There is no rest for the weary though. We still have another re-write or two before the book is done. However, before that happens, I’m off to New York. I was selected as a Fellow for the 99% Conference. It is put on by Behance, a  not Occupy. I am expecting an awesome event!

Time is short. As a hold over check out a fun interactive photo, courtesy of Sara Hall(sorry the embed code wouldn’t work). Once I have more time I’ll get some better info up. It has been a while! (I still need to enumerate all the awesomeness(jobs!) that happened at the BDQ event as well!)

—Update—
The Event will occur on April 18th, from 6-8pm. Located at Venturef0rth.
————
We are accepting applications now.
If you’re a designer with a great portfolio, ready to work in a dynamic atmosphere Apply Here
If you’re a businesses looking to hire creatives with real skills, ready to workApply Here

For more information check out the post on The BDQ.

The event seemed focused on training the participants on what to say when engaging their representatives in Congress. The first day was mostly registration but there was a wonderful panel discussion about women in cycling and the need for better marketing towards them, as well as for more women to speak up about their wants and needs. The acronym M.A.M.I.L. (Middle Aged Men In Lycra) That was amusing.

The second day was down to business, with three sessions of classes, each with 6 options to choose from. They were all relatively focused on advocacy and many related to increasing ridership and engaging different populations. I attended one about the business and economics of bicycling, which had a few good points, but wasn’t that mind blowing. I followed that with one on boosting economic vitality in cities. This one was much more interesting with people providing some real examples of improvements they were able to attain by working with businesses. Finally, I wrapped up the day with a session specifically about what and how I should be speaking with the Senators and Representatives on the following day. This was great because there were staff members from congressmen there to speak about their experiences being lobbied and what the proper etiquette and methods are.

Finally on Thursday Nick and I travelled to Capitol Hill. We were just two of a larger group that spoke with staff members of Representatives Brady and Fattah, and Senators Toomey and Casey. All in all they were very receptive to our requests. Senator Toomey was the only one of the four that didn’t support the transportation bill, but it was explained that it wasn’t thorough enough. While this sounded nice, I am skeptical, but it was nice to have our voice heard, literally.

Nick and I had prepared some materials leveraging our thesis research, to help articulate and visualize our point. We developed small cards with graphics relevant to our thesis project to act as conversation pieces focusing the discussion on the improvements that cycling can have. We also developed a tumblr site, providing the url on the cards, to actually tell the story of Philadelphia and our cycling needs, to act as a follow-up to our verbal conversation. We were able to get these in the hands of many cycling advocates but even better, the congressional aides we spoke with. This way, we were able to add a new dimension to conventional lobbying creating more visual and memorable experience for the staff member, increasing the power of our message.

By the end of the day we had developed an iphone app. We had taken our research, applied the processes of design using our biases and abductive leaps to storyboard a potentially revolutionary digital tool addressing people’s health. It was recognized that an iphone app, or even a digital tool, may not be the most appropriate solution for the problem at hand, but it provided contraints that enabled the lessons to be taught and the workshop to flow, and so it was a contextually useful goal.

In the end my group had developed a concept that motivated the user to walk more by enabling his steps to charge his phone. This required an external accessory that would create the electricity, we envisioned this integrated into a phone case, and an app to manage it. The app would provide walking directions to the user’s destinations and make suggestions, based on passed journey’s, for where they could walk to return their phone to a full charge. Maybe not the best idea, but with design, often good is good enough, then you iterate.

For me the power of the workshop was not in the outcomes of the tasks though, but rather in the interstices between the lectures and the interactions. The seminar portions were over, the points were made, but it wasn’t yet time to re-engage in the group work. This is when his concepts, or more his framing of the concepts really started to color my perceptions of my education. The ideas of ethnography, synthesis and prototyping were so similar and yet different. They were so clear and unambiguous and seemed to lead directly to a new business model, contrasting the heady ambiguity that I often feel stuck in.

I’m still determining how to interpret it all, but one thing is for sure – it was refreshing.

We had a great turn-out. It seemed like a lot of people appreciated the opportunity to have some of their questions answered and be able to meet some new people in the local design/entrepreneur space.

A speed dating workshop is now in the works to try and pair local designers to startups in the hopes of finding offering some mutual benefits, great job and internship opportunities and great design skills.

A more in-depth write up by Kyle can be seen here: http://thebdq.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/effective-communication/

I continue to hear about the crisis the education system here in the U.S. is in. It is highly upsetting, and for reasons completely detached from the fact that I am currently in school, though that does not help. It seems like just one more problem coming to a head, it highlights, in yet another way, the failure of measuring success in purely capitalist ways and it is directly attacking the future of our society. We already have consistent budget cuts in education, which make affording materials, or even teachers, more and more difficult. This of course only further whittles our, already questionable, public school system down to only focus on the “necessities” like math and science. These of course creates a recursive loop creating a populous that only understands the world in quantifiable terms. These are the terms of a monetary bottom line. Coincidence? I think not. (This ostracises the arts and those that practice them to hobbiest. It is only recently it seems that design is moving from an end position to the beginning in many business practices, but I digress.)

This quantifiable monetary bottom-line mentality is evident in the fact that now our economic infrastructure is aiming their high-return-on-investment sights at the higher education system, which happens to be in a unique position to be capitalized on. Now, because we have commodified and stratified education in a way that lets us quantify our societal value off of our “earned” ranking in the education system, and our consumerism culture that makes us want to buy more, education is now a hot commodity. Merge that with the fact that our primary and secondary school system continues to get worse and worse. Therefore, if we haven’t already begun personally paying for education through private schools, we are not just being left behind, but almost pushed backward. No one wants to be pushed down, so we decide to upgrade our education.

In this high-unemployment economy, going back to school seems like a great idea. It should provide more opportunities, earn you some extra respect and give you something else to do besides applying to jobs you don’t want anyway. Recognizing this increase in demand, schools have rushed to offer online degrees to make it easier for you to give them your money. Now the schools do not even have to offer you a personal relationships or professional connections, they just show you the Paypal button. Of course, the prices haven’t changed much. They are still relatively unreachable for the majority of the population. This requires the infamous student loan.

If it isn’t infamous yet, it will be. It is the source of a new economic bubble. Student loans have a unique capability of weathering bankruptcy and really sticking around. They also have some incredibly high interest rates at almost 7% (for graduate school loans). Combine both of these and you have a rather attractive offer. Add in the increasing rate of those buying higher educations and you can see a very lucrative business plan start to unfold. However, we are just slowly killing the goose that laid this golden egg.

Now the schools do not even have to offer you a personal relationships or professional connections, they just show you the Paypal button.

Many of these new higher level education systems are literally shams, and the ones the aren’t still often are just in a different, more subversive, way. Many of these, even highly respected, higher level educational institutions are offering dated curriculums that don’t actually teach useful relevant skills (think law school). Sure, as long as the consumer gets “a job” after graduation, they may not care. However this is a very insidious quality, because it puts the onus of real education on the employer and the student, but not the establishment that is being paid to provide it.

This has now become a viscous cycle. America can not turn off its consumerism and so now we are working on ruining the formal system instituted to develop an educated, modern and aspirational populous. This is clear evidence of nature and power of capitalism and its ability to override government services. When we have removed the core value our education system is built on, learning, whats left is but a simulacra of academia’s initial vision. Requiring companies to compensate for this deficiency makes this whole set up even more flimsy because businesses have no infrastructure set up for this task. Thus you get the other recursive loop of not being hired because you have no experience, but how can you get experience if you can’t get hired!

Taking all this in, we see that eventually there will be a huge number of college graduate with no jobs, no skills, and massive debt that follows them like a ghost of past dreams. This will of course ruin our economy even more on now we will be left with un-educated masses.

The solution to this is to re-calibrate our education system. We need to truly value our teachers. Not bait them into this paradoxical position, telling they are highly respected members of our community and yet pay them nothing. In the capitalistic reality that we currently live in no money clearly translates to very low status. We need to put value on breadth not specificity. Do not cut art and music programs because they offer too few numbers to add together. These are the programs foster the ingenuity that even future “non-creative” types use to develop innovative solutions.

In this new global community we need to recognize the prestigious position we have held in the past was not just due to our military and violent capabilities. We are a young country but one uniquely positioned in time, space and culture to adapt. America is the cultural “melting pot” of the world. We still have some of the best schools in the world, which means we attract some of the smartest. If we would only put value on developing our own society, leveraging the unique aspects and intersections of the myriad of cultures we have at our disposal we could not only excel but actually become a model for other countries.

Education is fulcrum for this change because it directly addresses all of these issues over time. It can enable a shift in culture to be inclusive of all cultures, a shift in economics from a strictly monetary bottom line to a triple bottom line (people, planet, profit), enable creative application of an individuals ingenuity to advance, and more.

I recognize that the examples and arguments discussed are extreme cases, but that certainly does not mean that they will not and have not happened. Lets use these turbulent times to help guide our country in a better direction, because a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

A couple suggestions:

Contact your federal representative, a quick google search will let you contact your local rep as well.

Start a paper, or online petition.

A little context: Our military budget is almost 7 times that of our education

Since the library’s clients are the community members, we needed to hear their voice. This new space would ultimately be for the community to use so it was important to find out what the community actually wanted it to afford them. To do this we proposed a workshop, bringing these community members together to co-create multiple scenarios for how they would like to see this new space used.

Development :
Through working with the client on the development of this workshop we felt it was most important to highlight three key aspects of the space, the services it might offer, the layout and use of the space, and finally the experiences that would happen within it. With these three key aspects we developed a broad agenda to provide the overall structure for the event. It began with explaining to our participants why they had been invited to attend, and what would be expected of them. We would then break them into three small groups, each addressing one key aspect. Once the small group sessions were complete we would then reconvene and have a round of presentations to share each group’s work with everyone. This way everyone would be on the same page; allowing potentially interesting discussions to happen around the intersection of ideas between small group participants.

Overall we recognized that it can be very difficult for many people to feel creative or let their guard down and say something they think is crazy, but may actually be very insightful. To mitigate the anxiety around this, and help people stop thinking about a library as shelves of books, we decided to provide inspiration. We chose to display 50 images for each of the three key aspects that would be focused on. Some of which would have a short title to provide some context as to how the image should be considered. These images would be posted on large cardboard pillars and each participant would be provided a set of stickers that they could use to vote up and down their most and least liked. This way the small group sessions would have inspirational images that would then have extra physical layer that allows the participants to directly perceive the level of interest in the ideas that image inspired.

The small group sessions were scheduled to last an hour, each with a lead facilitator and one or two assistant facilitators who would develop a contextually relevant schedule of events for the session. I was the lead facilitator, with Georgia Guthrie and Charles Lee as the assistant facilitators, for the small group session focused on the experiences aspects of the space. Georgia, Charles and I developed a plan for our session where the participants would use the silent generation practice to brainstorm answers to three questions, using the inspirational images as the canvas for their post-its. The questions were:

• How do you want to feel lin the space? – We hoped this might help uncover how the space or activities might affect the experiences
• What happens in the space that doesn’t happen at other libraries? – We hoped this would help the participants consider activities that may not be “normal” for a library.
• Why would you go there? – We hoped this question would provide some overt motivations that the space could accomodate.

Their ideas would then be clustered into similar themes, which could then be prioritized. Using these prioritized clusters, the group would then co-create a collage or mood-board, visually describing the experiences that they would like to see in the space.

Implementation :
The event went quite well. We had a great turnout and great outcomes and it was all documented by the local public access media group PhillyCAM. During the initial image tagging portion people were very personable, interested and engaged. Once the small group sessions began though, the intensity increased. There were about 11 participants in my small group and we hit the ground running. Each question produced a multitude of responses, so after responding to all three we had a wealth of ideas to consider.

Using large paper on tables we explained and guided the participants in the clustering activity. We explained that nothing is sacred and that they should feel free to move ideas and break clusters. However we stressed the importance of honest and open conversations as well. This was important because each person may interpret an idea a bit differently and see the clusterings a bit differently, however the goal for this step is to reach a shared vision so communicating is a must.

Once the clusters were formed, they were labeled and prioritized. Prioritization happened by deep discussion. It is important to prioritize, because it helps makes clarify the ideas in development and make them more actionable. This part was very challenging for the participants, because required a lot of considerations. For us, the facilitators, it was challenging because often times the basic assumptions group, or procrastinators, were very sly about sidetracking the conversation. We created a “parking lot” poster to acknowledge and record all the important, but off topic ideas that arose. Unfortunately due to timing and the challenge of this exercise a resolution was not fully developed.

Evaluation and Follow-up :
It is important to learn from your experiences, and so looking back a few things I would have done differently include:

• Developing a smaller exercise that recognize the limited time frame
• Make introductions a priority at the start. We arranged them just before the clustering when discussions would happen, but it seemed like earlier introductions would help smooth out the whole process.
• Provide a visual outline of the agenda to allow the participants to understand the process they are about to engage in.

After the workshop, we had a lot of rough ideas and it was important that we refine them for our client. Back at the studio, the facilitators worked in their small groups to formalize the information they were presented and collected in the workshop. Once complete, each group, again, presented to each other. We then began to recognize patterns across the three groups, experience, spatial and services.

These patterns were focused into four themes:

• Collaborate/Work/Build
• Personal Activities
• Share/Learn
• Special Events

These were well received when presented to our clients with content from the workshop presented as evidence of these themes. As experience/service/systems designers we develop concepts for how people engage and interact with a space, but not the technical drawings for its production. We recognized though, the need for these concepts to be properly translated to the architect in charge of this and since we weren’t able to do so, we offered our client a set of options for how they felt they would most easily done.

Deliverable
A book was chosen as the final form to provide guiding inspiration for what the community wants the space to afford them. We elevated the meta-theme of Flexibility, from our four themes and reframed the information in light of this new theme. These included the programming that would be appreciated, as well as the infrastructure and spatial aspects that would be necessary to support such events. These new categories became the chapters for the book. Large, full-bleed, inspirational images were then presented on the pages following each chapter page, to show examples of what could be done in the new space. For context not only was a small description provided for each respective chapter, but a small explanation of the event that produced this information was included at the start of the book to help frame the content.

Client Response :
Our client was very pleased with the work and the deliverable. They said it really helped them reconsider what they had initially thought the space should be for and our deliverable will help them articulate the new considerations of the community the space will service. We were invited to design two more events regarding children and new parents, respectively.

The book begins by outlining three different types of people, connectors, mavens and salesmen. He provides a few guidelines for how these people can work to create these idea epidemics, such as leveraging context or the “stickiness” of their idea. While all these are clearly articulated, he provides no structure for how someone might actually develop an actionable plan around them. He does, however, provide a lot of fun anecdotal stories to prove his theories, from Paul Revere’s ride to the birth of Sesame Street. Thus a fun read, but a bit disappointing in terms of my current projects, because it wasn’t as useful as I had hoped it would be.

Once this was determined, I began to consider the point of interaction. Would it be when a designer is synthesizing? Would it be a means of presenting to clients? Would it be a personal item to support other design activities? For this I turned to my own experiences. Working with a hesitant and inquisitive client at the time, and then learning of a new paper published The Bias Against Creativity I decided to try and address the mis-understandings that often surround what experience, service, interaction and system design have to offer. The moment in time that seemed best suited for addressing these issues would be during the first designer/client meeting. 
Then I became curious about how this could happen? How does one provide clarity about the offering when it is so custom to the situation? After running through various conversation scenarios, I thought, what I applied the design process to the conversation? This design constraint helped me quickly narrow down what the tool should be.

Below I am considering the different conversational scenarios

I then narrowed the conversation to follow the design process

I decided to make a small paper, conceivably a pocket notepad, because you never know who may be interested in one’s services. It would be a conversation piece guiding the conversation, while simultaneously documenting it and building a take-away for the potential client. It alludes to the bill of sales you might receive at a bike or auto shop, though distinctly design specific. The idea is to engage the client about a real problem they are currently having and quickly develop short scenario, informed by the discussion, about how this could be remedied. This would enable the designer to highlight the value of research, which is something that can often be a hard sell.  It includes the client in the synthesis so that they may get a glimpse of the kind of abductive reasoning that often makes that step so ambiguos. Finally creating a storyboard lets the designer highlight the power of a visual narrative. They are key points that can be hard to explain with words alone. Once the conversation is complete the potential client then has a document, tailored to their personal issues, providing instant value, that they can take home and share, discuss and consider.

The process as I’ve defined it, is research, synthesis, prototype and iterate.  Within each category are small suggestions to not only seed the designers thought process, but provide a reference for the potential client as the conversational journey begins. On the back of the page there are more in-depth explanations of what the steps would entail if the designer were to be hired on.  

Each step is color coded to be distinct. The prototype step has slight grid markings to provide bounding boxes for the storyboard. The iterate step is not in a box, because it is a different kind of step. During iteration evaluation of the responses the prototype, in light of previous research occurs to reconsider how the problem could be better addressed. At this point, there is most likely no way to get responses to the short scenario prototype, so it would be pure speculation. However, this provides the designer a good place to bring up the value of rapid prototyping and testing with real users.

The critique I have most often received is that the shape should change, potentially to a small fold out pamphlet or a book. I plan to revisit the form of this and begin testing it this summer sometime. I have also provided hard copies to the Action Mill and will receive feedback in the coming months.

As a test I used pieces of tape to add a textural affordance to help me identify the keys for the different arrow tools in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. I figured if the little nubs on the “F” & “J” keys help me maintain proper typing position, these textural references may, in time, help me navigate the two tools I use the most in the two programs I use the most. Maybe, if it works, I’ll scratch a small more permanent texture onto the keys…no need to rush in to permanent defacement yet though!

The students developed some really interesting projects. Since they were, for the most part, left up to their own devices for what kind of application to develop there was a wide range of focus including: the history of hockey’s goalie mask graphics, a personal art gallery, information about the Lenape tribes, a deck of inspirational sketch cards, and more.

It was a great experience to be able use my technical background to support these students in their professional development. It was fun to see how the students explored the program and pushed its and their limits to make it exactly what they envisioned.

My role included more than just room and technical setup for the teacher, I also worked with the students during class on their technical and design problems, as well as providing critque and tutoring.

Make some more obviously. We hammered out a quick design, moving from the t-shaped base, like the whiteboards we have, to an A-frame for strength and simplicity. We then Snagged some wood and homasote from the “secret” storage floor and got to work. Sure it’s a rough prototype, that we hope to iterate on for the sake of the future generations of MiD-ers, but in the mean time it’s supporting our documents just fine!

Now, though, it is work time. Nick and I are taking our thesis project to the next step. We are looking at building an argument around the premise of induced demand for increasing bike infrastructure in the name of “Complete Streets.” We have begun by breaking down our research and making it more granular and accessible. This way it’s easier to reference and cross-reference!

To do this we developed two templates, one for documents and the other for interviews. Both are built on the work from my earlier Penn Medicine project. The document research template, or document brief template, has spaces for the theory, resulting implementation and examples that could be pulled from the corresponding texts. Collecting these snippets makes the data much more accessible. We also provide a short synopsis to give context, internally, to the snippets and a place for describing the possible connections to the rest of the project, so that it has external context as well. Of course, we put the MLA citation on it too, to make the book-writing step easier.

The interview templates, or data cards, are based on the quote cards developed for the Penn Medicine project. We’ve expanded them to include evidence, in addition to the regular wants/needs, opportunities and obstacles. We found that during the Penn Project some quotes were powerful and significant but didn’t really fall under the three categories and thus were forced into them. The addition of the evidence category seems to have remedied that. Currently they consist of interview quotes, but Nick and I plan on integrating information from the referenced documents to see what connections we can find between the research and the perceptions on the it all.

Currently we are working with the data cards. We’ve clustered them into maybe 7 themes and have then dug into each one re-sorting them to piece together a more cohesive story. To do this we’ve placed them on brown paper, using proximity to indicate relations working together to figure out what the story is. Keeping the cards loose made it real easy to manipulate and try different sequences to see which feels the most accurate in terms of our understanding. Once we came to agreement, we  used the brown paper backing as a canvas for annotations regarding the significance of a relationship or a quote itself.

Once completed we tape the cards down so that the page can be hung. Since this is our first run, there are a lot of overlapping relationships that we’ve had to separate. Our next step is to hang these up together and use string to connect these previously divorced relationships to really make a meta-map of connections between all the information gathered from our eclectic set of interviewees.

In the mean time though, we’re devising more plans for reaching out to our stakeholders, including motorists, pedestrians, cyclists and policy makers. We’re also visualizing our understandings, revisiting our project plan, re-working our thesis website, writing our proposal and more! Excited to see this one to the end!

Can’t get enough? Nick also wrote a lovely article about it here.

I made this video, as my visual story for Phase 2 of my IDEO.org application, to demonstrate my point.

When I talk of bicycles, I mean all kinds. Whether handcycles, cruisers, recumbents, commuters, racers and everything in between. Personally, I’ve had a number of bikes over the years. Mostly mountain bikes, but also a lot of road/bmx/mtb mutants as well. Currently I am using a 29er single-speed with road slicks on it. It is an epic set up for the city. It came to be when I had to sell my fleet in preparation for the Peace Corps but still needed something to ride. This was in ’05 when 29er’s were just starting to get popular. I have pretty particular specifications of affordability and adaptability and only Surly’s Karate Monkey or Soma’s yet-to-be-made Juice met them. I decided to bide my time and wait for a Juice, borrowing a friends Surly 1×1 in the meantime (Thanks David).

29′ers were suppose to fit taller people better so I was excited to try it out. With the wheel being the same diameter as a normal road wheel it would be easy to use it for both on and off road. Initially I built it up with a Woodman single speed cassette disc hub and Salsa Delgados(the only cost-effective 29′er specific rim at the time) and road it literally everywhere. I had folding mountain bike tires so I could ride to a trail with them in a bag, swap tires, lock up everything to a tree, go for a ride and then swap everything back and head home. Awesome.

I am not exactly nice to bikes and quickly found those wheels lacking, so I sold them quick and upgrade to DT340′s and Velocity Dyads. The 340′s were meant for all-mountain and downhill riding so I expected them to be solid. The Dyads I worried about though, since they were a road rim for tandems and commuting; I figured they would be strong, but for off road, I didn’t quite know. The full cassette on the 340′s was also nice because it let me hone my chain-line in a way the single speed cassette couldn’t, while still offering me the ability to put more gears on if I pleased.

That setup worked for a while. It wasn’t until I was in San Diego that I noticed cracks in my rims and on my frame. I warrantied the frame, losing my special limited edition frame color of midnight silver (purple), but gaining un-needed v-brake bosses. The new color was cool, but I wasn’t psyched to have a surplus of brake mounts. I also warrantied the rims and upgraded to more legit 29′er rims that had since come into production. Glow in the dark polk dots were a really a no-brainer too, seriously, they are so fun!

Now, after tearing up the sandy San Diego trails it is pretty much a city-only bike here in Philly, but it is one awesome city bike. It can handle anything these mean streets can dish out. Since being here I had Krauss Cycles make some struts to mount a basket I got from a Gary Fisher Simple City to my fork’s surplus V-brake mounts. It’s been a nice addition though I’ll probably not keep the color…

Oh and P.S. Thanks to Nicolas Coia and Jennifer King for helping me make such an awesome video!