Cases

Interdisciplinary Design Workshop by NSF “Driving Innovation through Design” @ Northwestern University

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As design has attracted increasing attention across multiple academic disciplines, interdisciplinary design workshops have been hosted by the universities that have established their interdisciplinary design programs, including Stanford University and University of Michigan. In April 2010, the Segal Design Institute at Northewestern University hosted a workshop under the title of “Driving Innovation through Design — Engineering in the 21st century.”

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 business student. I have discussed a wide variety of issues with researchers, teachers, and practitioners. 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.
Cases

Games solve real-world problems

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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).
Piao, S., & Joo, J. (2022). A behavioral strategy to nudge young adults to adopt in-person counseling: Gamification. Behavioral Sciences, 12(2), 40.
Abstract Mental illness has always been an important issue for young adults. Moreover, initiatives resulting from the outbreak of COVID‐19 have had an even greater impact on the mental health of young adults. This study sought to examine the effect of gamification on whether young adults adopt in‐person counseling. One hundred twenty young adults (42 males and 78 females) with an average age of 29 years participated in our experiment. In the experiment, a 2 (Gamification: no vs. yes) × 2 (Vividness: low vs. high) between‐subjects design was employed. In the “yes” gamification condition, participants decided whether or not to read introductory material about in‐person counseling, and also whether or not to adopt in‐person counseling in the future. The results of the study show that: (1) gamification increased adoption, (2) participants’ perception of subjective usability of in‐person counseling mediated the effect of gamification to adoption, and (3) vividness of presentation moderated subjective usability. Our study demonstrated that gamification nudges young adults to adopt in‐person counseling while subjective usability mediates the relationship, and vividness moderates the relationship between gamification and subjective usability. Our findings provide counselors fresh insights into motivating people to access counseling services. Keywords gamification; adoption; usability; vividness; counseling; nudge
Publications

The 7th international conference on Design and Emotion @ Illinois Institute of Technology

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The Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Design & Emotion Society are pleased to invite you to participate in the 7th International Conference on Design & Emotion in Chicago. The International Conference on Design & Emotion is a forum held every other year where practitioners, researchers and industry leaders meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion. The conference will offer workshops, research paper presentations, design case presentations, and poster presentations.

This conference covers various issues including Design for Environments, Service Design, Strategic Design and Business, and Foundation for Design and Emotion. I presented my work on context-dependent design evaluations.

I was pleased to have conversations with many creative designers as well as insightful design researchers. In particular, four presentation excited me. Two of them discuss new product development and the other two discuss product design.

1. “Improvisational Comedy and Product Design Ideation: Making Non-Obvious Connections between Seemingly Unrelated Thing”

Barry Kudrowitz and David Wallace from MIT try to identify those who are good at developing new products. Inspired by the procedural similarity between making a comedy and developing a new product, they propose that comedians are good new product developers. Then, they support their hypothesis by demonstrating that the quantity and the quality of cartoon captions made by comedians are greater and better than those made by non-comedians.

2. “User Research Methods: Distinctive Need Expressions from an In-depth Interview and a Generative Method Market Research”

Hyesun Hwang and Ki-Ok Kim from Sungkyunkwan University compare two user research methods, in-depth interviews and generative methods (prototyping). They argue that the two methods collect different consumer needs. An empirical study suggests that the in-depth interview produces concrete, negative and past-oriented problems, whereas the generative method produces abstract, positive and future-oriented ideas.

3. “The Cute Look: Baby-Schema Effects in Product Design”

Linda Miesler from University of St. Gallen investigates whether face-like features of the car fronts (head lights and air intake) are processed analog to human faces (eyes and mouth). She demonstrates in an experiment that enlarging the headlights (“larger eyes”) and increasing the size of the air intake (“thicker lips”) led people to perceive the car fronts cuter.

4. “The Relationship between Eco Design and Emotional Experiences”

Heesook Jung from Seoul National University proposes that ecofriendly behavior requires effort and, therefore, some motivation such as playfulness should be employed to help consumers behave ecofriendly. She presents a case of Lohas, an ecofriendly Japanese bottled water. According to her, the sound that an empty bottle creates when squeezed leads consumers to behave more ecofriendly (e.g., squeezing bottles) (see Lohas commercial).

Cases

Human Factors symposium

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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.

At the symposium, I noticed an interesting connection between decision-making and Human Factors. Research in decision-making studies decision biases and provides prescriptions to eliminate or mitigate them. Similarly, HF researchers study errors from the real-life examples and suggest practical recommendations to overcome those errors.

For instance, John Senders and his colleagues studied errors of train drivers, vehicle drivers, airplane drivers, and medical practitioners in terms of their processing visual information. (In 1960s, John drove in Boston wearing a helmet and a visor that occluded his vision to find how often drivers need to see front!) Then, they provided recommendations to the city of Toronto, simulate trainings for pilots, or even develop devices for doctors such as Head Mounted Display).

Since Human Factors research investigates human behavior issues elegantly, which has a great potential to business. Shumin Zhai, for instance, presented his business which was developed from a research project. About 10 years ago, his team developed an innovative text input system for a touch screen device. It does not simply improve a conventional keypad to make it easy to use (e.g., laying out keys differently). Rather, it allows users to use their gestures to input texts. It is now called as ShapeWriter.

To me, Don Norman‘s call for Human Factors researchers to work with business people sounds right. I believe designers need business education to communicate with business people effectively. I found a wide variety of business-able issues were discussed in the symposium but hardly found any people with business background.

I hope to find more business students working at Human Factors community in the future.

Cases

Evolution of design thinking

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In 2006, what was design thinking? (see more at Luke Wroblewsky‘s blog)

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.

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.

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.

..

Now in 2010, what is design thinking?

I recently came across a carefully written post at Core 77 about design thinking. It was done by Kevin McCullagh and titled as “Design thinking: Everywhere and Nowhere, Reflections on The Big Re-Think.”

In fact, design thinking always meant different things to different players. For some it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling problems that used to be the preserve of managers and civil servants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it is was merely a new spin on design. All its proponents were, however, united by their ambition for design to play a more strategic role in the world than ‘making pretty.’ Who could argue with that?

..

Now in 2023, what is design thinking?

People are gravitated towards different attitudes about design thinking. Some are disappointed by the fact that design thinking fails to produce visible, lasting outcomes. Others pay attention to its unique role in helping people creative. Design thinking might not be a short-term, direct tool, but rather a long-term, indirect mindset.

***

Reference 1

Ackermann, R. (2023). Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong. MIT Technology Review.

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

***

Reference 2

Bertao, R. A., Jung, C. H., Chung, J., & Joo, J. (2023). Design thinking: A customized blueprint to train R & D personnel in creative problem-solving. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 48, 101253.

Organizations have sought to adopt design thinking aiming at innovation. However, implementing such a creative problem-solving approach based on designers’ mindsets and practices requires the navigation of obstacles. Corporate structure and culture hinder the adoption course, and cognitive barriers affect non-designer engagement. In this regard, training has been used as a means of easing the process. Although considered a crucial step in design thinking implementation, research on training initiatives is scarce in the literature. Most studies mirror that about d.school boot camp and innovative programs developed by companies globally remain unknown. This practice-oriented paper investigates a training blueprint tailored for LG Corporation in South Korea, targeting R & D personnel working in several affiliates that needed creative problem-solving skills to improve business performance. The study findings unveil a customized initiative that expanded the established boot camp model by adding preceding activities to increase learning opportunities and enable empathetic observation. Fundamentally, the customization strategy aimed to provide participants with customer-oriented tools to solve business problems. In addition, the training program reframed the design thinking steps in order to make it relevant for employees and foster corporate implementation goals. Ultimately, this case study supplies literature describing a training blueprint to disseminate design thinking considering two dimensions: individual adoption and organizational implementation challenges.

Figure 1 The overall structure and time allocation of the d.school’s design thinking training program
Cases

Dieter Rams, ten principles of good design

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Braun products by Dieter Rams (above) and Apple products by Jonathan Ive (below)

Dieter Rams listed 10 principles of good design. He is a legendary product designer who has developed a list of the Braun products and is still influencing our life through Jonathan Ive’s Apple devices. The above image comes from a  Guardian article and the below image comes from Vitsoe.com. You could find his 10 principles for good design here.

Dieter Rams

Cases

Context for good design

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Many design awards have their own answers about what makes a product well designed; it must be original, it must be aesthetically appealing, and it must be useful. Similarly, marketing researchers have also studied that newness, beauty, and usefulness contributes to the evaluation of a product. However, whether product usage context or the outer space of a product affects whether a product is well designed has been little discussed.

I found a nice example which shows the impact of usage context on design. Designers from Industrial Facility, a UK design studio, developed a Bath Radio for Muji. It is a radio but looks like a set of shampoo and rinse. This example shows that consumers may consider a product well designed when its design matches its usage context.

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Jump Associates, unique office

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Last summer, I visited two design consulting firms in California: IDEO and Jump Associates. Visiting them raised several interesting research questions.

In the Jump Associates, I was impressed by its space. It occupies two floors in one building and the two floors are connected by a steel stair “inside the building,” so that employees can freely go up and down without using the external elevator (picture).

Besides, Jump Associates has several interesting rooms including “Zen Room” (picture). This room has a low ceiling with several cushions. The Zen Room is often used for consumers who want to express their needs and ideas in a warm, comfortable setting. This is interesting because I have not seen any work telling the value of small sized space with a low ceiling. Instead, much work suggests that high ceiling facilitates creativity.

I wonder if spaces (rooms and their ceiling heights) are carefully selected for different stage gates of a product development process. Designers may want to collect consumer needs in a low-ceiling, close space but they may want a high-ceiling, open space to generate concepts.

Cases

IDEO, three roles of prototypes

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Prototypes have different forms. According to an article written by two apple computer employees, Houde and Hill (1997), prototypes prototype the “role” of a product, its “look and feel,” or its “implementation.” Therefore, designers should choose a right type of a prototype.

One step further, prototypes serve different roles. When I visited IDEO last summer, I found three boards which describe what prototypes do; they “inspire,” “experiment (evolve),” or “validate (specify)” a product. This suggests that different types of prototypes can serve different purposes for a product.

Given that there are different types of prototypes and different objectives of prototypes, designers should create different types of prototypes for different objectives. For instance, the “role” prototype can be more appropriate when designers inspire a product, while the “look and feel” prototype can be better when designers validate a product.

Jaewoo Joo | design thinking, behavioral economics, field experiment, customer experience