Empathy and humanity at the IIT Design Research conference in Chicago

I’m sitting on the ground in Chicago O’hare, on my way back from the IIT Design Research conference. The conference couldn’t have posed a more contrary point of view, or elicited a more contrary reaction than the Industrial Design Society of America conference that I posted about last week.

The Illinois Institute of Design has held the Design Research conference for a number of years; held in Chicago, the conference draws about 300 practitioners, academics, and students who are interested in the emerging world of “design research”. This discipline, sub-discipline, or subtle niche of design encompasses foundation research (finding out about a particular context through various ethnographic methods), generative research (producing new designs and insights through the creative process), and evaluative research (analyzing the results of design activities to determine if they are usable, useful and desirable). This year’s conference had four workshops and thirteen core speakers.

Having just gotten back from the rockin' party - light on content, heavy on the booze - of Arizona, I was skeptical of the short IIT program. No parallel tracks? No choices to make? What if I’m sick of hearing from the same conference circuit folks – will this be a glorified tour of Chicago?

What follows is a relatively brief review of the individual speakers, the conference venue, and the phenomenon of niche conferences. I’m hoping to spark a dialogue amongst the very folks I write about: those engaged in conferences as a manner of extending the dialogue of design, of determining what, exactly, it is that we do, and of finding a common set of language and vocabulary for understanding the new landscape of design.

The conference was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which featured an exhibit by Jeff Koons; large sculptures of balloon dogs made a nice backdrop for the two hour workshop that Ashley Menger and I led on Design Synthesis Methods. Over the last four years, I’ve become more and more intrigued with Design Synthesis. My curiosity has become even more pronounced as I’ve reflected on the nature of the complicated system design frog has been taking on for our various Fortune 500 clients. How do you manage the complexity and sheer size and scope of the data produced through design research activities? We presented to a diverse group of 30, including folks engaged in marketing and strategy and Sapient, Design Research at IDEO, Design at Autodesk, and education at the Virginia Commonwealth University. Our workshop introduced methods of concept mapping, process flow diagramming, reframing, and insight combination as ways to synthesize large quantities of data and move from data to information, knowledge, or wisdom. The workshop was well received, with articulate comments, strong and lively participation, and a great discussion about applicability at the end.

Directly after our workshop, Liz Sanders kicked off the main conference program; she was then followed by Marty Gage (pictured below, speaking with Ashley).

I’ve seen both Liz and Marty speak before, and worked with both of them in various capacities at SCAD. Their talks focused on participatory design, with an emphasis on cocreation: Liz describes how we are moving away from a world of Design-led, Expert-mindset creation towards Research-led, participant-mindset creation. Marty showed examples of how Lextant drives sensory research by using physical objects as probes to describe material, scent, and taste. Both talks were strong, and set a tone for the conference to follow.

The afternoon session included some fairly disappointing content from Miguel Gomez Winebrenner, from Cheskin; perhaps the low point of the conference for me, Miguel made sweeping and ultimately insignificant generalizations about designing for Latino markets. Apparently, Latinos are more optimistic than everyone else, more family oriented than everyone else, more interested in being part of a community than everyone else, and more hardworking than everyone else. What I found more disappointing than the unsubstantiated and superficial generalizations was that Miguel was representing Cheskin; discussed in the context of Doblin and Fitch, I’ve always considered Cheskin to be amongst the thought leaders in the world of design, research, and cultural empathy. Combined with the disappointing talk I heard at IDSA from Fitch’s Andrew Shapiro (45 minutes on Innovative vs. Innovation? Yuck), I’m beginning to second-guess my historic understanding of these firms. Has the playing field changed that dramatically, or has history inflated the contributions from key participants so much that their public presence can’t possibly live up to expectations?

Friday evening was spent schmoozing with Marty, Jim Couch, Steve Portigal, Dan Soltzberg, Jason Severs, and former frog Laura Seargeant Richardson; we enjoyed a nice, albeit strange, dinner at the Drake hotel, and conversation ran in and out of the ideas of noticing, observing, and the general absurdity of the life designers are encountering.

Saturday started with a bang, featured talks by Indi Young, Laura Seargeant Richardson, and Colleen Murray. All three hit on – directly or indirectly – the idea of empathy, something that I’ve been considering a great deal as a method of achieving Wisdom during generative design. Empathy, described by Indi, is the "vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.” This definition is particularly relevant because it includes the word “experiencing”. Vicariously observing, or vicariously questioning, has little to do with actual experience, and the ability to truly feel what it’s like to be in another’s situation. Indi gives some pragmatic advice on achieving this in the context of a project: “Don’t conduct interviews; don’t write interview questions. Have a conversation with people. Interact with them, and find out what’s interesting to them. Don’t think of them as customers – think of them as people that you are interested to get to know.” This was the first time I've seen Indi present, and I was taken with her stage presence; she seems perfectly at ease - more at ease, perhaps - in the spotlight than in the audience. You get a feel for her philosophy about design through her presentation method: she seems to realize that it's just people watching her - not a big deal, and no need to be even a tad bit nervous.

Don Norman’s talk was, as usual, witty and full of slights and wordplays. I enjoyed very much his observations of artificial indicators vs. natural indicators; he also recycled some of his observatory work on buffers and lines, and he was – as usual – punchy and articulate. Equally as witty was Rob Tannen, who spoke on a topic that extends his work for interactions magazine – he’s thinking about the tools we use to complete our design research work, and considering how to embody best practices in a new object. I’m intrigued most that his firm – Bresslergroup, a consultancy – is actually considering producing such an object, bridging the lines between agency and product producer.

The highlight of the conference was, for me, the talk by Larry Leifer of Stanford. Larry, the Director of the Stanford Center for Design Research, has been instrumental in founding the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (or d.school); what could have been an arrogant pitch for the school turned out to be an incredibly articulate, reflective, and approachable presentation on the nature of chaos and ambiguity. Leifer presented axioms for “precision innovation”, and the most important was the notion that designers must preserve ambiguity. The idea of embracing the chaos is one that I struggle with; my analytical drive is to clean the chaos, to sort it, organize it, fix it. This is the most actionable element I gained from the conference: to embrace the chaos and preserve the ambiguity. You can see Larry embracing the ambiguity - and making a fairly descriptive point about technology - below.

I managed to ask Larry a question that’s been on my mind for several years, sparked in part by a paper I wrote last year for Artifact magazine. In the paper, I explored the nature of innovation, searching for a definition that distinguishes it from design. I wrote that "Design can be innovative, and the innovation can be powerful. Design can also be other things: it can be delightful, or heartfelt, or sustainable, or romantic."

I asked Larry to define innovation. Without missing a beat, he responded that innovation is “invention that sells”. I appreciate this definition, which meshes with my friend Professor Bob Fee’s take on innovation ("It needs to be more than just new: it needs to catch on"), and I appreciate more that Larry could actually answer the question so definitively. His use of the word invention starts to imply that not all design need be innovative: the notion of appropriateness is often as alluring and persuasive as the idea of creating something new, and to quote Charles Eames, “innovate as a last resort”. Additionally, "... that sells" starts to ground the invention in a succesful business model; we can't claim that we are "innovating" during the design process, or that we are "designing for innovation", because the success of the design has yet to be judged by the market.

To my opening point, the content, vibe, and approach to this conference was about as distinct from the IDSA conference held last week as could be. Consider: a young audience and a single track of content; rich and intellectual discourse, a continual discussion of themes, with speakers riffing off previous ideas, and a small enough group that one could meet, quite literally, everyone in attendance. From the appropriately designed conference artifacts, to the rational and insightful content, the conference was a strong, humble, and cogent example of a single design community.

Two thumbs up, way up, to conference organizers Amber Lindholm and Matthew Gardner.

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If you attended the conference, you might want to poke through my raw notes, which you can download here (as a 63k word doc).

Jon Kolko