Beyond Consumer Centered Design

This video is based on a paper that I'm working on for the AAA conference in November. In it I encourage designers to think beyond the needs of consumers claiming that doing so will yield more interesting and innovative products, services, and systems. Let me know what you think.

PS. Thanks to Hilary Austen for helping me find the courage to embrace complexity in an artful way. Pick up her new book from U of Toronto press Artistry Unleashed (review coming soon)



TRANSCRIPT

FELLA: Hey, don't you know that Human Centered Design is all the rage? Every body's doing it.

LADY: That sounds interesting. What is Human Centered Design, exactly?

FELLA: It's a design process that borrows methods from anthropology so that designers can empathize with consumers.

LADY: So, in the end, designers give consumers more of what they really want?

FELLA: O yeh. Isn't it great?

LADY: Well, I'm not so sure. I thought that I read some where that hyper consumerism is kind of a problem. The article said that a lot of the stuff we buy in the west causes environmental, social, and economic problems in other parts of the world.

FELLA: O gee. I guess so. But what can we designers do about that.  Isn't consumerism a force that's beyond our control?

LADY: Well, let's think about this for a minute. What if, 0and this is just a thought experiment, what if we designers could extend our empathy beyond consumers. Could we extend our empathy to all people along the value chain of a product?

FELLA: Gosh.  That's sounds daunting. But I'll run with it for now. So, who would we be looking at?

LADY: Let's start at the beginning. I guess we'd look at the people mining the natural resources that make our products.

FELLA: Sure. Then we'd look at the people who work in the factories that manufacture products. And the people who live near those factories 0(ever see Erin Bronkovich?)

LADY: Right. Then there are the people that drive our products around in trucks and there are people that sell the products to us.

FELLA: This is getting overwhelming.

LADY: I know. But I think we agree it's important. So let's stick it out. No one said it would be easy.

FELLA: Right on, right on. So, here we are looking at the consumer. From the point-of-sale, through the use of the product, and the eventual disposal of the product.

LADY: Right. I heard somewhere that 90 percent of the products we buy in the west are disposed of within six months of purchase.

FELLA: I heard that too. It seems like Human Centered Design could address this problem. so let's keep plugging away.0 Who do we look at next, once the product is disposed of? Is that the end?

LADY: Well, no. A lot of the products that we "throw away" are actually shipped off to other countries so that people can take them apart and extract metal for resale.

FELLA: That sounds like recycling which is a good thing, right?

LADY: Sigh. Yeh, but there are a lot of toxins in these products. So the people that are taking them apart are exposing themselves and their families to really bad toxins.

FELLA: Um. I'm starting to hate design. Maybe I should just do what my parents wanted me to do and go to med school.

LADY: Ha. I guess you could but if design is the problem, then perhaps design can be the solution too. We have to begin by asking the right questions.

FELLA: You are right. And then we redefine some terms. Like Human Centered Design. Focusing on consumers only seems too easy.

LADY: Too easy indeed. From now on, we designers need to empathize with people all along the value chain of a product, service, or system. It might take ten years or so to get this right, but I'm up for the challenge. You in?

FELLA: Totally. Let's keep the conversation going. Be sure to post a comment below or send a tweet to our pal @xanthm on twitter. She's really good about sharing your feedback. Peace.

LADY: Peace.

BarCamp Roc - Design as a Breathing Cycle

I'm excited to run a workshop over at BarCamp Rochester this afternoon. I don't plan on taping the talk so am putting my notes here so that the contents of the talk can be shared. Let me know if you have any questions. And enjoy. 

Design As A Breathing Cycle* - Discussion and Workshop at BarCamp Rochester / October 2010

1. We are all designers

Programmers, Artists, Engineers, Managers, Entrepreneurs-- We all make things for other people to engage with.

2. Design is a way of being in the world.

(It is not an object)

3. Our goal, our duty, is to be open to new ideas all of the time.

If we increase the volume of good ideas, then we increase the chances of finding a remarkable one.

4. HTF do we do that?

It’s simple. But like anything else that we want to be good at,  it takes practice.

5. Design As A Breathing Cycle

INHALE - all of the ideas that we can possibly imagine.

Encourage Wild Ideas

Suspend Judgment

Build on the Ideas of Others

Write Every Idea Down

THE EXHALE - filtering

Categorize the Ideas

If an idea fits under more than one category, put it in more than one category

If an idea doesn’t seem to fit, put it in a “special” category

Connect ideas

INHALE. EXHALE. INHALE. EXHALE...

6. Summary: We are all designers. We need to be open to new ideas all of the time. Practice makes perfect.


*Like most great ideas, this one would not exist without the principle of "Building on the ideas of others ." Thanks, Bruce Corson.

photo: Community Msg Board from a historic 19th C. tavern in Rochester, NY

Sign up for Design-thinking at RIT

Design-thinking & Concept Development is a new Gen Ed course offered by Saunders College of Business at RIT but open to all students, from all disciplines, with junior standing. In the class we learn and practice creative methods for new product and service development by exploring two main lines:

1. EXERCISES - tons of them - that help you reach beyond your habitual thinking patterns and

2.  HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN - it's an approach that's more like social science and less like the techno vodoo that you (already) do so well.

So sign up and increase your creative vocabulary and skill set ten fold. Course number 0102-421-01.

QUESTIONS? Contact Prof. Matychak at xanthe.matychak@rit.edu


(hot dog toaster not included)

Tools for developing new products, services, and systems

This year I've been thinking a lot on how to use sustainability frameworks to inspire ideas for new products, services, and systems. Here is a link to my ever-evolving google doc that explains the process and includes an exercise (this one geared toward business management students). If you'd like to try it out, then be my guest but please give me some feedback on how it went. Or better yet, invite me to your class or event and I'll facilitate the exercise with you. Peace <3

World Maker Faire 2010

Last weekend, Andrea, Michelle, and I took our interactive exhibit, RIVER MEMOIR, down to World Maker Faire in NYC. As you can see from the picture above, folks were really engaged with the exhibit and we had fun sharing it with the wide range of people that passed through the fair.

Unfortunately, as exhibitors we didn't have much time to check out the rest of the fair. There were some great speakers, performances, and exhibits all over the site.

The most exciting part about being there for me was being in Flushing Meadows Park, the site of the 1964 Worlds Fair. The 1964 fair was all about the future of big industry. Growing up on Long Island, I saw the site as a beautiful yet tragic monument to a faded vision of that future. So, being a participant in this enormous celebration of DIY culture, in that location, is especially meaningful for me.

Thank you to the organizers of the fair. I think you did a fantastic job considering this was the first time working at this venue.

Above is a detail of the "river" we made at the fair. We collected little stories from people at the fair and then cast them on to a river (a piece of knit wear) using a knitting machine and a computer. The process was amazing and the final product, as you can see, is pretty.

Fibers, Modernists, and Makers, o my

As you know, I'm interested in ideas and projects that challenge the status quo. This September has been full of stuff like that and so I'm super happy. I'm going to write a brief overview of some of the projects that I've been privileged to be a part of this month and hopefully, when I get another chance to write, I'll dig a little deeper into some of these. Do let me know what you'd like to hear more about.

FIRST, THERE WAS FIBERS NIGHT. There's a new textiles studio in the RIT Innovation Center that my colleague Andrea Handy built along with some faculty from CIAS. It's fantastic. There are sewing machines and knitting machines and a slew of tools that I plan on learning how to use over the course of the year. Ever since craftavist Carla Sinclair came to visit RIT a few years ago, I've been obsessed with the urban craft movement. It's all about getting back to knowing how things are made which, in this day and age, is a radical concept.

The next fibers night is on Oct 22. If you want to know more about it, then find the Fibers Night event in the RIT Wearables group on facebook. Wearables, for those who don't know the term, is a genre of fashion that incorporates technology. If you've seen clothes that light up or move or make noise, then you've seen wearables. Diana Eng is probably one of the more well-known designers working in this field. (And she'll be at Maker Faire this weekend - see below).

VIGNELLI CENTER OPENING. As a graduate student, I was privileged to study with RIT's renowned design historian, R. Roger Remington. He taught me all about modernism and the grid and even though I rebelled a bit at the time (c'mon, are you surprised??), I've come to deeply appreciate the modernist foundation I learned while studying with Roger. I equate this modernist education to learning the classics while an undergrad in music school. Did I love practicing Mozart five hours a day? Of course not. But learning those pieces helped me build a framework for the the entire range of music I would take on later in my career. The Vignellis are my Mozart. Roger's relationship with them enhanced my education and is now enhancing RIT as their entire body of work has found a new home in the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at RIT.

The well known blog, Design Observer, ran a series of pieces on the Vignellis last week that are outstanding. And this quote is among the best:

If — as Mark Twain once wrote — the Creator made Italy from designs by Michaelangelo, then who made the rest of the world?

Lella and Massimo Vignelli may not have made it, but they sure as hell designed a lot of it.

If you aren't yet familiar with their work, head on over to the new center on RIT campus. I'm sure you will recognize quite a bit of their graphic and product design.

FRESHMEN. Speaking of education, we're doing something new this year. In Saunders College of Business, where I work, we have this incredible freshmen sequence called "Biz 1-2-3" in which our freshmen learn business fundamentals while discovering, developing, and delivering their own new product or service. If that weren't fantastic enough, this year we're teaming some of them up with some of the freshmen in the design program. Below is a picture from their second meeting. They are working with maps of the campus that the design students made in order to find good problems for solving. Ask any successful designer or entrepreneur, great products and services come from identifying juicy problems.

SUSTAINABILITY = CREATIVITY. As you may know, I teach a class called "Design-thinking and Concept Development" out of Saunders College of Business. Design-thinking is really just creative thinking in disguise. There's a fun yet deceivingly rigorous methodology for teaching creativity that's focused on helping students break out of their habitual patterns of thought.

Even though the course is listed under management in the course catalog, it's a course offered to all RIT students with junior standing or higher. This is the third quarter that I'm teaching the course and we've got a nice mix of students from business, engineering, and design.

In today's class,  I introduced the students to a sustainability framework called "Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)." LCA helps us dig into how our design decisions affect people, planet, and profit all along the value chain of a product. Neat stuff. And LCA lends itself really nicely to the teaching of creativity as it embodies multiple perspectives. I'll be talking more in depth on how LCA increases creativity at the AAA conference in November.

AAA is an anthropology conference. What does design have to do with anthropology, you ask? We'll, that's another story. But in short, anthropology is about human-tool relationships and so is design.

THE FUTURE OF (FILL IN THE BLANK). I keep getting invited to meetings that are about the future of this and that. One recent meeting was about the future of journalism. Another on the future of design. Every time I get an email invite to one of these things, I feel blessed - - like I must be doing something right for people to be thinking of me in this way. (I know, enjoying work emails sounds nuts. Believe me, I don't enjoy all of them!)

WORLD MAKER FAIRE. And finally, to finish off the month with a cherry on top, my colleagues and I are taking our wearables exhibit down to the World Maker Faire at the NY Hall of Science. This is the same location that the 1964 Worlds Faire was held. Except this time, instead of industry making the exhibits, the exhibits will be made by hackers and crafters. The speaker line-up is fantastic, including a talk from Chris Anderson on 3D Printing, one of my fave topics.

Design-thinking and Concept Development course at RIT

Attention RIT upper class men and women. Do you still need a general education course for fall 2010? Then  sign up for design-thinking. It's open to all majors and super fun.

We'll be working on at least three hands on projects involving instructables, sustainable, found object furniture, and social network tools for neighborhoods. No previous design experience necessary.

The course number is 0102-421 and meets Tuesday/Thursday mornings from 8 to 10. Sure it's early, but we've got Java Wally's running a coffee line right down to our classroom. No problemo.

Questions? Ask Prof. Xanthe Matychak at xanthe.matychak@rit.edu

Peace.