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Over the course of the school year, my thesis paper went through quite a metamorphosis as I explored many text and wrestled with what I wanted to say about design. In the end, I titled my paper “The Thinking Behind Design.” Here is the abstract I submitted with my final paper.

What designers do—the thinking behind design—is not fully understood. Design is still often viewed as a black art rather than a rigorous discipline. Designers themselves have difficulty explaining how they make the connections that lead to the final solution and why those judgments are valid. While good design work can be done without understanding these forces, it is my hypothesis that the more designers know about the forces involved in design thinking and process, the better they will become as designers and the better they will be able to communicate design to others. This paper examines design as an approach to solving problems and what makes it different from other approaches. It examines design thinking as desire for a particular outcome, a philosophic viewpoint, a conversation, imagination, reason, judgment, wisdom, and a skill. And it explores the nonlinear, dialectical, and unique nature of the design process. Finally, it suggests that designers can view the development of understanding and ability as a design endeavor itself, and that it is possible to design oneself as a designer. Though the audience and focus is on designers, it is my belief that a better understanding of design along with increased ability to communicate design’s rigor and value will ultimately benefit and advance the discipline as a whole.

It’s not a huge change from the previous abstract, but it’s definitely very different from the first, which had to do with making the leap from user research to solution. While I am pleased with the final paper, it’s not exactly the masterpiece I had hoped it would be. I absorbed so much from my readings that I often became overwhelmed or sidetracked on tangents, which is why I had to rewrite the entire paper over spring break. There is much that I had to neglect.

Personally, the process of writing a thesis paper has had tremendous impact on my thinking as a designer. This thinking has impacted both the way I practice and how I talk about design. It certainly provides a sense of mastery in design that required the exploration and struggle I went through. But it has also humbled me with the knowledge that with increased understanding there is also more ignorance, for I now know that there is more that I don’t know, and that becoming a master in anything is an endless pursuit. Still, this it was a worthwhile endeavor that has helped me grow as a designer and a human.

Download the final paper (pdf)

Just want to share the results of the eReader and gestural interaction project I had my Basic Interaction class (undergraduate HCI double majors) do for their final project. This was a six-week project with the following focus:

• Synthesize needs and opportunities from both potential product users and other sources.
• Discover the intersection between the needs observed by researchers and the needs people perceive in themselves in otder to find rich areas for product development.
• Design product interactions that support the emotional connections between the person the reader
• Explore the personal and social roles that ebook readers facilitate
• Communicate the value of the ebook reader through the visual, auditory, and narrative channels provided by a video sketch

Though the time line was short, I was pleased with the results. During the final, a user research specialist from Daedalus Excel showed up and was very impressed with the presentations and solutions.

I was really impressed with the quality of the video sketches. I had them read John Zimmerman’s Video Sketches: Exploring Pervasive Computing Interaction Designs and showed them several examples. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of different styles. But we did not go over tools, video techniques, or audio, which is typically done. Also, I told them that there was no right way to do this and that they should design their video sketch according to what they thought would be most effective given their skills and the time they had. The quality of the results were really impressive.

In particular, I enjoyed one group that used simple sketches and a child narrator to tell the story for an eReader for moms.

The students got to select an audience focus from a list of six options. Some of the groups overlapped. The documentation links are below, which contain links to their videos and final presentations.

Commuters
Starburst Reader
EasyNews

Moms
Kava
Oracle Reader

Family
Flip ‘N Share

At 10am this morning, I turned in my signed thesis paper and thesis project, making me officially done with grad school. It’s been pretty quiet on this site the past couple weeks as I tried to get everything complete. This short post is meant to break that silence. But as I have spent many sleepless nights the past week, I’m exhausted and in dire need of a beer, I am keeping this brief.

Graduation is on Saturday. It’s a relief to be done, though I don’t think the reality of what that means has sunk in yet. Congratulations to all of my peers.

Look forward to a longer, more reflective post to come, when I have more energy.

Today we learned, in an apparent slip, that Richard Buchanan is leaving the School of Design. At the very end of class, in a conversation largely framed around the question of what is design, he mentioned that he would be a professor of information systems, “whatever that means.” There was a pause in the room as we students wondered if we just heard what had been rumored to be the case ever since Dick dropped all thesis advisees a few weeks ago. I took the opportunity and broke the silence: “So you are leaving?”

“Yes.”

He did not say much more, only that it was very difficult to leave the program. Not surprising for the person who has been with the school for 17 years, first serving as the Nierenberg Chair, followed immediately by a 10-year stint as head. He redesigned the undergraduate program and spearheaded the creation of the grad program that I am about to graduate from.

Sources indicate that he has accepted a position at Case Western.

As Buchanan has provided the theoretical and philosophical perspective to design that has influenced everyone that has passed through the grad program and contributes greatly to what makes designers from the School of Design stand out amongst their contemporaries, his departure will definitely impact the feel of the program and perhaps the thinking of its future grads. I’m very curious to see how the school adapts to his leaving next year.

Personally, I have enjoyed the classes I have taken with Dick. I appreciate the broad view of design that he promotes. And there was something wonderful about being beaten down and made to struggle through difficult texts during Seminar 1 the first semester of my graduate experience. If nothing, the experience contributed to a stance of humility and appreciation for different perspectives. It’s difficult to know how much he has influenced my thinking. I tend to believe that I have been influenced more by my peers when talking about the material of his classes than the classes themselves. However, if the stories Dick tells are true, I may not realize the impact of his classes for years to come.

Last week, Tony Golsby-Smith, CEO of 2nd Road, the Sydney-based consulting company that focuses on shaping large-scale change, visited Richard Buchanan’s Design, Management, and Organizational Change class. Over the course of three hours, he shared his perspective on design and its role within 2nd Road. What follows are notes and thoughts from that conversation.

Tony is an interesting character. He can easily reach the top of any white board and gives thoughtful responses to the questions put to him. He believes that 2nd Road is fundamentally challenging the world view of organizations. “I’m driven by a revolution in organization fabric,” he says. Organizations have been built for stability and not innovation. They kill innovation. His firm helps organizations build what they call innovation capability.

Essentially, his firm seems to be an alternative to industrial age management thinking. And while design thinking is part of their process and information design is a core skill within the firm, they prefer to call themselves management consultants and work with upper management to create vision and strategy, build skills for new thinking, change systems, and change organizational culture. They are already at the table where designers sometimes desire to be. I’m a bit unclear how 2nd Road got there, but it seems like that’s where they started, or at least very near there. Tony argued that if you start in the marketing and consumer space, it’s harder to move up because you’ve been put into a box.

I wonder if designers in the consumer space really want to be at the table, or at the table in the same way in which 2nd Road participates. Transforming organizations seems like an entirely different wicked monster to deal with. But it certainly does pay well. While I won’t divulge the numbers, a three-day Strategic Conversation costs their clients more than you make in a year. Interestingly, I had a conversation with a San Francisco design consultancy that seemed to suggest their consulting workshops with management did not yield much income.

If I had to pull a definition of design from the way he talked about it, I’d say it is upfront conceptual thinking. “Tomorrow doesn’t exist,” he says, “You can’t analyze it.” Through rhetoric, 2nd Road invents tomorrow through dialogue, creating worlds through words (or visualizations). It seems that conversation plays a large role in their offerings. As much as possible, they want the client to own the process.

In terms of where they operate, Tony says they work in third and fourth order design. If you’ve never taken a class with Richard Buchanan, you likely don’t know what that means, which makes me wonder if it’s useful to describe design in this way. Simply, it means they are using design for services, environments, systems, and the interconnectedness of systems as opposed to design that is concerned with communication and forms. They work on highly complex and highly ambiguous problems that take place over the course of years rather than days, weeks, or months.

I’m curious about how design works in this arena, which is why I am talking to 2nd Road about opportunities to work with them. I’m curious about how this type of firm is different from design consultancies like IDEO, Frog, and Adaptive Path. I’m also curious how similar or dissimilar they are to the big management consulting companies or an innovation strategy firm, like Doblin. Good questions to ask in the next round of talks, I suppose.

Overall, Tony’s visit makes concrete some of the more abstract ideas about the role of design in organizational change that we have been discussing throughout the semester. But it’s noteworthy that they don’t call themselves a design firm. I wonder what that means for the discipline. Is design something that business consultants can consume and make their own, or can it stand on its own, and as Dan Saffer recently said, smash the table altogether?