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January 31, 2005
What to Model
From Shelley Evenson's conceptual models class: The types of things you want to think about modeling and why:
- Processes. Procedures and particular courses of action or the performance of some composite cognitive activity.
Why model processes? Breakdowns become obvious. You can tell what is and what isn't part of the process. Discussions can be had about where/when an intervention needs to be made by a designer. Comparing documented processes among parallel approaches can reveal why one is more of less successful than the other.
- Attitudes. A complex mental state involving beliefs, feelings, and values.
Why model attitudes? People change their attitudes based on lots of things ranging on how they feel physically to how competent they feel about a task. Ideally, experiences should map to whatever attitude the person has at a particular moment (so it feels designed for them personally). Or so that you can choose to not design for an attitude.
- Approaches. Plans of attack. Ways to start doing a task or set of tasks.
Why model approaches? Because they reveal what the general perception of something is and make explicit the methods used or plan made. Understanding different approaches (especially from superusers) may reveal unique strategies that can benefit all users.
- Elements. All the little bits of something.
Why bother modeling these? To see the relationships, to get quantitative data (like how many of something there is), to see opportunities amid clusters.
- Archetypal Users. AKA Personas.
Why model these? Only after synthesizing user data can we begin to create patterns of interactions that smoothly match the behaviors, mental models, and goals of users. Can illuminate lifestage, experience level, motivations. You need them to drive scenarios.
Posted by Dan at 04:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
CHI Rejection
My poster (363k pdf) of my thesis project was rejected from CHI, which is sort of a relief: now I don't have to go. But I did waste a couple of days writing up the four- page paper (on a poster!) required for submission. Oh well.
Posted by Dan at 04:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 28, 2005
The General Theory of Management
Management has to do with people, and with people playing roles within the form of an organization. According to Claude George, management is the element which brings some degree of unity and cohesiveness to every human undertaking. Managers are the people who provide or create the appropriate environments (both physical and intellectual) conductive to the performance of acts by others to accomplish the undertaking. Managers have to recognize not only the goals of the organizations, but also the personal goals of the individuals in an organization.
Managers function in certain ways:
- Planning.Involves two components: the vision of the organization and the strategic planning and strategic design planning. The vision of an organization involves the ideas and values of an organization and where the organization should go. The vision shouldn't be collapsed into planning; they aren't the same thing. Vision involves why the organization exists. Strategic planning and strategic design vision on the other hand are the how, the direction forward for the organization's products and services. Planners should be driven by vision, but vision should not be driven by planning.
Planning also has to do with the governing ideas of the organization. These are composed of the vision (where the world will be in five years), the mission (what the organization's role will be in that future), and the operating values (how the organization will get to that future).
- Organizing. Finding a way to gain order in everyone's thinking, the relationships between people, and with the physical environment.
- Directing. Make objectives known to people so that the work has focus.
- Control. Watching out for things that go wrong and stepping in to correct that. Has to do with making sure the organization is meeting its objectives.
Managers create group dynamics. There are three different kinds of managers:
- Leaders. Have a vision that brings people together. They usually start organizations, but aren't good managers.
- Managers. Creates (but can also break) the rules that an organization runs by. Doesn't change the vision of an organization.
- Bureaucrats. Brought about by a decaying vision. Following the rules is central to their management. The rules become self-fulfilling. Need a new leader to clean them out.
The activities of any business enterprise are these:
- Executive and management group (HR/staffing/communications)
- Finance to raise capital
- Accounting to keep track of all the beans
- Technical (design is a part of)
- Commercial (sales and marketing)
- Security to protect property and people
Philosophic differences about people and organizations cause profound differences in the types of organizations we have. Philosophies are present in every organization. Schools of management are really schools of thought. The organizations we create have conversations with each other and with the public.
Posted by Dan at 10:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 25, 2005
The Arsenal of Venice
We looked at the early Renaissance organization The Arsenal Of Venice in Design Management class. The Arsenal of Venice was an ur-factory, creating war ships along a canal in Venice. It's an example of a product organizing the organization; the design constraints shaped the Arsenal.
It's an early example of such "modern" organizational features such as division of labor, social and business contracts, and standardization of parts. It also demonstrated that the conception and planning of a product is different from the making of a product.
The Arsenal of Venice, like all organizations and like all designed products, can be broken down into four main parts: the materials, the form (or "mode"), the manner of production (the people), and the function or purpose.
Posted by Dan at 10:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Conference Cash
Forgot to mention that CMU is giving me $500 extra dollars to present my thesis paper in Montreal. I got the extra money from the Graduate Student Association's Graduate Conference Funds. Very helpful, since I'm currently low on funds.
Posted by Dan at 05:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 24, 2005
Ashwini's Bachelorette Party
Saturday night was a night that won't soon be forgotten. One of my classmates, Ashwini Asokan, is getting married in February in India. Since the wedding is in, well, India, none of us are going. To make up for it, Ashley Deal threw her a bachelorette party. Women only for the first half, men came later. The idea was that the stripper would have left by the time the men arrived. Not so. Someone (I'm not saying who) even got his phone number.
It was an evening of drunken dancing, intrigue, a five-foot-tall inflatable penis, and a bitter cold snowstorm blowing outside.
Posted by Dan at 03:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Thesis Paper Presentations
Last Friday, the graduating (!) students presented their thesis papers to faculty, students, and guests. A very nerve-wracking event: sets of 10-minute presentations followed by five minutes of Q&A. My presentation is the basis for the talk I'm giving in March at the IA Summit, so I won't give anything away here until after then. But here's some work that resonated with me:
- Ashley Deal's "Simplicity in Design" which focused on the need for clarity of thought before simplicity in action
- Yuan-Chou Chung's "Supporting Collaborative Experience in Human-Product Interaction" which examined karaoke as a platform for emotional experiences
- Chun-Yi Chen's "The Role of Design in Product-Mediated Human Interaction" which put forth the ideas that products should be both performers and be masks that help preserve human dignity
- Phi-Hong Ha's "The Role of Design in Public Life" about encouraging consciousness in public information spaces
- Jeff Howard's "The Creation of Place in Design" in which all of design is a means of wayfinding
- and Miso Kim's "A Case Study on 'Design By Users' " which looked at the role of meta-design in the attempted impeachment of the Korean President in 2004.
Posted by Dan at 03:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 23, 2005
Organizations as Systems Reading
"Systematizing Power, Communications, and the Power to Communicate," "Systematizing Workers and the Workplace" and "Technology as a Social Solution: the 1920s to the 1950s" by Alan Marcus and Howard Segal from Technology in America: A Brief History
Posted by Dan at 09:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 19, 2005
Making Bouillon from a Cow
This week for the 2nd year grad students has been all about preparing for this Friday's thesis paper presentations, when we get 10 minutes to present the 30-some-odd pages of our thesis papers to the other graduate students, faculty, and guests. Currently, I have about 30 slides, which is one slide for every 20 seconds speaking time. Thus, I'm trying to edit down.
Posted by Dan at 09:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Ways of Representing Things
From Shelley Evenson's Conceptual Models class:
- Spider Diagram. Organized by placing something in the center and radiating sub-ideas outwards.
- Process Flow: Linear. Shows how concepts and activities unfold, usually over time. They can be produced at a variety of levels of resolution and are good for helping teams identify possible points of intervention.
- Process Flow: Circular. Shows how concepts or activities repeat. They can sometimes loop within steps.
- Venn Diagrams. A favorite of consulting firms everywhere, venn diagrams are a way to represent sets and relationships to show what elements of an experience are shared and what is unique. They can be used to show just about anything.
- 2 x 2 Matrix. useful tool for initial sorting of data. Good for categorizing things that can be reduced to two simple variables. Enables a rapid clustering (or separating) of information into four categories.
- System Diagram.Shows a group of independent but interrelated elements comprising a unified whole.
- Maps. Usually deal with depicting some aspect of physical space and a person's interaction with it. Gives a sense of overview.
Posted by Dan at 09:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
The History of Management Reading
"The Merchants of Venice" and "Emerging Schools of Thought: A Classification of Managerial Concepts" by Claude S. George from A History of Management Thought.
Posted by Dan at 09:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 16, 2005
The History of Design
Dick Buchanan: There are two great currents of design thinking that come out of the ancient world:
- Making Stuff/Fabricating Things. Comes from crafts and more formalized activities such as architecture and engineering. These became fragmented during the Industrial Revolution.
- Organizing People. How you gather and manage groups of people into organizations.
An organization is defined as a group of people seeking a common goal through a structure of divided and coordinated activities (a form), supported by various resources (artifacts, tools, rooms, information, etc.).
From these two great currents emerged Three Great Design Practices:
- Engineering. The creation of roads, sewage systems, aqueducts, and other acts of civil engineering. It also has a lot to do with moving troops long distances and over obstacles.
- Management. Managers have uncanny connections to designers: both seek to turn situations that are not so good into something better.
- Design Proper. The great proliferation of design types, defined by what is made: fashion design, interaction design, industrial design, etc.
Each type of practice is fragmented, but all three are starting to coalesce. In engineering, natural science (physics, math, chemistry, and recently biology) define its foundation. Management has coalesced around the social and behavioral sciences: sociology, psychology, and economic. The foundation of design proper is art and has been for centuries.
Design firms are no longer finding their work confined to producing one type of product. Recent design practice calls for people who can more and more cross over traditional design disciplines and even cross into the other two practices, engineering and management. As Clement Mok says in the "Time for Change" article, maybe we should rethink the fragmentation of design itself. Instead of defining ourselves by what we make, think instead about the problems we solve. It's not about the medium we work in.
Dick suggests we reorganize design into The Four Orders of Design:
- Communication. The creation of signs and symbols, with its roots in mass communication and mass production.
- Construction. Concerned with the creation of things. Traditional industrial design.
- Interaction. Concerned with actions and behaviors and things that change over time. People relating to people, mediated by products. Emerged around 1970 in response to computers.
- "Organization" or "System" or "Environmental." This area of design is so new there isn't even a proper language for it yet. It's concerned with thoughts and organizing thoughts into environments, organizations, systems, and even cultures.
Posted by Dan at 01:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 12, 2005
History and Nature of Design Readings
For Dick Buchanan's Design, Management, and Organizational Change class:
- "Time for Change" by Clement Mok
- "Design, Rhetoric, and Humanism" and "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking" by Richard Buchanan himself
Posted by Dan at 04:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 11, 2005
The Most Important Product of the 20th Century
Today was the first meeting of Dick Buchanan's Design, Management, and Organizational Change seminar. He opened the class with an unusual claim: that organizations are the most important design product of the 20th century. We may not see them or feel their presence, but organizations are everywhere and influence our lives. And they are all designed: some well, some not. The world is a web of organizations; you can't ignore them. Every product comes out of some sort of organization. And, not incidentally, they tend to crush people.
Something special is happening in the world of organizations and Design is at the center of it. Designers are being invited to design organizations themselves. If we can use design thinking and find the right ways to apply it to organizations, we can make a real difference in what they are. And they need the help: organizations are becoming less and less efficient and less and less effective. No one is sure why this is, if it is caused by the size and complexity of the world. But the stresses are becoming significant and governments especially are becoming a tangled mess.
The 20th century is filled with ways of studying organizations: philosophy, sociology, business, etc. But a design perspective on organizations is new. Design takes the tack that organizations are environments created by human beings. And wherever things are being made by people, Design is there.
The class is going to explore how design works in organizations and how organizations work in general. This is to "give some armor for going out in the world" to designers. We'll also be examining this new area of design practice that is oriented consciously and deliberately at changing organizations. The things we think of as Design within an organization are really ways that organizations have of adapting to their environment, by producing products that have to go into the world.
Posted by Dan at 08:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
The Path of Least Resistance
I've been doing a small version of the CMU tradition of signing up for too many classes, then visiting them the first week, looking at the syllabi, then figuring out which ones I really want to take and dropping the rest. At this point in my graduate career (i.e. near the bitter end), I'm pretty unwilling to take on more ambitious classes that will distract me further from my thesis work and post-school planning (finding housing, jobs, etc.). Right now, it's all about the path of least resistance to graduation day.
It sounds horribly lazy, and it probably is, but I feel like I've gotten my money's worth from school already. You could take classes forever, really, given the time and inclination. After meeting with some companies over winter break, I definitely have very little inclination to do that. I don't want to waste my remaining time here at school, but neither do I want to burn myself out completely. This semester is crammed with so much stuff: teaching, conferences, presenting my thesis paper and project, finishing my thesis paper and project, career days, and hopefully graduating, that something had to give. And that something was my desire to squeeze every last drop from CMU that I possibly can. It simply isn't possible and it's getting in the way of the goal: May 14th, when I will hopefully be called a Master of Design.
Posted by Dan at 07:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 10, 2005
New Year, New Syllabus
I'm pretty happy with the syllabus (76k pdf) and readings for the class I'm teaching. I think it's a major improvement on last year. I've really mixed it up with the more cutting-edge articles (Dan Hill! John Maeda! The Design Fab Five!) and some interesting exercises I've blatantly stolen from Chris Pacione. It's a lot less process-heavy than last year, but I think it'll be more engaging. It'll be interesting to see how my students like it.
Oh, and I've got Hong as my new TA. Lucky her. ;)
Posted by Dan at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 09, 2005
Hemingway Got It Right
"How did you go bankrupt?""Gradually, then suddenly."
-The Sun Also Rises
Posted by Dan at 05:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack