Adaptive Path Blog

An interview with Scott Berkun, author and public speaker on
Show Length: 20 minutes

In 1956 a documentary called The Mystery of Picasso was released, showing two hours of Pablo Picasso doing what he did best: making paintings. This film gave the public a first-hand glimpse directly into this infamous artist’s creative process. Public speaker and writer Scott Berkun and I got together for tea to talk about the film and our own experiences around creativity. As both managers of creative teams and creators of work ourselves, we looked at how our processes aligned with Picasso’s…or where we could learn from him. As the discussion unfolded, we came up with an interesting set of guidelines that enable creativity to flourish.

Listen to podcast on www.TeaWithTeresa.com

Part of the Smart.fm iPhone App Story
By our talented summer associate Dane Petersen

The smart.fm website offers a number of fun learning games that help you master all sorts of world knowledge, from Japanese to French to European birds. Like a sophisticated stack of flash cards, the games learn and adapt to your performance, and constantly tune themselves to providing you with the optimal learning environment. As you progress through the stack, items that you have obviously mastered will automatically appear less frequently than items that you are still trying to learn.

The flash card analogy works well for describing the functionality of the smart.fm learning games, but it provides an impoverished account of their more experiential qualities. In particular, BrainSpeed’s pulsing icons, flapping wings and exploding pufferfish all work together to create a gaming environment that feels face-paced and zany. In designing the look and feel of the learning game portion of the smart.fm iPhone app, we knew we had to create something that would be more engaging than a stack of index cards.

When working on the experience design project for smart.fm, one of our guiding design principles was that the new website would be a fun and open space that invites play. Bringing this concept to the iPhone, we wanted to make the mobile learning game lightweight and playful, easy to start and easy to put away, while still delighting users with fun interactions. People would likely find themselves playing the game during those odd dull minutes of the day, perhaps while waiting for the bus, and we wanted to make sure that these short bursts of play offered a rewarding experience.

In reflecting on these goals, we generated numerous sketches and ideas for ways we could represent the timed, multiple-choice nature of the mobile learning game in a richly experiential manner. We explored metaphors for different ways to show questions and answers, represent time running out, and communicate the user’s progress towards learning an item. We considered the materiality of the game-space, and imagined ways to introduce tangibility through unique interactions. In this video I present a brief walk through my sketchbook, and talk about these explorations:

I took the results of these exploration sessions into a bit more detail, generating a number of sketches that depict potential design directions for the learning game. “Sore” is the Japanese word for “that, that one,” and I oriented this series of sketches around a screen where the user is trying to learn this word, and select its correct response from a series of choices. I talk more about these sketches in the following video:

We thought about an “Advent Calendar” approach, where the user would swipe to open paper doors on multiple-choice items to select their desired response. We also considered a “Scratch-Off” concept, inspired by lottery tickets and scratch-and-sniff stickers, where the user would use their finger to scratch off a response.

Going further afield, we mined the Pogs fad of the 1990s, and cooked up a direction that would involve throwing a “slammer” at an anthropomorphized stack of Pogs in order to select a response. Our interest in Pogs came from a desire to give the user some sort of token as a tangible reward for a correct response. We distilled this concept down into another approach, with Pogs that represent possible responses scattered across a hardwood table. The user would grab the correct response Pog and drag it into a drawer, where they were collecting all of their correct responses.

Finally, we explored a rich metaphor with the natural world, considering a concept where people would interact with a button-based game overlaid on a landscape. As the user answered questions correctly, this world would fill up with small items representing their responses. These items might start as autumn leaves, for example, but as the user answered more questions correctly the world would progress through the seasons, switching to snowflakes, flowers or fireflies. Instead of a conventional timer, the countdown for each individual question would be represented by a rising and setting sun… you’ve run out of time when the moon and stars come out, and another day has passed in your world!

Exploring all possible design directions in these highly generative sessions is an important part of our design process. By keeping the fidelity low and at the sketch level, we are able to entertain a massive number of ideas while still producing a tangible artifact that we can share with other members of the project.

As a systems-thinking, ridiculously rational INTP, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told to, “Stop overthinking!” After all, rational thinking isn’t naturally associated with creativity. I admittedly find it difficult to act on creative whim, preferring designs that are the logical outputs of a rational thought-process. To me, a “beautiful” design is one that is logically coherent and rich with meaning.

These left-brained tendencies can be a liability at times: I tend to dig deeply when I should be thinking broadly and can turn a simple idea (or sentence, sorry readers) into a complicated one by logical extension. But in trying to fight these tendencies, I’ve instead discovered ways to channel them into creativity.

I got to try these techniques with others when facilitating a recent workshop for some fellow left-brained people from Smart.fm. I loved these guys — they thought like I thought and didn’t hesitate to bring up rational nits, like “Shouldn’t that one be a blue sticky note? Maybe we should fix it.”

By introducing some “Left-Brained Creativity Methods” (learned from colleagues and conferences) to give structure to our thinking, I found I could channel our analytical energy into thinking experientially and generating out-of-the-box ideas. Here are two of the methods I used during this workshop on understanding and re-imagining Smart.fm’s online learning experience.

Experience Mapping

Concept maps can serve many purposes, but at Adaptive Path, we’ve found them to be useful tools for getting systems thinkers to think from the user’s perspective.

Creating an “Experience Map” involves identifying all of the parts of a system, connecting them, and describing these connections from the user’s perspective. For example, in a typical concept map, we might link the concepts of “tags” and “items” by saying “tags are added to items.” But if you take a moment to ask, “But how does this help the user?” you might get something richer, like “tags help users find and re-find items.”

While seemingly impersonal and abstract, for us left-brained folks, taking a moment to re-think every connection from the user’s perspective helped us get our left brains into the users’ minds.

Metaphor Analysis

Once we’d identified the core concepts and activities in this site’s experience — which included “Sets” and “Collecting” — we took one concept at a time and played a “word association game” where we threw every word we associated with that concept up onto the board. We also brought in random participants from AP for this activity, whose minds were a blank slate (they knew nothing about the site), to join us in free-listing associated words and metaphors. For the concept of “Sets,” for example, we came up with everything from “Bento Boxes” to “Coral Reefs.”

Then, inspired by Chauncey Wilson’s “Metaphor Brainstorming” and Edward De Bono’s “Random Word” methods, we chose random metaphors and deconstructed their characteristics: Games like Marbles and POGs are about “keeping what you win” and have “discrete, tangible, hand-held parts.” We clustered metaphors with similar characteristics together, then used these characteristics to inspire design ideas.

The free association game got us thinking outside the box, while the clustering and analysis activities leveraged our left brains to produce a rich soil from which concepts could sprout.

The team loved these activities, and we produced solid concepts we’ve been able to carry forward. One participant said that brainstorming can be challenging when it’s totally open-ended, and that, for an analytical person, these structured activities and templates made it much easier to generate ideas. More importantly, because the ideas were grounded in rational thinking, he felt more confident that they would carry weight in the long run.

Tapping into left-brained thinking can reveal a powerful force for idea generation. I’m looking forward to discovering more ways to harness the left brain by giving structure to creativity. If you’ve experienced any interesting methods, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Will we look back on the desktop experience of today in much the same way we reflect on computer punch cards of yore? If so, when will the desktop and mouse become irrelevant? How do people who want to explore the world of technology experiences that are free from the tethers of the keyboard and mouse begin?

These along with a host of other thought-provoking questions were among the topics of discussion, debate, and jest at last week’s Beyond the Desktop panel discussion. I was honored to be in the company of six brave and talented designers who are exploring the frontier beyond the desktop and thrilled to see such active interest in this topic by the San Francisco UX community.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes of the evening:

We’re still skeptics and I think that is an important perspective to have. I wouldn’t say the technology that we work with is better than anything out there right now, it’s just different. A lot of this is still a hammer looking for a nail. People come to us and say, “we want a multi-touch application.” and we say, “Why?” The challenge for us is developing an understanding for what this technology is well suited for. ~ Daren David

We use play in a lot of our design process. We find as we design stuff, we end up opening a box of things and emulate experiences on the table that way. That is one of the big things that has changed for us – our deliverables have gotten more physical and less visual. ~ Nathan Moody

The truth with all these emergent interactions and interfaces is that the conventions haven’t been established, so you don’t actually know how to work and you end up experimenting a lot more. ~ Noah Richardson

Prototyping used to be a luxury, but these types of emergent interactions, it is an important part of the design process. ~ Daren David

Often times the technology we’re designing for is still being developed. So there’s a lot of give and take and trying to understand what is possible… so we often have to attack from both ends. ~ Jennifer Bove

How do we go from bling to kaching? This is new and shiny right now, but five years from now when this become ubiquitous, what will be the meaningful experiences? And what will be the proper uses of these kinds of technology? ~ Daren David

It really comes down to experimentation. The recognition about a lot of this stuff and the reason I think a lot of people are here is that everybody recognizes and has this feeling that there is potential in this stuff, but we don’t really know what it is.
~ Jeevan Kalanithi

The common element all these interactions share is that they’re all more sociable. ~ Brett Fitzgerald

I have two Roombas in my house and they engage in gladiatorial combat. It’s awesome. I don’t feel like they’re gonna get hurt because they look like frisbees. ~ Nathan Moody

When your Roomba saves your life you won’t feel so cavalier about them. ~ Daren David

… there was a project that reminded us how different emergent interactions can actually open up different affordances and provide accessibility to people who haven’t had it. I have a two-year-old daughter and she instinctively knows how to use my iPhone. It’s frightening. And to see her walk up to the television and try to swipe it… you realize that some of the things being created by natural user interfaces really open things up…. I tend to be fairly optimistic with respect to technology and I think there is this notion of accessibility in a lot of the work that we are doing that we can take a fair amount of pride in. ~ Noah Richardson

I would advise people who want to start exploring interactions beyond the desktop to start by looking at the applications or experiences on the desktop they are currently designing and understanding that it is an instantiation of something that is probably broader. Start thinking about what happens when a user walks away from the computer. What are other the other opportunities? ~ Jennifer Bove

For those of you unable to attend the event, here’s a video of the 90 minute discussion:

Beyond the Desktop Panel Discussion from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Sketch note by Kate Rutter

Photo credits:
Panel discussion photo courtesy of Allison McCarthy
Sketch note photo courtesy of Jennifer Bove

In December, a blind man led me into darkness. I had a cane, but it only partially helped. I felt around with my hands. I listened to the voices of the people around me, gauging their distance by their loudness, shifting so I didn’t bump into them. The smell of grass helped me understand I was in a park. When I put my hands into a basket, I touched oranges and knew it from the feel of their skin, not their smell.

I was in an exhibition called, “Dialogue in the Dark.” As the organizers explain, “In completely darkened rooms, blind people lead small groups of guests through an exhibition in which everyday situations are experienced altogether differently, without eyesight.” Prior to this, I’d never experienced blindness. Actually, I’d never experienced the loss of any sense before.

At first, my eyes strained to see, which was distracting. But when I focused, instead, upon my other senses, it was…fun, an adventure. I was experiencing the world in a fascinating way I wouldn’t have known, had I stuck to sight.

Of course, you don’t have to go into a dark room to grasp the difference between blindness and sight. But, like all good exhibits, it got me thinking…about assumptions and how often we assume that others experience the world in the same way we do. We make these assumptions everywhere: In conversation, design, and judgment.

Imagine:

You and I are sitting across a table talking to each other. I assume you hear me, and that my words mean to you what they mean to me. I assume you see the expressions on my face and understand their implications. I assume you are enjoying the hint of caramel in tea we share. When I shake your hand goodbye, I assume you feel my warm hand and know that I am calm.

Meanwhile, you can’t hear me well over the furnace, and you forgot to put your contacts in this morning, so my face is a blur. You burn your tongue on the tea so it tastes like nothing, and you only notice how cold and sweaty your own hands are when we shake goodbye. You feel guilty because you were distracted throughout the conversation; I reminded you of a childhood friend and your mind kept traveling back to old stories.

Therein lies one of the ironies of human experience: You and I are NEVER really having the same conversation. Never. Assumptions are dangerous because they keep us from listening and paying attention. Granted, we’ll never gain total understanding of one another. But, we can do a better job of understanding more. In the next few weeks, Adaptive Path will make an announcement on this blog about a research and development project that touches upon the impact of assumption in design. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll contemplate the power of assumption in your own life and work, looking for places to assume less and observe more.

It’s exciting to see smart, thinky people’s ideas hit the uber-big time. And if they are visual-thinky types, it just makes my heart go pitty-pat all the faster.

So we’re thrilled that Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin is culling kudos from across the digital realm. We first met Dan in September, when he spoke at Adaptive Path about his inspirational ways of integrating visual communications for solving business problems. His insights are intriguing, fun and insightful, and the event was a hit.

Now we get to congratulate Dan for his major wins in the publishing arena:

• Amazon:  #5 of the Top 10 Books 2008 : Business and Investing
• Business Week : Best innovation & design books of 2008
• Fast Company : Best Business Books of 2008
• Best of BNET : #4 of the Best Business Books of 2008
• Business Pundit: #4 of the 10 Best Business Books of 2008

Sad to have missed the September event? No worries! Dan will be speaking at MX 2009 : Managing Experience through Creative Leadership, March 1-3, 2009. It’s your chance to hear what all the buzz is about, and to claim your inner visual practitioner.

Congratulations to Dan, and please join us in March to see him up close and personal at this marvy Adaptive Path event.

You can register for MX 2009 here.

(psst! Between now and the end of the year, you save 15% off our already discounted registration fees with the promotion code RNSB (Register Now Save Big.) But don’t tell anyone else. It’s just between us…)

We started out the week right, reminiscing about a massive group twister game and balloon fight in Dolores Park, San Francisco. The event? The MP3 Experiment. The culprit? Improv Everywhere. The result? We mused on the lack of PLAY in grown-up lives, resolving to create more of it in our own.

Since we were already on a bit of a philosophical bent, we started thinking about communication and interpersonal relations. After reading about Linguist David Crystal’s perspective on text messaging, we got to contemplating…is texting a corruption, expansion, or of little impact to language? Crystal thinks that a mere trillion texts, “appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language.” Hmmm….doesn’t feel so insignificant to our quickly texting fingers.

Speaking of communication, we’ve been thinking about the webiness of the web – how it is moving outside of its traditional boundaries, sticking itself, bit by bit into other areas of our lives, a la twitter, iphones, etc. We used to “go” to the internet. Now, the internet is coming to us. Or, so says Tim Arnall.

Tim shook us up a bit, but not nearly as much as watching YouTube breaking apart right before our eyes.

That was all just a bit much, so we had to take a mental break and get back to PLAY. And PLAY we did.

First, we got down to the Android Rap Song.
Then, we got our house plants costumed early for Halloween.
While we were prepping for Halloween, we stocked up and ate too much candy, right along with our favorite little French girl, Capucine.

(When you’re that cute, you can get away with anything, we realized.)

Tummies full, brains stretched, and tired from play, we plan to spend the weekend resting.
Till next week….

Peace out.

On June 20th, 2008 I began the 90 Mobiles in 90 Days project. I was suffering through a bought of the post-project blues and upon encouragement from friends, I started a “creative recovery” treatment plan modeled after the structure and mantra of AA’s 90 meetings in 90 days. For 90 days, I committed to thinking about, sketching, drawing, and prototyping ideas about mobile design and user experience. I posted the ideas to a blog each and every day. Like folks recovering from any addiction, I didn’t know what is at the end of those 90 days, but I had faith that something good was on the other side… and there was.

Creative Outlets
Addiction is the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice, so much so that cessation causes severe trauma. There’s a razor thin line between addiction and passion, and I started this project questioning if I had crossed that line. My biggest fear was being identified as a workaholic: A person with no sense of self outside of my vocation because I lacked the discipline to enforce boundaries between my personal and professional selves. I thought I just might be addicted to my work. Instead, I discovered through this journey that I am just passionate about ideas… and that my ideas need outlets.

I went into this project feeling blue, and was surprised at how quickly those feelings of sadness and loss disappeared once I started the 90 in 90 project. The daily ritual of allotting myself the space and time to explore my thoughts was liberating and giving form to my ideas through writing or sketching was more than fun, it was pure joy. I realized that my head was full of ideas and the 90 in 90 project gave those ideas a place to go. I discovered my feelings of sadness and loss were not caused by the project coming to an end, but by the loss of a creative outlet.

The design profession has a built-in outlet for ideas, but projects and professional work is riddled with boundaries and constraints. So many ideas are abandoned and left on the cutting room floor. After three years of working in the mobile industry, there were tons of ideas that I’d left behind because they didn’t fit into the project’s particular constraint. I hadn’t lost them though. Those ideas were trapped in my mind, left to haunt and torture me; stuck, unexplored, undocumented, with nowhere to go. I realized that ideas belong in the world. The act of writing about them—giving them form—gave my ideas somewhere to go and a sense of life and vibrancy, movement and velocity. Ideas need a space to be explored, shared, and built on and creative outlets provide that environment. Work had become my primary creative outlet and I realized I simply needed more outlets… many more.

Ninety in 90 served as a creative outlet, plus it allowed me to rediscover other dormant creative outlets—drawing, photography, painting, and writing—and the role they play in my life. I quickly realized that I *need* these outlets—these places and environments to explore ideas in order to feel happy and fulfilled—for my own personal well-being. This project allowed me to revive these outlets and nurture them. I now realize that my daily basic necessities are sleeping, eating, exercising… and creating.

A Template for Creative Practice
Back when I studied fine art in college, I had a painting professor who assigned the class the task of painting 30 paintings in a week. Seven days and a demoralizing critique later, she told us the point of the exercise was not to produce brilliant work, but to give us a template for a creative practice. She believed in the law of averages: The more you paint, the better chance you will have of creating something great. She encouraged us to be prolific, knowing that success would follow.

When I started 90 in 90, I felt stuck. I knew I had ideas that I wanted to express and share, but I didn’t know where to begin. I wanted the ideas to be good… brilliant in fact, and the pressure I put on myself to share only brilliant ideas became paralyzing. For a good long while, I had allowed my ideas to wallow in the shadows of my mind and it became the ultimate downer. Inertia set in.

Committing to creating something everyday for 90 days was daunting, but the alternative was to be held hostage by the trapped ideas in my head. In the end, the choice was easy: Sit around and feel bad, or direct that energy into something productive. Starting 90 in 90 was like taking a deep breath and leaping forward. It created momentum.

Admittedly, some of the ideas from 90 in 90 are brilliant, others are pretty good, and some of them simply stink. Instead of getting hung up on evaluating my ideas, I focused on the practice of producing an idea everyday. I couldn’t predict when brilliant ideas would strike, but I realized the process and the practice of making a space for my ideas would allow something great to happen. When you’re generating lots of ideas, you increase your odds of something magical happening. I became prolific.

Moreover, by committing to this project for 90 days, I was bound to get better at it each day. Thinking about mobile user experience became habit forming; almost like an itch I had to scratch. It helped me clarify the things about mobile user experience that matter to me.

Silencing My Inner Critic and Finding My Tribe
The decision to carry out this project online in a public forum was initially one of the most terrifying aspects. I was scared. What if my ideas were dumb? What if I write something stupid? What if everything I posted had been previously articulated and discussed? Did I really have anything interesting to say? These questions ate away at me until I remembered something my old figure skating coach once told me, “You are your own worst critic. Nobody is harder on you than you.” He was right. Many times throughout my life, I have come face to face with my own worst enemy. I see her every time I look in the mirror.

I quickly realized that silencing that inner critic would be quite possibly the biggest and most daunting part of this project. If I kept my ideas to myself, I would be left alone to contend with that critical voice. I decided to share these ideas in a public forum instead of leaving them to the brutality of my internal judge and jury.

My inner critic was quickly tempered by the encouragement of the people who followed me along on this journey. People who read my blog emailed me and cheered me on with their words of encouragement. My inner critic became powerless when people told me I had inspired them. With the support and encouragement of the people who followed along, I found my voice and the courage to use it.

More importantly, my ideas served as a bridge for connecting me with people who share my interests and passions. In sharing my ideas and point of view, I connected with a tribe of people interested in nurturing, supporting, and celebrating ideas about mobile user experience. This project allowed me to become part of that conversation… and part of that tribe.

Plus, the ideas just got better. Sharing my ideas with the world allowed them to have a life of their own. They were free to connect with other ideas and were incorporated into a host of other conversations. Even when people disagreed with a concept or an opinion, it started a conversation. Ideas get better with debate and when others are able to build upon them. 90 in 90 became less about authorship and “my ideas” and more about contributing to a community of thought. 90 and 90 allowed me to connect to something bigger than myself.

Renewed Engagement with the World
In the process of coming up with an idea a day about mobile experience every day for 90 days, I started thinking about where inspiration comes from. It would seem it came from anywhere and everywhere. Admittedly and obviously, a lot of the ideas were born out of first hand experiences in mobile contexts—waiting for the bus, walking down the street, waiting at an airport. But inspiration also comes from unexpected places. I was inspired by architecture, kelp forests at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, my niece. I never knew when inspiration would strike and I quickly learned that I needed to be completely open to the world—to the people and places around me—and then inspiration would follow.

This process has allowed me to forge a different relationship to the people, places, and things that touch my daily life. I feel more engaged with the world because I see it and rely on it as a source of inspiration. This process has also opened me up to new people and new conversations. I’ve become actively engaged with my neighborhood, the city, and with nature. I’ve become a more observant, empathetic, and patient person. It has made me a better designer.

90 in 90 started out as an exercise in creative recovery. When I started, I didn’t know where it would end. I just had faith that in the practice of doing something everyday, something good would happen. And it did. I went on a creative journey, and created a body of work that reflects aspects of the mobile user experience that I believe are important and emergent. I also learned loads about myself as a person and as a designer.

When people ask me what others can learn from this project, I come back to the reasons why people take journeys of any kind. Journeys allow us to explore, they allow us to discover; they can be arduous at times, and full of surprises and fun at other times. Most importantly, journeys provide us with an understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world. The journeys themselves are often the least difficult part; more often it’s finding the courage to start.

I started by taking it one day at a time.

90 Mobiles in 90 Days

90 Mobiles Flickr Photo Set

We’re excited to host Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems ad Selling Ideas with Pictures. He’ll be speaking at Adaptive Path on Tuesday, 9/23, so c’mon over and get your sketch on with Dan!

Dan will present on how to distill complex ideas into easily shared and memorable sketches. If you’ve ever stared blankly at a white board, a sticky note, or the back of a napkin this is an evening to get you inspired and started making concepts into sketches.

If you’d like to see some of Dan’s work and read what he’s thinking about, check out his blog here: http://www.digitalroam.typepad.com/. You can also read about Dan in a recent Fast Company article: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/124/the-napkin-sketch.html. Signed copies of Dan’s book will be available for sale.

Details:

• Tuesday September 23, 2008
• 6:00pm – 8:00pm
• @ Adaptive Path :363 Brannan Street, San Francisco, California 94107
• Beverages and nibbles will be provided.
• Please show up on time as the talk will start promptly at 6:45.

You can rsvp here.

Hope to see you then!

Design and innovation have become the hot topics and drivers of internal change within companies. Everyone is asking “How do I innovate?” and in return some designers have cheered “Methods!”. With methods on the forefront of everyone’s innovation list, many consultancies have begun to publish and sell their methods.

Method tools come in many shapes and sizes, here are a few to check out:

Cards:

IDEO published their set of 51 method cards in 2003 using the framework of “Learn, Look, Ask, Try”.

Nform developed a set of trading cards they have passed out during conferences that cover the areas of “Understand, Solve, Evaluate”.

Arup offers a deck of “Drivers of Change 2006” cards to explore the opportunities of “Social, Technology, Economic, Political” change.

Play and Games:

Recently at the LIFT Asia 2008 conference our very own Alexa presented “The Wonderful World of Make Believe” discussing play as a method of innovation.

Luke Hohmann wrote the book, Innovation Games in which he describes 12 games/ methods to play with your customers to better understand them.

MetaMemes developed Think Cube to facilitate collaborative innovation methods in a board game setting.

Online Resources:

The UK’s Design Council offers an online resource to a list of methods they recognize as being helpful in the design process.

The HCIDl, a part of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, offers a Design Methodolgy Wiki to the design community.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recognizes a set of common used methodologies under ISO 13407.

Methods Insights:

Hello, AP blog world- my name is Amy and I am one of the Summer Associates here at Adaptive Path. This summer I had the opportunity to spend some time thinking about methods and how they fit into the design community. Here are some insights I have concerning methods.

Method Tools can be Static

The landscape of methods has lifted a bevy of insights and issues. To begin the conversation, it has come to mind that method tools such as libraries, blogs and wikis are often static. We have yet to find a strong community around a method tool that fosters the content. It seems design firms, schools or practitioners often develop method libraries use them a few times but their vibrancy fades rather quickly. A laundry list of methods with descriptions is rarely a helpful resource for practitioners

The magic of methods surfaces when methods become a part of practice and understanding. Methods cannot live in a library but rather as essential tools within a practitioner’s toolbox.

Methods are only as good as the directions they point you in.

When faced with a project, choosing the right method is critical to the project’s success. Choosing the wrong method can mean insufficient data, or the wrong kind of data, lost time, and opportunity. Methods are a way to gain information, perspective, understanding, or context within a problem. It is important to choose the right method so that the resulting data can be actualized.

Choosing the right method can be confusing.

Often times Method tools (like method libraries) provide stages to categorize methods to help in this choice, however each tool offers a different framework. As a result, practitioners often abandon the method tool and instead consult past case studies or other practitioners to gain insight on a method’s ability.

Determining a method’s ability can involve consideration on several different axes, which can provide even further confusion. Some methods are more appropriate in the design stages, while other methods are more appropriate in collaboration with stakeholders but not during the design stages. With these considerations, the idea that methods can be categorized into specific stages seems to be false. Choosing a method requires assessing the symptoms. A problem is described by a set of symptoms and different methods can provide more insights into the problem or antidotes (depending on where in the project the method is applied, and what kind of method is used).

Methods relationship to frameworks.

With this being said, it can be seen that methods are not frameworks. The perception that methods are a means to an end is common among novice users. For this reason, some practitioners are often weary of method tools. Method tools can make methods seem like fix-alls and single stage actions. A better problem to solve may be solidifying the framework that surrounds your problem. Spending time properly scoping your design problem can lend a hand in using methods to their full capacity.