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April 28, 2005

Vector of Organizational Change: Values

A vector is both a force or influence and a course or direction. There are four of what Dick Buchanan calls "Vectors of Organizational Change;" four "things" that can be used separately or together to affect organizations. The fourth of these are values.

Designers can use strategic conversations to figure out what values an organization holds. Values, being deeply and collectively held, are difficult to change, and usually do so only slowly, but it can be done. This entry was from my last class at CMU. Fittingly enough, it was in Dick Buchanan's class, which was also my first class at CMU.

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April 27, 2005

Melancholy

CMU has admitted a new group of students for next year's class, and I realize I probably won't meet them. At least not as a fellow student. I've passed on the moderator role of CMU Grads, our n00bie mailing list, to Laura Wright, and soon my tenure as Graduate Student Assembly representative will end as well.

I feel like I'm hitting a string of Lasts now. Last class. Last crit. Last food from the CMU trucks. Etc. It's making me a little blue. But then, all good things must pass, and I know I couldn't bear another year in school. I can barely stand another two and a half weeks. Two and a half weeks...is that all that's left? It's hard to believe, and to come to terms with.

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No More Teacher's Dirty Looks

I taught my final class today. It's funny how each class is different, each one like a little experiment or project. You can plan it all you want, but what the students bring (or don't bring) to the class really changes it. Maybe this is more true of studio classes than of lectures, I'm not sure.

My class last year and my class this year were markedly different. In some ways, last year's syllabus was better. In other ways, this year's was. I'm still trying to find a balance between tactical skills like making wireframes vs. conceptual skills. Last year, I erred one way, this year, I erred on the other side. Oh well, there's always next time. If there is a next time.

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Bill Moggridge on Interaction and Service Design

IDEO's Bill Moggridge was on campus this week, giving a series of design talks and doing some recruiting. I sat in on two of the talks, on interaction and service design.

Moggridge, along with Bill Verplank, coined the term "interaction design" (after "SoftFace" was deemed too weird) to take the values that design had to computer science. Interaction design is about feeling results more than knowing them. Designers, unlike other disciplines, are able to move toward solutions that aren't wholly understood.

Interaction design, for Moggridge, is at two levels. At the broad level is that it's the design of everything that has technology in it. At the narrow level, it's about the subjective and qualitative in technology design. The main quality that determines something's interactiveness is its responsiveness.

Moggridge defined six categories of interaction design: games, screens (software), products (screens in an object), places, internet, and services. Games have the best feedback for failure in interaction design, because they vanish quickly if they don’t work well.

Services are the next frontier in design. The reason service design has become a design subject is because of technology--balancing technology with humans. Services are things we pay to use, not own. They are environmentally good.

Each service design project will have a different way of mapping it. Finding that "map" and analyzing it is part of designing.

Failing frequently means you are going to succeed sooner, so prototype things as quickly as possible. Don't worry about it being crude.

Couch important decisions as the client's. Put the information in front of them and let them choose. You can tell them you disagree, but you need to be modest--it's important that clients comes to the decision themselves.

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April 26, 2005

Design and Organizational Decisions

For Organizational Design class, I read Herb Simon's seminal book Administrative Behavior and wrote a paper (72k pdf) on how designers can help organizations make decisions.

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April 23, 2005

Designer as Moral Agent

Notes from discussions on ethics, politics, and organizations from Dick Buchanan's organizational design class:

The first formal discussions about ethics in design were in the mid-90s, but ethics has become a matter we just can't not discuss. It's how we can distinguish between well-done design and design that shouldn't be done. It's about what can be done when we're asked to do work that is questionable. It's about consequences; if there were no consequences to what we design, there'd be no need for ethics.

In discussing ethics, we need to make the distinction between preferences and values, although this can be very difficult. Preferences reside in us. They are personal choices that range from whether one likes chocolate ice cream to whether one believes in the death penalty. Most of the things we run into in the world are preferences, and they have their roots in psychology and culture. Values reside in things in the world. Values spring from two sources: faith and reason.

This of course, brings us to the problem of pluralism. We know there is a pluralism of preferences, but is there a pluralism of values? Is there one truth with many ways of saying it?

Values and preferences gives rise to judgments, and design is about making judgments. Not judgments after the fact, but before. To be a moral agent means to make choices informed by ethics. Thus, designers should be moral agents.

There are four parts to being a moral agent as a designer:

How does one talk about or evaluate a moral act? By looking at three things: the nature of the act, the circumstances of the act, and the motives for the act. Motives can be personal or ethical.

How do designers deal with the clients they serve? Do designers adopt the client's preferences? Nazi design was both exquisite and horrible. How then do we relate to clients and the organizations that hire us when we have a responsibility to create a world that is better and does less harm? There needs to be a balance between the designer's personal ethics and the company's ethics. And if a balance cannot be struck, a designer may have to change the values of an organization.

One of the roles design can play is to draw out operating values. Designers can encourage conversations that help identify what values the group really holds. When a value is held collectively, it's no longer a preference. How do you find the common values between people? You can do what designers do: visualize them with diagrams, images, words. Seeing them makes people less cynical and can help facilitate the workings of people.

Ethics is about how we deal with emotions in the workplace: how we handle our own emotions and the emotions of other people. What emotions are appropriate, and when and why. Emotions are a central part of our work.

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April 22, 2005

Final Draft

I reached another milestone this week: I finished what is hopefully my final draft of my thesis paper. It's about 30 pages long, but still needs to be formatted, copyedited, and printed on heavy stock. But that's for the future; I'm just glad the writing is done.

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Thesis Project Beta Prototype

Please play with the beta version of the FilePiles prototype (~1mb swf)! I'd appreciate any feedback or comments you can give me.

Some thing that aren't obvious:

Hopefully, everything else will be more obvious. Remember that it's still a work in progress, so some stuff is still in development.

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April 20, 2005

Senioritis

With my post-school job settled and graduation looming, I've got the disease that affects millions of high school seniors every year: senioritis: the inability to do schoolwork or to care about the schoolwork you do do. I'm fighting it, but not very effectively. Which is bad news for my remaining schoolwork.

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April 18, 2005

Readings in Ethics, Politics, and Values in Design

For the last section of Organizational Design class we're reading chapters one and two from Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research by Caroline Whitbeck and "Design Ethics" by Dick Buchanan from the Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics.

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April 17, 2005

Job

My job search really began in earnest, although I was only half-aware of it at the time, last August at a backyard barbecue in Somerville, MA during DIS when Chad Thornton introduced me to Peter Merholtz, who offhandedly asked me when I was graduating. After another meeting with Peter in January, a long talk with CEO Janice Fraser at the IA Summit in March, and finally a day of interviews two weeks ago with most of the rest of the team, I was offered and accepted a job as a senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path. I start about a month after I graduate.

Although AP is a great company with some amazing opportunities and an impressive set of benefits and perks, I did agonize over the decision. I met with some very impressive companies and was even offered a job at some of them. But in the end, you have make your best guess based on the offers you get and hope it works out.

In some ways, it's easier to design strategies for companies than for your own life. It's tough to figure out where you want to go, and how to get there. You need, well, an adaptive path to find your way.

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Dark Suit, Black Tie

Today was the second time in two years that I've dressed in a dark suit with a black tie to attend a memorial service for someone affiliated with CMU design. I hope it is the last.

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April 15, 2005

Carnival 2005

A CMU tradition, Carnival, started yesterday and continues throughout the weekend. The Shins are headlining the big concert that rages on the CFA lawn in the center of campus tonight.

Today and tomorrow are the particular CMU institution of Sweepstakes: buggy races that go through campus and into Schenley Park and back again. It's an amazingly huge deal and a blast to watch. I've been looking forward to it since last year. Also like last year, the weather is glorious: sunny with blue skies: a Pittsburgh rarity.

This is one of the things I'll miss.

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April 14, 2005

T-Minus One Month

Only one month left. So much left to do, so many loose ends to wrap up. Things are starting to fall into place for after I graduate, but that puzzle isn't fully resolved yet by any means. The clock ticks and days get marked off on the calendar, one by one.

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April 11, 2005

Innovating Healthcare Services

Ryan Armbruster, director of operations and design at the Mayo Clinic, was our guest speaker today in Service Design class. He was here to discuss a new initiative at Mayo called SPARC that's about designing healthcare services.

Healthcare has basically been delivered the same way for the last 50 years with little changes; there's very few industries you can say that about. Amazingly, more than 50% of patient satisfaction about healthcare comes through the delivery of that care, not necessarily how effective it was.

SPARC is a program to design better healthcare. It's a program to provide live-environment (read: real patients, real doctors) exploration and experimentation for the development of innovations in healthcare delivery. It's also an attempt to fuse design techniques with scientific rigor. All of the solutions SPARC comes up with need to be measured in some manner.

Started about three years ago, SPARC is both a physical space (a laboratory, although it's never called that, especially around patients), and a methodology. SPARC stands for See (user research, context, stories) Plan (translate stories into opportunities, brainstorming) Act (rapid prototyping) Refine (feedback from the prototypes) and Communicate (disseminate knowledge). SPARC's space was created for doing all these steps. It's embedded within a clinical practice inside the hospital. Modular furniture and movable walls allow for lots of flexibility. It was designed with the Wow Factor in mind; they like it when people say, "I didn't believe the Mayo Clinic could do things like this." It's staffed with people willing to accommodate and execute prototypes, which is very rare in medicine. The staff is mainly a blend of physicians and business professionals, with only a small number of people called designers there. The designers act more as facilitators than as traditional designers. "Design" here is about connecting the needs (especially the latent needs) of the patients with the resources of the Mayo Clinic. It's in the latent needs where true innovation lies.

SPARC isn't about the vision of the future. There are lots of initiatives around "the operating room of the future," but SPARC isn't one of them. It's not concerned with long-term vision; it's a learning lab environment. When something works, they ship it out like any traditional product release. This is how they create value--for patients and for the hospital.

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April 10, 2005

Lost Time

I've been traveling so much lately I feel like I've lost two weeks of school--and I suppose I have. This leaves me with only about a month to finish:

And that's just schoolwork. This isn't even mentioning the ongoing job interviews and negotiations, house hunting from 2000 miles away, teaching my class, and various extracurricular things coming up like CMU's Carnival coming up next weekend.

Oy.

Posted by Dan at 09:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 03, 2005

Sorrow

This has been a terrible year for the school of design. Christina Musante becomes seriously ill. John Rheinfrank passes away, as do other members of his and Shelley Evenson's families. And now this. It is nearly too much to imagine, to bear. My heart aches for the Boyarskis.

Posted by Dan at 11:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Vector of Organizational Change: Interactions

A vector is both a force or influence and a course or direction. There are four of what Dick Buchanan calls "Vectors of Organizational Change;" four "things" that can be used separately or together to affect organizations. The third of these are interactions.

Within organizations, people need to work together to get things done. But people have trouble working together; the Social needs to be created. Designers can create special products to do this, products that support and facilitate human interactions. By changing the way that people relate to each other, how people relate to the organization, and how the organization relates to people and other organizations, designers can change the organization.

Of course, you need something to do this--a product--but the product itself often isn't enough; it needs the art of design to bring it to life. And not just the art, but the art put to a particular purpose: to guide collective (inter)action. This requires focusing on both the tasks at hand and the goals of the organization and individuals. It is a summation and an integration of these things.

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Frequent Fliers

My classmates and I are scattered across the country these days, with job interviews and a handful of people presenting at CHI. The list of companies that people are talking to is impressive, a partial Who's Who of Interaction Design: Adaptive Path, Agnew Moyer Smith, Apple, Cooper, Google, IDEO, Microsoft, Motorola, Razorfish, Samsung, Sapient, Smart Design, and Yahoo. I wish us all luck.

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