Good conversation

A version of this post has been published on LinkedIn.

I love to engage in and facilitate good conversation. Here is a small sample of both personal and professional relevance.

Some of the best conversations I have are impromptu conversations with people I just happen to meet, such as:

• the conversation I had Friday morning just prior to Creative Mornings with a young Australian woman who recently moved to San Francisco from Hong Kong about cultural differences between San Francisco and Hong Kong and the challenges she was having living here so far and about the tragedy and nuances of gender and age discrimination in the workplace,

• the conversation I had last week just prior to a Consumer Biotech & Digital Health Showcase at Indie Bio with four other attendees about how safe it is to live in Beijing relative to San Francisco, what safety means in both cities, and what one needs to do or not do to remain safe,

• another recent conversation I had standing in line to get into an After Hours event at the Mill Valley Library with a couple married for 59 years, most of them spent in Mill Valley, about how Mill Valley and the Mill Valley Film Festival have changed over the years and the roles they played in some of those changes and why and about their favorite novels and what they thought of each other’s favorites and of the 100 semifinalists in the Great American Read competition,

• a conversation I had earlier this year in a CapMetro Bus in Austin (as I described in The Benefits of Riding the Bus) with a homeless fellow about the unsold suitcase, duffle bag, jacket, and novelty cane he had just happily found in a trash bin, about the kind of person his mother had been, about the difficulties he was having getting food stamps, and about the recent stormy day when the homeless shelter refused him and others entrance because of a worse than usual bed bug infestation,

• and a conversation I had last year during lunch at a Silicon Valley forum on the future of robotics in Japan and the U.S. with a female investor about (as I described in a tweet thread) our very different perspectives on the shortage of women speaking at the forum and working in tech and about whether business and robotic products should be of benefit to society.

Others occur during planned, informal gatherings, such as:

• the dinner party I attended Saturday evening during which we had in depth conversations about how to properly make risotto (an activity in which we were engaged), about the wine industry and how to best taste different wines to assess their quality (an activity in which we were engaged), about the compositions of Handel and Mozart and the role improvisation — musical conversation — is supposed to play in performances of Mozart’s music (you can guess what we were listening to), and about different reactions to and ways of dealing with the loss of loved ones,

• dinner parties I’ve planned over the years bringing together a mix of professional associates who had never before met, as when I brought together Don Norman and Sara Little Turnbull and watched and listened in awe (and occasionally spoke) as the master — Sara — educated the fellow — Don — who many consider to be the master,

• and the many meetings for coffee or some other beverage that I have with professional associates; recent topics of such conversations have included the challenges of addressing homelessness, using trauma informed care techniques in design research, shortcomings in design education, working in India, designing for confrontation, reframing design as activism, the concept of shared value, the challenges of running a social impact design agency, dealing with book publishers, and why we do the work we do.

Some occur during workshops I facilitate, classes I teach, and talks I give, such as:

• the design studio I facilitated remotely for groups of data scientists in a University of Michigan social research lab focused on advancing intervention data science via design; the structure of the design studio enabled them to generate ideas and conversations about ideas which they had not had before, resulting in a breakthrough one particular group badly needed,

• the “Designing More Effectively for Social Impact” (aka “Moving Beyond Standard Human-Centered Design”) workshop I teach during which participants experiment with and discuss the meaning and relevance of approaches new to them so they can determine whether or how to begin to experiment with modifying their existing design practice,

• the advanced “Theory of Interaction Design & Social Entrepreneurship” course I teach at the Austin Center for Design which is comprised, in part, of a series of intense conversations I facilitate about the meaning of various theories — old and new, their strengths and weaknesses, and their relevance to design and social entrepreneurial practice today,

• and (hopefully) in association with an upcoming talk I’ll be giving in a San Francisco residential living room about how important it is or might be to be or to have been or to not be or to not have been a member of the (marginalized) community for or with which you are designing.

Some occur on stage, such as:

• the somewhat contentious conversation I facilitated during San Francisco Design Week between five terrific designers on whether designers are becoming the new activists, a conversation that has led to so many more and to proposals about how design as conventionally practiced needs to change,

• the wonderful conversation I had on stage at San Francisco’s de Young Museum with Meghan Schofield (see top photo) about the unconventional path she had taken into and through the design profession, helping the audience of mostly new and prospective designers see and consider what might be possible for them,

• the terrific conversation I facilitated between Jon Kolko & Don Norman at the Academy of Art University about design education, design thinking, design research, wicked problems, how designers need to position themselves, and the importance of having sex in cars (now you just have to watch the video!),

• and the many other special conversations I’ve had or facilitated on stage over the years, some at CHI (e.g., with Bill Buxton & Cliff Nass about the human limits to HCI & design) and DUX (e.g., with Sara Little Turnbull about her amazing, pioneering design career) conferences, many at BayCHI events (e.g., with Paul Saffo & Jaron Lanier about looking back & looking forward), …

Some occur via text message, such as the wonderful witty conversation I’ve been having off-and-on for months with a UT Austin ESL faculty member about, among many other things, concepts which her students have difficulty learning, Texans and Texas culture, goats, yoga, happiness, diversity, and word meaning, use, and origins. And did I say goats? And goats?

Others that occur in writing are in considerably longer form, such as:

• the conversations I had with Jon Kolko at the end of many issues of interactions magazine when we were the magazine’s Editors-in-Chief (see “On innovation, appropriateness, intervention design, logic, research, the experience ecosystem, marketing, sustainability, wicked problems, and more“ for some teasers),

• the resurrection of such conversations with Jon as reflected in “On the relationship between design and activism” & “On the importance of theory to design practitioners” and the start of similar conversations with others as reflected in “On what it takes to effectively design the future of healthcare — my conversation with Joyce Lee” & “On what it takes for companies to move toward social and environmental responsibility, how we might help, and what that means for design — my conversation with Marc Rettig.” Interestingly, Marc emphasizes the important role of conversation in organizational change.

The depth and nuance, the emotion, the uncertainty and the certainty, and the insight accessed and generated via good conversation are to be savored, often prompt or influence numerous important followup conversations, and are critical to our individual and collective growth.

Wanna engage in a good conversation? Give me a holler.

On the importance of theory to design practitioners — Jon Kolko & Richard Anderson in conversation

A version of this post has been published on Medium.

When Jon Kolko and I were the Editors-in-Chief of interactions magazine, we would end most issues with a “cafe” conversation on topics of relevance to that issue’s content. We thought we’d resurrect such conversations on topics of relevance to the world of design today. This is our second such resurrection.

Richard: Not long ago, I was being interviewed for an opportunity to design and deliver workshops and (other) educational activities to enable multidisciplinary teams to (more) effectively use design and design thinking in their work. I’ve done lots of this type of work during my career, I enjoy it, and I’m very good at it, and I was delighted by the nature of the company with which I was discussing the opportunity. But the hiring manager knew that I had recently taught the advanced theory course at the Austin Center for Design (AC4D), and she repeatedly emphasized that no theory was to be taught at the company and later confirmed that she was afraid that I would insist on doing so.

You established the two theory courses that are a part of the AC4D curriculum, and you’ve written about the importance of teaching theory to design students. But is there no place for theory in a professional work environment?

Jon: I’ve never understood why practitioners make such a big deal about learning theory; it’s as if knowing the history, ethics, or philosophy behind your profession somehow makes you bad at actually doing the work!

I also see theory as akin to business writing; I don’t think people would argue that those who read BusinessWeek or Harvard Business Review are somehow being too academic, yet that’s what we do with design theory. Part of that is our own fault; design theory is heady stuff, often using overly sophisticated language that bullies a reader. But the style aside, the writing is critical for acting as a foundation for work.

When I talk to some of my alumni, they describe that their education grounded in theory gives them a reason to go to work — it provides them with a level of substance for justifying both their individual design decisions as well as their project and career selection criteria. That is, without a theoretical scaffold to guide decision making, all decisions are equal — and that means there’s no way to decide if a project is worth your time or not.

I do know that there are some academics who venture into practice and are surprised that their intellectual rigor alone (without practitioner skills) falls flat. That seems equally naïve to me. It’s hard to claim to be a designer without being able to actually design things.

I’ve written a little about this before and my biggest personal reflection is that if I hire someone without a deep theoretical understanding of our profession, I’m hiring a set of hands. Sometimes, I want a set of hands to creative direct — someone who can make things, and I can tell them what to make and often how to make it. But that’s not what I want for my alumni. I want them to be in strategic roles where they make decisions, and to have confidence that the decisions they are making are sound.

Did the hiring manager you spoke with add any more details about why she was so afraid, or did you get a sense for where that fear comes from?

Richard: I think many people don’t understand the full extent of what design theory is, let alone its importance to practice.

Consider my interaction with Christina Wodtke — who cares about, writes about, and teaches both theory and practice (and who doesn’t shy away from public Twitter debates) — on Twitter a couple of months ago:

What makes theory “theory”? What makes theory “important” or “useful”? I think if people better understood the answers to these questions, fewer people would fear theory.

Jon: Design theory is a way of explaining design. It’s a point of view or perspective, often gathered through research or observation of human-built phenomena. Design is not science; our consideration is not with the natural world, but with the human-created world. That means we can study and discuss various perspectives on the role of technology in shaping culture, in the qualities of rich and useful experiences, or on the way designers work and think.

For example, Paul Dourish’s article “What We Talk About When We Talk About Context” offers perspectives on the context of digital technology. Context, in this case, doesn’t mean the physical environment, but the social environment in which an innovation is found. He presents several alternative perspectives on how technology is presented to the world. One is the positivist approach, which is derived from a logical, rationalist way of viewing the world. This says that social phenomenon can be observed, simplified into modeled patterns, and then modeled.

Compare this to the phenomenological approach, which thinks of society as something that is always negotiated and ever-changing, and that the context of digital technology is based on our observation of it (and our integration of it into our lives).

This seems highly academic, until you think about the emerging fields of machine learning. Machine learning attempts to train models about human behavior with large datasets, and drives towards a predictive model about how people do things. It’s typically based on a fundamental belief that human behavior can be modeled successfully — a positivist approach.

But people do strange and often unpredictable things that can’t be modeled. When they talk to Alexa, they know things it doesn’t. They know, for example, that people in a room prefer different styles of music and may argue and fight over what’s played; that people change their minds; that people get drunk and act on impulse, and later regret it; that people hold grudges, make irrational decisions, and harbor resentment towards one another.

A phenomenological approach to technology would take a stance that not only can this not be modeled in a rational sense, but that it shouldn’t be modeled because it will lead to a disjoint and broken relationship between people and technology.

These perspectives have real-world implications on the types of projects designers take on, the places they work, the design decisions they make when working on digital technology, and the strategic business considerations companies make related to the changing wants and needs of the market.

Theory informs practice. Without knowing the types of things described above, decisions are still made, but they are made with a less informed, less thoughtful consideration. I want my students to be considered in the choices they make.

Richard: A point that I want to emphasize is that design theory need not “seem academic” or even be called (design) theory or appear where one might first think to look, which is well-reflected, I think, in many of the other readings assigned for AC4D’s two theory courses. For example, Emily Pillotin’s “Depth Over Breadth: Designing For Impact Locally and For The Long Haul” — which you assigned and which Emily wrote for us when we were Editors-in-Chief of interactions magazine — is readily accessible, accompanied by examples of her work explaining its applicability to practice. Much of what Ian Bogost writes for The Atlantic is design theory, including the recent “Why Nothing Works Anymore” which I assigned to be read for AC4D’s advanced theory course though, in it, Ian argues that design isn’t so much at fault. Harvard Business Review, which you mentioned earlier, contains design theory, including things you have written and “Creating Shared Value” by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer (which I assigned) which has dramatic implications for what design(ers) could and should be doing in major corporations.

I’m a big fan of Twitter, and I include tweets a lot in my talks, teaching, and writing, and many of those tweets (including many I choose to retweet) and many others I see daily include design theory. Even my Twitter exchange with Christina Wodtke (see above) includes (i.e., not just points to) design theory.

In my view, your writing — which you referenced above and which I referenced in my exchange with Christina — on why you teach theory includes design theory. Design critique — about which you’ve written lots and which is a critical part of good design practice — relies heavily on design theory.

Reign me in, if you think such is appropriate. But in my view, any design practice reflects design theory, and it is important to acknowledge and understand that. Practice and theory are intimately intertwined.

Jon: They are. But, and maybe this is a shift from what I mentioned above, I can empathize why a hiring manager may be reluctant to hire someone who calls themselves a theorist or overly references theory, because sometimes those people value argument (and often for its own sake, not for a larger purpose) over making.

I’ll offer you a case in point; there’s a mailing list called the PHD-Design mailing list. I highly recommend it, because it has wonderful content — and also because at many times, it is outright hilarious. The content often becomes a caricature of academia. I’ll offer you this excerpt from a thread from October, entitled “Can we learn from books?”

“We can learn something from books. The “we” is important to the question (omitted when one ask whether books contain a thing). What we learn has much to do with how open we are to allow the printed characters to resonate with what we already know and are willing to re-examine, expand or take in.”

The comment is ridiculous; the thread is ridiculous; the idea that anyone needs to spend time talking seriously about “if we learn from books” is ridiculous. But, for many, this is “theory” — this is what practitioners imagine academics spend their time doing and worrying about. I don’t think this is what academics spend their time doing, generally, but this is what hands-on, in-the-trenches designers see and judge.

And so from that perspective, and back to your very first question (“But is there no place for theory in a professional work environment?”), I’ll offer: yes, there is, and there should be plenty of it. But as an academic, I need to understand how pontification is viewed by practitioners, and ratchet my behavior up or down depending on the context. Over time, I can shift the perspective of my team or client by delivering great work with a thoughtful underlying theory. But in the context of a real world design problem, intellectualism without the substantiation of tangible design artifacts is just noise.

Richard: Fortunately, I’m not prone to pontification. (We’re not pontificating in this piece, are we? 😉) Nor have I ever called myself a theorist, and in the context of the interview I mentioned at the start of this piece, never once referenced theory or a desire to teach it. Indeed, I’ve taught theory rarely, other than to the extent that theory is always being taught when teaching practice because of how the two are intimately intertwined.

My concern is that theory and its relevance to practice isn’t understood, and hence any association with theory prompts fear and concern among many practitioners. In my view (and I think in yours), practitioners need to attend to theory more explicitly in their work, or, as we addressed in “On the relationship between design and activism,” risk ignoring or even knowing their convictions and, hence, risk just being passive economic servants.

The dilemma of empathy in design

A version of this post has been published on Medium.

Can you be or get too close to a situation or group of people to design effectively for it or them? Or is being fully in that situation or group of people beneficial, perhaps even essential?

Don Norman and Roberto Verganti are among those who have argued that “the more that design researchers immerse themselves in the existing context, the more they ... are trapped within the current paradigms,” making it difficult to imagine, let alone design, a paradigm change when such might be needed.

Dan Saffer tells a relevant story:

About 10 years ago, I worked on a project for a new system for people with diabetes. We talked with many people who had diabetes or who helped educate diabetics. I even wore an insulin pump around for several days. In short, we were building up subject matter knowledge and empathy for the people we were designing for. During this user research phase many of us (myself included) started to have actual nightmares that we had diabetes. I remember once looking at my toes, wondering if the tingling I was feeling was the onset of diabetes. (It wasn’t — probably just my foot was asleep.) We’d empathized to the point where we really identified with diabetics and their problems, which are considerable. We had so much empathy for them, in fact, that for several weeks, we couldn’t solve the problem. It seemed intractable, given what we knew about the condition and the state of technology at the time.

But Emily Pilloton, in an article entitled, Depth Over Breadth: Designing For Impact Locally, and For The Long Haul, wrote:

For design within communities, we must genuinely identify with the community and consider ourselves part of it in order to produce solutions that are informed and long lasting in their impact. Through such empathy, our actions become inherently collective, making more permanent impact. This power of collective action was beautifully described in a 1994 white paper published by the South African Government’s Rural Development Program committee: “…The people must together shape their own future. Development is not about the delivery of goods to a passive citizenry. It is about active involvement and growing empowerment.” 

I am entirely convinced that our greatest successes have and will come from work that is local, deeply entrenched, long-term, and in our own backyards. I firmly believe that lasting impact requires all three of the following: proximity (simply being there, in the place you seek to design with and for), empathic investment (a personal and emotional stake in collective prosperity), and pervasiveness (…involvement that has impact at multiple scales).

On what was this view based?

(After more than a year) bouncing between projects, constantly having to shift gears between cities, user groups, research sets, prototypes, and team dynamics… we began working closely with a single school district: the Bertie County Schools in Eastern North Carolina. Bertie County is the poorest county in the state, with close to 80 percent of its school district’s students living in poverty. Since the partnership’s start (a year ago, we) have spent nearly half our time in Bertie, building educational playgrounds, designing new computer labs, rewriting entire curricula, and implementing countywide education campaigns. 

What we quickly discovered was that being there, as citizens, rather than just designers, was 80 percent of the battle. By becoming immersed in the community, cheering at high school basketball games, and weighing in at board meetings, we have earned the trust and partnership of the school district’s teachers, parents, and students, making our work more personal, appropriate, responsive, and meaningful. Gathering feedback from the community happens more smoothly, the ability to prototype and experiment with new ideas is more fluid, and a public understanding of our process has become more common. All the capacities required by the design process have become more natural through face-to-face engagement and open communication with the community, which of course, requires us to be there. 

Where wide-scale endeavors fall flat is in their cursory understanding and lack of long-lasting commitment to the communities they serve. It is only by becoming a member of a community… that we can truly understand the issues and produce sustainable and effective solutions.

Jon Kolko addresses part of this when he states in, Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, “It may take weeks of observation to become aware of the intricacies of tacit knowledge in other people, which a short-term project-based approach to design doesn’t provide.”

And contributing to this is, as George Aye stated recently, the role of an imbalance of power between designers — who, when they “work on complex social sector issues, …often enter situations with power inherently given to them (even if they don’t realize it)” — and the “communities being served”:

For all the talk about being human-centered, one very human factor often gets overlooked — a basic understanding of how power operates in relationships between people. This lack of understanding by design(ers) results in wasted funding, poorly prioritized projects, and broken promises to the very communities that are being served.

Chelsea Hostetter, in an article with the title that I stole for this post, reveals that already being a part of the community to be served isn’t enough:

Alex and I were embedded into the trans and queer community of Austin, and it’s really hard when you’re part of the LGNTQ community and also talking with members of that community about their needs to not feel like you want to take action right then and there. There were a lot of emotions I felt around the research that was just difficult to process as a queer person myself. 

The Transgender Day of Remembrance is an event held for the community to remember the lives of the transgender victims of homicide with that year and to communally grieve. So throughout all of our interaction with the trans and queer community, the underlying ribbon we found is that somebody usually knows someone who has died whether through murder or through suicide. It’s tragic, and it’s awful, but that is the day to day of our community. As I was listening to the many names called out of lives lost that year, I started sobbing. Watching one person grieve is harrowing, but watching an entire community grieve, and feel connected to people you haven’t even met, is something that is completely, deeply, and soulfully impactful. At the time we dove really deep into the research but it struck a very deep, dear, personal chord with me. I previously considered myself a member of the queer community but through that research, I realized that I hadn’t been a good ally of the trans community like I previously thought. I didn’t have enough information or empathy to properly support our trans community then. 

I don’t think that (the app we designed for the queer community when we were students at the Austin Center for Design) would have worked in the state it was in (then) because I wasn’t as embedded in the queer community as I am today. I am now a regular member of several queer community meet-ups and work with an internal group at frog that promotes diversity and inclusion. I realize in my specific case, in order to be helpful and beneficial and really design for that community, you have to be embedded in it. In my current position within the community, I feel far more able to help people.

The following recent tweet and the top of the article it points to is of relevance…

…as is April Starr’s tweet which she composed shortly after she and her husband endured a terribly designed process of rounds by doctors and residents during her husband’s hospital stay:

[See her “Free ideas from a human-centered designer for hospitals that want to be (or make it seem like they are) patient-centric” and her “MORE free ideas from a human-centered designer for hospitals” for more.]

I’ve been marginalized professionally and through a health crisis and a healthcare nightmare (and as a result, a long stretch of homelessness). Does this make me better suited to design for diversity and for healthcare (and for the homeless) than designers without that experience? I think so; in fact, I think it even makes me better suited to work on other social issues of great complexity. [But does this mean I wouldn’t need to further connect with people in non-diverse, the healthcare, or the homelessness ecosystems and engage in or otherwise tap (additional) design research when designing for healthcare and for the homeless? Not at all.]

If one hasn’t had such experiences, is one ill-suited to work on such issues? I don’t think so. As Tina Seelig writes, everyone experiences “challenging character building opportunities” during one’s life that facilitate one’s ability to develop empathy for those whose character building opportunities are more challenging. And by embedding oneself in the community to be served as much as possible, as described by Emily Pilloton and Dan Saffer and Chelsea Hostetter…

Is all of this only of relevance when addressing “wicked problems” (i.e., social issues of great complexity)? 

And what of Norman and Verganti’s caution about becoming trapped by the current paradigms the more one immerses oneself within them? What can one do to not become trapped? Dan Saffer’s continuation of his story of developing too much empathy for diabetics:

It wasn’t until we were able to step away from the diabetics’ perspective and become less empathetic that we were able to come up with a product concept. We needed distance — a psychic removal — in order to really assess the problem and take action to change it. In other words, we had to act like designers, which meant we had to be more objective, to sit outside and to the left of the problem space. As this experience taught me, too much empathy can be as crippling as too little. 

Empathy will get you to see the problems from the users’ perspective, but not the solutions.

Do you think Emily Pilloton and Chelsea Hostetter would agree? Would George Aye find this imbalance of power to be unacceptable?

Questions, questions… (Indeed, I addressed the content of this blog post — and much more — during a session entitled, “Question Everything: Workshop to Help You More Effectively Design for Social Impact” which I led with Susan Wolfe last month during San Francisco Design Week. Should you be interested in such a workshop, give us a holler.)

Teaching theory at the Austin Center for Design

A version of this post has been published on the AC4D blog and on Medium

“Great timing,” I think to myself yet again. As I was preparing the deck I would use that evening to facilitate a discussion on the opportunities of (social) entrepreneurship, I discovered that a vote by the Texas House of Representatives the previous day had “set the table” for Uber’s return to Austin. (Uber stopped providing rides in Austin a year ago in protest of required driver background checks.) Already in the deck were quotes I had taken from “The sharing economy is a lie: Uber, Ayn Rand and the truth about tech and libertarians,” one of the readings I had assigned for that evening. Also already there were tweets and (other) references to other articles about Uber, some positive, most negative. Into the deck went the headline about the legislature’s vote and a few words from the online article.

Serendipitously encountering tweets, articles, and other information pertinent to a class shortly before the class was typical for me, since I follow people on social media who care about the things I care about and teach about. And I often took advantage of that. I had previously added to the above-referenced deck — which I’ve made available in its entirety below — images from two recent articles I encountered via Twitter about Walmart, including one entitled “Business Exists To Serve Society,” words somewhat surprisingly uttered by Walmart’s Chief Sustainability Officer during a recent interview; we watched that interview during class, since it was of great relevance to arguments made by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in another of the readings I had assigned for that evening, “Creating Shared Value.” That same day, I noticed on Facebook that a former colleague of mine, David Rose, was in town; I had shown a video about David and read a bit from his book, “Enchanted Objects” the previous week in class during another section of the course, and since David was a serial entrepreneur, a guest appearance would be a nice fit for this section of the course as well, so I made it happen.

All of this (and much more) was for an advanced theory course on interaction design and social entrepreneurship that I taught during March and April of this year at the Austin Center for Design (AC4D). Assigned readings included articles — often long and sometimes complex — by renown authors on theory about or of relevance to design and entrepreneurship as well as articles — often more recent and shorter — facilitating the understanding of theory and its relevance to design and entrepreneurial practice today. (All of the assigned readings are listed in a deck at the end of this post and possibly still -- depending on when you are reading this -- on the course's webpage.) The course is one of three that all students take during the final quarter of the AC4D educational program.

Teaching this course was a wonderful experience due in large part to the wonderful students. Each class featured great and often impassioned discussion, and student presentations, each synthesizing designated readings in a personally meaningful way, were always special. One of Sally Hall’s very creative presentations consisted largely of a board game she designed that “follows the development of a non-profit organization working to increase access to education among low-income individuals in Managua, Nicaragua”; the game (being played in the photo below) was designed to help players understand and “explore the complexities of social impact.” One of Kelsey Willard’s presentations was a scary story about the impact of the coming singularity told, appropriately, over a campfire (see photo below). Our examination of power relationships prompted Elijah Parker to share information about his life he had never before felt comfortable sharing. The same examination prompted Conner Drew to explicitly formulate a set of personal design ethics and to call on others to do the same. And repeatedly, Garrett Bonfanti effectively highlighted just how important the role of the designer has become.

I’ve taught lots — inside of companies, via educational institutions, and at professional conferences — with much of my teaching focused on practical skills. General Assembly — where I taught the 10-week, full-time User Experience Design Immersive course several times — is among the up-start organizations claiming that intensive programs focused on teaching practical skills in the context of multiple, real-world projects prepare students for the workplace much better than much longer, more traditional, and much more expensive academic programs. While that is often true, AC4D Founder Jon Kolko has articulated the importance of teaching theory:

"Our curriculum at Austin Center for Design is rich with design theory. Students take theory classes that focus on the social and political relationships between design and the culture of society. Students learn theory and discourse related to designing for the public sector, specifically as it relates to ill-defined problem solving and the ethical obligations of designers. They read complex articles from computer scientists, psychologists, and sociologists, and they build arguments that synthesize these articles into new ideas. 

Yet the program at Austin Center for Design is a practitioner program, and these students go on to be practicing designers, not academics. They work for big brands, for consultancies, and in startups — and increasingly, they start their own entrepreneurial endeavors. They aren’t pursuing a Ph.D. path, so why teach theory? Why waste precious class time on academic discourse, rather than practical skills? 

I’ve thought a lot about what makes a great designer. One of the qualities is craft and immediacy with material. That’s sort of obvious — someone who makes things needs to be good at making things. I’m convinced that theory is also a key ingredient to greatness, a key part of claiming to be a competent, professional designer, but it’s less obvious than methods or skills and is often ignored during design education. There are at least three reasons I think students need theory as part of their foundational design education:

• Theory gives students the basis for a “process opinion.” …

• Theory gives students the ability to think beyond a single design problem, in order to develop higher-order organizing principles. …

• Theory gives students a sense of purpose, a reason for doing their work. …

We’re seeing an influx of design programs aimed at practitioners, programs that intend to increase the number of designers available to work in the increasingly complex technological landscape. I’m skeptical of programs that don’t include theory in their curriculum. It has been argued that vocational programs should focus on core skills and ignore the larger academic, theoretical subject matter. I would argue the opposite. It is the vocational programs that require this thoughtful context the most, as graduates from these programs will have a direct impact on the products and services that shape our world."

I agree with Jon (and with the students who voiced additional benefits from studying theory), and whenever I taught for General Assembly, I made sure to include some theory. However, I was delighted to have the opportunity to dive more deeply via teaching at AC4D.

My thanks to: Jon and to Kevin McDonald who, before the course, shared invaluable information with me about when they had taught the course in the past; Lauren Serota, Adam Chasen, Mini Kahlon, Ed Park, and David Rose for their guest in-person appearances; Daniela Papi-Thornton, Paul Polak, Harry Brignull, Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Jake Solomon, Ricky Gervais, Brian Goldman, Jeff Benabio, Don Norman, Sean Follmer, David Rose, Jared Ficklin, Stephen Colbert, Sally Hall, Pelle Ehn, Kathleen McLaughlin, John Battelle, Jess McMullin, The Police, and a few others whose names I don’t know who appeared on video; and the many authors of tweets and of articles other than those I assigned that I referenced during the course.

The course ended just last week, but I greatly miss teaching it already. I am very happy to have become a part of the AC4D community.

A matter of semantics…

A version of this post has been published as an interactions magazine blog post.

In 2005, I wrote a blog post entitled, “Is 'user’ the best word?,” followed a year later by “Words (and definitions) matter; however…” The debate about the words we use in our field and their meaning has continued since that time, with many of the old arguments being resurrected. For example, regarding the beleaguered term “user”:

• Jack Dorsey dropped its use at Square, arguing that it is a rather passive word that “is a massive abstraction away from real problems people feel on a daily basis. No one wants to be thought of as a 'user.'”
• Margaret Gould Stewart revealed that Facebook sort of banished the term saying it is “kind of arrogant to think the only reason people exist is to use what you built. They actually have lives, like, outside the experience they have using your product.”
• Natalie Nixon argued “the next time you begin to ask about your users, stop. Reorient and remind yourself that you are solving problems for people. That subtle shift in language will do wonders for your sense making skills and build a different sensitivity to the challenge at hand.”
• Eric Baumer et al. argued that studying non-users is as important as studying users and stated that “only two professions refer to their clients as users: designers and drug dealers.”

The preferred alternatives, as a decade ago, are usually “person” and “people” or “human(s).” Baumer et al. argued for consideration of “potentially more descriptive terms such as fan, player, client, audience, patient, customer, employee, hacker, prosumer, conscript, administrator, and so on.” But even such alternatives might have shortcomings. For example, regarding the word “customer” (also preferred by Dorsey):

I still can’t imagine the term “user” going away anytime soon. Indeed, some have defended it, as reflected in the following tweets:

Nevertheless, there has been an increase in the volume of objections to the term, reflecting, I think, a recognition of the need to think bigger — to consider and design experiences beyond the digital in order to design the best possible digital experience.

I address such issues beginning on the first day of my teaching of General Assembly’s UX Design Immersive course. Students need to know that the terms we use in our field matter and, though not spoken of much above, are sometimes defined differently by different people. This has included two of my instructor colleagues, one of whom called all paper prototype testing “Wizard of Oz” testing and the other who called all paper prototype testing “walkthroughs.” Say what?!? In my view, neither one of them are correct.

Some of the other areas of debate regarding terms we use include what UX design means and how it differs from UI design (see, for example, “The experience lingo”), and what an MVP is (see, for example, “The MVP is NOT about the product”) and whether it is even an adequate concept (see, for example, “Minimum Compelling Product”).

Such debates seem destined to never end, which might possibly be a good thing. As Jared Spool recently tweeted:

Disrupting the UX design education space

A version of this post has been published as an interactions magazine blog post.

My teaching partner Mandy and I stood in silence looking around the room one last time in which magic had happened the preceding 10 weeks. We teach the UX Design immersive for General Assembly in San Francisco. 10 weeks, 5 days/week, 8 hours/day of teaching and learning, of intense, hard work, of struggle, of laughter, of transformation, of bonding that will last forever. Educational experiences don’t get any better than this.

The UX Design immersive is intended mostly for people wanting to make a career transition. Students make a huge commitment by signing up for the course, stopping whatever they were doing prior, and in some cases, traveling long distances to do one thing: to become a UX designer.

General Assembly is one of several new educational institutions that are slowly disrupting the higher education space. Jon Kolko has identified the following qualities shared by many of these institutions’ programs:

1. they are short;
2. they focus on skill acquisition;
3. they produce a portfolio as evidence of mastery;
4. they are taught by practitioners;
5. they promote employment and career repositioning, rather than emphasizing the benefits of learning as an end in itself;
6. they typically focus on "Richard Florida" type jobs and careers: the creative disciplines of software engineering, product design, advertising, marketing, and so-on.

As described by Jon:

“Students who graduate from these programs have a body of work that they can point to and say ‘I made those things.’ This makes it very easy to understand and judge the quality of the student, particularly from the standpoint of a recruiter or hiring manager.”

and:

“These educators have a deep and intimate understanding of both the material that is being taught and the relevancy of that material to a job.”

Given the increasingly heard argument that academic programs are not producing the kinds of designers needed most by industry (see, for example, "On Design Education")… And given that 90% of UX Design immersive students secure jobs within 90 days of the end of their cohort... (I will be moderating a panel contrasting different institutional instructional models at the Interaction 15 Education Summit in February.)

What is it like teaching the UX Design immersive at General Assembly? To get a sense of this, read the interactions magazine blog post written earlier this year by our fellow UX Design immersive instructor in Los Angeles, Ashley Karr, entitled, “Why Teaching Tech Matters.” Also, Mandy and I will be conducting a mock classroom at the Interaction 15 Education Summit in February to give attendees a mini-experience of the immersive program.

—— o ——

Tears filled the room on the final day of the course. We all had put everything we had into the preceding 10 weeks, and we could not help but be emotional. We hope the magic will happen again when we teach the course again beginning in December. But it all will happen in a different space (a new campus opens tomorrow), and Mandy and I will be paired with other instructors instead of each other. 

I will miss the magic of Room 202 in the crazy, crowded 580 Howard Lofts with only one bathroom and no air conditioning, situated next to a noisy construction site; I will miss the magic of working closely with the amazing Mandy Messer; and I will miss the magic of getting to know a certain 21 special, fabulous people who are now new UX designers. 

But we will do it again, and we will try to do it even better.

-----
(photo courtesy of Celso Rodrigues)