I Just Don't Understand?

IJDU was a multidisciplinary project I set out on at the beginning of the d.Studio course. The purpose of the project was to develop a personal understanding of what design thinking is.

Wikipedia’s definition of Design Thinking is:

Design Thinking is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result.[1] It is the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success.

After this course by dedicated learning and understanding through osmosis I can adeptly interpret this definition with my own experiences.

Empathy: the users are the experts. At the beginning of the course empathy would have been the most misunderstood pillars of design thinking. Through the readings and our projects an acknowledgement of user centered design has been at the forefront of our design principles. Empathy maps have become a staple framework I use when designing anything. In my new venture design course I have used them to unravel the needs of many different players to create solutions that will solve instead of contribute to their problems. An empathy map of an informal merchant in a Ghanaian industrial cluster spring boarded an idea to create a SMS reputation system with hopes of solving his problem of access to credit.

Creativity: Unleashing the mind. My surface level understanding of creativity was shattered by the end of the course. The course allowed a better understanding of how to create the right environment for creativity, through taming my critical voice and adding new concepts to my design thinking toolkit.

Rationality: Ground Control to Major Tom. When you put the words design thinker and rationality together most people’s faces wince. However, this last point is every design thinkers life saver. After allowing the fragile ideas to migrate to the surface of consciousness there must be a selection phase. In the end all ideas are not created equal and you need to be as good an ideator as an editor to fully give your ideas a fighting chance.

Understanding Patterns: Applying New Ways of Thinking

My first blog was a reactionary piece to Peter Norvig’s talk on a new way to look at computer software design. At this time I had just been introduced to design thinking. When viewing a slide midway through Peter’s presentation I noticed the shift in design principles. The shift: before the program used to be the center of the software universe. Now data is the heart of most cutting edge computer services.

Understanding the design principle of data driven information models, has added to my way of looking at design problems. For example, the offline social network analysis, through post-its, is an example of a data-driven model. We allowed the Remington residents an avenue for creating there own data, sticking post-its on their friends doors through a game. The game gave us an way to innocuously collect data on the Remington building. The self generated data from the game differed from conventional program centric models, which would have required a laborious algorithm of door to door interviews to collect similar information.

Quieting The Mind: Observe Don’t Judge

The d.Studio has changed the way I think about learning. The blog post about mind maps and the redesign of conventional note taking deepened my understanding of design thinking.

The Redesign: MindNode takes a biological process (semantic memory) and applies it to an everyday learning task (note taking).

When reflecting on the course mandate of observing fully before judging, I immediately think of MindNode. Many entrepreneurs have designed many different ways to take notes. Most of these inventions are improvements on the end outcome. An example of the most notable improvements are Word Processing, which is a tidier version of the pen and paper, and Livescribe which is a two in one audio recording pen. However, none of these entrepreneurs took the time to observe the entire process of learning. Instead if we observed how we process, store and retrieve information we may come to an entirely different way of note taking. Without fully understanding the system there is a tendency to rush to the status quo (conventional note-taking) and start from there. The idea of mind maps comes from that other realm, where we quiet our judgmental minds and in doing so open them to new possibilities. This technique is extremely important when rethinking problems with exiting solutions. Quieting the mind circumvents our tendency to dwell on existing solutions, and allows us to see the innovative answer that is staring us right in the face.

As my team and I were designing our social programs at Concert, we made a concerted effort to not ‘jump to the finish line.’ In our society there is a deep-seeded paradigm that coordinated action must have a centralized source in order for success. We see it in everywhere in the public and private sector. However with bureaucracy comes inefficiency, inflexibility and low creativity. To leave this way of thinking, We turned to Janine Benyus’s life long fascination of zoology and the new design area of biomicry. At asknature.org we were able to use Janine’s existing observations to understand the design of social insect colonies. Swarm theory became my life for a day and I tired to piece together a self-organized community of ‘cooking-bees’ and ‘cleaning-bees’ for the communal kitchen. The end goal was to create different players with set rules that guided each player independently. When all players acted out these rules in concert, complex swarm behavior would be seen. In the end we as a team opted for a centralized structure to better accommodate the users at the Remington. Regardless, this design activity allowed me to better hone my design thinking tool kit.

Creative Destruction: Learning to Fail Fast

In the 1950s Joseph Schumpeter threw the Marxist term “creative destruction” over to the wolves, design thinkers. In most circumstances creation of a innovative new idea or process ultimately leads to obsolescence of an old idea. As design thinkers we must not be afraid of this process. The judging panel for the AMS food services projects gave the class the first taste of what design critique. We found out that destruction of a bad idea can be the building blocks of a new great idea and there is nothing wrong with failing.

Our ideas were challenged, augmented, built upon, and destroyed in the judging. In the end what we were left with wasn’t a bunch of broken ideas, but with a bunch of new or improved great ideas! My personal take away was a new goal: to be able to fully dissociate myself from my ideas. When that is established an amazing harmony of creative destruction can occur. In the harmony it is alright for an idea to fail. When I fully own that, I will be able to fully collaborate with another creative partner and in the end arrive at entirely new and amazing place.

Many years ago when the d.Studio was just a twinkle in Moura’s eye, I watched a TED Talk on the best design thinker that humanity has ever seen. That design thinker was Mother Nature.

Janine Benyus, a Biologist working on asknature.org, has made it her life’s work to understand, catalogue and spread the design miracles that the creatures on this Earth have been tinkering away at for the last 3.8 Billion years. She notes that we are not the first to try and collect water, work in groups, or make shelters. So why should we assume we are the best at it. Janine’s field of biomimicry opens an exciting new field for the study of design and applications humans can use to improve our world.

What I found very relevant while designing social systems was the design of social insect colonies. These ants and bees come together to create amazing feats of nature with respect to their relative sizes.

In essence, we believe that social insects have been so successful–they are almost everywhere in the ecosphere–because of three characteristics:

• flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment);

• robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks); and

• self-organization (activities are neither centrally controlled nor locally supervised).

Self-organization is the most interesting out of the three. Swarm intelligence offers a unique way to design social processes, where you can break down the various needs of the group to various players. These players output necessary actions independent of other players and of their own accord due to personal incentives. This allows for a robust and flexible community where complex group actions manifest through many individual independent group behaviours.

For a time, imperialists in Africa observed early explorers go near the vicinity of a swamp and then soon after become stricken with malaria. Their forgone conclusion was of experimental causality – A caused B – when in reality it was only a correlation. The relationship was inaccurate but the observation was precise: the sickness was transmitted by a mosquito (inaccurate), but being mindful of swampy areas would decrease the spread of the disease (precise).

Many social scientists grapple with the inability to accurately describe casual relationships  because of the infinite amount of omitted environmental factors within the experiments they conduct. They are unable to control and alter a single variable at will, because it is physically impossible or immoral to do so. Many of the ‘natural experiments’ are historical events which can never be replicated. The historical data has usually been degraded and the social scientist cannot chose specific variables, but must make due with the unplanned data.

Nathan Nunn and a few other econometricians have taken this problem of correlation vs. causation and applied ingenious research design to solve these problems.

For years the international community has attempted to identify and fix Africa’s slow economic growth and societal problems. However, many policy makers actions have been closer to guesses than targeted plans. In Nunn’s paper ‘Shackled to the Past: The Causes and Consequences of Africa’s Slave Trades,’ Nathan Nunn establishes causality by piecing together historical data and identifying an ingenious exogenous variable. Nunn’s first obstacle was the nature of his research question “Is the slave trade the cause of Africa’s relatively low economic performance, when compared to other developing nations?” Nunn chose a historical event that at its apex occurred around 200 years ago. Because of the time lag, Nunn painstakingly put together a large data set through old slave merchant records. Within the data, Nunn finds a negative correlation between the presence of slave outposts in Africa and economic development. To establish a casual relationship, with the slave trade hampering  economic development and not the other way around,  Nunn shows that all slave outpost locations were decided upon by an exogenous variable: the shortest distance from the African continent to the demand of the slaves in other continents.  By showing that slave out posts were established due to distances, Nunn shows that the opposite was false “the African areas with low growth originally had low growth which brought the slave trade.” Many of the possible infinite omitted variables that could have caused the economic disparity no longer need to be considered, because the exogenous variable has full explanatory power over the lag in African development.

Since the 1970s approximately $3 Trillion USD worth of food aid has been donated to the developing world, however the results usually lag behind estimates. In Nunn’s newest Paper, “The Unintended Consequences of U.S. Food Aid on Civil War,” the natural experiment examines the debate of food aid. The failure of aid is one of the most important issues in development economics. Of all aid, food aid (giving nutrition as opposed to money) would appear to be the best vehicle for countries in need. When looking over the data a clear correlation between food aid and conflict exists. A logical explanation of the correlation is “places of conflict, require aid, therefore food aid is directed in those regions.” However, there are proponents on the other side that believe food aid may exacerbate civil conflicts.  Nunn has created a research design that may be able to settle the debate. In order to establish causality Nunn had to isolate the direction of the relationships.

In the end Nunn wants to show this equation to be false:

Food Aid = B1 + B2CivilConflict +…..+ e

And this equation to be true:

Civil Conflict = B1 + B2FoodAid +…..+ e

In order to prove the equation above, he must prove FoodAid (B) is completely dependent upon another exogenous variable (C) and not CivilConflict (A). Nathan predicts that Food Aid depends on the excess supply of grains in the developed world. Since crop yields are dependent on weather outcomes he takes weather system data and creates a predictive model for grain surpluses. He then takes the predicted crop surpluses (C) and uses the data as a proxy for food aid. In the end the data matches perfectly with the rise in conflict in the developed world, therefore proving a one way relationship of food aid – aid reaches an area and prolongs conflict. Food aid can be sold by dictatorships for weapons or funneled into the hands of supporters as opposed to the opposition. This can cause civil strife and negate many of the beneficial effects.

Both of these studies are unique and expertly designed. However there is a commonality. In order to understand the true relationships in society he must first prove that one of the variables behavior is completely independent of the others. This new way of designing research is beginning to redefine research and policy in economics.

Guest critiques graced the halls of our studios this week. The experience allowed new perspective into our group projects on the AMS food service businesses. It also introduced me to the idea of 7 for market research. By the time you have interviewed 7 people you will begin to notice patterns about your consumer.

What I learned in 4

A running theme with design professionals is “dream big or go home.” Innovation is about growing/building/stretching an idea to its limits.

Go with an idea until everyone in the room starts giggling, then take the idea and shrink it down.

Dreaming big is the romantic side of design. It draws innovators in and feeds the fire of creativity, but what happens when the scale and scope is out of your reach?

Unfortunately, you dilute and make compromises. So at what concentration does an innovation become linear?

David vs. Goliath

Then there are the David ideas: small, seemingly insignificant, but pack a punch. If they were crafted and tempered with design thinking, can we call these design innovations or are they just linear business paradigms wrapped in sheeps clothing?

My intuition says yes and no.

The distinction requires a critical voice which can look at the obvious and non-obvious. If visualization of observations within a design framework  is able to shed light on patterns and stimulate REthink on a problem

Is a cover of a song innovative?

I have been recently introduced to MindNode, an ingenious way to electronically mind map anything you can think of. Through my anecdotal experience and what I know of the brian I have decided this is the best thing since sliced bread.

Semantic memory refers to the memory of meanings, understandings, and other concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experience.

One theory of how the brain stores and process non-experential based information is semantics. Semantically storing an idea of a chair may go something like this:

When retrieving the idea of a comfy chair you may go through the process of semantically picking if the chair has 3 or 4 legs –> From there you may then decide if this chair will be made with wood, metal, or plastic –> then if it will have cushions or no cushions —-> until you get to an image of a comfy chair.

Basically your brain is one big mind node. Making a visual representation of the information allows us to store and retrieve facts in an intuitive way; therefore, increasing our capacity to remember.

The REthink involves taking a current organic biological process (semantic memory) and applying it to an everyday task (note taking). When we align with nature as opposed to fighting it, we see enhanced results.

In this example, the model of the brian is oversimplified. The mind is not just a semantic repository of linearly defined features. The mind is a relational database with many multifaceted connections, but the design idea still makes for an interesting read. Hope you enjoyed!