Agility and design

In Tom Kelley’s The Ten Faces of Innovation, there is a story about TellMe, the company behind much of the voice-recognition software we know best as telephone support.

One of the company execs was having dinner with a client from UPS. Long story short, the client piped up over appetizers about the official name change from United Parcel Service to the more succinct UPS, going the way of so many longstanding corporate brands these days. The TellMe greeting, when calling the UPS hotline, still referred to United Parcel Service. The client acknowledged that it was a small detail but that it was important to them. Mr. TellMe rose at a pause in the conversation to make a telephone call. When dessert rolled around, the client was handed a cell phone and was asked, “Try it again. I think you’ll like what you hear.”

This story illustrates the agility companies are capable of when they have a culture of experimentation, a bold willingness to allow faults in their products and services in order to seek greater refinement.

How to build agility into the design of a service seems like a great challenge. We are used to thinking of projects being somehow "finished" when they have already gone through an iterative design process and emerged all smooth and shiny. But this is very much a product-based way of thinking. Manufactured goods offer a certain flexibility for the creative types willing to see beyond their intended uses and relate to them in novel ways, but services can be communicative in a way that stuff really can't. Interaction and service design are exciting because there is the possibility for constant evolution. If you want the chair to evolve, you have to make a new one or hack at the old one (which doesn't lead to a very elegant chair).

Fixed Opportunities Part 2: My list

I looked around the office and discovered all these "fixed opportunities" in just a few minutes:

• Stack of Post-its covering an annoying green light below my monitor.

• Door trim notched out to accomodate the wall-mounted door stop.

• Guy's monitor behind me has three Post-its stuck to it each with a unique limitation of the internal software scrawled on it.

• My own desk is covered with notes documenting info that software forces me to remember rather than simply taking care of it for me.

• Another coworker has numerous Post-its all over her desk reminding her of various systems failures. My personal favorite is pictured here.

• Hood vent in the break room with tape over one switch and a tiny sign below it that reads "If you burn popcorn, please turn on the exhaust fan, which is switched to the left of the coffeepots."

• Coffeepot with blue tape on the handle for "decaf"

• Paper towels under the automatic soap dispenser in the bathroom to catch errant soap (be careful taking pictures in the bathroom)

• Printer with those label maker notes all over it explaining operation and cleaning

• And on my way home, I noticed the dashboard where I had shoved a folded up piece of paper in the corner to dampen an annoying clicking sound.

Fixed Opportunities

There is an aside in Tom Kelley’s “The Ten Faces of Innovation” called “Fixed Opportunities.”

The aside is about the flexibility of people in adapting technology to our lives: Post-its on copiers that tell us how to avoid frustrating little problems or “the handwritten sign taped to the front of the reception desk.” These are immensely important clues for the Anthropologist in an organization looking to improve on the last go around. They can even be hints that a market is being underserved or not served at all.

Kelley challenges us to spend a day noting all of these fixes we encounter. I was still finishing the paragraph when my brain wandered to thinking about any that I encounter regularly. I couldn’t think of any, so I finished reading the aside and looked up from the page. There, just below my monitor at work, the person who had last occupied my desk had cut off a stack of about ten post-its so that only the sticky strips remained and placed the one thick strip over a distracting and unnecessary green LED.

The hunt is on.

Abduction

Not of the extra-terrestrial sort, but a kind of logic.

Roger Martin, in The Business of Design, suggests that most businesses are run by two forms of logic, deductive and inductive. These two ways of reasoning have been extremely dominant ways of thinking for the body politic since the Renaissance, as far as I can tell. Progression of knowledge and creativity has been the result of a select few great minds fighting tooth and nail against the prevailing wisdom of past experience and status quo.

As an alternative to the stifling bog of pessimism and resignation, Martin suggests abductive reasoning, a sort of guessing we do all the time.

A simple definition of each form of logic:

• DEDUCTIVE: from the general evidence to the specific conclusion
• INDUCTIVE: from the specific observation to the general, probable, principle
• ABDUCTIVE: explanatory, economical hypothesis derived from observation of phenomena

Deductive and inductive logic are great for the refining and honing of current knowledge, for iterative development. They start with existing knowledge (whether specific or general) and derive a course of action from there. The next step is always taken from the current point of departure, where you are already standing. The sales figures say the these cars sell well and those do not. Therefore, we should make more of these (deduction). Or we observe that people are buying minivans, so we should produce more minivans (induction).

Here's the kicker: neither of these will get you a car that both sells well and has never been on the market before.

Abductive logic differs from the other two forms of logic in that it affords possibility. We can hear that people are grumbling about their vehicles, and we can make inferences and build solutions based on the needs of car-owners and drivers that has little or nothing to do with what cars they have owned in the past or currently own.

This form of logic affords validity, and does not exclusively prefer reliability. Reliability is an inherent part of abductive reasoning because abduction is also a form of simplification. We choose the simplest, or most economical, solution out of infinite possibilities because it "makes the most sense." We are extremely good at this and need only to consciously foster its development.

The Business of Design

I'm reading "The Design of Business" by Roger Martin.

The basic idea is that most businesses spend all of their energy and resources on refining whatever successes they have already had, exploiting the same product, tweaking what is essentially the same service.

I recently heard Robert Reich and Michael Porter talking about the dominant force in business over the last few decades which they say has been shareholder value. Martin points out that market analysts, however ludicrous, prefer that a stock's value come in according to projections rather than exceed them. This is because exceeded expectations signals that the company is behaving in ways that are not measurable, not predictable. The behavior of companies that produces industry leadership, long-term profits, long-term stability, and customer loyalty is precisely the type of behavior that is frowned upon through institutional incentives, shoddy market analysis, and poor business education.

Interestingly, the type of design thinking that affords business strength is practically laughed out of the room in favor of less profitable "reliability".

Back to Michael Porter, he was stating that the leading business thinkers today are seeing the need for a paradigm shift away from shareholder value and toward shared value as the key to goal development and the prime measure of success. Supposedly, this takes into account all of what were previously deemed externalities and incorporates them into the business model. This shift is due to the potential profits to be found in being responsible (both having and eating cake). Reich disagrees, saying that he has seen corporate institutions repeatedly go billions of dollars out of their way to find loopholes and continue to exploit externality-driven business plans in spite of the numbers on the table.

Whether or not Porter is right, these are exciting times for the redefinition of business and value. These things take time.

EATING

Caitlin made banana bread this morning and I said the bananas weren't ripe enough to do so. The bread was still good with plentiful banana flavor. Oh, how wrong was I.

Baking bread and interaction design

On baking bread:

From Outlaw Cook, p.215

Why, then, would anyone prefer a natural leavening? In response, it might be argued that at the very center of the artisanal process is not so much insistence on fine ingredients nor mastery of any particular method, but rather a willingness to assume personal responsibility for the thing made. Paradoxically, this means surrendering control, for there can be no responsibility without risk of failure. But willingness to assume that risk restores the baker’s artisanal status even as it offers the possibility of creating an incomparably crusty and full-flavored loaf.

This reminds me of a passage from one of the guest authors in Thoughts on Interaction Design that talks about how to best insert oneself, as a designer, into a company’s existing processes and workflows. She said that this is a process of finding opportunities to do good work on small projects, documenting that work, and then using that documentation to get bigger jobs with more responsibility. But, she says, in order to have an appropriate amount of responsibility (quite a bit), you must have some skin in the game, as Alan Cooper puts it. A certain risk of failure must be present to legitimize both one’s own sense of responsibility and others’ perception of your responsibility.

Now, about surrendering control… I believe this means that we must approach interaction design projects each one uniquely. We cannot rely solely on heuristic solutions, especially on the first go-around, lest we encourage mediocre interactions. Each solution, each loaf, must be designed (or baked) according to the specific constraints (or weather conditions) of the project. In that way, the risk is increased giving credence to one’s role as designer even as the potential value of the interaction is augmented significantly.


p.223

Our culture, so imaginative in finding ways to innovate, is not so inspired in finding a way to sustain a commitment to providing excellence in humble necessities. Indeed, sometimes it seems to conspire against it.