If anything, it introduced normal folk to a little bit more depth to design than you normally get–more problem solving and less “What Not To Wear.” There are other conversations that do a better job of talking about some of the details and criticism, but I saw it as a simple reminder of some core design issues, like collaboration, sustainability, prototyping, empathy with users, etc… and seeing how others take them on is fascinating to me.

The more interesting part of my trip fell on the second week, where I was free from work obligations, and had the opportunity to visit Walt Disney World in Florida. While most people I know have visited Disney-themed amusement parks as children, this was my first time. Not having come to Disney as a child, I felt like I was able to look at things with fresh eyes, and since I was visiting nearly a full year after completing design school, I naturally looked at everything through the lens design—thinking, making, or otherwise. Being immersed from the minute I got off the plane, I found the entire Disney experience from start to finish to be deeply fascinating from the idea as a whole to the excruciating attention to detail throughout.

The first thing I was struck with was the immense amount of area that the parks covered. I never realized that Disney was made up not only of multiple amusement parks, but scores of resorts, a “downtown” area, and a boardwalk. On the first day, while we boarded the monorail into the Magic Kingdom I was wowed by the fact that they had a self-contained transportation system via bus, rail, and boat. I wondered about how they planned the parks, the transportation system, and all the integration points to work for most everyone. It seems like an immense feat, especially when you’re pushing that amount of people through the park each and every day. Not to mention to variety and types people—young, old, native, foreign, disabled, etc… Talk about a wicked problem.

While I don’t know much about the history of Disney or the Disney Park beyond the name being the last name of the creator, my initial reaction to seeing and experiencing the Disney parks is that something of this magnitude and over-the-top-ness could never have emerged from a group of folks looking to increase revenue, growth, or design products purely based on what people say they want or need. The idea of multiple amusement parks and resorts that make up a kid-friendly near-fantasy world is not something that emerges out of a spreadsheet or a an afternoon meeting. In fact, I find it hard to imagine these types of grandiose ideas being entertained for more than a few seconds in most corporations. It would be deemed too risky, overambitious, expensive, and likely not providing a clear way of measuring the return on investment up-front.

So how do ideas like this flourish? How does something like Disney World develop from the insides of Walt Disney’s brain into its current manifestation? And how is it able to sustain its vision long after the person who created it is gone? It would be fun to dig into some of these questions and learn more about the process that people went through to get Disney World created in the first places, and what their process is for creating additional attractions within the parks. It seems to me that Disney is one of those places that’s teeming with insights and lessons about design, since they have a need to create and maintain products at all levels of design, be it communication, industrial, interaction, service, organization, or otherwise.

Often times, I feel like people underestimate this value and are perfectly content using conference calls as a replacement. And really, sometimes it’s completely necessary. If work is distributed across offices in different countries, it wouldn’t make sense to constantly fly around the world in order to keep up with everyone.  So in that respect, email and voice conferencing are used for efficiency. There are studies that show that a large percentage of our communication lies in non-verbal cues, making this somewhat troublesome. Whether or not these studies are valid in a real-world context, at the very least there is an increase in empathy with people you have met in person and worked with compared to those who only exist as a disembodied voice. You are able to see them as human beings and make excuses for them if you have disagreements.

While discussion itself can be difficult without being co-located, I find that design work is exponentially difficult in these situations. If you tend to work with physical media (stickies, paper sketches, etc…) an extra step is added in order to scan in or transcribe information. And brainstorming over the phone? Not worth it. At least not with today’s tools.

One way to help with this is to start projects with the intention to cater to everyone who is involved. This might mean trascribing notes directly onto a Wiki or knowledge management system, rather than starting in a notebook. It also means getting an online sharing system agreed upon early on so that photos of whiteboards, scans, and other material show up consistently in the same place. I have heard suggestions of video conferencing, and while this might be an improvement, video quality is usually low and the time it takes to get it working sometimes cuts into time allocated for the working itself.

Either way, I find this to be a challenge. Not only is communication lost, but a general sense of the culture of different locations and work groups is alien until you engage in person. I haven’t found any magical way of working this out, and I know there is a lot of software that tackles this problem. I don’t necessarily think that it’s a problem that can be solved outright, but is more of a band-aid until people are able to co-locate. Are there any tools out there that come close? I’d be curious to know what has worked best for people.

Throughout different discussions about the economy, bailout plans, and national debt, it’s difficult to really understand what these large numbers mean. What does $700 billion dollars look like? What does it feel like? At a certain point it becomes so abstract that it just seems like people pulling numbers out of a hat and using a calculator to solve all the world’s problems.

That’s why I think financial concepts are always ripe for some good design work, and why I was especially interested in a recent poster by GOOD:

(via GOOD)

I think it’s wonderful that they combined a bunch of layers of information. What’s great about it is that you quickly get a sense of what happened by looking at the main components: the timeline and the increasing debt, but over time you can keep digging and reading the various nuggets of information that are at more of a micro level.

One of the first thoughts I had about history was how difficult it was to truly understand the time spans that are referenced. Hundreds, thousands, and millions of years are not easy to get a gist of. There’s a certain subset of time that we can truly relate to–probably between several seconds and year or two.  Anything else is just a mental representation of what we are dealing with.

In any case, I think historical timelines area really inadequet, and instead of years they should use something that we can understand a little better on an intuitive level. We can understand human generations pretty well, and have a natural sense of the time involved in a person’s liftime in relation to their children’s, and it would be nice to show historical events in those terms.

Luckily, I found someone else who had the same idea:

Dan Roam is some sort of visualizer extraordinaire. He put out a book, and visited Carnegie Mellon while I was there–sadly I wasn’t able to make it to his talk. His work looks interesting, but I’m not sure about the whole napkin think. I think the idea is that it’s important to recognize that visualizing is useful even in extremely low fidelity. The value really comes in communicating an idea, making something understandable, and ultimately being a tool for stimulating discussion.

Theme
The article comes from an issue of the Harvard Business Review from 1999, and it deals with how people can achieve success within an organization—it’s practical advice. A person’s knowledge of themselves helps them to understand and manage their own life in the same way that a CEO might manage a company.

Problem
Drucker sees us living in a changing world that we need to adapt to. The changing roles and responsibilities of a “knowledge society” means that we need to be engaged in what we are doing and change when necessary. People in general are not prepared to manage themselves and often do it poorly.

Argument
To manage oneself, according to Drucker, means knowing how and when to change the work we do. We do this by answering the questions he poses:

• What are my strengths? Because we have choice in the work we do, we need to know what we’re good at and foster that strength.
• How do I perform? Knowing the way we work, communicate, and learn, as well as the way others do, helps us interact a lot more smoothly.
• What are my values? Understanding what you care about and what you think is the right way an organization should operate helps you to decide if you are working at a place that is right for you. Frustration comes from conflicting values.
• Where do I belong? After answering the above questions allows someone to choose what they think is the best environment and work.
• What should I contribute? This question is about finding a way to bring results. Balancing difficult results that are within reach and meaningful, visible, and measurable if possible. Doing so will help people figure out “what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set”

There is some more of the article that talks about managing relationships and developing a secondary career in order to “be somebody” where one might not be able to do so in their primary career.

Take Away
The clear connection is that designers, especially those involved in more of the front-end strategy and planning are what Drucker would call “knowledge workers.” The advice sometimes seems useful and other times obvious. As designers, we are a part of the societal shift in which we have more agency not only over the work we do, but of how we do it.

One part that I felt was particularly relevant was the part about contributing and bringing results. The example he uses is of a Hospital’s new administrator who focuses on a small part of the hospital in order to achieve results. As designers, one of our strengths is being able to bring about results by producing something, whether it’s a brainstorm, a conceptual model, or a full-fledged product. Indeed it would be interesting to ask Drucker’s questions to the discipline of design itself.

I found with his proposal to focus on strengths and nothing else a bit extreme. In fact, as designers, one of our strengths is in doing the opposite and becoming generalists rather than specialists.

Final Words
A quote on remedying bad habits, where you might replace “planner” with “designer”

… a planner may find that his beautiful plans fail because he does not follow through on them. Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work. This planner will have to learn that the work does not stop when the plan is completed. He must find people to carry out the plan and explain it to them. He must adapt and change it as he puts it into action. And finally, he must decide when to stop pushing the plan (66)

• Squarepeg (being built)
  This project is a recommender system that takes advantage of social networks and other information to provide what you need for organizing activism. It’s a bit vague right now, but the solid argument and passion that these guys have means you know it’s going to be good.
• Ask Your Lawmaker
  One of my favorite projects, because it bridges the digital and the physical. You vote online for questions to be asked to your lawmaker, and they track them down, ask them, and post the recorded audio.
• Greener One
  A database with a goal “to provide a simple environmental score for most products sold in major retail outlets across the US online and offline. We are bringing this score to the point of sale when and where people make purchasing decisions.”
• MAPLight
  This project won last year, but I don’t think it makes it any less interesting. They mash together information about political contributions, and the way the politicians vote based on location.
• KnowMore
  These guys were very professional, and seemed to have their marketing down pretty well, T-shirts and all. I liked them because their idea was very simple, yet powerful. They compile information about corporations and unethical things they might be involved with. They released a Firefox plug-in while we were there that reveals this type of information for any website that you might be viewing.

Again, these were all really inspiring projects, considering some of the limitations that people had in terms of resources. I hope to see lots more good things coming from these people.

The conference itself was mainly a forum for people to present and discuss what they were working on in order to find others and get support. It was a few months ago, but I thought it might be useful to summarize some of the main themes that came up. There were lots of them, but here are two that I thought were the most prominent.

Taming and Presenting data
Many of the projects were what people referred to as “mashups,” where data would be collected from various sources and overlaid onto a map or graph of some sort. A lot of the value came from digging up data sets and revealing the information to people, like Maplight, which brings out information about campaign contributions and the way that legislators vote. A lot of these projects stopped there, with their goal being moving people to action by making information available. I think there is a lot of potential for skilled communication designers to take part in these types of projects and use their infoviz know-how to help create the arguments.

New vs Existing Tools
One of the issues that kept coming up was the ways that people used tools. Should people use Flickr, Twitter, or build tools for a specific problem. Ideally I think it should be both. Since each situation or problem has unique issues, there should be some solution that caters to those problems, but then existing tools like Flickr can be pulled in for image hosting and tagging etc… Not only does it mean less cost, but also more chances for people to stumble upon your content.

User Centered Design
This issue is actually one that I found almost completely lacking. Often the designers were assumed to be the user, which was true in a lot of cases, or they simply felt that they understood the domain well enough to make something useful. While I don’t think this attitude brought about particularly bad ideas, it does make you wonder how much better the work could be if their process was a little more fleshed out.

The culture there was very much in line with a lot of the type of work that gets done in the same area. People were open to hacking, mashing, and doing things rather than spending a lot of time planning, which has its good and bad sides. To give a sense of the conference as a whole, and since I think the words people use are very important in reflecting what they do and what they care about, I wrote down the words that kept coming up throughout the conference, and grouped them:

• What community, organization, society
• How decisions, marketing, crowdsourcing, social networks, viral, sustainable, hack, mash, widget, data, information, tools, resources, open, mapping
• Why change, action, engage, productivity, utility, social value, transparency

Another thing I thought would be useful is the type of questions I heard audiences ask often, and are important for social entrepreneurial projects. If you have solid answers to these questions, regardless of your domain, you’re in pretty good shape:

• How do you reach people with limited access to technology?
• How is your project unique?
• What makes it different from x,y, and z?
• What is your business/sustainability model?
• Who are you targeting?
• Would people actually use this?
• How are you getting them to use it?

It was a good experience to interact with a group of people whose goals and values had less to do with money than they had to do with improving society. There is a real sense of openness and collaboration that I don’t see in many other places. There is also a deep passion that is visible as people take things into their own hands and push them because they believe in them. It was inspiring, and I hope that I can make it there again. I encourage any student or otherwise to get involved, since they accept projects at all levels completion, from being well-thought out ideas, to people in need of additional staffing.

Having nearly a year to craft a paper means that there is a lot of time where you are secluded in rooms full of books wondering if you still have an ounce of sanity left. With Dick Buchanan as my advisor, our meetings usually consisted of nudges and strategic questioning about the ideas involved. He helped me to look at things differently and explore sources I never would have, and generally gave a broader perspective of whatever we were talking about.

Anyway, I was inspired to write something about my paper because of a recent Adaptive Path post that had some web tools that analyze writing. I thought I’d throw my paper in and see what came out:

One of the things that happened to me, and I’m sure happened to a lot of people, is the discovery of so many more ideas and topics than you first start out with–via readings, discussions, classes, etc… So it almost turned out to be too much time as I had to fight to scope things down. Overall, it was a good experience, and made me a lot more confident in my writing and research process.

Theory
The book’s ideas are related what I wrote about in my thesis paper. During my research, I had a difficult time resolving the word technology – a word that engineers, anthropologists, and everyday people use as opposed to product – a word that designers, and perhaps business people use. Technology usually refers to the collection of products we use that contain a variety of computational components. When we talk about technology, we are more often than not talking about digital/information/high technology. The problem I see is that just using the word technology usually implies a sense of inevitability–which the authors were trying to push back on.

By talking about the man made world in terms of a product, for example, saying interactive product, more responsibility can be give to the people that actually create them and make decisions about them. Designers, policy makers, and the communities that use the products don’t deal with pure technology in their everyday lives, but with products that have been intentionally shaped. Because of this, I’ve found the idea of a product ecology to be more grounded in the reality and language of everyday people.

Their argument about using an information ecology is useful and interesting. It balances the way that technologists might look at a situation that incorporates technology. It reaches out and makes connections between an idea that comes from biology to our everyday life. One of the most valuable things about it is that it gives a set of dynamic characteristics (system, diversity, coevolution, keystone species, and locality) that we can use to study, interpret, discuss, and think about. At the very least, it is a source of inspiration to think about things in a different way–even if it seems too abstract at times.

Practice
Why does any of this matter and to whom? Well, the ideas in the book can be useful to lots of people, but I’m going to stick specifically to designers. As the things we design become more complex and integratated into our contexts, I think it can become harder to tease out all the parts and think about them. To a service designer, this might seem obvious–that there is a complex system with lots of parts that need to be accounted for, not the least of which includes people with their needs and desires. But I still think that it can be useful in different stages that designers find themselves in, here are some quick thoughts:

• Researching: Generating interview questions around information ecology characteristics.
• Synthesizing: Grouping data collected during research around characteristics of the information ecology.
• Communicating: Building models based on an information ecology’s characteristics.
• Generating : Coming up with ideas that cater to a living, evolving system that fit with people’s personal values. Brainstorming around an information ecology’s characteristics.
• Refining: Fleshing out concepts that take into account the characteristics of an information ecology and referring back to them.

It might look a bit deterministic at first, but I’m not saying this should take the place of whatever a designer does already or that they should use it at every step of the process. It’s just another tool that can be used when needed. The authors go into detail–perhaps a bit too much detail–with examples involving libraries, schools, workplaces, classrooms, and hospitals. Being anthropologists, their focus is mainly on the researching aspect and less on the other phases of design.