Toys toys toys

I'm developing a new project called Make Better Stuff, a series of toy-making workshops in which students design and build their own toys while learning social skills like teamwork, user interaction, and empathy. I've been thinking a lot about toys--about who designs them, who builds them (not elves), who plays with them, and how the design of a toy affects people in different ways.

Toys are designed by grown ups. Many of these designers work for firms who aim for high sales and low production costs. Then there are those who assemble toys, often foreign laborers who’ve moved away from their families to make money to send home, who might take a few night classes to try to move up in their careers. Then there are the recipients of these toys: kids who play with them. Different types of toys encourage different types of play.

A ball for example encourages a shared experience. It can be a competitive experience as in basketball, in which the goal of each player is to score for their own team and prevent the other team from scoring. Or it can be a collaborative experience, as in a game of catch, in which both parties want to toss the ball back and forth just because it feels good--that experience sounds and smells good too.

There are toys that encourage strict adhesion to the rules, such as a coloring book. And there are toys that encourage exploration and creativity, such as legos. (Even though they are marketed and sold in kits, they still end up in one big bin that kids make all kinds of fabulous creations with.)

But you know what there aren’t enough of? Toys designed by kids. So I look forward to exploring toy-design with kids. I’d like to know what they think about toys: the relationships that toys promote and how kids might create toys that make their own lives better. Sounds like fun, right?

Almost Perfect

As I embark on a new laser cutting project, I’m diving deep into patterns, tessellations, and polyhedrons. These are patterns of perfection, one unit exactly like the next. But the deeper I go into this research, the more I’m drawn to the theme of “almost perfect.” It’s popping up everywhere. In nature there is pattern and variation like in kernels on an ear of corn or in leaves on a branch. They’re all the same, but they are slightly different from one another. And in music there is the concept of “theme and variation.” The theme is the perfect and variation the imperfect. Alone they are flat little pieces but, paired, theme and variation create something rich, complex, and whole.

Christopher Alexander’s 1977 book, A Pattern Language, is filled with imperfect patterns that help us to design better buildings, towns, and cities. “Something Roughly in the Middle” is a pattern from that book. The pattern doesn’t discard symmetry but asks us to play with it a bit. When designing a courtyard, he says, place a sculpture or a fountain roughly in the middle. Resist the urge to place it dead center.

Like I said, this theme is everywhere. I even heard super-model Tyra Banks tell one of her contestants on America’s Next Top Model, ‘You want your photos to be perfect, but not quite perfect. Because that’s what makes a great photo, when something is slightly off.’

So thank you, universe, for pointing out the almost perfect. And let me ask you dear readers, what are your favorite examples of “almost perfect”?

Repost: Interview with Red Hat designer, Mo Duffy

Mo Duffy is a senior interaction designer at Red Hat, a billion dollar company that is the world's leading open source and Linux provider. I met Mo this past spring when we spoke on a panel at SxSW. I was struck by her insights into her profession and how those insights relate to all design professions. Not only does she get into the nitty gritty of the politics of the workplace and the realities of usability testing, but she is a passionate advocate for open source and the democratization of design.


To read the interview, follow this link to industrial design super site Core77.

Cheese, Entrepreneurship, and 3D Printing

I've gotten pretty good at making cheese over the past month which makes me (and my friends) happy. I've been making bread and more recently gnocchi and I'm experimenting with alternatives to wheat for that. But really, the most exciting thing for me at the moment is that I'll be at the Finger Lakes Social Entrepreneurship Institute this weekend where we will use the Board of Innovation's "Business Model Canvas" to develop ideas for new businesses. I aim to explore a business based on managing volunteers or on collaborative consumption (sharing stuff). And then next week I'm speaking at the Design for Manufacturing Summit in NYC on how I've used rapid prototyping in the classroom. So yes, it's cheese, entrepreneurship, and 3D printing for me this month and I couldn't be happier.

What can you teach in an hour?

Yesterday my husband and I went to a cheese-making workshop at the first Fingerlakes Cheese Festival. Our teacher, Tom Pinello, did a fantastic job demystifying the cheese-making process. His delivery was calm and casual yet thorough. And he was open to questions throughout the workshop--we had many.

The most striking thing about this workshop was that it began with a room full of folks with little-to-no-knowledge of cheese-making and yet, 40 minutes later, we had made a ball of mozzarella cheese together.

This got me on a stream of thought about what I could teach other people to do in an hour. I could teach people how to run effective brainstorming sessions, how to analyze the sustainability of a product, how to use the elements of graphic design, or how to grill perfect pork chops.

Then I wondered what the people I know could teach other people to do in an hour. I have friends who could teach people how to use a sewing machine, how to conduct an interview, how to design a paper-based game, and how to grow garlic. I have friends who could teach people how to use commas, how to write poems, how to self-publish books, and how to edit video.

Then I started to think of creating a collection of one hour lessons. I'm aware of Freeskool and Ignite Talks and BarCamp and Khan Academy. I'm not sure if this project is different and I don't know if it has to be.

But here's the first step--what could you teach a small group of people to do in one hour?

Simple steps for encouraging participation

NOTE: If you are able to read and listen to music at the same time -- I cannot -- then I suggest playing this video while you read. The music is quite good.


We gave our SxSW panel on women in open source today. It was fun. I’ve really enjoyed talking with Red Hat designer, Mo Duffy,  these past few days and Andrea Hickerson is always a pleasure to work with.

Our panel was about encouraging women to participate in open source and open collaboration projects. By ‘open collaboration’ I mean any project that isn’t directly regulated by the market or government but instead relies on a group of self-organized volunteers. Yochai Benkler writes about this at a very high level, but I’m looking for something a little simpler. Also I’m not as interested in how the work is arranged, which is what Benkler articulates well, but how the entry experience for a newbie is designed.

During the discussion, I think we all agreed that when a host of an open source or open collaboration project extends an invitation for newbies to join, that invitation isn’t enough to encourage a diverse group of people to participate. We articulated that problem well, I think,  and the audience nodded their heads in agreement. But solutions are hard to come by. Several audience members scratched their heads and asked, “Why is this still an issue?” To which I humbly replied, “I don’t know. That’s what I’m here to find out.” (I know panelists aren’t supposed to say that, but I’m on a “show your vulnerability” kick these days. But that’s another story).

One answer I thought of during the panel comes from what I'm learning in my grad strategy course. In strategy, we learn that it’s common for an organization to articulate a grand vision yet not clarify an execution plan to achieve that vision. “Why is that so common?” you may ask. Again, I don’t know but I suspect it’s because executing a vision is freaking hard to do.

So in trying to figure out how to add some walk to our talk, how to offer some actionable steps toward getting closer to the vision of  more women participating in open collaboration, I called on my first love, music. In music, we engage in something called “Call and response.”  The caller can be thought of, in this instance, as the host of a collaborative project. And the responders are potential participants.

Here are the steps for engaging people in a “call and response” collaboration.
1. Offer them an invitation to collaborate (good start, but not enough)
2. Show them how to participate (sing a simple line of a song)
3. Practice the line with them (until they feel comfortable)
4. Take a leap of faith together and sing the song

Now, I know the skeptics out there have been burned by engaging in a process like this. More than once I’ve heard a host of a project say, “I spent 10 hours training that person and they just abandoned the project.” This is a valid concern. That’s why it’s so important to find an easy task for the newbie to learn that won’t take too much of your time. Now, the other skeptics are saying, “Well, if I spend that much time with a newbie, won’t I just be training them to depend on me to lead them? That’s not what open source is about.” This too is a valid concern.

To come back to music, a newbie starts off with an instructor, but eventually learns how to play on her own. She may even outgrow her instructor and will have to find a new one that is more challenging. Finally, she goes on to perform solo and in ensembles and may even become an instructor herself. This is how you scale participation in open collaborative projects. Extend an invitation to a newbie; model for them how to participate; practice with the newbie until she feels comfortable; then, most importantly, take a leap of faith together and sing that song. And when you get really good at this process, you may end up as good as Miles.

video via Chris Azzara

TEDx Talk: Make Better Stuff

Back in November I had the privilege of speaking at TEDx Rochester about the convergence of two of my favorite topics: social business and rapid prototyping. Here's the video with transcript below. Enjoy!


TRANSCRIPT
Hi, I’m a designer, and I want to talk to you about making better stuff. When designers make stuff, we don’t just make one thing; we make thousands of copies of it. Often these things are manufactured abroad, using poor labor practices under substandard environmental regulations.

Then the stuff gets shipped to big box stores all around the world where we buy it cheap. To top it off, this stuff that we make and then buy isn’t even making us happy. Research shows that once we reach middle class status, the stuff we buy doesn’t add much to our happiness (Gilbert). There has got to be a better way.

As a designer and a want-to-be anthropologist, I believe that objects & products--that STUFF--mediates human relationships in both negative and positive ways. So when I say MAKE BETTER STUFF I mean stuff that strengthens our relationships with people in our communities and stuff that creates local jobs.

It’s NOT easy to do. But it IS getting easier. So I want to point out to you two encouraging trends. One is about meaning. The other is about means.

First, MEANING.
Businesses increasingly want to offer meaningful products for two reasons:

1. more customers want them

2. creating them is rewarding for employees

Tom’s Shoes, Method Soap, and Patagonia are large firms that make meaningful stuff. But I want to illustrate this phenomenon of meaning closer to home using one of my favorite examples: the local food sector.

The number of farmers markets in this country has doubled in the past five years. Not because the food is cheap or convenient, but because more customers now want relationships, both personal and economic, with the people making their food and their stuff. And the farmers and makers? They aren’t getting into these businesses to become millionaires. They do it because they want to do work that is meaningful. Now, the business model of the farmers market is not fully evolved, but it’s a good start to building an economy around better stuff that builds meaningful relationships.

Which brings me to my second point: THE MEANS.

I cite the local food sector as a venue for better stuff, but meaningful markets can be hi-tech too. Engineers here are probably familiar with rapid prototyping tools like “3D printers” and “laser cutters.” Having these tools is like a having a mini-manufacturing plant on your own desktop or garage. Engineers have used them for years to make and test prototypes of their designs.

What’s new about this technology is that it’s becoming remarkably accessible. Just as music production software is readily available now, anyone with an internet connection and a camera phone can now upload a drawing of a product to a manufacturer in the location of their choosing that will manufacture that product on demand.

And then of course the internet is an effective tool for marketing, selling, and distributing product. Ponoko is one of several platforms where we can already do this. When I want to buy a gift for my friend in California, I no longer have to go to the big box store and buy her something that was made halfway across the world. Instead, I can get online, design something of my own or pick something out, and that thing can be “printed” by a small manufacturer in her neighborhood and delivered a short distance to her home. The product is meaningful because it’s made just for her, by a small manufacturer and business owner who lives in her community who has the means to make and deliver product.

Now that’s a simple example but the last industrial revolution started in a simple way too, with textiles. So I’m here to ask of you, when this technology becomes ubiquitous, let’s not mess it up. Let’s not repeat the 20th century mistake of manufacturing ourselves out of jobs. Instead, let’s make stuff that creates jobs and strengthens the relationships between makers and customers in our own towns and cities.

We live in a time when there’s an increasing demand for meaningful products. And we live in a time when more and more of us have the technological means to create and distribute these products. So please, MAKE BETTER STUFF.  

MAKE BETTER STUFF by Xanthe Matychak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

NOTE: I used a photo by Ed Burtynsky in the slide presentation for this talk.

Pitching to the Crowd vs VCs

It used to be that if you wanted to start a business, you had to write a detailed business plan and pitch it to Venture Capitalists. It’s not uncommon to ask a VC to invest $100k for start up costs. What would she want in return? Well, only 40% of your company. So the pitch you make to a VC has to have a certain level of granularity and probably a lot of spreadsheets. Great ideas and passion are important, but you have to be pretty confident about every one’s Return On Investment for two reasons: 1. $100k is a lot of money and 2. That VC now owns 40% of your business.

But more and more we’re seeing entrepreneurs raise money on crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter or Indie GoGo. On these sites, you aren’t looking for one dude to invest $100k. Instead you are asking 100s or 1000s of people for small contributions of $10, $50, or $100. These people won’t own a percentage of your business. They’re just helping you get started because it’s a fun thing to do. And if you doubt that people can raise start-up money this way, just go to the “best funded” link on Kickstarter.

My question is this: What does this shift from pitching to VCs to pitching to the crowd mean for how we pitch or teach students to pitch? If crowd-funders don't care about your spreadsheets or ROI, what do they care about? What makes them sign in to their paypal accounts to make a contribution?

image: where George Eastman's mansion (left) connects with The Eastman Museum (right)

Local Food Economy: A Call for Innovation

The number of farmers markets in this country has almost doubled in the last five years. From a customer's point of view, this increased access to locally produced food is fantastic. And from the producer side, the increased demand for their products feels like a good thing. However, the “tools" that these farmers depend on to grow, process, and sell their food are in dire need of a makeover.

While small scale farmers are definitely not in their business for the money, make no mistake about it, if they don't have enough money to operate and pay themselves, the small scale farm won't survive. Here are some areas in which I’ve observed that a lack of proper tools seems to be causing problems: While the farmers find the vintage tools they use charming, they are frustrated by the lack of new tools available that fit the scale of their operations. And while farmers enjoy meeting their customers at the farmers market, the farmers market as a tool-for-sales is a drain on their time. There’s a great opportunity here for entrepreneurs, especially those interested in local economic development, to create the tools that small farmers need. Here in Upstate New York, we’ve already seen some entrepreneurial efforts in local distribution and sales beyond farmers markets. Both Good Food Collective in Rochester and Garden Gate Food in Ithaca have started businesses that connect local producers with customers providing locally grown produce, dairy, meats, bread, and even soap. These entrepreneurs don’t have brick and mortar stores but have instead retro-fitted refrigerated trucks that function as mobile “pop-up shops.” 

As for farm tools and processing tools, I’ve seen many great inventions on the farms I’ve visited. But moving these inventions (technologies that work) to innovations (technologies that scale) is the challenge that I’m hoping entrepreneurs will rise to. And rather than offshore production, I hope we take advantage of local, manufacture-on-demand technology and local talent. photo: on the left, Farmer Erin with a home made tool for marking seed beds and on the right, a spring-tooth-harrow, made by Leroy Plows, that she pulled out from the woods surrounding Mud Creek Farms.

Design-thinking with Local Food Entrepreneurs

There's a movement in the Rochester metro area to transform our local food economy. Transforming the local food economy presents three major questions: 1. How do we help small and mid size farmers do what they do best - grow delicious food using sustainable farming techniques,  2. How do we help customers get that food, 3. How do we keep food dollars in our region and create food-related jobs.

This fall my design-thinking class at RIT is working with three different stakeholders in this transformation: 1. The Good Food Collective which handles sales and distribution from 8 farms to 500 members, 2. FreshWise Farms, a social enterprise of Foodlink that delivers food education and healthy locally grown food to underserved populations, and 3. Mud Creek Farm/Small World Bakery, a medium sized farm that offers CSAs and makes some great processed food like KimChi!

We're super excited about the diversity of food entrepreneurs we get to work with. Each enterprise has different problems for us to explore. For example, Good Food has an awesome distribution truck, the Green Bean Machine, but winter's coming so they need to fit it with accessories that stand up to our Western New York winters. Mud Creek Farm has a great problem too - lack of access to tools that fit their mid-sized farm. It turns out that there are many tools for serious gardeners but they're too small. And there are many tools for industrial farms but they're too big (insert Goldielocks joke here). And then FreshWise is trying to think up innovative ways to engage K-12 students with the healthy locally grown food that's finding its way into their after school meals.

The list of problems here illuminates the complexities we navigate when trying shift from a well established model to an alternative model. And it's in these kinds of spaces, working with these kinds of problems, that innovation happens. It's dirty and gritty and messy and fun.

So three cheers for our new adventure. I'll be reporting on our process as we dig deeper into the projects. Its bound to be full of surprises.

PS - Please come to our Local Food Potluck on 9/29. Details here: https://nofany.org/

Printable, Readable Declaration of Independence

Every summer I make the journey back to my home town on Long Island to celebrate the Fourth of July with my dearest friends. I go back to participate in a wonderful tradition in which they gather friends and family on their lawn to read The Declaration of Independence aloud. It is a spirited reading with hoots and hollers for the patriots and boos and hisses for King George, all facilitated by lots of free-flowing American beer.

If you'd like to host your own reading, just print this document, hand out the parts to your friends (the parts are clearly marked), and read with pride.

Let freedom ring!

Project for 2011-12: Open Source Farm Tools

I made this video for a design competition and, even though I'm not using it for the competition (I've decided to highlight another project instead), I'd like to share it with you.

As you may already know, this past year my design-thinking class has worked with visionaries in the local food system - folks from Foodlink, FreshWise Farms, and the Good Food Collective. Recently, Chris Hartman from GFC brought a project to my attention. It's called the Global Village Construction Set. It's a project put forth by Marcin Jakubowski that offers open source plans for 50 tools that are essential to farming. The idea is that anyone who wants to farm anywhere in the world can if they are able to build these tools. Most of tools are comprised of off the shelf parts and come at a fraction of the cost of buying and maintaining similar tools from large manufacturers.

I'm just thrilled about this project. It brings together two things that I am very passionate about - the local food economy and DIY culture. So have a look at the video - make sure the captions are on and try to ignore the rough spots and anonymity at the end. Just let me know what you think. And if you are a student at RIT and want to get involved, please do sign up for my class!

Design-thinking course # 0102.421.01

Cheers!

Sign up for Design-thinking at RIT

Design-thinking is method for developing new products, services, and systems made popular by the Stanford d.school. The method takes cues from processes found in anthropology and fine art. We use anthropological processes to gain insights on stakeholders affected by our designs, for e.g., observing people in their natural environments.  And we use fine arts processes to develop creative prototypes, for e.g., navigating divergent and convergent thinking.

Make a bold move and join us. The course is open to all RIT students junior level and up. I haven't chosen the project for fall yet so if you have some ideas, leave a comment. (The project is different every quarter).

Course # 0102.421.01

This Answer Is Not Helpful

I had the goofiest interaction on Quora this past weekend. For those of you not in the know, Quora is a new site for Q&A. Unlike sites like Ask.com, questions and answers posted on Quora are highly curated. And as we’ve become increasingly attentive to the crediblity of online information sources, curation has become a vital part of our virtual interactions.

Quora has strict rules about how to craft questions and answers and I bumped up against them over the weekend. I posted an answer to a question and the answer was almost immediately voted down and collapsed by another user and labelled "This answer is not helpful." Call me oversensitive, but being told that I wasn't being helpful made me feel really bad. My censurer pointed me to the rules on how to write a helpful answer, but I did not know which of these rules I had broken. And beyond that, I didn't agree with all of the rules.  

In contrast, something that I kind of liked about Facebook was its "like" icon. Even though several groups formed claiming to want an "unlike" icon, it never materialized. And even though you can have a pretty contentious discussion on Facebook, the architecture of the icons is pretty positive. As are the defaults they afford us.

This experience with Quora got me thinking in a broader sense about online rating systems which are also playing a major role in the quest for creating credible information sources online. 

Why do we vote instead of encourage people to articulate their responses in writing?  Because it's faster and easier. Yet sites like Quora have the potential for a real exchange of knowledge and beliefs that a rating system can never achieve.

If we really want to increase human knowledge, then why don't we create systems that enable us to help each other find the right words? IDEO has a brainstorming principle "Build on the Ideas of Others." That is, when someone says something that you may not agree with, pause for a minute, find a part of the statement that you like, and build on it until you like it. As with any consensus-building exercise, the addition of new ideas to a conversation can almost always be helpful - regardless of the idea’s direct relationship to the project’s goal. Educators don’t shut people down for writing unhelpful answers; rather, we take on the responsibility of integrating those answers into the discussion.

My Quora experience would have been great if only my censurer had provided a thoughtful and constructive response. Now how can I help him do that?

special thanks to E. K. Learnard for feedback and editing

Does poetry matter?

Poet Nikki Giovanni was interviewed on the local radio station earlier this afternoon. She is in town for a Martin Luther King celebration. It was a fantastic interview. In it she said something about art, and poetry in particular, that I want to capture here. 

The host of the radio show asked her something like, 'Does poetry matter to the average person? Is poetry important?' 

Now, before I taught in a b.school, I didn't ever have to think about questions like these. When you are in art school as a professor or a student you just assume that what you are doing matters. 

But now that I travel in business and tech arenas, I'm constantly finding myself explaining the value of creativity to skeptics. Which is challenging, but ultimately good for me and, I hope, good for the skeptics.

But back to the interview. When asked if poetry mattered, Giovanni responded with this convincing anecdotal evidence, 'We have words poured over us when we are born. We have words poured on us when we marry. We have words poured on to us when we die. Surely, poetry must be important to us.'

I love this answer. It's straightforward and clear. It's the kind of answer that I can picture one of my colleagues in business or technology responding to. But I can also imagine these colleagues pushing back with something like, "Well, of course art matters to us during those milestones, but those moments are few and far between. I still don't understand how art, or creativity, is meaningful in our everyday lives."

‪Poems are important to us at births and weddings and funerals because we want them to shape those important moments of our lives. But we should be seeking to shape our lives every day. ‬Business and technology are every day ventures. Every day these forces shape us whether we want them to or not. So as long as they are shaping our lives, I'll make mine, and take mine, with poetry. 

bonus: Here's a much longer post on design & poetry that I wrote a few years back. Enjoy. 

Sign up for Design-thinking at RIT

Hey RIT folks. It's registration time once again. If you're looking for a great gen. ed. course for the spring, then check out  "Design-thinking and Concept Development," a general education course hosted by the Saunders College of Business at RIT. course #0102.421.01

This spring we'll be creating a 3D map of Rochester's future. Throughout the process of making the map, we will learn about and practice problem-solving strategies commonly held by designers: 

•               Generating & visualizing ideas

•               Engaging in creative exercises

•               Designing for sustainability & society

•               Observing & understanding human-behavior

•               Discussing readings & videos about design

•               Exploring new business models

•               Researching emerging technologies

•               Building & testing prototypes

Join us. The project is going to be fantastic. The class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am to 11.50am in the Center for Student Innovation at RIT. 

QUESTIONS? contact Prof. Xanthe Matychak at xanthe [dot] matychak [at] rit [dot] edu or shoot me a DM on twitter @xanthm