The power of archives

Ramesses II died in 1213 BC. Venerated, he lived 90 years, a ripe old age by modern standards. But when you realize that the average Egyptian at the time died by the age of 25, that would be the equivalent of a person today who lived to 400. You can see why he seemed like a deity.

I found this cultural gem in a story about the British Museum's giant statue of King Ramesses II in an archive called A History of the World in 100 Objects, created by the British Museum and the BBC. It's a 100-part podcast series that views the history of the world through the lens of objects from the British Museum.

This kind of archive is not just a collection of items or stories; it is a carefully curated collection with a function, purpose, and vision.

I love archives; they connect with our past and help us understand our present and future. These invaluable resources are often collected and curated by driven individuals to ensure we maintain this connection with the past and its rich source of culture and knowledge. 

Here are some archives I have found and created that have captured my imagination. Please check them out and share any archives you have found with me. I would love to see, hear, and watch them.



History of the World in 100 Objects 

This fantastic collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum tells the story of civilization through objects curated from the British Museum's catalog.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
This one-person odyssey of an archive tells the story of rock and roll through 500 songs, providing a rich cultural history.

The Studs Turkel Archive
A brilliant author in his own right, Studs Turkel had a radio show for 45 years, and the archive of his interviews allows you to listen to fascinating regular people and some of the most influential people in the culture of the twentieth century: the juxtaposition makes this collection unique.

Over the years, in collaboration with various organizations, we at Buscada have created archives covering multiple topics and ideas. These are some of my favorites:

This Triangle Fire Open Archive
Following this significant tragedy for working people over a hundred years ago, the archive collects political, cultural, and personal objects and stories that show how much this event has shaped our modern world.

Working with People
This video archive examines words like collaboration, community, power, and representation and allows individuals to express their diverse perspectives on the meanings of these words. They are creating a space for dialogue and nuance around some of the most critical issues of our time.

Family List
This is our project to curate activities for kids to try, make, and play. It focuses on diverse books, play activities, and cultural ideas to help kids and adults understand the world around them through play.

Investigating design

A software product designer is often given a problem like this:
“People cannot figure out how to share a document using our current software experience.”

It’s natural for that designer to want to talk to end consumers of the software and ask them what the issues are with the software experience. When they do, they often hear responses like, "It’s just not clear," or "I don't even know where the button is,” or "This is not how it works on Microsoft Word." These conversations might offer valuable insight, but they don't really help a designer understand the whole problem; the feedback is about specific parts of the problem but doesn’t form a complete picture of the experience.

But what if this was a mystery?
What if there was a crime, a murder! it happened in the middle of the day, and there were several witnesses, but none of them actually saw the dirty deed.

Interview the witnesses
You would interview the witnesses - just like in our software design problem when the designer talked to the users. But where would you be if you just stopped there without examining the crime scene or forensics?

The crime scene
At the murder scene, we’d investigate the details of the space. Too often, in software, we overlook those spaces where it all happens: the software screens, the buttons, menus, fields, and workflows. There is much to be learned from those old screens, like from a crime scene.

Forensics
Where did people click? Could they understand the labels? Was it clear that this item could be shared? What is all the functionality that's available? In other words, let’s establish the facts so we can see the whole problem.

Put the pieces together...
Once you’ve interviewed the witnesses, investigated the crime scene, and have all the facts in place, you can recreate the sequence of events that led to the crime (the user experience). You can see what is happening and why it's going wrong. You can take all those eyewitness statements (user interviews), put them in context, and make sense of them.

Once you can see what happened in a design, unlike a crime, you can change what will happen. As a designer, you can change the sequence of events and alter the facts to make the outcome something that engages your users and helps them get things done. In other words, you can create a design that is no longer a crime.

Reactive vs Proactive work

A recent official report on Fostering Innovation by the British Psychological Society, having surveyed all the relevant research, concludes that: ‘Individuals are more likely to innovate where they have sufficient autonomy and control over their work to be able to try out new and improved ways of doing things’ and where ‘team members participate in the setting of objectives’.

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind - Guy Claxton

Office workers now have more autonomy than ever, and it’s clear that people feel that autonomy is important to them—yet understanding how to use this newfound freedom is often challenging. Autonomy needs a new mindset.

To take advantage of your newfound freedom, you need to consider the balance of reactive versus proactive work that you do.

How do you know if you are doing reactive work?

Are you executing on work set out in the project plan and primarily responding to other people’s requests?

How do you know if you are doing proactive work?

Are you planning how you’ll approach your work?

Here’s an example of choosing one of these two ways to work in response to the same scenario. Your boss briefs you on a new project. You can:

A: Wait for your boss’s project plan and for someone else to schedule a kickoff meeting.

B: Make your own project plan, research the subject matter, and schedule meetings with end users of this project.

While plan B sounds like a lot more work, it has the benefit of being proactive, putting your needs out in the world, and communicating what you want to achieve with the project. Even if you don’t get everything you want, you might get more than you imagine. In addition, you will be much more motivated to do a task you set yourself rather than being told what to do.

Balance is essential. You don’t need to control everything, but you do want control over some aspects of what you do. Doing proactive work can help you achieve this balance.

No matter what your level in your organization is, proactive work can have an impact. If you are an intern, it’s a way to ensure you get a chance to do more exciting work. If you are mid-level in your career, it lets you set the tone for a project, and if you are a leader, it enables you to control your most precious asset, your time.

My books of 2023

Change is the one constant in life; it’s also the key theme in some of my favorite books from this year.

Maybe you are like spy George Smiley, looking forward to retirement before having your world turned upside down, or maybe you are like John Cleese, discovering the power of your subconscious mind and its ability to change how you think. The artist Wayne Thiebaud recalls his ability to change between being an acclaimed artist and a teacher. Peter Ackroyd details the amazing roller coaster ride of change that is British history.

Adapting and changing is a crucial ability in life, and W. Timothy Gallwey’s great book The Inner Game of Work helps you find ways to focus on the change you want.

I hope you find a book here to take into the new year that can help you focus on the change you want in 2024!

The Inner Game of Work
W. Timothy Gallwey 

The spy who came in from the cold
John Le Carre

Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide
John Cleese

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors
Peter Ackroyd

Wayne Thiebaud: Draftsman
Isabelle Dervaux

Give as few orders as possible

“82% of employees and 62% of HR directors believe that workers will need to hone their current skills or acquire new ones at least once a year in order to maintain competitive advantage in a global job market.”
- HBR What Your Future Employees Want Most

As a leader in an organization, your first priority is often to deliver results, complete projects, and meet deadlines. Doing the essential work of helping individuals and teams acquire new skills is often left to employees’ own self-motivated efforts or mandated training courses. 

I think there’s a better way to help people hone and gain skills. I recently read the book The Inner Game of Work by W. Timothy Gallwey, which focuses on a coaching approach. Gallwey’s coaching system involved not giving specific instructions to the people he worked with but instead suggesting specific things for them to focus on that could lead them to improve a skill. This coaching method is not about filling people with new information like a training course might; it is about helping them improve and optimize what they already have. 

In one example, Gallwey writes about his work with call center employees, who do a job that is often challenging and thankless. Instead of having them learn pre-determined scripts or evasion tactics, Gallwey asked the call center workers to focus on the tone of a caller’s voice. By learning to listen carefully to a caller’s tone of voice, the call center workers evolved a skill they already had; over time, they became better able to understand the emotional state of the person on the other end of the line, which allowed them to approach the conversation in the right frame of mind. Gallwey’s book is full of examples like this wherein coaching helped people better understand their jobs and increased their ability to handle most situations—all without giving them step-by-step instructions.

To put this coaching style of management in context, I made this diagram to show the spectrum of different team management styles. 

Order
Direct & results 
This is the most familiar management style: telling people what you need and when you need it, directing them about the results you need.  

Lead
Suggest & results 
This style requires a person to convince an entire company or group to follow a particular path without giving specific orders but rather through suggestions. This requires a very different set of skills. Communication and persuasion are the critical skills required.

Teach
Direct & learn
Teaching involves helping people learn something new; it requires structure, tools, and materials to help people learn a new skill. The goal of a teacher is to achieve understanding, not results. 

Coach
Suggest & learn 
Coaching is often the most misunderstood of all the categories. It is a subtle skill set. Coaching is about trying to get people to level up the skills they already have without micro-managing the process. 

Management styles are rarely delineated like this; worse, managers are often expected to use all of them. Yet, managers may find it hard to master all these different styles, and switching between them can confuse managers and teams. If you give orders and demand results one day and then offer open-ended suggestions the next, people often don’t know what to expect—or what is expected of them. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the hero receives some good advice: “‘Give as few orders as possible,’ his father had told him... ‘Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.’”

Following the “order” style of management can get results, but it often leads to teams feeling like they learned very little in the process of getting that desired result. When people on teams don't learn, they get bored, which makes getting quick results even harder. While “coaching” is often the least used management style, it may in fact, be the most effective at giving employers and employees what they each want: growth and new skills for employees and proactive, motivated employees for employers. Seems like a win-win.

Feeding my subconscious

Design is a process, not an outcome.

The process of exploring a problem will always lead to better results compared to creating the first thing that pops into your head.

I recently read John Cleese's book on creativity, and it reinforced this notion of design and creativity as a process of discovery.

In the book, Cleese notes that there are two parts to the process: first, the conscious effort you put into thinking about a problem, and second, the way your subconscious takes over as you daydream or sleep. It’s this subconscious time that makes sense of the tangle of issues with a problem and allows you to unwind your thinking and often to come up with a solution you could not think of when you were struggling consciously. Your subconscious mind is a mysterious place, and you are not entirely in control of it, which leads to these happy insights.

As I read this, I had a thought. If I am not in control of my subconscious mind, then what happens if instead of feeding my subconscious brain with fun, creative ideas, I provide it with, let’s say, reading hundreds of posts about negative things, a disaster here, a negative comment about my ideas there. What if I’m feeding these thoughts into my mind 2-3 hours a day in a constant visual and text stream? What will my subconscious make of that? Will it emerge with something positive or negative?

I am not in control of what my subconscious does. But I am in control of what I feed my subconscious. The diet I feed my mind is as important as the one I provide my body. I find that every day, I need to eat my mental greens to feed my mind with challenging and nourishing ideas and that maybe I should take a break from those Instagram Big Macs.

Are you directing or acting?

“Cut! Let’s try that one more time!” 

You’re on a movie set, and the director didn’t see exactly what they were looking for in a particular take. The lighting was off, the costumes looked wrong, or the expressions on the actors’ faces didn’t match the dialogue. Directors like David Fincher are famous for doing forty or fifty takes to get what they want. Everybody involved takes this process in their stride because they expect this to happen; they just set up and try again. This might seem like a super annoying—or incredibly inefficient—way to work. But this seemingly slow method can lead to great results for creative work. 

Doing multiple takes while everything is set up and everyone is in the right frame of mind is, in fact, very efficient and creative. 

Let's take another scenario. Let's say a designer spends some time creating a poster for a design team review. They present a couple of ideas, but something is not quite right. The structure is wrong, or the content does not quite work. What happens next? The people trying to decide if the design makes sense (the “directors”) cannot say, “Okay, let's try it again” in real time because the designer cannot just make another idea for the poster on the spot. It takes another 2-3 days to make a meaningful version, which, once again, might not be quite right. 

Suddenly, it’s our standard process for designing that looks pretty inefficient and emotionally bruising compared to the film process of repeatedly trying. 

To avoid this situation, a lone designer will often try to both act out the scene (create a design) and direct the scene (decide which of their ideas is the right one to show). But this is difficult. I know there have been a few actor/directors, but I would say that they are the exception, not the rule. 

In films, the audience never sees all the takes, just the final cut; in design, a client or internal stakeholders only need to see two or three versions of a design, but a design team’s internal process needs to be much more expansive to come up with those few strong ideas. 

If you are designing something, you are an actor. So, don’t edit yourself. Come into an internal team design review with a range of different concepts. This is where it’s helpful to think in concept models. What is a concept model? For example, cars, trains, and bicycles are different concept models of transport that can get you from A to B. They require very different elements to make them work. Cars require roads, insurance, driver’s licenses etc. Trains need stations, tickets, timetables etc. They each provide the same outcome of getting from A to B but go about it in very different ways. Their concept models are clearly different. 

One simple rule for crafting different concept models of an idea is to take your first idea and then make the complete opposite version. (Car vs. Train) Another method is to take your initial model and then take everything out of it apart from the essential elements (Car vs. Bicycle).

Finding the right concept model is the hard work of design. Once the concept model is transparent, creating the sketch or image of the design is usually pretty fast. Bring a variety of concept models to your “director”—now they can see a breadth of options, leading to better outcomes and a much richer conversation about the problem you are trying to solve.

If you are a design director, then you are like the film director; you cannot be involved with creating individual concept models/ideas. It’s not impossible of course, but you do have to flick a switch in your brain and let go of any attachment you have to an idea and look at it as if you were seeing it for the first time. This sounds logically possible, yet it’s often emotionally very difficult to do; the effort it takes to make something makes it hard to let go of, clouding your ability to understand the problem and see the right solution. 

I can hear the outcry from designers now: “Why can’t we do both?”

I would reply there is no harm in being an actor. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, and Angela Bassett … are all great actors; they have considerable influence over the creative process, but they don’t edit and direct the final movie. They play their part. A considerable part, and they seem very happy with that role. 

Design is the ability to make sense of things. It is often a collaborative activity, and even the “crazy ones” have their own creative collaborators. Brain Eno, famous for his creativity, has a term for this. He calls it scenius, his term which describes “the creative intelligence of a community.” In these collaborations, we all have a role. Sometimes those roles are interchangeable, but great ideas are often formed when people focus on a single role, allowing the design process to work and creating something beyond a single imagination.

Efficiency is overrated

It’s 7 am, and it’s a school day. That means getting our son to school on time. For the longest time, it has been a tricky task, that is until we wrote a checklist. Every morning, he has to do seven things to be ready for school. He checks them off the list, and we are out the door on time. A model of efficiency, checklists are great for activities in life that don’t need much consideration. The issue occurs when you start applying the checklist mentality to parts of your life that require real consideration. 

“When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.” - Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig

Checklists, timers, stand-ups, speed reading, book summaries, and workflows are some of the efficiency tools that have come to dominate our lives. They are great tools for production and for getting things done. Yet, when we apply these same tools to the creative parts of our lives (arguably the more important parts of our lives), they are destructive and rob us of much of the value of these creative moments. 

What matters when you slow down is the experience and emotions you feel when you enter this state; it is quite different from the momentary fix of the dopamine you get from checking something off a list. 

In the next few posts, I will highlight several examples of how slowing down improves creativity and makes activities more enjoyable.
To get started, I’ll share an example from music and one from conversation.

Music: Slow, Slow, Quick 
Recently I noticed that while practicing his guitar my son was playing the same songs as usual, but very slowly. I asked him why he was doing that. It turns out that his guitar teacher had recommended this slow playing to improve his technique. Playing slowly leads to better form, so when he plays at full speed, the notes he produces sound clearer, more exact, more pure.

Conversation: Repeat after me
A while ago, I read a great book called Non-violent Communication by Marshal Rosenberg. It’s an essential book on asking for what you need and listening for what others need. One important exercise in the book helps reduce conflict in conversations. Practice accurately repeating back to your conversation partner precisely what they just told you. This sounds simple, but it is a deceptively challenging thing to do. It requires you to stop jumping ahead in a conversation to what you want to say and to slow down and really listen to the thoughts and feelings of the person sitting across from you.

In the sci-fi classic Dune, Duke Atredies gives his son Paul Atreides (the hero of the book) the following advice.

“Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for a quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurances of success. Take your time and be sure.” - Dune by Frank Herbert

This rings true. Slow down to ensure not only success but also enjoyment in the parts of your life that are most important to you.

Designing the inevitable sequence

You walk down the stairs of the subway station. Pay at the turnstiles, step onto the platform, and your train arrives. Once on the train, you remind yourself to switch at 59th Street for the uptown express. You pull in at 59th Street, and the uptown express is waiting, doors wide open. 

You made your connection. Next stop, home. 

A perfectly arranged set of moments makes for a satisfying experience. 
But what happens when things don’t line up quite so well?

Frustration, questions, anger?

To me, good design is often a matter of sequencing experiences to result in an inevitably great outcome. Arrangement not reinvention can lead to the most satisfying of experiences. 

Recently, I came across two thoughts that highlight this theme, and they come from radically different perspectives, fields, and time periods. 

First, I was listening to how John Williams describes composing the iconic Indiana Jones theme song. He said,

“A very simple little sequence of notes, but I spend more time on those little bits of musical grammar to get them just right, so they seem inevitable, they seem like they’ve always been there they’re so simple. And I don’t know how many permutations I will go through with a six-note motif like that — one note down, one note up — and spend a lot of time on these little simplicities, which are often the hardest things to capture.” 

And then, after youtube, I was reading  Plato, as you do ;-) and the following idea struck me as connected. In The Apology, Plato wrote,

“I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.”

Taking the time to arrange experiences an order, and with connections between experiences, that feel, as Williams says, “inevitable” can lead to lasting satisfaction, maybe even “success,” over time.

Design is murder

Inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Jules Maigret, I’ve come to see that design and detective work (the fictional and possibly even the non-fictional kind) share some illuminating common elements: piecing together clues from many small pieces of information; putting these pieces back together in different configurations, and finally finding the solution that fits - either by solving the mystery or creating a design that works. 

Fictional, and even real, detection uses a particularly powerful conceptual framework:

Means, Motive, and Opportunity. 

Restated as a series of questions, this framework can be applied with remarkable effectiveness to design problems: 
 

Means: How can a person gain access to, and understand how to use, your product and service? 

Motive: Why would a person use your product or service?

Opportunity: When can a person use your product or service? How does it fit into their lives?


Of course, there are two big differences. First, a mystery usually has only one right answer—a single killer or bank robber—yet design can offer many great (or terrible) solutions to the same problem. A second difference is that in detection each time the problem is similar (e.g. who committed the crime). Yet, in the design process, the designer has to define both the problem and the solution. Without the former, the latter makes no sense. 

Like the detective, the designer has tactics they can use to define and solve the problem. As I’ve written before ("The “problem first” design process"), the process for defining a problem is very similar to designing a solution; once the problem has been clarified you can then move into design solution mode. 

Following the detective’s framework, you can use a number of tactical design tools to solve a design mystery.

Means: How can a person gain access and understand how to use, your product and service? 

In Form, Function, and Feel, I look at how prototyping allows you to examine the different ways in which end users will perceive and use your product or service. 

“It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise, your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.” - Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes novel

Motive: Why would a person use your product or service?

In Design First, I articulate a different approach to research which uses design tools to uncover the key questions that need to be answered to make a successful product or service. 

"You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear." - Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes novel

Opportunity: When can a person use your product or service? How does it fit into their lives? 

In Intent driven design I propose an approach to predicting your users' intent and actions which allows you to anticipate and delight users with intuitive designs based on their needs. 

“See the value of imagination,” said Holmes. “It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified.”  - Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes novel

Detection and design share many similarities. When you begin, there are many questions and many assumptions are made. Yet, only by testing out your ideas can you hope to find a solution. In both cases, understanding human nature plays a vital role in coming to a solution; can you understand what motivates someone to commit a crime, or to use a service?

If the “means/motive/opportunity” framework is crucial in fictional (and even real) detection, in design it can crack the case of both defining the problem and developing solutions. 

Experience First

The world of innovation is awash with acronyms and tech terms: AI, AR, VR, CV, Bots, Mix Reality. It seems that every few months a new piece of pure technology is being born.   

Yet, two people who have created significant innovation in the last fifteen years explicitly say that you address a person’s or group’s problem first, and then find the tech to support the solution. You don’t start with AI, AR, VR, or Bots and look for a problem they can solve.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology” - Steve Jobs

“There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product-focused, you can be technology focused, you can be a business model focused... But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.” - Jeff Bezos 

What this means is that we have to look beyond the newest technology born in a lab as well as beyond what people themselves are currently asking for. To quote Wayne Gretzky, we need to move to where the hockey puck will be. 

How do you do that? You have to look for fundamental needs: communication, transportation, living spaces, health. What are the unmet needs in these areas and what will they be in the next 10 years?

Airbnb and Uber each met a fundamental need. It was not the technology that led their innovation, rather it was the need and the experience. You can, of course, make things faster with better technology, but neither of these culture-changing companies created any new fundamental technologies; they used sometimes decades-old technologies in new ways.

When you start with a new technology you are limited by its context and its lack of history. It is something looking for a home; there are many cases of technologies that should never find one. 

If you want to innovate, stop reading tech blogs and start looking around at people's most basic needs and make those better. Those needs represent big markets that can change the culture of our society. By creating real people-centered innovation, you have the possibility of creating products and services that people will eventually be unable to imagine the world without.  

Intent driven design

People don’t want a drill. They want a hole.

People are often only given solutions that solve a portion of their original intent.

So what is the intent?
The intent is being resolved or determined to do something. Doing this thing on which one is intent can be broken down into a series of smaller interconnected tasks constrained by a number of requirements (time, location, money, for example) which are only important in that they get you to your desired something. 

By listening carefully you can hear people's intentions, rather than just the tasks they mention. 
To design for an intention, you must be able to sequence the tasks in the right order and make sure each task is possible within a particular set of requirements. 

If you can understand intent you can map tasks over time and predict your users’ future!

Let's take an example: cooking an omelet. This seems simple but it is actually deceptively complex to create a solution that fulfills the whole intent. The answer could be to look online or in a cookbook and to follow the instructions, which can often be a hit or miss approach. Instead, let's break this down from an intent-driven design approach. 

By listening and observing experienced cooks (or users) you can see three major things you need to do in sequence to make the perfect omelet. 

Have the right cooking equipment. 
Have the right ingredients.
Know the right cooking techniques. 

Hence, an intent-driven solution would first make sure that you had the right equipment, and if you didn't would offer you alternatives you might already have, or would help you find a place nearby to get the right equipment. 

It would then check if you had the right ingredients to make the omelet. Once again, if you did not, it would suggest the places in your local area that have the ingredients you need. 

The final step would be to provide you with videos or clear instructions on the correct cooking technique to help you make the best omelet possible with the equipment and ingredients you have. 

Putting intent into practice
Very few, if any, services today offer this kind of complete intent-based solution. Making eggs is simple, but still, there's a gap between the tasks and the intent. Imagine something more complex -- like buying a house!

The actual tasks when buying a house include :
Get financial advice, mortgage advice, mortgage loan, credit checks, real estate lawyer services, real estate broker, house finding services, building surveyor reports, school district data, house closing services, tax document action, notary services, and on and on and on……

You can see what I mean; you want a home but to fulfill that intent you “need’ all these services, people, and kinds of information-- in the right sequence--to be successful. 

Focusing on a user’s intent allows you as a designer to look into the future and predict what the user will need and when.

This is what Airbnb and Uber have done to some success and Apple does extremely well in its retail stores. They understand the intent of their users (e.g. for Uber, to get to a specific location in a set amount of time) and make services and products that cater to each of the tasks that the user requires in sequence to fulfill their actual intent. 

To use this method you should start by identifying the basic parameters for breaking down all the elements that will lead a person to be able to fulfill their intention. You can do this by asking the following questions:
1. How much time does the user have to complete their intent?
2. Do they have to be in a specific location?
3. How much money will they need/do they have to complete their intent?

Next, you should try to define three main categories of tasks that need to be accomplished for the person to fulfill their intent.

The final thing to do is to sequence the tasks and apply the time, location, and money parameters to create a design brief which, if met, will fully satisfy the person’s intent.

It sounds like magic but in fact, it is just learning to listen in a very different way, and thinking more expansively about a design problem. 

Design Proofreading

In books, proofreading for grammar and punctuation is a tool for creating clarity and simplicity in a text, so that big ideas are not clouded by small confusion. In the past 15-20 years we have begun to publish many more things: websites, apps, videos and even print 3D objects. What creates clarity in these?

While the possibility for error is as common as ever, in networked media a tool to help you improve the clarity and simplicity of a design does not really exist. The need for a proofreading tool for designing these new forms of media and objects seems necessary. 

With this in mind I have created a framework I call “design proofreading,” to allow people to navigate this new world of mass media and object production.

There are four core elements to the design proofreading framework: Assumptions, Simplification, Scaling, and Consistency.

Each core element gets you to ask key questions about the product or service you are designing and helps unlock potential ways to improve it. This framework is for use at critical junctures when you have made a major step forward with a design: developed a new concept, changed out the content, added a new piece of functionality.

Design proofreading framework:

Assumptions
Assumptions can be deadly. It’s important to understand the assumptions you are making and see if they are realistic or not.

How to proofread for assumptions:
List out the major assumptions you are making about the project.
1. Who is the project for?
2. What information are you basing your assumptions?
3. Are those assumptions still valid today ?
4. How many assumptions are based on known facts compared to untested facts?

Do you your assumptions still ring true? Is there new information that requires you to update or refine your initial assumptions?


Simplification
Less is more. By simplifying (but not making simple) a design you can  make the product more refined and improve the user experience with fewer elements. 

How to proofread for simplification:
1. What is absolutely essential for the project to work properly?
2. Can the same results be achieved with less?
3. Is there redundancy in the design?
4. Is the language used age-appropriate? Does is use the right vernacular?

Simplifying the design this way does not mean dumbing it down, but doing more with less.


Scaling
How can you make things work for one person and 10,000,000 people? This is important in all forms of design, from the web to manufacturing. How will a product / service respond over time with an increased number of people using it?

How to proofread for scaling:
1. What are the variable elements of the design?
2. If any part of the design is variable, what happens to this part of the design at the lowest and highest ends of the variance? Does the design adapt, or break down and stop functioning? (e.g. if your design is created for multiple languages what happens when everything is translated from english to a more verbose language like german)
3. What must be variable and what can be fixed in the design solution?

You cannot know all of the answers when you start designing something. This exercise lets you consider what might happen and plan for some of the bigger changes.


Consistency
Consistency in how something looks and works is an important part of  building a relationship with the person/ people using the design. While there always needs to be variability to allow for more intuitive ideas, the majority of the design should be consistent to create trust between the design and the user.

How to proofread for consistency:
1.How many variables do you have within a design?
2.What are the main activities that someone will use your design for? When you use the components that make up those important parts of the experience do they behave and look consistent?
3.Placement, size, behavior, typography, color, interaction, and meaning. Look at each element of the object, book, poster or website’s design: does it behave consistently when you apply the above parameters?

Do the basics, headers, calls to action add up? If not, go back and look at the system to see how to adjust or, better, simplify to create a more consistent set of rules for the people using your design. The simpler the rules, the quicker the adoption of a product.

***
By asking some relatively simple questions this process allows you to make rational choices about a project.The entire design process is about providing a vision for a project, understanding the content or functionality intimately, and delivering a solution. All of these things necessitate being close to the project, making it hard to take a step back and see an obvious flaw which could stop an otherwise great idea from taking off. Design proofreading is a way to take that step back while in the flow of making an idea real. 

Tools That Shape Us

On the weekend I drove a car which had a feature I had never seen before. It had a small LED indicator in the wing mirror which appeared when a car drove by me in the blind spot of the wing mirror. This saved me from having to crane my neck back over my shoulder to check that blind spot. Great! I thought, That’s handy, that makes my life easier.

Later on in the drive I had become used to this new tech and basked in its glory. No need to look any more, the little LED will just show up and I will be safe. Safe in this knowledge, I checked my mirrors and started to pull into the curb at which point I swerved quickly to avoid hitting two cyclists who were in my blind spot! Woah! It doesn’t work in that situation?

What had been a convenience a moment earlier now became a liability, making me think about all the trade-offs people make everyday for convenience. Google maps on your phone, no need to know where you’re going, right? Apart from all the people that ask me for directions while holding a smartphone in their hand, in New York, a city built on a grid for easy wayfinding.

This post is not about features, but about systemic problems of learning and how we apply our learning to the world. There seem to be many tools to make your life easier, but very few to help you get smarter and learn more.

Why? Perhaps it is that getting smarter and better at things requires hard work and patience, things that are not convenient. I am not advocating going back to the dark ages (or even the 90’s) and using maps and compasses again, but what I am advocating for is that we use technology to start building our own personal cultures, our own ways to think about the world, creating tools for ourselves to be more successful, happy and fulfilled.

What does that mean practically? Simple example. If you love sushi, instead of using yelp, spend the time looking up the best sushi restaurants in your area, make a list, map the locations, list out the specials and what you might eat there. Now make something, a blog post, email, instagram, anchor, snapchat about it and let other people know.
 
Do this every time, soon you are the expert instead of yelp, you have taken something you love and learned more and helped others learn more. This doesn’t have to be a job or make you money, but it is a way to share your personal culture — what you think and how you think — with others. That is how great ideas start.

Design first

A new day and a new project. The first thing to do in a human-centered approach to designing a new product or service is to understand the user and business goals. You start setting up interviews with your client, reading about competitors, and begin to observe and interview the types of people who might end up using this new project. 

But wait. What do you actually know at this point? What questions do you have? Are they well informed, distinct, and pointed? Or are they wide-ranging and fuzzy? I want to challenge the order in which we structure our approach to research in design, and to suggest how design can be used not only to create solutions but also to define the problem.

The current human-centered design process is essential: research, ideate, solution, test, and repeat. This is the wrong order. How can you research if you don't have a well-defined question? 

How many times have you seen projects begin by observing users, talking to business and end-users, competitive analysis ... only to end up with a list of pretty general bullet points about what could be done a little better and some pros and cons. This is not a well-considered research process; this is a research process that started without a well-defined question.

So how can you change this? I would say start designing a solution to the problem from day one. Only by making something will you as a designer start to understand the problem both from a macro and micro perspective. Next, instead of testing your design, take a step back and ask yourself what questions do you have and what assumptions have you made? Now use the answers to these questions to formulate your research questions, and begin your research activities with them in mind. The next step would be to iterate on the design this time focusing on a solution. Finally, you would test this idea with end-users. 

A bonus to this approach is that you will actually have things to show end-users, not just hypothetical ideas, and you can get a real reaction. The point of this initial design process is to understand the problem by actually doing the thing that designers are good at--designing! 

While many designers have a skill for research, this is often more intuitive than formal. Based on many conversations with sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists over the years, I've seen how many designers’ research skills are at best naive, without a grounding in real research techniques. The research that designers do is often incomplete or misleading, especially when it is done on questions such as ‘how can we improve shopping experiences?’ or ‘how do we help improve health outcomes?’ This is not a knock on designers; why should they be good at this work? Most were never trained to conduct formal research methods or research design.

You may say I have described the lean UX approach of “design and test.” Rather, I would argue that that process is focused on finding a solution, rather than defining a question. Testing by its nature is about narrowing to a solution. The initial round of design in the approach I have outlined is not to define a solution, it is to define the problem. 

By designing first, designers play to their strengths, creating a preliminary solution. By then doing substantive research into the questions raised by this initial design, they can look at more specific questions and find better outcomes. It allows the research process to be much more focused and useful, getting at core design questions more quickly. 

The Problem-First Design Process

"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” Bertrand Russell

I want to be rich. I want to be more mindful. I want to start my own company. These all seem like reasonable goals but when stated in this way they are almost impossible to achieve. Why? Because they are not stated in a way that allows for a solution. They are, in fact, a statement of desire and not a set of requirements that would allow anyone to achieve the stated goal.

In this article, I propose a design process that focuses on understanding the problem and, in so doing, it's requirements--a process I call "problem first." If you understand the problem, making the solution will be simple. 

The following exchange between founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard and his head of design, as retold in his book “Let my People go Surfing”, shows a useful example. As they discuss how to make the best product, one person states a goal as a desire that is impossible to achieve, while another begins to state requirements that will allow for the development of solution to meet their goal. 

“Early in our history our chief designer for many years, Kate Larramendy, issued me a challenge. She said that we didn’t make the best clothing in the world, and moreover if we did, we’d go out of business."

“Why?” I asked her.

“Because the best shirt in the world is Italian,” she said. “It’s made from hand-woven fabric, with hand-sewn buttons and buttonholes, and impeccably finished. And it costs three hundred dollars. Our customers wouldn’t pay for that. “

I asked “What would happen if you threw that three-hundred-dollar shirt into your washer and dryer?”

“Oh, you’d never do that. It would shrink. It has be dry-cleaned.”

To me a shirt that has to be treated so delicately has diminished value.  Because I think ease of care is an important attribute, I would never own a shirt like that, much less make and sell one.”
—Yvon Chouinard (2006), Let My People Go Surfing

This example shows that instead of stating a goal for his perfect shirt Chouinard states the problem as different requirements which allow for the best outcome for his particular set of consumers.

Today the approach to problem solving in design is both linear and iterative. Yet, these methods allow very little room for clearly stating the problem and reframing the requirements / strategies required to create something great.

This diagram shows a popular method of production called “waterfall”, a small amount of time spent up front stating the problem while the rest of the process is spent trying to create a solution to this problem statement. Unfortunately if the problem isn’t stated correctly at the beginning, many issues occur during the production process, leading to pretty mediocre results. This style also manages the process with hard deadlines and sets of milestones that have to be met.

In reaction to this, the “agile” process was created,
which works this way: 

This process is the opposite of waterfall; it looks to iterate quickly through all parts of the project in quick 2-3 week sprints. This is meant to allow for more feedback in the design process and creates a more reactive process as new information is learned. But, as with the waterfall model, agile is also a managerial process; in each structured 2-3 week sprint, a number of targets must be met. Even though things can change due to new information, the mentality is still focused on production. We are making something, just quicker.

All processes have their strengths and weaknesses. The biggest weakness of either “waterfall” or “agile” is their focus on creating a solution immediately. By its nature, this causes a narrowing of thinking and exploration which can lead to unforeseen issues in the production process. 

Even more problematic, in both processes the work of framing the problem is only a small part of the overall process and is attached to the idea of production which means that the thinking will be narrow and be influenced by subsequent stages. This leads to a process which is only 20% stating the problem and 80% creating a solution.

What’s an alternative? 
The “problem first” method I suggest follows a different path, spending the majority of the time on stating the problem, rather than on creating a solution. I have found from long experience that, even with the best of intentions, predetermined milestones and assumptions, and a focus on solution, can only create a climate of narrow thinking where milestones are all-important and the problem at hand is too often neglected.

This is what the problem-first process looks like:

I assume that to many people this will not look like a process at all; to some degree that is the point. Without all the artificial milestones and deliverables, this process allows for free exploration of the problem space. Many of the usual activities will be done--brainstorming, sketching, research, interviews etc.--but all with the goal of each week stating the problem, requirements and assumptions in a clearer way.

What do I mean by stating the problem? Well, this will also look familiar to anyone who has designed anything before: making artifacts of possible solutions, doing and recording research with consumers and businesspeople, stating assumptions about the market, creating metrics for success. Yet, these are all done with the aim of stating the problem and not making a solution.

Once the team is happy with the problem statement, making the solution is a natural process because they understand the problem. They have not had the burden of artificial deadlines; the problem statement itself is a clear guide to show them whether the design solution they are creating meets the needs at hand. While this sounds like magic I can assure you it’s not. It's hard work, but it is work with a focus and a clear idea of :

What are we building?
Why are we building it?
Who are we building it for?

When you can answer these questions with confidence you will be on the right track to making something valuable and innovative. 

Work Culture

"Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle." - Bertrand Russell

Everyone is busy! Working constantly -- often much more than their 40 hours a week -- yet, people still do not feel satisfied. The more they work the less satisfied they feel because they are missing out on other parts of their lives. Part of the issue lies in our work culture. Here I'd like to suggest three key ideas I've identified in my reading on this subject; attention to focus, culture, and space can allow for a more sustainable work life, and hence, one's whole life. 

Focus: How do you find the time to do your most important work, or spend the time with the people that matter to you?

Culture: How is our work culture affecting our lives?

Space: How does the environment in which we do our work affect us as people?


Focus 
According to one article from the BBC, “an average working professional experiences 87 interruptions per day” which seems to be an impossibly unsustainable environment in which to work. Cited in that article, professor Dan Gilbert’s study finds that “we spend 46.9% of our time not thinking about what is happening in front of us”. With this little focus, it is not surprising that people put in more and more hours to recover from all the distractions. And - it turns out that even putting in more hours is not the right answer, as the BBC goes on to note that “employees with the highest productivity didn’t put in longer hours than anyone else – often they didn't even work eight-hour day. Instead, the key to their productivity was that for every 52 minutes of focused work, they took a 17-minute break.”

So what can you do if working more is not the answer? These short breaks are a good option, as well as the idea put forth by Thrive Global, a life hacking website, which suggests that you should “build a working system for yourself...[which] makes your goal real...[and] concrete.” One way to do this is to take the 168 approach and look at how you spend your time, track the activities you do for a given week, and categorize those activities into the following groups:

Creative : Activities that make you happier or move you closer to your long term goals. 
Health: Activities that improve your mental and physical well being. 
Tasks : Activities you have to do to maintain your life e.g. washing up, laundry, food shopping. 

Now look at how you have spent your time, and the activities you did. Think about next week and how you want to spend your time and the right balance for you. This is a first step in creating your culture of work, stopping the feeling, and the reality, of being bombarded by trivial activities that stop you from doing what is most important for you to succeed and be happy. 


Culture 
Perhaps one of the clearest and frightening examples of our work culture gone awry is in Japan; the BBC writes that while “the country may have some of the longest working hours it is the least productive of the G7 group of developed economies” and that while workers are “entitled to 20 days leave a year...currently about 35% don't take any of it.” This article highlights how working more hours is not only bad for individual workers but is also bad for companies that use this culture of work and for a country's economy as a whole. Signal vs noise, a blog written by the company basecamp, addresses this issue and sums up much of what is wrong with the current culture of work this way: “Workaholism is a disease. We need treatment and coping advice for those afflicted, not cheerleaders for their misery.” Whatever short term gains companies get from workers doing 80 hour weeks is massively offset when you have burned-out employees and resignations, meaning that companies are losing their most valuable asset, their people. 

Place 
Where we work can have as much effect on our work and happiness as how we work. A 2014 article from the New Yorker shows how the ill-conceived idea of open-plan offices has taken over workplace design “The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve.” The article goes on to explain that compelling evidence in this way:

"In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. What’s more, Evans and Johnson discovered that people in noisy environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing increased physical strain. The subjects subsequently attempted to solve fewer puzzles than they had after working in a quiet environment; in other words, they became less motivated and less creative."

Companies gain the short term benefits of being able to cram more people into smaller spaces and to reduce office space cost overheads. Yet, by doing this they lose out in the long term by creating spaces in which it is almost impossible to focus and concentrate, leading to less innovative and lower quality work. 

Another article from Fast Company shows how allowing people control over where they work leads to much better productivity and more innovative outcomes for both the individual employees and the businesses. While they cite that “the most innovative companies have between 25% to 57% of their employees working remotely,” this still does not change the minds of many businesses that continue to look for short term gain and end up providing an overall culture of low innovation and stagnation. 

Focus, Culture, and Space help us think about how to build more sustainable creative workspaces which lead to more innovation, better products, healthier and more profitable businesses, and happier people. 

***
As an additional note to this article, it’s important to say that there is a whole field of study called environmental psychology dedicated to looking at the effect of space on culture and vice versa. Below are a few more articles that might help you understand the profound effect the built environments of our workspaces have on our well being. 
Additional reading :
HBR : Rules for designing an engaging work space
HOK : Workplace Strategies that Enhance Performance, Health and Wellness

Thinking

"The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development." – Oscar Wilde

Today we are awash with self-help and guidance books which will tell us what to think, eat, create and anything else you care to imagine. So, for this week's design + culture entry I have made a selection of books which, instead of telling you what to think, help you understand how to think. 
 

Book 1 : Pragmatism - by William James

"Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co- operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added RAW. More usually it is embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old."
 

Book 2 : The Soul of Man under Socialism - by Oscar Wilde

"Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend’s success."
 

Book 3: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - by Benjamin Franklin

"I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it"
 

Book 4: A Technique for Producing Ideas - by James Young

"If you ask me why I am willing to give away the valuable formula of this discovery I will confide to you that experience has taught me two things about it: First, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it."
 

Book 5 : Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind - by Shunryu Suzuki

"It is difficult to have good communication between parents and children because parents always have their own intentions."

Creative Culture

" The designer has a prescriptive rather than descriptive job.
Unlike scientists who describe how the world is, designers suggest how it might be." - Bryan Lawson

If you're running any kind of creative company, what questions and processes should you come back to regularly to make sure you're on the right track and focusing your energy on what matters? What follows is a set of guiding principles to shape the creation of more sustainable design culture. It focuses on defining the problem, shaping product culture and creating a transparent process.

Defining the Problem
Defining the problem is an important part of figuring out a solution, and having clarity of vision. The following questions need to be posed and answered again and again throughout the product development process to make sure your product or services are on target.

1. What's the problem we think people have?
2. Do they in fact have this problem?
3. How do they solve this problem today?
4. How much do they spend to solve this problem?
5. How much does this problem impact their business/life?

Product Culture
Products and services are made by people. Those people need to feel valued, motivated and happy. It's important to have a clear vision and ensure that your people are supported in its execution. Using this product culture framework and regularly asking the following questions of yourself and your team allows you to gauge the health of your organization.

• Future
  What do we stand for? What are our values?
   

• Framework
  What are the strategies which form the core of our company or service?
   

• Form
  How do we communicate our story?
   

• Feel
  How do people feel after using our product/service?
   

• Function
  Is it clear how to use our product or service?

Transparent Process
Once you have clearly defined the problem and have an engaged workforce, using a transparent process will help you create great products and services in a sustainable manner.

Framework
My framework is a way of logically laying out ideas, organizing them by Vision, Goals, Strategy, Tactics, and Tasks. The framework is a flexible tool which allows you to evaluate ideas at any level and helps you make decisions in real-time about your organization and product. It is also a tool to create consensus in your team about which ideas are truly connected to your vision and which ones are not.

Audience
It's important to understand the whole customer story. It's not about what you want them to do; it's about carefully understanding their current activities and then creating the best possible outcome for those activities. This will create real innovation instead of incremental change.

Market
Find the open spaces in culture; these are where the big opportunities are. This can be a hard path, since no one else is initially working in that space, but by addressing a gap it is also the one most aligned with your customers' needs. If by following your own path you create an innovation, you will have no competition. No competition allows you time and space to build your advantage.

Product Development
It's all about execution. We've all heard this phrase, but what does it mean? In this case it means that people want to see fully-formed products they can use, not half baked beta products. Creating complete products at each stage of your company's journey satisfies customer expectations and allows your ideas to evolve and change, learning through the challenge of creating real products.

Resources
No matter how many resources you have for a project, here's a simple breakdown: 50% will need to be spent on design production and development. The other 50% will be spent on understanding your audience, telling your story, and making sure your vision is big enough and aligned with the market of users.

Visual Thinking

Making a sketch is often the first step towards thinking about a design problem. But I’ve found that oftentimes making that mark feels daunting – it is the first sign of my imagination committing to a solution. A mark feels risky – the idea is now out in the world for more than just me to see.

I often think of sketching an idea as making a visual list. Making lists helps move ideas forward, another kind of decisive first mark. I also think about list-making as a process :

1. Make the list (Thinking out loud, possibly in collaboration)
2. Looking through the list again and re-ordering it. (Fitting it to the needs of the idea)
3. Reviewing your new list (Critique and time for contemplation)
4. Fixing the list and deciding to follow its order (Deciding on a course of action)

With sketching or visual thinking, these steps happen simultaneously, still holding a lot in common with a simple list.

Here’s an example from one of our projects with MIT’s Wolk Gallery for an exhibition promotion piece.

One of several sketches which emerged from this visual thinking process.

The Final Design

Although this process seems based in a visual product, I apply this kind of visual thinking (or visual list-making) to many kinds of problems. Because of the quick nature of the process, I'm able to address many questions and answers early on, helping to shape a project’s outcome in the process.