Business of Design: Four Start Ups

This week our Business of Design class has been asked to do a little research about four startups which will be visiting class tomorrow.

In short here is what I've learned about each and some questions which I'd like to have answered during class.

Town Squared: has a great little explanatory claymation on their homepage which went a long way to quickly explain the value they offer.  Is it the Facebook for small business?  I used to be a small business owner and being an untrained business person I had plenty of questions about what I was doing which might have been answered simply by being connected to other small business owners.  I like their idea.  They mention they are a private community and that they vet members...so the natural question is, what do you require of a member to join your community?

Share Some Style: personal style consultancy seems like a very practical thing to offer, especially in a city filled with such young money.  This is particularly interesting to me because I have a friend in Seattle working to launch the very same service.  They way I understand their website is that it serves as outreach alone.  Once I am there I would like to to serve me as more than just a contact point.  I realize in some sense they can't offer all their tips for free though I wonder; have they considered the possibility of including blogging or interactive fashion tutorials?

Skully: heads up display and smart helmut.  As a motorcyclist I would be all over this thing.  My only question is how much is this going to cost me?

Mosey: Yelp / Pinterest / Facebook for places and people? This company is perhaps the most intriguing of the 4, if only because it is the most vague as to what it is.  Though this isn't a great thing, it is allowing me to fill in the gaps with my imagination.  I have this dream that it can map itineraries based on selected points of interest...that it can curate an adventure for me...that it can connect me in a spontaneous feeling way with similar people.  But I don't understand what this company does, so what are you, Mosey?

Looking forward to seeing what answers I get and what start-up energy feels like on stage tomorrow.

Business of Design: Sitting on Your Laurels

Jules Bastien Lepage, "Le Foins" 1878 oil on canvas

As team Pape'ete we have begun the process of designing a community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique commercial spaces around the world; online or from a mobile phone.

So far we have done well according to various the metrics of this class.  However, if I recall correctly, a point was made of last year's team who earned the most support at the first pitch only to go on and falter.  I think if there is one challenge my team is facing it is that there is some sensation that we can sit back and not put our all into it.  Let's call it gliding.  I should clarify however, that we are doing our work, it simply doesn't line up with the level of urgency I feel it requires.

Perhaps time in the real world has injected a healthy sense of urgency in me.  There is no sitting back without falling back.  That is just the way things are.  As I've mentioned in other posts, I worked for a small sustainable business up in Seattle.  We were constantly operating under the sense that our work directly translated into keeping the business going.  Each project landed offered increased security.  As a result I've developed some internal pattern which equates my level of urgency and attentiveness with an equal level of revenue...might be unhealthy though I don't think so.

My approach to this has been to inject this point of view into our group discussions.  I get some support for it and some pushback.  It is a fine line.  I don't want to alienate myself from the team; especially because I really admire and respect the work they do.  I think they are a really talented bunch of folks and feel lucky to be with them, though in a perfect world we would push even harder than we are.

Business of Design: Rode Trip

The process of making unfolds a sturdy mechanistic version of myself.  It's me but faster, smoother and more confident.  It’s who I prefer to be.  So making is what I want to do.  That realization came to me in my studio a year ago.  I was staring blankly at a wall, exhausted, tired and thirsty.  It was dark out and I hadn't eaten or had water since I started working that morning.  Full engagement had pulled me through an entire day without a hint of hunger or thirst.  I didn't notice until my body rose up against me. 

Unknowingly, I've been training for a career in design my entire life.    

Since my early childhood I've been living a life immersed in good design.  As an Italian-American, I come from a culture which invites beauty and practicality into everyday life.  It was all around me in my home.  My Grandfather, a machinist, had a shop in his basement.  One of my earliest memories is of him giving me a chunk of wood and a chisel.  I must have been about 6.  Together we hacked at this piece of wood to make a toy canoe.  Instead, I destroyed the thing.  However, I discovered the properties of wood.  The material was so hard to control it shocked my early mind.  It chipped and tore, resisting alteration even under razor sharp blades.  We made a mess.  It was formative.

It changed the way I saw the world.  Suddenly everything in our built environment flashed with the mystery of hidden processes; a vast history of difficult puzzles and ingenious solutions.  Everything I’ve designed and built since, in one way or another, has been a participation in and an unraveling of, that mystery.  Through a degree in sculpture and years as a contract oil painter, my overriding interest in problems and their solutions pulled me through.

After my degree, I went out into the world as sponge like as ever.  While I can say there are designers and artists who speak to me, (Charles and Ray Eames, TurrelI, Thonet, Kundig, Eli Reich, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin to name a few) I think culture has influenced me most.  So while I continued to dabble in art, I really worked to travel.  I immersed myself in language and craft and labor to live.

I lived abroad, first in Spain then Italy.  Through these places I discovered variations on all the usual objects I had grown up with.  Doors, chairs, cars and stationary all had a metric foundation which lent a slight otherworldly quality to them.  It is no great leap from the fact that design is constrained in part by a system of measurement to the notion that it is shaped by every aspect of the culture from and for which it arises.  Good designs persist when they are elegant and appropriate; economically, functionally, technologically, linguistically, ecologically, geographically, et cetera, et cetera.  

Imagine the example of porcelain pottery.  At first glance it is mundane, but it represents a design solution so robust it has echoed across millennia and geography.  These types of reverberations are all around us.  They link us to the past and help direct our future.  To be awake to them is nothing short of exhilarating.  Surely as we move through the early stages of the information age something comparable to porcelain pottery is taking a foothold now (I've read about it being called "Spime").

Like some great decongestant, global awareness has opened the airways of my mind and there is no undoing it.  I have a hard won knowledge based on life and culture which gives me a unique glimpse into the design opportunities inherent in our present moment.  This fills me with a sense of urgency to participate.  I want my very real passion for design to be included in my community.  If it isn’t there already, I want to be the one who brings it.

In July of 2013 I was still the Salvage Services Manager and Senior Estimator for Second Use Building Materials, Inc.  Daily, I was called into more Seattle homes slated for demolition or remodel.  I assessed the quality and salvageability of everything our company had found a secondary market for.  I noted every light fixture, furnishing, plumbing item, flooring system, cabinet, appliance or coat hook...ad infinitum.  It's as though I'd been researching the spectrum of our region's good and bad design throughout the past 100 years.  During my 7 years there I never stopped making things; stools, tables, knives, light fixtures, storage cabinets, sculpture and more.  Yet doing so in my off hours seemed quixotic.  Why not do it full time?

The obvious next step was to participate in a vibrant, intellectual and practical community like the CCA.  I'm here because it promised access to the tools, experience, and community which could help me span the gap between my little world of private making and the larger world of professional design.  

Business of Design: Macro Trend and Me

I think it is fair to say I have been sucked into the Environmental Movement.  I am not sure why.  I am not particularly fond of housekeeping.

Isn't that an apt analogy for environmentally conscientious action?  The main difference between actual housekeeping and ecological housekeeping being simply one of urgency.  Imagine your house laden with candles and over run by dust bunnies.  That would certainly provoke a sense of urgency in me anyway.  Like the rest of us, I have some deep reptilian synaptic structure in me which can perceive danger and provoke a survival response.  Perhaps it is that simple.  I am interested in the continuation of a good life for myself and those around me.  

Before coming to CCA I was immersed in the unusual field of Building Materials Salvage.  I worked for Second Use Building Materials out of Seattle, a national leader and innovator in the industry.  They are a for profit company and the largest no strings attached donor to Habit for Humanity.  They have been the first to leverage the web by creating the first online inventory and are working on creating online purchasing and shipping.  Each day, over 90% of the material Second Use diverts from the landfill is recorded, described, photographed and published on the web for purchase.  You really need to see the place to believe it...

It was a right livelihood; a livelihood which causes no harm.  By working there I was taking a direct role in slowing the degradation of our planet.  It provided me a wage and a tangible way to contribute to the health of our environment.  I was responsible for managing a crew of guys who would physically remove salvageable goods from residential and commercial properties slated for demolition or remodel.  But I spent the bulk of my time assessing properties for salvageable goods, securing contracts and managing the relationships associated with those contracts.

It was thoroughly engaging.  Empathy was requisite for success.  Our clients had problems which needed solving and it was my job to figure out how they could be solved while protecting the bottom lines of both Second Use and the client.  I stayed there a surprisingly long time.  If you measure it against my overarching interest in design and making, you might consider it a diversion.  Yet, in an unexpected way it became a channel for my design thinking.  I found myself increasingly fascinated by WHY our clients might or might not choose to work with us and was given the freedom to critique and tweek the model the salvage wing of the company was operating under.

I'll miss that place...

Form: Breaking One Thing, Repeatedly

At the beginning of this semester, I was instructed to find new qualities, (week after week), hidden within a roll of twine.  At certain moments the process of repeatedly achieving new insight was thoroughly opaque.  My mind wanted to believe there were no other possible ways to see this object.  I wanted to stop looking.  In some ways it reminded me of learning academic painting.  As you look into the shadow turning over the form of a persons face and then mix and apply color, it is not uncommon to miss...to get it wrong.  You can get it wrong for years before you gain stride and feel confidence.  It is tedious and exhausting.  The only thing which keeps you going is a love of the thing.

Thankfully, the demands of exploring form are different from painting.  In form studio I was not confined to translating reality with the type fidelity required in painting.  Somehow, it was more about finding as many ways to break a thing as possible.  By "breaking" I mean that both physically and semiotically.  It is simple to destroy twine physically by tearing it, disassembling it, burning it, etc..  The products from that type of breaking can be visually intriguing but are mostly predictable.  Yet, if you begin to imagine attacking its semiotics you open a seemingly endless pathway.

For example twine is soft and remarkably malleable.  Breaking the idea of malleability is a new entry to unexpected discoveries, because really I never think this way.  Twine has many more semiotic qualities to depart from than it does physical.  It is fractal, frayed, load bearing, asymmetrically durable, varied in color, contaminated (with bits of sand from somewhere), course, multi-purposeful, inanimate, flammable, wicking, etc., etc..  Each of these qualities are things to push against.

They pose new questions to explore.  Can I make twine ridged? Can it be made non-load bearing? Can it be made pure, inflammable, fine?  What is the opposite of fractal?  Can it be made into that?  Follow these ideas and you will certainly find new, sometimes compelling understanding of a form.  I think this class can be called great.  I don't mean that lightly.  I will be referencing what I learned in this class for the rest of my creative life.

Bravo, Martin Venesky for synthesizing your hard won insights into this curriculum and bravo to Scott Thorpe for instructing it well.    

Design Research: Why?

“I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.” 
― Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal

I agree with Ionesco and I think his sentiment here lines up well with something which has been put forward recently in my Design Research course.  A sequence of five whys is a strategy to get at the real meat of an interview.  Though I can't say I agree with it entirely, I'm told it should go something like this:

Me - So Jane, why do you paint?

Jane - Well I like it...it brings me pleasure 

Me - Why does it bring you pleasure?

Jane - I think it helps me to stop thinking so much

Me - Why do you think it helps with that?

Jane - Well its like my attention is demanded to be on things like color, motor control and things like this...but in real time...in the moment. 

Me - Why would that fact that your attention is on things like color and motor control be better than thinking?

Jane - It's a relief of sorts...you know? I just don't want to live constantly in a world in which I am thinking about bills or the anger I have over that little torn bit on my dryers lint trap...Thinking is overrated, I want to spend less and less time there.

Me - Why is thinking overrated? Don't we need to think?

Jane - Of course its necessary.  I just have come to believe, there is no peace there.  As I get older, I realize living a good life is not about drama and excitement.  A good life is about living peacefully.  That is what I am shooting for.  I don't need to run around and drink til I'm blind and end up in bed with some half alive frat-boy who has bad body odor and strangely dim eyes...I think I could have been a monk in another life...maybe I still could be...maybe I am a monk...Oh god...should I be painting?  I am not sure. 

Me - So is it fair to say you should stop painting to become a monk?

Jane - I'm not sure...I'm scared. 

Great! See that?  It works! (At least it seems so in creative non-fiction.)  I think it is actually a little obnoxious to push repeatedly with -why- after -why- in this manner.  Perhaps I'm slightly over confident that I can get to the gold within another persons answers without a tactic like this.  Yes, let's keep asking why, but let's not get carried away with the format, people.  I'm sure we all have some ability to continue asking -why- without actually attacking an interviewee with such annoying repetition.

Design Research: Mythical Beasts in Your Data

Margaret Atwood said "War is what happens when language fails," and I would add that after language has failed, both sides see nothing but an imaginary beast in the other.  This is true for me and it motivates my tendency towards patient decision.  It has helped me become an excellent listener.

I recall a bizarre moment in my older brother Ian's kitchen.  That day we were in the process of making our grandmother's widely loved ravioli recipe.  It's remarkable that we were in his kitchen making ravioli because, this is a guy who used to attack me on a regular basis.  He was attempting to apologize for years of the torment he put me through.  It was mostly ordinary older brother type stuff, but some of his antics were downright medieval.  It is easily the most conflicted relationship I've ever had in my life.  He told me he was sorry and that he had always just wanted to play with my little brother and I.  The only way he knew how to engage us was to physically attack us.  Almost unbelievable.  My mouth must have dropped wide open when I heard him say that.

Why decide that a person across the table holds true animosity towards you?  It is an easy illusion to believe in.  I think it is better to wait for the person behind the behavior to reveal themselves.  It can be hard to remember that many displays of aggression stem from a desire for love and acceptance.  Some people will claim that they are simply mean...that they just want to watch the world burn.  I don't buy it.  I think it is actually extremely rare for a person's character to be misanthropic at the core.  I believe there is a small frightened child inside every aggressor; one who lacks the language to understand his own emotions.  Inside my brother there is a deep human hunger for love and connection, and that's in most everyone.

In interviews we have many layers of perception to see through before we might actually be able to glimpse something real about an interviewee.  My life experience with my older brother has informed everything (as sibling relationships tend to do.)  It is how I know to wait for people to arrive.  I think this makes me an excellent interviewer.  It is not seeing through your interviewee that you are attempting to do.  It is seeing through your own preconceptions...it is seeing beyond the mythical beast so you might see the child.

Design Research: Choosing Futures

Our future is a bummer...or it is the greatest chapter of human perseverance ever written. 

We are in the midst of one of the most amazing developments in history.  It's the information age, and our dependance and connection to it is only going to deepen.  In the next twenty years, information gathering systems will proliferate as entire cities become data collecting entities in themselves.  Individuals will continue to carry smart devices and wearables.  When we are ready and as Ray Kurzweil predicts, it will become normal to upgrade our intelligence by merging our biology with future tech.

Historically is seems just minutes ago that industrialization launched our world out of an agrarian mode and into unprecedented population growth.  Of course it also brought with it all the ills of our current moment.  As it was our salvation from tedious manual labor so too will the information age be our salvation from a teetering climate.  We simply have to choose our future.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of our global predicament and it is difficult to choose positive action in the face of it.  But I argue in support of the words of Albert Ellis; The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.

There are countless articles and websites devoted to the gravity of our predicament.  Reading them can quickly strike a blow against your courage to act.  There is however, one glaring omission from all of the doomsday hype you can find out there; we have the data and information systems to guide our actions.  This is no small thing.  Pat yourselves on the back humans!

Our planetary ecosystem is known to us in ever increasing detail.  This level of detail has allowed us to build predicable models of a balanced ecosystem and therefor we have a roadmap to get there.  We merely have to do the following:

1. Keep Calm
2. Trust in Science
3. Take action
4. Vote for the politicians who have courage to do the same.

Design Research: Vulnerability, Shame, Failure = Success?

Lately failure has been given a new paint job.  It is becoming a mark of your ability to succeed.  Fail faster so you can succeed sooner is a new refrain in design firms and schools.  IDEO founder David Kelley has been sited as the man who coined the phrase.  Clearly, it has been working for him.    Failure was once something to avoid at all costs.  Now it seems a badge of honor.

I've always considered the judgement of another's ability to succeed within social norms extremely small minded.  Yet, it is true there are real consequences if you align yourself with people who behave unlike the majority.  Without a sense of your own personal courage I wouldn't suggest anyone risk their own hard won social positions to recognize the edgy work of an oddball intelligence.  However, while a person is developing their own courage, I would suggest looking for non-damaging opportunities to celebrate the diverse characters which make up our world.  You never know, you could be supporting the next Steve Jobs.  

There are at least as many ways to fail as we have people on this planet.  I'm sure many of us still have a hard time making the leap from failure to success suggested by Kelley and others.  So what keeps people from making that leap?  Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW, believes we are blocked by the idea that we are not good enough.   To help make the point in her 2012 TED Talk Listening to Shame,  she labels TED the "Failure Conference".  Before going into detail she says, "you know why this place is amazing?  Because very few people here are afraid to fail".

As a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, Brown goes deeper than Kelley and into the things which make us afraid to fail and therefor afraid to try.  At the twelve minute mark (after more background than I would say is necessary) she really gets to the point.  She calls out shame as the main obstacle to success and retells a quote from Theodore Roosevelt which she claims, saved her:

"It is not the critic who counts.  It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better, and how he falls and stumbles.  The credit goes to the man in the arena...whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat.  But, when he is in the arena, at best he wins and at worst he loses, but when he fails when he loses, he does so daring greatly."

There is a lot of truth in what she says during this talk.  However, as a man who has been vulnerable in this world, chosen to let go of shame and believe in myself, I think it is shortsighted to not include some advice on never losing site of when it is appropriate to be vulnerable or not.  Like it or not, humans are hierarchical.  It is in our genes to jockey for social position.  Workplaces and home environments are filled with flawed human beings.  Some of whom are pushed around by the conflicting forces of innate urges and undeveloped thinking.  This can be literally dangerous.  

Apparently, there are places and cultures like IDEO wise enough to see its value, but vulnerability is a luxury not just a reward in and of itself.   As a design researcher it is crucial to understand the value and real risk of vulnerability within ourselves so that we might understand what it might mean for others.  Creating a safe space for the people we interview is key to receiving clear honest information and ultimately insight.          

Design Research: Data Management

My Meyers-Briggs test says that I am ENFJ. Extrovert(1%), iNtuitive(38%), Feeling(38%), Judging(1%). What that should tell you is that I use my gut more than data in general to make decisions. I know it may not be the best method, but it has served me for some things. In spite of my character and thanks to the insights of others I have learned other methods.

The most recent challenge I managed strong data tracking was finding housing in San Francisco. The level of competition here for housing is as surreal as everyone tells you. I looked for housing with 3 other CCA students which has its own complications by compounding preferences and budgets. On top of these usual challenges of finding something to fit everyone, I was the only person actually in San Francisco. Christine Young was in Toronto, Isabelle Shu was in Hong Kong and Dustin Tisdale was in Maine.
This is what we did.

1. Connected via CCA Facebook
2. Wrote eachother and met via online video chat
3. Identified our preferences for shared living and created our model apartment
4. Everyone joined google drive and Christine Young built a spread sheet to track apartment listings.
5. My calendar was shared so that the other 3 could suggest scheduled open houses.
6. Everyone scoured the internet for apartments to rent and posted them on the tracker.
7. I played the role of previewing places in person and reported my findings with video and written impressions on the shared spreadsheet.
8. We had many impromptu video chats along the way.

The Listing tracker included the following categories of data:

• Listing Title

• Contact Info 

• Total Rent per Person

• Listing Description 

• Listing Address and Map

• Travel Time and Distance to School 

• History of Attempts to Contact

• Scheduled Open House Dates

• Video of Property

• Written Impressions

• Application Submitted or No

We now live together in San Francisco.  I don't think I would have thought of building such a tracker, but it was a phenomenal tool.  It was so successful and smooth I'd swear by using it again for managing data with a group.

Palo Alto, Play and Skyspace

Today was one of those days where it seems like everywhere you turn you are having fun.  First up was a group trip to Palo Alto.  Our Design Chair Leslie Roberts set it up for a small but eager group of us aspiring students.    

One focus of the trip was to see a high school friend of Leslie's who also happens to be a partner at IDEO!  We were lucky enough to be given a tour by none other than Brendan Boyle and CCA Grad Shayna Proctor.  Lots of cool things happening down there (most of which couldn't be photographed); gutted Westie turned into a conference space, bigger "we spaces and smaller me spaces", guerrilla tree houses, a toy which has no electronics inside but is still a complete delight...etc...

Then it was off to school for some laser cutting followed by sunset in the Turrell Skyspace at the de Young, with a good art friend.  Besides friends who are too far from me, the only thing I missed today, was the shadow of our Earth crossing tonight's beautiful full moon.

Brendan Boyle pitches OpenIDEO

Awesome conference space prototype for Steelcase.  Our fearless Design Chair, Leslie Roberts (sunglasses on head) playing with the kids on a coffee table which is also a stack of paper! 

Turrell Sky Space with music 

Design Research: This Is How We Do

First Step: Find a Topic (we chose the rapidly decriminalized marijuana market)

Second Step: Identify Personas within the Topic Group

Step Three: Clarify the Personas into their respective Groups

Design Research: War Stories

Steve Portigal is the principal of the consulting firm which bears his name.  Portigal provides customer research, advising, workshops, training and keynote presentation service as well as maintains a blog related to his field.  According to his brief bio;

"Steve is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. He is fascinated by the stuff of a culture - its products, companies, consumers, media, and advertising. All these artifacts and the relationships between them are the rules that define a culture -- the stuff makes the culture, but it is the culture that makes the stuff.

Steve has an informal Museum of Foreign Grocery Products, a fun diversion that celebrates cultural differences through mundane consumer goods.

Steve takes pictures steadily whether for consulting work, travel, or as part of everyday life. Photography helps him discover another "frame" on our surroundings and to practice seeing the world differently.

Steve built one of the first online communities (Undercover, a Rolling Stones fan group) in 1992, nurturing it from a time when the Internet was an underground academic technology through to today, as part of a global info-infrastructure."

On his blog he has a collection of more than 50 short stories submitted by various Design Researchers about their experiences conduction research in the field.

I read a few and found this one by Lisa Aronson Fitch to reveal just how surprising it can be to go into a stranger's home for an interview.  For Lisa and her research partner, the challenge came through an innocent child who asked to kiss her and her partner as a greeting at the front door.  It raised all sorts of boundary issues which reverberated throughout the interview, which was repeatedly interrupted by the child who wanted more kisses.  Lisa clearly disagreed with the kissing but knew she ran the risk of damaging rapport with the interviewee and therefor the quality of the data to be captured as well.  

What is there to do in this sort of scenario?  How do you maintain your own personal boundaries when you have a task to complete for the greater good of a larger project?  This is life though...isn't it?  We are constantly making quick decisions about boundaries.  These decisions can be subtle or grossly obvious.  Our sensitivity to them and relative performance is effected by our ability to be present or not.  This can be difficult and requires a good knowledge of our own values and boundaries.  

We rely on social norms to help us with much of our boundary formation and even with the development of our own values.  If that doesn't ring true for you please see the long famous Stanford Prisoner Experiment.   If you are going out in the field and you have a role to play, the Stanford Experiment should be revealing.  We are always at risk of losing touch with our own values.  A line which may be crystal clear to you in your own bedroom can suddenly fluctuate depending on a change in local social dynamics.  

Managing ourselves in relation to others is big part of design research.  After reading this short story by Fitch, I am actually looking forward to interviews as exercises in my own value and boundary management.     

He Zhang Folds Things

This is He...She likes to fold paper...I support this pursuit and celebrate it here.

Design Research: Moccasins Project

Over the course of the last few weeks I have been working on a research project with Rafi Ajl.  Together we went to the San Francisco Transfer Station to learn about the folks who work there and report back to the class about them.  One main requirement of the project was to communicate empathy during our presentation.

For the most part, I feel the project and presentation were successful.  Yet, as with most things in my D.R. class, it had challenges.  The main challenge was one I experienced within previous projects; that being reconciling real data with the pressure for data which is compelling.  (One of the requirements for credit in this project was that the insights captured be "non-obvious and interesting").  In my opinion if this is the same pressure people are presented with in the real-world Design Research community, it won't be long until their is an expose revealing bogus data found in some high profile project.

I understand completely how valuable it is to find interesting insights during research.  However, I believe this pressure for interesting data corrupts any attempt to make a quality (objective) insight.  I am curious about what might be examples of research which has led directly to a successful new service or product.  Was the iPod developed within the structures of Design Research?

I'm still suspicious of you Design Research...Just sayin.

Design Research: Quality and Misunderstanding

When we attempt imagine how things will be in any yet to be accessed arena, we are destined to do so incompletely.  We may have an educated guess, but it remains a guess.  When I imagined what grad school would do for me, I missed at least one key detail.

Misunderstanding #1:  I imagined grad school would be a place to dig deeply into a subject of choice. 
   
So far I have been executing one task after another in rapid succession.  This pace almost guarantees that none of the work I am doing has any chance of being a thorough and quality piece.  It is odd.  I don't see the value in this yet.  I have a friend pursuing a Masters in Architecture at UW.  I recall him telling me as much about his education there.  At the time, I think I understood it relative to my undergrad in sculpture.  There is something magical about pumping out massive quantities of work.  It forces you to move beyond all sorts of fears and little unseen traps.  But it doesn't necessarily equate to quality work.  Instead it is about developing a process.

I've touched the surface of Illustrator, In Design, Rhino and even ventured slightly into Processing.  In one class I was even asked to execute what anyone would recognize as a drawing 101 exercise (I dropped that class).  Perhaps what we are doing here is necessary but I am not sold on it yet.  

I am extremely busy.  I've been doing homework 7 days a week since August and none of that work is good enough to be put in a portfolio.  But here is what is happening now.  I am learning a new process.  I have designed things for myself in the past and I have a bias towards this.  There is value in pursuing a personal vision, but there is another kind of value in pursuing new understandings of people.

Design Research comes in at this point.  It is considered a newish field and is really an outgrowth of successful systems applied in huge design firms like FROG and IDEO.  It employs all sorts of data collection techniques intended to help a design team discover unseen needs.  It has a strong capitalist drive underlying its intention. Though I am told it can be applied to anything, it is essentially always looking for marketable opportunities.

Design Research is a required course.  It has been a bumpy ride so far.  I am not sure yet how it will serve me, but I have the sensation I am learning something there.    

Form: Fray

Design Research: How do you get strangers to talk to you?

Before I begin, know this.  I can be moody.

This is just something I know about myself.  In the early morning, I have to work at speaking.  It's as though, each morning, I'm going through a process of accepting that I inhabit a body all over again.  So, until about ten o'clock it's just pain and grumpiness...really.  Even if I'm smiling at you.  If it is 8am there is a high chance I am uncomfortable with the fact that I am once again all wrapped up in my own flesh.  TMI?  

I like being quiet...When I was a small child I spoke so little it worried my parents.

I have found ways to overcome this part of myself.  Years spent working as a busker in the street and an oil portraitist helped.  It required lots of talking to people.  Yet it was much less about starting conversation than steering them once a conversation had begun.  As a street busker, I learned how to let my presence, tools and signage begin conversations.  I essentially spoke with those people who found me interesting enough to start the conversation themselves.

Cold starting a conversation is frequently hard, especially if I have some agenda other than a simple person to person interaction.  I'm sure this is not unique to me.  Our cities are filled with brave souls attempting to get you talking as they aspire for your signature on a petition, a donation or a chance to tell you why you should support this or that legislation.  These interceptors post themselves right in main pedestrian thoroughfares such as grocery store exits or the end of a crosswalk.  Their choice of posting in itself is off-putting to me.  I'm sure they feel the rejections.  

Unless you've been living on some deserted beach you'll know who I'm writing about.  They are often seen wearing a vest for their cause and/or carrying a clipboard.  When I see these people, I am immediately crossing to the other side of the street or preparing myself for escape with a fixed, determined stare straight into the distance.  I also momentarily go deaf.  It is probable I have accrued some bad interceptor karma. 

In spite of this, I went to Balmy Alley today to be one of these people who wants just a minute of your time.  The alley is famous for its murals.  I waited until about 2:30 in the afternoon.  It was sunny.  The alley was sure to be busy and I was sure to be awake.  I dressed like a regular dude, but carried a small notepad and a pencil.  I had a white t-shirt on with a blue heart on the chest and beige North Face hiking pants.  No vest.  No clipboard.

I won't go into the responses here but I focused on getting the following answered.

1. What do you like about the Alley?

2. If you were ever to commission a mural for yourself, what would it be like?

To my relief, no one I approached refused to speak to me.  Which is interesting, because I think I made it a little hard on myself in that I approached people by simply walking up to them and saying "hi" instead of staking a claim on some specific spot.  Each time I had a distance to cover, and the people I intended to speak with could have turned away as they saw me coming.  Or perhaps it was an unexpected approach and that is what helped it function.

I approached 8 people total, 2 of whom I completely avoided asking my questions. and 6 of whom I found opportunity to get to the point and were willing to talk for some time.  None of whom refused to talk with me.  I found groups of people easier to engage than single people.  I noticed a lot of non committal body language, which took some playfulness and smiles to break down.  

"So, what are you doing here?" is a question which seemed to bring people back.  It is provocative and yet banal at the same time.  It has a weird way of getting people to stay focused on their own journey, whether that be their journey of today or their lifetime.  

It's a question I couldn't help but ask myself as well.   

   

Design Research: Differences in Perception

How can we be sure that what we are seeing is “true”?  This is a paradoxical, not to mention timeless question.  We put an enormous amount of value on seeing for believing.  We say that "seeing is believing".  

Yet, we know our eyes can be fooled quite easily.  There are optical illusions which prove the tendency of our own biology to have perspective, pattern, scale and color biases which can be easily exploited to fool the mind.  More interesting to me is that we have selective attention.  This has been illustrated in a now famous experiment in which viewers are primed to count how many times a group of players pass a basketball around.  Most people can accurately keep the count, however in doing so they completely miss the fact that a person in a gorilla suit has slowly walked through and even danced in the middle of the scene they just studied.  

So, we know these things about ourselves and they call into question our own abilities to conduct research of any kind.  We are left to think we’ll need to consider our own blind spots and those of the people we may interview in the course of research.  We will have to be cognizant  of how we lead the interviewee.  We will have to be aware of how we may lead ourselves toward an expected end.

Personally, experience in meditation has shown me how awareness can be buried under years of accumulated experience.  Our past experiences tend to float along the surface of the mind.  As we encounter information from the external world our previous data sets rush in and try to fit themselves to the moment at hand.  For example, a disheveled person walking down the street is more likely to be cued up in our mind as homeless before our mind will find any story about the person having just suffered some accident, such as a mugging or a stroke or other momentary cause for their current appearance.  The same is true for the ways in which we hear the words of others.  Language helps us group people, but it can also gray out our view of what could be an exceptionally rich life.  

Language can imply socio-economic status and intelligence.  However, the very moment we place ourselves in any relation to the subject we have entered a biased relationship, composed of all the identities we have adhered to or rejected.  So what can we do to increase our ability to perceive accurately and help our interviewees represent their own experience?

Step 1: Know our perceptions are flawed  

Step 2: Practice awareness (sight, smell, hearing, taste, and feeling)

Step 3: On an interviewee by interviewee basis, practice empathy so that you may prime yourself to work within the specific challenges of each.

Well...at least this is how I would do it.

Design Research: Personal Statement (in progress)

Beauty:  

• What is it?  
• How do you describe it?  
• What does it do?  
• Does it work for us? 
• Against us?  
• Does it matter?

I believe it does matter.  In one form or another I have been studying it throughout my life.  I've gone so far with it as to have trained academically in drawing and painting.  I've searched it out abroad and today it informs most of what I do.  I still spend countless hours each year pursuing it in museums, galleries, books, web and time based media.  

I believe it can heal communities and provide a foundation for future health and prosperity.  It might seem odd to give credit to beauty in this way.  In future posts I will attempt to take you to the reasons I've come to that conclusion.  For now, let me describe beauty in some extremes.  

The thing about beauty is that it smacks you around.  Perhaps this is why America is so resistant to it (our mythic individualist never one to be told).  It does things to us.  It seizes our attention.  It moves us to action.  It sings in our chest whether we want it to or not.  Maybe we just want to be home already from a long day of work.  Maybe we just want to plunk down in front of the internet.  If Beauty crosses our path, our plans tend to change, even if just in momentary turn of the head.  

Beauty is copilot to our economy.  It sells.  

It demands hundreds of millions of dollars from those poor souls who can afford a Klimt or Picasso.  It tells us, “here, have a drink of me...I insist”.  It shows us how we are not it.  This can be so painful it compels some of us to cut our faces in a foolhardy attempt to share in its power.  

When we have beauty, we tend to coddle it and protect it.  If it begins to slip from us, we are hard pressed to resist the urge to cling.  Beauty is power.  It grabs you by the throat, (though you think it’s your heart) and demands...”look, hear, taste, smell, feel...think me”

When it leaves the room...we revisit the moment in our mind, like some pathetic infatuate, trying to retrace the experience.  When we meet others, we think we should tell them about the experience, as if it were possible to pump blood through word.

It is woven into the very fabric of physics.  It exists from the atom, through the molecule and up to uncountable permutations of chemical form.  Yet, it can appeal to us in something as simple as the center point of line or a circle.

Beauty is sublime.  As much as we like to be independent, and apart from it.  As much as we would like to objectify it, to truly experience it, surrender is prerequisite. 

Is it any wonder we hate it?

Beauty is a bully...