Ghost in the Pixel

Ok, enough of Steve Jobs. So how about A.G. Lafley, from Procter and Gamble? From Business Week Online:

In his new book, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley explains the difference between the two methods: “Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence),” he writes. “Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.”

Again, this is from the C E fracking O, which makes a world of a difference in my view, as it symbolizes and expresses a profound understanding of design’s differentiating value, not limited to vapid “look we got user experience with our lickable buttons, rah rah” silliness. The fact that this guy groks the different flavors of creative thinking and has supported company-wide design workshops for various departments, this speaks well of Lafley’s commitment to cultivating a good design practice and culture in what presumably is a design-deficient yet bureaucratically process-laden company.

Below is based upon a reply I made to the ixda list re: design school frameworks…

Two personal anecdotes from design school:

1) My first graphic design class, I remember trying to get the hang of compositional space and laying out letters and image with the grid, etc. And I was trying too hard to be artsy. Prof came over, moved the elements around trying different arrangements (this is all paper pieces with hand-drawn letters, btw). I was blown away. I asked her what was she thinking about as she was organizing elements. And she walked me through a “framework” of person/space/word/image (i forget the actual words, but similar) which I found fascinating…That there’s a basic framework that guided her design actions in an intuitive manner because it had become her habit and evolved with her many years of experience, operating sub-consciously.

At that moment I realized that there is something specific and capable of being articulated that really separated communicative design from expressive art, which I found very powerful.

2) Dick Buchanan’s graduate design seminar, he wrote out the steps of a typical UCD process on the whiteboard, going on about the major steps, etc. When he concluded, I raised my hand and asked, “So if someone just walked in right now and memorized and did those steps, is that person then a designer?” And Dick just smiled sneakily, hinting something about the personal and the “noumenal”… hmmm!

I share these to show that designing actually balances both “frameworks” and “ingenuity” or “talent” (for lack of a better word) in a kind of back-and-forth dialogue, left/right brain if you will (a dialectical method). What we must avoid is heavy handed bureaucracy and stifling of creativity by forcing designers to march lockstep step after step, all mandatory, all documented and codified, etc. Else it becomes a crutch and kills inventive spirit, imho…

I’ll be back at SJSU this fall teaching an evening course on the fundamentals of interaction design for undergrad ID majors, which should be quite fun! (and tiring too…who knew teaching was so much work! But very enjoyable) I learned a ton on my first go at it last fall and have thus been re-tooling the syllabus accordingly, front-loading the theoretical content and focusing the rest of the semester on hands-on projects, connecting back to the earlier concepts. One major change is that I will be not doing one central monolithic project for all the students… instead I will have a different approach that enables greater variety of solutions and more collaboration across teams. Plus I’ll be having a few guest lectures from folks like Andrei, Cordell, and some others in the valley to provide richer/diverse perspectives on design issues like digital craft, rapid prototyping, and strategic product development.

From the syllabus introductory paragraph:

The central theme of the course is that design is a human-centric problem solving activity,
based upon the ideas of conversation and rhetoric towards achieving simple, focused, elegant solutions. Each week we will delve deeper into what this means in terms of visual design, digital interaction/behaviors, and language/content.

By the end of the semester, students will understand the overall design process, address typical interaction design problems/issues, and be able to generate compelling solutions in a variety of forms: sketches, mock-ups, and prototypes (a movie, a click-through, or more advanced per student skills). Students will also develop a basis for how to critique designs and present themselves effectively.

As you can deduce, my approach to teaching this subject is heavily influenced by my education at CMU, particularly the humanist/rhetorical approach to design as argument, informed by Dick Buchanan’s ideas. This might be a bit heavy for undergrad students but I hope to at least seed the ideas, which may come to fruition later on in their careers. They may not truly get it right away, but surely they will notice the value of the approach soon enough with the projects and critiques I’ll be giving them ;-) Either way, I look forward to advancing such ideas and helping educate another group of young designers…