photo from ISIS

Last month, I presented at the Sex Tech, a conference that, to my surprise, had nothing to do with making sex better through technology. Instead, the conference brought together people involved in adolescent sexual health, sex education, HIV prevention, STD prevention, and sexual literacy. I was there with Carrie Chan to talk about our work in designing a mobile service to help HIV positive youth take their medication and stay healthy.

This was the first conference I had been to that was not design focused. Very few attendees knew much about design. But that didn’t stop them from trying to understand the people they hoped to impact and designing solutions in an attempt to make positive change. Are they not designing, I wondered. I was reminded of the many discussions I’ve had about enabling design capability in others, and the authors who assert that everyone designs or has the ability to design.

But something appeared to be missing. While we often say that design roams in fields of ambiguity, these guys seemed to be muddling around in a different darkness. Each effort at developing a solution, while based on much personal knowledge of the people for whom the solution was aimed and experience in developing past solutions, still seemed like a shot in the dark. Research data, while rich, provoking, and confirming, offered little way to move forward.

Overall, though commendable, I felt the efforts lacked the discipline and rigor that a design approach offers, and the quality that designers strive to ensure. What would happen if they had some designers on their team? More broadly, this question led me to wonder what if all important issues had designers involved? If as a people we were more skilled at design, more skilled at bringing meaningful changes into the world, what might that world be like? Is it naive to consider that design could have such great impact in the world, and that designers could facilitate this? Or we are just immature in our knowledge and use of design?

A hypothetical talk aside, the conference illustrated an opportunity for design in the issues surrounding youth and sexual health. What other issues are out there that design is not involved in where it could make a difference?

I’m not sure Carnegie Mellon’s master of tangible interaction design is news to me. I sort of recall hearing something about it last spring. But today was the first time I saw a curriculum for the program. Like several of my former peers, I am intrigued by this program. And as a master of interaction design, I am curious how this program relates to my own, given the only difference in name is the word “tangible.”

During my two years as an interaction design student, I took courses with several of this new program’s faculty. So I wonder what these students will get that I did not. What they will get, and what is a question for some of my peers, is a master of design distinction despite the program being part of the school of architecture and not the school of design.

From the program description…

The Master of Tangible Interaction Design program is a one-year program at Carnegie Mellon University centered around new computational technologies in making. The program serves two distinct groups: those with significant engineering and/or computer science knowledge who wish to master design or artistic skills, and those with significant design, art, or architecture experience who wish to master technological means of making. The scope of study in the mTID program is broad, including digital fabrication, analog and digital electronics, media and materials, and computer programming.

Some comments collected on Twitter:

Phil Robinson yeah we were discussing putting ‘extreme’ before our name, or making us interaction designers of everything

Kyle Vice is it just me, or does this feel thrown together? 

Jared Cole does the mTID fall under the realm of art or design? are we talking MFA or M.Des? Art, I can see… Design, I cannot

Jodi Forlizzi yes, just add water and prerequisites, you’ve got yourself a master’s program.

This sounds like a cool program. It’s new, so I can excuse its haphazard appearance. But I do consider my master of interaction of design to include all types of interaction, tangible and intangible. So is this a subset of what I studied? To a degree, with a lot less emphasis on design. And it does not seem like a focus within interaction design, but more experimental, particularly with its deference to art and computer science.

Certainly, it will only benefit humankind if more people that make products with embedded computing (which is how I interpret this program) have some exposure to design. But a master in design (albeit mTID, which is even more obscure than mDes) from the school of architecture? Curious.

Richard Buchanan presented the “Core Competencies of Design” in class this week, offering a slightly different version of the list of why designers are valued. I’m not sure if this is just a further iteration or different due to the shift in focus from designers to design itself. The language is fairly similar, though notably different in a few areas. I’ve included both for comparison.

Core Competencies of Design

• Vision: see the whole
• Facilitation: work across disciplines
  • Why? Something to do with being able to see the whole. To see the way things fit together
• Visualization: polysensorial awareness
  • Many senses: aural, touch, smell, as a way of grasping the situation we are in
• Prototyping: rapid experimentation
  • This is close to how we work. It’s not a comfortable way of working for most people.
  • Opposite to: if you don’t do it the right the first time, you fail. Philosophic difference.
• Human-centered focus: focus on people and their goals (individuals and organizations)
  • Look a people as individuals and as groups. Also in context of an organization, because humans work in teams or groups

Why Designers Are Valued

• Whole/part: designers look at the whole in relation to the parts; they see the big picture
• Bring to life/creativity: designers have a passion for making things
• Comfortable with ambiguity: openendedness; not prejudging the solution; take chances, take risks; try multiple solutions
• Polysensorial aesthetics: an aesthetic of many senses; this is about the actual making: prototyping; drawing; visualizing
• Emotion/empathy: emotion is a way to engage with the world; passion; designers care about people

Also, Buchanan said the core competencies list will be part of an upcoming publication, which I think is not his own.

Steven Johnson’s “Emergence” attempts to connect the lives of ants, brain activity, urban interaction, and software to show how decentralized and bottom-up interactions emerge as an intelligent swarm.

I was at first skeptical about the book, as it seemed to take a very scientific view, which I am wary of given my thesis on design thinking and its relation to a scientific approach to solving problems. But I got over myself and began to appreciate the perspective and what it might mean for interaction design. (Notably, the word “interaction” is repeated a lot throughout the book.)

The behavior of ant colonies forms the backbone of the thinking behind the book. Despite popular belief, ant colonies have no pacemaker, meaning there is no top-down authority that tells the colony what to do. The queen does not give directions, she only lays eggs. The rest of the ants base their behavior on interactions with their compatriots using a very simple language using pheromones. Through the numbers of these low-level decisions by individual ants, the colony as a whole exhibits characterizable behavior.

“The colonies take a problem that human societies might solve with a command system (some kind of broadcast from mission control announcing that there are too many foragers) and instead solve it using statistical probabilities. Given enough ants moving randomly through finite space, the colony will be able to make an accurate estimate of the overall need for foragers or nest-builders.”

When I read that the ants made decisions through statistical samples of the overall population, it seemed related to how designers make decisions based on a small, but rich interaction with sample users. Given millions of design decisions resulting from random sampling of the population, will there emerge a better world for all? That’s the hope that a greater design culture brings.

Another intriguing argument is that through local interactions higher-level order emerges. One prime example given is the benefit of sidewalks in increasing local interaction of city dwellers. Neighborhoods often develop, not because someone planned them, but through interaction with others—individual decisions about where an how to live creates an order. Examples include class divides, ethnic areas, and gay neighborhoods.

Good designers recognize that they have only so much control in the way that there solutions are used. Johnson points out that emergent systems are not without rules. In fact they need rules to prevent chaos. This seems a likely place for design to contribute: by understanding the system as a whole and providing the rules for interaction, but not dictating how interaction should take place. Not all interactions can or should be designed. There is room to allow emergent behavior to determine the interaction, rather than interaction being dictated by the designer.

Does this sound a bit like co-creation or allowing users to design their own experience? I think so. To encourage emergent systems, Johnson suggests that in addition to rules, incentives should also be provided. For designers interested in allowing users to design their own experience, incentives for participation are paramount because they encourage investment and support.

Johnson entertains the principles of emergence being applied to all aspects of human activity, from social organization to urban planning to business management to political systems. For businesses looking for innovation, an emergent approach is worth considering. Johnson suggests an organization made up of smaller teams that act without top-down dictation.

“The role of traditional senior management grows less important in these models—less concerned with establishing a direction for the company, and more involved with encouraging the clusters that generate the best ideas.”

Through the lens of design, you could see this as employees designing their own work experience. With groups making the best decisions at the local level, the overall system would be more efficient and innovative. This idea definitely gains my interest, having worked in too many places where decisions made from above hurt the experience of employees and the effectiveness of the organization; and where everyone at the local level knew how to make productive changes but were discouraged and prevented from doing so.

Perhaps what I appreciate most about “Emergence” is Johnson’s ability to make connections between seemingly tangential subjects, as making connections is what good designers do. Overall, it’s an interesting read with insights into emergent behavior that are worth considering and perhaps bringing into current and future design challenges.

Dan Saffer just posted his list of the best interaction design blogs this year. Missing is his own blog and mine (just kidding about mine—but perhaps one day).

Given grad school time constraints, I don’t follow many blogs these days. But here are a few I have found either insightful or troubling over the year:

• IxDA: Difficult to keep up with, but I try to skim every once in a while. Something usually catches my eye for its dichotic view of interaction design to my own.
• Engadget: Design wisdom in part relies on knowledge of what else is going on in the world. This site helps me keep up with new technology and products.
• Core77: Also good for keeping up with what’s new in the world of design. Usually brief, but prolific, which means I can’t keep up.
• Adaptive Path: Often thought provoking and applaudable for their willingness to share methods and insights.
• odannyboy: If you’re an interaction designer, it’s good to know what the guy who wrote Designing for Interaction is up to.
• The Superficial: Has nothing to do with IxD unless you think that everything has something to do with IxD, in which case this site is required reading for gaining empathy for the ludicrous nature of celebrity, media, and the rest of us who are drawn to it. Oh, and it’s funny.

Deserving an honorable mention are two peer blogs. Electric Insomnia, while infrequent, often has good design food for thought. And thinkcarrie.com, also infrequent, provides budding insights into service design.

I don’t know if this is new, but it was new to me and I just watched it. Paul Rand talks about graphic design, and says that design is art. I’m pretty sure I don’t agree with him, but it’s kind of interesting to hear his perspective and see the array of designs.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

No, this post is not about sex. It’s about Bryan Lawson’s How Designer Think, which is an orgasm of design process and thinking. On nearly every page I found an idea I could relate to as a designer and often thought the book should be required reading for those entering design. If you’re not screaming “Yes!” inside your head, or out loud, while reading this book, you might want to consider another field.

Bryan Lawson is both an architect and a psychologist. But I think everything he says applies to interaction design, and big D design in general.

He begins by defining design and acknowledges that design is “an everyday activity that we all do.” However, “professional designers also design for other people rather than just themselves,” and “are highly educated and trained.” This juxtaposition may serve me as I consider the implication of the design process for non-designers, a possible direction for my thesis.

One of the central themes of the book is that models of design are too logical and not actually useful for practitioners. Lawson says, “Designing is far too complex to be describable by a simple diagram.” This idea is in part my motivation for my paper, having encountered quite a few models that illustrate the design process only to feel like they weren’t quite right, and certainly, never actually using them when it comes to the actual process. “We probably work best when we think least about our technique.”

That said, I did draw several models of the design process as I read the book.

For me, the book was validation of my experience as a designer. (Hence, the “Yes! Yes! Yes!”) Some of the reassuring notions include:

“There is no natural end to the design process.”

On of the essential characteristics of design problems then is that they are often not apparent and must be found.”

The methods of science are perhaps surprisingly unhelpful to the designer.”

“It is often not possible to say which bit of the problem is solved by which bit of the solution. They simply do not map on to each other that way.”

The latter quote perhaps best mirrors my inquiry into the design process. Reflecting on decisions and directions, it is often very difficult for me to say how design solutions came about. I realize due diligence has been done, but there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between research and concept, which is why for my thesis I chose to focus on the leap of faith designers must take create good solutions.

The latter half of the book deals with design thinking, design strategies, design tactics, creativity, traps, and design as conversation. The latter chapter references Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner, which I am in the midst of reading.

“Good designers tend to be at ease with the lack of resolution of their ideas for most of the design process,” says Lawson. True, true, true. And for those who are not at ease, the design process is painful, as I have witnessed on some design teams.

This is not a sensible way of earning a living, it’s completely insane, there has to be this big thing that you’re confident you’re going to find, you don’t know what it is you’re looking for and you hang on. —architect Richard MacCormac

At first upon reading this I thought, how is this different than searching for the cure for cancer. In that case, you don’t know what you’re looking for. But then I corrected myself. No. You’re searching for the cure for cancer. In design, you only know that you are looking for a solution. It’s not a question of getting there. It’s how to get there.

In terms of my thesis and exploring the leap of faith, I worry that the design process—the leap—may be too complex: a psychological mystery. Lawson says, “Unfortunately, the really interesting things that happen in the design process may be hidden in designers’ heads rather than being audible or visible.”

What is it about what’s going on in designers’ heads that makes them good designers? Is it merely experience, developed over the course of doing it (Schön argues that we design all our lives.) Lawson says, “It seems impossible to learn design without actually doing it.”

For non-designers, is that all that it takes? Do engineers and business managers merely need exposure to the design process? Is this the philosophy of the business/design schools? Is design thinking a skill?

Lawson quotes Edward de Bono, Practical Thinking:

“To regard thinking as a skill rather than a gift is the first step toward doing something to improve that skill.”

I agree. But there’s still something more. Not everyone can be a good designer no matter how much experience and exposure to the design process.

Last year, while explaining the five reasons designers are valued, and thus the five characteristics of designers, Richard Buchanan told the class that if we didn’t possess all five, we shouldn’t be in design. I would argue that the five characteristics—whole/part , creativity, comfortable with ambiguity, polysensorial aesthetics, and emotion/empathy—don’t just have to do with how you think, but also who you are.

After reading Bruce Nussbaum’s recent article, Design Vs. Design Thinking, I have to ask, what is design thinking? Why? Because the way he refers to design thinking conflicts with my more or less ambiguous definition.

The first thing that struck me was his reference to design thinking as a new field. New field? Is design thinking a field, or a way to approach problems? I would go with the latter. It just seems really odd to think of someone saying, “Yeah, I work in the field of design thinking.”

I am a designer. Therefore, I bring design thinking to the problems I encounter. I can’t help it, because I’m a designer. Designers use design thinking. Isn’t design thinking merely recognizing what designers do as useful and applying the design process to problems that aren’t typically considered to be privy to designers?

It almost seems like the Nussbaum believes design thinking to be something beyond design, and definitely something that is closely tied to business and management. If so, perhaps he’s got the name wrong, which he acknowledges in the article.

The fact is that design thinking (or whatever we wind up calling this new field) is being created at the borders of design, business, engineering and even marketing. And I don’t know which institutions will take the lead in promoting it. We have the Stanford D-School, the IIT Institute of Design. and the Rotman School of Management in Toronto taking early leads in developing design thinking. The California College of the Arts is offering an MBA in Design Strategy.

Carnegie Mellon School of Design is not mentioned in the article, perhaps because we actually design stuff here. I find the school’s absence intriguing, regardless, especially since we have one of the foremost design thinkers on the planet in the form of Richard Buchanan. I’d love to get his perspective on the new field of design thinking.

Is defining design a worthwhile endeavor? Or should we just get on with it, do what we do and not analyze it so much?

My rather amorphous thesis paper revolves around the process of design research to design concepts, supposedly within the realm of interaction design, but so far not really staying within that boundary. In each reading, there invariably exists an attempt to define design, or sometimes an acknowledgment that a definition may not exist, or isn’t even the point.

“The answer is probably that we shall never really find a single satisfactory definition but that the searching is probably much more important than the finding.” —Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think

I found Lawsons idea similar to thoughts I had during the Emergence conference while witnessing for the second year in a row the struggle to define service design. The question that first came to mind was why everyone felt a need to define service design. From that, I jumped to the conclusion: What if we were able to define service design in a way that everyone agreed? What then?

Similarly I wonder about design in general. Lawson’s book was first published in 1980, but his insights are still relevant because we are still having the same conversation. What is design?

To answer my own question of what would happen if we were able to define and agree on a definition of design, design would become paralyzed and die.

Design. Die? What?

It sounds ridiculous that design could die. But perhaps it is also ridiculous to think we can define design, even though we must. For if we collectively became conscious of the futilely of our passion to define design, we might stop trying, and in doing so cease the momentum of design.

Thus I argue that the constant attempt or conversation of trying to define design is necessary for the advancement of design, even though the presumed end goal is futile. In this respect, Lawson is right when he says “the searching is probably much more important than the finding.”

So continue your search and forget what I said, for I don’t want to go down in the books as the man who killed design.

Just finished watching Crash, and am now thinking about the ability films and other media have on stirring emotion and changing our perspective. I used to say that I never felt more emotional than during or after watching a film. There was a time when I would go to a film on a weekend night, then head back to my apartment to write while under the influence of my zealous mind, trying to capture the feeling in my own work.

From poetry to fiction to music to screenplays and now to design, I seem compelled to create for the purpose of influencing—stirring emotion and changing perspective—changing the world for the better, I like to believe. That seems like a rather presumptuous and egotistical task. And the passion behind it I find rather mysterious.

Is it passion for beauty? Is beauty the realization of a more humane world? Is that what we strive to do as designers? Reflect the beauty of the world and provide hope for the human condition?

Or are we just trying to make cool stuff? And is making cool stuff still sticking to the path? Do products and services that look and feel better, that treat us well, ultimately affect change and enable a more humane world?

I think they do. And that’s why I’m passionate about what I do.