Running notes from the recent Dave Gray workshop at Arvetica.

Dave Gray, founder of Xplane, gave a great workshop on how to use visual techniques to organize ideas and share them more effectively with others. Here are my notes:

• Drawing allows to agree more easily on things and is a more effective way to present and share ideas. Pictures allow to communicate with short term memory via the visuospatial sketchpad, and to reach long term memory.
• A picture is worth 84.1 words ;) which is not bad even if it is below what conventional wisdom teaches us.
• Every 5 years old can draw. We have all been 5 years old. We can all draw ;) and it proved right for
• With a basic set of shapes one can draw everything. It is a sort of visual alphabet (line, arc, circle, square, angle, etc…) that can be combined to draw anything. Dave offers a few tricks, like the fact that we tend to draw large heads and small bodies while the opposite makes it more simple to show attitudes.
• Now to the core of the process Xplane works with:
  
  Clarity leads to Understanding, which leads to Decisions that turn into Actions who produce a result. Dave advocates a process that allows to work on all the steps of this process and produce better results. The idea is to start from the end and work back to finally create 5 or 6 drawings which will create clarity, and all the steps afterwards.
• Results
  What are the expected results? For example: convince my boss our team needs a new office. That’s the easy part.
• Actions & Decisions
  The goal of this step is to identify the actions that will have to be made to achieve the goals. To do this, Dave suggests to start identifying the “ministries of no” - i.e. those who can prevent you from achieving your result (a boss, a colleague, a client) - and list the decisions they will have to make.After that, impersonate each ministry of no and draw the following on a poster:
  
  • What is the decision that person needs to make for you?
  • What is that person thinking about what you are asking?
  • What is that person seeing? (in our example, could be “sees the Google offices pictures in Wired)
  • What is that person hearing (from peers, boss, etc…)?
  • What is that person saying

  Do this for each “ministry of no” and you will be able to come up with the most common questions, which allows to decide on which ones it is crucial to communicate.

  Once you have all the key questions, order them by topic without any pre-conceived notion of what the topics should be. Put each question on a post-it, and start organizing them in columns. Naturally you should come up with 5-6 columns, one of them very likely will be all questions related to money (”how much will it cost? why should I spend my budget on this?”). Each column is a topic you will need to address with one drawing, so you just found out how many pictures you will have to draw.

  Now we need to order the drawings. For that rely on simple story telling techniques: your drawings should follow the Situation -> Complication -> Resolution flow used in movies. In our example, “Why the team needs a new office” is the situation, “What is the new office we propose” the complication and “How we will move to the new office” the resolution.

• Understanding & Clarity
  Now is time to draw. Each of your drawing should address one of the topics identified at the previous step. Remember that metaphors are good to express emotions, literal drawings are good to illustrate processes, and schematic drawings the best way to explain logic. A mix of these types of drawings should allow you to clarify your points. Try this, it is much easier than you think.

That’s it! You just used visual thinking. This method, starting from the goal, moving up to the more complex and numerous questions to find the “meta questions” and address them via drawings is quite powerful.

I am now looking forward to Arvetica’s next workshop on may 28 on how to make powerful powerpoint presentations. I will be looking for a few tips to pass to the LIFT speakers.

Interesting brand created by Todo (a Torino based design studio) for their “cultural avatar”, an association called Nada. The brand is consistently changing but remains recognizable.

TODO has an interesting manifesto that would make a lot of economist happy (the “we will never retire part”)

we listen
we ask questions
we research
we take risk
we make mistakes
we like busted knees
we solve problems
we are happy
we’ll never retire

Unedited running notes from an extremely entertaining Share panel featuring the festival’s guest curator Bruce Sterling, Donald Norman (author and Breed Senior Professor in Design in the School of Engineering at Northwestern University), Luca de Biase (Italian journalist) and Gino Bistagnino (Professor at Politecnico di Torino). You better hope the talk will be available in the Share video archive soon. Please use quotes with care as the debate was extremely lively and I might not have been able to capture the exact wording.

Bruce Sterling starts by reminding the audience of Donald Norman’s rules for establishing an effective interaction between humans and intelligent systems

Design Rule One: Provide rich, complex, and natural signals.

Design Rule Two: Be predictable.

Design Rule Three: Provide a good conceptual model.

Design Rule Four: Make the output understandable.

Design Rule Five: Provide continual awareness, without annoyance.

Design Rule Six: Exploit natural mappings to make interactions understandable and effective.

More on the 6 rules here

Bruce Sterling: what are properly designed objects?

Don Norman: If you don’t notice an object it means it is properly designed. We have 100 chairs in this room and nobody needed a manual, no chair needed to beep to be used. That’s what good design is about, it does not need anybody’s attention. Technology is new stuff that confuses us. And science fiction is fiction because it is the only context in which technology always works ;)

BS: what’s the nightmare scenario? What are non-properly designed objects?

It’s when the chairs wants to sit you! And then all chairs start fighting in the room.

LDB: what is the ethical responsibility of designers? Can you design a knife that does not kill so that nobody can say “I didn’t kill, it’s the knife!”?

It’s a bit presumptuous for designers to think that people care. You design a car, and people die driving it because they go too fast. But we all want faster cars. Designers are the wrong persons to ask a question about ethic to.

Gino Bistagnino: is there such a thing as an intelligent object?

We design intelligent objects because humans are too stupid for certain tasks. Intelligent cars need to exist because objects need to take over the task of driving to let more people live (in the US 6 million people are hurt by cars every year, 40′000 die). The problem we have now is that intelligent objects are only doing half of what they need to do. An espresso machine will take over the whole process, and in that sense it’s perfect. But today’s intelligent cars only go halfway, and therefore become even more dangerous.

BS: what is the toll of using complex systems, and especially all the preliminary steps you need to take to use a complex system?

DN: I’m against simplicity! Life is hard, life is complex. It’s like Bruce who can’t speak a sentence of less than 500 words!

LDB (who is a journalist): when we were using type machines to write, we were thinking much more before putting our thoughts on paper. Now we can edit things more easily we don’t think as much. Has technology and design changed our behavior?

BS: I’m against word processors. Microsoft word did not allow anybody to write a novel. And when you complain about clippy - the annoying “helper” who consistently interrupts you when you try to do something - the answer you get from Microsoft is “you should disable it”. Microsoft Word is like a world full of flying knives killing people, and the knives’ creator tells you “just disable them”.

DN: I wrote my book using Microsoft Word! Instead of complaining you should write your own word processor.

BS: one of my fellow science fiction authors decided to go back to writing with pen and paper. You tell me to design my own word processor, it’s like if you tell me to design my own fiat 500. It’s simply not one person’s work. Design critics are needed. I can complain and I will complain until my death!

DN: you will complain until your death because you don’t improve anything! I have had much more effects when I stopped criticizing and started doing things.

LDB: before we went on stage we decided we would fight because it would be more fun. Here is another fight: Apple vs Microsoft. Apple shows that design is also about stories, about distorting perception.

Donald Norman: Apple tries very hard to be as evil about Microsoft. People at Apple don’t care about their customers. They try to make money, put DRM in their music, or unchangeable batteries. The products are identically bad, they are both evil. But Steve Jobs does a good job of distorting reality and you don’t notice.

Bruce Sterling:Apple is like Albania: “think different and give us your money”. Microsoft is like USSR: “let’s make darkness the standard”.

Don Norman: One common mistake is to try to do a tool for everybody. To come back to the word processors, we need a different product for screenwriters. We need more specialized things.

Gino Bistagnino: It’s not that there are intelligent and stupid objects. I think it’s the user who does intelligent or stupid things with objects.

London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 forecast that future travelers would be older. Research into older travelers showed they often go into the toilet, so many new toilets were planned.

However, deeper investigation discovered they were going into the toilets….to hear the announcements. It was the only place they could find where they could clearly hear the flight calls! So now the airport is putting new audio areas where you can clearly hear your flight call….

Link

Amazing. This shows how hard it can sometimes be to truly understand users.

My friends at Bread and butter – who happen to co-organize LIFT with me – have released a new website that honors their status of top 3 design company in the country.

Kudos for a more interactive and attractive site, and I am happy to see another promising blog flourish in our local sphere.

After the work these guys did for the LIFT poster they deserve a bit of link love ;-)

My first professional challenge, back at Netface in the pre-bubble days of 1996, was to work with designers coming out of school. I learned the hard way that they can sometimes be hard to deal with, as their artistic roots don’t always prepare them to face the need for compromises that the business world demands. Lots of fights that could have been avoided if I had the top 10 things they never taught me in design school list back then. Excerpt:

1. Talent is one-third of the success equation.
2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
4. Don’t over-think a problem.
5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
6. Don’t forget your goal.
7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance.
8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
9. It all comes down to output.
10. The rest of the world counts.

Link (via cph127 and anecdote)

Great food for thought. Point two is especially interesting:

2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
Only 5 percent is actually, in some simplistic way, fun. In school that is what you focus on; it is 100 percent fun. Tick-tock. In real life, most of the time there is paper work, drafting boring stuff, fact-checking, negotiating, selling, collecting money, paying taxes, and so forth. If you don’t learn to love the boring, aggravating, and stupid parts of your profession and perform them with diligence and care, you will never succeed.

This actually applies to most jobs out there. Cool stuff is always surrendered by boring and administrative tasks. Balance is the key.

John sent me this interesting research paper titled Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs. It is an in depth look on weblogs design, and the authors drew a number of interesting conclusions, particularly relevant to a system like coComment that requires – to work fully – integration in people’s websites.

Individual webloggers do not tend to make substantive structural changes to the layout of their sites. […] “significant” customization among weblog users is in fact somewhat rare. […]

A second pattern we have observed is the frequency with which design schemes used by consumers of popular weblog software are simply minimally modified versions of templates […]

An overwhelming proportion of the customizations we observed came in some sort of sidebar – an area running vertically down the web page but with less visual prominence than the main content area (where most weblog posts occur).

Link

This is very valuable information for all the web 2.0 companies out there fighting for space on user’s sites. Users are lazy (who’s not anyway) but willing to install something in their sidebar as long as it does not change the overall layout too much.

I had lunch with Laurent Bolli of Bread and Butter today, and he pointed to an article about Metadesign’s CEO talking about the complicated *g* relationship between design and business.

It is a short and interesting piece. Bill Hill is putting words on something most clients feel while working with designers and vice versa: the lack of a common language, of tangible things to articulate discussions around. This leads to blunt statements like “clients are stupid” or “designers don’t understand what a business is”. Being from both worlds, Hill’s view is both refreshing and interesting.

From inspiration to investment

Designers and their clients aren’t in the same room. Even if they were, it is highly unlikely that they would even be able to speak the same language. As long as designers speak the language of emotion while business leaders expect to hear metrics, there’s going to be a problem. CEOs want to hear about Return on Investment. Designers want to talk about Return on Inspiration.

Now replace the word designer with programmer and read the article again. It applies a little isn’t it?

La première agence Suisse romande de cool hunting¹ vient d’apparaître à Lausanne. Un nom un peu bizarre, mais les collections ont l’air pas mal. myPlayground

¹ J’adore cette expression. Définition: trouver des choses à l’intersection du design, de la culture, et de la technologie, qui excitent l’imagination et inspirent la créativité. La reine du domaine est sans aucun doute Régine qui viendra d’ailleurs parler à LIFT06.

The first swiss cool hunting agency (as far as I know…) just appeared in Lausanne. Weird name, but cool stuff: myPlayground