From The Couch: ID Charette 2

by Eric Niu, Alex Cheek, Erik Van Crimmin and Irene Chong

The second ID charette to made some great progress. Here's a rundown of what went down:

Advising Packet

Beyond the high student-faculty ratio, there are two main issues that advising faces. The first issue is preparation prior to advising. Charette participants envisioned a brief biographical sheet to be sent with acceptance packets. These bios will give advisers a better feel for new students and will enable incoming students to develop goals and consider questions that will make their advising meeting more productive.

Secondly, in order to be better informed about classes, our participants mocked up some of the important course information not mentioned in the catalog. Similar to the way a product is displayed on Amazon.com, course descriptors would include ratings & reviews, recommendations and expected time commitment.

Curriculum Visualization

The ID curriculum is complicated! And what happens if the curriculum is no longer guided (and constrained) by the three tracks? Participants took a first crack at identifying the criteria to describe how ID courses fit together and complement each other. To demonstrate some of the tagging concepts that might help students navigate the curriculum, the team created a Flickr account where the images can be tagged with relevant variables.

Orientation

We want students to be informed about useful happenings at school. We also want them to feel like they made a great decision to come to ID. So participants restructured the orientation schedule and introduced new content, like Vijay's 10 minute intro on the design planning process and a bike tour of Chicago.

Career Services

The career services team mapped out what the new recruiting process might look like with interviews continuously being scheduled throughout the school year. They created a scenario for how a company might set up interviews. The goal is to reduce the strain on students and recruitID volunteers while increasing ID's visibility and accessibility to companies.

International Students

We took a giant step forward in understanding the challenges faced by international students, who make up almost half our our student body. It is important to recognize these challenges, but also to understand the native students' perspectives as well. These were strongly expressed in the presentation, which you can view in //Temp/Charette 2/videos.

Of course, all of these initiatives are a work in progress. We feel that we're building a good foundation for future classes, but student input throughout the entire process is crucial. If there's something that you wish existed in any of these (or other!) topics, let us know – email Alex.

Design Research Conference

by Ido Mor and Caroline Little
Design Research Conference 2007/Co-Chairs

The Institute of Design has been gaining much attention in the business world thanks in part to great coverage by leading business publications, as well as the exceptional work of our alumni in their respective workplaces. In this excellent period in time for ID, we felt it important to reconsider the name of our conference – about, with & for. While the name is truly poetic for its mantra-like emphasis on user-centeredness, it is also somewhat ambiguous in the context of a broader public who may not be familiar with the work we do.

Caroline and I set into a series of discussions with staff and students about the concepts conveyed through ID's two annual conferences (Strategy Conference being the other). Out of these meetings emerged our conference's new name, Design Research Conference. The change is part of a re-branding initiative to connect more succinctly between ID's two annual conferences, and is an effort to communicate the relevance of applied design research to a broader academic and corporate audience.

While the structure will largely remain similar to previous years, showcasing both corporate and academic research practices, its scope has broadened to include an emphasis on the relevancy of our work to the worlds of design research, strategy development, and sales and marketing. For their ability to frame problems and provide insight, user-centered design methods are a critical element to the successful diagnosis of the issues facing every facet of an organization.

It is our goal through the conference to gain a better understanding of the value that can be gained through the synergies taking place when designers function across multiple stages of the organization. For this reason we hope this year to draw a greater cross section of the non-design sector of professional organizations.

In line with the forward-looking visionaries who will be presenting at this year's conference, we are pleased to announce the new home of the Design Research Conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Registration opens next month, starting May 17. http://www.id.iit.edu/events/drc/2007/ will be updated periodically as new speakers and content are confirmed. Write us with further questions at DRC [at] id.iit.edu.

about, with & for: Past, Present... & Future

by Jordan Fischer

The final in a series of three articles exploring how current student initiatives have become what they are.

The name about, with & for has been retired. If you are interested in acquiring the URL, I believe it will be available by year's end. The newly titled Design Research Conference will take place in Fall 2007, and will feature presentations and workshops from speakers from around the world with an "emphasis on the relevancy of our [ID's] work to the worlds of design research, strategy development, and sales and marketing."

In light of the fact that AWF is now called the Design Research Conference, we thought it would be valuable to learn more about what it means today and what it has meant over time. Today, the phrase "about, with & for" stands for discussion about design research methodologies, and the people we design about, with & for. The students who founded about, with & for in 2002 were just as acutely aware of what it was not.

Circle among the squares

The Chicago Ethnography Conference (formerly the Conference on Ethnography) is an academic sociology conference that was started in 1998. The Illinois Institute of Technology wasat one time one of a small group of schools (including Northwestern University and the University of Chicago) that shared responsibility of planning and hosting the day-long event. One school volunteers to host and organize the event, and students from it and other participating schools submit to present and share their research and findings.

In February of 2002, the students of the Institute of Design planned and hosted the 4th annual Conference on Ethnography. About 150 students and a few faculty from ID, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Loyola University, Depaul University, Western Michigan University and the University of Illinois-Chicago met on the 6th floorof 350 N. LaSalle for a day to present papers to each other.

However, this conference was unlike the 1999, 2000 and 2001 conferences in the sense that ID, a design school that borrows heavily from ethnography but is not involved in the development of the field, was the host. In years prior, student design presentations had been isolated; now, sociology and design presentations were intentionally mixed at a four to one ratio. There were presentations from for-profit companies as well as academia.

The change did not go unnoticed. It was clear that ID did not fit the mold the way the other schools did. Most other particpants came from anthropology and sociology backgrounds. It is surprising that given the opportunity to challenge and begin to understand the confluence of design and ethnography, these two parties did not hit it off.

In an article featured in the June 2003 issue of Loop: AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education, then ID students Jun Lee & Jennifer Joosa wrote a critique of the event: "Some attendees were concerned that mixing design student presentations with sociology student presentations made coherent discussions impossible. Others appeared unwilling to think of ethnography being used in any context outside of academics." The conference less than thrilled traditional academics.

Associate Professor Brianna Sylver, an ID student and member of the organizing commitee at the time, found it tough to fit in. "(Other) people were interested in what ID had to say, but didn't know how to respond to it... we were definitely the circle among all the squares."

Although it has changed names, the Chicago Ethnography Conference is alive and well. This year marks its ninth incarnation, and coincidentally, the '07 conference will be take place Saturday, April 21st (yes, that is tomorrow) at Loyola University.

A tale of two conferences

Those close to ID know that the school no longer participates in the Chicago Ethnography Conference, the 2002 conference being the last time. In reaction to the criticism, ID students started planning their own conference. Student organizers including Brianna Sylver, Margaret Alrutz, Robert Zolna, Angelo Frigo, Gitte Waldman, Trish Whalig (and no doubt many others) wrote, "We are interested in creating an interdisciplinary opportunity to reflect and build connections among disciplines that may have different end-goals, but share a concern for furthering the thinking and the methods around the practice of understanding people."

The new conference would be held that very fall, which gave them little time to prepare. One basic premise of starting a new conference was to do things differently than they were being done at the Conference on Ethnography, so there was little to borrow from--but also little to adhere to--in terms of precedent. The organizers of this first conference of its kind had to work with zero budget, zero brand recognition and zero administrative support.

Because of this, publishing a call for abstracts would not yield much in terms of presenters. Few knew about the conference, and those that did were either already helping out or wanted nothing to do with it. So, the organizers had to personally call people and invite them to come on their own dime.

That first year, the inaugural about, with & for conference was a mix of student and professional presentations. A variety of students, educators, professionals attended and contributed to the undercurrent of enthusiasm that comes with being a part of something new. The ID administration let the students use the 6th floor and provided basics such as heat and air for free. But, as is with many student initiatives, administrative support was cool until it was apparent this was not a one-off. It has been said that no administration was present the first year. However, attendees couldn't believe it was student run, a reaction which has remained consistent over the years.

Carving a niche

In the years since that first AWF, it has grown off the 6th floor; first to the IIT Stuart School of Business, then to the Courtyard Mariott, Navy Pier and most recently, the East Bank Club. It has been as large as 300 people and attracted presenters and attendees who are either in the know or want to know more about design research from companies large and small, and also from the finest academic programs worldwide. Conferences such as DUX, Adaptive Path's User Experience Week and Carnegie Mellon's Emergence Conference have since been founded and focus on similar issues in this space where social science and design come together.

After the second successful conference in a row, the administration embraced AWF. Director Patrick Whitney opened his home for a reception party for the student planners, which was described as "very shocking, but very much appreciated."

"The conference is a way to experiment with how people in the real world might interact with some of the stuff that goes on here[at ID]," said Brianna Sylver. "It's really cool to see that it's grown. It could frankly end at any time, when someone decides they don't want to do anything with it anymore."

It seems that time has come. To quote the 2007 Design Research Conference Co-Chairs Ido Mor and Caroline Little, "the structure will largely remain similar to previous years, showcasing both corporate and academic research practices, its scope has broadened to include an emphasis on the relevancy of our work to the worlds of design research, strategy development, and sales and marketing."

Ido and Caroline hold in their capable hands the future of a student-run conference born out of a desire to distinguish itself.

Rumor Dispelled: ID Prom did happen

by Linda Pulik, class of '01

It's not often that one gets the chance to dispel a rumor by confirming that something actually did happen--denying that the rumored event ever took place is more common. (ed note: original rumor was published in the March 23, 2007 article "From the ID Shoe to the IDSAB) In this case, pleasant memories of one of the best parties that I attended as an ID student help to confirm that an ID prom on the high seas (read: Lake Michigan) actually did occur on May 5, 2001. I was there. I was also on the planning committee. I had telephone conversations with various booze cruise captains and arranged a series of meetings at Navy Pier in order to assess the prom-worthiness of their boats.

On the night of May 5, 2001, the turnout was great and prom-goers spared little expense or excess. The party had all of the appropriate ingredients for late-blooming international students and seasoned American prom veterans alike: flashy outfits, horse-drawn carriages, rival candidates for prom queen and king, an open bar and a boatload of exhausted students rejoicing in reminiscing and also trying to forget.

Psychology in Brainstorming

by Laura Franek

Big ideas are so hard to recognize,
so fragile, so easy to kill.
Don't forget that, all of you who don't have them.

- John Elliott, Jr.

Brainstorming is what ignites the concept generation phase in design, both in the sheer volume of ideas that are sparked and in the new directions it takes us. However, there is a body of scientific evidence asserting that brainstorming in a group is not effective. Some psychologists have claimed that solo brainstorming efforts are generally more fruitful and will actually prevent lost contribution and value of effort. In most cases, social issues among group members lead to this loss of contribution. This is not news at ID, land of the 8-hour team meeting. Brainstorming is perhaps the most important phase of generation to consider and it often lacks meaningful structure.

Psychologists break down the act of brainstorming into three areas:

1. Problem-solving - Reaching a goal that's not readily available

2. Reasoning - Evaluating our arguments to reach conclusions), and

3. Decision-making (assessing or choosing from alternatives which involves judging probability, often under uncertainty).

In essence, brainstorming as an rational exercise is a problem-solving measure that we use to escape the bounds of our own functional fixedness, a tendency that leads us to consider only the normal use of something by constructing rational schemas to solve the problem. In a brainstorming session, we all come to the table with different sets of mental biases and, consequently, different schemas of how we might frame the problem. This is an added benefit when dealing with ill-defined problem spaces where there is incomplete information or unsatisfactory conditions.

Having a few defined strategies paired within a brainstorming session--solo or team--allows for more structured problem solving. Here are some examples:

• Use means-end analysis to aid in getting “unstuck.”

• Consider brainstorming around a specific topic, then taking a break and looking at something random and completely unrelated, like tropical fish. Begin by brainstorming qualifiers around that random subject and at the end of the exercise force a connection between it and the problem. Spark any connection between the two and see what ideas come to mind that might allow you to diverge from your normal schemas. This temporary, forced distance between the current state and the goal state will enable creation of new and divergent connections that could push your concept further toward your goal. Quantity rather than quality is desirable in difference reduction.

• Break into two teams and separately brainstorm 30-50 ideas (reserving all judgment!) in seven minutes. Come back together in a larger team and quickly group those ideas with the most commonalities into one category, then seek out those ideas that are most unusual and deliberately combine and build upon them. The idea of diverging and converging as a team initially reduces the probability of having similar sets of mental schemas, and ultimately utilizes the power of group consensus to identify common solutions. In converging, it is sometimes just as powerful to develop the outlying, unusual concepts as it is the more obvious ones.

Through reasoning and decision-making, quantity yields to quality.

It's difficult to overcome biases, break from one's mental schema of the world and think about how to adapt ideas to different cultures. Rather than seek out a "best" solution by generating with speed as opposed to creativity, seek out all possible sets of solutions to define the broader space from which compelling concepts can emerge.

Source: IIT course PSYC 222: "Brain, Mind and Behavior," taught by Prof. Ruthanna Gordon, spring semester 2007.

Project Snapshots

Wonder what goes on in other classes? Here we look at what various IDers are working on.

In Tomoko Ichikawa's comm design workshop, students are visualizing complex health issues, translating various information structures across multiple media. The first part of the semester was devoted to posters (which you may have seen pinned up in the studio spaces), and the final segment will be presentation slides. Sandwiched between those are booklets that the students just finished. Following are a few of them.

Kayo Takasugi (above) took the topic of how and why humans sleep, and how that relates to overall health, condensing information on circadian rhythms, sleep cycles and tips on getting a good night's sleep. Download the poster (1.9MB PDF).

Kyungsun Kim's project (right) focused on the functions and intake of different vitamins, and effects of proper and improper doses, with the goal of informing consumers' decisions. Download the poster (902KB PDF).

Jonghee Choi (below) explored the role of minerals in health, the nature of hair, and the intersection of the two in using hair mineral analysis as an indication of our health. Her booklet took the form of a food diary/mineral guide. Download the poster (736KB PDF).

Suggest or submit an interesting project, whether it's recently completed or in progress.

New IDer: David Dunne

Hi, I'm David Dunne. I teach Marketing and Advertising at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. It's a second career for me: in my earlier life I was a marketing manager with Unilever in London and Toronto and an account executive at Young & Rubicam Advertising for a couple of years. I went back to school and did a PhD in Marketing so I could teach – and I love it. I was born in Ireland and lived there (mostly in Dublin) till I was 21, spent 5 years living in London and then moved to Toronto. I have 3 sons, all adults doing diverse things from fashion modeling to teaching to professional rugby. I'm interested in hiking, photography, great cities (yes, Chicago is one of the greatest) and yoga.

How did you end up at ID? What were your motivations for coming?

I love teaching in a business school and feel that we have very talented students. But there has been a lot of criticism of business schools lately, and I wondered if I could contribute to changing it in some way. I got a design “bug” a few years ago when I met up with people from Ideo. It seemed as if I had found a way of combining all those things I've believed in for years – creativity, discipline, humanity and rigor – under one label. So I published some articles on it and wanted to find out more. It's my sabbatical year from Rotman and this was an ideal opportunity to spend some time on design. I have conducted many interviews and being at ID gives me a chance to experience design first hand.

What were your first impressions about ID?

People are curious, creative, energetic, optimistic. My kind of people. I gave a talk during my first week and I was impressed with how interested everyone was in the relationship between design and business. I see a real hunger for learning among students and faculty, and I think it's wonderful. I have also been delighted by the warm, open welcome I've received from everyone.

What are some of the things you have learned in your time here?

I've learned how little I know! Students and professors have gone out of their way to spend time with me and show me what ID is all about. Good thing, too, as there are so many concepts and models to learn.

What do you think you can bring to the people here at ID?

I have lots of experience in marketing both as a manager and a professor. I do a great deal of executive teaching and try to bring great research ideas to practitioners. So I have ideas about what happens in practice in the world of marketing, branding and advertising, as well as what researchers are doing.

Which designers or thinkers have impressed you the most lately? Or who are you following now?

For design, I'm going to have to go with the crowd and select the iPod. What's interesting about it from my perspective is that, while it's a great design, the “business design” aspect is at least as important as the product – managing licensing issues around music downloading, keeping the product portfolio fresh, branding, distribution, pricing and so on.

I've been reading quite a bit about design lately. Don Norman's work is very impressive and I had the privilege of interviewing him recently. Also, Donald Schon and Russell Ackoff have interesting things to say about the thought processes behind design.

Can you tell us some more about your school and the work that you do there?

The Rotman School of Management (www.rotman.utoronto.ca) is the business school of the University of Toronto. We've been on a mission for the past several years to become one the top 10-ranked business schools in the world. We've moved into the top 20 now and we're improving all the time. A lot of that growth has come from the innovative ideas we've pioneered – integrative thinking and, more recently, business design. As for me, I teach Marketing, Health Care Marketing and Advertising to MBA students and executives. I also co-direct the Rotman Teaching Effectiveness Center where I help faculty develop their teaching skills. So I'm passionate about business education and I have directed my research towards ways of improving it. I think design has a lot of lessons to offer management education.

Is there anything amazing from Toronto that you think people should not miss?

Toronto has become a vibrant city with an exciting cultural life. If you are in Toronto, the best way to get to know the place is to walk around. Get out of the business district in the center and walk in some of the neighbourhoods. It's a pleasant and easy place to live. I would check out Queen St. West and the area West of the University of Toronto. There's some interesting new architecture: Daniel Liebeskind's extension to the Royal Ontario Museum and Frank Gehry's reconstruction of the Art Gallery of Ontario will both be opening soon. For culture buffs, there's a new opera house where the Canadian Opera Company stages some great productions, and the Toronto Symphony is also very good. The food is diverse and excellent – check out Danforth for Greek food, Spadina for Chinese food, College for Italian/Portuguese food. And so on …

What are the websites you could not live without?

unlearn.com is always interesting and thought-provoking – I met these people a few years ago in Toronto and love the idea that, to learn anything, we have to unlearn a lot of useless ideas. There are some neat creative thinking techniques at here, and digitalenterprise.org has a good discussion of business models if you are interested in web-based business. For news, I use the BBC site and sometimes listen to CBC Radio – sorry, never CNN – and for fun I listen to the Gerry Ryan Show on Irish radio and follow my son's odyssey through Central America.

What are your plans after your visit to ID?

I'm glad you asked. I am going to Linz, Austria to teach a course in strategic innovation to MBA students. I hope to apply some of what I have learned at ID and would be grateful for any suggestions.

Notes on WonJoon

by Chris Conley

I just wanted to say congratulations to WonJoon and to thank him for being such a strong contributor to our community. Now some history! You may know that WonJoon was my first PhD student. I remember being excited about bringing him in because he has a great design background and skills and had completed his masters at Ohio State. When he arrived, I was so excited since our personalities were very complimentary. I loved his sense of humor and willingness to help everyone out. The most important aspect of his time at ID, however, was how his thinking and interests shifted. At first, I wasn't sure he was going to embrace research about design, rather than research for designing. He had real questions about why we needed to go look at what designers already do in order to understand it.

I think a real breakthrough happened when he went back to his alma mater in Korea and gave a lecture. There he saw with stunning clarity that the design faculty and students were only focused on bettering their skills and expertise, but had no understanding of WHY what they did provided value or HOW it did that. He came back and began devouring academic papers and texts trying to understand and describe the phenomena of design in general and prototyping more specifically. Now I can't stop him! With his dissertation wrapping up this fall he is still finding new concepts that help him understand and describe how and why prototyping is an essential methodology for the earliest stages of product development. All the while, he has maintained his passion for the doing of design. This integration of thoughtful reflection and engaged practice is rare.

WonJoon has been a great student, colleague, and friend to many at the Institute of Design. I'm sure he will go on to educate and inspire many in his academic career, starting first as Assistant Professor of Design at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Please stop by the sixth floor on Thursday May 3rd around 6pm for a reception to thank WonJoon and wish him the best!

Book Review: Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice

by John Kestner

Lately, people around school had been throwing around words like 'satisficing' and 'maximizer'—like they were this year's 'disruptive' and 'compelling'—to explain consumer behavior. I finally shook someone down for the source and received a copy of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Like Naked Economics, a book we read in Jeremy Alexis' Economics and Design class with which it shares some research sources, it examines human behavior through an economic lens.

And by economic, I don't necessarily mean money. The book's thesis is that we are generally less happy because the number of choices we are now given in our lives leaves us wondering if we made the best choices. Decisions abound in jeans, jobs and relationships. Schwartz argues that we are happier when we choose things that simply meet the standard that we set, rather than seeking to continually improve on what is "good enough."

From a design perspective, there are several principles that one can take away, some obvious but convincingly argued. A large array of choices creates more cognitive work for consumers to the point where they avoid buying anything. And when they do buy something, the fear that they might be missing out on a better alternative leads to less satisfaction with what they have. People also define past experiences by their feelings at the peak moment (the best or worst point) and at the end of the experience. Schwartz illustrates this nicely with a study in which participants were asked to listen to two very unpleasant sounds. They were identical for eight seconds, but after that, the first sound ended while the second went on for another eight seconds at a lower volume. When told they had to choose to listen to one of the sounds again, participants overwhelmingly chose the longer sound because they remembered the less annoying end.

At the heart of the book's argument is that we don't really want the freedom we think we do. This is driven home by a study that found that, while most people say they would want to make decisions about treatment if they were diagnosed with cancer, people actually faced with cancer want a doctor to make the decision. Schwartz highlights data on societies that promote social duty at the expense of individual freedom, such as the Amish, and shows how happiness correlates more closely to managed expectations of freedom rather than unlimited freedom itself.

The book has some good explanations for consumer behavior, but I feel it could say in 80 pages what it says in 240. It gets repetitive in reinforcing its points—though there are many interesting illustrative examples, "A-ha!" moments don't come as often. In some ways, The Paradox of Choice reads as a self-help book with serious social science explaining our behaviors, but ultimately it's an interesting examination of the psychological impact of consumer culture. To sum it up, Barry thinks we could learn some lessons from the Amish. I think I'll satisfice and say that fewer classes next year is good enough for me.

Strategic Dine Planning: Chinese Fried Rice

by Yu-hsin Chiu

This week we are pleased to offer a recipie for fried rice. Further, we are please to offer this recipie for fried rice as an example of a project completed for the Foundation Communication Design "Process" assignment.

Chinese Fried Rice