16. November 2009 by justdanika.

Design is a very open ended field…it is not like engineering.

One does not have a right or a wrong answer but an endless set of choices that need to be justified and supported. Everything one does is a decision and it will affect the future of that object. Its materials (acrylic or masonite), realism (working or looks-like), texure (inviting or passive). All these decisions weighing in on the end our our tongue, hopeing we are making the correct one.

Decision paralysis has hit me hard today:

Racquetball…do i go right and give it a backhand or left and go for the forehand…WAM it hits me in the stomach.

If I can’t decide that…how can I decide something I want to make for personal statement? Do I go left, right, up, down, through the tunnel, do I warp to another level or do I just try and avoid the koopas?

no wonder I was never any good at video games…

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13. November 2009 by justdanika.

I can’t keep ignoring it…I have to think about what I want to do come June.

Maybe a better question is what am I qualified to do? What job title can I have? What value add does my background have to a potential employee? What values do I have as a designer have around what I want to do?

Is potential enough?

I want to be Genevieve Bell .

My criteria:

• I do not want to spend 8 hours a day behind a desk doing CAD, but I wouldn’t mind doing it once in a while.
• I want to work somewhere that I can have impact.
• I want to help the customers as well as the employees I work along side to have better days.
• I want to work for a company that recognizes my talents, actually see them as talents, and then utilize them.
• I want to work alongside people I can learn from.

What do I want to do?

I want to work with organizations to improve process, help companies see the customer at the end of the tunnel, and give employees the power and respect they deserve… A company can only be as great as it’s employees and I want those people to go home as satisfied and proud as the customers should when they take home their products.

It is holistic but it is important to design, innovation and creation.

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3. November 2009 by justdanika.

Reading through a chapter of “Mistakes Were Made” a really interesting area came up that I recently had a conversation about. It was regarding the idea that doctors are balancing their patient’s needs against their own financial concern. This dichotomy is interesting because it seems contradictory that either is more important than the other and in the heat of the ongoing debate over health care in the US right now it is extremely relevant. Looking at the players, seeing their interests, understanding their blind spots we might be able to start understanding how to negotiate this.

First lets understand the different player’s interests. Doctor’s have a set of interests that need to be met, they need to pay back loans from 7 years in school, insurance for their risky job, deal with a lot high stress and other wonderful/agonizing things they go through daily to make other’s healthy. Patients want good, clean, safe, affordable healthcare efficiently. The government is supposed to keep the needs of their citizens at the forefront of their mind, trying to get doctors paid while also directly giving the patients lower costs. Lastly, the Insurance Companies are for profit organizations that provide people with financial help when they get sick but rarely engage in the actual dealings between the doctors and the patients. Not one of these players overlap on what they want from their experience, their number 1 interests are individual.

This is a large, and complex negotiation between lots of players about something very important, people’s well being. All of these people have a role that is important though, and their needs have to be met in order to keep the system working. It is a constant push-pull and ethics plays in a lot. Are doctor’s trying to take too much from the insurance companies, are insurance companies attempting to hide things from their clients, are patients not caring about where they get medical care since the insurance company will pay it anyway. All of these questions, though perhaps not thought of in this way, are probably an issue behind the scenes.

This is where the blind spots come in that were mentioned in “Mistakes Were Made”. I think all of these people think they are doing what is best for the patient and themselves. They can certainly justify their actions to themselves and state openly that their number one priority is the patient but it wouldn’t be such a large issue in government today if everyone was truly acting ethically.

“Blind spots enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.”

Whenever a doctor, or insurance worker or patient justifies that what they are doing is ethically ok, they are activating their prejudices of the other players. They are stating that the others are acting just as they expect them too. These prejudices create a sort of negative feedback loop which results in higher justified prices, more fights between patients and insurance companies and in the end the government picking up more and more health care bills and other patients having to subsidize those that can’t afford the healthcare they need.

These blind spots within this highly ethical debate allow our healthcare system to slowly spin out of control.

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23. October 2009 by justdanika.

Studying collaboration for my master’s project is like studying the world.

Life is collaborative.

I’ve decided to focus on 3 areas of collaboration that I personally find interesting and important.

“meetings”

Those boring events that you constantly roll your eyes at, doodle during, feel unproductive at the end and the momemt you walk out you forget exactly what happened

innovative idea generation

Brainstorming, though a group activity, is not actually collaborative. You don’t actually encourage the diverse range of information to build off each other.

collaborative ownership and responsibility

Community spaces are often dirty, go unused or are not actually productive in anyway. Community collapses around shared space because people don’t share well and contribute often.

I want to tackle collaboration in these areas because it is important to me for people to get together, get something done. I care about my communities and I think everyone should.

Group Creating

Group Creation

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9. September 2009 by justdanika.

Designing in another country is a great learning experience for foreign designers. First and foremost, all the references that the professors use and the students laugh about, as they are well known towns and products in the Netherlands, I have never seen before. They laugh about a town that “looks classic” but was built quite recently in order to give the same feeling of community as the old towns possess. They joke about a toy that looks like a blob with a face. The term classic is a loosely defined term that’s references differ from culture to culture as much as the language.

I wonder how one might teach design without a filter and what other references should be presented in a class to better prepare the students for global work. In the classes here in Delft, similar to mine at Stanford, they almost never reference design in Asia and if they do it is only in very recent terms. One might reference something of Japan or Korea with reverence but rarely China. China is a culture with a long history of craft. It has emerged more how their design is affected by their culture and history, but students rarely learn about it. Not to mention, how come you never hear about Australia in design?

Currently reading Design Inspired Innovation, it defines a classic design as a long-lived design that anchors and stabilizes the evolution of a firm’s product family. If the purpose of a classic is to give a base-line of what a good design is and classic is defined by culture, it may imply that doing cross-cultural design is the only way to really design for someone else. If you don’t get the culture, you can’t design for them. This I tend to agree with. It also means that students that go abroad to study design, though they may bring back some techniques and tools that can be helpful, they may not have studied their own culture enough to design for it.

With over 40 years of design history at Technical University Delft, it is easy to understand why they think their education system is effective. The program has Alumni that are lead designers at Philips, a CEO at BMW, and entrepreneurs starting companies based on their projects during school. Does this program output very specific types of designers and how will the international students be perceived when they return to their countries? Will they lack the knowledge of how to apply the design process to their own very difference culture? Can they mold the ideology they are taught into something they can utilize and share with others back at home?

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6. September 2009 by justdanika.

I find myself, sitting on this Sunday afternoon, on my tiny porch over looking the rooftops, canals and streets of Amsterdam. It smells like pancakes. The sound of the train, people laughing and a distant bagpipe band makes me smile. It is overcast giving a very European feel to my view with a perfect glaze over the chimneys.

The bike culture is just different here. I walked around the city (looking for somewhere to stop for a Heinekin) enjoying the architecture and the fashion. It is great how everyone from the hipster boys to the older couples are just biking around the streets on their cruisers.

No one here has a 1000 dollar bike (it would just end up in the bottom of the canals). They all bike on these worn out cruisers with oversize handle bars and high seats. Everyone is sitting erect just casually meandering around the streets.

My partner in crime this week, Caroline, mentioned the large number of Harley Davidson bikes and apparel we have seen here. There is a direct correlation to how the Dutch use bicycles and how they use motorcycles.

When you compare these uses to those of the Nor Cal folk who surround me on the streets on Sundays in packs, on bikes that cost more than my car wearing crazy spandex on their way to meet at a coffee shop, it is pretty polar opposite what these people have in mind.

Maybe the real differnce has to do with the difference between what coffee shops sell here and there.

Maybe…

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17. May 2009 by justdanika.

All the different tools available on the internet have allowed people to share more information, collaborate and have better, stronger opinions. The availability of information from all different points of view and from a diverse group of people has been organized and made available to the masses. This sharing of information allows for people to be more informed to make better decisions when place in a group.

Applying these new tools to a democratic system has allowed for better decisions to be made. Decisions can be made without wondering what other people are thinking. You can truly collect and aggregate information and make an informed decision that takes into account your opinions and those of people who agree and disagree with you.

If cocoons are avoided you really will get a more democratic system working. I heard in a speach once that you should always discuss your opinions with someone who does not necessarily agree with you because it will improve your own opinion by 1) forcing you to justify why you think that way and 2) force you to accept that others are going to disagree with you. Democracy is based on this aspect and the internet has allowed people to become better, more well rounded citizens.

Cocoons are truly the biggest issue I can see. People secluding themselves in bubbles, not reading the news, not seeing how other people live, making conjectures about those that are not like them, stereotyping people without asking why and certainly living in spaces that allow them to not see the outside world. All of these types of actions are what will truly break the democracy that we need to keep creating to encourage information sharing and collaboration. I think the best way to make our democracy better is by encouraging people outside of these cocoons and to see the world as it is and then make a judgement based on the actual thing.

“Its marvelous what you can see when you open your eyes.”

-Unknown

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13. May 2009 by justdanika.

I was inspired after reading about the poor ability of groups to make decisions that there are ways to make deliberation work better.

“We have to move from old to new” Sunstein says on pg 102 of Infotopia. I tore into the next chapter delighted to hear that there could be a happy ending. But when I arrived I found gambling, betting and prediction markets.

I’ll give it to Sunstein…provide an incentive and it will get people with insider information  to share that information and keep people who have no clue from voting in the first place. I think the use of the internet to pool this information is really compelling. It creates a platform (most likely anonymous) that allows people to voice what they actually believe based on the information they have because there is a monotary incentive to get the answer right.

Sunstein is telling us to move from old to new…new being the space the internet has created to pool this information. To collect a group of people with information means you can make the outcome of the group’s deliberations more accurate. Is prediction that important though? Perhaps the real use of this tool should be to collect people who have information in order to steer decisions. Get a group of people with a common thread (whatever the topic of discussion is) to collect in a space (virtual or physical) and share their knowledge to make deliberation better, not just more accurate.

I look forward to seeing what other tools Sunstein has regarding the power of the internet to create change, not just to help predict future happenings. Though I will admit, predicting the future has a nice ring to it.

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30. April 2009 by justdanika.

While reading Infotopia (Sunstein) I came across an area talking about brainstorming and discussing what types of groups can come up with good ideas. He mentioned a quote that directly contradicts what the design community believes.

“For such problems [brainstorming], deliberating groups have been found to do far less well than statisticl groups. The apparent reason is that deliberating groups discourage novelty.” He then goes on to say that you are better off to brainstorm individually and then to collaborate on decision making and judging ideas.

Deliberating groups are designed under the assumption that through deliberation they will improve judgements and predictions.

During a brainstorm there are set rules that need to be followed to encourage a good brainstorm. The first 3 are directly related to group dynamics.
1) Defer Judgement
2) Encourage wild ideas
3) Build on the ideas of others

Trust truly is the most important aspect of a group brainstorm. To feel that you are not being judged on your ideas and that you are contributing.

Sunstein goes into these during his social influences of “deliberative failures” due to the fact that people silence themselves. He says people fear their statements will be disliked or ridiculed (see Rule 1 and 2).
The problem with individual brainstorm (as Sunstein suggests as a solution) is that you can not utilize rules 3 without a group. Rule 3 states that your ideas can be enhanced and become more innovative as you hear others experiences and ideas and build off of them. A brainstorm is only as powerful as the collection of the experiences the people bring to the table. An unspoke idea or experience is useless and can not help others grow their ideas.

There are proven ways to make deliberation groups better group brainstormers and remove the lack of trust from the equation:

1) Do improv to let people relax and feel energized by the group. Work environments especially, usually encourage “normal behavior” and you need to break people out of it to get a good brainstorm.
2) Team building exercises to encourage acceptance.
3) Brainstorm on a topic not related that is suppose to be funny.
4) Talk about the opposites.Brainstorm a bug list to get people talking about the topic on a personal level.

These types of activities can break Sunstein’s suggestion that deliberation groups can not be good brainstormers. They can be but they need a some prepatory work before hand.

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27. April 2009 by justdanika.

Different technologies dot history and craft the behaviors of groups. In the past it was automobiles that allowed people to move farther from their neighbors and their place of employment. This behavior change, not the car, have changed how people live their lives now and the future of how people interact. In the future you can’t say solar power is going to save the earth from global warning because it is not about a technology. As long as people are reckless with their energy use a technology will never actually help.

Shirky states this on the cover of his book. “Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors.” This statement is driving engineers, designers, politics and other influential groups to think about how to change how people behave. A technological solution is simply a pill fix for the culture that is unsustainable.

Sustainability lies within people changing how they behave and though technology can help that or encourage it, it can not be the sole effort. Understanding groups and how they have changed is important for understanding how to create infectious action. Shirky discusses lowering transaction costs and then getting the promise-tool-bargain ratio correct to effectively form a group.

Here lies Shirky’s disconnect. There is no behavior change in this, it is just different. People have been forming groups since the beginning of time for every rhyme and reason under the sun. As he puts it, “faster is different.” Yes it is different, but it isn’t a change in behavior. All of these social tools that have been created across the world have given people new tools to achieve goals that they have always had but just have not been able to achieve due to lack of communication. I don’t see how helping people to achieve their existing goals is changing behavior.

I believe Shirky’s book title would have been accurate by saying something such as

“You can’t change behavior with just technology, but you can utilize the ease of group formation to encourage that behavior change.”

or

“Empowering groups is a 21st century phenomenon. By lowering the transaction cost of action, behavior change is no longer reliant on technology as a driving factor.”

Shirky never addresses behavior change, he just addresses the possibilities that the change in how people are organizing can lead to greater, faster impact. Not that I disagree with the statement of the cover, it is just not what Shirky’s book is about.

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