This is a mockup of a deck that uses the metaphor of a river to tell a story of a journey. The main path of the story is represented by cards representing segments of a river, with obstacles, smooth patches, stagnant pools, motor boats, and other features along the way. The picture cards can be used to add detail to parts of the journey and portray common metaphors or actions—an idea, angel wings, a seeing eye, a snake, and so forth.

A variant of this idea was used successfully by one of our alumni for research interviews describing participants' journey to wellness for the health care industry, and I'm hoping this will be a useful generative tool for qualitative interviews.

I am testing these cards on two types of material—regular and plastic playing-card stock. I am hoping that the plastic material can be written on with fine-point dry-erase markers. I'm providing five blank white cards so that participants can create their own cards if needed. If the plastic material is of good quality and can be a "write on, wipe off" surface, then this will be possible and the deck can be used for multiple interviews.

The printer I am using has a "marketplace" option on their web site that I plan to use if the deck turns out well—for both this deck and my Archetype Deck described in an earlier post. I continually have requests from colleagues, students, and alumni for copies of these decks, and this might be a way to make them available. We'll see how it goes. I should have the two samples in about a month.

As I registered for this year's EPIC conference, I was reminded of why I love attending this worthwhile event. Last year, Murilo Gomes and Marcelo Fagundes presented an analysis-planning process used by their firm, Brazilian consultant group INSITUM. It is a thorough and elegant strategy to evaluate and design the analysis process itself, with the goal of presenting insights and innovation opportunities discovered from the research.

The workshop showed how to choose the most suitable techniques for each phase of the analysis based on criteria derived from an assessment of project objectives and methodology, the client and audience for the presentation, and the resources available from the research, the design firm, and the client.

I thought the workshop was an excellent way to use structured methods to examine, extract, and present the research outcomes, and Murilo and Marcelo were generous enough to allow me to run the workshop with students at ArtCenter. 

We tried something new in ID Research last week. I've long wanted to do "beeper studies" using smartphones and the simple capabilities of text messaging - texting participants and asking them to provide a brief description of what's happening in the moment, plus a snapshot. 

This is an old method that allows researchers to collect "samples" of everyday experience that would otherwise be difficult to capture. It was done using beepers back in the day, hence the name Beeper Studies.*

There are ethnographic research apps available that can be used for this, but I wanted to see if we could do it simply and without having people buy a special-purpose app. Using the class as our participants, my TA, Jeff Lin, texted them at various times of day for a week and asked them to text back with a rating of how stressed they were in that moment, along with a brief description and a photo of what they were doing.

We compiled all of the samples into a matrix and viewed the results - a picture of one week in the life of fifteen ArtCenter students. The method worked pretty well. We have a few notes on what we will change the next time we do this, but I think I'll add this to our list of generative tools.

*  For more on Beeper Studies, you really should try to find a copy of the book, "Experience Sampling Method," by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others. He is one of my research heroes, and every designer should have a copy of his book, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" on their shelf. Here's a link to his TED talk, on the topic of Flow.

Elizabeth Sanders and I have just finished an article for the upcoming issue of Innovation in support of dedicated research-only courses in undergraduate design education (please see the final draft of the article in the "papers" section of this site). As far as we have found, OSU and Art Center are the only programs presently offering such courses at the undergrad level. Many graduate programs have dedicated research courses but it seems rare for undergrad programs, and Liz and I both regret this. We would appreciate very much hearing from design students and faculty who are presently taking or teaching research-only courses in an undergrad design program. We'd love to compare notes.

Image: Analysis exercises by Jocelyn Ma, Siwei Wang, and Susan Zhang for my ID Research course, Summer 2014

I've added a new page to this site that contains a few of the articles and papers I've written over the years. Enjoy.

I have just been reviewing my copy of Elizabeth Sanders' new text on generative tools for design research, and it's a home run. Ever since Brenda Laurel published her book (which, though very good and interesting to those who already know how to do research, is not that useful for beginners), I've been looking for a text to use in my courses. Bruce Hannington's Universal Methods of Design (a solid companion to Rockport's earlier Universal Principles of Design) is excellent and I highly recommend it as a reference, but it's not exactly a how-to.

Liz approached me a couple of years ago asking me to contribute a few sidebars to a book that she and Pieter Jan Stappers (from the Delft University of Technology) were writing, and I've been waiting with bated breath for it to come out. I've followed their work for years. In the 70s, Liz, at Richardson Smith, along with Lucy Suchman at Xerox PARC, Jane Fulton Suri at IDEO, and Bruce Archer and colleagues at the RCA, originated the methodology for what we now call design research. Liz has evolved a specialty in co-design practice using generative tools, and it is in this area that I feel the most promise lies for today's designers, so I have been eager to review the book.

It's met my expectations, and I'll be using it in my classes from now on. It lays a foundation of thought to explain generative tools and support their use for participatory design, and then breaks down the methods, the rationales, their use, the analysis of the findings and presentation of results—the whole nine yards, as they say. Fleshed out with real-world examples from 49 practitioners and educators, it's at last the text I've been hoping to see.

The Convivial Toolbox, along with Hannington's Universal Methods of Design, have earned a place on the bookshelf of every designer.

I've been reading Lakoff's seminal work on metaphor, Metaphors We Live By. Written originally in 1980, the new version has an afterword written in 2003 that alone will floor you. I'd been listening to him on his recent book tour promoting his latest book, The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide To Thinking and Talking Democratic, in which he tells progressives how to frame their ideas, and was reminded that he is one of the noted experts on the subject of framing, and therefore, the use of metaphor.

I've used the idea of Metaphor as a "wild card" in my deck of analytical tools for desgin research for some time. Instinctively, I and my students saw that if we could find the right metaphors that best expressed what we were seeing in the research, we would go a long way toward explaining the essence of what we had learned. For example, one of a team studying the phenomenon of adults playing in kickball leagues turned to me and said, "Kickball is a social filter." I understood him instantly. By choosing to join the kickball team instead of the softball or dodgeball team, one is choosing the type of people one wants to hang out with. Each crowd is different, and we had heard the kickball players saying they "wouldn't be caught dead" with the dodgeball players—a rowdier crowd with fewer brains on board (their words, not mine, so don't start in on me...!). It's easy to see how many of the activities we choose, from sports to knitting, act as social filters.

So we've long asked our students to consider the metaphors in play regarding the topic they are studying. But Lakoff brings depth and scholarship to the discussion, to the point where I'm a bit lost on how to convey to my students the breadth of his work and the many ideas they'd find useful.

Take marriage. To Lakoff, marriage can be a partnership, a journey through life together, a haven from the outside world, a means for growth, or a union of two into a third, larger entity. If one partner sees marriage as a partnership and the other, a haven, we can easilty see that the responsibilites inherent in the partnership frame will be at odds with the relief from responsibility that comes with the haven frame, and a rocky road would lie ahead.

Our research is based on the fact that one person's frame of reference will be different from another's, and it's our business to find out which frame a particular participant might be using. That's why we use the laddering technique in our interviews—to not accept any idea at face value, but to dive deeper into what a person means, as precisely as possible. At the heart of this idea is understanding the metaphors that people use as their operating system.

One of Lakoff's most interesting ideas is that aside from being lenses through which we look at the world, metaphors can offer new meaning. His example is the new metaphor of Love as a Collaborative Work of Art, compared to conventional metaphors of love—as a physical force, a patient (a sick relationship, a healthy marriage), madness, magic, war, a journey, and so on. The new metaphor has what Lakoff calls "reverberations" that can act as a guide: "The metaphor provides an organization of important love experiences that our conventional conceptual system does not make available.... It is work that requires that special balance of control and letting go that is appropriate to artistic creation.... it gives love a new meaning.... it can sanction actions, justify inferences, and help us set goals.... The meaning will be partly culturally determined and partly tied to past experiences."

All of this is potent fuel for the designer, and uncovering this fuel is the job of design research.

Some years ago I was asked to write a history of the pickup truck for a client. Some of you might know that I've taught History of ID at Art Center for years, but most of you might not know that, ever since one idyllic summer of 1972 spent in Austin when the place was crawling with excellent restored examples of F100s, 5-window-cab Dodges and early 50's Chevys, I have been a fan of old pickups. So I jumped into the project with enthusiasm.

Then I ran up against the problem with automotive design history. Most of what's recorded is based on what's written in the magazines and reviews (the first draft of history, as always) - long descriptions of engine sizes and performance specs. Nothing about the intent of the designer.

Automotive design is a parallel universe to mine. I was raised as a product designer, and although of late I've been complaining that you can't find a good, detailed case study of product designs these days, it's even more difficult to find an explanation of the problem-solving process within transportation design.

Rant alert...

Compare a 60s-era issue of Industrial Design magazine with its modern-day, on line counterpart and you'll see what I mean. The old version of the magazine was filled with excellent articles describing at length the problem-solving process and rationale. What stands for today's version is a hopelessly shallow serving of visual snacks. (Any designer who complains that our clients don't understand us had better look at this face we show to our public.) 

…end of rant.

It's even more difficult to get a sense of the problems automotive designers are taking on in their work, and how they think when they're solving them. There is no record like the old issues of ID Magazine to fall back on. Almost all of the books in our library (and I'd consider our design library probably the most complete on the West Coast) contain lengthy descriptions of models, dates, and engine performance specs, but precious little on what the designers themselves were thinking at the time.

Automotive designers occupy the next studio over from ours, figuratively speaking, but theirs is a different culture. Different way of talking about problems, and indeed, different problems they are attempting to solve. It is largely an oral process that occurs in the studio crit, and unless you sit an automotive designer down and ask them to backtrack through the decisions they've made, you'll not understand the work they have done.

Here's an example: the Duesenberg SSJ LaGrande Roadster. I was Googling Strother McMinn and came across a quote from him by our Transportation Department chair, Stewart Reed, saying, "Strother McMinn, my esteemed colleague, used to talk about the Gary Cooper Duesenberg (SSJ LaGrande roadster) -- the selfishness about it, with the tight interior and large body, which gave it that attitude." Reed goes on to say that when he was at Chrysler Advanced Design in the 1970s, "the "old-timers" felt that four doors were a stigma, and two-doors represented something a little more sporting, a little less practical. Eliminating as many pillars as possible was part of that philosophy, and designing "a selfish little coupé or roadster makes the car feel proportionally larger, makes it more imposing." 

Set aside, for a moment, any bias you might have about car designers, ecological wastefulness, Detroit, the yearly model change, or what have you, and take yourself back to the simple days before the 1973 oil crisis. This tiny gem about the "selfishness" of the car and adjusting the proportions to make it more imposing - this is what I once heard Tom Matano refer to as "visual weight distribution" - that by elongating or shortening the greenhouse, the front deck, or the trunk lid a designer would convey to the observer what the promise of the vehicle was - family mover or "selfish" performance animal, for example. 

The rest of the article, by the way (in Hemmings Classic Car magazine) was about the definition, exactly, of a "Club Coupe" - the other sort of material you'll find if you're researching auto design history. 95% of the lengthy article was about how many doors, how many cubic feet of back seat, how many pillars, and so forth, comprising a Club Coupe - an effort at pinning down a lexicon interesting perhaps to owners of classic cars, but only that one small quote that tells us about the intention of the designers.

This, by the way, is what they call a Club Coupe.

This was better than what you usually get, as in this article about the SSJ Roadster from another site. You'll see what I mean about there being nothing about the design process, other than the automotive engineering / manufacturing and to a certain extent, the marketing.

Automotive design is not a mystery to those who practice it. Some, like Matano, are eminently capable of clearly explaining what it is they do. But no one is recording this. Only occasionally do I come across glimpses behind the curtain - listening in at the Art Center Car Classic, or pinning one of my colleagues down and ask them to 'splain me what's behind a particular design. Which is what I did for the pickup truck project, and it was great fun.