Ghost in the Pixel

I recently had a nice chat with a former design prof about what makes for an educated designer these days. I graduated over 10 yrs ago from CMU’s School of Design with my Master’s, so it’s interesting to look at today’s crop of incoming students and emerging design leaders. What are the expected work experiences, toolkits, grades and scores, etc. All that has evolved per raised expectations and changed parameters (i.e., GRE scores, web-based toolkits, social service and “alternative” work experiences and travel opps). But coming out of all that, what does it mean to educate a designer and then even lifelong, what’s that journey ahead in gaining education? What does it mean to be an “educated designer” these days…and beyond?

There’s simply a balance of past, present, and future, in my view.

** Historical understanding of ideas (origins & evolutions) and techniques (manual, non-digital). You’ve got to understand how things have come to be today, based upon earlier theories, practices, movements, schools of thought, etc. Else you’re doomed to repeat mistakes, look foolish re-applying former approaches inappropriately, and simply lack proper appreciation for how and why we do what we do today, and as we extend into the future. A brilliant short example of this is Mike Kruzeniski’s reference to paper/print/type for the future of interaction design, influencing the creation of Metro visual design system as a truly novel, authentic competitor to iOS. 

Also you need to understand how the things we take for granted in Photoshop and InDesign were done in “the olden days of yore” with manual typesetting and letterform drawing, manual laying out of paper elements and photography. It’s a matter of appreciation and thoroughness of understanding to be a complete designer. Sure there’s Kuler for creating algorithmically correct color palettes, but performing color studies with paper and paint heightens one’s sensitivity further. And of course, sketching will never die, despite the advent and popularity of digital tools on iPad, etc. Basic pen, pencil, paper skills are vital even more, IMHO.

** Liberal arts basis of thinking: literature, philosophy, art history, etc. As a designer drawing inspiration from disparate, complementary or orthogonal sources, you gotta be a polymath of sorts, with ever evolving appreciation for various subject matters, and be able to dive deep enough to interpret and leverage that for problem solving. Simply adds to your arsenal, making you a cultural creative conversant in the grand scheme of life itself, or at least with other designers when brainstorming ;-) 

** Current events and media/pop culture. Gotta stay hip to the times, not just latest cool tech gadgets, but also what’s relevant and fashionable. And how those topics refer back to historical patterns and trends (borrowing form liberal arts basis, describe above…see how it all ties together ;-) And of course social, political, economic factors going on now and near future. What are the trends, situations, events, and general attitudes overall. 

** Current tools and methods of making. Still need to make stuff, even if you are in “design strategy” or “design thinking” roles! Knowing how to craft highly resolved solutions in their various embodiments and expressions is vital to securing and developing your credibility as a designer, period. Keeping up with tools is essential for this, with ongoing practice trying them out, doing projects, etc. 

** A pulse on the future. Voraciously absorbing what’s on the horizon in terms of trends, patterns, trajectories, scenarios, predictions, etc. from fashion to politics to new theories and products/services. What are emerging social norms and generational lifestyles/attitudes to prepare for? What are ethnographers and anthropologists and psychologists discussing?

And keep taking classes on new things…improvisation, negotiation, social entrepreneurship, writing a business plan, refreshers on history and philosophy, etc. Keep the mind sharp and agile!

Whew, that’s a lot! At the end of the day, however, I keep coming back to a fundamental core value for a truly educated designer: adaptability and willingness to “unlearn” so as to “learn the new”. Having a strong liberal arts-based design education myself, I believe that’s the key to honing your ability and becoming a total, well-rounded, 360 designer prepared for a lifelong journey of evolution and success in Design.

This year I had the grateful and honored privilege to speak at the annual UX Australia conference in Brisbane on a Citrix success story, based upon our newly introduced “3-in-a-box” model of collaborative dev (slides publicly available here on Dropbox, 42mb PDF). Below is my conf recap and highlights…

Overall the conference was a very well done affair, nicely proportional and structured for a regional event, supporting ~ 350 attendees with a balance of workshops, keynotes, 45 min talks (as dual tracks in side-by-side ballrooms), and quick “lightning round” 10 minute talks…and of course social events! Held at the conveniently situated Sofitel in Brisbane’s CBD, the conf was well worth the 15 hour flight with lots of good nuggets and stories of design thinking & doing! 

Bill DeRouchey kicked things off with an inspiring keynote around the necessary and sustained questioning of “Why”, despite changing tech and processes and problems (related to Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” book/TED talk). Also went further, extending the notion of “empathy” with “compassion” (via the Dalai Lama), suggesting we need to have “genuine interest” in people & contexts to be truly effective designers of worthwhile impact. Designing with compassion! Hmm.

There were several success stories of design innovation and collaboration as well, which was heartening to hear. We’ve become so used to hearing “learning from failure”, so it’s nice to relay positive anecdotes too: mobile apps, “big data” information design, banking interfaces, even the Australian Post news redesign. Many of these nicely conveyed in the 10 min quick sessions: http://www.uxaustralia.com.au/uxaustralia-2012/10minute-talks-2

A couple talks I enjoyed were on the more alternative, edgy side of things (shades of SxSW perhaps? ;-) which grabbed my interest strongly. For example, a very heartfelt, sensitive ethnographic journey into the lives and minds of graffiti writers and street artists–how should you delve into such a subculture while preserving their anonymity, your personal safety, and deliver useful insights and solutions? Or dealing with your online presence after you die..what happens to your content and data? Some tough questions with no easy answer but thoughtful reflection is needed. Both were quite fascinating!

 

 

Stephen Cox’s entertaining and touching take on the anthropological mindset for designers inspired a deeper sense of “being human” and enhancing human abilities through our methods and tools. Gotta absorb that curiosity and genuine interest for humanity to be a better designer!

Quite a few talks around collaboration and innovation from various perspectives.

Steve Baty offered a compelling set of exemplars for innovation, encouraging attendees to avoid taking the easy way out, and instead “be bold, ask extreme questions, think big” to pursue something like a Nike Air, Yellowtail wines, etc. Be disruptive! (and consider the ecosystem, your stakeholders motives)

Jeremy Yuille took a different approach, examining design as performance (not theater per se ;-) but distinguishing amongst pragmatic, critical, and enterprising performances (ways of demonstrating, acting) in design. Most interesting to me was the relationship between “ambiguity” and “affinity” in terms of problem discovery and framing and solving. Good intellectual stuff, also speaks to innovation.

A couple speakers delved into the need for design process transparency for stakeholders, citing various lessons learned and tips for keeping cross-functional teams all informed about design progress. Another spoke of the near-symbiotic relationship between design and development, and championed the cause for greater ties to devs who want to achieve high-quality products. 

Finally, the closing keynote was a valuable, inspiring demonstration of a regional govt.’s desire for design thinking in public policy and urban re-design, further extending the promise of “user experience” from digital interfaces towards entire service-driven ecosystems and cultural design itself (i.e., the 3rd and 4th Orders). Kudos to the Adelaide govt and Integrated Design Commission for raising hope that design can lead to resilient, productive economy and civic exchange!

 

There were other many useful, memorable, engaging talks and presentations but these are just the brief key highlights from my view. I look forward to hopefully attending UX Australia in 2013 at Melbourne! Cheers…

 

 

Tonight I attended a rare and insightful conversation/interview featuring two of the biggest names in “Design”: Don Norman (no introduction needed) and John Maeda (ditto, currently president of RISD). Hmm, star power much? ;-) It was an uncharacteristically fully packed house at PARC’s Pake auditorium in Palo Alto. Clearly, there was a general expectation of something of interest arising out of this discussion! 

Overall it was framed as a debate between design and art, and the relationship to innovation. Exceptionally broad themes, of course, worthy of a 9 week seminar. Yet this was structured as a 90 dialogue and audience Q&A. Below are my main takeaways…

** Maeda, for his part, focused on “design doing” (rather than “design thinking” which he acknowledged has seized boardroom and buzzword consciousness), on what does design do exactly? For him, design is about “solving problems”, while art is about “making questions”. 

** The manipulation of content via typographic forms to convey mood, tone, tenor, voice. Maeda used “fear” as the content and demo’d how expressive presentations of varying degrees shape one’s interpretation of content. A fairly standard device for showing design’s persuasive power. Erik Spiekerman’s “Stop Stealing Sheep” does is beautifully in a short tome, published over a decade ago. 

** Maeda: “Artists find features, which they hold on to as references.” Points to the exploratory nature of discovery and inspiration that shapes the artist’s mind and eye as a lens upon reality.

** Norman began by identifying himself as an “interaction designer” but wondering aloud, what is an interaction, how do you design that, is it visible? He continued with his now-common critique of design education (Full article found here: http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/why_design_education_must_change_17993.asp ) 

** A key point echoed by Norman, which I firmly believe in as a distinguishing characteristic that separates a “designer” from a “design thinker” or other designer-types: “What you learn in design is how to draw”. He later replaced “drawing” with “sketching” to be all encompassing, towards prototype sketches as well. You learn how to visualize as a mode of thinking, analysis, synthesis, and generation, in a fluid hand-eye-mind manner. That’s essential to being a designer.

** Maeda’s response to Norman’s issues with design education: It’s about variety and role models, exposing students to a wide range of sources and opportunities.  It’s also about first principles and primitive systems/forms (chair, knife, etc.). 

What I found quite interesting was how Norman was very much interested in how “Design” can solve the BIG complex problems of systems, transportation, healthcare, etc. (3rd and 4th Order Problems, in Buchanan-speak). Meanwhile, Maeda was approaching it from the POV of first principles embodied in basic form/content/expression challenges. Maeda contended such massive complexity problems are not “Design” oriented per se, but more about leadership, society, and policy. Requiring higher levels of domain expertise and skills beyond what “Design” affords in the main. 

Another note-worthy aspect of the dialogue was Norman’s constant iteration of what it means to be a “great designer”. For example, a “great designer” makes the invisible visible, or perceptible. A “great designer” draws/sketches to think through a problem. A “great designer” doesn’t know much about the world but has the curiosity to ask why, how, etc. 

Norman also went on at length about different kinds of innovation, as iterated on his blog articles, specifically a) incremental and b) radical. The former being more common, while we romanticize and idealize and expect the latter, which is extremely rare and difficult to achieve. He emphasized that standard human-centered design (HCD) process amounts to basically “clever design by committee” that enables “hill climbing” but not great leaps of novelty. 

Referring to Apple, Norman stated that their big leap of innovation was really “systems thinking” around iPod and iTunes, not just a slick click wheel UI mechanism. There have been lots of portable MP3 digital players before the iPod (I used to own one, the Diamond Rio, which I bought at CMU Tech Store for $250 for a hearty 256 MB of storage in 2000 spring! yikes). The relative ease of transfer and purchase and playability of DRM content across devices in a unified ecosystem was the market-busting novelty. 

(A moment of classic Norman curmudgeony-ness: He said that he loves the iPhone but it’s badly designed b/c the gestures are non-discoverable…”swipe here, tap there, tap and hold someplace…who knows?” I personally disagree, as we’re still defining a vernacular of gesture, the patterns of which are being more established and learnable as pre-cognizant expectation with every quickly released app. Just ask a 12 yr old kid ;-) 

Maeda emphasized his point that “in any field, for innovation you must go back to first principles, the canonical thinking”, as personified in traditional design and artistic disciplines, for making chairs, knives, pots, etc. Form, content, expression, experience are essential ingredients. (Reminds me of John Dewey’s thoughts, which I’ve often championed)

Indeed, it’s the balance of both kinds of thinking, that enables innovation at varying scales. The real question is what challenge are you tackling, and towards what end? Norman and Maeda offering valuable points across the board for all designers to consider. 

 

Recently I’ve been involved in a few rather vague, open-ended conceptual projects at Citrix. Hey, it’s fun stuff for sure and certainly quite challenging. But what I keep coming back to is the structured manner in which I strive to collaborate with my non-design peers presenting this mothball of ambiguity for me to tackle. How do I go about dealing with all that fuzziness, as they unravel, in such a way that it doesn’t become overwhelming and confusing, thus getting lost in the process?

For the last decade I’ve frequently referred to Vogel/Cagan’s “Creating Breakthrough Products” for guidance on tackling what they authors call “the fuzzy front-end” of product development–trying to identify the core market, business value prop, and guiding design principles, to help ascertain a specific direction with certainty. It’s a great starting point and the advice has been valuable in giving backbone to my own assertions and decisions with skeptical devs/PMs at the office.

Lately, however I’ve evolved my own set of questions and approaches for tackling this fuzziness, in conjunction with the project leads from non-design domains. That’s what I’d like to share here briefly :-)

The key thing is what I’ve previously referred to as “3-in-a-box” partnership with the key leads representing UX, Engineering, and Management (or whatever labels may be applied). This is necessary for sustaining ongoing discussions, building rapport/trust, and ensuring efficient impactful communications towards resolution and planning for what’s next, post-ship.

With all the players in the room or studio together, then it’s really a matter of continual deep questioning and discussion with the designer serving as a therapist or facilitator ;-) For instance…

* What’s the premise? Summarize in a nutshell, short pithy phrase what’s your product/service about? Why should someone care at all?

* What’s the problem and/or opportunity at stake? It important to define specifically what is being addressed by what is being proposed. Is it compensating for some existing problem? Or is it anticipating an unmet need, a missed opportunity on the horizon?

These two initial questions are about the “Why“…as Simon Sinek famously extolled, you gotta start with “Why” first, before feature lists and use case inventories. Why would anyone, engineer and customer alike, even care?

Then from there, moving into:

– Who’s the primary user and market target? What’s their composition in terms of skills, experience, goals, fears, anxieties, dislikes, motivators, and worries. Draft out a persona that captures the essence. (maybe multiple personas, as needed) and capture specific “POV statement” (Actor needs X because of Y in order to achieve/fulfill/satisfy Z) which will help anchor and guide design solution iterations and evaluations.

– What are the key assumptions, dependencies, and expectations in terms of the user, devices, software, hardware, contexts, activities, and related elements? Draft these out and draw connections via insightful analysis and real observations in the wild (or on-site interviews). Too often we make unsaid assumptions that color our perceptions of what users truly want. Get all that out in the open! Debate and prioritize and clarify into a tidy list.

– List out the core use cases per market and design research (or at least an initial baseline via personal observations) and use them to literally write out a story/scenario that captures the actor, scenes, objects, actions, responses, and sequencing/frequency clearly.

– Consider the critical moments of device or UI interaction–what are the triggers, affordances, signals, feedbacks, and flows & errors? Illustrate them into “comic book” storyboards with notes about objects & actions accordingly. Call out special attention to potential problems and annoyances.

– Dive deeper into the possible interfaces for those key moments…break them out into lots and lots of sketches of possibilities: patterns, layouts, widgets, behaviors. All at high-level sketches, not pixels ;-)

– Reference back to your user/persona profiles and their “POV statement” of what they need to accomplish or support deeper motives/goals given a particular context. This will help ascertain which interface sketches make sense and are deemed “viable” vs “delightful” vs “breakthrough” (as basic criteria for selection)

Using this approach you can at least cut through some of the initial fogginess of a new conceptual project in a structured manner, avoiding lots of vague hand-wavy awkwardness of “what do we do” :-) Also ideally these steps should be reinforced with effective and constant user research based upon direct observation in the filed, as well as surveys, interviews, lab studies, etc. Always be learning and applying those findings to your ongoing design investigations to make forward progress through the conceptual fuzziness.

 

 

The other day I met with my boss to discuss my “career plan” going forward. Snooze, right? Could easily descend into a boring corporate dialogue, filled with trite, empty jargon and eye-rolling acronyms…blah.

However, being a veteran of such drab contexts, I walked in fully prepared, focused on a substantive discussion, by presenting a simple yet powerful schematic that summarizes key “vectors of influence” which I see myself pursuing in an aggregative fashion over time, enabling me to gain valuable lessons and develop my repertoire as a design leader…not just in my current workplace, but also in the field at-large, applicable to a variety of contexts. Because in the end your career is what you make of it, and how you see yourself become what you seek. (sounds so Zen doesn’t it? ;-) What was this schematic and what are its core elements? Well, I’m happy to share, as I don’t believe it’s something to be withheld, but instead propagated to help other budding design leaders.

 

This schematic is based upon the infamous “cross of pain” diagrams at Carnegie Mellon in Dick Buchanan’s Grad Seminar back in the day. The centerpiece at the heart is “influence”, in terms of shaping and guiding impact regarding problems & opportunities as a principal designer. As my first industry mentor once said to me, “Uday, what you need is influence. That’s the key to success as a designer.” It’s basically a rhetorical concept, in terms of applying language and perception towards advancing your aims in support of a beneficial goal for the team or company or the market. Influence is about framing and guiding, activities grounded in humanistic principles, not mere slick snake-oil manipulation (i.e., sophistry) but of progress, delight, and craft. Change for the better! Who doesn’t want to achieve that…it’s the essence of design itself.

So from influence, what are the vectors? Four simple yet major areas of impact within a company context (and applicable to agency or consulting situations as well), as described below:

 

Vision: What’s that beautifully articulated noble, magnanimous, ambitious concept of where we are headed as a company? What are the product or service design “moon shot” concepts, typically next-generation ideas, that push us further as a team, and help advance the company, even industry and society? What’s truly disruptive and game-changing that you are passionately enabling? How are you impacting that with workshops, brainstorms, prototypes, with emphasis on executive involvement? To be a design leader you’ve got to enable powerful visions of what can be, not jus incremental fixing existing pains…but leapfrogging and anticipating tomorrow’s potential.

 

Culture: How are you impacting and evolving the norms, values, principles, and general ethos that defines a team, department, and company overall…by virtue of your advocacy, evangelism, outreach activities, thought leadership outputs (books, articles, talks, classes), and training efforts. Are you making a mark in defining what kind of place this company is in terms of design excellence and the value of those efforts for the company-at-large, for non-designers like HR, IT, Finance, Legal, Sales, etc. To be a design leader you should be constantly nurturing and advancing the cultural design-oriented vibe of a place, whether it’s in-house design or an agency or even your client. Always be fostering design-mindfulness.

 

Strategy: Oh strategy…Such a nebulous and buzzwordy notion! But at the end of the day it comes down to a systematic, thoughtful articulation of how design is applied in multiple areas of the business in interdependent, integrative fashion, from products to marketing, services to branding to hiring. How is design manifested as a strategic conversation of deliberative intentions, versus a temporary policy of adherence and policing. And as a design leader, are you instigating, guiding, and resolving critical conversations with the highest visiblity stakeholders (i.e., executives) or simply reacting to short-order requests? Are you being proactive and anticipating “big picture” decision-points with multifaceted rationale (humanistic, technological, financial, etc.)?

 

Process: Designers love to discuss process, right? Well, this is more than simply speechifying “1-2-3” steps, but also effectively advocating, educating, and evolving processes to support general product & service development in a blended  partnership model, serving as a diplomat and ambassador for doing what’s right, fair, useful, and just…for the business and the customer. To be an effective design leader you gotta be a constant champion for ensuring better ways of collaborating, cooperating, sharing, and delivering powerful innovations.

 

Hopefully it’s become clear that these four central elements (vision, culture, strategy, process) overlap in many ways; indeed, they must in order for design innovation and progress to be made. That’s why, in my view it makes sense for a design leader to evaluate their contributions and influential impact along these “vectors of impact” and map out a career plan accordingly per these areas. This can help lead to far richer, engaging, insightful, and perhaps challenging conversation with your boss about what you really want to do, and how to mark out a path to get there. They set the beacons for helping to define specific, tangible actions and outcomes that can be itemized and evaluated for personal and professional progress.