Adaptive Path Blog

Some of the most fascinating examples of journalism are where the author literally steps into the shoes of the people he or she is interested in and experiences their struggles first hand. To write Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin artificially darkened his skin to experience life as an African-American in 1959. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich set out to live on minimum wage to expose the difficulties faced by low income workers.

During a recent diabetes-related project, our project team informally conducted a similar experiment: What if we took on the personas of newly-diagnosed diabetics and sought to experience their challenges first hand? We recognized the caveats and limitations of this as a research method. The books above, for example, were colored by the authors’ agendas and have received criticism for being from a “tourist’s” perspective.

It’s this outside perspective that can bring value, however. As I pricked myself with needles and logged every carb at every meal, I quickly found that making these challenges my own got my mind’s wheels spinning a lot more often and a lot harder. They spun every time I rationed out cereal with measuring cups (subtracting fiber carbs in my head). They spun as I fretted over the ambiguous portions at restaurants. They spun as I snuck sandwiches onto the office mailing scale because I had no clue what 56g looks like.

While I could have learned about any of these issues by reading forums or blog threads, experiencing them for myself left me with a deep sense of empathy, a head full of ideas, and a nagging drive to find or build solutions. Immersive research has limitations — insights must be tempered by understanding that “we are not the target audience” and “design won’t save the world,” and there are many shoes you can’t step into (heart surgery anyone?) — but I found it to be an irreplaceable opportunity to change perspective. If you’ve had any experiences with immersive research, I’d love to hear about them!

P.S. I found these sites inspiring. Will someone please develop more resources like these?

HealthSimple Toolkits
Carb flashcards and magnets… I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes!

Although UX Week is coming up, it doesn’t mean things are all quiet for our other events. We have a slew of new speaker videos from this spring’s MX Conference up for you this week. These aren’t just excerpts, these are their full presentations.

Ryan Armbruster, Chief Experience Officer for OnCURE Medical Corp.: How Emotion Transforms Experience

By the way, Ryan is hiring service designers.

Björn Hartmann, Stanford University & Microsoft Research: New Interactions: Enlightened Trial and Error

Stephen Anderson, VP of Design, Viewzi: Leading the Rebellion: Turning Ideas into Reality

At the end of the conference, Brandon challenged everyone to take one idea that they had heard and to try it out in practice. Inspired partially by Brian Cronin’s talk about Earth Day, the Designer’s Accord and going green, Thomas Obrey and our friends at PixelMEDIA in Portsmouth, NH are taking steps, both internally and with clients, to make a difference.

You can already register for next year’s MX Conference, March 1-3, 2009. It will be held in San Francisco. Use the code BLOG and get 10% off.

We’re excited to announce Charmr as a finalist in the IDEA awards! Charmr is a design concept we created that shows the vision for a combined glucose pump and monitor for Type 1 Diabetics. This started in response to a challenge. Amy Tenderich, a well-known diabetes advocate, wrote an open letter to Steve Jobs on her blog. In her post she asked Jobs to apply his design expertise to “the little devices that keep us alive, the people with chronic conditions.” As part of our R&D work, we took on the challenge and created a revolutionary diabetes management system concept that has triggered an overwhelming response from the diabetes, medical device, design and now the design award communities!

I’m in Chicago attending the Institute of Design’s Strategy Conference. I’ll be blogging thoughts inspired by speakers.

The event started with a presentation by John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC. He emphasized that the primary challenge organizations are facing as they move forward is overcoming outdated structures. This is familiar territory to anyone who has read David Weinberger for the last ten years… Brown essentially recapitulated Weinberger’s calls for a the “hyperlinked organization.”

The basic idea is that our top-down, hierarchical organizations, pioneered by folks like Henry Ford, are optimized for efficiency of delivery. That’s fine in a manufacturing economy, but we’re seeing it breakdown in a services-lead economy.

He stressed that as a society we’re shifting from being interested in knowledge to being interested in the act of knowing, and as part of that, moving from Homo sapiens to Homo faber — we think through making. He identified the trend of tinkering as part of this, that we learn through fiddling with things. There was a death of tinkering from 1980-1995, when locked-down, microchip technologies made it difficult to take things apart and mess with them, but that we’ve seen a rebirth of tinkering, largely driven by communities finding one another online. (He didn’t mention Make magazine, or the Maker Faire, but clearly these are also part of this movement.)

One thing I wish Brown had done is to reflect on how tinkering is part of the social construction of technology, in that how we tinker, and what we make, comments on who we are as a people.

Brown was followed by Michael Citrelli of Pitney Bowes, who spoke about Dossia, and initiative driven by a group of companies that tries to deliver on the promise of personally-controlled health records, and is a reaction to the skyrocketing costs and less-than-satisfactory delivery of health care in the United States.

The morning closed out with the always entertaining Larry Keeley, who talked about the role of innovation in health care. He suggested a number of approaches for identifiying innovation:

• study new models (such as surgery happening in Asia, at resorts, that costs patients less than procedures in the United States)
• study the high end (such as PinnacleCare, a premium service that navigates the byzantine world of health care for you)
• study the bottom (such as Minute Clinic, which provides fast, affordable health care within CVS pharmacies

Larry also provided a quote from Charles Darwin that we should have included in Subject to Change:

It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.