Hasta La Ideas

Everything in the built world has been designed and crafted by someone. This is not news to most of us, but I’m amazed that even as engineering and design have taken more visible roles in shaping how we experience the world, there are still so many who see themselves as consumers, not makers.

We Are Makers is a new short film that explores the workshops and institutions shaping a new generation of makers and designers. It’s the first documentary on the Maker Movement—a global cultural shift aimed at empowering more people to create. Most of the film was shot on location in New York last spring in places like the School of Visual Arts, NYC Resistor and the New York Hall of Science. But it wasn’t at all clear from the beginning that the film would take the shape it eventually did.

I work with a team of media producers and storytellers at Abilene Christian University, and when we were approached to produce a film on making in education, the goal was purely local, something focused on our immediate community. Faculty and staff at ACU were planning a large digital fabrication space to support engineers, designers and makers on campus, and the film we produced would essentially make the case for this new idea. Over the course of several interviews in just a couple of weeks, we realized we were tapping into a broader story about the full spectrum of makers in museums, hacker clubs, design schools, creative businesses and communities everywhere.

It’s clear today there’s a growing emphasis on craftsmanship and a return to making with the hand, that we can and should reclaim this somehow-forgotten part of our human identity. But I’ve noticed there’s a certain complexity to this new movement that distinguishes it from past eras of DIY and craft. This is an open movement. It blurs the lines between disciplines, it encourages the generalist, and it seeks to bring together makers of all kinds. Today, the focus is on increasing access. It’s about fostering a universal sense of creativity, and it’s about making sure the tools are within reach for everyone.

In our visits with Dale Dougherty of Make Magazine, Allan Chochinov of SVA and Core77, Liz Arum of MakerBot and the others we’ve captured in the film, it quickly became clear this was not really a story about tools or places; the human element took center stage. It’s not hard to imagine how this struck us. As makers ourselves, immersed daily in the creative process, this project felt deeply personal and intimate in an uncanny way: this was also a story about us.

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Welcome back, once again, to Project Medusa. This final installment in our three-part How-To series aims to illuminate the last phase of any design research project: what are you to do with all the information that result from your brilliant effort? How do you decide what’s relevant, and what’s not? Needless to say, it can be a bit complicated. Many of the considerations introduced earlier are also helpful at this stage: remember your goals, and understand your audience (which shifts now to whoever you’re preparing the research results for.) Confused? Visit Part 1 for a more thorough introduction. If you recall Part 1 but missed Part 2, now’s your chance to catch up.

While there are no right or wrong answers in design research, not all data is equal. Assuming you’ve carefully prioritized your goals and outreach, it’s now time to prioritize results. At Ziba, we use a four-part process to synthesize the data research yields.

1. Aggregate the data.

This could mean digitizing handwritten responses, stacks of sticky notes stuck to a wall, dozens of photos printed, or whatever works for you and your material. You’ll need to be able to see the data—and ideally search through it efficiently—before you can plunge ahead.

2. Sort for theme(s).

Like goes with like, and making logical groupings of related information will help you identify the trends and anomalies within your data set. Embrace the granular: this is most likely the only time you’ll look at each and every survey question, listen to every minute of recorded discussion, and squint at all those doodles. Stop worrying about your goals, momentarily, and evaluate your results as honestly and objectively as possible. Everything is allowed to be interesting, at this stage. If, on the other hand, you feel overwhelmed with the amount of data you’re confronted with, the sorting process will allow you to reduce complexity.

Themes emerge as you connect the strongest trends in the data to your hypothesis or hypotheses. Think of it as a naming exercise, if you’re stumped: with the data sorted into buckets, each bucket needs a concise handle. There may be some hard choices—fascinating but quirky individual responses sometimes need to be cast aside if they fail to play well with other, larger groups of more typical answers. Force yourself to make decisions about what’s meaningful and what can actually have an impact on the work to come.

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Image courtesy of IAMECO

I recently met Colin Fitzpatrick at the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technologies, where he spoke about the IAMECO (pictured above), a product service system that he and his research group worked on with an Irish SME, MicroPro Computers. Colin is at MIT this summer, researching “Conflict Minerals,” which are the raw materials used in electronics that come from the war torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. Needless to say, he’s doing great work in the area of sustainable electronics. And lucky for us, he had some time to chat about his work and where he thinks all of this is going in the near future.

Xanthe Matychak: So, tell us about yourself. Who are you and what you do?

Colin Fitzpatrick: I’m a lecturer in electronic computer engineering at the University of Limerick in Ireland and I’ve been working in the “Electronics and the Environment” area since about 2004. I teach a course at Limerick called “Electronics and the Environment,” and I lead a medium-sized research group there on the topic. We look at anything to do with technology and sustainability. Product design, energy, smart grids, you name it. We go where the opportunities take us in that whole space.

When I heard you speak at ISSST, you shared a project that you and your students worked on with MicroPro Computers, the IAMECO.

Right. To be clear, MicroPro is their brand and we worked as consultants. They had an ambition that they really wanted to have a credible environmentally friendly product, not a greenwash sort of fashion. So we helped them make sure they didn’t leave anything out, any bits and pieces along the way. We helped them consider the whole life-cycle of the product, as much as a SME (Small-Mid Sized Enterprise) can do so. We sat down and said that it isn’t just the product but the product-service system that is important.

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I’m pleased to share this excerpt from Chapter 2 of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. This part off the book sets up the overarching framework for successful interviewing: most experts have a set of best practices—tactics, really—that they follow. But what really makes them expert is that they have a set of operating principles. This ends up being more like a framework for how to be, rather than a list of what to do.

I’ve talked to a lot of practitioners about their own experiences in doing fieldwork and often they try to address challenges when they experience the symptoms, but that’s usually not the right time. Consider this analogy: if you have insomnia, the best solutions are not those that you roll out at 3am when you can’t sleep. To effectively counteract insomnia you have to make specific choices during the day, before you go to bed. Doing research with people is the same thing and ideally you approach this sort of work with a well-defined perspective that will inform all of the inevitable detailed, specific, tactical problem solving.

I think getting to this point as an interviewer (or for anything that we do at a certain level of both passion and expertise) is a journey. I’d love to hear about your journey or any other feedback or questions that you have!

When Wayne Gretzky apocryphally explained his hockey success as “I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be,” he identified a key characteristic of many experts: the underlying framework that drives everything. This platonically idealized Gretzky could have revealed any number of tactics such as his grip, or the way he shifts his weight when he skates. Keith Richards explains his guitar sound, which involves removing the 6th string, tuning to open G, and using a particular fretting pattern, as “five strings, three notes, two fingers, and one asshole.” Even though Keith is explaining the tactics, he’s also revealing something ineffable about where he’s coming from. The higher-level operating principles that drive these experts are compelling and illustrative. Expert researchers also have their own operating principles. In this chapter, I’ll outline mine, and I hope to inspire you to develop your own interviewing framework. As you develop, the process evolves from a toolkit for asking questions into a way of being, and you’ll find that many of the tactical problems to solve in interviewing are simply no-brainers. As George Clinton sang, “Free your mind…and your ass will follow.”

Check Your Worldview at the Door

I’ve been asked, “What was the most surprising thing you ever learned while doing fieldwork?” I scratch my head over that one because I don’t go out into the field with a very strong point of view. Of course, I’m informed by my own experiences, my suspicions, and what my clients have told me, but I approach the interviews with a sense of what I can only call a bland curiosity.

As the researcher, it’s my responsibility to find out what’s going on; I’m not invested in a particular outcome. Even more (and this is where the blandness comes from), I’m not fully invested in a specific set of answers. Sure, we’ve got specific things we want to learn—questions we have to answer in order to fulfill our brief. But my hunger to learn from my participant is broad, not specific. I’m curious, but I don’t know yet what I’m curious about. My own expectations are muted, blunted, and distributed. Although I will absolutely find the information I’m tasked with uncovering, I also bring a general curiosity.

Now, the people I work with don’t have the luxury of bland curiosity. Whether they are marketers, product managers, engineers, or designers (or even other researchers), they often have their own beliefs about what is going on with people. This makes sense: if there’s enough organizational momentum to convene a research project, someone has been thinking hard about the issues and the opportunities, and has come to a point of view.

Figure 1 – Capture everything that everyone thinks they know so that it’s not stuck in their heads. Portigal, Steve. 2013. Interviewing Users. New York: Rosenfeld Media. rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users/

The Brain Dump

At the beginning of the project, convene a brain dump (see Figure 1). Get what’s in everyone’s heads out on the table. Whether it’s real-time, face-to-face, in front of a whiteboard, or asynchronously across offices on a wiki, talk through assumptions, expectations, closely-held beliefs, perspectives, and hypotheses. Contradictions are inevitable and should even be encouraged.

The point is not establishing consensus; it’s to surface what’s implicit. By saying it aloud and writing it down, the issues leave the group specifically and enter an external, neutral space.

It’s also not about being right or wrong; I encourage you to anonymize all the input so that people don’t feel sheepish about expressing themselves. I wouldn’t even go back and validate the brain dump against the resulting data. The objective is to shake up what is in your mind and free you to see new things. Think about it as a transitional ritual of unburdening, like men emptying their pockets of keys, change, and wallet as soon as they return home (Figure 2).

Figure 2 – Transitional rituals are actions we take to remind ourselves that we are shifting from one mode of being to another. Portigal, Steve. 2013. Interviewing Users. New York: Rosenfeld Media. rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users/

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This excerpt from Chapter 2 of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation explains many of the differences between designing for services versus designing products and the nature of services themselves. We wrote this book because we wanted to capture both the philosophy and thinking of service design and connect them with its practical aspects, based on our experience with developing, doing, selling and teaching service design over several years.

When we formerly worked as interaction and product designers, we realized that what we were often being asked to design was just one part of a larger, more complex service. No matter how well we did our job, if another link in the chain was broken, the entire experience was broken from the customer’s perspective. We believe service design offers a way of thinking about these problems as well as clear tools and methods that can help designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, managers, and administrators do something about it.

We explain service design in the second chapter, rather than the first, because we needed to have an end-to-end case study to refer back to throughout the book. Service design really involves constantly zooming in and out from detail to big picture and back again. An example used in the book is of an electricity company experiencing a high volume of call-centre calls because people didn’t understand their electricity bills. The solution is not more call centre staff, but to redesign the bill. Small problems can have a big effect on the overall service. Design carried out in silos missed opportunities.

Conversely, the service and business proposition needs to ripple through every single touchpoint in the service ecosystem. Without the context of an entire service to refer to, we ran the risk of falling into the same trap that clients and service users often face, which focusing on the parts at the expense of the whole.

With all that in mind, we hope you enjoy this chapter excerpt. Feedback and commentary are always very welcome.

Like most modern design disciplines, service design can be traced back to the tradition of industrial design, a field defined during the 1920s by a close-knit community of American designers that included Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes and Henry Dreyfuss. In Europe, the Bauhaus was central to the birth of industrial design.

What all of these designers had in common was a drive to use new industrial technology to improve people’s standard of living. During and after World War I, people were horrified to see the devastation caused by the industrialization of warfare. There was also a great need to restore and improve the material standard of living in Europe and the United States.

On an ideological level, the first generation of industrial designers strove to turn industrialization into a force for good. They focused their talents on figuring out how to use industrial technology to satisfy the fundamental human needs of the day. They explored how industry could create products in more efficient ways, what would make them more useful for people, and how products could contribute to optimism about the future. They created well-designed furniture that was inexpensive enough for the middle class to buy to modernize their homes, and white goods that enabled women to escape some of the drudgery of housework, freeing them to take jobs outside of the home. Cars and trains enabled people to expand their range of travel for work and pleasure.

In the 20th century, the design profession made a huge contribution to the improvement of the standard of living in the developed world. Today, however, this standard of living has reached its natural plateau. We are saturated with material wealth, and our consumption of products is threatening our very existence rather than being a resource for good living.

On the ideological level, our fundamental human needs have also changed. The great challenges facing developed societies today are about sustaining good health, reducing energy and resource consumption, and developing leaner transportation solutions and more resilient financial systems. The 1920s generation of industrial designers strove to humanize the technology of their day and meet the fundamental material needs of their generation. Service design grows out of a digitally native generation professionally bred on network thinking. Our focus has moved from efficient production to lean consumption, and the value set has moved from standard of living to quality of life.

Why Do Services Need Designing?

As designers, when we build services based on genuine insight into the people who will use them, we can be confident that we will deliver real value. When we make smart use of networks of technology and people, we can simplify complex services and make them more powerful for the customer.

When we build resilience into the design, services will adapt better to change and perform longer for the user. When we apply design consistency to all elements of a service, the human experience will be fulfilling and satisfying. When we measure service performance in the right way, we can prove that service design results in more effective employment of resources—human, capital and natural.

It would appear easy to study how people experience a service, determine which parts of the delivery are not joined up, and make them all perform well together. In reality, some of the best organizations in the world struggle mightily to design good service experiences.

To explain why companies find it so difficult to design services well, we need to study the nature of services and the way they are delivered.

How Services Differ from Products

The challenge we found when we moved our attention from designing products to designing services was that services are entirely different animals than products. Applying the same mindset to designing a service as to the design of a product can lead to customer-hostile rather than user-friendly results. Products are discrete objects and, because of this, the companies that make, market and sell products tend to be separated into departments that specialize in one function and have a vertical chain of command—they operate in silos.

Figure 1 – Where is the customer in this picture? Staff working in silos tend to focus on the efficiency of their step in the value chain rather than the quality of the complete customer experience.

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