need to be thoughtful and intentful in our work, the nature of our work provides plenty of opportunities to get stuck, staring at a blank sheet of paper wondering where to start. Or inversely, overprocessing too many ideas without creating necessary artifacts to show how we got from point A to point B. In the avalanche of work, we must at a certain point get out of our own heads and commit to paper (or whiteboard or the digital tool du jour).

3) In addition to learning to manage time better, we become better prioritizers, deciding what is most important to accomplish each week, what “falls to the floor,” and what still gets done, but at lesser quality and fidelity than we prefer.

4) There is special value in the work we decide to get done, but wherein we sacrifice quality. When we do lackluster work, we are guaranteed to get that feedback in critique or in a gradesheet. Sometimes, we know exactly what that feedback will be. In this case, our excuse of lack of time does not matter; the result is all that matters. Other times, the criticism we get is over unexpected areas, and we learn that, if we are going to cut corners for the sake of shipping, we need to repriortize which details to focus on, and which to skip. Either way, each time we learn to become less attached to our ideas and our work. And this is a critical point: I’ve watched many startups become fixated on one idea, and when they refuse to let go of it, they fail.

Just this week, I took the time on a project I was struggling with to get feedback from several peers and faculty. One faculty member said that the idea was obvious, and that if I was going to continue with it, I’d have to dig deeper. I’m not sure I agreed with the obivousness of it, given other’s reactions, but I did understand the need for continued refinement. But it just wouldn’t gel no matter where I took it.

So I killed that idea. It was hard and a little scary, as I had put a lot of effort into it, and I had no idea what I would do instead with a rapidly approaching deadline. But the writing was on the wall: I couldn’t make it work. I started over. And even though the idea was gone, I now had a few more techniques for bringing together disparate ideas, diagramming them, and generating new work from scratch. It was a little bit easier than the previous effort, it took less time, and most importantly, I was left with a concept that did hold together, made sense, and had more depth to it.

Like many things, getting good at something requires doing it again and again: killing an idea and starting over is no exception. Given the pace of AC4D, I expect plenty of chances to practice!

When people ask me to explain what the experience here at AC4D in Austin is like for me, I tell them its a Mental version of NOLS.   At the age of 23 years old, I decided to take a thirty day mountaineering course, in the Wind Rivers of Wyoming, with the National Outdoor Leadership School.   Before this trip, I was supposed to get my body up to speed and get in physical shape.  I was taking day hiking trips adding rocks to my backpack to try to feel what it would be like to carry a heavier pack.  I ran, swam, and worked out at the gym, to prepare for the adventure that summer.

Let’s just say when I got off the bus with the NOLs group that first day I thought to myself there is no way I am going to be able to do this.  I was carrying an 85lb backpack and we started on a straight uphill 10 mile hike the first day.  I was out of shape, slow, exhausted, and the first night I was struck with a severe case of altitude sickness. I couldn’t sleep and it did not get better until about a week and half in. Everyday I asked myself if I was going to be able to make it to the end.   By week 2 I started to get stronger and leaner.  I was figuring out the tricks to set up camp, keep warm, cook in freezing weather, and traverse all types of terrain.  By week 3 I got even stronger, and faster.  By the end of the 30 days I was a machine, I was ice climbing, rock climbing, summiting 14k foot summits, and felt invincible.

So how does this relate to Ac4D?   Well right now I feel like I am in week 1 of my NOLS trip.   I am brand new at Photoshop, I stumble through it, Illustrator, its like carrying an 85lb backpack.  Coding in HTML is like altitude sickness.   My presentation skills need a lot of refinement. But for me the hard part is mental, I knew this was not going to be a walk in the park, but the growing pains are not easy.  So I am trudging through the snow waist deep right now with the hope that at the top of the summit will be a great view, and a sense of accomplishment.   I am not here because its going to be easy, but I am here to see where I can affect change, and hopefully leave a stronger leader and problem solver.

The theories of Bernays, Buchanan, Chochinov, Papinek and Vitta can be used to inform the designer’s role in society. The rallying cry of Chochinov (“stop making crap”); the power handed to the designer in Bernays’ reminder that public opinion is malleable and can be shaped; Papanek’s admonishment to stop creating sexy objects and tackle bigger problems; Buchanan’s definition of those indeterminate, bigger problems as “wicked problems;” and Vitta’s observation that participants in contemporary society become so defined by the goods they consume they lose their personhood, all amount to a hefty charge to the designer. As students, we are learning how to approach the world with an informed eye and create responsible change. We are learning at AC4D how to use the viewpoints of theorists like these to approach our work in the world responsibly.

These theories form a spectrum of thought a designer can pull on as they work. If the motivation behind making something doesn’t consider the viewpoints put toward by these five thinkers, perhaps it isn’t worth making at all.

When you pull together their varying viewpoints it coalesces into the following charge for the designer and their engagement with the world:

There’s a lot to consider. And based on the sheer number of people currently influencing the world who are not considering these factors, it’s vital for designers (yes us, the glue between the disciplines, the medium between the mediums) to approach problem-finding and problem-solving with this dose of added responsibility.

Yesterday, I gave a talk in France about social entrepreneurship, urging people to consider starting their own company and leaving behind the corporate machine. I realize the laws governing entrepreneurship differ greatly in various countries. It may be tremendously difficult in Europe to, say, declare bankruptcy after a failed startup attempt, and dissolving a company may be next to impossible. I was expecting to hear questions about this from the crowd, and to be frank, I don’t have a great answer to how to mitigate this (except to urge local governments to establish laws that are more agreeable to entrepreneurial endeavors). Most of the questions I received weren’t about that, though. They weren’t about the legal and structural aspects of company creation: they were about the emotional and attitudinal parts. How do you deal with a country where, to paraphrase one of the questions, people aren’t encultured to challenge norms, take initiative, and utilize creative approaches to problem solving?

I don’t think that’s unique to countries in Europe. I actually think this is the largest opportunity for entrepreneurial training: giving students the permission to do things they are already allowed to do, but making that permission explicit and constantly reinforcing a drive towards creativity and away from consumption. This is related to passion and motivation: it’s about learning a way of thinking that encourages self-directed action as provocation, and fostering a culture of curiosity.

By and large, this is a learned attitude. There’s probably a genetic disposition towards action, but I simply can’t believe that curiosity is some sort of Boolean, where you either have it or you don’t. And no matter what your genetic starting point, the increasing scientific evidence towards the plasticity of the brain and our ability to constantly gain knowledge implies that you have the ability to change your initial disposition. Cognitive development doesn’t stop; while the cliff of learning may be longer as you grow older, I feel that most of the length of that cliff is artificial and not chemical. And in the context of entrepreneurship, a lot of the issues faced are those of proactivity.

I remember a conversation with a student who was learning about public assistance programs for food (“food stamps”). I suggested that one of these assistance programs might be integrated into his product so people could leverage it as a form of payment during the online checkout program. He told me that, as far as he knew, it didn’t work like that; you had to present the assistance card in person to pay for things. As we discussed and debated the feasibility of this based on our assumptions about how the program worked, it became clear that neither of us had enough data to determine if it could really work, and so I asked him a leading question: how could you find out, and what would be a course of action to make it work? I thought the answer was simple: call the government and ask. To him, this was crazy. Who would he call? How would he get their number? Is it OK to call them? What if they wanted to know more about his product? They wouldn’t change their policies for him, would they? You don’t just call the government, do you? It’s just not done like that, is it?

There was a basic assumption of how things are done, both on a detail and a broad level. On a detail level, he assumed that the program was set in stone, and that precedence indicated resolve. We hadn’t seen any online payment system that uses public assistance as a checkout mechanism, and he just assumed it couldn’t be done for a considered reason.

On a broader level, there was an ingrained hesitation to challenge existing policies, procedures, and norms, and this hesitation blocked curiosity. Things are the way they are for a good reason, and so a solution to a problem should recognize this precedence as logical and appropriate. His frame, like that of so many other people in the world, was one of acceptance rather than skepticism. This wasn’t a logical or conscious or rational assessment; it was his default stance, based on the way he was brought up, on the way he was taught to interact with the world around him.

The more I encounter and consider the way systems work in our world, the more I realize that these systems, in fact, aren’t the way they are for any good reason, and that these systems are malleable. The constraints of a wicked problem are fuzzy, blurry, and often, completely arbitrary. If you start with the assumption that things can’t be done and that the world is the way it is for good reason, you view opportunity and options through an extremely narrow lens. Your set of options at any moment are limited to things that have established precedence. But if you start with the assumptions that anything can be done, particularly when it comes to non-scientific actions, and that historic precedent doesn’t determine future action, your set of options is nearly limitless.

This speaks to one of the biggest breakdowns in how we educate kids in the US. It illustrates why eighteen years of learning a shallow version of science and math force rigidity in thinking that doesn’t play well with the process of design. As STEM is commonly taught, constraints are fixed. When you solve a logic proof, or solve for x, or cause a chemical reaction to occur, you are taught that constraints are fixed and can’t be changed. If A, than B; if B, than C. What about D? Who decided A was there? What if A is A prime? Can I substitute things for the letters? What is logic, anyways? Where did it come from? Who decided how it works? Who set the rules? These questions aren’t encouraged or considered, and probably for good reason: I’m not sure the teacher could answer them. And so we learn that, when you encounter a logic proof, you can’t change the assumptions, they are fixed. Rules are rules; things are the way they are. I don’t particularly think this is true even in the natural sciences, but I’m absolutely sure it’s not true in the artificial. We make culture, and so we can change it. But there’s no delineation in education made between the natural world and the created world; there’s no education given to our relationship with the created world.

That relationship should be one of empowerment. The constraints in a problem of design are completely artificial, and our starting stance towards the artificial should be curiosity and skepticism, not passivity and conformity. This is why entrepreneurship and design are such good partners. Both view the world as rich with opportunity, and as a medium of change.

Words that make me cringe. I get frustrated and annoyed with things just like anyone else, but I’ve never felt the sentiment of these sentences – yet I’ve heard them from entrepreneurs looking to start their own companies, from consultants working on projects, and from people trying their best to orbit the giant hairball that is a Fortune company. It’s typically a plea for approval, even when said casually over a beer; the long, unspoken form is “It’s hard, and I’m just not passionate about it, and I’m thinking of giving up – will you tell me it’s OK to give up, so I’ll feel better about it in the morning?”

I’ll offer a quick anecdote, and then I want to poke at these words a little and see if I can understand them better, and perhaps offer advice on how to overcome the emotions of these ideas.

When I was at another educational institution, I worked on proposing a new graduate degree in Interaction Design. This effort took approximately a year, and required crafting a proposal, socializing it with various Vice Presidents, presenting it to peers at a Curriculum Council, refining it based on feedback, and ultimately, pushing forward a vision that serves students and a profession, while trying to navigate a highly political environment. It’s like any other design activity in a big institution: it was hard, and I had to be passionate about it all of the time. I ran into all of the political bullshit you would imagine (“Interaction is too vague; why don’t we just call it a Masters in Multimedia?”), and some that would surprise you (a Dean of Liberal Arts that was adamant, to the point of blocking the proposal entirely, that anyone who teaches qualitative design research must have a PhD in Anthropology).

I failed in getting the proposal through, and as a result, I left the institution. The experience had all the makings of “It’s hard, and I’m just not passionate about it.” But in reflecting on my efforts, I never felt that, and I have some thoughts about why.

“It’s hard.”

There’s a challenge, and it’s wearing me down. Can you produce artifacts along the way that illustrate forward momentum, and force yourself to reflect on those artifacts occasionally? The longer you approach a difficult problem, the more likely you are to feel a lack of forward movement. I was able to see evidence of my effort in things as small as the incremental filename/number of the proposal document (38 versions of this thing?) and in the physical curriculum map that I taped to the office wall.

I need skills I don’t have in order to succeed. How can you get those skills, or find someone who has them to help you? I had never proposed a Masters Degree before, and I had no idea how to do it. I reached out to some faculty who had successfully defined and proposed new programs, and asked for their advice and support.

My confidence in my own abilities is low. Your confidence in your own abilities needs to be irrelevant to you; that is, while others may have the emotional need to see you as a rational, confident contributor, you need to ignore the idea of confidence entirely, and have a laser focus on your work. I’ve found a simple internal dialogue works for me; when I catch the little voice questioning if I can do something, I quite literally tell myself, in my head, “Shh. I’m working.” Believe it or not, it works.

Things are outside of my control. Of course they are! The bigger your project, and the more impact you’ll likely have, the more people that end up getting involved and the more actions you’ll encounter that literally don’t make any sense. Throughout the process, dial-up the empathy and try your best to see the world from someone else’s perspective. With my proposal, I didn’t do this: I kept thinking, over and over, “Why are they being so stupid?” I’ve since learned a better question to ask: “What perspective do they have that’s causing them to react to my proposal in such a different way?” Force yourself to consider their perspective.

I’m not given the time to do what needs to be done. There are 168 hours in a week, and if I get a nice night’s sleep, there’s close to 120 left. I view my 120 hours as full of huge potential: think of all the things I might do! You can prioritize your time any way you want, but I think it’s important to be conscious of your priorities, and so I try to articulate them to myself: I put my projects into mental buckets, and continually revise which buckets get the most attention.

“I’m just not passionate about it.”

I don’t feel good when I’m doing it. I think this is actually a distraction, and not really about passion. I’ve found, for myself, that this feeling usually has to do with the items above: a lack of visible progress, a lack of dedicated time, a mismatch between my abilities and the challenge of the task at hand, or something going on in my life that has nothing to do with the work. And all of these things are under my control: I can change something to improve them.

I don’t really have an opinion about it. Force yourself to have an opinion about the importance of your work at a “thirty-thousand foot level”. This opinion can change, and should change as the work evolves and you gain perspective from others. But the strength of design work comes from constantly having an opinion, and manifesting this through a particular level of craft and follow-through of execution. In the case of my proposal, I felt strongly that interaction design shapes culture in a positive way, and that teaching students interaction design would help the world be a better place. That’s huge and lofty, which is, in its amorphousness, strange and foreign. But it provides a reason for doing the work in the first place.

I don’t care if it succeeds. Passion is contagious, and so is apathy. If you don’t care, no one else will, either.

“It’s hard, and I’m just not passionate about it” is rarely about difficulty or enthusiasm. I’ve found that it’s usually about other things, things I can manage, change, or otherwise control. If you find yourself in the apathy conundrum, try to use different words to describe your situation, and you may find that you just need to reframe from a new perspective.