ConnectED 2010

It was a great reason to get my over sees with a purpose and a little bit of funding.

Highlight of the conference: Hearing the excitement, innovation and drive of the hundreds of educators who really care about teaching great Design.

They were doing great things like:
1. designing businesses within their schools to get students access to real world experiences (especially when internships are non-existent during a recession)
2. pushing the envelop of what collaboration means by teaming with new disciplines like performance art
3. constantly being surprised by the great work their students created and never settling for the notion of “what we have been teaching will work forever”

Design is a growing, changing field and these professors are in charge of teaching their students to  keep pushing the boundaries of the field. They prototype and fail, but they also prototype and are truly inspired by the creativity of how their students interpret a project.

This was a really intersting display of how one woman was looking at the different dimensions of her course so she could find what she needed to improve on and what she did well.

More design educators need to start pushing the envelope of what a design program needs and keep the cutting edge of design at the fingertips of their students to ensure their ability to get the best jobs when they leave.

Thanks to all the keynotes (especially Kees Doorst, Larry Leifer and Thomas Meier) for their risky but inspirational speeches, thanks to all the other educators who came to share and be inspired by other’s research and thanks to Pam Hinds for letting me write the paper and get this great opportunity.

I decided to just show up to a class one of my fellow Stanford Improvisers teaches on Monday because he had asked us to at some point and I felt like I wanted to. Not only did I get to play with a young group of excited improvisers, I also got to play with Patricia Madson herself. She was the guest teacher for the day doing a class on shared control.

It was a treat to play with her, see her excitement at creating and telling stories with the group, enjoy her passion as a teacher and her smile every time anything different came up.

I now have another source of inspiration when sharing improv with people. I absolutely love my teacher Dan Klein and have learned so much from his guidance on how to do improv. He has a natural ability to understand peoples actions and creates a safe space to be different. Patricia is wonderfully compassionate and caring as an improv teacher. She is different as she coaches improv as a way of life, not a theater experience. Both are creative and help craft the way we think (or don’t think) about what we should say next.

I find myself feeling lucky to have met these great improvisers and people on my journey here at Stanford. If any of you are ever so lucky…please take a class and embrace the improv as a way of life.

I believe improv can be a tool to help people experiment with tough interpersonal issues.

I am trying to apply improv games to specific situations to change a groups behavior and interactions.

I did my first prototype yesterday.

I got a really interesting reaction from a very “nice” team that has been neglecting strong emotions to drive their design process.

I had them do the “It’s Tuesday” exercise that allows them to have a huge reaction to a small thing with no relavence.

I watched as a very calm person yelled about a word…for no reason…and the reactions of his teammate who have never seen such a camotion from him.

He was moved by his own reaction to him raising his voice…

I can’t wait to inteview him about his reaction.

I want to help companies have a better culture that fosters innovation, collaboration and a more holistic view of the future.

I can’t think of a product or market I want to work in. It isn’t Apple, Google, GE, facebook, HP, or any other product or service industry. What I care about is that the people in there are being able to utilize their creativity, push the company and grow as humans that recognize the world as something larger than themselves.

That is what I care about. I can finally identify where I want to have impact. The question now is where can I go to do this…is it management consulting? design consutling? is there anyone out there doing what I want to do?

I failed,

but I still won the contest.

Social Movements are really complex to start. The points I have learned around how to/how not to start a social movement are more valuable than my social movement.

This is not the only guidelines but it should help get anyone started on a better foot.

1. Simplicity

You need to be able to pitch your idea in 30 seconds or less. The longer your pitch is the less impact you can have.

2. Urgency

If your movement isn’t urgent you can’t expect people to just start caring.

Urgent movements revolve around things like earthquake relief, trying to get a bill passed in an upcoming election, stopping removal of a large wooded area for development.

If your movement isn’t urgent there has to be other motivation. It has to be fun, enjoyable, easy, routine and provide feedback. Getting people interested and keeping interested needs something unique, catchy and viral.

3. Power of Groups

The reason you start a social movement is to get groups of people to make impact together. You can’t expect to get enough people to reach a critical mass when you invite people 1 at a time. Also a random group of people isn’t helpful, you need to get a group of people who know who is going to see their actions.

Get a group of people, who care like you do, to be in it together. Get a class of students, an existing organization, a meet-up group, people who take the same train. Whatever group is the most obvious to care about your movement is who you want to join, and you want to get them to join together.

4. Get Offline

Online platforms are a great place to get people organized and on the same page (literally). You probably aren’t making the next twitter though so don’t think your site is going to make the impact by itself.

Think about what you are asking people to do for your social movement. Think about actions and real world experiences then think of how to make that experience better. Be creative, think big and don’t be afraid to tackle complex social situations. People need to have a conversation started to talk about your movement, share it and help other be active. Give them that tool…

5. You aren’t Going to Get it Right the 1st Time

The worst thing you can do is become so attached to your movement you aren’t willing to change it, reshape it or refocus it. When things seem to be going poorly, step back, look at what is working and what is stopping you. If one little bit of it has gotten traction, focus on it! Make that little piece that stands out the starting point for the movement.

Be ready to fail, regroup and keep going.

Don’t give up. Perseverance trumps all.

Now…go change the world.

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…

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.

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.

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

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?