Creative Acts for Curious People PDF

OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com Copyright © 2021 by The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University on behalf of Hasso Plattner Institute of Design Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Michael Hirshon All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. www.tenspeed.com Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. The following photographs are used with permission: this page courtesy of AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, this page (top and center) courtesy of Adobe Stock, this page (bottom) courtesy of Adobe Stock/Markus Mainka, and this page courtesy of Charlotte Burgess-Auburn. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936405 Trade Paperback ISBN 9781984858160 Ebook ISBN 9781984858177 Acquiring editor: Hannah Rahill | Project editor: Julie Bennett Print designer: Annie Marino | Art director: Kelly Booth Print production designers: Mari Gill and Faith Hague Print production and prepress color manager: Jane Chinn Copyeditor: Kristi Hein | Proofreader: Lisa D. Brousseau | Indexer: Ken DellaPenta Publicists: Jana Branson and David Hawk | Marketers: Windy Dorresteyn and Daniel Wikey d.school creative team: Charlotte Burgess-Auburn, Scott Doorley, and Nariman (Nadia) Gathers Research: Amalia Rothschild-Keita Ebook production manager: Eric Sailer rhid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0 OceanofPDF.com Contents Foreword by David M. Kelley Introduction Getting Started The Assignments: Find Your Path 1 Blind Contour Bookend 2 How to Talk to Strangers 3 The Dérive 4 Handle with Care 5 Immersion for Insight 6 Shadowing 7 Fundamentals 8 A Seeing Exercise 9 Talkers & Listeners 10 The Wordless Conversation 11 Favorite Warm-Up Sequence 12 Interview Essentials 13 Party Park Parkway 14 Maturity, Muscle, Variety 15 Empathy in Motion 16 What’s in Your Fridge? 17 Expert Eyes The Journey from Not Knowing to Knowing 18 Learning How You Learn 19 Identify, Acknowledge, Challenge 20 Practicing Metaphors 21 Direct Your Curiosity 22 Remember That Time… 23 The Monsoon Challenge 24 ABC Sketching 25 Reflections & Revelations 26 The Girl on a Chair 27 How We Are 28 Bisociation 29 The Secret Handshake 30 Map the Design Space 31 Rock Paper Scissors Tournament 32 First Date, Worst Date 33 The Solution Already Exists 34 How Are You Doing, Really? Widening Your Lens 35 Fresh Eyes Sketching 36 Unpacking Exercises 37 Frame & Concept 38 Making Morning Coffee 39 Five Chairs 40 The Hundred-Foot Journey Map 41 Everyone Designs 42 Protobot 43 Experts/Assumptions 44 Stakeholder Mapping 45 The Banana Challenge 46 Micro-Mindfulness Exercises 47 A Day in the Life The Feeling of Learning 48 Tether 49 Solutions Tic-Tac-Toe 50 A Briefcase Viewpoint 51 Instant Replay 52 Tell Your Granddad 53 Distribution Prototyping 54 When to Change Your Mind 55 Embodied Prototyping 56 The Test of Silence 57 How to Give Feedback 58 What? So What? Now What? 59 High Fidelity, Low Resolution Productive Struggle 60 I Like, I Wish 61 What Went Down 62 Your Inner Ethicist 63 The Futures Wheel 64 Units of Energy Critique 65 More Brave People 66 Build a Bot 67 Designing Tools for Teams 68 This Assignment Is a Surprise 69 The Final Final 70 Personal Project 71 Learning Journey Maps Putting It All Together 72 The Haircut 73 The Ramen Project 74 Family Evening Experience 75 Thirty-Million-Word Gap 76 Organ Donation Experience 77 Stanford Service Corps 78 Post-Disaster Finance 79 Taking Responsibility 80 Scope Your Own Challenge 81 I Used to Think…& Now I Think Creative Acts: Behind the Scenes The Haircut: A Design Challenge Index OceanofPDF.com Throughout my thirty-plus years at Stanford, there’s always been something special about working with the students at the d.school. They arrive thinking that we’re going to fill them with ideas, but what really happens is they get a glimpse of their own ingenuity and resilience. We get to be there at the moment when they realize their own potential, and I feel lucky to be a part of it. Yet these kinds of realizations don’t come from just understanding an idea—they come through the experience of trying, and failing, and trying again. One of my big regrets is that it’s hard to deliver these moments to people who aren’t able to take our classes and workshops in person. But this book does the trick. It is chock-full of recipes for these special moments. We call them creative acts, and like any good recipe, the real magic is not in the instructions on the page but rather in putting those instructions into action. I tell my students that when it comes to creative work, exactly what their creative practice looks like is less important than the fact that they have one to begin with. Back in the day, we used to call this being “mindful of process.” Yes, the product is important, but how to get there deserves at least as much attention, if not more. Creative Acts for Curious People is all about how to get there. Creative work involves making things seem tangible and real, but what you really take with you to the next challenge or job is not what gets made, but the way to make it, and the understanding of how to do it again. Like the d.school itself, this book contains as many how-tos as there are people who contributed their knowledge to its pages. There’s a lot of wisdom here, from d.school stalwarts to a new generation of teachers and designers of whom I couldn’t be more proud. And I can’t think of a better guide to lead you through these exercises. Sarah has gathered some of the most fascinating, unique, and useful assignments from the transformative classes of the d.school’s first decade and a half. In our world, she’s famous for giving students that special—and sometimes difficult—nudge that pushes them to discover the creative confidence and potential they have inside but have yet to discover. She has a wonderful knack for seeing deep into things to pull out the kernel that gives them meaning and makes them sing. Each of these many assignments and the six essays sprinkled throughout are framed with a bit of Sarah’s magic, and I am excited to see what creative acts emerge—not just for the curious, but for everybody. David M. Kelley Stanford, California February 10, 2021 OceanofPDF.com As a child I was obsessed with Peter Pan. I reread my treasured clothbound volume until the cover frayed. And despite the cold Philadelphia winters, I often kept the window cracked open at night; if Peter chose to alight on my sill, he’d have no trouble getting in. To me, Peter represented all that was fearless and brilliant about kids. He sang out a flight plan to a place in my imagination (“second star to the right and straight on ’til morning”) that celebrated imagination itself and blurred the line between pretend and reality. Along with Wendy, Peter’s band of Lost Boys imagined their own version of society into existence simply by acting it out—an idea that has never left me. Another important teacher of mine was Fred Rogers, with whom I visited every day via public television. A full-fledged adult (though his trademark sneakers slyly suggested otherwise), he knew that kids needed a safe place in their minds to explore their feelings or talk out the difference between right and wrong. No part of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was fast-paced, but I found it thrilling when Trolley clanged and it was time to follow it down the tracks to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Now, many decades later, every time I arrive at work I walk into a place that feels to many people like it exists in one of these imaginary worlds. At the Stanford d.school, we’ve created an environment where normal rules are suspended and we constantly use our imaginations. Our purpose is to help everyone unlock their creative abilities. We cook up special ways for people to interact with each other. We make a lot of time for feelings, and we act like that’s no different than doing any other kind of work. We speak a language of encouragement. We’re hard on work but soft on people, and we don’t confuse kindness with weakness. We try things out before we know exactly what will happen, and then we spend time thinking and talking about what, exactly, just happened. Our furniture rolls around. Our way of being and working contains a standing invitation to everyone to join us. Almost without exception, we can convince you to come up with a secret handshake at a moment’s notice. We know how to engage a room of adults in a fierce game of Rock Paper Scissors played at top volume. We can give you a bin filled with art supplies and teach you to make something world-changing with them. We can show you how to stop self-censoring your most interesting ideas. With these methods, we help thousands of people each year expand their creative abilities and apply them to the world. And then those thousands of people help thousands of others do the same. What is this shared, waking daydream? It’s our belief that more creative, meaningful work emerges when we help each other undo the mindsets that limit us and instead hold each other up as creative individuals. At the d.school we make the choice to approach our work this way every day. You can, too. Although the d.school’s methods are full of joy, I constructed a significant portion of this book during a sad and sobering year. At times the gap between my source material and the world around me felt wide. Our approach to creative work is amplified by collaboration; how does that evolve when people cannot physically come together? Design doesn’t yet have a wide repertoire of tools to acknowledge and fight systemic racism; but if we claim to be human-centered, it must. Since our mission is to democratize access to design, how do we navigate a fracturing, polarized world? When the land is on fire, can nurturing more creative humans bring water? Design offers methods not for a changed world, but an ever-changing one. In the face of current challenges–those here today and those yet to come–we all need ways to prepare to act even when we are uncertain. We’ll always need to find our way to our reservoir of creative abilities, and figure out how to apply those abilities to each situation. This book contains a wide range of activities developed and taught at the d.school, plus a few that were created elsewhere by members of the extended d.school family. Many terrific design toolkits and templates are widely available these days; the goal of this guide is to offer you a taste of the kinds of experiential journeys we take at the d.school across a variety of subjects. It gives you the opportunity to experience what it feels like and looks like to learn at the d.school, which you can apply to many different contexts. The skills you will develop are fundamental for stretching your creative abilities: things like becoming aware of your inner critic, bonding quickly with new creative collaborators, and engaging people intentionally to learn more about their lives and spark new ideas. These experiences, called “assignments,” form the main part of this book. They follow an arc similar to what you’d experience in a course at the d.school, though there are many more here than you could ever fit into one class. Some assignments will take twenty minutes or an hour, and others could take weeks, depending on how deep you want to go. Among the assignments you’ll also find a few essays that share insights we’ve gained by designing these kinds of learning experiences. Knowing more about how they work will help you to get even more out of them and to adapt them to your context. Throughout the book I refer to the concept of design, a word that means different things to different people. The d.school is part of a global shift: from a world where designers have a very specific, narrow mandate predicated on the idea of design being mainly about aesthetic finishing to a world where design plays a broader role in society. One aspect of this shift in design has to do with inclusiveness: we fundamentally believe that everyone is creative and everyone can use design to improve the world around them. This aspirational way of thinking about design was described by the Hungarian painter László Moholy-Nagy in the 1940s: “Designing is not a profession but an attitude…[it should be] transformed from the notion of a specialist function into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness.” The first section in this book is an illustrated story of what this broad definition of design can look like. It follows a real group of our students through the ups and downs of using design tools and mindsets to address a challenge at a hospital in India. Another important implication of the expanding role of design is the responsibility that comes with taking that attitude of inventiveness and creating products, experiences, and systems that change the world around you. When you design, you shape the world for others, whether you’re redesigning the evening routine for your family or an entire public health system. Many of the assignments in this book are about cultivating deeper awareness of how you work so you can be a thoughtful citizen creator. The d.school approach prepares you to take on any challenge in life or work without knowing exactly how to do it before you do it. The world is changing too quickly to learn everything you need to know about life while you’re in school. Knowing how to learn is the fundamental ability you need to cultivate in order to thrive in the twenty-first century. Thinking and learning like a designer is tremendously powerful, and the assignments here will keep you learning indefinitely. Many of these assignments may seem fantastical, but they are actually both practical and useful. Keep this in mind when you encounter The Banana Challenge (this page), the zombie apocalypse prep in Favorite Warm-Up Sequence (this page), and more. These exercises embody playful yet rigorous ideas, and they’ll help you begin to act your way into a new creative reality. It’s no wonder that some of our ideas sound strange when encountered outside of the d.school, since it is an alternate universe compared to many organizations and environments. When people grow up and stop believing, many end up creating schools and jobs and social norms that constrain creative thinking and action. We are fortunate to have carved out this special place where we can set the conditions for creativity to emerge right in the heart of a world-class research university. It’s both a gift and a challenge: our methods build on deep knowledge and the spirit of scientific and technological discovery that pervades Stanford’s campus. We also challenge the norms and orthodoxies of an institution with 125 years of history, 16,000 driven students, and 2,200 staggeringly accomplished faculty. The d.school’s success is a great argument for welcoming a little oddness into your midst from time to time, a provocation to explore alternative ways of producing new ideas. Our approach to design brings productive, creative tensions: an emphasis on humanness in a time of technological prowess; an embrace of naive, unprejudiced questions in a sector that specializes in expert answers; and a jostling of hierarchy and status to break down barriers across fields and amplify collaboration between unexpected allies. When we use, teach, and share our ways of learning and working, extraordinary ideas appear. When we practice certain intentional behaviors, they quickly become more natural. As you make your way through these assignments, I hope you also feel the sheer joy that comes from working in this more human, more connected, and, yes, sometimes more childlike way. Being childlike has helped d.schoolers pursue wide-ranging endeavors. They’ve designed treatments and resources to help children born with clubfoot avert a lifetime of stigma and disability, launched flourishing creative hubs in the heart of countries undergoing political repression, found new ways to unite journalists and technologists, started businesses that created jobs and economic value, and brought humanity and efficiency to the heart of government bureaucracy. They’ve tackled the esoteric (redesigning how lawyers conduct research), the environmental (solar lighting to give more than a hundred million people around the world an affordable alternative to carbon-polluting kerosene lamps), and the economic (storytelling and media services that help locally owned businesses thrive across the United States). These outcomes are impressive, as are the innovations that propelled them. Even more amazing: the people behind these solutions all started as beginners, with little or no familiarity with design or creative collaboration. By trying and learning these methods, they found truly novel ways to look at an opportunity. That is the d.school’s special contribution: we help open the door to people who have not previously seen themselves as working in a creative field. But success is never about a single moment of insight. These examples are good ones because the d.school’s founders spent time in an environment that encouraged their natural creative abilities to emerge and because they didn’t stop practicing those learned behaviors after they graduated. They began to believe in and act their way toward a different future. For some of us this space is physical, and we call it the d.school. But everyone can open a d.school in their own mind. I hope this book helps you do just that. By trying one new assignment that lets you notice an old pattern in your behavior. By challenging a habit of thought that’s getting in your way. By helping you find a new practice that fuels your imagination. By supporting you as you celebrate and lift up the inventiveness and resourcefulness of the people you lead, teach, or work among. This book isn’t just for people on the path toward becoming a professional designer; it will help anyone bring design principles and practices into any profession or endeavor. Like our students, you might be working on sprawling, complex topics and aspire to push your skills to the same places they do. You might be tackling focused projects much closer to home that matter to you, your family, or your community. Whatever the context, our goal is to help you come out of each assignment you try knowing that you can do a little bit more, a little bit better than you did before. And you’re in charge of how you do that: none of these assignments has to be used exactly as written. Each is meant to be tinkered with, adapted, and remixed. Skip around the book, try something new, let it rest, and then take it off the shelf for a browse when you need some fresh inspiration. The experience of doing these assignments is the value you will take away. The emphasis is not on mastering tools or technique, although you’ll encounter a few. A tool or a practice by itself is just a way to start: it can eventually be overused, misused, or forgotten. But the mindset or approach you learn and the self-awareness you cultivate are both flexible and durable. These assignments are just a bit of new input for you to react to. With a little creative prompting and structure, you can summon new perspectives from within that might not have emerged otherwise. I hope to meet you in your d.school sometime soon. It’s not too hard to imagine. OceanofPDF.com Think about the last time you tried to change, fix, design, or solve a problem in your life and you really didn’t know what the outcome would be. Maybe it was a challenge you took on following a promotion at work, the search for an apartment in a new city, or an effort to organize your neighbors to deal with a block-wide problem. You might have felt a mix of things—excitement, commitment, and nervousness—all at the same time. You might have been secure in your skills and prepared a creative approach, yet still felt like a beginner. This is really common: when faced with an open-ended challenge that doesn’t have one fixed, right solution, we can all feel like beginners. And it’s true—we are inexpert in that particular problem. However, if we have practiced how to tackle an open-ended situation and learned how to handle all of the complicated feelings that arise while doing so, we can improvise our way through any challenge. This is a story about a group of beginners facing a large, messy, creative challenge and bringing all they had to it. It’s a story about a big opportunity hiding in plain sight and about finding a signal within a noisy, complex system by listening to the clarion call of human suffering and fear. It’s about resilience, inventiveness, improvisation, humility, and many leaps of faith. It’s also a story about Edith Elliot, Katy Ashe, Shahed Alam, and Jessie Liu, four graduate students pursuing degrees in international policy, civil and environmental engineering, and medicine. Their lives took an unexpected turn when they met during a d.school class called Design for Extreme Affordability. As part of the class, they began to work with the Narayana Health Hospital chain of cardiac care centers founded by a charismatic surgeon, Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, based in Bangalore, India. The team was asked to travel to India, find opportunities, and design solutions to improve the patient flow in order to help the hospital get closer to its mission to deliver high- quality, low-cost care on a wide scale. When they started, the team had a lot of support and a willing partner, and they had already experienced a few of the assignments included in this book, specifically The Monsoon Challenge (this page); I Like, I Wish (this page); and Stanford Service Corps (this page). But their biggest advantage was that they went into the situation without being fixed on the exact problem they would tackle. What the students thought might be the need and what they actually found turned out to be two very different things. No matter your skill level or the scope of the challenges you take on, approaching the unknown with the spirit and tools of inquiry will help you uncover bigger and better opportunities than you could imagine beforehand. That’s just how design works. It can take you on a journey to learn not just how to solve a problem, but also how to identify what problem might be so worth solving that you reorganize your life around the endeavor. That’s where we hope this story ends, anyway, but that’s not where it begins. Like so many great tales, this story starts with a miscommunication. Edith, Katy, Shahed, and Jessie became the cofounders of Noora Health, whose mission is to train patients and their families with high- impact health skills to improve outcomes and save lives. The service became a streamlined version of their very early prototypes. Existing staff (usually nurses) are trained using interactive videos and printed materials. Those nurses run sessions with family members to train them on helping to care for their loved one’s condition. It happens in the ward, before or after visiting hours, making it as easy as possible for people to access. The family members learn tangible skills through activities and exercises, and it’s making a difference. By the end of 2020, the organization had trained more than 5,000 nurses and more than 1 million family members in 160 hospitals across India and Bangladesh. In addition to cardiac surgery recovery, Noora Health now offers training in other therapeutic areas like maternal and newborn care, general medical, and surgical care. Demand for their service grew so quickly during the pilot phase that one team member fondly called it “mayhem.” The founders decided to alter their educational and career plans and step fully into the unknown. They recognized that they had designed something worth implementing, and they jumped in. The four relocated to India and built Noora Health from the ground up. Jessie and Shahed both delayed medical school for several years before returning to complete their degrees, and Shahed returned to Noora afterward, becoming co-CEO. Katy served as Noora’s founding Chief Design Officer, and Edith as CEO. Anubhav Arora, an engineer from Delhi who provided in-country design and logistical support starting in 2013, became employee number one: Director of Operations. And Anand Kumar, the enthusiastic and committed nurse the team met on their very first research trip in 2012, became Director of Training. When you read about how far Jessie, Shahed, Katy, and Edith took Noora Health, it’s easy to forget that they started at the very beginning not knowing where they would end up. But there were many moments along the way when it was not clear that they would be successful—moments of feeling stuck and uncertain, moments of tension as the team tried to craft a clear direction for themselves, and moments when other firm commitments seemed like the safer route than betting on a very new idea. They gained clarity by seeing the pattern that emerged from their discussions with patients’ families at the hospital: for the families, being there was expensive, emotional, and frightening. The team listened to those voices and wound up creating something people really needed. It turned out to be a major moment of learning. Reflecting on this time, Edith says, “If we had gone in with the problem statement ‘reduce readmissions to the hospital,’ we wouldn’t have gotten to the same solution. Our problem statement was very emotional. It was about reducing fear and suffering. That’s what we were hearing from family members over and over. We weren’t hearing from people, ‘I’m afraid of the thirty-day post-surgical complication rates!’ But by focusing on the human problem, we’re now addressing the medical one.” In tackling this challenge, the Noora Health team went on a journey of learning and experimenting in order to build conviction in a particular creative direction. Obviously, that’s not simple. You can explore one way to think more deeply about this—and how design and learning are closely intertwined—in The Journey from Not Knowing to Knowing (this page). The Noora journey, like most design and most learning experiences, has emotion running right through it. It’s the electrical current that charged the insights, powered the supportive (but not conflict-free) team dynamic, and sparked the hope lit by the initial positive feedback to the early ideas. Emotion shaped the team’s direction and, woven together with concrete evidence that their solution worked, fostered the team’s decision to take a leap of faith and launch the concept into reality. You may choose to channel your creative energies in many different ways, but one thing will be true no matter your context: feelings count. Learning to observe and register feelings in others is crucial to Widening Your Lens (this page), because it helps you connect to how the world might appear through others’ eyes and kindles your imagination for what you could create. Learning to appreciate the feelings of teammates with conflicting viewpoints and to collaborate in an open and vulnerable way is the key to creative teamwork. And registering your own emotion is central to cultivating intuition about how to direct your creative energies. Recognizing and grappling with The Feeling of Learning (this page) and Productive Struggle (this page) will prepare you to handle this challenging—and joyful—aspect of working creatively. When you are ready to apply your creative abilities to more complex projects, the strategies in Putting It All Together (this page) will help you think about how to frame and scope your work. Leaving the right amount of openness in your approach will allow you to discover needs and opportunities that are meaningful, important, or novel. Design is a wonderful, scary, tremendous roller coaster, just about every time. Let’s go! OceanofPDF.com Developing your design abilities is personal, and the way in which you use this book will be too. If you happen to read it from front to back, you’ll find that the assignments are loosely organized according to how we might introduce them to new students. However, no design project precisely resembles another, and no designer works exactly like the next one. If you are hoping to develop a specific skill, you might want to navigate these assignments in a very particular way. The following index will help you find that path or perhaps lead you to discover a new one. See things in a new way train your attention, make the hidden visible, and move beyond the obvious 5 Immersion for Insight 6 Shadowing 8 A Seeing Exercise 12 Interview Essentials 16 What’s in Your Fridge? 19 Identify, Acknowledge, Challenge 25 Reflections & Revelations 26 The Girl on a Chair 30 Map the Design Space 35 Fresh Eyes Sketching 46 Micro-Mindfulness Exercises 47 A Day in the Life 55 Embodied Prototyping Work well with others build trust, courage, energy, and joy 9 Talkers & Listeners 10 The Wordless Conversation 11 Favorite Warm-Up Sequence 13 Party Park Parkway 15 Empathy in Motion 29 The Secret Handshake 31 Rock Paper Scissors Tournament 34 How Are You Doing, Really? 51 Instant Replay 57 How to Give Feedback 67 Designing Tools for Teams Make sense of your insights tune up your critical brain, uncover connections, interpret information, and form hypotheses 20 Practicing Metaphors 26 The Girl on a Chair 30 Map the Design Space 36 Unpacking Exercises 37 Frame & Concept 40 The Hundred-Foot Journey Map 50 A Briefcase Viewpoint 53 Distribution Prototyping Come up with ideas generate new directions and unleash your imagination 22 Remember That Time 28 Bisociation 33 The Solution Already Exists 43 Experts/Assumptions 49 Solutions Tic-Tac-Toe 63 The Futures Wheel Build something make fuzzy ideas concrete and think with things 23 The Monsoon Challenge 24 ABC Sketching 32 First Date, Worst Date 38 Making Morning Coffee 39 Five Chairs 42 Protobot 53 Distribution Prototyping 54 When to Change Your Mind 55 Embodied Prototyping Tell a compelling story find the essence of an idea and communicate it to others 10 The Wordless Conversation 38 Making Morning Coffee 47 A Day in the Life 52 Tell Your Granddad 61 What Went Down Put your work out there cultivate judgment and solicit feedback to make your work better 37 Frame & Concept 54 When to Change Your Mind 56 The Test of Silence 57 How to Give Feedback 59 High Fidelity, Low Resolution 64 Units of Energy Critique Take control of your own learning notice and reflect on the changes in your thinking, abilities, and work 1 Blind Contour Bookend 7 Fundamentals 18 Learning How You Learn 51 Instant Replay 58 What? So What? Now What? 60 I Like, I Wish 71 Learning Journey Maps 81 I Used to Think…& Now I Think Locate your own voice find inspiration, passion, and perspective 1 Blind Contour Bookend 7 Fundamentals 14 Maturity, Muscle, Variety 21 Direct Your Curiosity 41 Everyone Designs 43 Experts/Assumptions 45 The Banana Challenge 50 A Briefcase Viewpoint 69 The Final Final 70 Personal Project Get out and discover stretch your senses and escape old routines 2 How to Talk to Strangers 3 The Dérive 5 Immersion for Insight 6 Shadowing 12 Interview Essentials 17 Expert Eyes 35 Fresh Eyes Sketching 47 A Day in the Life 48 Tether Pick up the pace rapidly free up your thinking and try things before you feel ready 28 Bisociation 29 The Secret Handshake 31 Rock Paper Scissors Tournament 38 Making Morning Coffee 52 Tell Your Granddad 68 This Assignment Is a Surprise Slow down and focus cultivate patience and spaciousness so you can do your best work 8 A Seeing Exercise 21 Direct Your Curiosity 27 How We Are 36 Unpacking Exercises 46 Micro-Mindfulness Exercises 48 Tether 60 I Like, I Wish Have fun experience hilarity and encourage play 1 Blind Contour Bookend 22 Remember That Time 28 Bisociation 29 The Secret Handshake 31 Rock Paper Scissors Tournament 32 First Date, Worst Date 42 Protobot 45 The Banana Challenge 52 Tell Your Granddad Work toward equity build consciousness and develop humility, challenge bias, and put effort into ethics 2 How to Talk to Strangers 4 Handle with Care 5 Immersion for Insight 15 Empathy in Motion 19 Identify, Acknowledge, Challenge 47 A Day in the Life 62 Your Inner Ethicist 65 More Brave People 66 Build a Bot 79 Taking Responsibility Peer into the future dream about the big picture, question assumptions, and envision the implications of your work 30 Map the Design Space 43 Experts/Assumptions 63 The Futures Wheel 66 Build a Bot Tackle a whole project gain fluency and graduate to a greater level of skill and ability 72 The Haircut 73 The Ramen Project 74 Family Evening Experience 75 Thirty-Million-Word Gap 76 Organ Donation Experience 77 Stanford Service Corps 78 Post-Disaster Finance 80 Scope Your Own Challenge OceanofPDF.com 1 Blind Contour Bookend Featuring the work of Charlotte Burgess-Auburn, Scott Doorley, Grace Hawthorne, and art teachers everywhere I’ve learned a lot about dealing with a very picky “person” who seems to share my brain with me: my inner critic. She cares too much about whether I’m completely original, entirely comprehensive, and indisputably rigorous. She’ll whisper (in my head) that I shouldn’t share my idea if I can’t immediately describe a randomized controlled trial that backs it up, or if anyone has ever talked about a similar concept before in the history of the world. We struggle together, and over time I’ve learned how to listen to the grain of truth she offers without getting completely stalled and unable to make progress in my own creative endeavors. It’s helpful to develop a range of personal practices for dealing with your inner critic, and this assignment is a great one. Producing creative work—actually getting it out of your head and onto the page or into the world—requires you to deliberately suspend your evaluative brain at specific moments. You want to temporarily defer judgment on what might work in order to explore a new concept without prematurely dismissing it as impractical or unfeasible. To develop your creative abilities, you need to learn how to turn off your internal self-judgment so it can’t act like a censor. This doesn’t mean every idea you have is a great one, but it gives you the discipline to separate the moments you’re generating from the times you’re evaluating. Blind contour drawing is a common practice used by artists to shortcut the distance between the eye and the hand. With practice, when the eye follows a curve, then the hand draws the same curve on the page without thinking about it. The process skips the judging brain. This assignment adapts the practice for a different purpose: to help you locate and wrestle with your critical functions (your ability to judge and to critique). It helps you experience what it feels like to not judge your work and to let your creativity flow. This activity is useful anytime you’re feeling deflated about the quality of your work or you’ve just caught yourself doubting your own potential. Grab a pen and paper. Identify someone you can see from where you are sitting. You could be on a train, at a park, in a really boring meeting, or sitting across from someone else doing the same assignment. Now, take just one to two minutes to draw this person while looking at them the entire time. Most importantly: draw the other person without looking at the paper and without lifting your pen from the paper. (If you do lift your hand, you will not be able to find your way back, and the temptation to look will be overwhelming.) You are making a translation of what you see with your eyes into a line with your hand—without any visual feedback. When time is up, then you can look at your drawing. Think about what you felt as you were sketching and how you feel about your drawing now. Reflect on the following questions: Did you make a great drawing? (Unlikely.) What did that feel like? Did you laugh along the way? If so, what was that laughter about? What did the voice in your head say? What did it try to make you do? What’s at the base of those feelings? Where’s that coming from? When is it important to judge a piece of work, and when might it be important to not judge? This exercise helps you get into the habit of separating the process of making and creating from the process of critiquing or judging. The first step toward doing this is to know where your judgment lives and recognize what it feels like and sounds like. If you’re like most people, the first time you do this assignment, a voice inside your head will strongly urge you to look at your paper to judge whether your marks are in the right place. Does my drawing look like my subject? Did I put her mouth in the correct spot? Judgment is incredibly important: you need it to survive and to course-correct your way through life. But the ability to put your critique on hold is what allows you to sometimes pursue a wild idea. Think of it as a set of sliders or knobs that you can dial up and down. When you need to judge and make decisions, dial it up to eleven and say, “I have chosen this because of that and that.” But sometimes dial it down and say, “I’m not judging, I’m just producing right now. I’m just making stuff, and I’m going to worry about judging it later.” That’s a skill that everyone needs to practice. I love to use this activity as both the first and last assignment in my classes, as it can reveal to students their own progress. By the last day, they have stopped wrestling with their inner critic and have started noticing their own capacity for enjoying the act of just producing—all the worry about judging is suspended until after the work is made. —Charlotte Burgess-Auburn OceanofPDF.com 2 How to Talk to Strangers Featuring the work of Erica Estrada-Liou and Meenu Singh, with inspiration from Kio Stark In an era when so much interaction takes place online, approaching a stranger in person seems to be getting harder. Many of us were raised to be cautious of strangers, but it seems that today, more than ever, we hesitate to do what used to be second nature or even required in a close community: chat while in line at the supermarket or ask a stranger for directions. You might feel uneasy around a stranger because you don’t have context for who they are. Uneasiness might be amplified by your own bias or shyness. But design work requires you to break through this barrier. Without engaging new people and ideas, you can’t get over your preconceived notions. The word stranger even implies the idea of strangeness. In everyday life you might avoid strangeness. But creative work requires you to become more open to things you find strange or unusual. Without strangeness, you are left only with sameness. This assignment helps you confront the stranger barrier. Eventually you will find “strangeness” appealing because you know it is essential to your work. You’re going on a series of missions that must be done outside of your home, classroom, or office. You can do this as a solo challenge or, if you feel uncomfortable by yourself, with a partner. Start small. Choose a path in a safe place where you will encounter other people walking. Perhaps you’re going to walk from home to the library. Now, say hello to every single person you see on the path. Do this for one minute. How many people did you say hello to? How did people react? How did your behavior change from start to finish? Your second mission is about triangulation. There’s you, a stranger, and an object that you both can see. Comment on that object in order to strike up a conversation with the stranger. You can find something to say about anything; don’t be clever, just be obvious. “Oh wow…you can get those apples from this grocery store? I didn’t know they carried them here. Are they good?” Then converse. When it’s over, think about the following (or discuss with your partner): What was the object you chose? How did the person react? Compare this mission to the first mission. Your third mission is harder. Pretend you’re lost and ask a stranger for directions to a specific destination nearby. If you get the person to give you directions, then ask them to draw you a map. If they agree to draw you a map, then ask them for their phone number so you can call them if you need more help and get lost along the way. If they agree to give you their phone number, then call them to see if they answer. If they answer, thank them for their help and let them know you found your destination. Now reflect (or discuss with your partner): Who did you ask for directions? How did you choose them? How far did you get? What was the barrier to each next step? This mission asked you to tell a small lie. How did you feel? Many people think no one will say yes to having an interaction with a stranger. Getting over this fear is liberating and valuable on its own. And it’s a broader reminder to challenge your own assumptions about how people behave. People who do this assignment often get really excited when they go further than they thought they’d be able to go. If you want to go even deeper, check out Kio Stark’s wonderful book When Strangers Meet, which directly inspired this assignment. The third mission is deliberately provocative, because of the pretense. Some people decide immediately that they won’t do it, and they choose a destination whose location they genuinely don’t know, so there is no falsehood. Despite the low stakes of the assignment, it gives you a lot of rich emotions and experience to reflect on. It’s a very good lead-in to a broader consideration of the ethics of interviewing to gain empathy and insight. You have to make a conscious decision to be transparent and authentic, and this experience shows how easy it is to slip into a less-than-transparent interaction. It’s a good preparation for being upfront about telling people what you’re really working on and why. —Erica Estrada-Liou OceanofPDF.com 3 The Dérive Featuring the work of Carissa Carter, with inspiration from Guy Debord and William S. Burroughs The best designs feel so simple. You look at them and think, Why didn’t I come up with that? Great designers can take what everyone has been looking at and perceiving in the same way and see something else. They see a slightly different world even when they are looking at the regular world. It’s a skill that’s hard to acquire. This is an assignment for cultivating that capacity. You can do this on your own or with others. Distributed teams or groups of friends could even do it simultaneously, as there’s no need to explore the same territory. It’s especially interesting to compare notes and debrief with other people afterward. Bring a notebook and a pen, and depart on foot from your office, classroom, home, or whatever place is your starting point. Don’t plan where you’re going to go. You’re not taking a journey; the journey is taking you. Let it. Choose a specific quality to follow. A great starting point is your senses. You might select a color, a sound, a smell, or a texture. You might follow some weird line that you see on a building. And that brings your eye to something else with that same quality. Set a timer for an hour. When it goes off, you’re done. Allow yourself to totally get lost, slow down, and not pay attention to where you are. (Dérive means “drift,” but, obviously, stay safe and watch out for uncovered manholes.) If you forget what you’re doing, just return to directing your attention in a deliberate way. Capture what you’re noticing however you want: through doodles, sketches, a list. Your goal is to wander and record how you did so, but not to make the most detailed map along the way. When you’re done, take a little bit of time to clean up your notes, and then share your dérive with someone. You get used to a certain environment, and then you make assumptions about what it’s like all the time. This assignment breaks you out of your normal way of taking in data and gives your brain and your senses a new protocol. It helps you to make completely different observations. When I teach this, it usually goes down as people’s favorite activity. Everyone comes back transformed—without fail. I think it’s because people don’t realize they can see their environment in this way. One time a guy followed “acceleration.” Someone else looked at things that were yellow. The smellers usually come back with a radically different understanding of what’s happening around them. If you think of the world around you as your data set, you are always looking at it the same way. But if you take a dérive, you’ll realize that you’ve been looking at your data in just one way, and now you can perceive a totally different thread in that data. I love to prescribe this when people are blocked, stuck, or don’t know where to begin. Sometimes in your work you have so much data to process that you don’t know what slice of it to take. Those are really good moments for a dérive. —Carissa Carter OceanofPDF.com 4 Handle with Care Featuring the work of Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Maureen Carroll, Frederik G. Pferdt, and Erica Estrada-Liou It’s a tremendous honor to be invited into someone’s inner life. If your aim is to design for others, you need to understand their real feelings and perspectives. At the heart of this work is the practice of engaging directly with the people your design work will serve or affect. If you develop the skills to meaningfully engage with people, you get to listen to their stories and motivations, their needs and hardships, their dreams and concerns. Beneath the surface is where you’ll find deep insights that help you imagine not just what could be better, but also how to make it so. As you develop and refine your own approach to this type of work, you’ll discover that you have a certain power when you do this. In the best cases, there’s a real connection—even if it’s temporary. People say things like, “I haven’t gotten to talk about myself like this before; thank you for being such a good listener.” Or “I’m telling you things I don’t even talk about with my close friends.” However, you never want someone to walk away from an interaction feeling like you just extracted their stories and ideas. Taking advantage of a person’s time or personal stories solely to benefit your own work is not an ethical way to deploy your design skills. This assignment is one small way to prepare for engaging with people. It helps you walk in the shoes of someone you’re interviewing even before you meet them. It’s not about the mechanics of the interview; rather, it’s about building up your consciousness of how the other person will experience meeting with you. This can help engender humility and consideration in any setting in which some people are listening to other people’s personal stories, like in health care or some parts of law. This preparation will help you keep that mindset front and center while you’re engaging others throughout your design work. All you need is your phone and at least one other person. It’s generally better to interview people in pairs in order to interpret what you learn through multiple perspectives. This assignment involves connecting with a partner while preparing to launch your design work. You can also do this with a large group—say three to fifty people. Decide together how long the assignment will last. Five minutes is a good minimum. Set a timer. Each person unlocks their smartphone and hands it to the other person. If you are doing this exercise with more than two people, stand in a circle and instruct everyone to pass their phone to the right (you too!). Do what you want with the phone you’ve been given. People will exhibit different behaviors in this situation. Some will hold the phone at arm’s length as if it’s fragile—or radioactive. Others will start swiping right away. Do not stop until the timer goes off. It may feel long and uncomfortable. Let it. Once the alarm rings, debrief with your partner or the whole group using these prompts: How did it feel to have someone else going through your personal information? How did you behave as the explorer? What subconscious principles, if any, guided your actions? There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. Your goal is to expose feelings and unearth realizations about the value of our own information and stories and to take that learning into how you want to behave when you are exploring the personal lives of others. If you are working alone, you can still do this with a friend or family member. Unlock and exchange phones and see what each of you does and how that feels. Just as with the group version, set a timer and hold yourself to it. This assignment was developed to help students deeply question their level of responsibility when conducting interviews during design work. The experience doesn’t give you a moral checklist. But it does give you a visceral feeling of the power you have as an interviewer and what it’s like to expose yourself to someone else’s scrutiny. OceanofPDF.com 5 Immersion for Insight Featuring the work of Lena Selzer, Michael Brennan, and the Civilla team, with commentary from Adam Selzer It is very hard for people to relate to a complex system in a personal way. However, doing so is important for anyone who is trying to use creative approaches to fix or remake many of the systems that shape daily life; for instance, health care, government, education, and beyond. Designing a system is such an abstract idea that you need ways to provoke a deep inner understanding of that system. You need to stretch yourself to relate to it emotionally and intuitively. With better context and empathy, you will ask better questions, embrace more humility, and make better decisions about your design work. This assignment is one way to start understanding a system using your senses and emotions, as well as your intellect. It’s based on the practice of immersion, in which you follow the exact steps of someone who might need to engage in the system. Does that sound uncomfortable? You’re already on to something. Depending on the system, going through those steps is likely pretty intimidating to others as well, and you need to be able to relate to that emotion even if you’re experiencing only a fraction of it yourself. Many of today’s vital institutions and organizations are getting bigger and bigger, and decisions about how they run are made farther away from the places where people are actually using the services. Your exploration of any system may reveal hints of this. For example, you might find an unintentionally messy or confusing design, the kind that happens when no one thinks through a whole process from end to end and different layers build up and conflict with each other over time. In other cases you find examples of design choices that actively cause harm—steps in a process that are meant to keep people waiting, to force them to repeatedly prove themselves worthy of a service, or to minimize the chances of the institution having to provide a benefit— think, for example, about private health insurance claims in the United States or places where voter ID policies make it harder or more complicated for out-of-state college students to vote. One vivid example worth redesigning is the unbelievably complex public benefits system in many states. This assignment involves an immersion to understand that specific system, but you can adapt it for many other contexts you want to design for or understand better, like health care, education, veteran’s affairs, and so on. Regardless of where you apply your creative skills, this assignment will help you see how powerful it is to practice immersion to increase your insight. This kind of tool will be very useful as you explore some of the final, most advanced assignments toward the end of this book. Your goal is to go through the process of applying for public benefits online, although you will stop short of filing the application. Many states now offer a way for people to apply online for public benefits like food assistance, but the process is still far from simple. Give yourself a strict time limit of twenty-five minutes. Regardless of your actual resources, act as though you don’t have a computer at home; instead, use a library computer or your phone. This adds to the difficulty and better reflects what people without computer access will experience. Read everything carefully. Try not to make any mistakes. Very important: Do not submit the application. Do not call and distract workers in a public benefits office, asking them to help you instead of helping someone else. In other words, learn everything you can about this system without creating any extra burden on it. That’s it. After your time is up, reflect on what you’ve learned. This assignment isn’t easy; odds are you won’t complete the task within the allotted time. Your goal is to identify surprises and opportunities and how they felt along the way. What are the gaps between how the system is supposed to work for the applicants and what you observed? Did you persist to the end? What questions did you come away with? What additional hurdles would someone without access to technology face? This assignment is most helpful if you are a financially secure individual who wouldn’t normally depend on public benefits or, regardless of financial status, are unfamiliar with a system you want to understand. Going through this exercise should give you a personal connection to the work that you’re about to engage in. We designed this assignment for new team members or state leaders who work with us on this topic. Inevitably it reminds us that for most people who engage this system, the experience isn’t designed to help them succeed. There are so many small moments that lead to big insights. The participant has to know what to search to find an application online. Often, they aren’t able to set up an account, or they discover that it’s not easy to fill out on their phones. Health and Human Services sites aren’t usually optimized for mobile, so people spend a lot of time trying to navigate the application and avoid errors. Some people have an emotional reaction when the application asks if they are homeless; for many people, this is a routine question. Even if you know this intellectually, it lands emotionally—and has a lasting effect—from this immersion. When we started this work, the public benefits application in Michigan was really long. It typically took more than forty-five minutes to complete. Applicants were asked to enter the same information multiple times, including questions as personal as “What was the date of conception of your child?” Participants often described that it felt like the application was designed intentionally to make them fail. Lawyers said, “I can read it, but I don’t understand what it means.” Having challenges with literacy or disabilities such as visual impairments doesn’t make it any easier. There are so many barriers that become visible only if you go through the experience yourself. Most people who try this assignment fail to finish the application. They don’t get the satisfaction of checking all the boxes. It’s humbling. And that’s part of the point. Now, just because you dabbled in this system for a few hours doesn’t mean you completely understand it. We might have deepened our commitment and insight, but we still don’t fully understand the complexity. This assignment always reminds us that for most people who engage this system, it isn’t primarily a learning experience. It’s not something that they can turn off and on again. —Lena Selzer and Adam Selzer OceanofPDF.com 6 Shadowing Featuring the work of Ariel Raz, Devon Young, Jennifer Walcott Goldstein, Peter Worth, and Susie Wise Two deadly phrases that always condemn promising ideas to the rubbish heap: “That would never work here,” and “We tried that before and it didn’t work.” They are often uttered by weary veterans of an organization or system—people who have been trying to make things better for years or those for whom change is threatening. These reactions—and others like them—remind us that it’s hard to address a challenge creatively without getting stuck on worn-out ideas about fixed constraints. We are frequently asked for help with this at the d.school. When you’re trying to bring fresh thinking to an old problem, you need a way to inoculate yourself against those deadly phrases. One way to do so is to put on a pair of “fresh eyes.” We’d love to just send you to the eye doctor and get a prescription for these, but until that’s possible, try the practice of shadowing. Shadowing helps you observe a context and the behaviors within that context without the constraint of preconceived ideas. It helps you adopt a deliberate, temporary naïveté in order to see things differently and come up with potential improvements. This assignment is a crash course in empathy and understanding. We often assign it to help school leaders or teachers see school through a student’s eyes, but you can apply these ideas and the practice of “shadowing” to any organization or situation. It’s great when you’re feeling cynical about the possibility for change, or just a little stuck. The trick is to think about how to get inspiration by shadowing a nontraditional expert. It could be the maintenance person in your office building, who knows the hidden rhythms and needs of the community better than anyone. It could be someone who just started a job with your group and has a totally fresh perspective on what your culture is like. Could a parent do this with a kid? Or vice versa? Absolutely. You’ll learn the most if you choose someone whose experience is unlike your own. For example, if you’re a high school teacher with a knack for math, pick a student who is struggling with algebra. If you are a quiet, introverted person, choose an outgoing type. If you’re a White female, consider selecting a male of color who navigates a whole different set of challenges from the ones you face. Choose who you’re going to shadow, and then use these instructions to get the most out of the assignment. At a basic level, shadowing is a simple practice: you pick someone whose experience you want to understand, then spend a day following them around and doing everything they do. Prepare to shadow by writing down your learning goals for your Shadow Day, choosing a person you will shadow, and questioning your assumptions. Ask yourself: What do I hope to learn about the person I am shadowing? What do I hope to learn about the broader context and system? What do I hope to learn about myself through this challenge? Get ready. Spending a day shadowing is different from the way you normally show up! Think through what to wear and what to bring with you. Give some thought to how you will break the ice with your shadowee. If shadowing is a new practice in your organization, you’ll have to spend some time beforehand explaining your goals and getting permission from the person you’re hoping to shadow. Spend an entire day shadowing, capturing your observations along the way. The purpose of your Shadow Day is not to simply observe, but to immerse yourself in your shadowee’s experience. Work, eat, and walk along with them. When teachers do this, they spend the entire day—from waiting at the bus stop to long after the final bell—walking in the shoes of their student. At the end of the day, take some time to reflect on your observations, then question them, and find opportunities for positive change and action. Preserving time to do this will help you make sense of what you saw, heard, and felt. What was the most memorable experience from your Shadow Day? Why? What surprised you? What delighted you? How did your experience differ from your expectations? What did you discover that is related to your design goals? What did you learn that was totally unexpected? Get ready to act. Based on your Shadow Day findings, think about how to make the most use of them. Is there a story you want people to hear? Conclusions you want to circulate? Design a small experiment for making changes, using the following prompts to stimulate your thinking: What is the most pressing need that should be addressed? What’s something you can try next week to learn more about your new insights? What makes you most excited to take action? Most nervous? Shadowing can be used in many environments; one place we’ve used this assignment a lot is with educators. In the K–12 school context, shadowing is a positively disruptive experience. Educators’ search for meaning and root causes can lead to valuable insights and a different relationship with the things they do and see every day. Ultimately, this can change how they behave or even how the entire school functions. Some walk away with smaller observations—like how physically exhausting it is for children to sit all day, or that the students don’t get enough relaxed, unrushed time to eat and be nourished—or bigger ones, like how students experience the school’s culture. One teacher who shadowed a student noticed that the middle school students did not engage with adults other than when they were called on. And the school did not reflect the middle schoolers’ presence in any public way. She immediately wanted to do a big student-work gallery walk to show the kids that the school cares about them and their work. As a small experiment, she just tried it with her own class. She posted a ton of different student work in the hallway outside of her classroom. It was influential immediately and started to lead to broader change. Her colleagues noticed her display and asked why she had mounted it. The principal of the school got very excited. Students saw their work being shown off and expressed pride. Other teachers started to do it. It was a small, easy hack, and it led to more widespread and systematic ways of showing students that their work is appreciated. You can adapt the practice of shadowing to suit any organization or context. Sometimes just the act of public empathizing can start to shift a culture. —Ariel Raz and Devon Young OceanofPDF.com 7 Fundamentals Featuring the work of Aleta Hayes In any creative practice, there are just a handful of important ideas. They show up differently across contexts but are always there. If you pay attention to those principles, you can respond to any situation. As a dancer and choreographer, Aleta Hayes uses her fluency in the fundamentals of movement to help her students—many of whom have never taken a formal dance class—to express emotion regardless of their technical background. What fundamentals matter most to how you express yourself? Think about projects or work you have produced of which you are particularly proud. What are some fundamental principles or skills present in these projects that you have mastered? How could you use this mastery in other spaces and places? I love fundamental principles. That’s what I like about classical ballet. How you raise your arms, how you place your weight: it’s very codified. I enjoy researching and unearthing that code in its many forms. Think of the innumerable African dances: there are as many ways to sense the ground—and understanding the ground gives me access to the space all around me. As a little kid I had a dream that I could speak in all languages. Now I have the possibility of doing so; I realized through dance that I can. Because the way people use space, and the way people use gravity, and the way people relate to one another is speaking this language. —Aleta Hayes OceanofPDF.com 8 A Seeing Exercise Featuring the work of Rachelle Doorley and Scott Doorley, with inspiration from Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine There is something around you that is hiding in plain sight. At this very moment, you are processing an incredible amount of information: the sound of that fly buzzing at the window; the way the shadows are spilling across the room; the fact that, yes, you did turn the oven off after you cooked dinner last night (good for you!). But how much of this information are you consciously noticing? Just a tiny fraction. Your brain is constantly protecting you from total information overload by filtering what you register. Learning how to control your filter—so you can pay close attention to what’s right in front of you—will help you see what others miss. And the effects are powerful: the research of educators Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine, whose work inspired this assignment, showed that this control supports the overall growth of your creative and critical thinking skills, which transfer to many areas of your life and work. This assignment helps you slow down the connection between your eye and your brain so you can make discoveries about what you know, but don’t know you know. Lurking in this huge category of unconscious observation are thousands of opportunities for design and creative work. Sometimes you’ll notice either literal or figurative “duct tape,” a temporary fix someone has placed on a problem that really deserves a more considered solution. You might see the equivalent of what architects call a “desire line,” a path that people are walking because it’s easier or more intuitive than the official paved one. When you get really good, you’ll see the omissions. What’s missing? Find a photograph. A documentary photograph drawn from real life is absolutely perfect. Look for a shot by a photographer interested in the everyday. Journalistic photos are sometimes too dramatic but work in a pinch. Street scenes are great; you want a lot of detail, multiple people in the frame, and some ambiguity about what’s happening. You can practice with the image on this page. Now, ask yourself the following questions: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What else do you see? What do you see that makes you say that? Repeat. And again. And again. Consider keeping a journal or log and doing this exercise once a day. At the beginning, fill up a few pages per photo. Once you practice a few times, you’ll never run out of observations to record. This assignment helps you understand how much detail is part of your daily life. Background detail is what makes the world feel vivid and real, a quality that you want to imbue all of your creative work. Noticing detail is the first step toward being able to design it into your work. In normal life, I find that people look at an image for less than fifteen seconds. When I run this assignment, I have to pull people away after fifteen minutes. Afterward, when I walk home, I see everything totally differently. A stain on someone’s backpack. White shoes. I start to notice all the details, which as a designer is really important. —Scott Doorley OceanofPDF.com 9 Talkers & Listeners Featuring the work of Leticia Britos Cavagnaro and Melissa Pelochino, with inspiration from Maren Aukerman and Mano Singham In any group you’re a part of, there’s natural variation in how people process information and share their ideas. Some people generally talk out loud to figure out what they mean; others sit back, observe, and contemplate. But these traits are situational, not fixed, which means that the context you’re in may determine just how much each person voices their ideas. Sometimes the issue is power dynamics: a boss gets more air time or a doctor’s perspective is valued more than a nurse’s. (That same nurse might be the most vocal extrovert in another group.) Or it’s about socialization, which can be the case when men speak more than women or nonbinary people or some group members participate in their second or third language. All of these dynamics inhibit a culture in which everyone can benefit from the ideas and contributions of diverse thinkers and doers. But you don’t have to accept that the norms of the rest of the world will determine how your group functions—whether it’s your book club or your team at work. You can design your own norms. You just need a way to call attention to this challenge, without casting blame or silencing anyone. This assignment is about surfacing the unspoken assumptions between people who talk more and people who talk less—whatever the reasons. It assumes good intent on the part of every participant, and it helps create self-awareness and other-awareness. We need this ability to look inward and also around us to unlock real learning or build trust within a creative culture. Do this assignment with five to fifty people. You will be rewarded with a group of individuals who have greater empathy and understanding for how the other members contribute best, leading to a more collaborative environment. Invite all participants to define themselves as either a talker or a listener. For the duration of this assignment, all must select one or the other. Since how you act can depend on the situation, select the group that best fits how you are showing up right at this moment. With your fellow talkers (or listeners), go to a corner of the room that is separate from the other group. Take about fifteen minutes to identify some of the similarities and differences among your group members in terms of how you participate, as well as the similarities and differences you’ve observed in how people in the other group participate when everyone is together. You should notice some interesting variation even within your own group. Come up with at least three questions that you want to ask the other group. Bring the groups back together and, if possible, arrange the two groups in two lines so you’re each standing opposite a person from the other group, like a face-off. This might feel a little strange, but the arrangement is a reminder that even though the groups have differences, you’re hoping to see eye-to-eye in a new way. The first group poses their questions to the second group, and then vice versa. It’s that simple. Once you start noticing and reflecting on these essential behaviors, the discussion can easily go on for an hour. Often someone has to end the activity before people have had enough, because you have run out of time. This assignment is powerful because it reveals the assumptions people have about what motivates others. It helps you understand how people interact on a level that is usually known but unspoken. And this understanding profoundly influences the group’s performance. For instance, a common question from the listeners to the talkers is, “Why do you feel that you have to start talking right away and leave no space in a conversation?” A talker might respond, “Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but in my case, I feel that if I am the first to speak, it breaks the ice and encourages others to engage.” You can actually see the assumptions form in the air between the groups. And then, poof! they disappear in the middle. You could do this to help bridge many organizational divides where there’s a gap in understanding. If you’re leading a group or teaching a class or running a household, you aim to create a world in which your people can do their best, but the responsibility isn’t all on you. This experience creates more ownership for everyone. In order to participate and contribute, everyone needs a way to actively engage. —Leticia Britos Cavagnaro OceanofPDF.com 10 The Wordless Conversation Featuring the work of Glenn Fajardo Emerging research indicates that building relationships with people from cultural backgrounds different from your own may actually spark your creativity and reinforce your ability to be innovative. (These can be professional, friendly, or even romantic relationships!) But there’s a catch: the relationships must be more than superficial. There’s a link between the depth of these relationships and the degree of creativity you can derive from their cultural diversity. Some people have the advantage of working closely with others from a range of backgrounds or living in a diverse town or city. And increasingly, we can form meaningful work and personal relationships online and in distributed professional teams, which opens up the world for many more of us. In all teams, for effective collaboration to occur, you as an individual must have some basic needs met, like feeling respected, understood, and valued. In internationally diverse teams there are additional needs: you want to know people will be patient with you and that they’ll eventually understand you. You need to feel that others won’t assume you’re not smart because you can’t speak their language well; that despite any language or cultural difference, people will work to learn your strengths and weaknesses, your likes and dislikes; and that you’ll all be accountable and responsive to each other. This is no small feat, so this assignment helps you build and deepen relationships across borders, especially between people who don’t speak the same primary language. Use it to launch or deepen new international relationships to lead to deeper connection and greater creativity. You’ll need to collaborate with a partner who is from a different cultural background than yours, however you define that difference. And if you’re so inspired, you can certainly run this same assignment with folks you know who are close to home. Both you and your partner will need two important communication tools: a smartphone that can take pictures and video, and a messaging app that can send those file types. Schedule twenty minutes with each other to complete the assignment at least twenty-four hours from when you begin. You will be sending image and video files back and forth, so be careful about eating up your data on your mobile data plan. Most people will want to use WiFi, if possible. Between now and your scheduled twenty minutes with your partner, over the course of one full day use your phone to shoot at least fifteen photos and/or short videos from your regular daily life. Don’t worry about looking cool, and don’t try to impress. The key to this assignment is to build a real relationship, so consider documenting the following: Your thoughts, feelings, and responses throughout the day. Scenes from your life, from morning through afternoon and evening. Your surroundings and environment. People and objects you interact with. Activities you engage in. Make sure you get photos/videos from different times in your day: five to ten photos and/or videos each between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., and finally between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. Don’t send your partner any of this content—yet. The more photos or videos you take, the better; you will need a lot to choose from when you meet up with your partner at the scheduled time. When it comes time for your meeting, you will be ready to have a no- words conversation with each other. There is no need to start a call. The conversation will take place entirely through the photos and videos that you shot. Do not use any words, and no emojis either. (That would be too easy!) Here’s how the conversation works. On text or chat, send your partner a photo or short video you shot. Then within thirty seconds, your partner responds with a photo or video they shot that somehow relates to the photo or video they just received from you. Then you respond within thirty seconds with another photo or video that relates to the previous photo or video from your partner. Keep going back and forth, as if you were having a conversation with each other. Try your best to “listen” and relate to each other. Although there are no words, you are trying to have a conversation. (This is not just about sending random photos and videos back and forth.) Listening and relating can take many different forms. You might respond with something very similar (they show you their breakfast of eggs; you show them your breakfast of noodles). Or you might respond with something very different (they show you their soccer game outdoors; you show how you felt while being cooped up inside on a rainy day). Don’t worry about being perfect or clever. Just give yourself no more than thirty seconds to respond each time. After you are done with your conversation, take five minutes to write down the following two reflections. First, how did you feel over the course of your conversation? Second, what did you learn about the other person? Share these reflections with your partner (you can talk now!) so you can use them as another way to connect and build your relationship. This assignment is powerful in part because it completely removes any existing language barriers by focusing on a language you already share: visualization. (In a case where any of your team members are visually impaired, flip this into an audio-only assignment, in which you capture interesting sounds throughout the day to communicate the same fundamental experiences: feelings, environment, activities.) A beautiful way to build on and preserve the output of this assignment in a larger group is for each pair of partners to make a one- to two-minute film by stringing together their photos and video clips in the same sequence in which they were originally shared. Set this tiny movie to music, and you’ve got a lovely, lasting document of what might have been your very first conversation with your partner. Years later, when you look back on all the creative work this relationship ushered forth, you’ll be glad to have an artifact that captures these initial moments of opening up and sharing across cultures. In addition to deepening human connection, this assignment fosters noticing and curiosity about people’s everyday lives. You pick up on details in order to converse during the assignment, and I often see people ask each other about those details afterward, helping build relationships. The format also surfaces both parallels and contrasts in people’s lives, nudging you to find both patterns and diversity. —Glenn Fajardo OceanofPDF.com 11 Favorite Warm-Up Sequence Featuring the work of Sarah Stein Greenberg I have large opinions about small talk. Its prescribed blandness confines our first interactions with new people to the safe categories of interests we’re all supposed to have in common. Sometimes it breaks down along stereotypical gender lines: sports are supposedly for men, clothes for women; weather for everyone. In my mind, small talk is just about the cruelest way that people have found to bore each other while providing reassurance that we’re not a threat to the social order. Surely there’s a better way to connect with our fellow humans! There absolutely is. And it’s essential if you want to shift people’s interactions from “politely distant” to “creative collaborators.” Despite our social norms for engaging strangers for the first time, I’ve found it remarkable what people will share with each other after a relatively short period if you take care to set the conditions well. This bonding lies at the heart of launching effective and open-hearted collaboration. Here are three creative ways to bring people together at the start of something. You can use them independently or in the sequence given here. And while these are useful for work purposes, they’ve also made popular appearances at weddings and other family gatherings. The activities are deliberately sequenced to start easy and move toward more personal disclosure by the end: small steps to big talk, if you will. You begin by pairing up with one other person (a gentle start for all the introverts). Then you and your newly acquainted partner find another partnership to join, so you already know one other person in the group. You keep these same quartets intact for the final round, which helps everyone reach toward deeper issues to conclude. The Story of Your Name Find someone in the room you don’t know well and pair up. Exchange the stories of your names. You can interpret this prompt in many ways, which is why it works so well and delivers such a wide range of interesting stories. It could be how you came by your name, why you’ve changed your name, that funny time you were confused with another person of the same name, the meaning of your last name in the mother tongue of your grandparents, and so on. Share a few of the interesting stories that emerge. Zombie Apocalypse Prep Sticking tightly with your Story of Your Name buddy, find another pair to form a quartet with. Now the four of you discuss what unique skills you bring to the entire group in the room that will aid in your mutual survival when the zombie apocalypse hits—which could be any minute. This is disarming for any group of experts who are used to introducing themselves via their field and past achievements. Instead, this round becomes an opportunity to connect with the surprise sourdough baker, carpenter, or mixed-martial artist in the room. You’ll find that a whole range of unexpected talents emerges. Ask a few people to share with the group as a whole what surprising skills they will now be counting on from their quartet members. Round Three Remain in your Zombie Apocalypse Prep quartets, but return to the present and think about your public persona. Taking care that everyone in the foursome gets a turn to share, talk about how you’re each seen in your field or at work or school today and how you’d like to be seen or known. This prompt is also intentionally flexible. You might, for example, want to share that you’ve long been known as the person who gets things started, and you’re trying to become known as someone who always follows through. Or you might think about a bigger arc: what’s the legacy you wish to have in your community or domain over the course of your life? Thank the members of your group and say goodbye for now. Noticing what people share—or even how they (and you) react to these kinds of encounters—is a tremendous asset for you in your creative work. It will support your ability to notice important subtext in all kinds of situations and make you a better and more thoughtful collaborator throughout your life. I like to use this sequence when I am with a group of people who have never met each other before and will be working closely together, including in classes with students, at global conferences, and in workshops designed to stimulate collaboration for breakthrough scientific research. It works because it builds toward disclosure and intimacy, but without asking too much of total strangers. OceanofPDF.com 12 Interview Essentials Featuring the work of Michael Barry and Michelle Jia, with inspiration from Rolf Faste At the beginning of a creative project you aim to discover new opportunities. Interviewing people in depth helps you avoid accepting by default the way a problem has been framed in the past. Developing your skills as an interviewer can help you overturn your assumptions and come up with relevant and potentially innovative ideas by putting real people’s needs at the center of your work. This assignment helps you learn to host a semi-structured conversation, meaning it has clear purpose and is not random. You’ll try to learn things about the other person and how they relate to your creative challenge that you can’t predict. You won’t know precisely what you will discover in an open-ended interview, but you are likely to learn things of critical importance along the way. When you start interviewing, you might think there’s some kind of buried treasure you’re trying to uncover. Dig deep enough, and it will suddenly present itself. But just like mining for precious metals, an “extraction” experience can leave your interviewee feeling exposed or taken advantage of and won’t yield the insights that are most relevant to your endeavor. That approach is too reductive; without employing a broad lens, you might find out what someone thinks about different television shows, but never realize they are much more interested in movies and don’t think highly of people who are glued to the screen all the time. Instead, your purpose is creative research, during which new connections are made through the exchange of dialogue, and both you and the person you’re in conversation with have novel realizations about the world and how you both make sense of it. As you hone this craft, you’ll learn how to build a conversational bridge between the topic that you’re interested in (usually the subject of your design project) and the way the other person’s life experiences relate. Before starting, take note of any power dynamics that may be involved. The difference between this type of conversation and a more spontaneous one is that you’ve initiated it for a particular purpose. If it goes well, you might gain a lot of insight, information, or direction for your creative work. Is that a shared purpose or yours alone? If you’re a person of status, means, or privilege, what might you do to ensure that you’re not taking advantage of someone who has less of these? One example, direct compensation, is below. But you also might consider whether you’re the right person to conduct the interview; maybe a teammate or colleague who has greater affinity for these issues should take the lead while you play a documentation or supporting role. Becoming a good interviewer includes pausing when someone else is the right person for the job, not just honing your abilities to elicit details during a discussion. Since this assignment is about conducting a practice interview, identify someone to talk with where this won’t be an issue so you can try out these techniques without concern. This assignment helps you focus on just three important foundations: the behaviors, pacing, and interactions that help you create and hold space for your interviewee to think out loud, the ways you can move the interview along without damaging that “holding space,” and finally, understanding—through experience—how the quality of your conversation changes over time. Plan ahead and find someone who is willing to give you an hour or two of their time. It should be someone you know, but maybe not too well. For me, one of my landlords would be a perfect person to ask for help with this assignment. They are a couple about a generation older than me. One comes from Japan and the other from the US. They have a daughter, a grandson, and a number of very long-term tenants because they are exceptionally kind and caring. I’ve known them for more than a decade, and while we’ve talked about many things (difficult neighbors, rent increases, local coffee shops), I’ve never tried to explore a topic I was working on from one of their points of view. I know I would learn an enormous amount, and I think they would be pleased to help me refine my interviewing skills. That’s the kind of person you’re looking for. Once you have an interviewee in mind, follow these steps to plan and execute your interview. Create the Space A depth interview usually lasts for one to two hours. It takes that much time to build rapport, follow multiple story threads, embrace moments of silence, and explore all the topics of interest to you. Plan to hold the conversation in an environment where the interviewee is comfortable. You will benefit from their time, so make sure you’ve thought about what the exchange means to both of you, and decide how you want to honor this relationship. It might be appropriate to offer some kind of compensation, especially in a professional context. In other cases, you could bring a gift. Because you will need to reach out in advance to set things up, identify ahead of time what you’re interested in learning. If you’re not working on a specific project right now, choose one of the design challenges from the final section of the book as a practice topic. The Family Evening Experience (this page) is a good one because it’s very open ended. Tell your interviewee whether this is pure practice, or if you are planning to use the insights you gain to start work on a real project. Note that you are interested in their life experience and perspectives, that there are no right or wrong answers, and that your plan is to listen and learn. Envision the Arc of the Interview It’s helpful to use a mental model of the arc of your interview. Think about it as a hike you’re taking alongside a fascinating partner. It starts in gentle terrain; at this early stage, you feel out your relationship with your interviewee, establish a connection, and show your interest in their comments through your body language, verbal affirmation, and explicit appreciation for them. You can’t take a shortcut through these foothills. Spend time to build rapport, or you won’t get to new or substantive insights later on. As the path climbs higher into the hills, you gain a greater sense of the landscape around you, and this context will help you better understand the significance of specific examples or opinions from your partner. The conversation becomes more personal (as long as that feels comfortable for your hiking buddy). You hear some great stories that unfold at length as you walk along together. During this section of your hike, you keep these stories going by asking for more color or by advancing the conversation to new topics. Nearing the summit of the mountain you’re climbing, you pause together to explore some of the emotions that have come up. You look back on the ground you’ve already covered to see how different parts of the landscape are connected. As the path descends the other side of the mountain, reflecting on earlier parts of the conversation helps you both make sense of the ideas, perspectives, and feelings that were shared. As you arrive at the end of the trail, you’ll share what stood out to you from the journey and the main things you’re taking away. You’ll ask if you got it right and what they are thinking about. You hear one or two new reflections that surprise you—a moment where your interviewee shares another idea or reaction that turns out to be the one that stays with you all the way home. Color, Advance, or Reflect? In addition to creating and holding space for your partner, you can toggle between three rhetorical actions: color, advance, or reflect. In our hiking metaphor, these actions are like stopping to admire the detail of a particular scene (color), continuing the hike forward on the path (advance), or pausing to rehash the interesting moments from throughout the trip (reflect). You already communicate using color and advance all the time with your friends and family: “She did WHAT!? Then what happened?” In an interview the only difference is that you are using these actions with intention. The third action, reflection, requires more technical skill. It’s about creating a safe space and then prompting someone to reflect on their own experiences, needs, or beliefs, and it’s where much of the new insight that reframes how you think about your challenge or opportunity comes from. With your chosen topic in mind, write down a few examples of how you might keep the conversation moving. Color For example, if you’re discussing someone’s evening routine, you might get to the topic of dinner. You could hear, “So my favorite food is a baked sweet potato. Well, not like regular baked but in this special way. My mom used to make it when we lived in Texas…yeah, that’s definitely my favorite food.” As you practice, you’ll notice opportunities for more color, like “this special way,” “My mom used to make it,” and “we lived in Texas.” You could ask: “In this special way? What made it special?” “When would your mom make it?” “Was this special to Texas in some way?” Use color questions when you hear something interesting, emotional, personal, or specific and you want your interviewee to talk more about it. This is about taking someone else’s lead and following their cues, which is how you fill in the blanks for common color questions, like: “Can you help me understand what you mean by ________?” “Can you walk me step by step through how you do ________?” “Can you draw me a visual diagram of how ________ is laid out?” “With whom / when / how would you do ________?” “Interesting! Say more about ________?” “Tell me about a time when _______?” Advance Advancing questions help you bring in something new that your partner hasn’t been talking about. It’s how you weave in your agenda. “So, we’ve been talking about your dinner habits, can you describe how that relates to the rest of your evening experience?” Other helpful bridging phrases are, “We haven’t yet talked much about ______” or “I’m also curious about ________; how does that connect to what you’re saying?” Reflect To more deeply explore someone’s perspective, reflection questions refer back to statements the person has already made during your conversation. They are so useful—and nuanced—that you can focus just on this one skill in the assignment Reflections & Revelations (this page). For quick practice now, try out a simple variant in which you check back in on something your interviewee has already said. “Earlier, when you were talking about ____, I heard you implying that ____. I don’t want to mischaracterize. How would you say this in your own words?” This reflection question is simply a way to repeat or rephrase something they have said and see if they agree. Take Your Hike, Slowly During your interview, don’t hurry. This hike is more of a wander than a march. Try leaving a moment or two of silence after someone seems to finish a statement. It’s easy to just react when someone’s mouth stops moving and pile on your next question. But there’s often a powerful difference between when someone stops speaking and when they are actually “done.” If you always ask your next question immediately, you miss important moments of recollection or introspection. Almost always, the other person will fill in a silence by continuing their train of thought in an interesting direction. This is part of the skill you need to follow someone else’s lead. Not only do you verbally respond to the content they offer, but you also nonverbally respond to their pacing and pauses by holding the space for them to speak further. This is the final goal of this assignment: to notice how the quality of your dynamic and their responses shifts over time. Once you get a feel for how intimate and personal a conversation can become through your ability to create and maintain space for someone else, you gain a fluency with creative research that allows you to act intuitively and gracefully in the moment and worry less about how you are phrasing a question. At the very end of your conversation, open the door for something new. Ask a question or two that allows your interviewee to surprise you or lead you to something you didn’t anticipate. Two classic ones are: “Can you think of anything else I should know about your views on this topic?” and “What else should I have asked you?” When you’re done, ask your interviewee for feedback. What were the highs and lows of the experience for them? What would they suggest you do differently? What were they thinking along the way that they didn’t say? This practice is not easy. When you’re interviewing for discovery, you have specific things you want to know relating to your project. Yet you must follow the other person’s lead and energy. You’ll learn over time how to balance those goals by rehearsing your approach and practicing. Overall, if you place your focus on becoming a good listener and observer of both verbal and nonverbal cues—even more than becoming a good questioner—your conversations will soar to new heights. It’s crucial to understand the shape or the arc of an interview relative to time. As an interviewer, the stuff you’re most interested in doesn’t happen until late in the interview, and usually just for a short span of time. There’s a period of work you just have to put in; the amount of time spent going up the hill is way different than hearing the revelation at the top. You need to build the holding space before you get to the summit. And that just takes time. —Michael Barry OceanofPDF.com 13 Party Park Parkway Featuring the work of Dan Klein and Scott Doorley Great collaboration on creative teams requires psychological safety. To feel safe, you have to build trust, which comes from knowing that the people around you have your back and are invested in your success, and you in theirs. You might all have slightly different priorities, life experiences, and ideally different things to contribute, and knowing more about each other helps you build stronger relationships. Those relationships matter a lot; they free you up to disagree at times about the specifics of the work without anyone interpreting the disagreements as existential threats to the team. This matters for groups beyond the workplace too: a pod of roommates, travel companions, or parents in a playgroup can all use this assignment to build a stronger rapport. Since trust can’t be faked or rushed, you have to create deliberate opportunities to build it. This assignment will give you a new set of tools for using space to invite trust. For example, when you go to a play, the lights are dimmed and the area on stage is designed in a specific way to help you believe in the premise and the action. In a similar way, this assignment uses space and physical dynamics to influence the way people speak with each other and help them feel closer. You can do this assignment with one or more teams of three to six people when you want to build relationships that enhance creative trust. It requires a small amount of imagination and one person to set the scene during each

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