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.