At the dschool, I heard about the book Wired to Care by Dev Patnaik, CEO of Jump Associates and professor at Stanford. The book focused on the subject of empathy, which is the first (and perhaps most difficult and critical) of the five steps of the design thinking process.

I found the book enjoyable and easy to read, and I liked its many examples and stories of individuals at companies finding empathy with others. I found myself wanting more specific advice from the book on techniques for more effective empathy interviewing and observation, as well as how to turn those observations into ideas, how to best document them, and how to best communicate them with others. The book stayed too high level for me, even though it was interesting and well written.

My biggest takeaway is that empathy and a deep connection with customers can make even "uninteresting" products strike a chord, and it can motivate people to work their hardest because they have a deeper goal in mind. I also think the lesson of "the map is not the territory" is very powerful and a great reminder of the importance of seeing things first-hand and doing your own thinking rather than just relying on second-hand information.

Part 1 the case for empathy

Ch 1 intro

• Simulate what it's like to be old to empathize with them to design better fridge
  
• Put on costume and earplugs
  
• Disabilities caused by products, not age
  
• Caring instinct in brain lost when in org
  


• Reflect what you see
  
• Harley parking lot devoted to customer motorcycles
  
• Hire your customers
  
• To understand someone, be like them
  
• Understanding of riders
  

Ch 2 the map is not the territory

• London subway map simplification
  
• Models only good for purpose they're designed for; not equal to reality
  
• Model of behavior different from real behavior
  
• Maps and plans companies make not substitute for direct contact
  
• Coffee industry lost touch with customers
  
• IBM regained touch with customers
  
• Empathy gives gut sense for what in customer minds
  
• See the real territory, not the map
  
• Making abstractions tangible
  
• Disney imagineers
  
• Animal Kingdom
  
• Make concept tangible when selling to team
  
• Make facts tangible by visiting ppl in real world and living life as customer does
  

Ch 3 the way things used to be

• Class at Stanford: need finding
  
• Empathy not a new thing
  
• Rapid prototyping
  
• Lots of convos ongoing with customer yield better solutions
  
• Intimacy with client was way product design was done before
  
• Industrial revolution created rift between producers and consumers
  
• Harder to make products for people unlike you and far away
  
• Zildjian creates drums and cymbals by hanging out with musicians for 300 years
  
• Farmers markets in London
  

Part 2 creating widespread empathy

Ch 4 creating affinity

• Hire your customers
  
• President candidates connecting with public
  
• As companies grow larger, they become less like their customers
  

Ch 5 walking in someone else's shoes

• Moccasins project at class to spend time as someone else
  
• Mirror neurons lights up in our premotor cortex when we see others move body or just tell u about it
  
• Learn by watching
  

Ch 6 empathy that lasts

• Limbic system wired is to care
  
• Steelcase furniture
  
• Understand customers and make them feel like heroes and architects
  
• Always ask, "what are customers telling us"
  

Ch 7 open all the windows

• Open book management of financials
  
• Open empathy organizations
  


• Make it easy
  
• Insert empathy events daily not a irregular events
  
• Nike
  
• Intel ethnography group
  
• Posting end user personae in bathroom stalls
  


• Make it experiential
  
• Nike employees playing sports at work
  
• Smith and Hawken employees doing gardening at work
  
• Create immersive simulation rooms of persona's lives
  

Part 3 the results of empathy

Ch 8 reframe

• Empathy replaces second hand info
  
• 3 kinds of reframed
  
• See world as other sees it
  
• See world as no one else does
  
• Reframe how u see a problem into a different context
  
• Empathy precedes reframe
  
• Nike Presto
  

Ch 9 we are them

• OXO Good Grips
  
• Line blurs between producers and consumers, internal and external
  

Ch 10 golden rule

• Cisco way of ethics by John chambers CEO
  
• Golden rule requires envisioning real people affected by actions
  

Ch 11 hidden payoff

• Calling energizes ppl
  

Last week, I attended a really cool event at the intersection of design and augmented reality (AR): the VOX Summit. We had some great speakers (including one of my favorite authors, Daniel Suarez), and we broke up into smaller groups to prototype how AR can be used effectively in fields like robotics, education, and storytelling. 

I learned a lot about the state of the art in the field and got to play with some AR apps (and learned how to drop my own AR objects into the "world"). I really enjoyed Daniel Suarez's and Blaise Aguera y Arcas's talks, and their messages about the pros and cons of the world we're in the process of creating resonated with me.

Below are some of my notes and takeaways.

a. design thinking

ii. AR as new medium
2. “We should build good ships here; at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships.”
3. always good experiences

i. augmentedreality.org

IV. Daniel Suarez
a. Shamanism/Daemon
b. Present-adjacent (not too far)
c. He’s optimistic about future
d. Remote-controlled drones almost obsolete because can jam communication
e. Pushes decision-making to drone itself
f. False consensus in social media; scripts creating fake trends
g. Perception is reality
h. Network needs to be more reliable for DarkNet
i. Things need to default to being encrypted to freely exchange ideas
j. People voting several times a day for local issues
k. Afraid of weapons systems that have credit card and can direct itself (Razorback)
l. New social system as a lifeboat in case old system dies
m. Hole-in: self-contained system but which is informed by other parts and can evolve
n. IP becomes something more fluid; the plan is original idea you own and others can build on top and you get some percent over time as it evolves
o. AR beginning of something very big

b. AR and entertainment
c. Augmented Hollywood
d. Hollywood as how ppl should tell stories
e. AR needs to fulfill a fantasy/wish
f. Tie in to wish fulfillment of the film
h. Remove barriers
i. Augmented movies
i. Terminator
ii. Minority report
iii. Iron man
j. Augmented theater
i. Conspiracy for Good
ii. Storylines
iii. Augmented reality cinema app
k. The Witness: the first movie in the outernet
l. Augmented marketing
m. Citadel movie
i. View clips via posters
n. Iron Man face AR experience/game
i. Wish fulfillment of becoming hero
ii. Social element of sharing your pic w/ friends
o. Augmented books
i. Ice Age book trigger cards
ii. Wonderbook book of spells
1. Magic mirror effect on TV
iii. Art of Journey book to visualize art in 3D

a. Blaise Aguera y Arcas
ii. Online services, Microsoft
iii. Training in physics and applied math
1. Never studied CS or design
iv. Seadragon
1. Founded company
2. Multiresolution images
v. Photosynth
2. Acquired by MSFT in 2007
3. Started as grad student project at UW
vi. Bing mobile
vii. Next
viii. Interaction design
1. Art deco
2. Helvetica
ix. Design of systems based on math

x. Portfolio

1. Gasbar
a. Progress bar
b. Not 1 degree of freedom (% done) but 3 (% done, uncertainty, how much activity going on now)
c. Using particles representing activity
d. Modeling fluid gas transition

2. Streetside
a. Navigation in street view
b. Rotation is easy (photos on cube/skybox)
c. But translation is hard because model environment
d. Sense of parallax weak; just need actual good imagery, not complex space
e. Simplified the geometry the image is projected on
f. Potemkin village geometry
i. Handful of polygons for entire scene

3. On{x}
a. Israeli project
b. Ifttt for mobile
c. Recipes
d. JS APIs
e. People hated that it required facebook login
f. Very closely connected to Node.JS
i. 1 language for front and back
ii. everything is reactive
iii. callbacks on events
iv. nothing ever blocks, all async
g. android
i. ease of creating app and using internal signals makes it easy for anyone to violate privacy in app
ii. phone is not a phone; it’s a computer

4. Incoming call
a. Daemon.js
b. Looking up unknown numbers on web on incming calls
5. Thinking about design mathematically
6. Interactions define behavior of app and shape of our relationship w/ real world
7. Lineage of phones inheriting from PCs not phones
a. Still desktop w/ icons
b. How far can AR go if stands in silos of apps that require its own app to be downloaded
i. Pull vs. push
ii. How to push AR info to ppl w/o app
c. Single AR key broker vs. open vs. secure
i. Need cheaper signals to do more expensive operations like vision recognition
d. CV is advancing fast, but app model is broken
e. Wii -> Kinect transition to naturalness
f. Problem of the vanishing physical
i. Kindle books getting removed from your shelf on copyright violations
ii. Book metaphor vs. online service metaphor
iii. What of what we produce is real vs not
iv. 15th century books still look great
v. is our current product ephemeral?
vi. Embodied objects vs. not

VII. Helen Papagiannis talk @arstories
a. Augmented reality as a new medium for storytelling
b. Always build a good ship
c. Moonshot
d. Reveal
e. Delight
f. Engage
g. Make
h. Reimagine
i. Use tools to change the rules
j. New planet
k. Dreamer
l. Emotional journey
m. Iterative
n. Retention
o. Engrossing
p. Curiosity
q. Wonderment
s. Make mistakes faster
t. @MarsCuriosity: Roads? Where I’m going, I don’t need roads.
u. The Future Belongs to the Curious video
v. Ask questions

I've been getting deep into design thinking and heard the book Change by Design by Tim Brown mentioned repeatedly, so I figured I'd check it out. Tim Brown is the CEO of the design firm IDEO, which, along with the Stanford d.school, really spearheaded a lot of the design thinking movement.

I found the book to be a great overview of DT and recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the subject. I personally would've wished for the book to spend more time on specific techniques and less on the broader trends and high-level concepts since most of those are already familiar. I suppose there wasn't a lot of depth on the techniques because this stuff is much better learned by doing rather than reading. I did find the copious number of real-world examples where DT made a difference to be interesting.

Below are my main takeaways from the book that go beyond what I learned before or present the material from a different perspective.

Intro

• Integrating human POV with technical
  
• Design as hub of wheel not link in chain
  
• Human centered not tech centered
  
• Design thinking applied to many new industries and problems
  
• Mind maps not tables of contents (linear)
  

Part 1 what is design thinking

Ch 1 dt is about more than style

• IDEO work for Shimano
  
• Interviewed many areas of bicycling customers
  
• Created coasting bikes and better retail strategy
  

3 spaces of innovation

• No one best way
  
• Overlapping spaces
  
• 1. Inspiration
  
• 2. Ideation
  
• 3. Implementation
  
• Iterative, nonlinear, exploratory
  
• Fail early to succeed sooner
  
• Feels chaotic but makes sense by end
  

• Willing embrace of constraints actually helps
  
• Sometimes constraints conflict; that's ok
  
• Evaluate constraints on 3 overlapping criteria 
  
• 1. Feasibility: functionally possible
  
• 2. Viability: sustainable as biz
  
• 3. Desirability: makes sense to ppl
  
• Find harmonious balance
  
• Businesses sometimes focus only on what fits in biz model (incremental improvement)
  
• DT uses project not problem
  
• Project has specific goal and beginning, middle, and end and constraints
  

The brief

• Like scientific hypothesis not algorithm 
  
• Starting point
  
• Mental constraints by which to begin
  
• Benchmarks to measure progress
  
• Set of objectives to be realized, Price point, tech, mkt segment
  
• Need right balance between constraints and broadness in brief
  

• Interdisciplinary team
  
• T shaped people
  

Creative culture and environment

• Physical space giving permission
  
• Skunkworks
  
• Mattel
  
• Separate project rooms
  
• Visibility of project materials
  
• Wiki
  
• Flexibility in space
  
• DT needs to move upstream
  

Ch 2 converting needs into demand or putting ppl first

• Asking ppl what want doesn't work
  
• Articulate latent needs
  
• Insight, observation, empathy
  

Insight

• Learning from lives of others
  
• Myriad thoughtless acts of ppl
  
• Actual behaviors give clues
  
• Watch what ppl don't do or say
  

Observation

• Intense field work
  
• Find extreme users, OCD ppl
  
• Research sponsored by companies
  

Empathy

• translate observations into insights
  
• Hospital patient er experience
  
• Emotional understanding
  
• Video ethnography, computer logging
  
• Understand links between ppl
  

Consumers as part of design team

• Crowd-sourced design
  
• participatory design teams
  
• User generated content
  
• Collaboration between creators and consumers
  

Ch 3 a mental matrix or these ppl have no process

• Getting client to come backstage
  

Convergent and divergent thinking

• To have a good idea you must first have many ideas
  
• Methodical experimentation
  
• Ideas should not be favored based on who came up with them
  
• Let ideas create buzz and a following
  
• Bottom up experimentation
  
• Propagate ideas up
  
• Not just suggestion box
  
• Must gain org support
  

Brainstorming

• Rules
  
• Build on ideas of others
  
• Write rules on walls
  
• Dedicate rooms for it
  

Visual thinking

• Drawing practice
  
• Draw to express ideas and options
  
• Drawing forces decisions
  
• Post it notes best tools for convergent thinking
  
• Getting consensus through butterfly test
  
• Vote putting butterflies on post it's
  
• Deadlines turn options into decisions
  
• Exploring opposing ideas
  
• Complexity most reliable source of ideas
  

Ch 4 building to think or the power of prototyping

• Kids build
  
• Prototypes all over kids rooms
  
• Physical to abstract and back cycles
  
• Thinking with your hands
  

Quick and dirty

• Don't over invest in one prototype
  
• Goal is just learning and understanding
  
• Skits
  
• Foam core
  
• Storyboards in film
  
• Keeps ppl at the center
  
• Describing customer journey
  

 
Acting out

• Service innovation
  
• Kids are best role models
  
• Role-playing
  
• Tell users to add post it's to ur prototypes
  
• Improv acting techniques
  
• Takes some confidence and open-mindedness
  

Prototyping in the wild

DT for company reorg

• IDEO's own redesign through prototypes
  
• Prototypes slow us down to speed us up
  
• Must make own prototype instead of outsourcing
  
• Start with quick cycle like 1 day to first prototype
  

 
Ch 5 returning to the surface or the design of experiences

• Not just fulfilling function but having an experience
  
• Mayo Clinic Spark Lab design studio testing new provider experiences
  
• Changing behavior hard; offer new behavior
  

Experience blueprint

• Specs for interaction
  
• Described emotive elements of journey through time and space
  

Ch 6 spreading the message or the power of storytelling

• Cool Biz movement in Japan
  
• Used compelling story to spread word
  
• Stories give ideas meaning
  

Designing in fourth dimension

• Time
  
• Interaction design
  
• Designing verbs and stories
  

Stories as product

• Meme
  
• Turn audience into storytellers themselves
  

Design challenge

• Challenge between rival teams
  
• X-Prize
  

Part 2 where do we go from here

Ch 7 design thinking meets the corporation or teaching to fish

• Steelcase
  
• Dedicated spaces
  
• Workshops
  

Ch 8 new social contract or we're all In this together

• Convos with customers
  

Blurring between products and services

• All becoming experiences
  
• How might we... (HWM)
  
• TSA redesign
  

Sustainability

Ch 9 design activism or inspiring solutions with great potential

• Designing for extreme needs
  
• Acumen Fund
  
• Social enterprise
  
• Architecture for Humanity
  

Ch 10 designing tomorrow today

• Designing a life
  
• Observe the ordinary
  
• Carry a sketchpad and draw sketches