Design Thinking with Barry Katz at Stanford: Class 6

In the sixth How to Think Like a Designer class, Barry lead a discussion of the user research exercise that we participated in last week. We broke into teams of 2 and took turns interviewing each other about our work environment. We then identified key issues and brainstorm solutions. Some of the insights that came from the discussion of the exercise:

Be attentive to something that doesn’t fit. There's a tendency is to ignore the anomaly. It’s often the incongruous bits of data that that yield the greatest insights.

Make the most of your constraints. In class, we weren’t able to observe our partner in their work environment and we had limited time to conduct the interview. This is similar to real world professional practice, which is always constrained by time, money, technology. How do you know when you’ve dug deep enough? When you run out of time, money and/or technology (because technology is not available or does not exist). User research/interviews are a scalable procedure which can be applied over and over again throughout the course of the project.

Reframe the problem statement to discover the true issues Designers want to to be asked “what is your point of view on a wall?”, not “here’s a pile of bricks, build us a wall”. The danger of just building a wall without questioning why is that the solution may really be a window, not a wall. Around 2006, the DOE (Department of Energy) came to IDEO with a problem/question: why don’t Americans care about energy efficiency? User interviews turned into an inquiry into values which lead to the discovery: it’s not that Americans don’t care about energy efficiency, they just care about other things more – aesthetics (appearance of house and the appliances in it) and the safety and comfort of themselves and their family. The real challenge facing the DOE was to create energy efficient solutions that align with American values. The starting question presumed a set of values that was not correct. Read more about IDEO's process and solution here.

Design Thinking with Barry Katz at Stanford: Class 4 and 5

In the fourth and fifth How to Think Like a Designer classes, Barry invited an excellent guest speaker, Gabriel Trionfi, User Researcher at Facebook. Previously, Gabriel was a Human Factors Community Leader at IDEO. He has a psychology and theater background, which he taps into when conducting interviews and facilitating research. He's a warm, open, insightful guy - definitely someone I'd enjoy working with.

Gabriel talked about the state of most experiences, which by default, aren’t designed. When experiences are designed, not all iterations are accounted for (EX: most chairs are optimized for sitting, not slouching). Experience takes place within an individual - it's a psychological phenomenon. You cannot point to the experience you designed, but the thing that facilitates the experience. Designers can constrain experiences, increase the probability of an experience happening, but there's no guarantees. Ideally as a designer, you’re looking forward seeing how you can change what is, iterating to get people to the better experience, the optimal state.

Gabriel said the #1 thing a User Researcher does is to provide authentic, grounded, meaningful inspiration to designers. Inspiration is required for innovation. As a User Researcher, you need to have genuine insights about people and the opportunity to share those insights with designers to help them find a reason for the design to be. User Research is a set of practices that help you discover valuable insights.

 

User Research has many names and overlaps with multiple disciplines: ergonomics, need finding, human factors, usability, HCI participatory design. Believing in Human Centered Design doesn’t make you a User Researcher, or at least doesn’t make you a good one. (Note: Don Norman wrote a fascinating article about the Dangers of Human Centered Design). Design research is not objective. It is subjective because we intend to design something from the start. If you don’t pursue inspiration you aren’t doing it right. It's about change, fluidity, being reactive, following insights to an end vs marketing research, which is generally about how many dollars are associated with different types of users.

Design Thinking with Barry Katz at Stanford: Class 3

In the third How to Think Like a Designer class, Barry started by sharing a story about an inspirational visit to a cutting edge recycling plant called Green Waste in Palo Alto, CA. He asked the class to guess what the #1 working hazard was. Breathing/lung issues? Carpal tunnel? No. 95% of all the injuries are needle sticks. Even though the workers wear needle resistant gloves, it's not possible at this time to completely avoid needle sticks. This ignited an impromptu brainstorming - use magnets to pull the needles from the piles, put RFID tags in needles so they can be scanned and seen, create more stick resistant gloves, provide needle repositories on public recycling bins, and more. The ideas ranged from changing the needles, to changing how they're identified, to changing the way they are discarded in the first place.

How far up the chain do we go when we look for a solution? It depends on the careful defining in the brief. Design solutions can behavioral, technical, social or legislative. Defining a brief is an art. The client often comes to the designer with "This is my problem." The designer needs to say, "No. You think that’s your problem. This is the real problem." Guiding a client to the proper posing of the issue in the first place is often the most difficult part of the process.

Barry talked about the 7 year itch phenomenon in the industry. First people were all about design methods, then design management, now it’s design thinking. It’s a sign of a profession that is continually renewing itself.

We then resumed where we left off last week on the origins of design thinking:

Design Thinking with Barry Katz at Stanford: Class 2

In the second How to Think Like a Designer class, we explored the origins of design thinking:

1. Design history is the history not just of objects, but of ideas.

Primatologist Sherwood Washburn believed people don't make things. Things make people. Primitive tools have shaped our evolution.

The Historical Trajectory of Objects:

19th Century - the stand alone object is analog, mechanically straightforward, and operated by hands. Ex: Olivetti Typewriter
20th century - the plug in object makes no sense unless it's connected to electricity, which is both a restraint and an opportunity. Ex: Television sets
21st Century - the networked object opened up new product categories and made predecessors obsolete almost instantly. Ex: iPhone

The Historical Trajectory of Design Thinking:

In the 1840's, Henry Cole pioneered government recognition of design. He lobbied the British government for support for his campaign to improve standards in industrial design. He was appointed the first General Superintendent of the Department of Practical Art, tasked with improving industrial art and design education in Britain. He was also the inventor of the postage stamp and the Christmas card.

In 1851, Joseph Paxton made an important contribution to biomimicry inspired design in the Crystal Palace for The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations - the first World's Fair. The Crystal Palace could be considered the world's first horizontal skyscraper - revolutionary in its modular, prefabricated design and use of glass in a patterns that mirrored the structure of a leaf. Not only did he consider the architecture, but its use by thousands of people a day. He designed the wooden floorboards with slight spaces between them so dirt could be easily swept into the spaces below the floor. He then hired a huge group of boys to sweep the floors every evening, but soon realized that the bottom of ladies' dresses were doing the job.

Design Thinking with Barry Katz at Stanford: Class 1

I'm beyond excited about the new class I'm taking at Stanford! It's called How to Think Like a Designer taught by Barry Katz. Barry is a consulting professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, professor of Humanities and Design at California College of the Arts, and fellow at IDEO, a design and innovation consultancy that I've been a major fan of for years.

Just being on the Stanford campus is inspiring! The 12 week class is held in the Mechanical Engineering building adjacent to the beautiful Memorial Church. I arrived a few minutes before start time and was lucky to get one of the last seats in the back (some people sat on the floor). There must be 70 students ranging from mid 20s to mid 50s, more people than anyone was expecting. The interest and enthusiasm in the room was palpable. I'm among people who love learning and collaborating. I am home!

Barry gave an excellent overview of his experience, which included a fascinating history of the Stanford d.school, CCA and IDEO. He told stories about innovative projects from each place, and observed an interesting switch in the undergrad/grad focus. In the past, students often received their undergraduate degrees in something general, like Liberal Arts, and then pursued a specialty in grad school. These days, more students get a specialized undergrad, then use their graduate studies to explore how they want to apply that specialization. He talked about the history of design thinking, including French industrial designer Ray Loewy who designed everything from locomotives to Lucky Strike cigarette packaging, and Nobel prize winning polymath Herbert Simon who studied human activity around human built systems. He also told us about the book, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, which he co-authored with Tim Brown from IDEO.

Barry closed the class by revealing our semester long assignment: improve the experience of commuting. He said it's our responsibility and opportunity to define what commuting means. Immediately my mind kicked into high gear:

Commuting by car: improving comfort, safety (requiring driving tests more often, offering greater rewards for passing driving tests/traffic school, driving tips while you drive, rewards for staying at or under speed limit), multitasking, distractions from children and pets, traffic alerts, construction, alleviating boredom (new suggested routes to and from work to discover new things), parking (parking meters, paying remotely, app to avoid parking tickets), making use of traffic cameras to provide commentary/emotional feedback, weather conditions, sun in your eyes (a windshield that can dim, like auto-tinting eye glasses), forgetting your laptop at home.

Commuting by train/bus/subway: seat comfort, mobile phone use (etiquitte, accessibility), falling asleep and missing your stop, cleanliness/smell, temperature, transferring, lack of seating, accessibility, accommodating packages, using public transport to move something other than yourself (pets, sick people, bulky objects), meeting people, schedules, waiting shelters, advertising, educational opportunities while you wait, empathy for customers and drivers/conductors, tickets, exact change, loosing cards, over capacity, traffic, construction. Also commuting by taxi and car/limo/van service, special events, parties.

Commuting by plane: orientation and relationship to public transportation, shuttle buses, loosing your boarding pass, boarding order, safety assurances, meeting people (Virgin's seat to seat IM), frequent business flyer perks/issues, sleeping in airport when weather is bad, lost luggage, luggage flies to airport before you do, delays, updates, sleeping on plane, empathy for fellow passengers, lighting, food and drink, staying hydrated, circulation, time zone changes, odors, temperature, storage, lap belts, safety instructions, wifi, barf bags.

Commuting on foot/bike/motorcycle: navigation, addresses, parking, carrying laptop, number of blocks to surrounding destinations (California Ave), comfort, weather, relationship of cars to people/bikes, giving the right of way, blind spots.

I can't wait to collaborate with new people and apply my passion for design thinking to important issues we all share.