Human Factors symposium
I attended a Human Factors symposium at the University of Toronto. It was organized by the HFIG (Human Factors Interest Group) and titled as Celebration of Applied Human Factors Research, in Honour of Prof. John W. Senders’ 90th Birthday.
In the symposium, I noticed an overlap between decision making and Human Factors. Decision making researchers describe “biases” and prescribe people how to make unbiased decisions. Similarly, HF researchers account for real-life cases relying on the framework of “human errors” and then make practical recommendations to overcome those errors. For instance, John Senders and his colleagues studied human errors in processing visual information among train drivers, vehicle drivers, airplane drivers, and medical practitioners. (In 1960s, John drove in Boston wearing a helmet and a visor that occluded his vision in order to find how often drivers need to see front!) After that, they make a list of recommendations to the city of Toronto, simulate trainings for pilots, or develop devices (e.g., Head Mounted Display) for doctors.
What made me interesting is that HF research is (and should be) closely related to business. Shumin Zhai, for instance, introduced his business shaped from a research project. About 10 years ago, his team developed an innovative text input system for touch screen devices. It does not simply improve a conventional keypad to make it easier to use (e.g., laying out keys differently) but allows users to use their “gestures” to input texts. It was named as ShapeWriter. This is an excellent example about how technology addresses human behavior issues to make commercial impact.
Finally, Don Norman called HF researchers to work more closely with business people as, I believe, designers need business education to communicate with business people. Indeed, HF researchers seem to discuss various business issues but I could not find business students in their symposium. Hope Human Factors make a bigger impact by coming close to business.
Design thinking
Although it has not been clearly settled down, many people attempt to clarify what design thinking is. Here are some examples summarized by Luke Wroblewsky in 2006.
Jeanne Liedtka
“Design thinking is synthetic. Out of the often-disparate demands presented by sub-units’ requirements, a coherent overall design must emerge. Design thinking is abductive in nature. It is primarily concerned with the process of visualizing what might be, some desired future state and creating a blueprint for realizing that intention. Design thinking is opportunistic: the designer seeks new and emergent possibilities. Design thinking is dialectical. The designer lives at the intersection of often-conflicting demands – recognizing the constraints of today’s materials and the uncertainties that cannot be defined away, while envisioning tomorrow’s possibilities.”
John Zapolski
“A design approach tries to construct or shape reality. The worldview difference is that a business viewpoint defines a situation objectively, from the outside. “The world is out there, and we if we can understand it better than a competitor, we can respond more appropriately.” A design viewpoint looks at a situation subjectively, participating in it from the inside. “We’re making the world up by the choices, stories, products, and experiences we make. If they are compelling enough, other people will want to join in.”
Daniel Pink
“Well, one, of course, is Design. The others are Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning. Mastery of them—I call them the “six senses”—will increasingly mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t. Fortunately, design is one profession that relies on all six of these abilities.”
Richard Farson
“Design achieves its power because it can create situations, and a situation is more determining of what people will actually do than is personality, character, habit, genetics, unconscious motives or any other aspect of our individual makeup. Nobody smokes in church, no matter how addicted.”
Roger Martin
“When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive – proving that something actually operates – and deductive – proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray – which involves suggesting that something may be, and reaching out to explore it.”
“Designers induce patterns through the close study of users and deduce answers through the application of design theories. However, designers value highly a third type of logic: abductive reasoning.”
Tim Brown
“Because it’s pictorial, design describes the world in a way that’s not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe.”
“At IDEO, a design thinker must not only be intensely collaborative, but empathic, as well as have a craft to making things real in the world.”
Niti Bhan
“Design thinking is one of enlightened trial and error wherein one observes the world, identifies the patterns of behavior, generates ideas, gets feedback, repeats the process, and keeps on refining.”
Dan Saffer
“If there is such a thing as design thinking it is probably shorthand for: a Focus on Customers/Users, Finding Alternatives, Ideation and Prototyping, Wicked Problems, A Wide Range of Influences, and Emotion.”
Teaching Business in Colleges and Universities
In 2006, I worked as a teaching assistant for an interdisciplinary design course. It was designed for MBA students to complete a cycle of new product development with graduate students from a design college. While helping them complete their projects, I observed a marked disconnect between the world of commerce and the creative domain. Most often, design students pursued a chance for success without taking into account market analysis while business students ignored promising design ideas. My observation led me to believe that design students urgently require business language, in particular marketing, to clarify the potential design affords to business to grow and thrive.
I took the course, Teaching Business in Colleges and Universities. David and Uli taught me about from course development and teaching methods to teaching devices, student assessments, and feedbacks. Most importantly, it was an opportunity for me to think about what is “my” teaching philosophy and how “my classroom” looks like in the future.
My ideal classroom is a design studio. It is primarily a safe and comfortable place where teachers as well as students become deeply interested in the subject and freely share their thoughts to build a meaningful knowledge base. In the future, I expect my interactive activities in and outside classroom enable my students to master basics and get more adventurous.
NSF Design Workshop: Driving Innovation through Design
I leave for Chicago tomorrow to attend an NSF design workshop, “Driving Innovation through Design: Engineering in the 21st Century.” The official website lists its goals below.
The one and an half day workshop will bring together a group of university administrators (Deans/department heads), faculty, researchers, and industrial practitioners across a variety of disciplines such as engineering, business, economics, journalism, arts and architecture, education and social policy. The goals are (1) to reach a deeper understanding of the transdisciplinary issues faced in university and the world of design, (2) to foster interactions and facilitate dialogue by collectively sharing experiences of creating, cultivating, and sustaining successful interdisciplinary research and education programs, and (3) to seek synergistic research and educational efforts towards establishing Design as a path towards innovation and transdisciplinary cross-connection.
In order to achieve the goals, various forms of interactions take place in the next two days including presentations, panel discussions, group discussions, and a participation in a design event, Design: Chicago. As previous workshops did, this workshop hopefully provides me insight into how to research and teach various issues of design and marketing.
“Dieter Rams”
Braun products by Dieter Rams (above) and Apple products by Jonathan Ive (below)
What makes a product good designed? Dieter Rams might be one of few who should be able to answer this question. He is a legendary product design champion who have designed numerous products for Braun and is still influencing our daily lives “through” Jonathan Ive’s Apple products. The above image comes from a Guardian article.
By the way, Dieter Rams made a list of the ten important principles for good design. You can find his “Ten Commandments” with amazingly beautiful product images (Dieter Rams’ ten design principles).
You can also find an interview with Dieter Rams here (Dieter Ram’s Interview).
Consumer needs vs. Firm’s technology
Don Norman recently wrote a web article, Technology First, Needs Last. In this article, he argues that technology drives needs. Although his argument is not only interesting but also consistent with the key argument of my thesis work, it does not fully resolve my curiosity about how designers deal with the relationship between consumer needs and firm’s technology. In other words, his article did not fully convince me why many contemporary designers create/choose solutions by intentionally avoiding cutting-edge technology (e.g., Swiffer and iPad)
Recently, I came across another article, Balancing Need and Technology, written by Fil Salustri. It quenches my thirst to some extent. It is absolutely worth a read!
“Industrial Facility”
What makes a product well designed? Design awards have their own factors including newness, aesthetics, and usefulness. Researchers have suggested many factors that make a product newer, more beautiful, and more useful. However, most awards/researchers focus on the product itself or, when they go beyond the product, take into account whether the product goes well with neighboring products. Interestingly, product usage context or the “outer space of the product” has been relatively little discussed.
Recently, I came across an interesting example showing that the outer space of a product matters.
Industrial Facility is a UK design studio founded by an industrial designer and an architect. These designers have designed a “Bath Radio” for Muji and it looks successful. This shows that when the design (form) matches with where a product (radio) is placed (bathroom), it can be better evaluated.
“Jump Associates”
Last summer, I visited two leading design/innovation consulting firms located in California: IDEO and Jump Associates. Visiting them inspired me many interesting research topics as well as convinced me that design/innovation is absolutely interesting field.
One thing that I was impressed by Jump Associates is its “smart space.” As it is well described in BusinessWeek, Jump Associates occupies two floors in one building. Interestingly, they are connected by a steel stair inside the building and designers freely go up and down without using the elevator (picture).
Besides, Jump Associates has a wide variety of uniquely designed rooms. The most interesting room is a small room called “Zen Room” (picture). This room has a relatively low ceiling and is full with cushions. According to a designer who gave me a guide, the Zen Room is used for consumers to express their needs and ideas in a warm, comfortable setting. This is interesting particularly because no marketing research has ever identified the value of low-ceiling space. Instead, prior marketing literature shows that high-ceiling facilitates creativity.
Now, I can find that rooms (or their ceiling height) are smartly chosen for different stages of product development process. Designers prefer a low-ceiling room when collecting needs from consumers, but they may need a high-ceiling room when creating solutions for consumer needs.
“IDEO”
prototypes have various forms. According to an article written by two apple computer employees, Houde and Hill (1997), prototypes prototype the “role,” “look and feel,” or “implementation” of the final products. This suggests that designers should be able to make different forms of prototypes for one product idea (i.e., 3D space planning application).
One step further, prototypes serve different objectives. Last summer, when I visited IDEO, I found a series of boards which describe why designers build prototypes; they do so for “inspiration,” “experimentation (evolve),” or “validation (specify).” This further suggests that different forms of prototypes serve different purposes for one product idea (i.e., Swiffer cleaner).
Given that there are different forms and different objectives of prototypes, do designers need different forms of prototypes for their objectives? For instance, are the “role” (or functional) prototypes more appropriate when designers “think” about their final products but less appropriate when designers “specify” their final products, compared to the “look and feel” (or aesthetic) prototype?
“Samsung” 3D TV
On March 25, Samsung Electronics Canada introduced its 3D TV to bloggers, celebrities, and press at the Andrew Richard Designs, Toronto. Many people over there showed great interest in watching programs such as car racings or footballs in a 3D way. I was amazed by the quality of the swimming fish in a virtual aquarium.
In the past, I thought myself as the last person who consider buying a 3D TV. However, the launching show heated my dormant desire to enjoy video materials in a 3D way.
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