Chuck Hildebrand

“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.

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.

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.

Confession: I completely rigged a ‘random’ exercise in our Design Research class last quarter. This proved to be a productive maneuver, it led to fascinating fieldwork and insights that are proving, at the very least, incredibly helpful to me.

I gamed the design research exercise because I wanted to explore how students access guidance and mentoring as they engage with education.

Students are often unaware of the questions they can and should ask when deciding their course of study. They are liable to select sub-optimal learning experiences that fail to catalyze their unique gifts and learning style. They can become disengaged and unreceptive to guidance.

Here in the second quarter, I am building a website based on our research findings. The website I am designing helps students take charge of their education experience.  The website helps students reflect on how they learn, guides them to apply that knowledge to course selection and teaches them to ask questions that will evoke useful mentoring and guidance. I want students to select classroom experiences that merge ample supports with generative challenges so they are, upon graduation, equipped with the best possible tools to live and work as a contribution in the world.

Goals:

-       The user will understand that they have a unique learning style and temperament.

-       The user will understand that they can amplify their education through matching course selection to their unique abilities.

-       The user will that there are questions they can and should ask as they select courses and seek guidance. They will receive tools to help them formulate and ask productive questions, and will be able to absorb and act on advice received.