Crossing the Chasm

Demo lecture
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Here's another "pen cast" from a user of the Pulse Smartpen, a 7.5-minute lecturette on Geoffrey Moore's book about technology adoption and marketing. For those unfamiliar with the innovator—early adopter—early majority—late majority—laggard bell curve of how new technology gets adopted by markets, this is a useful overview. You might also be interested to read about Everett Rogers' technology adopter categories (described in his Diffusion of Innovation theory) on which it's based.

It's also a good little demo of how the pen can be used to illustrate a point. If you click on the link to the lecture on the Livescribe site, you'll see that a community of users are sharing their notes—from the sublime to the ridiculous. For those working in study groups and teams, this seems to be an interesting way to share notes with people who missed a class or a meeting.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

I've struggled for years to accurately convey the complex picture of industrial design at Art Center—the reality behind the hype. We are sometimes viewed as shallow stylists, mostly because what people see of our work are slick photos of final models. Rarely do people get to see the process that we employ, and the thinking behind it. This isn't limited to us, by the way—if you examine what gets published about industrial design, you'll see an endless parade of glamour shots of the latest shiny thing, and the criteria used for the curation of this work seem to revolve around the hot image it will create in a magazine. This shallow picture isn't helped by the fact that we at Art Center are often running at such a pace that we—students or faculty—rarely get out to share with others what we're up to.

Industrial designers complain that people misunderstand what we do. Part of the blame lies with us. We struggle to appear in publications that limit the view of our work to the single glam shot. If we're not careful, we might wind up like those architects who seem to design a building to create a photo op for the cover of Architectural Record—not to provide an optimal experience for the people who will inhabit the space.

For years I've admired the way that IDEO crafts their own story. Through artful self-publication as well as controlled use of traditional publishing outlets, they have created the image that we have of them. They are not known for any particular design; they are known for their innovation process, as they should be.

What's a designer to do who doesn't have the firepower of a major office as backup? Check out the blog of industrial design student Stéphane Angoulvant. In January 09, at the beginning of his second term (or the second half of his freshman year), he decided to start a record of his work at Art Center, project by project, course by course. 

We get to look over his shoulder as he tackles each assignment, understanding not only the process he uses to solve the problem but also the rationale for the assignment in the first place, how it fits into the stream of coursework that makes up the curriculum. He does this without undue self-aggrandizement but with quiet confidence and clear-eyed excitement. As he says in his kickoff post, "Just want to keep it simple here and post what I can from my ongoing design projects." Following his posts I see the world that we have created for our students from the student's-eye view, and at the same time get to revisit the fun of my own experience learning the design process so long ago.

Following a notice on Coroflot earlier this year, the blog has acquired an enthusiastic following of fellow students and admirers. By the time Stéphane reaches his 8th term, he will have already created that new requirement for career success—a solid web presence.

I find this profound in so many ways—seeing the world of the Other from their point of view (which is what my research methodology is all about), seeing the organic start of a designer building what will eventually become his career and his reputation, and perhaps most interesting, seeing how young designers gather together in communities of shared interest. IDSA, and all who purport to be gathering places for designers, take special note of this last one.

Serious Happiness, Serious Toy

Last January I attended a conference on Positive Psychology at Claremont Graduate University that confirms my belief that the best conferences to attend are ones outside your field. I had heard that one of my heroes, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, would be speaking (the author of "Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience" and one of the authors of "Experience Sampling Method: Measuring the Quality of Everyday Life", which reveals him to be one of the granddaddies of what we call beeper studies), and I wanted to hear him. He was scheduled for the end of the day-long seminar, and I toyed with the idea of coming late just to hear him. I am so glad that I didn't.

The entire conference was a revelation. The field of Positive Psychology is a young one but they are getting busy with the act of measuring happiness, developing a Manual of the Sanities (the opposite of the DSM, or the "manual of the insanities," as they call it), and otherwise treating dysfunction, whether individual or organizational, by focusing on what one is doing right, rather than what one is doing wrong. Being firmly rooted in academia (and most likely attacked from all sides by traditional—i.e. dysfunction-focused—psychologists), they are building an impressive body of work that proves that thesis. You can find video of the entire conference on their web site, plus a good overview of the field in this Time Magazine article.

I took the opportunity to try out my new Pulse Smartpen, a product I'd bought with the hope that it would aid me in taking notes during research interviews. 

What an amazing product. Usually these things are vaporware; this is the first product I've seen of this type that performs as advertised, with very few glitches. The pen works with paper printed in a proprietary dot pattern licensed from the Anoto Group. The dots are in a random pattern, and each area of the pattern is unique. 

Evidently, they have generated an immense area of this pattern—something like an area equivalent to the size of Europe and Russia—and have printed it out on the pages of a set of notebooks that you use with the pen. If you can imagine chopping the pattern up into page-sized pieces and printing it in notebooks, each page of which is unique, you'll get the idea of the basis of the technology.

The pen has an IR camera embedded in the tip that "sees" the dot pattern. The pen knows, then, where it is on any page of any of the eight notebooks. And just when you think, aha!, here's where they're making their money—you're hooked into buying their notebooks—it's true that you are, but the notebooks (standard spiral notebooks or 5.5 x 8.5 Moleskine-type books) cost about what the ordinary versions cost. Not a big deal.

So the pen does not actually record the image of the pen stroke; it records the location the pen is on the paper when the pressure sensor indicates that you are pressing down, i.e. writing. It's a pretty fool-proof system that records what you write by hand and stores it in the flash memory in the pen.

You dock the pen to your computer to download the files to a companion piece of software, the Livescribe Desktop, where you can view your notes.

"Cool," you say. But wait. There's more. The pen has a microphone on it that can record audio of what's going on when you write. And it links it to what you write. So. In your notebook, on the analogue version of your notes, you can tap the pen on any part of those notes and the pen will replay the audio that was recorded. It does this on a crappy little speaker on the pen, but on the computer, when you click on the visual image of the notes with your cursor, the playback audio reveals that the mic on the pen is surprisingly good for the size of the pen, and if the speakers on your computer are good (or you're listening through a headset), you will hear surprisingly good-quality audio.

But wait. There's more. The pen comes with a headset that plugs into a mini-jack at the top end. Each earbud on the headset not only contains a speaker but also contains its own microphone. When you wear the headset while taking notes, the pen will record binaural, stereo audio. The playback, if you listen through the headset or through any headset connected to your computer, will give you a "you are there" experience of the event. This is seriously cool. Knowing just enough about brain science to make me dangerous, I can imagine that a learning-disabled child, taking notes with the pen and headset in school, can replay the notes later and hearing the stereo recording will enable him to better recall the experience of the teacher's lecture, hence enabling better incorporation of the knowledge. Just a theory, but I'm sticking to it. At the very least, the high-quality binaural audio puts me back into the conference in an immersive way, which I know helps my recall of the event.

They call these recordings linked to notes "paper replay" sessions, and there is a community web site where one can upload paper replay sessions for others to access online. I haven't experimented with this part of the system until now (I've only looked around at some of the recorded sessions that others have uploaded there). They just added the ability to embed sessions into blogs, so I'm trying it out. Here goes.

01.24.2009 09:14:09 AM Claremont: Seligman
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This is a 7-minute session of Martin Seligman's introductory remarks at the Claremont Positive Psychology conference. I recorded this with the headset, and if you listen to it with headphones, you'll see the quality of the binaural audio. Pretty darned cool.

Oh. By the way. Click with your cursor anywhere on the greyed-out notes and you'll skip instantly to that part of the recording. This is immensely helpful for reviewing longer talks, like this one:

Cyberterrorism: Col. Jodine Tooke 02.19.2009 01:52:14 PM
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This one is a longer recording, but an interesting one. I recorded it at Art Center College of Design's 2009 Summit, a small conference we hold each February on the topic of sustainability. This talk is an example of why I like this little conference—it attracts a wide variety of presenters on a number of interesting topics, in this case Col. Jodine Tooke, who is talking about how the US Air Force is keeping us safe from Cyberterrorism. Pretty darn cool as well.

And speaking of the length of the recording, you can see how, by clicking anywhere on the image of the notes you can skip to that part of the talk. This makes listening to a longer talk much easier—you can navigate around within it in an intelligent way (as long as the notes I've taken are intelligible to you, which they may or may not be... sorry). This is a marked improvement on merely listening to an audio file, where your only option is to scroll forward or backward, without knowing where you are "landing."

This second recording is an example of what is captured without using the headset—just recording with the mic in the pen. Not bad at all, although you'll note that it's a monaural recording.

In sum, I'm very happy with the pen. In the past, I've recorded using a Belkin mic attached to my iPod, making note of the time signature in my notebook whenever the speaker says anything interesting, so that I'd be able to cut straight to that part of the recording later. With this pen, the linking of written notes to recorded audio is automatic.

The only glitch that I've found is that not all of my pen strokes are captured, which you can see in the first example, above. I was writing more slowly in the second example, and so (while my handwriting is atrocious, sorry) you can see the complete words.

My friends who are designers are not happy that the pen strokes are recorded as lines of consistent width. They would like the dynamic quality (thick, thin) of the line to be captured. To them, I say, This is not a Wacom tablet. Get over it. It would, however, be an easy way to record simple sketches (the files can be saved three ways: as linked Paper Replay sessions, as JPEG files, and as AIFF sound files) and get them into a layer in Illustrator or Photoshop to use as an underlay. You can buy unlined Moleskine-type notebooks with the dot pattern only, which would make this easy.

All in all I'm pretty happy with the pen, and it's made accessing my notes much easier than before. I used to attend conferences and take copious notes that I'd rarely look at later. I find that I'm accessing what I've written much more often now.

The Omnivorous Eye

California Department of Transportation District 7 Headquarters, Thom Mayne, 2004

Earl's Service, Gilmore Gas Station, Farmers Market

Sean Casey, storm chaser and IMAX director, in front of his Tornado Intercept Vehicle

I think 90% of design research is the act of walking through the world with your eyes open. Today I was reminded of Martin Schall, one of the all-time champions in that department. Schall, called "LA's Intimate Stranger" by the LA Times, has been shooting Los Angeles—mostly our architecture, but also vehicles, street art, and anything else that catches his distinguished eye—since he visited as a tourist in 1966. He makes yearly pilgrimages to our fair city and though he's not known for it even to those close to him, he has become well known here and among urban designers for the detailed, street-level documentation of LA on his web site, you-are-here.com. He's not an architect, photographer or connected to urban design at all. He's a German oil and gas engineer who works on oil rigs in the Persian Gulf. What spare time he has is dedicated to maintaining the web site, and when his boss forces him to take time off, he comes to LA to continue his mission. 

I celebrate his magnificent obsession and invite you to examine the length and breadth of his site—the STARchitects, the Googie, the Transportation, and especially the MAP—with the same attention to detail that he gives our town. You won't be disappointed. 

What I'm Up To

Research wall from Camp Boomer, a three-term research project on Baby Boomers entering retirement, by Laura Dye and Heather Emerson, back when they were my students.

I'm two-thirds through with my MSID in design research at Art Center, and I feel the need to take stock of where I am. I've been teaching design research to product design students at Art Center since 1991, but since my journey down the path of getting this additional degree I have been traveling over some interesting ground. Here's an update.

My goal is to be able to teach product design students how to do credible and effective qualitative design research. Most product designers are at first focused on the methods, like we would be on any set of tools. Give me the tools, and I'll use 'em. I think this comes from how we learn the design process. It is a standard sequence—investigation, problem definition, ideation, concept generation, concept refinement, final design specification. We learn it by doing it, over and over. We expect that any problem can be solved by the application of this process, and for the most part this is true.

The investigation stage, however, has its own set of tools (methods), borrowed from science, psychology, anthropology, etc., and there is no standard set that applies to all situations. It is important to know not only the methods that are out there, but also the rationale behind their application. And nobody has a complete list. For example, Brenda Laurel’s Design Research cites 36; the Design and Emotion Society’s Methods and Tools web site describes 57 (not all research—some of those are analysis); and IDEO outlines 36 research and 15 analysis tools in their Method Cards. After reviewing these and other sources and allowing for duplication, I have found 52 distinct techniques for research and 18 for analysis (and I've only begun to compile a list of those).

Many design firms' initial experience with research is via the hiring of a specialist. They observe the process that that person uses for a particular investigation and assume that that is "the process," (it's as if they think that, like design itself, design research has a universal process applicable to all situations). Some offices then polish up that process, giving it a catchy name and graphic veneer, and add it to the list of their firm's capabilities as a branded form of research, much like they began to offer engineering capability in the 80s. It's a way of making their firms more marketable. In the competitive environment of today's consulting offices, this is understandable and necessary.

The problem is that the research approach should differ depending on the issues under investigation. Good research takes into consideration the entire palette of methods available and chooses the right set to uncover the necessary knowledge in each situation. It's vitally important, then, to understand the rationale behind each choice.

And above all it is important that designers understand that qualitative research is not merely a kit of tools, it is an approach. At its heart is an immutable demand: to understand and have empathy with the point of view of all customers and stakeholders in a situation. In order to gain this understanding one must make smart decisions about which methodologies to employ. [I use the term methodology to mean the tool, or method, plus the rationale behind using it.]

So my goal is twofold: first, to acquaint my students with at least a basic set of methods, and second, to enable them to understand why, and in which situations, a particular one would be effective.

I continue to teach my course the way I've done it since 1991: using the time-honored project-based learning we're accustomed to—learning by doing. The students engage in fourteen weeks of field research and analysis (in some cases, more than one term's worth, as in Laura Dye and Heather Emerson's Camp Boomer project, above), culminating in a research presentation. They choose the topic and I advise them on approaches that would be effective. The problem with this is that the students, like the consulting firms I describe earlier, often come away from the experience thinking that there is one way to do research.

To remedy this I have added a theoretical component that teaches the wider range of methods and their accompanying rationales. A survey of the methods is followed by learning the principles behind their application via the case study method. The cases are written specifically to teach design research, and each case centers on important axioms. Much like the case study method pioneered by the Harvard Business School, the cases provide opportunities for students to engage in discussions centered on the decision process involved. Instead of discussions about management theory, the cases I am writing focus on the decisions necessary for planning research activities. A range of cases allow students to act out the planning process—and choose approaches—for research that would apply to a variety of design problems.

So far, I've got that long list of methods and am working on descriptions of each of them (broken down into: a brief description, an example, the objective, the procedure, the rationale, advantages and limitations, and citations of references where one could go for more examples, papers by those who have used the approach, etc).

I've got a few simple cases that I have used to teach basic axioms, and am working on some larger ones with research specialists from a couple of well-known firms. Both are excited about my doing this work, and although it's a tall order to flesh these out, it will be worth it.

While I started out like many product designers, focusing on finding "the right kit of tools," I have come to realize that the so-called tools are only a means to an end. What really matters is how smart you are at analyzing what you get from using them, and figuring out what it means.

This Is Brilliant

You can accuse me of living under a rock because I haven't seen one of these before, but this is absolutely brilliant. I just bought a new contact grill and take a look at the plug on the cord set. For all of you designers out there who bemoan the "stupidity" of consumers, how they won't follow directions, bla bla bla, take note of this simple design solution. 

The problem is as old as electric products themselves. People grab the cord rather than the plug to unplug an appliance, eventually ruining the cord. 

The conventional solution: warn people not to do this. Put it in the instruction manual. Get irritated at them and call them stupid for ignoring this warning.

The brilliant solution: Breville's designers designed the plug with a convenient hole to hook a finger into. Yes, I know there are plugs with flanges that provide good affordances for pulling. My Dyson has one of these:

Sure, either of these affordances could be ignored, but the shape of the Breville plug, top, invites us to use it in the way the designers intend. It's a message from the designer: "Here's something helpful. I'm thinking of you."

Moral of the story. Design things to accommodate what your customer actually does, rather than what you think they should do. Give, in a spirit of generosity. Remember Eva Zeisel and her message to us: Design is a gift across time from the one who made it to the one who receives it.

Stroller Theory, Revisited

Well, so much for my Unified Stroller Theory (previous post). Like I tell my students, Strauss and Howe's pronouncements about generational types don't account for individual variations.