Title

Deconstructing Design[and why designers wear black]

TitleTHE CONTEXT

Title

[can become] GESTURESPEECH

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Title “…there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but

in the various…’virtual texts’ constructed by [readers] in their search for meaning.”

Rebecca Goldstein

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Title

[can become] ORIGAMIIDEA

IDEA + SQUARE = ORIGAMI

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TitleM3 METHODS LANDSCAPE, 2008

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Title

[Practicing Magic @ Apple]7

TitlePRACTICING MAGIC SINCE THE AGE OF 4…

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Title

9

TitleTHE ELEMENTS [of magic and intuition]

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Title

[Observing]11

Title

[Observing]12

TitleWHAT DO YOU TASTE? [fruity sample]

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TitleWHAT DO YOU SEE?

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Title

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Title

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TitleMEANINGFUL MOMENTS

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Title

TimeEmotionSpatial RelationsBehaviorConversationGestureNeeds

what do you not see?

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Title

[Recognizing and Forming Patterns]19

Title

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Title

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Title

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DISCOVERY HAPPENS WHEN WE ARE FORCED TO CREATE NEW PATTERNS

(SEE THE HIDDEN GIRL?)

TitleTHE HOLE IN THE WHOLE

Challenge expectations

Look where no reasonable person would look

Turn things on their head, literally

Play contradictions

Draw on the most absurd implications of an idea

Collect anomalies

Pay attention to outliers

Try doing the impossible23

Title

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Title

[Analogizing]25

Title

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TitleJONATHAN HARRIS: THE WHALE HUNT

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Title

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TitleCROWDSOURCING A DESIGN THROUGH CO-CREATION

CrowdsourcingThrough Co-DesignLaura S. Richardson, M3Greg Burkett, ASUVincent Lam, M3

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Title

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Title

[Deconstructing]31

TitleDECONSTRUCTION IN DESIGN - MUSIC

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TitleDECONSTRUCTION IN DESIGN - MOVEMENT

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TitleDECONSTRUCTION IN DESIGN - PLEASURE

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Title

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Title

Nine Dimensions(Seven listed here)

Location in the mouth Bite Material ThicknessBite Material HardnessBite Surface AreaSurface TextureVisual PropertiesLip Engagement

Taste was excluded

NINE DIMENSIONS OF PLEASURE

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Title

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TitlePLEASURE ANALYSIS RESULTS

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Title

[Dimensional Thinking]39

TitleFORM BLIND

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TitlePOWERS OF 10

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TitleLITERAL DIMENSIONS

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Title

Stakeholder: SurgeonFocus: Moment of UseConcern: FunctionApproach: Faster, Lighter, More Powerful

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TitleMETAPHORICAL DIMENSIONS

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Title

[Transforming & Synthesizing]45

TitleSYMBOLS [CAN BECOME] SMELL

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TitleSYNTHETIC COMPREHENSION

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TitleEMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO MEDICAL ID CONCEPT

Presented at IDSA 2007Art & Science of Measuring Emotion

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Title

Presented at IDSA 2007Art & Science of Measuring Emotion

Frog’s Design Mind, Tasting Rainbows Winter 2007

TitleCHOCOLATE REVISITED

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TitleTCHO BLOG

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Title

[Make. More. Magic.]

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Title

Page 8: I’ve been practicing magic since I was four

Page 9: Of course, back in my day we didn’t have the wonderful schools they have now.All joking aside, the question remains – what is in the magic? Why can’t we describe it? I think it comes down to something so fundamental, so elemental…

Page 10: …that I felt compelled to express it as a periodic table.These elements of design research “magic” can be mixed together as compounds to help us translate the research into something that becomes meaningful and innovative.Sfumato may be the only one that isn’t clear – that’s because it’s the italian form of the phrase “up in smoke” – our ability to handle ambiguity and chaos is crucial.Because of time, I can only discuss a few of the ones that we have leveraged at M3

Page 11: I experienced TCHO at Adaptive Path’s UXWeek back in August. After lunch one day, TCHO did a tasting demonstration. Let’s take the fruity sample out – what do you taste?[moment of silence for tasting]How many of you bit right into it and munched?How many of you noticed its fruity undertones?How many of you remarked on its texture?How many savored it over time?

Page 12: If that was about taste…this is about what you see. First, how many of you have been to the WTC site since 9/11? About a year and a half ago I became very interested in the idea of altar and artifact analysis. However, I wasn’t interested in individual altars or artifacts, I was more interested in what we could learn from a group altar. I found that the largest altars were those associated with tragedy – princess Diana’s death and 9/11. And then I get a call from my father. The VA Tech tragedy happened and my sister, a senior at the time, had opted out of her German class a week prior to her class being massacred. This particular set of photos is from the WTC – see what you observe.

Page 15: Part of observing is 1) knowing what to look for; and 2) seeing the essence of things in an instant. It is absolutely an acquired skill. Karl Von Frisch, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1973, decoded the dance language of bees by not merely looking, but actively observing and seeing. And whether we approach the photographs metaphorically or literally…

Page 3: Linguistically speaking [and for those who have heard of French philosopher, Jacques Derrida], deconstruction focused on taking something that already existed, such as speech, and through translation, making it into something else.

Page 4: Rebecca Goldstein tried to explain the essence of deconstruction by saying: [read quote] Replace [readers] with [researchers] and the meaning becomes clear.Innovation and Insight are not from the obvious, actual texts (such as interviews, photographs or other made artifacts from our research) – rather it is from our ability to effectively construct “virtual texts” - to take our research and mold it into something else, something that “becomes”

Page 5: In a recent TED talk, Robert Lang described how he extended the art form of origami to heart stents and vehicle airbags. As he so eloquently described it “you take an idea add it to this empty square and it becomes beautifully detailed origami.” Here he is describing the process: If you think about it – what he does, he takes an idea then combines it with some translation to get a robust design is not much different from what we do with our research. Note his last comment – it’s really hard. Why is it so hard? Because we struggle to articulate what happens in the square box, translation. For Robert, it turned out to be a mathematical equation. What is it for us?

Page 6: Some might say “it’s our methods, right?” This diagram was the result of the M3 Design Research team finding as many of the research methods in the public domain as possible, you can see some of the sources consulted here, and then the resulting mental model of how those could be organized. While you might not 100% agree on our breakdown, consider the area of translation. It’s rather light compared to finding and discovery or analysis and evaluation. How many of you have used this word to describe what happens? “magic.” When we went through this exercise, we also put up a card called “magic” because there is something that happens in translation that is hard to put a finger on, let alone describe as a method. If it was really as simple as methods, we’d all be out of jobs. It’s the magic clients pay us for. At least this clears up one thing for me – I know why designers wear black…apparently we perform a little witchcraft… ;o)

Page 7: Here’s the master warlock himself. He’s been practicing magic for awhile…

SLIDE NOTES

TitlePage 221: What was unique about this book, is it actually came with the 9 photographs, so that the reader could hunt for clues as well. We find at the end of the book, that the most important clue wasn’t in the separate photographs, instead it was only when the detective re- ordered the photographs into a 3x3 matrix and stepped back to see the whole, that he found the missing piece. The important point is this: The curator, who had been trained in photograph analysis, couldn’t see what was right in front of her. How often do you think that happens to us? The most critical part of research is not getting the data, but making sense of it. Now, if I re-arrange the photographs, are you able to see the whole? Discovery happens when we are forced to create new patterns.

Page 23: Absence is just as important as presence. Yet we are often not trained to look for nothingness.[Story about interview, which led to 3-day research at library and yielded the interviewee’s dead daughter]

ASU Medical has a curriculum dedicated to medical ignorance – it covers how to ask questions and recognize blank spots in the map of medicine. According to the curriculum “hidden ignorance must be surprised” – research is designed to:[see powerpoint page]

Page 24: For an example of forming new patterns, check out the May/June issue of Interactions Magazine, in which the M3 design team discusses a different approach to design. Because of time constraints, I won’t be able to discuss our approach here, but I encourage you to check out Interactions Magazine if you haven’t already.

Page 25: As humans, we learn by making analogies, but as researchers we must be able to make stronger and deeper analogies than most. Consider Da Vinci’s analogy of the ripples of water correlating to sound rippling out through air – something he couldn’t even see, he was able to deduce from an analogy.

Page 26: Analogies have been applied to some of our greatest designs: Chris Wilkinson’s bridge is the analogy of a human eyelid.

Page 27: As a researcher, I’m also interested in how we can re-think what research we gather. How we can express it differently to unearth new insights? Take Jonathan Harris, artist and computer scientist, who spent 7 days in Alaska. To frame his story, he told it from the perspective of his heartbeat.

Page 16: I believe we are often observing with “eyes wide shut”You might be thinking – well, of course. You aren’t there performing ethnographic interviews, or contextual observations, you aren’t there to see it with your own eyes. And you would be right, but it’s even more than that.

Page 17: First, Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has else seen and thinking what nobody else has thought. I’ve had the benefit of looking at hundreds of photographs from both sites and one of the most simple, but compelling ideas stemming from artifact and behavioral analysis is the idea of providing the largest blood donation collection center of its kind, anywhere, at the WTC site. The theme of blood, the need to give, the time constraints of many visitors warrants a meaningful, participatory activity that is life giving.

Page 18: Secondly and more importantly, It’s no longer enough to ask “what do we see?” but to ask “what do we not see?” Our eyes see in two dimensions…how do we see and understand the third or even the fourth? Ancient physicians tasted urine to identify a patient’s sickness, which is how we know today that a diabetic’s urine is sweet.Seeing with our bodies…observing through touch; Understanding the dimensions of time, sound and emotion and gesture, all of these contribute to observing.So, now I’m curious – do you think you experienced the chocolate?

Page 19: There are so many ways of looking at the same object or idea, yet most of us see one way.

Page 20: A few years back, there was a book called In Soft Focus, about a photographic curator who becomes the fixation of a mad man, a killer, who sends her nine photographs. Using photographic analysis, she finds clues in each photograph.

Page 21: As you can see from the highlighted text, she finds patterns in the clues.

TitlePage 33: Edward Muybridge had the photographic challenge of capturing a horse with all 4 hooves off the ground; he knew he had to capture movement he couldn’t see and so his solution was to place cameras along the race track that would be tripped by the horse as it ran past, thereby deconstructing movement down to individual frames

Page 34: A client recently asked M3 to redesign an intra-oral device. One of their requirements was that it be perceived as more pleasurable. How would you approach such a design challenge? For the M3 team, it began by understanding all the opportunities for pleasure in the mouth through deconstruction.

Page 35: Consider the following diagram from the Journal of Texture Studies: just the one property of texture can be further deconstructed – what we perceive is tied to extra-oral and intra oral properties as well as cultures, norms and expectations.

Page 36: Through our experience and sensorial expertise, we narrowed our focus down to nine pleasure dimensions, seven which are pictured. Lip engagement - The lips are the second most sensitive part of the body.

Page 37: We ran 12 participants through 55 samples, milling many of them in house - not including the competitors. [describe process]

Page 38: The outcome was this pleasure graph. It gave the our team (comprised of researchers, industrial designers and mechanical engineers) definitive product aspects to design more pleasurably. This product is still in development, so this is all that I can share.

Page 39: When you think of dimensional thinking, what comes to mind?Page 40: Perhaps the Bauhaus, which recognized that their art students were uniformly form-blind and helped them develop their dimensional thinking by intersecting geometric shapes in plaster to see how the shapes interrelated.

Page 41: Or perhaps its charles and ray Eames powers of 10But how does dimensional thinking extend to our research?

Page 42: From a literal perspective, our M3 design teams brainstorm innovative approaches to collapsible structures through origami.

Page 28: Consider these two photographs again. The idea of a group building on one another’s work, re-making the meaning of an object together, led me to re-think how our team had been approaching participatory design.We wanted to know, what are we missing by not enabling the crowd to co-create together, to share a common kit rather than mirror images of separate kits? Can we really enable collective creation through participatory design?

Page 29: What we know: Groups are powerful. Conversational insight reveals that participants build on each other’s ideas to jointly construct a new understanding that none of the participants had before.So, we set up the research to enable our understanding of group participatory design. We brought in five teenagers and the context was expressing the ideal game experience. The first participatory activity was an individual image collage, we moved on to a second participatory activity involving the group expressing their desire for aspects of game components, which finally led to the group co- creating the expression of the ideal game experience through a single toolkit.

Page 30: Because this paper is still in progress, I’ll share one brief clip so that you can see for yourself. While at first blush, this doesn’t seem meaningful, rather a little silly. Making of “the man” and singing together. However, keep in mind this is one minute of dialogue out of a 45 minute exercise. While we would never literally translate their responses, the group was intimately collaborating and laddering off of each others ideas, moving from deciding on a game concept, to what might happen when the box is opened, to creating characters. What I find most interesting, however, is the deep analogies this group made – this joint construction of a new understanding – in which the weapons of the game was a weapon fought for in 1964, freedom of speech.

Page 31: Now I turn to deconstructivism – in architecture, it meant the dismantlement of building components. To break apart or dissect. If we apply this to design research, we can gain a deeper understanding and surprising insights.

Page 32: The music you are hearing is from American composter, Charles Ives. In his quest to reproduce non-musical sounds, he would race outside during a thunderstorm and listen to the church bells ringing in alarm and then try to create them on his piano. The sounds seemed impossible to recreate and so he began focusing on the “cracks between the piano keys” - in other words the microtones between the standard notes of modern western music.

TitlePage 50: And so now we have come full circle back to the piece of chocolate you tasted before. This time I want you to taste chocolately, but bring a synthetic awareness to it. Really observe the chocolate. Don’t merely taste, but feel. Open yourself to all of the possibilities of experience and expression. This time, with eyes wide open.

Page 51: A final note – in my attempt to experience the chocolate as fully as possible, I expressed it as a continuum of taste. After I opened my eyes, the Tcho presenter said to the crowd, “the founder likes to call this one a roller coaster ride.” I looked at my drawing and I had expressed exactly that. Could Tcho do an even better job describing their chocolate? And can we as researchers do a better job of translating our work through magic?

Page 52: I think the answer to both is “yes.” So, let’s go make more magic.

Page 44: From a metaphorical perspective, we approach design challenges dimensionally. This is a proprietary methodology called The Triptych.

Page 45: I’d like you to consider the following:Can you smell the alphabet?Can urine be put to music and the different frequencies be heard?Can we listen to a DNA protein sequence?The answer to all is yes.

Page 46: Transforming is changing concepts from one form to another for comprehension. Too often we might advocate one method or one approach and expect only one answer. How many people here learned only way one of thinking about the periodic table? Did you know there are 450 valid representations?

What about how we learn the alphabet as children? We see symbols or gesture, we hear how they sound, we might feel their form – what about how they smell and taste? What does CAT smell like to you? Would dyslexics confuse a b or a d if one smelled like banana and the other like Drakkar?

Page 47: The result of this transformational thinking is synthetic understanding in which sensory impressions, feelings, knowledge and memories come together in a multimodal, unified way. True synesthesia is a neurological condition in which senses are conjoined – for example, seeing letters or numbers in color, or hearing music in color or tasting shapes.

How we can utilize this gift is through associational or learned synesthesia in which we consciously try to extend our understanding by conjoining senses, memories, experiences, things seen or unseen. Associational synesthesia occurs in half of all young children, but only 5 – 15% of adults.

Page 48: When I ask for an emotional response to a product and I get a painting…

Page 49: Or if I want to track an emotional response to a product over time and I get sound I am getting a synthetic response. Keep in mind Jonathan Harris’ photographic heartbeat…synthetic response.