Recently I’ve been cleaning out my file drawers and closets, going though a lot of old material I haven’t seen or thought about in some time. Some work I had collected on TRIZ (a Russian innovation methodology) struck me with its connection to my “Remote Associations” post back in early February. Just as a refresher, here’s the diagram central to that post, and then here’s a diagram of the TRIZ method.

This isn’t a perfect mapping of quadrants; since these quadrants are measuring very different things (the first measures two continua, while with the second organized four discrete items into sequential flow). That said there are some pretty strong connections between what each of these diagrams says.

Moving from specific problem to generalized problem is abstraction; it is to see the metaphorical behind the actual. It is in a sense inductive. In terms of the first diagram, it is the ability to see similarities between things that seem different.

Moving from generalized solution to specific solution is concretization; it is to designate an actual from the metaphorical. It is in a sense deductive. In terms of the first diagram, it is the ability to see differences between things that seem similar.

Recognizing the similarities between apparent differences, moving from the actual to the metaphorical, is like bridging to other places. It is in a way like the archetypal hero’s journey Joseph Campbell (expert in comparative mythologies) describes.

The hero’s journey begins with a sickness in the village, a sickness the normal medicine cannot cure. This is the actual problem. Fortunately there is a magic elixir that can cure the village, but it is far far away. So a hero must be chosen to journey beyond the village and beyond everything that is known. This is the journey from actual to metaphorical. Along the way the hero gains many magic items and companions. These are the generalized solutions. And finally the hero must secure the elixir, and return to the village with it. This is the journey back from the metaphorical to the actual with the specific solution–the solution no one else could come up with.

Now here is the problem: according to my scheme here, TRIZ puts design (seeing the similarity between different things) *after* research (seeing the differences between similar things) the in the sequence of innovation. Clear this doesn’t make sense, so clearly I’ve made a mistake somewhere–but where?

So, what’s my point? Well, I’m not sure I have one really, certainly not beyond just pointing out an interesting connection between Campbell, TRIZ and an earlier posting of mine. But this connection does seem to suggest that there is a point buried in here somewhere—a point worth trying to figure out.

Pardon the hyperbolic headline. But after lamenting how listening to music was once a meaningful experience for me but has lately become disposable, I started to think about what might exhibit the reverse dynamic. Oddly enough television came to mind. By this I’m referring to content, not broadcast medium.

I remember television always being a seductive time-killer, filled with passable fluff that always promised something better would be next, so stay tuned. Shows started at the same time each week, regardless of what viewers were doing. Often shows would be background for other things, like cooking, cleaning, talking, and procrastinating with homework.

Because a lot happens in a week, you could only remember generally what happened or what was said in last week’s episode. The details didn’t matter much since all story arcs ended roughly where they began and occurred within the single weekly hour. In many cases you could easily miss an episode, or probably even watch a whole season in reverse, and it wouldn’t matter. BJ and The Bear get back in the truck and drive down the highway. Michael Knight and Kitt save the day and then tell the British dude about it. And Mike Sever gets out of trouble and everything is okay again. In other words, the experience of watching television was entirely disposable, a condition reinforced by the medium itself.

While the bulk of what comes across the cable today is both metaphysically toxic and intellectually insulting, things I think are about to change.

Today nearly every show I watch comes from a monthly DVD rental from service like Netflix and Blockbuster. Partly because I am now paying to see these shows, partly because I can now choose what I want to watch rather than settle for what’s on now, and partly because I can now choose when I want to watch; the entire experience of watching tv has changed for me.

Watching is now more of an effort and more of an investment. I have to manage my queue of shows online and decide carefully–its a similar experience to creating a mix tape. Because I’m paying a flat fee, i wan’t to maximize the value I’m getting for my money, which means that I make sure I watch the DVDs I get. I watch closer now. I notice things I never would have before. I sometimes watch 2 or 3 episodes in a row. And sometimes I rewatch episodes. When your viewers connect this close with your content you can’t just serve up the same old steaming coils crap you’ve be pinching out over the past several decades. That stuff just won’t stand up. And you get immediate feedback in the form of no sales and no rentals.

Watching like this really reveals the cynical, manipulative bullshit artists out there in tv-land. For instance 24 seems great on the surface. And for the first couple of episodes it was really good. But when you can watch a bunch of episodes all in a row it’s painfully obvious the writers just made up the story and characters up as they went. Nothing any character does makes any plausible sense (Aristotle pointed out an audience wants plausible impossibilities, not possible implausibilities). 24 simply cannot stand up to the kind of close watching that is not only possible but encouraged by DVD ownership; the kind of close watching people who want to connect with the material will give it. 24 is an entirely hollow and insulting, visceral thrill ride; it is completely and utterly and deservedly disposable.

In addition to quickly revealing such lumps of coal as 24, this new way of watching tv just as quickly reveals the gems. Two of my favourites are Wonderfalls and Firefly. Both are very different from each other and both are little works of pure love and genius—you can feel it immediately and can’t help but connect with the characters their stories, and even perhaps with the storytellers as well. Your time watching these shows feels like time spent hanging out with friends. Each show speaks to you on multiple levels, with an uncommon charm and a wit that takes a bit of time to get. Each reveals themselves only by degrees, and eschews exposition for action. Each makes you care about the characters and feel almost as if you’re there with them. I would even go so far as to say the depth of emotional connection these shows foster with their audience is more like that of a good book than a television program. Gems like these stay with you and keep you coming back—they are anything but disposable.

Of course gems like these also get canceled in their first season as regular broadcast television shows. The old medium, the medium that discourages connection in favour of disposability, suffocates them—and us in the process. I have a lot of hope though; as much hope for the future of tv shows as I have pessimism for popular music. I hope that new ways of watching television will open up new kinds of shows with new levels of quality that are simple incompatible with the old distribution model. I hope that what I’ve seen with Wonderfalls and Firefly is just the beginning.

(However 24-hour cable news networks have achieved the zenith in disposability and make a product so unconsumable that it goes straight from production to disposal without need of a middle-man to consume it. So not all distribution fulfillment innovations yeild positive experiences. But this is another story.)

Ok, so what does this mean for us designers? My examples do again raise the notion that disposable experiences are perhaps easier to monetize than deep connection. They also once again raise the question of balancing consumption acceleration with meaningful connection as the friction between the old and the new increasingly obscures the answer. What kinds of experiential products succeed by offering deep connection as opposed to accelerating consumption? Perhaps the answer is situational and always provisional, and innovations in unlikely areas can dramatically change that answer.

This also points out in interesting phenomenon: innovations in areas designers don’t usually contribute to can naturally and organically enable new kinds of experiences in other areas on a scale explicit experience design simply cannot achieve. So new distribution and fulfillment technologies have enabled a new kind of television watching which demands a new kind of television show, and result in a new kind of experience–all without explicit professional experience design.

PS
Broadcast television’s business model is to produce shows that can last at least 4 years as first run. At that point they have enough episodes to go into syndicated reruns, which is where the real money starts rolling in. Obviously business models constrain both production and consumption. So it will be very interesting to see how both content production and consumption will evolve as DVD, IPTV, on demand, and all-you-can-watch services, change the business model economics of production and hence the experience of consumption.

This is outside my focus here, but wow. The story is that The Smiths were offered $5mil to reunite for Cochella—and turned it down. “[B]ecause money doesn’t come into it,” Moz said.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for not ruining another cherished band from my childhood with some cynical money play to cash in on my nostalgia for the days when I didn’t pay taxes. Thank you for not being the Pixies. Thank you knowing when something is over. Thank you for not being Depeche Mode, the Cure, or U2. Thank you for leaving the hairdresser on fire where he belongs.

All i’m left with a giant wow.

Ok, enough with these cheap little off-topic posts. I promise to get back on track with something more meaty–right after I listen to Meat if Murder.

As the song goes, “More, more more. How do you like it, how do you like?”

Aparently, we only truly like it to a point–but we’re hooked, so we can’t stop even when it becomes bad for us.

As a follow up to my question about accelerating consumption verus enriching meaning, here’s a story from IHT about the negative side effects of an overly materialistic lifestyle. Apparently there are limits (who knew?).

So this raises the question for design again: how do we balance our client obligation to help them make more money with our obligation as good people to do no harm when these two obligations find themselves at odds?

Oh my god this must never gain traction folks. More insidious than the animated gif. More annoying than Netscape’s blink tag. More obnoxious than X-10s original pop-up and pop-under ads. And soon to be more ubiquitous than the animatronic Marissa Mayer conference bot.

Ladies and gentlement, i present to you …

the tiled background advert! (88k)

May God help us all.

I’m worried. I’m worried that experiences are becoming disposable. I’m worried that in our striving to make experiences simpler, easier, and faster, we’re also somehow stripping their soul, their meaning.

The subtext beneath this implies that we are supposed to use the time, money and attention that simpler, easier and faster frees up to consume even more experiences. But before we get a chance to really connect with any single given experience, before we can press beyond its surface, before it has a chance to naturally unfold and leave us changed, we’re off to the next one, and the one after that, and so on, and so on.

This raises an important question for designers: is it out job to merely accelerate experience consumption, or is it to deepen and enrich experience connection?

While our own individual answers likely strike some balance between these two extremes, the trend I’m afraid appears to be very much toward acceleration at the expense of connection.

Economically, this makes a lot of sense. Today’s experiences are off-the-shelf products, mass-produced, mass-marketed and mass-consumed. But an experience can only be monetized once, so superficial disposable experiences are much more economically attractive than deep lasting experiences because they can be monetized more frequently.

The economics of the matter then encourages the design of experiences that are standardized, that have extremely short self-lives, and that are disposable. These are to the human soul what McDonald’s is to the human body.

Enough with the abstraction, let’s get concrete.

I don’t listen to music the same way anymore. I don’t know many people who do. When I was a kid all my music was on tape and I didn’t have a lot of money to throw around. So getting new music and listening to it took a lot of time and effort. This time and effort meant listening carefully to each track, listening to whole albums at once, and listening to the same albums over and over again. It was like developing a relationship.

Today I have several gigs of music on my hard drive and I subscribe to Yahoo’s music service which puts several hundred more only click away. I keep some of it on my Zen on constant shuffle (not so sure about the shuffling since it seems to really be enjoying Goldfrapp these days). I have an incredible variety that crosses genres, decades, continents and even tastes, only a click away—and it has all started to blend into one relatively undifferentiated mass of sound with which I have absolutely no emotional connection.

If I don’t get a visceral jolt from a song, click and its on to the next one. Like a junkie I’m chasing that one great high, that one great hook. I can hardly listen to the same artist more than twice a day–and why should I with thousands of artists all clamouring for my ear and approving mouse click. I’m no sooner coming down from the sugar sweetness of Mint Royal than I’m twanging away with Niko Case or camping it up with the Sissor Sisters—it doesn’t really make a difference. It’s all sooo easy. And the medium’s inherent ease keeps me hungry for ever more music, keeps me hooked to the service, and helps ensure that I don’t get too attached to any one song, band or genre.

What originally seemed like such a blessing, is turning into a bit of a curse. Obviously I can still listen the way I used to–nothing is really preventing that. But the medium itself has evolved to tersely discourage close listening, to discourage connection. The medium wants you, it needs you to listen to more, more, more tracks by more artists, more superficially, more disposably. It needs you to consume not connect.

The entire business model of disposability is predicated on rapid, massive, non-reflective, superficial consumption. Fine for tissues, but for music? For experiences?

The effort involved in both production and consumption of music is evaporating. The individual song is fast becoming completely disposable, cheapening music into becoming mere background hippness for life as a Mitsubishi commercial (thanks for ruining T.Rex and the Wiseguys for me Mitsubishi). Its fast, its easy, its non-committal, its autonomic, and there’s plenty more more more where it came from, so no need to pay too much attention to what you’re hearing now.

Truth be told I can no longer stomach the Thievery Corporation because it is so disposable. Forget about the medium, the content itself doesn’t want you to connect with it. It’s mere auditory decoration, mere vapid paint by numbers West Elm lifestyle ‘hipness’ for your ears. There’s nothing to connect with. But I degress…

Of course your personal music experience may be quite different from mine–I’m sure it is at least a little different–and you may not really see it as disposable. That’s fine, because my point here hasn’t been to wax ludditic and moan about how things aren’t as good as they used to be (although I do wonder how Kate Bush would do if she was just starting out today).

My point (in case it got lost in all these words, words, words, dear Polonius) was simply to illustrate the disposability of experience by contrasting my music listening experience of today with yesterday’s, and ask the question of design how will we balance the tension between accelerating consumption and deepening connection without losing our souls or our jobs?

PS
Next time I’ll get into television and how advances in distribution are driving the experience of watching tv shows in the exact opposite direction from listening to music, in terms of experience and connection.

A while back on cph127 Adam Richardson of frog raised the issue of wicked problems. I’m really glad he brought it up because I’ve always felt they are central to design as a professional practice. Curiously though there isn’t much talk in design circles about them.

In “Making Use,” John Carroll offers one of the most lucid descriptions of wicked problems I‘ve seen. To oversimplify him for clarity’s sake, wicked problems are those whose end solution states are unknowable at the outset.

For example a jigsaw puzzle is not a wicked problem. The end state is printed right there on the box top. Achieving that end state is an entirely tactical matter. Rapid trail and error seems good way to learn the puzzle’s internal rules. Once the rules are learned the puzzle is easily and solved.

On the other hand, “we need a new tool to help improve our call center reps’ productivity” is a wicked problem because the end solution state, the real root problems and their causal connections are unknown at the beginning.

This suggests that to call design a problem solving endeavour (as I’m fond of doing) is actually quite inadequate. Much of human activity, after all, is problem solving. So to be meaningful, we need to get a lot more specific: professional design’s main value is in solving wicked problems.

In my mind there are three general strategies in dealing with wickedness: mitigation, improvisation, and shot gun (I’m not sure these are the best labels).

In my experience the most common product development strategy is a whole lotta shot gun (with surprisingly little shot), mixed with a heap of improvisation (with woefully inadequate talent) and just a smattering of mitigation (with the caveat that this cannot impact schedule or budget).

Richardson seems to agree with this approach to wickedness, saying “[t]he only way to really understand the problem is by devising solutions and seeing how they further knowledge about the problem.” In other words, a shotgun is your only weapon again wickedness. According to van der Heijden in Scenarios this is the product development version of a strategic planning evolutionary paradigm (p.31 in case you’re interested).

To me this isn’t quite right because neither improvisation nor shotgun are sufficiently sustainable or repeatable to form the basis of a solid product innovation method. Leading with mitigation strategies, however, followed closely by shotgun strategies and improvisation capabilities promises much more consistent returns.

Let’s walk through the logic (again, oversimplified to clarity) of this backwards.

How do we mitigate wickedness?
By developing an appropriate vision of an optimal solution end state.

How do we do that?
By clearly focusing on the actual root causes of the problems being experienced, and using them as a mirror to reflect what optimal solution end states could and should look like.

How do we do that?
By discovering the right questions to ask—clarity is easy once you’re armed with the right questions.

How do we do that?
By closely studying and modeling users and/or customers, the pain they experience, their coping activities and their varied contexts.

(After writing this I was struck by its similarity to the designer as physician diagram below. I didn’t do this intentionally… really)

Now let’s walk though it forwards. We start with a client’s painful negative experience. No one knows how to alleviate this pain; if someone did, this wouldn’t be a wicked problem, it would be a puzzle—and so you would need an engineer and not a designer.

We then begin to study the painful experience, who experiences it and how. This starts to reveal the right questions we need to ask and the right areas we need to dig into deeper. Asking the right questions in turn starts to reveal the root causes that are driving the symptomatic pains the client came to us to solve in the first place.

With a clearer picture of the root problems and their causal connections we can realistically start to envision appropriate solution end states. The wickedness isn’t gone, but we’ve mitigated it, its no longer quite to so wicked. Not only have we reduced the wickedness, but we’ve also dramatically improved the speed and effectiveness of our shotgun and improvisation strategies and tactics.

If no one else has has done so yet, I would like to be the first to cutesify the new iPod Hi-Fi by shortening it to just the i-Fi.

I think this is my lamest post ever–lamer even than my first Hello World introductory post. I need a vacation.

There’s been lots of talk about design, what it means, what value it can offer, etc. There’s plenty of both navel-gazing and striking insight. However, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of simplicity or clarity. I thought I take a stab at some clarity by making my perspective on design concrete with a couple metaphors for design as a professional activity.

The Designer as Physician
Ralph visits the emergency room because he feels a sharp pain in his side. He tells the attending physician about the pain and his suspicion that it might be appendicitis.

She asks Ralph a series of questions about his medical history, about the pain, about his diet and recent activities, and feels around to learn where the pain is most acute. Her diagnosis is that the pain is not from appendicitis but rather from gall stones, and she makes arrangement for the appropriate treatment to remove the stones and stop the pain.

With the gall stones removed Ralph feels no more pain, didn’t have to have surgery and gets to keep his appendix.

This is what professional design as a problem solving endeavour is all about. Understanding the problems or pains people experience, digging beneath the surface symptoms to reveal the underlying causes, and either creating or applying novel solutions to truly alleviate the original pain.

(This isn’t meant to present a design process, rather its just to show the designer as physician analogy)

In this metaphor the essence of design is not a collection of teachable methods; the essence of design is critical thinking. Critical thinking is what is needed to discover the underlying causes of the experienced problem, and recognize the actual causes from mere appearances (similar in a way to recognizing Platonic forms from the shadows). I claim this is the essence of design because as John Carroll says, “the worst misstep one can make in design is to address the wrong problem” (Making Use, 26).

This then suggests that design and style (a contrast I often return to) are not merely different in scale, but different in kind. While style is tactical application, design is strategic determination. The common conflation of design with style leads to many designers thinking that clever information presentation qualifies them as strategic planners on the one hand, and on the other gives business people the equally misguided idea that design is just about pretty pictures. I suppose the distinction between style and design is analogous to Aristotle’s distinction between form and substance–intimately related but markedly different in nature.

Next time, the designer as author.

This post by Black Sheep really struck a cord with me. The gist of this rant is that the IP policies of universities basically rob students of what rightfully belongs to them (their ideas, or at the very least credit for their ideas) sucking creativity out of students for the institutions benefit without doing much to push a little creativity back.

In other words, schools get to take both your money and your ideas, and in return given you a cheaply mounted piece of paper. That’s really a minor version of trading a handful of beads for Manhattan Island. How do they get away with this?

The problem is not that you’re going to come up with the next killer product idea that is worth millions–because you won’t. The problem is fairness, intellectual honesty, justice and sleaze.

When a professor takes one of your ideas, treats it as their own, gets a grant and some nice career boosting press for it, all without crediting you I think that’s unfair and dishonest. And I think the fact that institutions use obscure legal slight-of-hand to legally take advatage of unsuspecting and vulnerable students is both unjust and just plain sleazy. Hell even soulless corporations will put your name on thier patent if you contributed. Academia apparently berudges even this small token. That will be $50,000–thank you, come again!

So for all you potential design school students out there here’s some advice: check your school’s intellectual property policy before you give them any money.

And if you decide to attend d.school, here’s a suggestion: make friends with one or two professors (perhaps outside the design faculty) for both thier different perspectives and decent references. Otherwise do the absolute minimum amount of work for class–no one will ever check your grades. Save your best ideas for yourself and work on them on your own time, on your own computer, and off campus (if you use any school facilities, they own your idea). This way you get the piece of paper, and you keep the bastards from unjustly highjacking your creativity without giving you credit.

Better yet, say to hell with school. Just take 2 years off of work, keep all the money you would have spent on tuition, put a downpayment on a house, and do a pile of pro bono and self-expressive work. You will learn and grow more as a designer, and you’ll have a nice place to live in rather than an doomed marriage to sallie mae.

(Sorry about the recent tangents–I promise I’ll get back to design and innovation stuff now)