Design & Thinking, the documentary

Last week the documentarty Design and Thinking was screened at ECA (Edinburgh College of Art).
In the panel, Alan Murray (Head of School of Design), my colleague at Moving Targets Mariza Dima and myself.

Curious movie, and a more interesting debate.

The key question from the audience was: What is Design Thinking, and how does it differ from any design discipline?

Well, if I had been asked before watching the movie, I would have said that Design Thinking is a kind of brand that serves as umbrella for all design disciplines that go beyond the popularised understanding of design as “beauty”.

Furthermore, I would have said that Design Thinking is more than anything else human centred, and argues for the value of applying the design process to achieve a higher democratisation of our current society in both social and environmental aspects.

If I had to put a face to my understanding of Design Thinking it would have been TED global, and its wonderful talk by individuals – designers or thinkers – seeking social change and innovation.

However, and after seeing the movie… I might not agree with myself.
The movie seemed to me a long advertisement for californian companies, and I feel the term Design Thinking is being appropriated (or might have been created) by multinationals.

My initial understanding of Design Thinking cannot conceive how it can be represented by CocaCola.
How a company causing straggles all over the world and monetising on addiction can argue to be social because wherever the go they are felt as a local brand?
How does inprinting the lable on a glass bottle stand as Design Thinkin?

Excepting for some interviews with David Kelley, some picks into the D-School and little hints to the existance of social innovation… I personally haven´t got much more out of the movie.

I feel this movie still represents designers as those wonderful creatives in pulcrous studios where inspiration comes and their wonderful brains make innovation happen for the rest of unfortunatelly less creative humans.

Customising bycicles… yeah, cool idea… kettles with a two note wistle… whatever… sitting business men around a low table to get them relaxed… yeah sure …

Where is the sense of co-creation, and empowering people with the tools to build sustainable solutions for the problems they know better than anyone?

Where is the process designers follow to be able to understand and empathise with the end users?

In the end… the key question of the debate was: Who are the intended audience for this movie?

Design Principles and Practices 2013

Yesterday evening I found out that our paper “A Tool for Audience Design: a service design perspective on media consumption“ has been accepted and will be presented at the Design Pinciples and Practices Conference in Japan.

I couldn’t be more excited. Presenting the design process of our Audience Brainstorming Tool and going to Japan all in one.

We have been working in this project for about a year now. What started as a design experiment has end up being a great case study for me to reflect on my design process and its implications for my research.

It all started with some insights we got through our work with creative companies and our interest in the active involvement of audiences. From there loads of case studies, literature review and experimentation with paper. Little by little a brainstorming tool – deeply connected with service blueprinting and user journeys – started taking shape. As soon as we got something sensible to play with, we invited our industry partners along to a workshop. From there we started modifying and testing again and again… and we’ll keep on doing so. Also now we are building a digital prototype to play around with it in a different format and see what happens.

If anyone is interested in giving the tool a go, just get in touch :)

Here a wee teaser video we did to take down to Queens Margaret University with us for the workshop Ends of Audience, and below a wee presentation we did at Dare Indie Festival in Dundee.

Exploring HCI – starting point

This is being a busy week. I have started an online course on HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) by the University of Stanford. So far, so good.

The beginnings of a concept design are quite similar in Service Design, but the digital prototyping is getting closer :S

So now instead of spending my nights debating with myself the present and future of Service Design… I am finding needs and making storyboards.

I am really enjoying myself in this. I don’t get to do some hand drawing very often. However, at times I feel I’ve gone into deep waters with the topic I’ve chosen for the course project…

I have decided to work on designing a technological system that can improve feedback (and with it team dynamics) in the work-space. Yeah, I know… tough.
But in case you don’t know, this is something I’ve been interested in for some time now.

During my Masters’ I did some research into team dynamics and designed a feedback workshop to see how a different, more fun approach may work. A low risk environment, some storytelling, some winners… and great insights. I posted some time ago about the differences found between self-perception and external-perception, if you are interested. I just find the topic amusing.

Well, once I’m back from the world of story boarding, I’ll get back to some more thoughts about transformation design.

Tim Billings Talk on Creative Minds

In yesterday’s post I mentioned I went to Tim Billings talk organised by the IPA in the Melting Pot But I was too immersed into the service design debate as to comment on the event.

To be completely honest, I was expecting more. In my option it was a bit too shallow (for a £25 event).

I am aware that more than 15 years of experience in creative businesses cannot be shared in an hour. However I am also sure a bit more depth could have been achieved. 

What I found most interesting of the talk was one slide about the evolution of IDEO as a design firm through out the past 20 years. Every 3 or 5 years a new component was added to the business offer. It passed from product development, to engineering and technology focused, to incorporating human factors, to human computer interaction, to brand design, to end up excelling as strategy makers. If they hadn’t evolved that way, it is likely the company haven’t gone that far, as the component of product engineering within the company has been lost on its way.

I found also very interesting Tim’s points about growing a small creative company. When creative companies start up, the only possible approach is the do-it-all approach. The challenge, and this is something I have frequently discussed with our partners at Moving Targets – is how do you grow from there? At some point – if you want to grow the company – you need to delegate. But where should the founders stand, in the management or in the creative side?
I still don’t have an answer for that… but I’ll be giving it a deeper thought.

The rest of the talk went around recruiting strategies (young people with new skills versus seniors with experience); career strategies (to what extent the company wants to team up high performers with low performers for coaching purposes, will high performers get frustrated); management approach (“people are key to the business so keep them happy”)… which is very interesting and necessary to run/grow a company, but that is not really specific to the creative industries.

Call me idealist, but I was expecting to find in the packet what the label said:

“the evolution of the design industry and the issues involved in leading today’s innovation companies to achieve creative and business success.

I thought the issues involved in leading today’s innovation companies, would be different to the issues of running any other company. My bad.

I also found very relevant the questions raised by the attendees: creative spaces, team feedback… but especially a question regarding how challenging it is to “sell” innovative services to other businesses. Something that is new doesn’t have a proved track record of success, and it is hard to sell its (potential) value. Well, stop trying to sell innovation to new clients. Apparently what you need is to do your explorative work with existing partners of whom you have gained their trust. Very insightful.

Does Service Design stand on its own?

Following up on yesterday’s post, I realised I didn’t quite analysed what Service Design means to me, but ended up debating why I feel a Service Designer.

In the evening I went to Tim Billing‘s presentation at the Melting Pot in Edinburgh, and bumped Christina Kinnear and we both kept debating what Service Design is.

I still don’t know, but I would love to get to the bottom of it.

On the one hand I yesterday decided that the ingredients of a Service Designer are the tools and the mind-set or approach. But I keep on clashing against its definition as a discipline, sub-discipline, or something else.

More precisely, are we service designers… or something else?
Tim Brown’s concept of design thinkers, designers that are not focused on aesthetics or functionality but a wider approach, keeps coming back to my mind.

The more I work with designers from other disciplines – more specifically Human Computer Interaction (HCI) & User Experience (UX) – the more I feel we are more or less the same. We follow the same user-centred process: Need Finding – Connections – Brainstorming – Rough Prototyping – Testing – Iteratively Refining… and same tools: Field Research, Embedding our-selves in the experience, Observation, Focus Groups, Interviews, User-journeys, Future visioning, Personas, Visualisation…

But in theory we focus on different aspects, or not? 

In theory, a service designer designs services. Not quite. In reality I believe we are facilitators and concept designers. We define specifications on how “things” should be to reach the best possible outcome. But those “things” could be anything.
I would have never thought Service Design was to be so useful for video game design until I worked for Dynamo Games. I realised then that it doesn’t matter what the product/service is as long as you get to understand your users and the context you are working in.
Furthermore, when I work with companies to improve their products or services, we always look a the whole experience from beginning to end, which for me means starting from Awareness all the way through to Sustaining Engagement. That has led a lot of my work to be around marketing, subject on which I have needed a lot of self-training. But if you want the right people to access or buy whatever you produce you not only need to get the product right but you need to know where they are and how to approach them.

So, in a society in which digital technologies are becoming pervasive we need to take a holistic approach and ultimately design users’ experiences. And either HCI, UX and SD designers can do so. However… at an academic level terminologies tend to be different. Writing a paper for an HCI  or SD conference may entail completely different approaches. My wonder is: is that sensible? 

As usual I don’t reach any conclusions, but maybe someone out there has the answers…

What does Service Design mean to me?

This morning I took a survey on Service Design which is part of the research carried out by the Design Council. I learnt about it through a post at Linked-in’s Service Design Network by Christina Kinnear. And it got me thinking.

Amongst other things it tried to define Service Design, as well as its connections with business and academia. So it got me thinking about What does service design mean for me and for my practice?

Well, to be honest, I am not sure I know so I use this writing as a way to explore my own thoughts.

I have been more or less trained as a Service Designer during the Design Innovation Masters at the Glasgow School of Art, and I do believe it to be the centre of my practice as researcher/designer in Moving Targets. But when I finished my course I wasn’t able to identify myself as service designer.

The first thing that came to my mind are the tools we use.  As David Hicks – Scottish design consultant – once said to me, we keep a variety of tools in our bag and are able to mix and adapt them to the different situations we come across.
We all know the basic tools in the bag. They are widely used in every design discipline: user-jouneys,  service-blueprints, mindmaps, personas, roleplaying, prototypes…  And we keep on picking tools on the go, some borrowed from other disciplines like business or management; and others result of our own experiments.

But I feel tools don’t make the Service Designer.

On one hand, I feel I become a bit more of a Service Designer everyday – with every project I challenge myself with, with every book I read, with every random person I meet on the streets, with every experience I have in doctors, with every documentary I watch… All of those things may not be related to Service Design as a discipline at all and never be taught in any design course, but I believe all those things build towards my practice. Am I actually growing as a service designer with all those random things I observe and absorb?

On the other hand, I have recognised “service designers” far out of the discipline: in health carers, engineers, software developers, business people… who don’t know nor use any of those tools

So I got thinking … what makes me feel they ARE service designers?
And I got to the root of it. They share something vital to Service Designers, the Mind-Set.

They are human driven and open to working and sharing with others; always willing to learn and on the lookout for new challenges. They are capable of perceiving how everything interconnects and therefore take a holistic approach to problem solving; keeping in mind the big picture and thinking of how their solutions may affect or be affected by others. And those are completely independent of their background or formation.

However, I don’t think I’ve always been a service designer. I believe some of that “Mind-set” I’ve always had. Being curious, empathic, enthusiastic, good observer, wanting to learn everything… But until someone suggested – and I decided – those were important assets for me I didn’t become a service designer, I never gave them any importance and thus never thought of developing them.

What makes you a service designer?

Why the video games industry doesn’t exist in Scotland?

Yesterday, I was forwarded  by a colleague a striking article by Scottish Games and the official report it refers to.

Apparently the last official studies demonstrate that the video games industry and education don’t exist in Scotland. I was very surprised by the news, as the project I work in is led by University of Abertay (well-known by their programmes in VideoGames design and development) and through the project I have been working with several video games companies of a decent size. Then how it comes they’ve disappeared? It also seems they haven’t. Scottish Games are already preparing an official response to the report.

Well, as many, I believe the company who carried out the research and report – DCResearch – didn’t look thoroughly enough.

Also, at the beginning of the Moving Targets project I spent some time reading all the official reports on the creative industries I came across, trying to get a mental picture of where things sat. I was amused by the classifications and distinctions made by the different organisations.

Looking at the categories used by DCResearch, I firmly believe video games have been swallowed by other sectors. I acknowledge the difficulty of defining boundaries between the creative sectors – especially now as current technologies enable multi-media and cross-platform experiences – but for our own sake we need to come up with a sensible classification.

As everything steps into the digital world, then almost anything can be considered “Software and electronic publishing”, which is the leading category in the mentioned report.

I will give some examples of how I think digital media get easily mixed up:

1. If it was, I wonder how eegeo would be classified, as it is both software and video game development company. They have developed innovative mapping technologies which they use for both functional applications and video games.
2. I wonder how Tern, which is both a television production and digital development company,  would be classified. The same happens with their recently founded Digital Adaptations & the Story Mechanics which develops interactive storytelling media.
3. I wonder in which category the freelancers that de-bug videogames (and other software) would be included.
4. I wonder how companies that develop video games or interactive media for education or marketing purposes would be classified as the old 55degress did.
5. I wonder how companies such as Codeplay would be considered, since they support video game companies through compiling solutions.
6. As the DCResearch’s category is “Computer Games” would companies such as Lucky Frame who develop video games for mobile platforms fit into their definition?
7. Digital artists who work with interactive and responsive software as Professor Simon Biggs or Beverley Hood… how would they be classified?
8. Where would they place companies like Musemantik  who creates interactive music solutions for the game industry?

… and so on.  My point is that Video games are a mixed media. They can include professionals from film or animation, graphic art, sound and music, software, interaction and interface design, experience design… in general digital media professionals are flexible and dynamic, and therefore difficult to encapsulate. 

PRESadTATIONS

A couple of years ago, in one of the first media conferences I attended, there was a presentation from a well-known media company I was looking forward to. They were going through exciting times of change and I hoped to learn about their innovative approaches and exploratory work on how to adapt their traditional business to the current digitally connected society.

In the end, the presentation turned out not to be as exciting as I expected, but quite dull. For some reason, their presentation turned into a 30 minutes advertisement – no challenges, no process, no how-to… only well measured successful outcomes. A “How wonderful we are!”

At that point, the boredom turned my attention to the twitter discussions, which to be honest I found much more relevant than the presentation itself. Everyone in the room was seeing the same I was: a long boring advert.

Since then I have gone to many more media conferences, and every now and then, a PRESadTATION appears. When presenting our work we tend to have an Ego moment, I have been there myself. We want to show off our successes and keep to ourselves the terrible mistakes we made. But the truth is that those mistakes are the ones that shaped our learning curve and enabled us to reach those successes. So why not to share them?

Working in a cross-sector environment, I have realised that many of the challenges media companies face are transferable from sector to sector. My great wonder is: are their solutions also transferable?

These and an insightful conversation with the director of the digital department of a media company in Glasgow triggered an idea: to hold a failure conference. A conference in which the speakers would not share their successes but how they overcame the challenges faced during a project as well as the failed approaches and ideas.

I am sure this is not a new idea, and it has been done somewhere else before. However, I would like to see it done here, in Scotland.

I don’t know either if I’ll ever be brave enough to organise such a conference and able to find speakers happy to share such a valuable assets of their companies. However, the idea is there, and I invite you to take up the challenge.

So far I got the project I currently work in – Moving Targets - to test the concept starting small. We have decided to run a wee workshop (what did we learn?) to explore those ideas of transferability and the value of sharing the learnt lessons.

Though valuable, sharing can sometimes be challenging. But maybe if we do it in a visual and active way it can become easier.

I am now exploring activities and tools that can facilitate that exchange of knowledge between the participants. I am looking at various approaches: storytelling, mind-mapping and template based. Soon we’ll be testing these within our team to see if they work with our own projects. We’ll see how that goes.

Digital Adaptations – Reinventing Storytelling

Moving Targets, the knowledge exchange project I work for, gave me the opportunity a few months ago to visit Tern TV’s digital department and work with them for a while. I take the opportunity to thank Simon Meek and his team for having me there and welcoming my “I stare at you, sorry, it’s research” attitude.

I got very excited today when I started to see their project coming up on Twitter. With the department just re-branded as Digital Adaptations and still a few months ahead of its release, the marketing campaign for their adaptation of 39 Steps has started.

RE-INVENTING STORYTELLING
39 steps is a great book on its own right. But now Digital Adaptations have given to it an extra tweak to make the experience more immersive, flexible and insightful.

How?

• Context – Well the story happens in 1914, which for a reader makes it difficult to visualise how things looked like back then. If there was a word that came across the time I worked with them that was authenticity. They have worked to the greater detail researching every single object or location that appears in the book and finding original references to work with.
• Interaction – One of the features I loved the most was the exploring mode. In a book or a movie you cannot explore and interact with the objects but with digital technology you can. There are plenty of fascinating objects to discover that definitely enrich the experience.
• Flexibility – Stories aren’t absolutely linear. There is always room for some jumping around, and Digital Adaptations allows you to do so. They have carefully mapped the story so the readers can explore the book in various ways.
• Adaptability – the software takes care of you as reader, as it adjusts to your habits allowing you to follow at your own path.

BEAUTIFULLY PRESENTED
During my time at the company I had the chance of seeing the work of Paul Scott Canavan and Thomas Pollock in action. Both the artwork and the animated effects they were developing set the reader in the perfect environment for the reading.

THINGS I LOOK FORWARD TO 
When I visited the company the project was at a very early stage, so now I am looking forward to its release to:

• See how the variety of media used have been integrated with the story
• Feel the interface, especially on iPad
• and simply to experience the story in a very pioneering way

Great team, great work. Keep an eye on it!

TechMeetUp Movember 11

Yesterday I attended Movember’s @TechMeetUp in Glasgow. It was my fist time, and I loved it.
It is a great place to meet people doing amazing things, drink beer and eat pizza.

The speakers were all very interesting, but I was deeply amused by Alistair Morrison’s presentation: Mass participation mobile software trials in the “app store” age.

They are using a videogame (ios app) – Yoshi – for their research. They are distributing it through mainly through alternatives to the App-store cause it is easy to reach visibility.

Through the app they are getting tons of data – nothing that Zynga or others don’t do – but with it they are questioning the ethics of such a data collection and how it affects people.

For instance one of the trials was something similar to the following

“remember this is a university research project, we are collecting your data”
” and we believe you mostly play here”
 and after asked them how concern/happy they were about it.

Even more interesting than the users’ responses was the changes on their behaviour; and how the people who replied “very worried” were too engaged with the game as to give it up.

Other interesting points were

• The undefinition of user. What can you consider a user? someone who plays once, someone who plays twice a week or someone who plays three times a day?
• Behaviour patterns: getting to the point of splitting the videogames in two. For those who enjoy mechanics type A and for those who enjoy mechanics type B. I also wondered if at the point you have some clustering of users, the quantity of data analysed could be reduced  by defining different guidelines for data collection depending on the user.
• Further engagement on evaluation: They involved people in online user feedback through in-game rewards , tried telephone interviewing but only got the less than 10 very very very keen users. Plus audiences are global and they struggled with the language.

I think the work they are doing is brilliant and their insights could easily be translated into guidelines for both policy makers and apps’ developers.