have a come-to-jesus talk with yourself

I’ve written a lot of posts about self-awareness lately. Every blog with advice on blogging says you have to have a focus when blogging. I’m going to be honest with myself – when I started blogging, I thought I would be writing about design, user interaction, and the developing world. And I’ve only done that halfheartedly. But the reason I write is to create conversations with people. And the conversations in my head lately are about self-awareness.

(image courtesy of... )

Blogging is about honesty. Design is about honesty.

I’ll be honest with myself – I write about how people interact with objects, situations, each other, and themselves. Being able to view those interactions objectively – watching the gap between the encounter and the action of its response – is what makes a great designer great. Those honest truths that you uncover will lead you to great designs. The hardest interactions to understand, though, are the ones that you have with yourself.

It’s hard to be honest. It’s hardest to be honest with yourself.

We see this all the time in product design. Donald Norman says that people only buy things for two reasons. Either something is useful, or it is beautiful. In marketing land, what sells a product is features. But people don’t want features. They want usability and beauty. They just don’t want to admit to themselves that usability and beauty are not found in the latest and greatest features. People are notorious for not being able to do that. Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, I would have ended up with a faster horse.” Designers have to ask the right questions and be honest about the answers they get to be able to come up with something remarkable.

Right now, I don’t know what’s useful in my life, or what’s beautiful. In some ways, I’m at a personal and professional crossroads. It’s a good place to be, for the opportunities that it provides, but it’s a scary, uncomfortable, and brutally honest place to be, too. But that’s ok. I’m not sure what’s ahead of me, but I’m sure that it will be both beautiful and useful in my life.  To get there, I’m going to have to ask the right questions, and I’ll have to be prepared for the answers.

We’re all like that. We see beauty. We value usefulness. And yet we want the features – we want the 13 extra buttons that we’ll never use when we would have just been happy with the volume and channel controls. So ask yourself if the things you have are things that you find beautiful or useful. And if they’re not, ask yourself what they’re doing in your life. Do this with your things, your interactions, your circumstances. And do this with yourself and your personality.

Be honest with the answers you get. 

work hard at the things that matter - sometimes, that's just life

I can’t think of a single Peter Bregman blog post that I don’t like. In fact, on my Google Reader feed, all of his recent posts are starred and marked as unread, because I want to write about all of them. But writing all my blog posts about his blog posts would be cheating. So here are my own thoughts on working too hard:

(professional headshot... this is only here so Shan won't complain about no pictures; please do NOT reproduce)

I went through a workaholic phase a few years ago. I was constantly in my office, cranking out reports, sending emails, approving documents. From September until Christmas, I didn’t make it a single weekend without going into the office once (and usually twice). I would come home from the bar and would immediately walk to my home computer. I was too scared to get a Blackberry because I knew what it would do to my already-sparse social life.

And then my grandfather died.

And for the first day in a month, I didn’t go to the office. I sat on my bed and stared at the wall. I went home to spend time with my mother. I took a walk in the park with a friend. I took a long vacation. And I realized that the world would go on without me if I didn’t check my email on the hour, every hour. I decided that sometimes the best answers were ones that people came up with on their own, while waiting for you to get back to them.

I grew up.

The idea wasn’t that I wasn’t working on something meaningful. That year was one of the best experiences of my life, and I learned and grew immensely from it. The work I did was, and remains, a huge passion of mine. But there was so much more to do than just work. I hardly took time to enjoy the fruits of my work. I spent little time with the people who benefitted, or the people that I loved. I ignored my health. And although I gained tremendous experiences, I missed others that were irreplaceable.

I don’t regret for a minute where I’ve been, but that experience has helped shape where I’d like to go. Now, when I work, I love design, and I know that the things that I design will improve the quality of care for millions upon millions of patients. I keep people alive, and that’s rewarding. But it’s also rewarding to enjoy that quality of life that I preserve for others. It’s rewarding to pursue my passions – to travel around the world, to learn as much as I can, to share ideas with interesting people – because it makes the work that I do that much sweeter. So don’t regret working hard. But remember what it is you’re working for.

i'm watching lightning from my window seat

Flying from ATL to ELP this evening, and got a glimpse of lightning forming out my window. By the time I started taking pictures, the real bolts were hidden behind clouds, but here's some shots courtesy of my lowly (lovely?) iPhone 3GS and a GoGo inflight connection:

 (all phoros are personal... but, in this case, feel free to use them as needed!)

Art & science. The stuff that dreams are made of. And also just stuff. Beautiful.

Ok seriously, how awesome is the flat world we live in where I can check my Buzz feed, see Gary's post on lightning formation, look out the window of an airplane and see it in real-time, and send this out?

more dreams than memories

walking it out en route to the Taj Mahal (personal photo... please do not reproduce without permission)

This one’s for Ryan -

A few summers ago, I took a long vacation. For many years before that, and ever since then, I haven’t had such an opportunity. It wasn’t a trip for the faint of heart – I spent two months trekking through India and Malaysia with both parents in tow. The trip itself was remarkable, and at the time, much-needed. I was coming off of a very stressful, crazy, and unique year, and only had a few more months to go before graduation. It was my chance to relax, to rediscover pieces of India and pieces of myself, and to do some field research for my two senior thesis papers (one in biomedical engineering on design for the developing world, and one in economics on policy, poverty, and technology in post-1991 India). As such, I picked up The World Is Flat on recommendation from a professor just before I left.

It’s one thing to read a book and understand the context in which it was written. It’s another to experience firsthand, in real-time, that context, and to explore it both intellectually and emotionally. Friedman does an awful lot of writing on things that I’m familiar with – India, economics, development, Georgia Tech – but the most interesting chapter in my eyes was the last. There is a juxtaposition of two dates – 9/11, and 11/9. The former, most in my generation are familiar with as the day that the Twin Towers fell in New York. The latter, equally (or more) important, is the day the Berlin Wall came down and sparked a chain of events that led to the solidification of democracy worldwide (and the eventual opening of the Indian economy in 1991, for those that are interested in my economics research). He then takes these dates and puts them in the context of creation and consumption – of building and destroying. From Friedman:

"[…] then you and your generation must not live in fear of either the terrorists or tomorrow, of either al-Qaeda or Infosys. […] While your lives have been powerfully shaped by 9/11, the world needs you to be forever the generation of 11/9 - the generation of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories, the generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines that things can be better but also acts on that imagination every day.”

I was only three on November 11, 1989, but I can imagine that there was a great sense of unity and pride in the world the day that wall came down in Berlin. Friedman goes on to say that what causes people to be driven to extremism and hatred is not a poverty of money, but a poverty of dignity. To see others with opportunities that you yourself have never seen, to live in a world where those opportunities aren’t fathomable, that is a poverty of dignity. The goal of development should not be to create monetary wealth, but rather to create a sense of empowerment, a sense of dignity in a population. When I design a device to be used in a low-resource environment, I’m not trying to give a clinician in Nairobi the same technology that a doctor in New York uses. I’m trying to give them the information they need to make informed choices – on their own. I'm trying to give them tools that are meaningful to them in the context that they live in. I’m trying to give them something to look forward to, to create a dream of how things can be better, not in my eyes, but in theirs.

More dreams than memories, indeed.

the fallacy of the empty vessel

(photo courtesy of... )

“In the Yucatan peninsula, it is the local collectivity of Mayan women who hold authoritative knowledge about birth; that is to say, the knowledge that is considered consequential for making decisions about and managing the event. Childbirth takes place either in the woman’s own house or that of her mother and technologies are familiar household objects. There are unquestionably experts involved: a midwife, with extensive experience of many births, supported by other women of the family, each of whom has her own experience on which to draw. But moment by moment knowledge of the event is produced collectively by the participants and draws centrally on the authority of knowledge of her own body granted to the woman herself. 

Into this system, designers of development programs to promoted Western biomedicine introduce new technologies developed in the context of the high technology hospital. A case in point is the sterile scissors, introduced as an alternative to the local practice of burning the umbilical stump with a candle to prevent infection. The gap between the context of its design and the local conditions of its use (in particular, an absence of stoves) led to a reinterpretation of the technology from a sterile scissors to a pair of scissors dipped briefly into a bowl of hot water. Observation by traditional birth attendants of a subsequent increase in infant tetanus resulted ultimately in their rejection of the scissors in favor of the former, clearly more effective practice of cauterization.”   - Chapter 7: Computerization and Women’s Knowledge | Suchman & Jordan, 1988

The gap between the context of its design and the local conditions of use – there isn’t a more powerful statement in the eyes of a designer. The single most important answer one can seek when developing a new technology is answering the question of use case – where will this technology be used? By whom? In what environment?

Suchman and Jordan go on to describe the “fallacy of the empty vessel – the belief by those who design new technologies that there is nothing there in advance of their arrival.” It's an interesting point - we aren't designing for an environment which has nothing. We are designing for an environment that has something different than what we have.

These two thoughts together define the crux of the difficulty of designing for the developing world – determination of the use case by people who aren’t well-versed in the context and circumstance of the users they are designing for. In other words, how do I, with my middle-class, relatively healthy, immigrant-turned-US-citizen background, translate my background in engineering into meaningful designs for people who need it most? There has been criticism among the larger NGO community of the “helicopter designer” – those who come in without understanding the use case and drop in a technology that isn’t well-received and doesn’t build trust or collaboration between the parties, and then leave. But there’s also the reality of both an inadequate critical mass of native designers and engineers coupled with Brain Drain of those who do specialize in those fields. With every failed innovation that gets transplanted from a disparate use case to one in the developing world, we lose credibility and trust in the eyes of those who we meant to help.

The world has a long way to go to address all the health challenges that we face, and we have a collective responsibility to improve the quality of life of people everywhere. In the short term, that means developing technologies that cater to the populations who need them. In the long run, we need to empower people to develop those solutions on their own. As we develop, then, it becomes crucial to do so in a way that builds trust and fosters partnership between those who design and those who use.

why "work/life balance" is a misguided concept

“Never let the things that you do, overtake the things that you are.”

The statement rang in my ears as a reality check, sitting on stage in the Coliseum, waiting to give a keynote address to 3,000 people on the day before they began one of the most insightful journeys they would ever undertake. Words meant as advice for those who were just starting their college experience, not for someone who had endured through the bulk of theirs. They caught me off guard, as I stood to make my speech, aware of the irony of being asked to speak to a crowd not because of who I was, but because of what I did.

Fast forward to now – I work for a large, publically traded, conservative, well-established company. I design products. I am the quintessential biomedical engineer. And three years later, those words still hang on a wall in my room, a reflection for myself at the end of a day’s work.

I’m an engineer. But also, I’m a daughter. I’m a sister. I’m a dog owner, a friend. A recreational dancer. A passionate football fan and hardcore fan of all things Georgia Tech. And it’s deeper than that. I love city skylines. My least favorite thing in the world is bananas. I flinch when people try to touch my face. I rarely watch TV. I drink green tea in the mornings, and I love (really love) Starbucks vanilla scones. And I have a burning passion to design products to improve health for those whose problems are long forgotten.  These are the things that make me, me. These are the things that make my life remarkable, and the things that will make a difference in the world around me. While I love what I have the opportunity to do, it’s (I hope) who I am that will be remembered when I can no longer do it.

The hallmark of my generation is that we’re not willing to give up the things that we are in order to pursue the things that we do. There’s so much research about Gen Y wanting to be engaged in something bigger, from day one. There is no waiting till after 5 o’clock to pursue passions, no paying dues to be able to have an impact 10, 20 or 30 years down the line. There is no concept of “work-life balance”, because life is about both work and life. Ryan Healy says this in a great post on Penelope Trunk’s blog:

“This whole notion of needing to separate work and life implies that your career, which takes up about 75% of your day, is something you simply try to get through so you can go home and do what you really enjoy for the other 25%. What a terrible way to live. …  I would never dream of saying I want a Family/Life balance or I want a Friend/Life balance. Is work so terrible that people don't want to consider it a part of their lives?”

Part of building a remarkable life is being able to examine the things you really want, and finding a way to make them work for you. It’s harder to find things we love than it is to find a way to make them work in our favor. But understanding who we are – why we do the things we do – gives us the leverage to use our skill sets to do them, if we have the discipline. Build a career objective that is meaningful, and you can find work that lets you pursue that meaning. Build relationships that are worth having, and you can ways to make them work in the context and circumstance of your life. Build an understanding of the world you want to live in, and find a way to make that world a reality.

None of these things are easy to do. But not knowing enough about ourselves to know that we should be doing them, is near impossible. Don’t work so hard at what you do that you forget the importance of who you are. In the end, it’s the latter that matters most.