Soren Petersen and I wrote articles about how we see each others’ areas to clarify our misunderstanding and hope to find any solutions to close the gap. They are published on the Huffington Post.

“How Marketing Researchers See Design”

“What Designers Say about Marketing”

At first, I did not like the Touch Wood phone by DoCoMo. However, an ad introduced by the Core 77 website changed my view completely. In the ad, a wooden ball plays Cantata 147 as it rolls down the wooden xylophone in the forest.

Interestingly, I found this product more special after watching the video about how the ad was made (http://answer.nttdocomo.co.jp/touchwood/?banner=dcm3#making). People may consider a product special when they know of any behind story about the product; how it was developed (e.g.,Wii Balance Board), how its ad was made, or how people work together or compete against each other to develop it (e.g., Social Network). This suggests that the process that designers go through for developing a product, if released appropriately, may be able to benefit the market performance of the product.

One of her interesting projects is a medical device for those who suffer from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. This syndrome is a medical condition in which the median nerve is compressed at the wrist, leading to numbness, muscle atrophy, and weakness in the hand. At present, most patients are recommended to wear gloves that are composed of two separate materials which perform different functions; a soft cushion and a hard metal (see left). As an alternative, she developed a “skin” with a single material by mapping the pain-profile and distributing hard and soft materials to fit the patient’s anatomical and physiological requirements, limiting movement in a customized fashion (see right). Her project is called as Carpal Skin.

Overall, her argument is interesting; designers may produce a better product when they perform a series of design tasks simultaneously (e.g., selecting a form and materials together) than when they go through the same tasks sequentially (e.g., selecting a form and then selecting materials).

Sustainable growth in the 21st Century requires technological and social innovations that effectively address the complex, interdependent problems that we face as a nation and throughout the world. Design research and education provides the intellectual underpinning and offers knowledge and experience to serve as a foundation for this endeavor. However, establishing interdisciplinary design research and education programs requires institutional transformation to overcome the current system that is structured around traditional disciplines with little cross-connection. This two-day workshop, supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), brought together a group of university administrators, faculty and researchers, and industry practitioners, to discuss the role that Design may play in helping universities transform their educational mission and practices to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

- excerpted from the executive summary, NSF workshop report

I was invited to attend this workshop as the only student at a business school. I was fortunate to discuss a wide variety issues with established researchers, teachers, and practitioners working in design. We worked in groups discussing interdisciplinary design research and nurturing design faculty, and presented the summaries (click here for the team presentations).

In particular, recommendations on design research are worth sharing (click here for the final report).

A large-scale, sustained education agenda must be supported and complemented by a research agenda that studies the pertinent questions and develops the knowledge and methods to address them. While interdisciplinary education is readily understood, interdisciplinary research is much less so. Rather than perceiving design research as an interdisciplinary area, it is more advantageous to view Design as a discipline in itself that can combine knowledge from other disciplines, akin to our concept of medicine as a discipline. Examples of design research topics include:

1. Exploration of the intersection and interaction of people, products, and systems;
2. Reconciliation of the creative, holistic thinking of the arts with the analytical, decomposed thinking of the sciences;
3. Methods to enhance interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, knowledge capture, and reuse across disciplines;
4. Design innovation of complex engineered systems;
5. Identification of the characteristics of innovative teams;
6. Exploration of the intersection of computing and human systems and how this supports the design process;
7. Methodologies for the design of emerging systems, such as medical and health care systems, energy related products and services, and multi-scale devices and systems;
8. Design of completely new products, services, and systems yet to be conceived; and
9. Interdisciplinary design education including innovation, creativity, teamwork, leadership, entrepreneurship through curricular and extracurricular learning.

Jane McGonial, a game designer and a presenter on TED, visited U of Toronto and presented her work, How we can harness the power of video games to solve real-world problems. She made an interesting argument and shared various interesting examples of games that help us individually and collectively.

In her presentation, she argued that (1) games have unnecessary obstacles that people want to tackle (and therefore people are immersed in games) and that (2) the real world is too easy and too simple compared to the game world (and therefore people do not pay attention to the real-world problems). When the real-world problems have the elements of games, she expected, people would put their strengths to better use and challenge the real-world obstacles.

She began with two games that help people achieve individual goals. For example, Nike+ helps people work out more and Foursquare helps people interact more.

More interesting examples came from a series of games that tackle real-world issues. The first example is Groundcrew. People play this game and help the farmers in their neighborhood.

The second and the most interesting example was Urgent Evoke. This is an online reality game that the World Bank Institute and infoDev launched in the early 2010 to support social innovation among young people. In this game, players become superheroes, set up their own superhero teams, and choose one of missions such as water crisis and food security.

Her examples of the bright side of games continued to cooperative websites in which game players solve puzzles for science! (Foldit) or even design RNA for scientists! (EteRNA).

Eric Gales, President of Microsoft Canada, had a conversation with Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management.

In the conversation, he said the two most dangerous words are “Prove It,” because creative ideas cannot be proven in advance. Interestingly, he said, a rigorous analysis of consumers stifle creativity, he welcomes people who approach him with compelling data or, at least, conviction.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,500 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 14 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 31 posts. There were 25 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 7mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was January 6th with 67 views. The most popular post that day was Food shaped product.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, rotman.utoronto.ca, linkedin.com, WordPress Dashboard, and en.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for dieter rams apple, ideo, jaewoo joo, plus minus zero, and scotch tape.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Food shaped product November 2009
2 comments

Jaewoo Joo September 2008
7 comments

Design needs business November 2010

Teaching Business in Colleges and Universities April 2010
2 comments

7th international conference on Design and Emotion November 2010
1 comment

Kevin McCullagh says no. In his article, “Is it time to rethink the T-shaped designer?” he argues that designers should strengthen their core competency for now rather than expanding the horizon of their interests.

…In design, the T’s vertical element consists of a vertical stack of deep design expertise, which is typically acquired at college and honed through years of professional practice. Some of these capabilities are general design skills such as creativity, sketching and visual sophistication. Others are specific to a particular design discipline: for example, deft handling of surface geometry (product designers), the finer points of typography (graphic designers) and mastery of the interplay between light and space (interior designers).

The emphasis of the T-shaped model however is usually placed on the generalist horizontal beam. Capabilities here include a big-picture perspective; knowledge of other related disciplines such as marketing, production and distribution; and the ability to facilitate work across organizational silos. These tend to be developed by some more senior designers ‘on the job.’ These lateral competencies are the ones that have enabled some pioneering designers to edge into new problem areas.

… Some exciting new opportunities have opened up for designers. But to take advantage of them, we need to do some deeper thinking on the new problems, our transferable know-how and what new capabilities we need to work on. Even the most cocksure designer would admit that there are some problems that are best left to others more able to tackle – pension reform, for example.

By contrast, Don Norman says yes, though business education must be made by designers themselves.  In his article, “Why Design Education Must Change,” he argues that designers should learn how managers make business decisions as well as how people behave and how technology serves people.

… Today’s designers are poorly trained to meet the today’s demands: We need a new form of design education, one with more rigor, more science, and more attention to the social and behavioral sciences, to modern technology, and to business. But we cannot copy the existing courses from those disciplines: we need to establish new ones that are appropriate to the unique requirements of the applied requirements of design.

But beware: We must not lose the wonderful, delightful components of design. The artistic side of design is critical: to provide objects, interactions and services that delight as well as inform, that are joyful. Designers do need to know more about science and engineering, but without becoming scientists or engineers. We must not lose the special talents of designers to make our lives more pleasurable….

I recently came across an article written by Helen Walters. We appear to reach a similar conclusion about design education. I introduce her opinion.

At BusinessWeek, we worked to put together a list of the schools that teach design thinking… For now, different experiments are being tried in schools around the world… It’s early days, but clearly it’s smart to teach design principles to MBAs.

Reverse attempts at introducing business principles to design folks seem to be less consistent and perhaps more problematic…

Too often it seems that design graduates emerge from school without the skills necessary to thrive in the real world. That strikes me as a tremendous problem. These graduates need to be able to do well beyond the confines of an academic or even a corporate design department. What’s needed is for a legion of smart, informed designers to emerge who can take on the MBAs at their own game… and win. That certainly won’t happen through wishful thinking or by chance…

… If designers want to be seen as more than stylists, and that’s still a common complaint even now in 2010, then they need to step up to drive the projects, not merely be co-opted to make them look good. It seems unfair, in a way, because making things look good, in print, in product or on screen, is no small matter, as I know from my own disastrous, aborted forays into the dark hinterland of PowerPoint. But many people in many disciplines have been forced to expand their skillsets in order to offer much more than they’d initially anticipated. That is the reality of our modern world. And so, as designers continue to be forced to cede control of many of the means of creation they used to be in sole charge of, as they are forced to share their toys and play nicely with others, this is no time for nostalgia or regret. It’s time to reevaluate what else they too can bring to the table.

If you are interested, you can read her article, the 7 biggest challenges in merging design and business.