Design Investigations

Web Site [semi]-Launch

2010-11-21T14:19:00.000-08:00

I will be posting from now on on my new web site, DesignInvestigations.com. Please go there to stay in touch with my and my students' activities, thanks!

Engines of Innovation

2010-03-06T12:55:00.001-08:00

Just listened to this Podcast of a conversation between Brian Eno and Steven Johnson, roughly organized around Johnson's book, The Invention of Air, but talking about environments that support innovation, how ideas can be made, and what conditions are in place when this happens. Very interesting.

Eno and Johnson talk about how Londoners went from drinking wine and beer all day to drinking coffee and tea in the 1760s, and the explosion of coffee houses that provided gathering places for intellectual discussion. They pose the question of whether this fueled the innovations of the Enlightenment - hubs where different disciplines connect combined with an atmosphere of amateurism being characteristic of environments that foster innovation. Johnson compares this open sharing of ideas and cross-disciplinary exploration to the atmosphere in the Silicon Valley. Eno talks about the period in the 60s in England when art schools were where the interesting music was being made - the idea of crossing disciplinary boundaries being essential for creativity - comparing that to the early days of Silicon Valley, when folks coming from a wide variety of disciplines had a hand in creating the personal computer. The idea of randomness being important to innovation, and that when you have experts from only one field involved, that essential randomness is eliminated.

He also discusses platforms that inspire creativity, comparing the 45 rpm record to iPhone apps. Rock music being very easy to play, combined with the 45 rpm record being easy to record and distribute, plus a thirsty dissemination medium, radio, always looking for something new to play. Johnson and Eno compare this to the current open platform web environment, and especially the iPhone app platform.

Well worth a listen.

Art Center Futures

2010-01-14T09:05:00.000-08:00

Art Center College of Design Visioneering Panel

brought to you by Livescribe

Last night Art Center College of Design's new president, Lorne Buchman, started a conversation within our community about future directions with a few guests from outside the college. This is a Livescribe recording of the panel discussion, delivered to a packed house of students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Panelists were Katherine Hayles, David Rice, Stephen Oliver, and Andrew Blauvelt.

The discussion was webcast, but I'm not sure they saved it in a form that is still accessible, so I'm posting the session here for those who are interested. For those of you unfamiliar with Livescribe recordings, the audio is linked to the written notes, and you can click anywhere on the notes to hear what was being said at that time. It's a useful way to record a session as long as this one, because you can skip around.

Today we will have a day-long brainstorm on a number of topics: students & student life (life?! what life!! you mean there's life outside of Art Center??!! ;-)), curriculum & pedagogy, outside partnerships, governance & community (promises to be a hot topic, given the excitement of the past couple of years), and future trends & global context. If I have time (we start the term next Monday) I'll report on that as well.

Design Thinking

2009-11-17T06:41:00.000-08:00

Dev Patnaik's recent post at Fast Company.com about reinventing the MBA caught my eye this morning. In an interview of Roger Martin, of the Rotman School of Management, they discuss the idea of bringing Design Thinking into the mix of what a business degree should include. The discussion is an excellent one, and if you don't have the time to listen to it in the video, at least read Dev's summary at the Fast Company site.

This idea, Design Thinking (which I define as the sort of creative problem solving / lateral thinking / & so forth taught in many—but most definitely not all— design schools), looks like the new darling of the business press, and I welcome that. The more we can integrate this sort of thinking into all of our problem-solving processes, the better off we will be. But when I reflect on what's missing in today's business management, I see another, perhaps more important omission.

I think we're long overdue for a renaissance of the ideas of Peter Drucker. On my drive home yesterday I caught the public radio program, Marketplace, and heard Kai Ryssdal's interview of Harvard Business School's Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who has written an article about the continuing relevance of Drucker's ideas in this month's Harvard Business Review.

This week we are celebrating (along with the 103rd birthday of Eva Zeisel, of course) the 100th anniversary of Drucker's birth. Most will know about Drucker, who was considered the father of business management. I found this short interview an excellent review of Drucker's ideas, some of which we are in sore need of today:

As Kanter says, "First was the importance of a company having a sense of mission or a purpose, and that's not identical with its strategy, it's not identical with its business model, it's why it exists and what social good or greater good that it's serving." Most important, he did not hold that management should concern itself solely with serving shareholder needs: " He talked about all the responsibilities of management, so shareholders were certainly one for businesses but also employees, customers, suppliers, and society in general.

Ryssdal: what Drucker would say about "the context that a lot of businesses find themselves in today of really having to cut their costs and get their share price up, maximize their profitability?"

Kanter: "Peter was a very big believer in management by objectives. ...you know what your goals are and then you organize to get those goals met, which means to that you do have operate efficiently. But it also means that you don't sacrifice the long term for the short term. So ever since he started writing about high CEO compensation in the 1980s, he said that companies were often not fair. They often did have resources, but they were concentrated at the top. And that letting the shareholders, but also executives, walk away with the lion's share of the profits rather than reinvesting them, that would not create a productive future for business."

So my question is, who is enacting Drucker's ideas today?

Project Infusion, Miami

2009-09-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

I'm back from the IDSA National Conference, Project Infusion, in Miami, and will post my impressions of some of the more interesting sessions in the next few days. Until then, we'll make do with some of the extracurricular events at the conference: Damien Vizcarra, Kevin Young, and Jung Tak of Continuum with their double-winning entry in the IBM Ultimate Derby, "Swine Flu." The design won both the race in their category and the People's Favorite award.

Money added to the car's piggy bank increased the weight and so made the car go faster. I and a number of others packed our change into it until it was full. The designers are multiplying the amount collected by ten and will donate $ 1000 to design education. Nice going, guys!

Below, Lorraine Justice, Head of the Design School at Hong Kong Polytechnic, in a round of PowerPoint Karaoke, in which she presents slides she has never seen before. This was a diversion cooked up by Tamara Christensen of Arizona State, and was great fun between sessions.

F L Wright's Meyer May House Anniversary

2009-09-14T11:28:00.001-07:00

September 10th was the 100th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's Meyer May House, built for retail magnate Meyer May in 1909 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This is perhaps the most meticulously-preserved example of Wright's work, renovated by Steelcase in 1987.

As I get ready to take another group of students through the history of industrial design, it's a joy to find Steelcase's detailed site about this house. I especially like the video on the house and the process of restoring it, as well as the section that illuminates Wright's design principles. Any student of ID or architectural history will be rewarded for spending some time here.

Analytical Toolsets

2009-09-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

Here is the set of tools for analysis of research data that John Payne presented at EPIC 2009. He ran a workshop in which we discussed and refined this process. I was especially interested, as I had come to the same conclusion as John—that there are few who have assembled an organized and comprehensive way to analyze research results. I had begun to assemble a kit of tools of my own:

In my previous post I showed the "Tool Picker" for helping design students decide which research methods to use. The right-hand edge of that diagram containing the list of methods is shown, above. The question: after you use the proscribed set of methods in the field, how do you make sense of what you've found?

I have been putting together a set of tools gathered from my own experience and the experience of others (such as the good folks at the Institute of Design at IIT, Dori Tunstall, Lloyd Walker, Andy Ogden, among others). This is the "Insights : Opportunities" deck we've been using in my Design Investigations course. The intent is that, with the use of a variety of "lenses" through which to look at the data, the conclusions will be more robust. I've been very pleased with the results. Where before, students finished their research presentations with a single slide containing three or four bullet-point conclusions, they are now concluding with ten or twelve slides, each pointing out a viable design opportunity that derives from an insight from the research.

When I saw John's Analysis / Synthesis Palette at EPIC, I was fascinated. He is coming at the same problem from a completely different direction. I am using the metaphor of a group of individuals looking at the research data, each with a different point of view. John is looking at the process itself, and creating, in a wonderfully methodical way, different ways to arrange, sift, compile, deconstruct, and recombine the data, winding up with prescribed directions.

I will be looking over my notes for some time, to decide how I will change what I'm doing based on his approach.

The Insight : Opportunity Deck

2009-09-05T14:40:00.001-07:00

Research is worthless unless it fuels the design process. Once the fieldwork is done, we need additional tools to help us make sense of what we've got. I have been using a variant of the KJ Method (developed by Jiro Kawakita in the 60s, similar to Affinity Diagrams) for years in my course, but recently I've begun to beef up the process by which we analyze what results. I've begun to assemble a deck of analytical aids to help guide students' thinking into areas they might not automatically consider. I've found many methods in use for fieldwork and am developing an aid to reduce the complexity of navigating that decision (discussed in the previous post), but to date I haven't found many aids for making sense of the the analysis process.

In practice, designers always work in a multidisciplinary team and research findings are interpreted by a number of different specialists: designers, human factors engineers, anthropologists—the list varies according to the needs of the project. In student work and also in small design firms, those multiple viewpoints may not exist. The deck consists of lists of questions that we can "ask" the data—questions that an anthropologist might ask, or a cognitive scientist, or an engineer, or a management consultant.

Students stand in front of the wall of data and work their way through the deck, each card acting as a lens through which they view the data. The deck is in two parts: an insight deck and an opportunity deck. The first part helps reveal important insights that might fuel design opportunities. We work slowly and methodically through the deck, making an effort to find—even force—connections between the questions and the data.

The insights are listed, mapped, or arranged in diagrams, as needed. The second deck is used to create and validate the design opportunities represented by each insight.

This process takes two or three weeks, at least. At the end, we link the insights to opportunities for design intervention, seeking quantity, quality, depth, and range: products, experiences, and business models from near term to blue sky, mild to wild. Our aim is to present our clients with a robust set of insight : opportunity pairs, hooking each opportunity to the insight that inspired it.

This is a work in process. Last week at EPIC2009 I took part in an amazing workshop with John Payne from MomentDesign, who showed us an analysis framework he's been developing, and based on that excellent session (which I hope to cover in an upcoming post) I know I will be developing this further.

I'll be presenting this work at the IDSA National Conference in Miami in a few weeks. If any of you are attending, I'd love to have the opportunity to show you more and get your feedback. See you there!

Designing Design Research

2009-09-04T10:05:00.001-07:00

By way of an explanation for why I haven't posted lately, this last term was consumed by two projects: finishing the plan for what I've come to call the "tool picker" (above) to help designers new to qualitative research expand their palette of methods, plus a set of analytical tools to use on the research data.

This, on top of a term of research for a multi-term project for the American Red Cross, kept me busier than a dot painter in a paisley tie factory. I'll post more on all of this in the upcoming weeks.

The so-called "tool picker," above, is an attempt to help designers explore beyond a set research methodology. As currently taught (and sometimes practiced), design research is often treated as a constant set of tools and, as a result, students tend to think that it's a standard process. The field of design research has evolved into a complex landscape of approaches, however, and good design practice stays abreast of these developments.

In order to help my students break out of a narrow approach and yet negotiate the complexity of the myriad methods in practice today, I am attempting to acquaint them with a comprehensive and yet manageable set of methods. Also, I need to equip them with an understanding of why, and in which situations, a particular approach would be effective.

Currently, the research approach is chosen by those with expertise. There is a "guru" who brings years of experience to bear on the decision. Is there a way to enable beginners to more quickly gain the experience necessary to know which approach might be best for a given problem?

I distilled the complex set of approaches in use today into a set of eighteen (you see them down the right-hand side of the diagram, above). I will be creating a decision-making tool to guide the students through the decision process by asking a series of questions about what type of knowledge they seek for a given topic.

Starting at the left-hand side with a careful choice of topic, students are asked to generate a research objective statement. We discuss issues of ethics, scope, appropriateness, and so forth, and gain explicit knowledge of the researcher's bias.

Moving on to the decision process (while at the same time generating specifications of which sorts of participants will be recruited and engaging in the recruitment process), students begin to consider the type of knowledge they seek. We consider three general areas of knowledge about the user: what they do, what they feel, and who they are. Moving right-ward through the diagram, you can see how we move into finer levels of discrimination, arriving at a recommended set of methods.

This is a first rough design for the tool. When I first completed this version, I was disheartened at first by seeing that, if one worked backwards through the chart one could see that a skilled researcher could use any of the tools to uncover any of the types of knowledge desired. But I reminded myself that this is a decision tree that helps beginners and widens their view beyond a limited single-thread process. The tool is designed to lead them to the most appropriate choice, by no means the only choice possible. Once they've used the tool for a few projects, they will begin to gain knowledge of the wider set of approaches and begin to see how the different methods work in different cases. Once they begin to see that the tools actually can be tailored to many purposes, they are right where I want them: imbued with a robust working knowledge of the multivariate research process.

Crossing the Chasm

2009-05-24T12:42:00.000-07:00

Demo lecture
brought to you by Livescribe

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

2009-05-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-06T12:28:00.000-07:00

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
brought to you by Livescribe

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
brought to you by Livescribe

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

2009-01-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-31T11:15:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-01T14:43:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Stroller Theory

2008-10-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

I was talking to my colleague Steve Montgomery today about my Unified Stroller Theory (it's not really unified, but I think theories sound better if called that, don't you?). The theory goes like this: I think the generational demographics outlined in Strauss and Howe's Generations: A History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 and expanded on in The Fourth Turning—that is, that societal attitudes about children and the degree of nurturance they receive have swung from casual to protective—are reflected in baby stroller design from the 60s to today.

In the late 60s-early 70s, you saw minimal strollers like the first Maclaren, above—no protection for the kid, all about convenience for the parent--because that generation of parents had a casual attitude toward parenting. Entitled beneficiaries of the post-WWII economic boom, this generation of parents carried childhood self-centeredness into adulthood. They seemed to view their lives and goals as central, with kids added. The kids were pretty much part of whatever the parents were doing. I can remember one of my young college professors who had a small child. Like many young adults at the time who were busy "finding themselves," she continued her work as a painter and teacher, and didn't skip a beat—the kid went wherever she did. I remember seeing her one day, forging her way across a busy city street, thrusting that baby carriage out in front of her as she raced across, mid-block. I can still picture that red Maclaren B-01 in my mind's eye.

Even the jogging stroller (especially the jogging stroller) fits the theory. The inventor, journalist and jogger Phil Baechler, wanted to spend more time with his son, but instead of dropping everything to do that, he built a stroller that allowed him to bring the boy along with what he would be doing anyway. No judgement here on the quality of parenting—just observing that in these examples, the kid is included in the parent's life, rather than the parent's life being solely centered on the child. What I see today is a less easy-going and casual, and more intensely focused, style.

The 60s and 70s saw the rise in dual-income couples, the resulting phenomenon of latchkey kids, and the generation we have come to call Gen X—one that has gotten a very bad rap from the rest of us (much of the time undeserved, I might add). As these children grew up into risk-taking young people with a live-fast, die-young worldview, the indictment of them by society was severe. Portrayals of children in movies like Rosemary's Baby and The Omen reveal uneasiness, or at best, ambivalence. The worsening trend of lack of nurture continued until we became fed up with what we perceived as the "slacker" generation that resulted.

These days, we see a complete turnaround. Movies like Home Alone portray the kinds of kids we want to raise today—smart, resourceful, and assertive.

In the 90s, many of our kids began to go to school in uniforms. Education became a top political priority (in the 70s it was something that we lost focus on). Strollers began to be bulky, protective, and padded—the SUVs of the sidewalk—telegraphing the message that kids are precious cargo.

Most recently, kids are the focus of increasingly intense nurturing attention, and strollers have risen to cult objects that now telegraph this amped-up emotion. Considering our growing uncertainty in the face of perilous times, it's not surprising that our protectiveness is on steroids. The same obsession that goes toward Vuitton bags is now spent on outfitting our child with the latest. With a product like the Orbit, you are not buying a stroller, you are buying a system. We're even seeing a reprise of the old-fashioned pram (nostalgia is the last refuge of those enduring turbulent times).

I. Can't. WAIT!

2008-09-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

I don't know why it's taken us so long to begin to talk about getting high speed rail into California, but it's well past time. It's a no-brainer, especially now with the post-9/11 airport security measures making door-to-door between Los Angeles and San Francisco a tossup between taking a plane and driving there.... The route between Sacramento and San Diego has been approved, the environmental studies have been given the go-ahead, and it's now up to to voters to vote on a bond measure on the November ballot. Let's hope that the voters have the sense to say yes. Check out the web site. There are some wonderful quicktime animations. If you download them, they come up as full-screen movies. The station view, above, is particularly nice at that size.

Cranbrook / IIT Smackdown, II

2008-09-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

A pair of slides from yesterday's presentation by Cranbrook's Scott Klinker and IIT's Jeremy Alexis. Above, IIT aims to root out inefficiencies in process, while Cranbrook asks, "But what will it look and feel like?

Above, radical craft: genetic code-generated silverware. At this point in the presentation, the discussion turned toward what we might call digital baroque.

I found the presentation compelling, with both sides—IIT's down-to-earth approach and Cranbrook's "things with attitude"—represented well. The result confirmed what I've believed all along: it's not either / or, and we can stop the name-calling. There is a valid place for both.

Cranbrook / IIT Smackdown

2008-09-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

This morning, Cranbrook's Scott Klinker (above, wrapped in Eames' Design Q & A diagram) and IIT's Jeremy Alexis revisited a debate between the institutions' dueling ideologies that had occurred between Michael McCoy and Chuck Owen some years ago in ID Magazine. Very thought provoking. Fuel for many upcoming discussions, to be sure, with my students. A few aspects of the debate:

Cranbrook : IIT

things with attitude : strategies that transform organizations

exploring personal voice : improving organizational performance

cultural innovation : business innovation

patrons : clients

social value : value to the organization

I know this is cryptic, but it's late. More later.

Mobility Vision Integration Process Workshop

2008-09-13T21:24:00.001-07:00

Today at Polar Opposites Geoff Wardle presented the Mobility Vision Integration Process, a method developed by Lloyd Walker, Geoff, Andy Ogden, Heidrun Mumper-Drum and David Muyers at Art Center. It's a way to run futures scenarios brainstorming workshops using a set of cards that they have developed. This video was shot at Art Center's Sustainability Summit this past Spring, where the mVIP cards were rolled out for the first time. In it, Lloyd Walker describes the mVIP process and you can see how we used the cards.

In today's workshop, a team looks over the "hand" of cards they've been dealt that describes the future world. The team gets an understanding of this world for a few minutes and considers the implications of the scenario.

Left to right: Ron Pierce in the black shirt, Peter Treadway, standing, and Mark Dziersk, at far right. My apologies to the other two designers! I've forgotten who you are!

Next, four cards are dealt that describe the enterprise the team works for, the enterprise's axiom, the customer, and a constraint. The team considers all cards and brainstorms design solutions that address the circumstances set out in the cards.

Finally, one member of the team (in this case, Los Angeles designer Max Beach) presents the design solution to the rest of the teams.

We always have a good time running this workshop. It's a break from the tedium of PowerPoint, and provides a great networking opportunity. When we ran it this Spring, we broke the entire conference out into groups. It was great.

I talked to a number of educators who wanted to check out the cards as a brainstorming and team-building tool for their students.

Be sure to check out the Flash demo we have on line. You can deal yourself (or your students) a "hand," print it out on a letter-sized sheet (using the button at the top right), and have a hard-copy for reference during the exercise. You can deal yourself a random hand or you can select the cards.

Check it out—try it with your team, your firm, or your students, and let us know what you think!

Top o the Morning

2008-09-13T06:40:00.001-07:00

Toasting the morning sun with the only liquid that makes sense in the desert—water—in my new Kor hydration vessel, courtesy of the folks at Eastman. They had presented the Kor story at Art Center a few months ago and told an abridged version here at Polar Opposites Thursday morning. We run materials-based explorations in our Color, Materials, and Trends Exploration Lab (CMTEL), and are scheming up a plan to do one with Eastman soon. More later... I've got to meet Geoff Wardle (whom you saw flying a screaming monkey in the previous post) to help him run a workshop later today with a tool we've developed in Grad ID that enables anyone to run a futures scenario workshop, the deck of mVIP cards. More about that later, too.

Screaming Flying Monkeys at Polar Opposites

2008-09-12T14:56:00.000-07:00

You had to be there. I'll get serious later, but for now, enjoy the screaming flying monkeys, brought to you by the folks at P&G Design.

Something to Consider

2008-09-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

Two slides from Erica Eden's slide show this morning give us something to consider. Erica is a senior designer at Smart Design and one of their FemmeDen, an in-house group of women designers dedicated, as they say "to drawing connections between social, cultural, and economic changes in design to satisfy the unmet needs of women consumers."

If women have 80% of the buying power in this country, yet 85% of industrial designers are men, well, that might explain a few things about the world we find ourselves in.

Eden shared a session this morning with Marti Barletta of TrendSight Group, who specializes in marketing to women. A dynamic, wickedly funny speaker. No surprises in much of her talk for the women designers in the audience, but were the men I saw "multitasking" with their phones at least to some extent tuned in? Hope so.

Some take-aways:

Men (and she's working with averages here, recognizing that there is a continuum) organize by prioritizing, while women organize with an aim toward maximizing. Men focus on a few top-priority criteria in deciding, for example, what jeans to buy, while for women the buying decision is a process of discovery, finding multiple options that fit the initial criteria, adding new criteria, weighing options and working toward a perfect answer. Men buy the first pair of jeans that fit the top criteria; women will look at all factors, coming eventually to the deciding factor that clinches the deal.

Designing for women is like universal design—if you design for women, you amplify the benefits for male customers as well. Key factors to keep in mind:

The Basics

designs must be easy to handle
easy to use single-handedly (consider the McLaren stroller's single-handed 5-second fold and you'll know what we're talking about)
easy to store; efficient use of space
easy to clean (machine-washable stroller liners, for example)
easy to understand (not because they're dumb, but maybe because women don't have the time to mess around? I'm just sayin'... Barletta said that women aren't busy, they are time starved. Indeed.)

Extras

pay attention to aesthetics. They spend time and money designing their living room in Craftsman Style, or Country French, or whatever, and you tell them that they've got to put a big black box of electronics in the middle of it?
appeal to the senses. For four of the five senses, women have more acuity, and for the fifth, sight, it's not that men have better sight, they have better depth and distance vision, while women have better peripheral vision.
offer "two-fers" two-for-one. Sunscreen and foundation. That kind of thing.
make it green. All other factors being equal, 57% of women will choose the environmentally-responsible product.
connect with people. Products that help people connect (Wii, for example, which allows people to play together) are big successes with women consumers.

Well there you have it. Go out there and get busy, people!

IDSA Polar Opposites Conference, Phoenix

2008-09-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

I will be posting from the IDSA National Conference, Polar Opposites, in Phoenix for the next few days. More to come. In the meantime, enjoy the view from my hotel balcony at the Arizona Biltmore, the location of the conference. Oh pool boy.... peel me a grape, would you?

Have Laser Cutter, Will Build House, Part 2

2008-09-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

At Art Center, we've been discussing building student housing for years now. Here's an interesting proposition. It's a wild thought, and one which goes against my (and Art Center's) view that the acres of wild hills that we own around our Ellwood Building should remain untouched, but imagine these little houses perched on that landscape!

That last link, by the way, is to a photograph on you-are-here.com, a site by German petrochemical engineer Martin Schall, who, to date, has shot 2,360 photographs of Los Angeles over who knows how many vacation visits over the years. An amazing body of work showing a somewhat scary level of devotion to our fair city. There's a story there, I'm sure. Maybe one day I'll find it out.

Have Laser Cutter, Will Build House

2008-09-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning / Associate Professor Lawrence Sass and his students designed snap-together laser-cut parts to build a New Orleans shotgun house. Part of the Home Delivery show at the Museum of Modern Art: small houses created with computer-aided design and fabrication. Makes you wonder what they've been doing (how they're spending our money and their time) at FEMA.

Slow Thinking and the Pursuit of Empty-Headedness

2008-09-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

In this GoogleTalk, UW Information School Professor David Levy speaks about how our culture is accelerating so fast that there is no time for creative, contemplative thought. Levy describes this as "slow thought"--the type of thinking that requires quieting down the mind to allow inspiration to arise out of the subconscious. I was reminded of my student days when my department chair, Noel Mayo, had an expert (one of the faculty, Winnie Winston*) teach us how to meditate. I wound up using it then (especially when working against a deadline) and I use it still, though not as consistently as I should, I have to confess.

Along with Vannevar Bush, whom he credits with the invention of the idea of hypertext and the web (in 1945, no less), Levy references Josef Pieper, author of Leisure: The Basis of Culture, who wrote about the need for contemplative thought in 1963. I think designers have no problem understanding the need for this sort of thinking, as we experience it (when we're lucky) in our creative process.

We might ask ourselves, however, if creative thought is as important as we say it is, are we allowing the place, space, quietude, and sanctuary to allow true creative reflection and engagement? Are we doing enough to move beyond having it happen "when we're lucky," to having it happen when we want it to?

As educators we might ask, Do we respect this, or just give lip service to the need for it, in the typical student project timeline?

* Winnie Winston deserves a post to himself. Stay tuned. An industrial designer (Royal Typewriters, Creative Playthings) and ID educator, but also an expert banjo and pedal steel guitar player featured on a number of top bluegrass albums (he was one of Bill Monroe's many "bluegrass boys" and is known by any pedal steel player who started playing from the mid-70s on as "the guy who wrote The Book"). He was also an internationally-known expert on homeopathy.

Objects of Affection, Part 6

2008-08-24T09:03:00.001-07:00

This is the last part of "Objects of Affection," a short piece I wrote about my first meeting with Eva Zeisel. I hope you have enjoyed it.

Jeannie came up the stairs. “Mr. Swan is lonely.” She reminded us that the driver is still waiting in the kitchen. We had reached the limit of his patience. When we came down to leave, he knew that something of great importance had happened. He asked us for our names, so that he could tell his wife where he’d been and who he’d met. We each wrote down who we were, each protesting that the other was more of a luminary. I put an end to the gentle contest. When Eva wrote down her name, I said to Mr. Swan, “Do you see this tableware?” taking in the overloaded shelves of the kitchen with a sweep of my hand, “This woman designed all of these things.” He looked more closely at Eva, and looked at the stacks of dishes. That settled it, in his eyes. He put the paper with our names on it in his pocket.

Sara was my tour guide to Twentieth Century culture on the ride back to the conference. She interpreted the significance of everything we had seen. Turning to me in the darkness of Mr. Swan’s immaculate car, she said, “I suppose you know that this means we are meant to become friends, you and I. This sort of experience does not just happen.” God’s finger.

Coming back to the conference where just hours ago, things of utmost importance were being discussed, nothing seemed as crucial as before. In the treehouse, Eva Zeisel had leaned forward and said, “We are makers of things, not thinkers of thoughts.” Making things, talking with wise people, using the tools my father used, surrounding myself with affectionate objects - these are of life-shaping importance.

The designed object is a vessel of communication, from the one making it to the one holding it. The message can be thoughtless, or it can be infused with meaning that speaks across time. This is my first lesson from a master of the wordless, magic language of design.

Objects of Affection, Part 5

2008-08-21T23:07:00.001-07:00

I walked over to the shelf and picked up the Halls refrigerator pitcher ...

When you see a painting in an art book and then see it on the gallery wall, it is transformed. It comes alive. Time falls away, and you see the canvas fresh from the hand of the painter. The image bypasses the intellect and shoots straight to the instinct, speaking from the painter’s heart to the viewer’s, a one-on-one conversation in the wordless language of the soul.

A great work has the power to stop me in my tracks. But nothing prepared me for the electricity of holding that form in my hands. You can’t tell in the photograph that it starts out a rounded square at the base and tapers into a trapezoid, squeezed not by geometry but by the shape of the hands which hold it. The fluid curves are made to be held. The sides give inward to form a place to grip and pour. The spout pulls slightly downward in a petulant lip. The lid sits softly on top, following the undulating line of the pitcher’s upper edge like a well-rehearsed tango partner. You don’t see these things in a photograph.

We sit, encircled by a life’s work. Sara against a backdrop of iridescent glazes, Eva with a vase beyond, glowing dull and luminous in the darkness. The quiet voices of the master-women...and the quiet voices of the objects shaped by the gesture of dancing hands. Created as gifts to the world. I sit, absorbing a steady radiation of love.

I had described in a letter to Eva my idea of "objects of affection." She talks about these now, referring to them as "affectionate objects." I try to correct her until I realize the meaning revealed by the transposition of those words. My objects of affection are things that I take pleasure in. Passive things. Eva’s affectionate objects speak actively. As I sit in that room listening to Eva and Sara talk, I am struck with an overwhelming, palpable affection from every thing surrounding us. That forms can be created which speak so eloquently – I never knew. The experience of it sinks home to me the active power that an object can project, if it is from the hand of a master of expression. We sit, surrounded by the quiet, lively chatter.

to be continued ...

Objects of Affection, Part 4

2008-08-21T09:37:00.001-07:00

... continuing where we left off—Sara Little Turnbull and I are sitting down to tea with Eva Zeisel:

Eva will not let us help. She carries in a table to hold a tray of food. Tomatoes, a couple of cheeses, boats of French endive, mayonnaise. A late-night feast. The light from the lamp shines through the translucent yellow-green of the lettuce. Everything put in place. When she is ready to sit down, Eva stops at my side and says with a quick sigh of accomplishment, “Now. Let me look at you.” She holds my eyes for a long moment. I let her. I am in safe company. I have never seen eyes like hers – completely brown, but with a narrow border of blue at the outside of the iris. Her daughter Jeannie joins us. She has the same eyes.

Sara and Eva talked about people they have known over the years. Their friends were, to me, the protagonists of art history. I had moments of desperation that I wasn’t grasping what was being said. That things of utter monumental importance were sliding by without sticking, and then I remembered. Relax. I absorbed the conversation through my pores. My soul has heard and has remembered. The message is in my bones, and will speak when I sit down at my work table to create my next humble offering to the universe.

I drink in the things on the tea table. I had poured over the pictures, but the pieces themselves are alive. I had no idea that a shape could be so vocal. Teapot, pitchers, cups, bowls, saucers - nothing out of tune, no line that is not absolutely of the master’s hand.

“There is no way to hold this that is not graceful,” Sara remarks, holding the bowl of cherry tomatoes towards us with a smile. There is a moment that I can not pass without picking up the pitcher of milk, holding it at eye level, burning the image into my retina, and putting it back. Eva watches me do this. We are designers. She understands.

We climb to Eva’s “treehouse,” her studio at the top of the stairs. We pass through the workshop, trade opinions on power saws. She shows us photos of current projects. Climb another flight to the top. To the room of affectionate objects.

The treehouse is a sanctuary that displays all the pieces that Eva has designed on lighted shelves. I spot the refrigerator pitcher she did for Hall kitchenware in 1954. My good sense leaves me and I blurt out, “I would kill for one of those!” She smiles at me like an indulgent grandmother and says with kindness, “You may touch it.”

to be continued...

Objects of Affection, Part 3

2008-08-19T20:55:00.001-07:00

Part three of my story of meeting Eva Zeisel...

Albert Swan, owner and sole driver of Albert Swan’s Limousine Service, owns a spotlessly kept, gold-colored car. He was the carriage driver on our magical journey through the wooded drives of Rockland County. Off we rode into the dark countryside, as Sara talked about Eva Zeisel’s impact on the design world.

We found the address in the darkness of a winding road, turned into a short drive and pulled up behind a stable of Volvo station wagons. Eva came out of the house to meet us, standing on the flagstones paving the tree-shadowed entry. Gurus eventually become human, this one a woman with white hair and kindness in her eyes, waiting to greet us. We asked Mr. Swan to wait, and we went to meet her.

She has the grace and manner of an earlier time, another continent. Old world. I remind myself that the Europeans defined Western hospitality. The house is one of those old, northeastern country houses. Originally very small, and added to over the years, an assembly of rooms following rooms. Settling with great age, the furniture settling with it, standing in place longer than several lifetimes. We pass through the hallway into a sitting room. There are two very small upholstered chairs, armless with heart-shaped backs and flowered covers. Little Miss Muffet chairs. There are two larger wingbacked chairs. I choose one of those; Sara puts her tiny form on one of the tuffets. Each has a chair that fits perfectly.

There are low bookcases along one wall. A lamp stands on one and reminds me that Eva is a designer who is not afraid of ornament. The lamp base swells into a curving volume, white porcelain covered with a repeating design of small gold medallions. In front of us is a low round table filled with teapot, cups, saucers, plates and bowls. All her designs. I can not pull my eyes away from it.

To be continued...

photo: Hallcraft Century in a sublime yellow pattern, photographed at the Mingei Museum, San Diego. For designers like me, raised in the Modernist tradition, the thought of applied decoration gives us pause. Not in this case. The total effect of this display was breathtaking.

Objects of Affection, Part 2

2008-08-18T12:09:00.000-07:00

photo courtesy of Eva Zeisel

Continued from yesterday's story, picking up where I left off: looking at Eva Zeisel's work in the book in the library.

I came away changed to the core. Would it be possible to have this designer come and talk to my students? How do you get in touch with a guru? I dialed Manhattan directory assistance.

The voice on the answering machine was right - the right age, the right accent. The tone was genteel, encouraging. I offered a message to the electronic ear: would Eva Zeisel like to come to Los Angeles to talk to some design students? Two weeks later she called me back. The genteel voice with the European accent said yes, she would come.

Eva Zeisel spoke to me across the timelines of the Twentieth Century, across the boundaries of inhibition, across the limitations of the ego. Designer to designer, speaking the same language. Teacher to student. I wanted my students to have the experience I was having, to learn at the knee of the master. There were many months of preparation. Schedules to be coodinated. Everything must be perfect. A date was set; travel arrangements were made.

A few months later, I was at a conference in New York. I tried to get in touch with Eva, who lived nearby. I finally got through, but it was late on the last day – and I was leaving the next morning. We agreed that I must come over right then and have tea. I told her I had met a friend of hers, Sara Little Turnbull, the Director of the Process of Change Laboratory at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Eva said, “Bring her along.” She ended the conversation with, “You know, I think that our meeting like this, it has God’s finger in it.”

Sara is another luminary. She had a line of people waiting to talk to her at all times during the conference. But an invitation like this is not an everyday thing. I interrupted her at dinner. I apologized to her companion and whispered in Sara’s ear, “Do you want to go to Eva Zeisel’s house for tea?” She looked up with wide eyes and said, “Now?” I said yes. She rose from the table, saying to her dinner partner, “I hope you understand, but something has come up which I must do.” She walked out of the restaurant, down the corridor and to the front portico of the conference center, and stood poised on the curb like a figure on the foredeck of a seagoing ship. She stood there like that until the car came to take us away.

There are people who stand, killing time. Sara stood, running through the camera of her mind: what she felt when she thought of Eva’s work. Her magnificent ability to question the rules of the world. The designer who refused to use the term “Good Design.” When questioned about the subject at a Museum of Modern Art symposium, she replied, “Love is a very personal matter.” The next day it was headline news in the New York Times: “Eva Zeisel Says Love Is a Personal Matter.” A designer who challenged convention.

Eva at her one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art, 1946, a few months after MoMA's exhibition of the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames.

To be continued...

Objects of Affection, Part 1

2008-08-17T15:46:00.000-07:00

The past few days I've been emailing back and forth with my new colleague, Julka Almquist, who will be teaching a new course in design ethnography at Art Center. I find we are both Eva Zeisel fans. I was reminded of a piece I wrote back in 1996 for presentation at the IDSA National Education Conference. It describes, in a very personal way, my first meeting with Eva and the impact this meeting had on me. I met her in the early 90s, at the start of a renaissance of interest in her work. Today, of course, she's the talk of every design magazine and newspaper. It was a night to remember, as I was not alone—with me came Sara Little Turnbull, another giant figure in design. I will post the piece that I wrote about our meeting—Objects of Affection—in several episodes over the next few days. I hope you enjoy it.

Once upon a time in a library, I found a book which changed my life. It is called Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry. I like the sound of that. Inside, there’s a photo of Eva, suitcase in hand, just arrived at a small midwestern train stop, setting off across a field towards a factory in the distance. The Designer for Industry, come to do her job.

The front cover shows a nested group of serving dishes, the shapes splashing outward in a corona of liquid white. The curving edges of the platters unfold upward, tapering and thinning as they stretch toward the gripping-places, inviting the touch of a hand.

I paged through the book to find shapes I had known all my life: the salt and pepper shakers nestling together like mother and child; glassware remembered from a thousand neighborhood dinner tables. Table furnishings from my childhood, looked at with my designer’s eyes. I had no idea shapes could be like this.

Eva Zeisel worked and lived through the flash points of the modern movement. A journeyman-potter with a studio in her parent’s garden in 1925 Vienna, when young women from well-to-do families didn’t do such things. A studio in Berlin in the 30s, when the design world was being set afire, and Berlin was the place to be. Art Director of the china and glass industry for the Russian Republic in 1935, when Russia was an exciting but dangerous place to be. Falsely accused of plotting to kill Stalin, imprisoned and interrogated for months and then miraculously released. She escaped from Austria the day Hitler invaded. She eventually settled in New York, set up a studio and taught at Pratt for many years.

Throughout this explosion of living, Eva created many, many designs of tableware for manufacturers here, in Europe and Japan. At the height of her popularity from the 40s to the 60s, thousands of her designs were selling successfully all over the world. I studied the photographs in the catalogue. The shapes full of life, expressive. Astonishing. The curves seemed to extend beyond expectation in a multi-lingual vocabulary of expression from one pattern to the next – here friendly and informal, there sophisticated and crisp, elegant and fluid. I was looking at the work of a master.

To be continued...

Michael Wesch Explains Everything

2008-08-06T08:04:00.000-07:00

Michael Wesch, who is the Kansas State professor of anthropology who created the well-known video, "A Vision of Students Today," gave a talk recently at the Library of Congress. It's an anthropologist's take on the phenomenon of YouTube and Web 2.0, and what it means for rethinking, as he says, our conception of copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, and ourselves.

It's long (55 minutes), but excellent. Bless his heart, he has provided an index, so you can cut to the chase, but the entire thing is "the chase," so I suggest you watch the entire thing. Wesch, an academic who would have, in the old days, been happy to reach 200 people with his message, has a world-wide audience. The very idea that a professor of anthropology has become a star via self-publishing on the internet is testimony to what he and his students are studying.

Enjoy.

The Art of the Car Display

2008-07-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles is the original car-centric culture, and we have brought the art of the car display to a highly refined level. Above is an early example, at the house of movie star Frederick March's Bel Air mansion (found on image-archaeology.com, a wonderful repository of post cards, matchbook covers, and other SoCal ephemera). Perhaps it is this convergence of auto culture and Hollywood culture that created the phenomenon. Touring the well-manicured homes of the stars, might Angelinos have longed to create a display of their own?

I still have a small treasure of a book, Charles Jenks's "Daydream Houses of Los Angeles," in which he tours LA residential neighborhoods and waxes acidic with pithy captions like, "Debbie Reynolds Egyptoid with Topiary Petrol Pumps and Car Display." Love it.

Here is a north-of-San-Vicente version. Less is more (less is a bore?).

Not to be confused with cars (in this case, trucks) parked ON the lawn. Every neighborhood has one of these households....

But you don't have to be rich to engage in the art, especially if you can get your neighbor to collaborate by paving over the yard between the houses. Muscle cars like caterpillars in their pupae, waiting (but for ample amounts of money and elbow grease) to be reborn.

Art That Makes You Think

2008-07-15T10:19:00.000-07:00

I ran across this quote on John Massengale's blog (New Urbanist architect). He's commenting on the waterfall art installation in NYC.

Eliasson Waterfall at Brooklyn Bridge from rsguskind on Vimeo.

He says, "Art like this is supposed to make you 'think.' I don't think it makes you think anything worth thinking. I wish art schools would go back to teaching the transcendent power of beauty."

Heads up: teaching the transcendent power of beauty, in fact, has migrated to industrial design. It did this midway through the twentieth century. Case in point: Eva Zeisel.

Eva was the first to teach an industrial design approach (design for mass production) for tableware at Pratt in the late 30s. Here she is, above left, with some of her students' work. She arranged for them to design products for the Bay Ridge pottery in New Jersey. The dish on the right is from her "Classic Century" pattern—a combination of two of her most popular designs, "Tomorrow's Classic" and "Century"—now sold by Crate and Barrel.

When she visited Art Center in the 90s, Eva took a tour of our gallery. On the wall in the fine art side was, if I remember, a large crucifix made of what looked like scrap wood. There was also a structure the size of a small hut, built of the same sort of wood. Zeisel is an opinionated woman. She stopped dead in her tracks and demanded an explanation. I told her that I didn't think I had one. I could only observe that it seemed to me that creating something that was accessible, something that an average viewer would find beautiful, was now forbidden in fine art.

Zeisel stood near a display of orange juice squeezers. They were designed by early-term industrial design students in beautiful, curvilinear shapes and vibrant colors. She wondered why it was that here [with a wave of her hand taking in the ID side of the gallery] where there are so many limitations—constraints of technology, function, user need and business realities—was where the beauty lay, and not there [in the fine art gallery] where there were no constraints.

As she has said to me more than once, "That's a very good question!"

The Origins of Kawaii

2008-07-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

I have figured out why the Japanese are masters of "Kawaii," or cuteness. Their cats have bigger eyes than ours do. Case in point, above. This is one of Junku's cats, made famous on his hit Flickr set, "Airborne Cats." To quote the photographer, "Junku's five daughters, Rika, Hime, Fuwari, Kin, and Nana jump gracefully, feverishly, and lovably. Their dancing surely makes you feel happy." If you haven't checked this amazing set of photos out, please do. It's time. This Flickr set does indeed, as they say, "make laugh and surprise to the world." And yes, there is a book.

An Ethnographic Interview Primer

2008-07-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.

The Illinois Institute of Technology's Gabe Biller and Kristy Scovel have created a nice introductory video on how to conduct an ethnographic interview. It features Dori Tunstall, who teaches a course called Design Ethnography at the University of Illinois Chicago and Colleen Murray of Jump Associates, along with a host of IIT folks. It's a job well done and well worth watching.

Inclusive Design Toolkit

2008-07-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

The i~design research team has developed an Inclusive Design Toolkit, as they say it, "to support designers and those involved in product development, as well as providing a general guide to inclusive design for businesses." This is an image from one of the Impairment Simulators, empathy tools that simulate common vision and hearing impairments, in this case showing the effect of Retinitis Pigmentosa on a consumer's ability to use a vending machine interface. There is an impressive set of resources for product strategy, categorization of users, task analysis and evaluation, for designers and product development managers alike.

Dirt: Matter Out of Place

2008-06-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

Dirt, as defined by the anthropologist Mary Douglas, is “matter out of place.” Soil in the garden is "in place," but on the kitchen floor is "out of place," and therefore "dirty." I find this a fascinating topic. When we examine what it is that makes matter “out of place” in a particular culture, we learn more about that culture and its world view.

Take, for example, the clothes in this photo: two pair of pants lying on the sidewalk outside a drug store. There is no one nearby who might be their owner. The clothes are worn, so much so that some might call them rags. Others, however, might see these clothes as still quite wearable, despite the frayed edges and holes. In fact, in the context of a high-priced clothing store, the denim jeans might fetch an exorbitant price.

Here are two pairs of jeans, sold in stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Nieman Marcus. The well-worn pair sells for over $300 and the "lightly distressed" pair is $540. In the experience of West LA culture, women and men spend quite a bit of money for “artfully” worn-out jeans. In their perception, jeans in this context are worth a great deal.

But not the jeans on the sidewalk. These, because they are abandoned on a curb and not hanging on a hangar in Bergdorf's, are most likely perceived as suspect, associated with societal outliers—the homeless who might have abandoned them there. They might belong to people that West LA culture defines as “out of place,” and so the clothes themselves are out of place. They are dirt.

But wait—there's more!

Those expensive jeans are "distressed" in factories like this one in Tehuacán, Mexico, which artificially wear the fabric with sandpaper and other abrasives, and bleach them with potassium permanganate.

The untreated waste water is sent directly into an irrigation canal used by local farmers.

"As well as being blue, it burns the seedlings and sterilises the earth," says one of the local farmers, interviewed by the Guardian's Jo Tuckman, in an article published in August, 2007.

Jeans on a sidewalk; jeans in a store. Jeans in a clandestine Mexican sweatshop; blue waste burning a farmer's field. Dirt: matter out of place. A window into our culture.

Information Revolution

2008-05-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

Another great digital ethnography from Michael Wesch at Kansas State University. As he puts it, "This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information." What skills do we need now and in the future to, as Wesch puts it, "harness, evaluate, and create information effectively"?

David Macaulay

2008-05-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

David Macaulay has been working on a new book. He gave us a guided tour at Art Center's Serious Play conference a couple of weeks ago. It's another book about how things are built / how things work, but this time it's about the human body. I loved the gentle Prismacolor shading in some of the drawings. From top to bottom, conquering the ascent of the nose, of course, the stomach and intestinal system (complete with trucks hauling away the waste), and finally, the bottom end of the spinal cord being lowered into place in the pelvis. This one promises to be another delight.

Fail Early; Fail Often

2008-05-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I sat in on one of the planning meetings for the 2007 IDSA / ICSID Congress in San Francisco. At one point in the day we assembled into breakouts to discuss various aspects of the project. I joined the one on the story of design in the Bay Area, since I'm a design history junkie.

I remember being fascinated with the tales spun by old Silicon Valley hands like Hugh Dubberly about the culture of risk that has always been strong there. Failure is a badge of honor. If your resume says that you haven't been fired at least once, you haven't had at least a few spectacular bombs, you haven't had at least one venture shot out from under you, you haven't accomplished much at all.

I remember the infamous Dot.Bomb at the beginning of the decade, listening to NPR interviewing people in the Bay Area who had just lost their jobs. No moaning. No whining. They were already working in someone's garage on some new idea.

Fail early. Fail often. Embrace risk.

Re-Authorship of the Body: Amiee Mullins at Serious Play

2008-05-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Aimee Mullins knew at a young age that she was going to be the person who would choose her identity. In John Hockenberry's terms, he and she both have "re-authored" their bodies, taking over their bodies for a second time after, in her case, double amputation and his, an auto accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. For those of you who have not read Hockenberry's book, Moving Violations, I'd consider it required reading for any designer. This is the second time I've heard Mullins, and though the second time around I found her talk less focused, less inspiring, the conversation at the end with Hockenberry was a treat.

Go Sparks!

2008-05-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different. Allow me a moment of congratulations to LA Sparks' new hire, Candace Parker. She was a joy to watch today as she, Lisa Leslie, and the rest of the Sparks kicked butt (actually, it was more like a hard-won and closely-fought nail biter) over Phoenix in today's WNBA opener. It should be an interesting season.

Second Life at the Art Center Design Conference

2008-05-16T16:09:00.000-07:00

Philip Rosedale was a kid who read a lot, got into electronics, then computers, and was obsessed with making things. Wood, electronic—it didn't matter. He thought it would be good to have his bedroom door go up, instead of swing inward. So he cut through the ceiling joists, installed a garage door hoist.... He sees Second Life as a way for people to do things they want to do but may not have the opportunity to. Why do we dream of going into space? It's the illusion that you can begin again. Leave life as you know it behind; transform yourself (ah... but will you be able to do that? or will you find your old self wherever you go?).

Rosedale questions: Why is the impulse to create in Second Life not utopian? Is a virtual world likely to be a utopia? The web is profoundly bottom up. There is a fundamental freedom at the level of the individual. Utopia is top down.

Rosedale comments that there is a lack of cultural fine tuning in Second Life. I notice that, as his slides cycle through, there is a profound ugliness about many of them (not the image at the top, but for example this one, immediately above. I'm just sayin'...). In a future post I will talk about what this reminds me of—the uneasiness that designers have with the awkward creations of non-designers. Shiver. (Or... the sheer exuberance of unbridled enthusiasm exhibited at events like the Maker Faire. I want my Muffin car!)

The internet is disturbing like electricity was, but it's impossible to ignore. A huge disruptive change that we can't get away from.

The Origins of Serious Play, Revisited

2008-05-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

Coming June 17th: in celebration of Charles Eames Centennial Year, the Eames Office will host a celebration of the first day of issue for the Eames postage stamps. The event will be between 11 am and 1 pm at the Eames Office at 850 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica.

Ruminations: in the next few posts, I'll be talking about some of the topics covered in Art Center's Serious Play conference this past week. Eames Demetrios had a scant ten minutes to talk about the work of the Eames Office, yet touched on some important themes. First, his bemusement that the world focuses almost solely on the furniture designs of Charles and Ray Eames: as beautiful as the objects are, the ideas behind them are as important. In the lunchtime roundtable after the talk, some seemingly pulled up a chair only because they wanted to know where to get their vintage chairs restored. Demetrios is always gracious in fielding these sorts of inquiry, but steers the conversation to the heart of the matter: the Eames Office ethic, the process, the ideas. A few choice selections:

The Eameses never delegated understanding.

The design process never ended; the play process never ended.

Eero Saarinen couldn't wait to be an adult, because then he would really be able to play.

Eames' experience bumming around Mexico during the Great Depression: he saw there people who were living a rich life despite having nothing. He learned that he could live on next to nothing and stopped using "making a living" as an excuse for taking a job he didn't believe in.

Here's something that will blow your mind. Most people think there are two versions of Powers of Ten: Rough Cut, created in 1968 for the Association of College Physics, and the later, final version. There are three versions, not two. In 1963 they created a rough sketch of the concept in a simple line-drawing animation without sound, just because they had the idea and wanted to test it to see what sort of camera movement would create the illusion. When the physicists requested the film a few years later, the Eameses had the proven idea ready to execute. This was typical. They explored ideas they were interested in, and eventually the clients caught up with them.

Note to young designers: were the ideas that captivated the Eameses forms of self expression, or did they spring from other motives? Contrast this with German designer Boris Hoppek, who says, "Everything I do is for myself, I try to do what I like. I am an egoist and get paid for it." Witness his design for Copenhagen's Hotel Fox, which purports to be the "soft-sewn world of a baby's cradle:"

Is good design fashion? Is it timeless?

Early on, the Eameses realized that the age of information was coming and that designers could have something to contribute. IBM bought a thousand copies of the film that resulted. Though the Eameses were consultents to IBM for the rest of their lives and created out of that collaboration such jewels as the exhibition Mathematica, it came about from a pure motive to explore a noble (and way ahead of its time, I might add) idea.

Lunch

2008-05-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

A few shots of people I ran into over lunch. Two of my former students who have become regulars at this conference, Alan Mudd and Kenneth Jewell from Continuum, and found them horsing around with Steve Montgomery, who I worked with at Hauser (we go back to the time of the green shag carpet, and later, the office overlooking the pet cemetery, and alas, Hauser itself has gone on to the place where design offices go to die), and who I have been teaching with at Art Center for quite a number of years now.

Gaylon White from Eastman Chemical, always a generous sponsor for conferences and especially design education. Check out their innovation web site. It's got a wealth of information for designers, about designers that they've worked with and interesting applications of their materials. Not your dull engineering site.

This July, Eastman is bringing together materials guru Chris Lefteri and Art Center students in a designstorm with our Color, Materials, Trends Exploration Lab (CMTEL) in a special exploration surrounding materials use.

Gaylon has a talent for finding designers with vision. Case in point, on display at the conference is the eyewear designed by IDEO for the "Collective Vision" project. A couple of my favorites from that project, below:

This one is an elegant play on the veils we used to see on ladies' hats (when we used to see ladies wearing hats).

... and Gaylon wouldn't be able to operate without Anna Laws, his right hand. Here she is in the "room of swag," with a towering pile of Eastman tote bags behind her.

One of the goodies in the tote bags is a bottle of "Y Water," a flavored water designed for kids, package designed by Yves Behar's Fuseproject, using a material developed by Eastman, designed to have a second life as a building toy after they're used.

I think you can tell I've been lagging behind in my posts today, as compared to yesterday. I promise you I'll catch up when I look over my notes later.

Day 3

2008-05-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to day 3 of the conference. We're watching PechaKucha presentations by eight Art Center department chairs right now. We have altered the format slightly, though (being Art Center), from 20 slides in 20 seconds to a super-charged 15 slides in 10 seconds. A challenge, but worth it. Above, Environmental Design chair David Mocarski holds forth.

I ran into Eames Demetrios again, and he showed me his new book, hot off the press, of quotes from Eames in several languages. I am thrilled. It contains two of my favorites, "The best you can do by Tuesday is a sort of best you can do," bringing to mind the short stop-action film the Eames Office whipped together over a weekend because Charles never liked to show up empty handed (he was scheduled to appear on a TV show early the following week), and my other all-time favorite, "Innovate as a last resort," which always can be counted on to shock my students. What? Eames? The innovator, saying that? Yes indeed, grasshopper. Innovate as a last resort. Why use a wild new process / technology / idea when there is an existing one that will do the job as well? To do so would be doing something new for "newness'" sake. And to paraphrase another of my all-time heroes, Eva Zeisel...

... many times when a designer creates something different solely for the sake of doing something different, the result can be actually quite hideous. Eva is a strong advocate of the playful search for beauty, and maintains that in instead of continually searching for novelty, designers should value the search for simple variety. Her life's work is testament to the fact that creating variety is a noble occupation.

Writing what you don't [already] know

2008-05-08T20:33:00.000-07:00

After the last session, the conference broke up into hands-on studios (Art Center's Heidrun Mumper-Drum leads "Nuts to Butter: a Sustainable Design Exercise," above). There were places to create, learn, build, and play. I joined the writing workshop led by author Irene Borger. Here's what I learned: The creative process is a fertile and dangerous place. A liminal state. It has the attributes that anthropologists would characterize as ritual. In traditional rituals, elders protect the neophytes as they pass through the experience. For this reason, creativity requires a protective "container" in which to take place.

It also requires the right attitude, one of openness and non-judgement, as you would want to find in brainstorming. We talked about Flow, about Csikszentmihalyi (see the book list at right).

After spending some time discussing the nature of the protective environment and attitude required, Borger led us through a very simple exercise that had amazing results. She asked us to name three things we had created, and taking one of those, to create a "clustering" exercise around it. This was very much like a mind map, but without the link lines.

Then she read us "One of the Lives," a poem by W. S. Merwin, which begins with the line, "If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father had broken a leg parachuting into Provence to join the resistance..." and continues in a long winding thread to tell a story. Borger asked us to take that starting phrase, "If I had not..." and write about the topic we had chosen in one, unbroken session of about 10 minutes.

The clustering exercise set the stage in the mind and when we turned to the actual writing, we all scribbled non stop. When it came time to read, we were astonished. I came away thinking that it was nearly impossible to not write a compelling story using this exercise, and when we heard one story after the other read, it was fascinating to see how, though each of us started with the same original phrase, our stories were different.

So here are the tools:

Attitude (tolerate delay of closure on a problem)

Protective Container for the process (time, space)

Lists

Clusters (both of which are divergent tools)

Breaking the task into smaller units

Focusing devices (both of which are convergent tools)

Fun (this was the Serious Play conference, after all)

Two bonus tools for expanding a part of the writing:

Deepening: take any word and dig into it. In the phrase "the name was already taken," for example, "What I mean by taken is..."

What I don't remember: ask yourself what you don't remember. This might take you somewhere.

And there you have it.

Aerogel

2008-05-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

You've heard of Aerogel, or frozen smoke, as it's sometimes called. In addition to other magical properties, it makes a wonderful substance to project images on. There was a small display showing this at the conference.

Jump!

2008-05-08T14:56:00.000-07:00

How to describe the jump rope (yes, jump rope) team? I can't. I notice that none of the other blog sites had video of them, so I whipped out my camera and caught the tail end of their performance. It's a lousy video, and they were slowing down, but I think you get the idea. To see the trailer for Helen Hood Sheer's documentary of this phenomenon, click here.

Here is my lousy video. Keep in mind that at this point in the performance, they were moving at about half-speed:

The Origins of Serious Play

2008-05-08T13:55:00.000-07:00

I ran into documentary filmmaker Eames Demetrios in the hallway and we talked about how difficult it's going to be for him to decide what to show in his upcoming presentation. Eames is the grandson of Charles Eames, and has a lifetime of knowledge about the work of Charles and Ray Eames. We both were saying that at every design conference we attend, during half the presentations we're reminded of something the Eames Office did back in the day. And when it comes to Serious Play, the Eameses invented it. Well, it will be interesting to see what he decides to show. Will it be his film, A Gathering of Elephants? Part of the Eameses' Powers of Ten? We talked about a clip of Demetrios' own documentary, 901: After 45 Years of Working, that shows the dismantling of the Eames Office after Ray's passing. There were towers made with xylophone keys that play tunes as a ball falls downward through them. We talked about what Stuart Brown said about the connection between play and the ability to problem solve. The essential aspect of play is a lack of an ulterior motive—if you've got a purpose in sight, you don't have play. One of the first tasks a new hire at the Eames Office might be given was to rearrange the keys in the xylophone towers to create a new tune. They took their play seriously.

A Lot of Paperwork

2008-05-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

Dr. Robert Lang has discovered a way to create patterns for origami from simple stick-figure drawings. His application, Treemaker, is free and runs on all platforms and enables not only the figures you see here (all made of a single piece of paper), but also has enables him to design folding telescopes and mirrors for space exploration, as in this prototype of the Eyeglass, below, developed for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Day 2, mid-morning

2008-05-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

Stuart Brown has studied the play history of murderers and found that from Charles Whitman shooting up the University of Texas campus in 1966 to Seung-Hui Cho's killing 32 at Virginia Tech, "normal play behavior was virtually absent throughout the lives of violent, anti-social men." Play deprivation is a serious thing.

Take aways: hand in search of a brain, brain in search of a hand—this is where play takes place. At a high school in Long Beach, California, it was found that students could no longer solve problems. Looking at their history, it was because they hadn't worked with their hands when younger. Note to self: next time you hire someone, ask them if they've worked on cars / built roads in the dirt / taken apart toasters / sewn their own clothes when they were younger. If they haven't worked with their hands growing up, they will not be able to problem solve, according to Dr. Brown.

Play is born of curiosity and exploration. Rough and tumble play is a learning medium for emotional regulation. 3D play fires up the frontal lobes, the executive center of the brain.

The opposite of play is not work. It is depression.

Neoteny. Remember this word. This is the retention of immature qualities into adulthood. Humans are the most neotenous, the most flexible, the most playful. This gives us a leg up on adaptability. Live and learn.

Serious Play, Day 2

2008-05-08T11:30:00.000-07:00

Today opened with George Smoot, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics, and Charles Elachi, director of JPL and the president of Cal Tech, showing us the universe. Smoot discussed the ultimate design in nature: looking at the relics of creation, the dawn of the universe, in order to understand the process. Nature's design principles. Elachi presented a number of past and current activities at JPL, along with the magnificent imagery that we've come to love.

Elachi takeaway: wherever everybody else looks, look somewhere else. Look at what everyone is doing; do something else. Don't travel the path, go somewhere else and leave a trail.

My Art Center colleague, Tony Luna, responded in this way: "I makes me feel insignificant, but I also feel the importance of being able to understand the grandeur of doing something good while I'm here. Everything is so transient, but a the same time, I have hope. I've always been fascinated by the universe, and to see Dr. Elachi explain it in everyday terms makes me feel like I belong."

Art Center Design Conference

2008-05-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

This Thursday and Friday I'm going to be blogging from Serious Play, Art Center's third design conference. If it's anything like the last two, it'll be wonderful. This conference created buzz from the outset three years ago and has a devoted following. John Hockenberry will MC as he has done for the last two conferences. Not taking anything away from the stellar list of speakers, but Hockenberry absolutely makes the conference. He ushers us smoothly from one topic to the next, introducing each speaker and chatting with them in an informal session afterward. I don't miss the tired audience Q & A, waiting for runners with microphones to work their way through the audience, and I certainly don't miss dealing with unintelligible—or worse yet, ego-driven—questions from the audience. Hockenberry knows the right two or three questions to ask, and provides an elegant transition to the next speaker.

Highlights that come to mind from years past: Theo Jansen's fantastic creatures, Eiko Ishioka's magical visions, the conversation between Chee Pearlman and Jonathan Ive, and who could forget Sandra Tsing Loh's excoriating stab at the program director of public radio station KCRW? (Note to self: don't fire someone just days before they are to take the stage at a major conference!)

I also look forward to the "play" part of the conference. The first time out, we had palate-cleansing musical interludes by the Ditty Bops, a delightful pair of guitar-and-mandolin-strumming women who periodically treated us to a swinging song. I'm hoping guest program director Chee Pearlman has planned something equally sweet to liven the energy level this year. From her Cheshire-cat smile this afternoon at one of the planning sessions, I think she has.

I took a look at the room as they were setting up this afternoon. There will be the usual cushy ergonomic seats and lounge-lizard dens, same as last year (above), and the stage is at the center of the space, more accessible to the audience. I've already cased the joint and have located a choice spot near a power outlet. I'm ready to go.

Talk to you again Thursday morning....