News and blog posts from our students and faculty

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:

If you are reading the AC4D blog, you have probably encountered the single most excruciating side effect of being a designer. It can attack anywhere. It strikes when you’re with grandparents, at cocktail parties, chatting with a well-meaning clerk while you wait for a price check.

You, too, may have been asked to explain what the hell design thinking is. You, too, may have walked away from an encounter knowing full well the person you were just with is convinced you are a semi-delusional interior designer.

The latest batch of readings doesn’t cure the dilemma, but they did offer me a bit of palliative care. Nigel Cross (citing one J. Daley) provides a comforting insight:

“The way designers work may be inexplicable, not for some romantic or mystical reason, but because these processes literally lie outside the bounds of verbal discourse: they are literally indescribable in linguistic terms.”

Well, mazel tov to you, J. Daley! We’re supposed to be hard to explain.

In creating my diagrammatic salute to this thought, I aimed to incorporate other findings that seemed key to me.

1)    Riffing on Cross / Daley, I’d go so far as to say that the better a designer is, the more innately incomprehensible they are. However, the readings are incontrovertibly stern on one point. The burden of communicating all the goodies from the great nonverbal beyond rests squarely on the designer. Design involves drawing, making, iterating, drawing, making.

Yes. I know, that is officially not a newsflash. But what I hadn’t considered is that all that drawing, iterating, making is a very specific sort of contribution to the world. If designers are better able than most to dive into the realm where certain forms of wisdom reside, then there’s a certain moral requirement to do our best to make the insights broadly accessible.

What’s juicy here is that we not only iterate on what we-the-designers learn from our insights, we also iterate on designing the methods of unearthing them. I am slightly wonderstruck at the thought of a world in which designers keep creating better and better methods of subverting the thought ruts into which the brain naturally falls. I started thinking of designers / artists as the early adopters of generative lateral thinking. And of course, designers are also the group who have the tools to make things irresistible, attractive, easy to use and inspiring. Chocolate, peanut butter, world change. With innate skills and ever-more sophisticated tools of unearthing, translation and attraction, we may well be able to topple the cognitive patterns of the world.

2)    In homage to the concepts above, I went through a ton of iterations and also started building in Flash, which is a new tool to me. Tools. Me. Learning them.

3)    Previously at AC4D, I have explored the many, many ways in which one can skirt the diagram assignment through telling stories. The all time nadir was the evolution of HCI as told by peppy chickens bounding through a PowerPoint comic book. While I don’t speak diagram naturally, I’ve been persuaded that most people do. Translation. Me. Learning it.

ISDE 302: Diagram #2

ISDE 302: Diagram 2…flotsam that was jettisoned along the iterative way.

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.

The first two weeks of our Theory IDSE302 class we worked through ten readings on the changing role of technology in the world. Everything from Steve Mann’s idea of sousveillance, to Bruce Sterling arguing that designers can learn from fiction writers.

We were then tasked to produce a position diagram developing the authors contributions to the subject.

Below you can see a bit of my process, starting with a blank canvas and then filling that with key concepts and ideas. I then worked that into a communicable story line.

But unhappy with a simple loop diagram showing the input-output cycle of human-computer interaction, I decided to try a more hands on approach.

After verbally developing progress of design & design research, I had my classmates take the final slide, which I had printed and handed out, and roll long-ways it into a cylinder.

Feel free to print out the image below, or just imagine the point at which the the “User” side meets the “Designer” side. At that intersection you have what you have today in a user-centered, participatory design process. Not only the inclusion of the user in the preliminary design research and development, but a continual loop of feedback from user to designer.

The two words, User Designer now form one concept, whereas previously they had been at opposite ends of the spectrum.

IDSE302 – assignment one – handout

We are bombarded by information from every angle.  The technological devices we carry are getting faster, cheaper, smaller, and more powerful.  They are an extension of our everyday lives, part of our cultural.  Do you remember the last time you rushed to work and forgot you smart phone at home?    I bet you felt like you left a piece of your identity at home and probably ran back to get it.   On the flip side of that isn’t it nice to disconnect from the technology, tune out and take a walk outside, or gaze under the starry sky with no distractions.

The amount of technology and data that we come across daily is astounding. Our attention spans are being molded to fit the speed and quantity of all of that information.  So how do we combat all of this data?  How do we filter the information we want to consume?

It takes a system to navigate through all of the technology.   As the technology becomes more interactive we can use that to our advantage.  The technology can make our work more efficient, can make our use of time more manageable, and it can filter through our data, emails, news, tweets, and give us what is important.   The new platforms and applications that are launching now have the ability to give you integrative feedback that is personal, visual, and fun.

An example is Strava, an app I downloaded for my Iphone.   This week I started biking to work to get some exercise.   Strava allows me to track my rides with visual feedback 0n time, elevation, heart rate, route, and it allows you to find friends or users who also bike in the same area. This type of feedback creates an incentive to work out. The new thermostat by Nest has the ability to track your movement and behaviors within your home to keep your living space a comfortable temperature setting while also saving energy.  I believe the technology will begin to help people make smarter choices when it comes to community and societal factors.  You will begin “play” against neighbors to change behaviors around energy consumption, water, waste, and food.

Lets take all this data and information and let the technology work for us while we tune in with our friends, families, and the things that we love to do.

http://www.slideshare.net/vasudave9/position-diagram-theory-class-with-chris

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)

Engagement is about participation. It’s a word relevant in civics, in social and cognitive psychology, and in education. Fundamentally, it’s about autonomy, motivation, and empowerment: you are engaged when you are motivated to purposefully direct your attention.

Attention is about focused concentration. The world is competing for your focus. External events cause your eyes to move, your ears to perk up, and your locus of attention – your single point of sensory awareness – jumps. Imagine sitting at a coffee shop, trying to read a book that just isn’t very good. Someone comes in, you look up. The espresso machine grinds, you look up. Nothing happens, and you look up; your scan of the room searches for something more interesting – more engaging – than the book in your lap. When you aren’t engaged, external events override internal self-talk and self-control, and your eyes, ears, and more importantly, brain, wanders.

Motivation is about understanding value. In learning, the phrase “Cognitive engagement” or the “Cognitive engagement model” describes a way of thinking about education that’s focused less on access to knowledge and more on ability and willingness to process and understand information. This model recognizes that, to be successful, a student must understand the value of what they are learning. Teaching is not simply providing access to content. And to foster this motivated stance, a teacher can utilize several teaching strategies, including:

• relating the value of the knowledge to the value of something the learner already knows and values,
• fostering higher-order talk and writing about the subject matter,
• stating learning strategies explicitly,
• encouraging active responses that require introspection and synthesis of ideas,
• and explicitly stating the strategic purpose of the educational activity.

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Dennis Littky runs a school called The Met. His graduation rate is “consistently above 90 percent, drawing from the same population that is victim of the 66 percent graduation rate in the regular public schools. And 98 percent of the Met’s graduates apply to college, with nearly all being accepted, and most of them are first-generation college students.” [link]

Littky’s method draws directly from the Cognitive engagement model. He identifies a topic that the student wants to learn about, and bases that students’ entire curriculum around that subject matter. Not surprisingly, the students he encounters don’t select typical academic subjects. Instead, they pick things like Hip Hop or, as he describes, dying. He recalls a story of one of his students who wanted to study death. The girl “proceeded to spend the year in and out of funeral homes and cemeteries.” His students are engaged, and so they participate by offering their attention and motivation. And once he has their motivated attention, learning occurs through sensemaking and synthesis.

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I encounter the word “engagement” a lot when reading about digital products. It would appear to be the holy grail of social-media: an engaged audience is somehow more valuable to investors and to business owners. Somehow, in this context, the word engagement is always connected to email marketing or spam. Tips from the “pros” describe that “Email providers use a few metrics to determine engagement: opens, clicks, unsubscribes, abuse complaints, and just generally treating email like spam or not-spam.” A good email “re-engagement campaign” should, apparently, ask the question “What is the best way to draw them back in, not push them away?”

The director of social business strategy at H&R Block describes that “…engagement and ROI depend on the particular program. For our marketing campaigns, engagement may mean likes, or shares or comments. But then for our educational series, views may be the engagement. The metrics continue to solidify over time, and there is no one answer to all programs.” As you ponder what, if anything, that means, you might also take a minute to ask yourself why H&R Block needs a director of social business strategy. Perhaps the next big thing will be to do your taxes with your friends.

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The word engagement, and the marketpreneurs rallying around it, are missing something pretty fundamental. Facebook, pinterest, and instragram are engaging because people want to participate in these services. People are motivated to purposefully direct their attention: they see some form of personal value in the service. Fundamentally, engagement is a question of “value proposition.” In a world where time is the most limited resource we have, ask yourself – why would someone be motivated to direct their valuable attention your way? What’s in it for them?

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.

In the early 1900’s, manufacturing, agriculture, and services each made up about one third of the United States labor force. At that point, technology and mechanism reduced the number of farmers, and labor was diverted to manufacturing and services. This trend continued until the 1960’s when manufacturing began to decline, and the service workforce continued to grow even faster. The modern era of mass production forced product designers and engineers to design for repeatability and consistency. Products were designed to appeal to the largest demographic possible, as customization led to increased manufacturing costs.  Each product was designed to serve the same purpose and provide the same value to each customer.  Today, almost 80% of workers are employed in the “service” industry and the Newtonian cause and effect systems are no longer relevant in the information age. Successful companies and designers must now embrace complex relationships and channel Darwinism to create ecosystems in the ever more connected world.

The information age isn’t limited to the collection and analysis of information, the communication of information is just as important in a serviced based economy. The system in which a product belongs to reflects a complex biological system. Product ecosystems have always been present; designers just haven’t evaluated or taken advantage of them until recently. Businesses have traditionally evaluated their product’s success in an industry, but not an ecosystem. A 3^rd grade textbook defines an ecosystem as “All of the nonliving and living things in a given area. Organisms are living things in an ecosystem.” The book provides the diagram below, while providing the important explanation: “Why does it matter? You are an organism. You live in a population with other organisms. You live in an ecosystem with other populations.”   Not too long ago, designers only considered the non-living parts of an ecosystem to define a product, this environmental predictability allowed for mass produced goods, and identical user experiences. The increased flow of information and the adaptability of software allows for parts of the ecosystem, and even products to become “alive.” Let’s rephrase that textbook in the context of product design:  Why does product design matter? A product is an organism. A product lives in a population with other products. A product lives an ecosystem with other populations, living and nonliving.

Designers must not only create products with the best DNA to give them the greatest chance of survival in ecosystems, they also play a role in designing the ecosystem. For example, products such as iPods and iPhones would not be as successful, if it was not for Apple’s influence over their 3^rd party ecosystem of music and apps. Businesses must now consider the influence of their product in their ecosystem and vice versa. Product design is an art, which should very much mimic “life.”

Jesse quite rightfully became a hair stern with me a little while ago. We were discussing our year-long project. I was orating from atop my analog cloud about how we must solve wicked problems by shutting off our computers and reverting to goofy, sensate, human critters. A testament to Jesse’s diplomacy: it took him two months of working with me before I finally heard “Chuck! Like it or not, at the end of the year we have to create a digital artifact.” Maybe if I wanted to weave daisy chains I should have hitched up to a different rodeo.

Thing is, I truly did hear Jon and Jan when they told us that we soon must create some digital thing. My abacus and spinning wheel aren’t so loud that they drowned that one out. Honestly, I just hadn’t yet heard anything compelling enough to lure me out of the ether down into wireframing chamber.

This has changed.

I would love to let you read about my epiphanic moment, but for now am presenting this iteration (3rd round!)  of a position that I am really enjoying writing. Perhaps enjoying too much! The deadline is nigh, I have a job, I have to lurch to bed and resume the fun mañana. There is, however, a summary paragraph below the post-its to prove I know where I’m going with this.

It is hard to imagine that articles about computer language and malicious, semi-autonomous fire-spewing robots would woo me to embrace the digital world. But it looks like they have. About four years ago I set out to see if there was a way the Internet could foster human resonance. As I sit here in the loading chute, peering into the wicked problem arena with one fist up I will confess what I knew all along. I’m at the right rodeo.

That doesn’t, however, mean that I know jack about riding this bull.