designing experiences

When I think about my hometown, there are a few defining experiences that come to mind. Running through Mountain Park on Thursday evenings in the fall, surrounded by the sights and smells of football in the South. Summer nights at Bruster's that seem to stretch on for hours, laughing at jokes that are still funny after retelling them for years. IHOP breakfasts and Ponko lunches. Traffic on Cole Road at 6:45 every January morning.

Sawra enjoying her iced green tea. (feel free to use with credit)

And of course, our Starbucks. We have a beautiful Starbucks that sits out on Lake Lucerne. On clear days, you can watch the ducks playing on the water. At Christmastime, lights shine across the lake, giving it an almost ethereal glow. And on stormy days, the black water will chop at the dock and patio, lending the atmosphere a pensive aura. There isn't a drive through, meaning that everyone that comes by has to stop inside the little shop and say hi. For the past ten years, since I've been able to drive, Starbucks has become a staple of our Lilburn routine. Meeting friends for a cup of coffee, writing a paper for my research project, or having a conversation that changes everything - that Starbucks has played host to a number of memorable moments, in my life and in others.

It's amazing how that atmosphere, that design changes things. Because it's a small shop, because there are only a few well-worn couches and small tables, because there is no drive through, the ambiance inside that Starbucks is far less commercial than any chain coffee shop I've ever been into. The manager once told me that that particular location has one of the highest percentages of "regulars" of any Starbucks in the nation. As for me, three or so mornings a week, I'll stop in for my green tea and vanilla bean scones (you have no idea how good these things are). Patty and Shanna know what my order will be before I get to the counter. I'll say hi to Joe and Greg, and wave at the police officer who has undoubtedly stopped in for a drink before getting on with their shift. The experience of Starbucks has come to mean more than just scones and tea - it's come to mean that I will always walk out in the mornings with a smile.

Today, that Starbucks is closing. The landlord has decided not to renew the lease, and despite being very busy and very profitable, tomorrow, after a beautiful white Christmas in Atlanta, the doors won't open.

The best experiences are the ones that linger for days, weeks after they're over. It's one thing to be able to create that kind of experience with a one-time event - a special outing, a big celebration. It's another to design an environment that consistently leaves people walking out with a smile. I will miss my Starbucks, for sure. Although I may find a replacement for my morning tea and scones, I will not find a replacement for the experience that changed my mornings.

what is your relationship with money?

Not sure if any of you are Bank of America customers, but I dropped by IDEO Palo Alto on Friday afternoon to have a conversation with Altay Sendil about the emotional and human aspects of the goods and services we use.

(photo courtesy of... )

The Keep The Change program (I'm not a BofA client) is one of my favorite examples of good design strategy. When BofA was looking at creating an easy savings account, the questions started (predictably) about how we use savings accounts - about interest rates, linked accounts, online tracking, and other functionality that we classify as "account features". But the interesting question is not how we save, but why we save. What is our savings paradigm? Fundamentally, how do we interact with money? What are our deep-seated attitudes, our internal scripting about spending and savings?

Understanding the why was important to making the how work. The Keep The Change program is very well-received in the consumer banking arena.

Microfinance in developing countries caters to similar attitudes. Repayment rates for microlending in Bangladesh are unbelievably high - not because people are more capable than in other countries to repay the loans, but because the lending structure - the women-centric, group-accountability, installment-structured system of lending - works for the villagers who take the money. The process fits with their relationship to money and the way they view capital and investments.

I have a Way2Save account with Wachovia (Wells). As I build my own financial paradigms and explore my attitudes toward wealth and savings, it's been interesting to take a deeper look at how I interact with money, and to talk to others (including my parents) about how they deal with their own finances. About saving and spending. About the things that I value and what I'm willing to pay for them. About creation and consumption.

So how do you interact with your savings? When you were growing up, what did you learn about saving and spending? Ultimately, what is your relationship with money?

the internet is full

Flying from ATL to SFO tonight, and was going to post earlier about use case, airports, and long flights, but as GoGo informed me, "the internet is full."

Seriously, though, kudos to Google for sponsoring free wifi through the Holidays.

See you on the West Coast!

the difference between health and public health

For the second time in two months (and despite getting a flu shot), I'm sick. This is strange for two reasons; the first being that I grew up in a developing country and have an immune system bolstered by 1+ billion people living in an area smaller than half the United States; the second, because I'm a relatively healthy individual who exercises regularly, doesn't (didn't used to) get sick often, and maintains a fairly healthy diet (sleep schedule notwithstanding).

(photo courtesy of... )

If I had to guess, I picked something up at work. Because workplaces, like elementary schools, are incubators for illnesses. It's all fine and well to be a healthy individual with a strong immune system, but throw that healthy individual into a building for 9+ hours a day with others of varying immune capabilities, and it makes no difference how healthy they were to begin with. Essentially, I need my coworkers to stay healthy if I plan on staying healthy, and I derive a very real benefit (in economic terms, an externality) from my team not being sick.

That's the difference between health, and public health. Healthcare, like education, provides benefits not only to the individual that purchases the good, but also externalities to others in society such as increased productivity, lowered disease transmission, and reduced microbial resistance to medication.

Here's the real kicker (and especially in the context of healthcare reform): if all of society derives these benefits from me not being sick, who in society deserves to pay for my health? We've managed to answer that question in education - society pays to educate its children because society benefits from an educated population. Should society be paying for healthcare when that society derives benefit from a healthy population?

And let's take it one step further. In the developing world, individuals cannot afford to pay for the most basic of health services. In these places, though, because of the prevalence of infectious disease, keeping individuals healthy delivers huge impact to others in the population. Globally, preventing an outbreak of infectious disease in Niger means a smaller chance of a compromised population in Atlanta.

So, today's good question: who should pay to keep people healthy?

a few things to be thankful for

It's the day after Thanksgiving, and as I was walking into Octane, I came across this very fitting chalk painting on Howell Mill.

@ Howell Mill & Brady Ave (feel free to use, with credit)

I'm thankful for pink heels and the Atlanta skyline.

I'm thankful, of course, for my family. For my friends. For growing up in a world that never told me that I wasn't capable of being what I wanted to be. For the opportunity to create opportunities for other people.

I'm thankful for the country I come from and the country I call home.

I'm thankful for my health.

Sawra, ready for gameday, and thankful to be a Tech fan (feel free to use, with credit)

And, although it's been hard this season, I'm thankful for football. Clean, old-fashioned hate kicks off tomorrow at 7:45 PM.

Hope y'all had a great Thanksgiving, and go Jackets!

a few statistics in global health

Last Friday Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Global Health had its first annual symposium. It was an incredible turnout - at least 300 or so were in attendance. Lots of good thoughts as I try and wrap up my research paper, but one in particular:

(photo courtesy of MedShare - if you live in Atlanta and don't know about MedShare, you need to volunteer)

I posed a question to Kris Olson, who is a pediatrician and doctor of internal medicine at Mass Gen, and also the Director of the Global Health Initiative for CIMIT, about public-private partnerships and how we make innovation for the developing world a sustainable venture for the developed world. He didn't have an answer (no one does, and even now, only a few people are trying to figure that out), but he did bring up some interesting statistics and the need for healthcare innovation:

~ 40% of needles used to vaccinate children in developing countries have been used in another child before

95% of medical equipment (what we call "durable medical equipment", or DME) in resource-limited areas is donated equipment

90% of those devices fail in the first five years

Dr. Larson, while acknowledging the need for innovation in the space, made a great point: "A need does not necessarily equal a market." Not sure if we can find a way around that, or create a market, or develop a nontraditional market, but answering that question and monetizing that market goes a long way to improving global health in all regions of the world.

designing around the generation gap, in goods and experiences

Last night, Rafael and I were marveling again at how little human interaction a business trip actually takes as we picked up our rental car at BWI. Everything was going smoothly - flight landed on time, bags arrived, the Hertz Gold Club had us listed on the billboard, and we were just talking about how an interaction-less culture means a higher bottom line for a company, when we discovered that they had given us a hybrid.

(Nissan Altima hybrid, courtesy of...)

Being the office treehugger, I of course was thrilled. I've driven a hybrid once before (the HS250, and while it's not perfect and there are some peculiar styling details in the center console that I don't adore, it's still a great first stab at a luxury hybrid). Rafael, on the other hand, was not so excited. On normal days, he drives a C280 that was made in Germany and imported into the United States. He loves the feel of the road and the paradigm of driving for him is driven by lots of sounds and textures. It's much harder for someone like that to get used to a car that is silent upon starting up. In fact, it took him three tries of pushing the On button to realize that the car was actually on, and in fact we were in a hybrid vehicle.

While we laughed about it on our drive to dinner (with Rafael nicknaming our Nissan Altima as "the sewing machine"), we started talking about how generational differences make for different user experiences. Like traveling for business without interacting with a single customer service representative, driving a hybrid is an experience tailored for a specific generation. My paradigm of driving has been developed over eight years, and has always involved one primary vehicle. My boss, on the other hand, has been driving for almost 30 years, and those layers of memories and thoughts toward the experience of being on the road shape his product preferences very strongly. Those paradigms are different; the things we value are different.

Back to business travel - I'm part of a generation that has always valued time as its most precious resource. Unlike baby boomers, who chase money after growing up in a relatively less well-off setting as their parents were still handicapped by the economic climate of the 30s when they were starting careers, and unlike Generation Xers, who chase family time after growing up never seeing their parents as they strived to fulfill their American Dream, we grew up overscheduled with ball games and tutoring and soccer practice and flute lessons.

So now, we don't chase money. We want time. We want all of our time to count for something. We recognize that once it's gone, we can't make more. And that says something about why we flock to things like climate change and public health. We have a defined amount of time on earth to tackle these problems.

The culture of business travel is ok for Generation Y, because things that are designed to automate the process also take us less time to accomplish. The culture of business travel is also ok for the Baby Boomers, because they value money. But Generation X traditionally values interaction.

So what does that mean for a user experience designer? How do you design for people who have very different paradigms of how the world should be? The user preferences aren't always the same. In some cases, the end goals aren't even the same. It's not always practical to design different experiences for each of those groups. How do you make sure you've identified with one without alienating the others?

One man's dream car is another man's sewing machine.

happy election day (it's a post about Halo)

Three months ago, despite the warnings and news stories, I took a trip to our manufacturing facility in Cuidad Juarez. Let me tell you, it was a surreal experience. Mexico is very much a developing country, and it doesn’t look much different from India (with fewer people, more paved roads, and no random animals walking the streets). Border towns in Mexico are regularly patrolled by armed National Police standing in the backs of jeeps. As one of my friends described it, the border security in Mexico is like seeing a live game of Halo.

Zaragoza land bridge in El Paso, Texas/Juarez, Mexico. (feel free to use, with credit)

Over the weekend, two Americans were killed on the land border bridge we crossed to get back into the States – the Zaragoza International Bridge. A third was killed in the city itself.

It’s sad to see a city, and really, a country, be consumed by this kind of violence. We don’t often think of Mexico as a developing country, but it’s not that far off. Juarez is one of a string of maquiladoras that’s been affected by drug violence. I have to wonder how long American companies can continue their operations in Mexico (which offers significantly lower labor costs for labor-intensive manufacturing operations). Many have already left. For the 1.3 million Mexicans that are employed by these maquila factories, a plant closure has a devastating effect on their well-being and empowerment.

A lack of empowerment, and still, voter turnout remains lower in the United States than in Mexico.

The American flag, as seen from the Zaragoza bridge.

It’s an election day to count our blessings.

how can we design to inspire self-efficacy?

I went to a talk yesterday by Josh Chuzi for Atlanta Design Week called Healing Environments: How Art & Design Can Improve Health. Although the context of the conversation came from his background in art history, he posed a very interesting question: how can we design to inspire self-efficacy?

The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". Chuzi talked about healing as a multifaceted term as well, highlighting not only physical healing, but psychological, spiritual, social, cultural, and sexual healing as well. The common theme in healing, though, is to build (and I don't love this term) self-efficacy.

(thanks, Wikipedia)

The prevailing attitude in the healthcare environment today is to treat the physical body. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we must address the physical, corporal needs first. I think, though, sometimes in the current state of healthcare in the world today, we take that need out of proportion with the others. As a medical device designer, I see that we certainly think first and foremost (and sometimes solely) about how medically efficacious a device or therapy is. While that has to be our primary concern, it often becomes our only concern.

We lose sight of the human element of healing. The need to feel nurtured, stimulated, and protected - emotional self-efficacy. The need for our family and friends in times of medical emergency - social self-efficacy. So how do we inspire patients and clinicians to strive for that?

And even more importantly, how do we inspire patients and clinicians in the developing world to achieve that goal as well? In places where empowerment is in short supply, how do we create products and processes to drive people to total self-efficaciousness?

Clever design takes these things into account. That's why music videos in India work wonders on rural literacy rates. That's why Paul Farmer's DOT program was such a success in Haiti. And why Greg Mortensen is able to effectively counter the Taliban's madrassas in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan by building schools.

No, clever design can't do this on its own. Empowerment and self-efficaciousness are a partnership of people, product, and process. I suspect that in the next 20 years in this country, we're going to see a dramatic shift in how doctors see patients. As costs continue to rise, we're going to have to. The process by which we pay for healthcare will change. And the products that we use will have to adapt to keep up. Health is about a whole person. While the medical profession is segmenting and specializing further, the processes and products that we use have to be able to synthesize those specialities into a whole person again.

a gorgeous Georgia night

Saw this gorgeous sunset when I went out for a run. It wasn't so much the sunset that got me - it was the quality of the light on the trees, the grass, and the houses that I noticed first. Almost ethereal. It's hard for an iPhone camera to do it justice.

When I dream about the South land, this is where it all begins.

I think good lighting changes moods. I think it brings people together. I've been obsessed with Morocco since I read in Sky Magazine that it has the most amazing natural light in the world.

And I think candid cameras do the same thing. That's why Polaroids at parties are a huge hit.

This wasn't taken on a Polaroid, and nor is it candid (it was taken with a camera clicker, one of the best inventions ever) but I did promise that I would post this picture -

(please don't reproduce)

From left to right: Andrea, Colleen, me, Jenn. Old friends that got together over good wine and under good lighting at Woodfire Grill in Atlanta.

question your assumptions

During my sophomore year of college I took a class in engineering thermodynamics. It was the kind of class that makes young engineers change majors, where the professor told us on the first day that 60% of us would fail the first test (we did). 

About that time in my life, I received a card in the mail from a mentor of mine. I'm a big fan of Quotable Cards (I'm a big fan of good quotes), and this particular card is still sitting on my nightstand.

Part of becoming an engineer is learning to make good assumptions. But part of being a great engineer is learning to question those assumptions.

It's this part that's lost in lots of designers.

In order to start the design process, you have to make assumptions. To solve a complex system, you have to engineer with information you don't have yet. The design process dictates that you generate design inputs - that is, physical specifications, dimensions, materials... what the product will look like - before you can even create a prototype. And professional engineers do a great job of checking to see that their product meets those design inputs. That's design validation.

But what about verification? What about verifying that my product does not what I wanted it to do, but what my doctor wanted it to do? what my patient wanted it to do? That's design verification. And that's where it becomes important to question your assumptions.

In the past two years I've learned a lot about myself as a designer. I've brought three products to market, taken a course in SolidWorks, and spent significant time in the hospital with clinicians and patients. I've been to a manufacturing plant in Mexico and created a new process for adhesive coating in New Hampshire. I've found that in my career what I'm best at is asking questions, and questioning assumptions. I spend my time in the top half of that graph - on asking why we're doing what we're doing, and how a product behaves with a patient.

I think we can all benefit from questioning our assumptions. Making an assumption is answering the question of how to do something. Questioning assumptions is about asking why we're doing it in the first place. It's about being mindful of decisions, of interactions, of relationships. So go ahead and jump into a problem headfirst. Make some assumptions. Move forward. And then come back and ask yourself why. Look at the assumptions you made, and question whether or not they were the correct ones. Give someone else a chance to surprise you. Give yourself a chance to surprise you.

surprise & delight, and the story of lexus

Today, I was driving down I-20 on my way home from work, and the 18-wheeler in front of me had a tire explode. This isn't the first time I've had a run-in with rogue tire treads - two months ago, a flying tire tread knocked my side mirror out of its position. In fact, when you have a 35-mile commute each way down a highway known to be a tire graveyard, you know it's only a matter of time before you're the unfortunate victim of a flyaway tire.

(photo courtesy of...)

It's in situations like this that I really appreciate my car. I drive a 2002 Lexus ES 300 - a grandmother's car, although I'm pretty sure that neither of my Indian grandmothers ever had a drivers' license - a hand-me-down from my father that's been through 8 years of everything that Atlanta driving has to offer. The more I drive and the more I design. the more I appreciate the thought that goes into Lexus's design choices. There are few companies that I respect more (Apple being another, for their superb focus on design intent). Lexus stands out for a few different reasons:

1. Lexus doesn't engineer cars. They engineer experiences. There is an R&D director that I work with that talks often about the principle of "surprise & delight" - that is, not just meeting design requirements, but exceeding expectations. Surprise & delight is about understanding your design intent, about taking care of tasks that your user didn't even realize they were trying to accomplish.

So they employ hundreds of human factors engineers to study how people interact with their cars. The company understands very well that what people need out of a car isn't the maximum amount of horsepower or payload. People buy cars for the experience of driving. Lexus doesn't focus on features - sure, they have beautiful interiors, state of the art navigation systems, and a thousand other features. But when that tire tread blew up in my face, what I noticed wasn't the automatic stability control that kicked in - it was that I heard only a muted pop in place of a loud bang. The environment inside my car stayed calm, even when my heart skipped a beat.

2. Consumers are far more mature in the car-buying market than they are in other consumer goods. No one tells me to buy a compact hybrid when what I really need is a pickup truck (but lots of people will tell me that I need a Macbook Pro over a Macbook Air). We understand our needs far better in automobiles than we do other things. And that's why Lexus is so successful - they know they can engineer the experience of driving because it's something that people understand very well.

I know how to check my gauges and change my tires, but even the engineer in me doesn't crave horsepower over simple creature comforts.

3. They anticipate how the driving experience should be - from start to finish. Lexus makes sure that at no point in my driving life, I drive anything other than a Lexus. From the showroom to the test drive to routine maintenance visits in which I get a Lexus courtesy car and free gas, the company always has their best foot forward to make things easy for a customer. Sure, they may lose a little bit of money filling the tank back up for you after you've spent the day cruising around in one of their new models while getting your timing belt replaced, but they more than make up for it in loyalty when you buy your next car.

welcome, new friends!

There's been a recent upswing in visitors to the blog, and although it's still modest traffic, there's a good number of you coming in from overseas - welcome!

(photo courtesy of... )

When I first started blogging, I stressed an emphasis on creating good content, so that anyone reading was consuming interesting and thought-provoking posts. I don't always hit that mark, but I'm always, always open to suggestion and comments!

If there's something that you'd like to talk about, please don't hesitate to ask.

If there's a design or development issue that you'd like to write about, talk to me about a guest post.

And finally, if you're subscribing on Google Buzz or Reader (and therefore I can't track you as a visitor... if you know a way around that, can you let me know... Shan... ?), thanks for the emails with your thoughts - they are sincerely appreciated. A lot of you have some really sharp insights - don't be afraid to share them publicly with other readers.

how information moves to create empowerment

Late last year I met with some folks in Boston who are working on some neat emerging technologies for diagnostics in the developing world. Since then, we've all been trying to brainstorm ways to engage others who are interested in this topic into the conversation. Recently, Aaron posed a really interesting series of questions to me in thinking about the world after their diagnostic technology becomes widespread:

(photo courtesy of... )

"How does the data move; what is done with the data when it gets there? How does it influence caregivers, governments, funding sources, etc? Can we predict what we might learn?"

I have an endless curiosity for questions like these (as Thomas Friedman calls it, this is my "inner fire truck"). Although my design skills are still in their infancy, and I hopefully have a long road in global health and technology ahead of me, these are the best kinds of questions to ask to move further down that path. Essentially, development is about empowerment, and empowerment comes from information. When you design for the developing world, and with the developing world, the primary concern is access to information. What information do these people need to make appropriate decisions (and how does that differ from the information that we provide for traditional devices in domestic hospital settings)? How can we deliver that information in a usable and readily accessible format? What will happen to that information once we obtain it? What other things can we couple it with to make the most of it?

Of course, you have to optimize your physical design for the environment that it will be used in, but these are questions of design intent, and they're far more interesting than questions of form or function.

a fun post, a serious note, and pictures of the dog

Despite my best efforts and a flu shot, I'm sick. For the past two days I've been running a fever of about 101 degrees, and laying in bed with just the dog and a bottle of Amantadine to keep me company.

It's only tangentially related to talk about trauma centers, as I'm not actually in a trauma situation. The flu in a relatively normal, healthy adult shouldn't be much cause for concern. The upside of being sick is that I've had some time to go through emails that gmail has designated as "Everything Else" in my Priority Inbox (is anyone else using this? To any degree of success?). Last week, our VP of R&D's wife sent me an email from her daughter, an RN in Georgia, about trauma centers and funding. There's an amendment on the ballot for a November 2nd election for increasing the car tag fee by $10 to fund trauma centers in Georgia. For those of you in Georgia, spread the word, and make sure you make it to the polls on November 2nd.

In a former life, I did three months of eye-opening research in the trauma center at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. Grady is something of a joke between most well-to-do Atlanta families (and I use that term very, very loosely) - the ones that live north of I-20. Even the residents at Grady would tell us, if you've had a serious accident come to Grady, and then get out as fast as you can. Due to the large contingent of repeat homeless patients, the trauma team would call the ER "Hotel Grady" - drug addicts, chronically afflicted homeless, and alcoholics would deliberately self-injure to be allowed back into Grady for a warm bed and a meal to eat. The trauma center was constantly put on diversion due to overcrowded wards, and then would still have to accept patients because other trauma centers were on diversion too.

Needless to say, I'm all for the amendment. Check out the details here.

Now for the fun part of the post. I've been laying in bed, reading interesting blog posts, listening to Josh Ritter, and taking poor-quality iPhone photos of the dog. Some particularly memorable shots (if you want to use these pictures, please drop me a line!):

What Sawra thinks about me being sick.

Toy-hoarding. No, you can NOT play with my toys.

Getting a little camera shy. It's so funny to watch her rub her eyes.

Content that she gets to sleep on the bed all day.

Sawra is a 7-and-a-half-month-old Yorkie/Maltese mix, and the cutest thing ever.

depth, breadth, and the "real world"

There are two things on Earth that grate on my nerves to no end. One is bananas; the other is when people refer to a certain milestone or experience in their lives as a mark of "the real world." Graduating from college, returning from a trip abroad, or finishing a substantial service endeavor are all good examples of activities that seem to fall outside the realm of the "real world."

I don't know, it looks pretty real to me... (photo courtesy of... and read the headline for good measure)

This phrase always makes me wonder, what fake world were you in before that?

In adult life I think people value professional depth. For most people, school is about creating depth in one subject area to pursue after graduation. Work is about becoming a subject matter expert in one field. Graduate degrees are about depth of understanding in one very specific topic. But although our society encourages to specialize professionally and develop a depth of understanding in a particular topic, it personally idealizes those who do the opposite - who have a breadth of interests and engagements in addition to their (to use another buzzword) core competence. The phrase "the real world" is about experiences that create professional depth. But what you do outside that "real world" is what makes you a great designer.

To be a good designer is to possess depth. It's very, very important to understand fully what tasks are needed to achieve a given outcome. That's depth. That's understanding the realities of the use case. To design products for mitral valve repair, I have to have a complete and thorough grasp on the anatomical details of the heart and the physiology of its components. But to understand the user is a different scenario - what are the pain points in the surgeon's particular technique? How many patients does a nurse see in one day? What are the most challenges tasks on the agenda in the operating room? Being able to address depth issues, or task-specific challenges, is to meet your design criteria. But being able to address breadth issues, things that a user can't necessarily articulate for themselves, things that are tangential to the task at hand but functionally related to the use of a device - addressing those issues is what creates products that defy expectation.

It's one reason that I'm such an advocate of engineers having ethnographic experience in user sites. Understanding the technical details of what you're designing to is one thing; but understanding physical environments, workflows, structures, and attitudes are priceless. Processing these connections in one setting can help us translate dissimilar experiences into useful inputs, can help us come up with good questions to ask when we're designing something new. Even just being able to touch something, rather than hear about it, gives us a whole new dimension on what it is we're designing. Watching a patient being transported into the ICU on an Army base in India has helped me translate the mechanical requirements to keep Foley catheters in place for patients in Belgium. Even if that observation didn't take place in the "real world."

the crayon method of good design

There's a great column in Wired Magazine (October 2010 print edition) from Clive Thompson about crayons. Ok, it's not really about crayons, but he talks about drawing with crayons. And then he talks about how the fastest way to bring everyone to the same mental model is to draw a picture.

When I was starting my career in design (I guess I still am starting my career in design), I thought that design meant pictures. Drawings. "Art." I thought it was something that industrial designers did to make things pretty. And then I thought, maybe I want that skill. Maybe I'll go to design school. Maybe I'll learn to draw pretty pictures. And now I'm learning that design is more than that. That to be a good "designer" can mean lots of different things.

I recently realized that my creativity has always come in words. I have a lot of respect for lyrical creativity, for beautiful phrases and gutsy syntax. It explains why much of my writing is wordy, why I collect quotes and memorize song lyrics, and why I sometimes deliberately ignore grammar for the sake of style (even though I'm a pretty notorious grammar nazi). I'm still learning how that applies to the realm of good design, and how I can use my lexical creativity to design better products.

This weekend I went to lunch with Howard, our new design engineer. Howard is inherently creative (and British, which is a very important attribute for any design engineer, esp. one that has designed for Dremel). He challenged me, as we were sitting outside of Paolo's eating gelato, to start drawing. Just drawing anything, really. Anything I found beautiful or interesting or useful or inspiring. So here I am, sitting in front of my blank notebook that I bought the same day I started the 750words project. Today, I've got an outline of a wrist (arguably one of the most beautiful, interesting, and underappreciated pieces of anatomy we have), and a diagram of various confluences in the design process (and a feeble attempt to understand my place in the design world).

In Clive Thompson's article, he uses a crayon to draw out various alternatives for a new laptop. Seeing it in pictures helped him understand what he needed and what he didn't, and gave him a means of filtering out the noise. One great design example of this is PadMapper - a mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist apartment listings. Craigslist has the right information, but not in a way that can be broken down and understood easily. Another is the now-famous Ikea method of delivering product assembly instructions. And it's the method of visualization that helps people learn to read, both in the developed world and the developing. It takes a mix of both the lexical talent (appropriate content and use-case understanding) and artistic flair (a usable format and pleasing view) to make a product that just works.

So I can still use song lyrics as a platform for creative brainstorming. But I'll have to start drawing my own emo album covers to go with it.

how bollywood is teaching india to read

Love this thought of the day from the New York Times (tip: Will - thanks!):

Think of the old follow-the-bouncing-ball singalongs, with a serious purpose. In The Boston Globe, Riddhi Shah writes that “same-language subtitling” of music videos in India improves literacy, once people become curious about the text at the bottom of the screen:

Indians and musical device for learning to read.

 According to Hema Jadvani, a researcher who has been studying the effects of the subtitles on Khodi [in western India], newspaper reading in the village has gone up by more than 50 percent in the last decade. Her research also shows that the village’s women, who can now read bus schedules themselves, are more mobile, and more children are opting to stay in school.

India’s public karaoke-for-literacy experiment is the only one of its kind in the world. Technically known as same-language subtitling, or SLS, it manages to reach 200 million viewers across 10 states every week. In the last nine years, functional literacy in areas with SLS access has more than doubled. And the subtitles have acted as a catalyst to quadruple the rate at which completely illiterate adults become proficient readers.

The article adds that “this is big news” for fighting poverty, since literacy “is linked not only to economic growth, but to better health, greater gender equality, and a more transparent political process.”

It's originally an article in the Boston Globe. The development community has understood for a long time that literacy is a key step in building an economic future. The problem is that the conventional method of teaching people to read is labor-intensive and time-intensive, and requires access to ancillary reading material. But with the advent of television, even in the rural areas of India, and the popularity of its Bollywood film industry, a whole new vector to transmit information is being put to use.

I've talked at length about design for the developing world and of course, India holds a special place in my heart. This is a great example of a keen understanding of a target population and some very thoughtful and deliberate (yet unobtrusive) design to create access to literacy. 

useful life skills, part one: using a lug wrench in three inch heels

For the second time in my life, I'm changing my own flat tire in a skirt and heels.

The hardest part? Getting the jack out of the holster. Come on Lexus, that was a poor design choice.

A black lace Banana Monogram skirt and gold snakeskin heels, to be exact.

Done! ... White shirt's still (almost) spotless. Hands, not so much.

Mad props to the random dude who stopped in a Park 'N Ride lot in the Middle of Nowhere, Georgia, to help me out. And to AAA, for finishing the job. But I wasn't creepy enough to take their pictures, too.

tug of war & thoughts on 3rd year of medical school

An incredible post from an incredible friend.

Current location:	Barnes Hospital/St. Louis Children's
Current mood:	All
Current music:	DMB: Christmas Song

Tug of War

I've never been more nervous or more excited about what's going to happen from day to day. I'm blessed to be on the path to the greatest profession I could possibly imagine.

The first time a patient calls you "Doctor," it's really cool and really scary. I am not, in fact, a doctor yet, but it's fun to pretend.

to become a better writer, write

self-expression is a learned skill.

On August 1st, I stumbled across a website called 750words.com. I've always heard that to become a better writer, you need to write. And that by becoming a better writer, you become a better reader (of more, and more relevant, content). I thought, I'll give this a shot. 750 words = 3 pages, as it's explained:

Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in "long hand", typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.

For 48 days, I wrote religiously, almost exclusively in the morning, often before going for a run at 6 AM. Eventually, I got into a rhythm, writing first my personal mission statement verbatim, then letting myself run wild on my thoughts and reactions to where I was. Then I always concluded with a thought for the day, a goal, an inspiration. For 48 days, despite my travel schedule, availability of internet connection (or laptop!), meetings, appointments, and all the other craziness that the past few months have brought, I wrote no matter what, sometimes finishing the day's thoughts on my iPhone. I wanted to make sure I hit every date, could continue my "streak", meet my challenge. Some days were harder than others; some days more open, some with more thoughts to share. I expected to feel a surge of creativity, an undiscovered side of myself that would point me in a new direction. And above all, I wanted to check my box and say that I had done my time and completed the day's words.

And then yesterday, I woke up at 4 AM to a sick puppy. Sawra had vomited in her crate, and both her fur and her den needed cleaning. It wasn't a task I particularly felt like doing, especially on my day to sleep in after weeks of 5-AM-wakeups. So an hour later, as I pulled my laptop into the bed and opened up the site, my mind was as blank as the white space in front of me. I just didn't want to write.

my overall mindset in all my time at 750words.

Creativity can't be forced. Creativity isn't about checking the box, about scoring points when you write just to write. There is a lot of value in pushing yourself through things that most people won't (link is a .pdf), even when you don't want to. But there is more value in realizing when you need to do that... and when you don't. I've learned a lot by waking up every morning and writing 3 pages. One of the things that I've learned, is that sometimes you have to let yourself deviate from the schedule you've set. That your idea of what should happen in your life, and when it should happen, isn't always the way that it will happen. And you have to be ok with that.

I've learned that you don't always learn what you think you're going to. I've learned that I write very quickly, that my thoughts center on religion and success. I learned that I am consistently and privately introverted (and, although many of you won't believe me, that my extrovertedness is a learned skill). I learned that I am unfailingly positive, more certain of myself than most of the world, and toeing the line between thinking and feeling. I am learning that I filter my words unconsciously, that I'm not often completely open with the thoughts in my head, and that to be self-expressive is difficult for me (which makes blogging scary, at times). I've learned that despite my background in design and engineering, my creativity has always been primarily in words, and that I have an uncanny ability to describe every situation in life through song lyrics (and am I reminded now of the Anna Nalick song "Breathe"):

two am and i'm still awake writing a song
if i get it all down on paper it's no longer inside of me,
threatening the life it belongs to
and i feel like i'm naked in front of the crowd
cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
and i know that you'll use them however you want to.

I learned (well, confirmed) that I like metrics and complete datasets. I learned that I view my life in the third person more often than I'd like, and that maybe there have to be changes in the way that I think in order to create the changes that I want. I learned that I am capable of thinking big thoughts and taking big chances.

I broke my streak at 48 yesterday. I have already lost the September Challenge. I have to start my quest to 100 days from the first step again. But I'm finally ok with that. This morning, I came back from my run and started my words.

the best place to start when you're struggling is anywhere at all

Today was a good day.

I've been working on a big design project for just under one full year. It's a two-part project with a lot of visibility in the company, and involves a change from our current paradigm that falls outside of our "core competence." For the past year, we've gone back and forth on designs and iterations, on concepts and user needs, on market segmentation. The topics are always interesting, and the insight is always good, but month after month, the song remained the same. It was starting to remind me of the Einstein quote about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

We were struggling.

just get the ball rolling. (photo courtesy of... )

But two weeks ago, something important happened. We brought in a new industrial designer, one with a totally different paradigm on medical devices than anyone we had on our staff. Almost immediately, he started on one piece of our design problem, and had a working concept in four days.

For anyone that works in design or manufacturing, four days is not a long time. Four days in the entire development lifecycle is a blink of an eye. It takes months, and sometimes years, to take a new product from idea to shelves. For medical devices, time to market is typically even further exaggerated, with regulatory requirements, clinical trials, and extensive documentation standing in the way. It's not uncommon for an implant or heart valve to take more than eight years of development time before seeing commercial use. For a kinesthetic person, it takes an enormous amount of discipline to work on something for that long without seeing the physical output.

The best part, though, was not that we had a design in front of us that met our design criteria, or that changed the way users interacted with IV lines. We had a design that gave us momentum. We got moving on part one of that two part design. And today, that spilled over into part two. I had been searching for a new material since February. I had drowned myself in the research, looked at material properties, made tables of peel / shear / tack values. I had tested for moisture vapor transmission rate and looked at every vendor this side of the Mississippi. But late last week, after seeing Howard's excitement and new designs, I got excited. I picked one. Today, the material arrived, and it works wonderfully. The excitement is contagious. Howard's designs get better with my excitement, and my designs get better with his input.

Momentum is a funny thing. When you get stuck in the inertia of the day-to-day, it's hard to visualize the end of the road (especially when the end of the road is 18 months down the line for a medical device to launch). But as a new friend of mine told me a few weeks ago, the important thing when you're dreaming up something new is not to come up with one really good idea; it's to come up with lots of ideas, period. Ideas lead to more ideas, and more ideas lead to action. And that's all you need to get the ball rolling.

what i don't understand about "busy" people

Sawra values sleeping, eating, and chewing on everything in sight. And it shows. (please do not reproduce without permission)

Everyone has 24 hours in a day. No more. No less. Everyone, or at least, the fully functional adults among us, has a choice of what they get to do with their 24 hours. Some value sleep. Some value work. Some value family, or friends, or athletics. We choose what those values are, and we choose how we manifest them. Which is why it amazes me that people still use the excuse "I'm too busy!" (read the part about being addicted to "busy")

No, you're not too busy. You just don't value what I'm asking you more than you value what else you're doing. And that's fine. They're your values, not mine. Trust me; I get it. I've been "busy." I've had (and still sometimes do have) 18- and 19- hour days, back to back (to back). I've been through engineering school and a political campaign (at the same time). But in each of those situations, I still had the choice of designing my life to fit those things that I valued.

Case in point: the traditional workplace is designed by people who value early mornings (and apparently going to bed at 9 PM). Unfortunately, I value late evenings with family and friends, and I value sleep. I value waking up and going for a run. I value having 30 minutes, before I do anything else - before I shower, before I take the dog out, before I check my email - to have time to write and sketch and ideate. And I value doing all of those things before I leave for work at 7:45 AM. So I design my mornings to accommodate for them. But I also value my work, and sometimes, these other things that I value get sacrificed to maintain the trust of my team and the integrity of my work.

The point is, what we value comes out in our actions. We are no busier than anyone else, our actions no harder, our lives no more challenging. We value what we value, and we put those things first, and we can't force those thoughts or priorities on anyone else. I think Stephen Covey says it best:

"... You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage - pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically - to say 'no' to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger 'yes' burning inside. The enemy of the 'best' is often the 'good'.

So it's worth asking yourself if you really live in a way that promotes those values. If you value your family, do you regularly make time for them each day or week? If you value your relationship with God (Shivji, Allah, Jesus, Yeshua, nonbelief, etc.), do you actively pray and make time for reflection? If you value your health, do you exercise routinely?

Or, are you too "busy"?

business travel is about being ok with being alone

I woke up this morning at 4:30 AM to find my hotel bill slipped under my door with a note that said "Thanks for staying with us - please leave your key in your room!" I marveled then, as I have for the past two days, about how the entire hospitality industry has designed itself for business travel. But as I got on the plane this morning and was catching up on emails and articles, I read this Penelope Trunk piece that resonated with me about being lost.

I am feeling lost. Maybe not completely lost. But at least a little. I've had some big conversations over the past three months. I've been pushed to a lot of limits. I'm still figuring out what all of it means in the context of my work and my life. To be fair, my work is my life. And I'm not complaining. I genuinely like what I do, both in the office and outside of it. We are lucky if we have work that is both meaningful and challenging to a manageable capacity. I find meaning in what I do, and I am challenged by it (some days, more than others).

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I drove to a restaurant and asked for a table for one. I made it a point to not have a single telephone conversation through my entire meal (Greg, I promise, I really didn't). I wanted to focus on the silence, on my own thoughts and how I would interact with my environment. More than myself, though, I was baffled with the ease that the waitstaff handled the situation.

It's amazing to me that the entire hospitality industry operates on two modes - family travel and business travel. As someone who traveled with my family a lot as a child, I never understood (or had any visibility into) how things are designed for business. Anyone who has spent an appreciable amount of time on business trips - both alone and with coworkers - can appreciate this. From the time I checked into my flight (online), dropped my bag off, went through security at Hartsfield, got on the plane, landed in Manchester, picked my bag up, rented a car, and checked into my hotel, I spent maybe 6 and a half minutes talking to someone.

Business travel is about making things faster. And the way to make things faster is to automate. It's the culture of business, translated into the culture of hospitality. To check out of my hotel or return my rental car, I didn't need to talk to anyone at all. Which is fine, at 6 AM, when I'm barely functional anyway, but still remarkable. I'm not sure that I want that culture to dominate my life. So I need to reevaluate my work being my life.

Traveling alone for business is so transient. There's nothing, except well-documented American Express bills, to remind people that you were there. There's so little interaction between people. It's kind of disconcerting, the fleeting nature of it all. Yesterday's experiment at lunch was a good learning experience in how I deal with being in social situations alone. But it was a more powerful reminder that we are social people, and we need interaction to be grounded and un-lost. It's hard to feel grounded when the culture of business takes over your life.

One of the things that I do when I travel is take pictures of my feet. I started a few years ago, in 2007, to focus my camera when I had multiple focal distances I was shooting. I used to post the pictures with the caption "I was here." Over time, through long trips and short ones, I've started doing it to ground myself - literally. So here's my shot from Manchester, NH this morning.

Manchester, New Hampshire - I was here.

So here's my attempt at un-lost, for now. I write. I take pictures of my feet. I try new things. I make the flight attendant take the banana from my breakfast tray away. And I admit to myself that while maybe I can handle eating lunch alone, I'll call my coworkers when I get back to the office and make some Amici plans.