News and blog posts from our students and faculty

Just about every news outlet has written about the importance of Science, Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) education recently. Businesses report that they cannot find enough engineers domestically and advocate for greater STEM education in middle and high schools. Many believe that the US is losing its competitive edge and cite the lack of skilled engineers and scientists. Even President Obama has said that improving STEM education is one of his top priorities.

Beginning a half century ago, scientists and engineers were credited for doing amazing things at the time. They put a man on the moon, invented the pacemaker, and put a calculator in our pockets. Society regarded engineering as a highly respected profession. They were truly changing the world through their own research, hypotheses, and personal competitive motivation. Engineers in a corporation were responsible making products and discovering new applications for technology.

In high school, I enjoyed and excelled in my science and math classes. No one was surprised in 2005 that I graduated college with an engineering degree, much like about 60,000 others in the US. I believe I represented the ideal STEM graduate: I enjoyed math and science at a young age, pushed myself in high school, studied electrical engineering and graduated with an employment offer. On paper, I am part of the solution, but realistically I’m part of the problem. 8 years later I’m not an engineer, and never want to be again. Roughly one half of Americans with engineering degrees do not work as an engineer. If there is such a shortage of engineers, why aren’t these seemingly qualified people taking those jobs?

My short engineering career was spent creating circuits and software to meet the specifications in a product requirement document. I was lucky enough to work in an industry I love, and for an employer which gave me some freedom to visit customers and make product decisions outside of my job description. Unfortunately such freedoms are rare in many companies. Now days, most engineers are kept in offices far away from customers, they work to build the product which the marketers and designers define. I realized this after two years as an engineer, and re-enrolled in school so I could have more influence over product creation and definition.

Marketing departments increasingly carry much of the responsibility to define new products. R&D or more specifically the engineers, who were once the competitive edge and pulse of a company are now just an expense line item on the income statement. (It’s interesting to notice that R&D, Research and Design now refers to technical personnel and expenses, while actual product research and design increasingly happens in the marketing department.)

Design is becoming the new competitive advantage which companies are investing in. My experience here at AC4D has been life changing, and I’m excited to rejoin the workforce as a designer. I’ll get the opportunities to drive change in society, create new products, and apply technology in new way. Oddly, that was the same reason I wanted to be an engineer.

For the past 9 months at AC4D, we learned how to ‘create’ new products and services through generative research, ideation, synthesis and prototyping. But since every designer is not also an electrical, software, industrial and mechanical engineer at the same time, we create product requirement documents, we draft wireframes, and sketch mockups.  We use these artifacts to communicate our intent to someone else with the skills to build make our idea into a reality. (e.g. engineers.)  At AC4D, faculty and a students alike (myself included) will say things like “just find a developer” or “we need a mechanical engineer” in the same way a farmer may say “I need someone to pick these berries” or Apple wants to find the cheapest labor to “just assemble this iPhone.”  Has engineering become a commodity resource?

Within the past few decades America began to outsource labor for textiles, electronics and internal processes among many other things. That’s not surprising as America’s economy is increasingly service based.  Labor and knowledge processes which were once important part of a company became line items on an income statement, just like engineering is now. It’s no surprise that some American companies now either outsource engineering labor, or hire engineers abroad to lower their expenses. If an engineer in the US can follow a specification document or make a webpage look like the wireframe, why can’t an engineer in China or India? Why should a college student in America study a field which is treated as a commodity resource by companies?

To recruit America’s most creative and intelligent students into engineering, we need to redefine engineering as a profession, not push middle school children in to math and science classes. Universities and employers should work together to incorporate design into curriculum and job responsibilities.

Students like myself are attracted to engineering to define and make things, not execute some else’s designs. Let’s add generative research and ideation courses to engineering curriculum and teach engineers how to approach ill-defined problems and service design. Companies should break down the cultural barriers between marketing and engineering. They should include engineers on customer visits, and co-mingle the designers and engineers at the beginning of the new product development cycle. The cultural shift needed to redefine the field of engineering is itself a wicked problem, and I look forward to chipping away at it wherever I may end up next.

When you ask an 8 year old “What did you do in school today?” They will invariably answer with “Nothing.”

Ask Will Mederski and me what we did in school, and our answer is “A lot!”

We’ve designed a service to combat “Nothing” and help parents discuss school at home with their kids. Our goal is to extend the classroom experience into the home by giving parents the necessary information to have insightful conversations with their children. Our service, BringUp will automatically send parents a SMS text message each evening with that day’s classroom highlights and talking points. While many other teacher to parent text messaging services are available, BringUp is the only one which allows teachers to input their lesson plans ahead of time and then delivers them when parents are with their children.

While we spent 6 months formally learning design, the past 6 weeks have been a crash course in entrepreneurship.  I’m personally accustomed to pitching and selling ideas from my industry experience, but speaking to potential customers about a product which doesn’t yet exist is difficult. From my point of view, there’s a fine line between delivering a weak message, and being overconfident.  Much like designers must know their customer’s expectations, entrepreneurs must understand the expectations from everyone they meet with. (Customers, partners, advisors, funders etc.)

One part of our experience, which is most likely unique from the rest of the AC4D companies, is that we had the opportunity to form a partnership with an existing company before we even started software development. These discussions felt different that other partnership meetings I’ve had, but I initially couldn’t figure out why. After the 2^nd meeting I realized that it was because Will and I had complete control over making decisions for BringUp, which is a pretty powerful (and scary) feeling. We’re not making decisions on behalf of our other companies, or bosses. We’re doing it for ourselves, and BringUp. Cool.

Will and I want BringUp to be used in schools. We believe that BringUp really can help drive student engagement and allow parents to get into a habit of talking about school with their children daily.  Whether or not Will and I build BringUp as a standalone product, or sell the design to another education company, we want it to be used.

www.bringuptogether.com

If you haven’t checked it out, please stop over and Chuck and I’s site – www.wecallitboost.com.  We are designing an app to help families coordinating caregiving tasks.  A large part of caregiving is staying on top of everything that needs to happen, both for the care receiver and the care giver.  In a typically stressful environment, family caregivers may tend to become isolated and retract from getting the help they need and deserve.  We’re here to help them get the support they need from their network, and to make that coordination as easy as possible.  One way we are doing that is through automated SMS sign-up and confirmation.

This past week, we began piloting, with Chuck and I as the system.   Why pilot you may ask?  To make sure we get the system interaction right.  And in a very cost effective and fun manner, we learned a lot about how to improve the initial interaction model.  Six actual caregivers posing as care helpers received texts regarding activity “asks” such as taking Grandma to PT, visiting, or buying her a sweater.  They then had to respond “y” or “n” and could check task details by following a link to a hosted image page of the fake task.  After accepting (or declining), we sent confirmation texts 24 hours in advance of the supposed task due date to reconfirm their commitment.  The day after, we sent texts asking for updates that would be posted to the system for all to see (imagining use of the actual app by a core team of helpers).

For one, we learned that we will need to plan for uncertainly – helpers will invariably want more information, and there has to be a text option for “?”, at this point, which will likely direct a text to the primary caregiver to determine how to answer.

The goal is to take as much of the matching and explanation responsibility OFF the caregiver, which we intend to do through smart hints when creating tasks, and well as a redesigned message that may include key components of the task in addition to the name.

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.

In our latest batch of readings for our theory class, I was particular interested in deconstructing a lecture from Charles Pierce. He is considered “the father of pragmatism.” Given that he is a philosopher and logician, his lecture, “The Three Cotary Positions,” is particularly thick, and I found difficult to parse: which made it a great candidate for using diagrams to make sense of it! This brought to mind another reading, “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking,” by Karl E. Weick, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld. So in this diagram, I’ve woven together both concepts to describe a process and relationship between abductive inference, synthesis, hypothesis testing, and sensemaking.

Click to download a PDF version

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

In IDSE302: Theory of Interaction Design and Entrepreneurship, professor Chris Risdon asked for a position diagram on the role and importance of technology in the world based on the last few weeks of readings. I used that theme as a jumping off point. In fact, technology, especially computing, is practically inescapable now. In the past, traditional HCI was approached from a positivist, rationalist way. But we now understand how important designing for emotion is, especially if you are trying to create products and services that can create and impact social change. What are some approaches that we can use as designers to account for emotion when building for impact? (Download as PDF)

This is the last iteration of our course scheduler wireframes for IDSE201, in which we bid a fond farewell—or good riddance—depending on how the process went. I must admit that this iteration and the last one were a complete struggle. The last iteration didn’t change much, but this time I found a little bit more inspiration and landed on something that I felt balanced the simplicity required for the user experience and that degree planning is pretty complex no matter how you slice it.

Once you cut through standard degree requirements, there’s not a lot of room for variation. The most room one has for adding courses is in a major, and that’s pretty much constrained by department. So this version of the scheduler organizes the classes you need to take in buckets wherein the range of choices is not particularly huge. I’m not totally satisfied with the handling of required classes versus pick one (or at least n) of the following courses.

During testing, all my participants were able to easily work their way through the flow, going from an empty schedule to a completed semester. Only the print and export buttons were somewhat hard to find, and surely there is a better way to say export, like “send to calendar,” but that fits in a button!

Jon Kolko says we go through the pain and frustration of interaction design so that our users don’t have to. Point proven.

The latest iteration of the course scheduler is available in PDF or Flash formats. Note the Flash version is manually controlled with forward and back buttons in the upper-right.

Traditional systems thinking developed as an effect of World War II sense making, and was rationalized soon after by early computer programmers.  Systems thinking has come far, from the stuffy halls of academia and military planning into many contemporary spheres, including design.  Current systems thinking has evolved these tenets to apply to current trends in software, service, and sustainability design, as well as artificial intelligence.  In the next few paragraphs, I offer up my understanding how early systems thinking applies in current thinking.

The two traditional systems thinking reads, both from Thinking In Systems, offer up broad definitions of systems that are still useful today.  Systems are interconnected sets of elements and interconnections that have function or purpose.  The author cites the difficulty in identify the interconnections, which tend to be information flows, as well as identifying system purpose.

In today’s world, the interconnectedness of information flow is less obstructed from view than in times previous.  We are all connected virtually through the internet, and with better tracking of digital information, we can often see cause and effect much quicker than in times’ past.  The idea of feedback loops in systems is true and holds; the difference between then and now is their instantaneous nature.

We can now have discussions in real time across the world.  In Design in the Age of Biology, Dubberly cites this trend as a reason for the changing nature of design.  While not stated directly, I believe Dubberly is speaking to the democratization of design that this dialogue has created.  Users are no longer meant to be “designed for”; the real time connection and ubiquitous flow of information will have regular people demand more from the products and services that are created.  People, particularly empathetic designers, are also painfully aware of their effect on  culture and the environment.  Dubberly speaks to the idea of sustainable design’s inspiration in biological systems; I think it is more a side effect of this empathy.

Thinking in Systems also speaks to difficulty humans have in judging systems.  We tend to think in elements instead of connections, as they are more visceral or tangible.  The problem with understanding these connections (or flows), is their temporal nature and effects on a larger system.  This on the whole has not changed – ie  human tendencies towards understanding cause and effect has not changed.  This has led to the proliferation of problems in our society.  As the article states “if you have a sense of the rate of change of stocks, you don’t expect things to happen faster than they can happen.  You don’t give up too soon.”  Poverty, disease, lack of education – I believe these all have developed fundamentally due to a lack of awareness of these flows.  Sure, racism and ignorance have played their part; but many efforts to help resolve or remedy these issues have failed because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the systems, elements, stocks, and flows related to them.

As someone brought up in the digital age, as well as having traveled much in my early twenties, I feel the connections I have to the world in perhaps a clearer sense than from someone in previous generations would have.  The systems thinking articles to me seemed quite relatable to my existing knowledge, both tacit and learned from the last quarter.  Practically, I know that what I end up designing must fit sustainably and fairly into any system, whether it is in Austin or much larger.  I also know that the old way of creating – hand-craft – is not something that I can beat out other companies or skilled designers with.  Nor is that something I need.  Where I can, I hope to accelerate as an interaction “designer-facilitator” and as a systems thinker.