Design Thinking: Design for New Experiences

1. Trailer: I'm Jason Severs, I'm the Executive Creative Director for the Frog Studio in New York. I've been there for about nine years now and I love design. So, in this class we're going to take you through three stages; discover, design, and then telling the story of that design. This class is about taking more of a creative perspective on viewing the world and finding some sense of purpose and being able to take action on that purpose. This class is going to be about design thinking but more importantly, it's going to be about design action, what it means to actually think like a designer. But then to translate that into something tangible and to make things that will potentially have impact on the world around you. I would say that the thing that I'm most curious about is the world in general, how the world works, and how people perceive the world. I think it's important to take a much broader perspective in terms of what I do as an individual and how that impacts on people around me and design is a really interesting way to express that curiosity. 2. Introduction: So, as part of this class, one of the things that we're going to do is think about the design of a particular type of experience. One of the things that's important when you're thinking about design action is how can I impact a particular experience that has a lot of different connections in the world? So, for this class, we've decided to focus on one particular experience, which is the grocery store experience. You may ask why we're focused on the grocery store experience. Well, the reason for choosing that is that the grocery store is actually a very central component in most of our lives, or I would say in all of our lives. To some extent or another, the grocery store can be a community hub, it can be the place where we make most of the decisions that affect our health, it's a critical component in our daily lives. One of the things that's interesting about the grocery store experience in general is that it's one of the places that we've learned how to shop, we've learned how to be consumers. What's important to understand about that is that when we learn how to be consumers, someone is teaching us, and the people that are generally teaching us have different types of motivations, those could be people that are trying to sell products to us, good products and bad products, those could also be people that are trying to help us be healthier. But there is some motivation, not just to get you to buy more, but to buy particular things, and that's a skill that we've learned as shoppers. But the thing I want you to take away from this class is that someone, the teacher, or in this case, the designer or the marketer is setting things into a very specific course of action, they're designing the experience for you to be a shopper, and that's the thing that we want to understand how to impact, and impact in a positive way. So, in this class, we're going to take you through three stages: discover, design, and then telling the story of that design. In the discovery process, we're going to give you some tools to help you observe the world, capture that, and then think about synthesizing that into something where you can understand it and you can get a sense of what you've learned in your research. One of the ways that we're going to help you do that in the discovery process is to give you the tool of the journey map, and the journey map helps you think about how things are currently unfolding. So, if you think about the grocery store experience, for instance, when you go into the store, you enter the store, you get a cart, you walk in, you decide what you're going to buy first. You may bring a shopping list, you may not. Thinking about the sort of sequential unfolding of that experience, we're going to use that as a tool to understand what's currently happening and to capture the opportunities to make it better. Then, using that to bring together everything that we learned in the discovery phase, we're going to then move into the design phase, and what we're going to do is take that current journey map and we're going to look at what are the opportunities to make the experience better along the journey. Then to bring that all together, we're going to bring you into the tell a story phase, and what that's going to be about is articulating the points that you want to make with the journey maps. So, you can have the journey map, but you're going to have to explain it to somebody. The idea of how I explain that, one of the things that I feel are most important to articulate about that, those are the things that we're going to help you extract and create a more thoughtful narrative around. So, it's all about being a clear communicator. You probably have heard the term design thinking somewhere in Fast Company or whatever magazines you might read, and what that term actually means is the way that designers work. That's what design thinking is meant to express. So, companies like IDEO have have popularized the term, but what that really means is how designers work in the sense that they're always trying to make tangible the things that they see in the world. When they tried to come up with a solution to a problem, it's usually to draw your way through to the solution, and that means sort of writing out stories that can mean sketching the idea for a new object, a new toothbrush, anything, but the idea that I'm making things to solve the problem is that what's at the core of design thinking. In this class, there's some core principles that we want to always draw you back to in the core project that you're going to be doing, but also in the sense of how you can work with other people, and how you will be sort of thinking as an individual. One of these that's really important is the idea that conversation is more important than monologue, and what we mean by that is that conversation in the sense that what you hear from other people to balance out what you think is going on around you to sort of challenge your own assumptions. That's very important in the sense that we can all get sort of isolated in the way that we see the world, but the minute that you enter into a conversation about something, about why something could be better, that sparks a whole new set of ideas and a whole new set of inspirations, and it'll open up your perspective on the world. One of the other things that we wanted to think about that is sort of connected to this idea of conversation is the sense that empathy is a driving force, it's fundamental. It's fundamental to design and the reason that it is fundamental is that empathy is another way of saying that I can relate to you, or I can understand you as someone who has a different set of concerns, or different set of emotional perspectives on the world, but I understand you is essentially what empathy is about. That could mean someone that is, if you want to take the grocery store example, someone that is shopping in the grocery store all the way to someone who's actually working in the grocery store. We tend to think only about the perspective of people that are using things, or buying things, but there's also people that are delivering those things to you. So, it's about being empathetic to what they're going through, as well as to what you are going through in that moment. But if you pull that idea of empathy back to one core principle, it's the idea that people are at the center of all the decisions that we make. That's often lost a lot of times, decisions about what's good, what's beneficial, what's useful can also be made based on reasons for its more- it'll generate more profit for a company, for example, or the technology is not ready to service that to accomplish that kind of thing yet. So, it's not about the person being at the center of the decision-making about what's good and what's useful, it can often be about the profit motivations, or the technology that is at the center of that conversation. So, we want to make sure that we pull you back to people as the focus of what's useful and beneficial. We're always trying to drive towards a solution. So, that's the other thing that we want to sort of pull you back to is that I'm in a solutions-oriented mindset. So, if you take the idea of "Yes and", as opposed to "No but", it could be that way, you don't want to be in a sort of a judgmental mindset, you want to be in a mindset that's a little bit more optimistic and more proactive. So, it's about always thinking about what the possible solution could be. No matter how crazy the idea is, there's always a path to a solution embedded in that. 3. Core Idea: Discovery: So, in the first phase of this project that you're going to be doing, what we're calling the discover phase, I want you to pull back and think about one core idea. That idea is that, everything in the world has been designed for you, and almost sort of aggressively designed for you. There's a lot of people that are pointing their efforts at you to make sure that you experience things in a very specific way. I want you to just take a step back and look around and think about everything being designed to affect you, to guide you through something. We're going to bring you into a better understanding of what that processes is. I was thinking more recently about how design is trying to impact health and to get people more engaged around their health. So, you have all this stuff like Fitbit and NikePlus and all these things that help you track your exercise and track what you eat and give you a different perspective on what you're trying to accomplish with your health. But I was thinking more recently about how the gym experience is starting to change and there's an example out there right now that is kind of interesting which is I don't know if you've tried CrossFit, CrossFit is a designed experience. It's created in a way that it gets you excited, engaged at a sort of beginner level and then moves you up into like intermediate levels, to expert levels, and then put you in front of people in sort of a competitive way like a positively competitive way and it guides you through this process, to this progression, and reward you along the way. But what it does is it also teaches you the use language. It teaches you the behaviors of what they're trying to do in the CrossFit community. So I'd like to ask you to try a little experiment. Pause the video, don't pause it yet, but when I'm done asking you to do this experiment, pause the video. What I want you to do is after you pause the video, don't get up off your couch, don't get out of your chair, remain standing wherever you're standing and looking at your laptop, and I want you to start to pull back a little bit and look around you and think about all the things that are there, obviously the computer, mobile device whatever you're viewing this on and then the desk you are sitting at, the chair you're sitting in, the window next to you, the room. Then start to go out from there and think about the people that made those things and what they were trying to think about and what they were trying to communicate to you and what they were trying to get you to do with these things. Is the maker of the chair just purely trying to make you more comfortable or were they trying to do something whimsical that made you think about sitting differently? What was the designer of the refrigerator that might be in the kitchen next you, what were they trying to get you to do differently? Were they trying to get you to open it less? Were they trying to make you see things more clearly with better light? There's all these little decisions that are embedded in the things that are designed and I'd like you to take a look and see if you can figure out what all of those decisions were and what people were thinking when they design it for you. So go ahead, press pause. So if you take the idea of everything being designed for you, I want you to actually now put yourself in the role of the designer and start to think about you being that person designing things for people. But there's another notion that I want you to pull away from that is that you as the designer are impacting the world around you. So all of these stories have been telling you about how design can have an impact, you are now going to be a voice in that impact, but I want you to think about the ripple effect of that impact. We're going to use the terms impact and words like consequences and implications. They're not to really be used interchangeably. I would think about impact as the bigger picture, like the bigger story about how you're going to change things. So I use the word community a min ago. So how is what you're doing, say with the grocery store experience, how is it going to change the community? Is it going to make it more social? Is it going to make it more divided? Is it going to split people into people who love organic food and people who were opposed to organic food? What's the impact that's going to have on the way that people relate to each other? But implications or consequences, they're different in the sense that you want to think about the implications more as a momentary thing. So impact is a bigger idea of what's going to change, but the implications are more about how it affects the person in the moment and in their day to day. Typically, with a discovered process say at a company like Frog, it is about learning your way through a problem but it's about grounding a group of designers, a group of people within a particular problem. So grounding within a problem means helping us to find what the problem is and then what are the opportunities to have some positive impact on that. But at the same time it's about understanding what the needs are of the people within that particular scenario that you're talking about. So at Frog, we tend to take this perspective of we are going to learn our way through so that, designers aren't experts in everything, designers can't be experts in how oncologists treat cancer, we have to learn about that. That's really what designers role is is to sort of be able to learn enough to create the appropriate solution for a particular situation. The discovery process, all the tools that you have and the methods that you have for discovering what is appropriate, that's what that process is all about. Research matters for a lot of reasons. The main reason that I would pull back and focus on in this class is that the notion of empathy. So the idea that we're empathizing with people in the moment in context and understanding the dynamics of how that situation is affected by what we do, what we ask people to do like how we ask people to shop for instance. So you have a perspective on what that's like. You have your own experiences. You might have gone to the grocery store before and they're out of your favorite thing and you're like, why are they out of it? I always buy it. They should know that I want it. So you have associations about what's right and what's wrong and how things should be. Sometimes they can be derived out of the complaints you have with something. But the idea that I see the world in a certain way, that I have an opinion about the world, research helps you challenge that opinion, helps you challenge those assumptions, and helps you expand on how things should be and could be. So there's a sense of research as a tool for inspiration to get new ideas. So you can look at the latest shopping app to get a new idea about what's possible, but there's also a sense of research being about informing, giving you the right kind of information so that you're not making decisions in a vacuum, that you're making decisions that are responsible to the context, to the people that are going to be working in the grocery store, that it leverages their prior experience, that you're pulling all this information together so that you're making an informed decision, that you're not only inspired to create new ideas, but you're grounding them with the right kind of knowledge. 4. Research: Big Ideas and Tactics for Interviews: So, in your research process, there's going to be a couple things that you want to keep as a core thread and how you're going to approach this. The first one is this idea of a start where they live. What that means is just really getting into the context of things. Well, you can do a lot of research in Google about how things work. You want to get out into the world and make sure that you're going to where things actually happen. So, being in context is important. The next thing is that when you're in context even when you're just doing general research, say like using something like Google, you want to be looking for particularly pulling out like what are the difficulties? What are the obstacles that people have? And we'll talk more explicitly about that, how to approach that. The other thing that you want to be thinking about is watching what people do. So, the interviews give you a window into what people say, but just seeing people move through a grocery store, or wherever you happen to be observing people, watching what they do gives you a completely different perspective because what people say about what they do is not often the same as what they do. So, just giving yourself a moment to stand back, and just to observe, and try to be very explicit about what you're capturing while you're observing. That's going to be really important in terms of building a better sensibility about what's happening around you. The next thing you want to be thinking about is that you're not going into a situation whether that's an interview, or even if you're just doing your own research on your laptop, you don't want to go into like, oh, I know a lot about this. You want to pull back and think about it from the perspective of pretending you don't know, and this is a great idea and almost even recognizing that you don't know anything about what you're researching. This is a good interview tactic when you're talking to, let's say that you do interview a store manager at your local grocery store. Pretending that you don't know how things work often is a good catalyst to drive someone forward in a conversation. So, let's say that you're an avid iPhone user, but you want to talk to someone about what they do with their iPhone, and they say, "Oh you know I know this is thing you can do in a settings menu, but I'm not quite sure how to do it. Could you show me?" And you go "Well, actually I don't really know how. Let's try to figure it out together." So like moving into that moment of discovery because you say that you don't know either. People get into a mode of trying to educate you, and they give you information, they give you insight that they wouldn't have normally done because when you ask people questions from an expert point of view, people tend to feel like they're trying to get the right answer, and they get more consumed with "Did I give you the right answer? Is that what you wanted to hear?" And that's not the mode you want to be in. You don't want to be in the mode of Is that what you wanted to hear? You want to be in the mode of hearing what people really feel, what they really think. Another way to think about this is always capture your thoughts. So, if you're in the moment of observing what people do, make sure that you have a notebook or a sketchbook, and or you could use a note on your mobile device, you could use a note taking to your own mobile device. Just make sure that you're capturing things, and photographs are a great way to capture things as well. Now, some stories will take issue with you photographing a lot of stuff. So, sometimes you have to be a little bit more careful about how you do that. I would say that don't look at it like your spine, but try to be a little bit more subtle about your capturing techniques. But make sure that you're always capturing what you're thinking whether that's your drawing, through writing down a note, or taking a picture. Just try to always be in a constant mode of capturing what you see. Then finally, as you're out or doing research using a tool like Google, you're going to want to be able to notice when things are repeating, and we tend to refer to that in the research world as patterns. So, if you see things that it's like you go, "Oh I've seen the way they set up those oranges. It looks similar to the way they've done it in the other store." There could be a pattern there, and patterns usually exist because there's a reason for that, and it's often related to a convention of something that works really well. So, patterns often reflect things that are working, so those could be things that you want to leverage and make even better, or they can be things that you make sure have to be there, because if you remove key patterns from an experience, then you've essentially taken something away from the experience that's already working, which can confuse people. So, that idea of being able to be sensitive to patterns of what's working is something that you need to keep a constant throughout. So, we're going to take three primary angles to covering research. We're going to look at what we call in the design role as analogous or competitive research, that's also if any of you familiar with what people do with strategy, like how you might strategise the way a business works, the competitive landscape is often a good thing to understand because you want to know what they're doing that's working, and what they're doing it's not working, and how do you do something that's slightly different or often better than that. So, you have to understand what the competitors are doing. The other thing is the analogies experiences. So, the analogies experiences are a way of drawing new types of inspiration looking at other sources that you wouldn't normally think about in the context of a grocery store. So, it's very easy to get lost in the idea of doing this competitive and analogies research because you can do it all from Google. You can set it in your laptop, and you can do all of them, you can research yourself into a frenzy. But as we mentioned before, the idea of starting where they live, you need to get out into the world, and two of the other things that we were going to guide you through are doing interviews, or and or doing observations. So, we would encourage you to not only do the analogies and competitive stuff or desk research as we would call it, we want to challenge you to actually get out into the world as well. So, the two ways we're going to do that are through contextual interviews and observations. So, first with the idea of a contextual interview, and what would be my context is either the context of the grocery store, outside the grocery store, or even if you have the opportunity to go to someone's home. When you're coming up with your ways of thinking about analogies experiences, an easy place to start is that you know food. Right? Food happens in a lot of different places, a lot of different contexts. But there are also cultures that have built themselves around the idea of dining, and food, and cuisine as the core part of the social dynamic. So take for instance, Italian street fairs, or Italian markets, they have a very open air feel, but they're all about the culture of food, about talking about the food, about having a different way of selecting food. So, selecting food is not just, I need that, I'm going to buy that, it's about who grew it? Where did it come from? Is it in season? All the conversations and nuances are different in those contexts, and those environments are designed, and then the design just evolved to be that way. You can take other contexts like a restaurant. What does it mean to have a restaurant? You know whole foods is doing that. But what does it mean to combine different kinds of eating experiences into the grocery store? So, let's talk a little bit about contextual interviews and the process of doing interview. There's a couple of ways that we want to guide you down the path of doing interviews. The first one is the idea of a shop along. A shop along is actually finding an individual say like a friend, and going through the process with them, going to the grocery store with them and all the way through to bring the food back home. So, to make it a lot easier on yourself, you might want to find a good friend that you can do this with, and plan to meet them at their home. Then whether they're driving or walking to the grocery store, take that journey with them. But the one thing that you want to ask them to do is to think aloud about what that experience is to them, how they planned it, what their intentions are when they get there, and have them talk you through it as as they're going through. That could be on the drive there, and it could be or on the walk there. But the idea of them thinking aloud is that's the interview technique that you want to pull out here. The key thing about doing this is that you can do a shop along by meeting someone in front of the grocery store, and then going through all the way do a checkout and leave, but you're going to get different things when you actually meet them at their home or at their place of work, because they're going to be in this moment of transition, and that moment of transition is actually a good one to ask different kinds of questions. So, again find a good friend because that's going to make it a little bit easier. This could be a good one to start with actually. A good way to get your interview chops up to speed. So, to prepare for this, first you want to find the friend, second you want to plan the time, make sure that they know explicitly when you're going to meet, how long it's going to take, and then that you're going to possibly go all the way back home with them, and be clear about what you're doing and what you expect of them. So, if you expect them to talk a lot during it, say that I'm going to want you to be telling me everything that's happening during this experience. The other thing that you want to come prepare with is a few key questions. Questions that have been nagging you, like why are all the bags plastic all the time? They may not be able to answer that question, but it's going to spark a different kind of conversation about what's important in the moment. So, you want a balance a couple of key questions that you want to ask with the things that you observe your friend doing, or other people doing, and the things that they're thinking aloud and voicing back to you. So, the other interview technique that you can use is something called the intercept interview. This is all like a man on the street interview that you might see on a news report. It's when the person walking by is interrupted with the person with the microphone, what do you think of so and so? You're going to do something a little bit similar. You're not going to have the microphone, but what you're going to be doing is you're going to be interrupting people, intercepting them in moments of shock. But you want to do it in a way that is not disruptive. So, you don't want to come off as the interviewer asking a bunch of questions. You might want to do it in a more subtle fashion. So, think about all of the key places that in the store for instance, that's outside or inside, the questions are starting to emerge. Like why are the shelves so high? Maybe that is a question that you have. A way that you could do an intercept interview is let's say that someone pulls up next to you with their cart, and there you could look for people trying to reach something high up on a shelf, and you could say something very conversational like, why did they put these things up so high? So, trying to make the intercept more about a conversational thread that is in the moment, in the context, and making it seem natural in the context. You can actually capture a lot of data throughout a store experience, just by striking a very small brief conversations with people. But make sure it's relevant to what they're trying to do. The other way to think about the Intercept interview is that you can take a slightly more formal approach, and you can go right up to the store manager. If you feel like taking a bunch of pictures, it often is better to approach the store manager. You can do this with the idea that I'm a student taking class and this is a class project. That's generally a very non confrontational way to get someone to allow you to have a little bit more access, and the security is not going to follow you around and think that you're up to something. But you can also get some time with the store manager and with people that work in the store, and generally if you're not too disruptive, most people are open to that idea because people like being heard, and they like being talked to about the things they do. So, someone that works in a grocery store might not think that it's that important, but because you're placing so much emphasis and you're listening, that's going to open them up to want to tell you more. So, those are the two dimensions of the intercept which is natural conversation that you can have with people in context, but also the more formal approach of, nice to meet you Mr. store manager, could we have a conversation about how this whole thing works? 5. Research: Observations: So, we talked about some fundamentals and techniques for interviewing people in context, but you may not be one of those people that actually want to spend a lot of time interviewing, maybe a little bit more on the shy side and you want to do more observations. We're going to give you a simple framework for thinking about how to approach an observation. We call this the AEIOU framework. Pretty simple. But what that ladders up to are some key points that you need to be looking out for in the experience. A, meaning action, and what that means is what actions are people taking. You can almost think about what are the interactions. So, when do people ask for help? When are they looking at the label on a box? How long do they spend looking at the label on the box? Which, incidentally, could be a good moment for an intercept interview. The next thing is, followed by the actions people take in context, what's the environment? How is the environment setup? We mentioned the idea of the store shelves being potentially very high. Why are they that high? There must be a reason to that high. It's your job to sort of uncovering the reason for that. Sometimes you can do that with interview, sometimes you can just make some assumptions based on observation of why that is. The next thing to think about this is we have the actions, but what are the specific interactions that are happening in context. You can go from the general actions of loading a shopping cart to purchasing to the interactions of handling a package to a conversation that you might have with the store clerk. Actions and interactions tend to overlap a little bit but think about them in terms of scale like, the big actions that push you through the store, that guides you through the store, and the little micro interactions that happen at the level of the package or at the level of a conversation with the store clerk. The next thing is to think about the objects themselves. So, a grocery store is full of objects. What are all the objects and how do they relate to each other. So, the grocery cart, for instance. Is it too big or is it too small, in comparison if you go into a store like Costco, you're going to have a much bigger cart because you're buying much bigger items. But what if Costco only gave you small little hand baskets. It doesn't quite fit what you're seeing in that environment. So, pay attention to the scale of things, the positioning of things, how all the objects relate to each other. Finally, the idea of the U or the user, or in this case, it could be the customer, the people that are going through. So, that's one of the most important pieces is how are people using the space, how are they interacting with each other in the space, all the way down to, what are their facial expressions? Do they seem frustrated? Do they seem happy? Try to get a sense of that whole vibe of the place. So, you don't have to go down the list and say AEIOU, have I captured everything, you just want to use it as a general mental tool as you're observing to make sure that you're getting the bigger picture of things. So, these mental tools are important because when we get lost in the moment, it can be very easy to get very fixated on one thing like the shopping cart, for instance, and you lose the context of the bigger environment. So, just keep repeating AEIOU gives you a sense of, am I looking at the big picture, and if you want to make it a little bit easier on yourself, you can even mark these things down. If you're using a notebook or a sketchbook, you could have a page that says actions and you can have a page that has observations or that has objects written at the top, and that way you have places where you're capturing notes specific to the types of things that you're looking for. So, use that mental framework as a way to guide yourself through observations. In general, when you're doing observations, a good rule of thumb is to not stand in a corner and be in a mode of spying. You want to do this in the context of your daily shopping trip, so you might want to overlap observations with your actual trip to the store. But make sure that you give yourself time to stop and reflect and actually look at what's going on around you. 6. Synthesis: Organizing Insights: A general technique you can use to keep this thread of why, like always questioning why, why is this thing that way, why is it that way? Mapping back to the idea that everything is designed, there's an intention behind most things, good or bad intentions, and you're asking why? A good framework to keep in your mind is this notion of the why, the what and the how? So, if you take the why, why is it that way? Then, the what, what's there to make the why come to life? Then, the how, how is it coming to life? This is going to give you a much bigger picture of how things are orchestrated the way they're orchestrated. So, the why is your motivator, it's this mental instigator to keep you going and keep you asking. The what keeps you grounded in what people are using and what their exchanging. Then, the how, gets at how they're using those things to accomplish that. But the why will always draw you back to the bigger philosophical point of view or the bigger impact that you're trying to have. One of the next stages in thinking about moving from discovery to design is starting to think about how I synthesize all this data I have. There are two ways that we're going to approach the notion of synthesis. That synthesis, and then turning a synthesis into a map or making everything that we've seen more tangible. So, the first we want to talk about synthesis is through the the ability to craft an insight. The insight being that spark, that light bulb over the head that makes you think a little bit differently about something that you've seen over time and maybe it's become something that you become accustomed to but you're trying to put a twist on it, so that you think about it a little bit differently. So, the very easy way to actually craft an insight. It's not about sitting around and thinking about the most clever statement to summarize what you've seen. It's more about taking the things that I've observed. So, you think about the patterns we discussed earlier. Maybe there's a couple of things that I've observed over and over and over again, like how people pull product off the shelf. What you want to do is take that key observation that observation being people move slower in the freezer aisle could be an observation. You take that observation and then you put a twist statement on it. That twist statement is usually, started with the word, however or but or therefore. If you take those statements and you put it on top of that observational statement, the statement that follows gives you a more robust understanding of what you observed and then what you think could be happening to make it better. So, let's take the freezer example again. People tend to move slower in the freezer aisle. However, they're spending more time there because they're making harder decisions about things that are probably less healthy for them. So, you take the notion that something that seems very simple and tactical, which is just people are moving slower in a particular part of the store, but then you take something else you've seen, maybe you heard in the interview about someone having hard decisions when they're around unhealthy things, and the freezer section generally contains a lot of unhealthy stuff. So, knowing that that section has a very particular type of mindset tied to it, can create a new way of thinking about it. So, maybe your twist on that is to create two freezer sections, and maybe the freezer section for the ice cream looks like an ice cream store, whatever. The idea that you might want to break those things out is where that insight should take you and that insight is going to challenge current ways that the store works because the reason everything in the freezer section is together is because it's easier to have all the equipment there in one place, and you start spreading freezer equipment all over the store, it's going to be more expensive. So, you want to make sure that when you have an insight and you craft an insight about something, that it's truly something that gets at how people want to experience something differently or what they feel like they need to make better decisions. So, that insight should give you the insight into how to address that. Taking the idea of insights and it being a spark a way for you to articulate things that you feel intuitively are right, but putting some language around it, so that you can almost express that intuitive thought back to yourself or to other people that's the important part about crafting an insight. When you come out of research you will have a lot of data and information as you start to craft these things into insights, you're going to have some statements in front of you that summarize things that you've seen, and you're going to start to question what's a good insight and what's a bad insight. One of the ways to test that, is to share those insights. So, I would encourage you to use the class as a platform to actually share those insights with people that are also doing the projects. So, use the project space to think about and to share those insights, to see if there's some commonalities in what other people are hearing. But the key thing to pay attention to is, a good insight sparks a whole thread of conversation. If insight doesn't spark conversation or even spark ideas within you, it's probably something that's just living at the level of just a basic observation about something or it could even be a statement that's a bit judgemental about something but if it's not a creative catalyst, a catalyst to thinking about things in a new way, that's a good litmus test for understanding the difference between a good insight and a bad insight. When you come out of research and you kind of go into this moment of synthesizing things, one of the first things you're going to want to do is, actually, your instinct might be to just think through it and type down some thoughts, that's good. But the other thing that you want to do is externalize all the stuff that you've heard. You may not have access to a printer but if you do, I would encourage you to take as many notes as possible and then print those out and use it on a piece of paper or something and mark it up, correct them, add in ideas. The other way that you can do that is, you can do the old designers trick of the post-it note. So, the post-it note is one of the best tools in the designer's toolbox, and the reason that is, is that we have a lot of things that we learn and we want to get them all out on paper so to speak, but do it in a way that we can arrange them and fiddle with them and move them around. So, if you have time, go to your local office supply store and pick up a pack of post-it notes. Generally, at least two to three colors, and some sharpies. Then, what you do, is if you can print out your photographs or make your photographs accessible on your laptop and your note is successful, grab your post-it notes and start to write down everything that you remember from the experience like things that people said, things that you saw and you could even color-code it. You could take the blue ones for observations, and the red ones for key quotes, and the yellow ones for things that you just you either heard people say or observed that are more about general findings, general observations. So, you can color-code it however you want, but the notion is that you get everything out onto the table, and you start to write them. Then, what you do is you pull them together and start to group them. So, you might find things that are similar themes about how people move or about how people make decisions or what people are frustrated about. Try to group those together and find the common theme, the common pattern. So, common theme in frustration could be about lack of information. So, look for those kinds of themes and try to get at and try to understand why that is the way it is, so we're back to the moment of questioning why. But putting all that thinking out in front of you is going to help you externalize that and make it almost in a lego-like-fashion, where you get all these post-it notes out in front of you. You can start to move it and position it in a way that you can rearrange and reorganize your thinking. That's really what synthesis is all about. Is it's about getting your externalizing your thinking and then using the process of reorganizing it and finding the patterns and then putting the twist on it with the inside statement. That's the process of synthesis. Another way that you can bring things together is a tool that we call the affinity map, and you can do this in a couple different ways. An easy way is to grab a big sheet of paper, write down in a circle, some key things that are just one thing that you noticed, like people always get stuck at the entrance or even go as simple as saying, "People at the entrance" Then, draw a little line off that and describe why or what's the other reason? So, what you're doing is you're creating affinities between things that you know. So, it's essentially just creating a map of your thoughts. So, what you want to do is think about it as like the key thought, and then all the little thoughts that are connected to that bigger thought. So, what happens when you create affinity maps, is you capture the big things that are top of mind and then all the little sub-thoughts and ideas that live off that. It's just a good way again of externalizing your thinking in a very quick and easy way, and it will reveal to you things that you didn't realize that you knew. 7. Class Project: The Journey Map: We've given you some insight into how to bring everything together through a synthesis process. How do I organize all the information using posted notes, bring those things together in themes, and then start to think about what are those insights statements that I can craft from everything that I've learned. There's other ways of organizing data. The first way we want to talk about that is the idea of the journey map. We talked about the affinity map which is a way of mapping your thoughts. The journey map is a map that lays out the experience of the store. Almost think about it as a movement through the store over time and the journey itself is broken down into stages. For example, this was a project we did for a popular hotel chain a few years ago, and one of the first things we did in our discovery process was we had one of the designers go spend the night in the hotel. When she came back, what she had done was mapped everything out in terms of the journey. So, if you can see the blue squares here, that's everything that she experienced with a little happy and sad face. She was talking about how she felt and what she expected to see in those moments. From the moment of awareness, which is what does she know about that hotel? What was she expecting? What has she seen in advertisements and marketing and so on? What did she see on her website when she was booking it, all the way down to the moment of arrival which is when she actually walks in the door. What's the the first thing she sees, to the moment of getting a room and showing up in the accommodations or in her hotel room, to the moment of what it means to use the facilities like the sports club inside the hotel, or the swimming pool, all the way down to when she checks out. What she's done is she, at a very high level, has looked at how she felt and the key things that stood out her. So, she grabbed little photographs of that and then wrote little notes about it. The pink here is our idea she had along the way. She captured those in a notebook and then when she came back she put those ideas on key parts of the journey. What this does is it lets you think about the whole experience through time, but it also helps you bring together some of the things you've seen in context of that journey. You can think about the opportunities to make the whole experience better, so using this as a general tool to capture what's happening and what you think could be better in those moments. This can be very simple, this is a very high level simple journey but they can get very complicated as well as complex as you want to make it. When I say, as complex as you want to make it, it's dependent on like how much you really want to explore, how deep you want to go in terms of thinking about the entire experience. This is a journey map of unpacking a box, an out-of-box experience, for setting up what they used to call VoIP routers. So, it can do telephone over the Internet. It's a simple way of describing it. The problem was, this is about seven years ago, no one really understood what telephone over the Internet meant, and let alone setting up a device for that. It's based like a modem. Our client thought the process was okay. So, one of the things that we did was, is to map out the current experience. We took the box, and we went through the whole unboxing experience of, here's what it means to get it in the mail, to open it up, to take up the materials, read the materials and then set up the device. This takes you through that flow of purchasing and opening it, exploring the materials and setting it up, all the way down to using the product itself. But what this map shows is how many decisions I have to make as a user along that journey and you could think, "Oh, it's a it's a box that has about eight manuals in it. It's not that many". But if you actually start to break down all the decisions that you have to make along the way, like is this information useful? Is this what I need to set up the device versus is this just more marketing stuff? All those decisions, together in one flow, show the complexity of what it actually means to move through that experience. This level of complexity was a big sort of turning point for this particular client, in the sense that they didn't think it was that- they knew it was problematic, and they knew that had to be redesigned, but they had no idea that it was this complicated. So, this journey map gave a little bit of insight into the complications there. But it also helped us summarize what other people said about the experience as well. This is not just what our designers felt unboxing that product and setting it up. It's also what other people felt when they went through the experience as well. One of the interview techniques that we used with this particular project was, we had people unbox and set up the product in front of us and they walked it, much in the way we talked about the shop along where they thought about as they did it. They walked through that process and talked us through it, about what they were feeling and what they were experiencing. We combine that with actually going into people's homes and seeing how they set up routers and modems and their TV equipment and all the other kind of stuff to get a sense of what a general setup process is like. The journey map is emergence like one of the more important tools in a designer's toolbox toolkit. The reason that is, is because the journey map allows you to not only understand how an experience unfolds, so even down to the moment of how a particular thing like a mobile device plays out over time or the setup of something, how that plays out over time, but allows you to understand the story of that. When you think about experiences, experiences are rooted in the stories that people tell about how they've experienced things. You don't even really know that people have had an experience until they can tell a good story about it. Journey maps help us map out what that initial story could be. It's almost like the hypothesis of what the story should be and it's a planning tool to help you think in a narrative fashion about how experiences will unfold and the stories people will tell once they've gone through that experience. If you think about the journey map as the story of the grocery store either that one day or over the lifetime of a person that's what you want to be thinking about, it's the story that they will tell about the experience. The journey maps helps you map that out. At this point in your research or in your synthesis process you're going to have possibly a couple of insights or even some general statements of things that you've heard in a couple of really good quotes that you heard people say. You're also potentially going to have this journey map. What you've ended up with are two sets of information, and you can almost start to call them knowledge, things that you know, because you've re-articulated it to yourself in the form of insight or the form of a journey map, now you'll have these bits that will help you tell the story. Part of what design is about, is about communicating your ideas to other people. These will become elements of that communication, and the clearer they are the better they are as communication tools. If you make a journey map that's very big and complicated you might want to think about one that's a little bit simpler as well just so that it can be used as a communication tool. Remember that we talked about the insight as even something we use in conversation. All these things are elements of telling a good story which is where we're going to go near the end of this project. You're going to be bringing all this stuff back and using it later. 8. Ideation: Questions and Random Entry: At this point, we've moved through several stages. We've gone through the notion of trying to figure out what the problem is, and discovering or learning our way through that doing research, and then we brought all that information together into a couple of tools that help us synthesize that, whether that's crafting an insight or constructing a journey map. The next step in the process, is to bring everything you've learned to life through creating some new ideas to address the opportunities that you've seen along the way, and even grow some of the ideas that you might have been sparked along the way. So, in the moment of design, we're going to use the journey map as your design output. So, sometimes the design output might be a new floor plan, it might be a new service that's put inside of the store, it might be a kiosk that gives information. There's a lot of ways to approach the design, but we're going to look at it more from the perspective of the journey map as the design artifact. So, now that we have our journey map, we're going to use it. We used it before as a synthesis tool, now we are going to use it as a design tool. So, one of the things that you should do, is you should put your journey map in front of you, and start to think about what are the general opportunities to make things better. So, find the biggest pain-points along the journey, things where people were most confused, having the most trouble, and that could be the shopper or the store owner. Think about ways to improve that, and two ways to go down the path of thinking about improvements are: number one, what does the store itself have ready to use that can make it better? So, they might have a really good grocery carts that they're not using, or putting out there to be used in a better way. They might have really great lighting, but there's something that's getting in the way of the lighting. So, trying to find the opportunities to use what's there, to make things better is a good first step. The next way you can think about it is, the idea of new technologies. So, making some associations with technologies that are emerging and starting to become more popular, and technologies that are a little bit down the road. This is actually a great way to think about shaping up an opportunity, because technology is often a big driver in terms of making things better, making things more efficient, but making experiences better. So, as long as you have the bigger threat of how the experience comes together, and you know the appropriate use of the technology in the moment, using the technology to create new ideas is a great way to get things started. So, you might want to think about technology in the way that what's people are currently using, so maybe the mobile device isn't a big part of the shopping experience. How can the mobile device be use in the moment to make things a little bit better? Maybe the checkout isn't needed, and self checkout is becoming a big thing, particularly in chains like CBS. They're using more self checkout and it's good and bad experience. It is a big learning curve to that. So, maybe the mobile device plays a role in shopping and checkout. Maybe, you don't even need to go to the register anymore. There are ways to think about paying in the moment versus paying in a register. So, there are ways that technology, like if you be imagine the product square being used in a grocery store. Being able to check out anywhere in the store might be a different way to think about it. But only technology will help you do that. So, you can start to think about how those technologies will change the experience. But the key thing you should be thinking about is, while you're introducing new opportunities, you're also removing things that are critical parts. So, be sensitive to the fact that when you add something new, you're removing something that people are familiar with, and something that even has conventions that are important. So, the checkout, there's something important about the checkout in the sense that it gives you time to second guess what you bought. It also gives you time to ask questions. So, you might want to think about how that resources is augmented and reused in a different way. You're now at the point in terms of creating new ideas, and along the way of creating a journey map, you probably have some ideas about how to make things better and crafting opportunities statements will of course generate a lot of new ways of thinking about ideas. But there is a more formal way to think about, or more structured way, I should say about thinking about generating ideas, and we tend to call this part of the process, ideation. There are a lot of ways to approach it, we have a lot of specific techniques for approaching it, some more structured than others, but there are some quick and easy ways to get into generating new ideas. So, you have all this stuff that's rooted in almost a very reason-based analytical way of approaching the problem, so you're like been observing things, interviewing people, collecting data, putting it together in a structured journey map, but now the moment when you want to break out of that pattern of reason, and introduce some of the creative juices to get something like a different perspective going on what could be. So, design always puts you in this category of what could be, or what should be. So, generating new ideas will help you do that. So, one of the techniques that we use quite often, is this idea of what we call random entries. So, we call this an ideation technique and we use this a lot in workshops, in workshop settings to get a bunch of people generating a lot of ideas, and the idea is to create a big volume of ideas. Not worried about if it's a good idea or a bad idea, just to create a lot of ideas. So, how random entry works, is take your journey map, and pick out one of the key touch points. So, let's take the shopping cart for instance. Take the shopping cart out, and say that you've seen that as an opportunity to make the shopping cart better. What you want to first do, is think about some general ways that you might be making it better. So, the theme could be about making the wheels so they don't wobble, and that could be something that is the idea starter. The way to do is take the shopping cart and say that that's our focal point, that's what we're going to focus on. The next thing to do is, either generate a long list of random words, you can actually just find a random word on the Internet, or a random picture on the Internet. It doesn't matter what it is. Should be as random as possible. You can even find an object in your house that you haven't seen in a while. You take that word, image, or object. You put it in front of you, or even in front of you and a couple of people depending on how many people you want to pull into this process. We're focusing on the shopping cart. Next, we're going to take this. Let's just choose a random image, let's make it a butterfly. I take the word or the word or image of butterfly and I list all the things that I can think of in relation to butterfly, and you only give yourself one minute to this, and write as many as you can. So, quick, fast, colorful, light, metamorphosis, all these things that butterflies do. Start to pull out all of those words, and then once you have a minute of just listing everything off, go back and look at the list of words, and then pick out the two that really stand out, maybe even the one. So, I said metamorphosis, that's an interesting one, that there's something there about change. About different functions. You take that word, and you apply it to the shopping cart. You say, it's a metamorphosing shopping cart. What does that mean? So, if the shopping cart has properties of changing, maybe it's different, in different parts of the store. Maybe it has the ability to be the same cart, but different for people who are handicapped versus people who are taller and people who move at different paces. You can go with the idea that the shopping cart adapts to different types of people, or different species in the stores. Maybe when it gets crowded, the shopping carts get smaller. Don't worry about the logistics of how that gets done. Focus more on the idea itself because if it can't be done now, it can most likely be done later, and if the idea is good enough, it's going to spark other paths of thinking about how to make it better. So, the idea of the cart being smaller could just mean you have three different sized carts, where you didn't have three different sized carts before, and on a crowded day, maybe they only put out the small carts, and on a less crowded day, maybe the bigger carts are out. Those are things that you might not have got to before, and just thinking about how to make the shopping cart better. But the minute you put the idea of metamorphosis and change, all from that random stimuli, you have a new way of thinking about it. That's what ideation is about, is creating new ways to think about something. If you remember from our research process, we use analogy to do that. So, we used other products, other technologies, other experiences to think about how this one could be different. So, for the banking service, we used the Montessori School to think about differently. We used the community room to think about how a bank would behave differently, the coffee shop to think about how a bank would behave differently. You could do the same thing again, in this process. You can go to any technology you want to pull into it, or any experience, and apply that to the grocery store. You can take the idea of a football stadium, or whatever you want or driving a car. Any experience you want, and overlay that on top of the grocery store experience, and see what new ideas pop out of that. But the key thing that you want to be doing in the process of ideation, is number one: Capturing your ideas, so writing them down, and if you can, do a drawing to express how it might come to life. The drawing that expresses how it might come to life is a pivotal point in ideation, because what that does, is it helps you start to thinking about the initial stages of design. So, what are the requirements that are going to be needed to make this happen? What are the ways that people will use this thing, will experience this thing? These are all techniques in terms of generating ideas that will help you get through the first steps of actually designing something. The thing with random entry, is that it's very easy to follow the pattern of to want to use the word butterfly over and over because it sparks a lot of good ideas, but what you want to do is actually try to use something different each time. Not even a word each time, but an image, or an object. You can do this exercise over and over again to generate a lot of different ideas. The more people you bring into the process, the more associations you get to the word or object. But be careful not to use the same one over and over because you're just going to fall into old patterns of thinking. So, the whole point of random stimuli, is that it creates a whole new path of thinking. So, you want to keep it as random as possible. 9. Ideation: Design and Emotion: Through this process, you're going to be generating a lot of ideas and not always in a more structured way like you would do with random entry but things are just going to come to you. When you're out and about or standing in the shower, there's all different ways that ideas are going to pop into your head. So, when you're going through this process and this is generally the way I personally move through the world as a designer is I always have something to capture an idea with me. Luckily, I usually have my iPhone on me so a picture or quick voice note or whatever is a good way to capture that. But what I like to do is keep a sketchbook handy in all the places that I'm usually at like my desk, my bedroom, and even going so far as to keep post-it notes sitting around as well. So, that's a big thing that I keep on my desk and not just a sketch book but a stack of post-it notes and being able to write that idea down and put it off to the side, mix a little idea module that you can have and always keep together. Then when you go into that synthesis process, you can have some ideas already captured, you can go back and rip out the pages in your sketchbook and pull those into it. But the idea that I just have something to capture my thinking, never to lose that moment is very important. One of the core things that designers usually keep in the back of their mind or even it's just a core way that we think about the world is the combination of form and function and there's this old saying that form follows function. Meaning, how a thing works, it will be used, easier to use, better to use if the form reflects the actual function of it. So, if you think a camera, the form very much follows the function. You have a lens that you can hold on to and manipulate and you have a button over here, so it helps you anchor. So, the function of the device is very much tied to the form and when you look at a camera on a mobile device, it's removed some of that function and it's changed the way we take pictures. So, the form has a lot to do with the way that you experience the use of a product. So, you don't want to just think about form as the skin on something, the thing that makes it look prettier like a different color, the tail fin on a car, whatever it is that makes something look cooler or more streamlined. You want the form to have a purpose and make sure that any expression of something you're trying to design, whether it's the way a shelf looks or something a poster in the store, whatever sort of thing you've used to change the experience of the grocery store experience, that that has a purpose and its function. It's not just a formal thing to make it look a little prettier. If you follow that rule of thumb, you're always going to be creating something that has purpose that is meaningful. So, that's what people mean by form follows function. At Frog, we have this mantra that form follows emotion and that's one of our founder actually said that. That's something we truly believe because it's not just about the function of the thing, it's about how someone feels when they use it. So, thinking about the emotional quality as the functional piece, and then how does the form reflect the emotional quality. So, not just the function of the device but what people will feel when they use it as well. One of the things that we wanted to talk about is prioritizing your ideas. So, if you're really getting into this process, say you use a lot of different random objects or random words, you probably generated a lot of ideas, what you want to do is actually start to prioritize those and what we mean by prioritize those is find the ones that are going to have the most impact, ones that are going to be the most transformative for the experience. So, if we go back to the idea of the hotel journey, one of the things that when we were looking at across this journey, there was a lot of opportunities to change the experience to a better check-in process online all the way down to making the lobby feel like it has a more local flavor so that even though you're in a hotel chain, it feels a little different for each place you go. Or the moment when you actually put the key card into the door, there's opportunities to do that. One of the ideas was is that, the key card when you check in, that is a form of identification and then when you click that door, the room can reset itself to everything that you find preferential. So, maybe like the lights at a certain level, maybe you want certain things in your refrigerator. But all those preferences being tied to that key card at the minute you put it in the door, your favorite TV shows are available. You don't have to look at other channels. Looking at that moment and looking across this whole thing, we decided that was actually a good one because there's a lot of opportunity for personalization. But also, there was a lot of ability for the hotel to actually affect some changes there. So, the prioritization habits in terms of what can the hotel actually accomplish but also what's going to have the most impact and then from that, like where can all these ideas start to grow out of that? Now, that you have your journey map in place, and you have some ideas on that journey map, the next stage we want to move to is thinking about what the ideal experience is and there's a couple of ways that we want to do that. The first one is to rethink the journey map as it pertains to the key things that you want to redesign. So, think about the journey map in the sense that if the card is your focal point, how does the journey map build around the card and the card become a key part of the experience? It's not to say that's the most important part or the only part, but you want to start thinking about the journey as leading up to that moment and then how that moment carries you through and beyond. So, this is where we start to in the design lingo it's about we've gone through the process of discovery which helps us get a little bit divergent. Create a lot of ideas and a lot of thinking. Now, we're going to start to converge and bring things together and go for a little bit more focus. So, writing a scenario is one way to dive into the details of an interaction or a particular moment in the experience and that's an important one, that's one that everybody should do. But if you want to take it further, you could even go to the element of prototyping the experience. What we mean by prototyping it is to make it real in the sense that you can stand in front of it, that you can use it, that you can actually physically address it or go through the experience of it. But the idea is that it's not just an idea on paper but it's something you can actually interact with. Prototyping can take on many levels of what we call fidelity, all the way down to, I can draw a bunch of screens that would be seen on a mobile device, take some pictures of them, and then flip through on my mobile device. You've just created a mobile app prototype. You could do that for the whole app. What that does is it allows you to feel what that experience would be like as you flow through it. That's a very low fidelity way of doing it. You could do that with the shopping card as well. You could take a bunch of cardboard boxes and tape them together or hot glue them together to create something that feels like a small cart and something that feels like a big cart. But the point is, is that when you make that thing tangible, when you can actually physically address it and feel what the scale of it or the temporal nature of it, that makes you think about it differently. So, prototyping puts you in a different state of mind that's not just about the idea and the details of the idea, but the actual interaction of it, the feeling of it, the form of it. You can take that to all the way up to very different levels and you can do a lot of research on your own about how you can do prototyping. So, it can be prototyping the thing but it also could be prototyping the experience through making your own movie. You can use video and scripted out and create a stage with props and prototype the experience using video or photographs. You can photograph yourself standing in front of a traditional shopping card and then import that into Photoshop and change it around or draw on top of the photograph. There's lots of different ways to prototype but it's the idea that you're you're making it more tangible, more physical, that's the key thing that you want to try to do. So, you may be asking yourself, when do I share this thing that I've made with other people? That could be your journey map, that could be the scenario that you've written, that could be the prototype that you made. When do I introduce the stuff to other people to get feedback just to get general, how could this be better, which by the way is what we call the design world participatory design. So, the idea that I make stimuli that people can react to and then give me feedback and we create it and design it together. The minute you make something tangible, that's the moment to share it with somebody. So, you can try and perfect it and make it right and then share it. But the whole point of prototyping is to make it tangible, make it real very fast. So this is the moment you should be at least afraid of failure. So, the minute you actually start to express something, get it in front of someone as quickly as possible. Don't be afraid to do that in a lot of iterations. Be very social with your design. The key thing is to be making things and getting it in front of people. Don't try to perfect it because the more you try to perfect it, the more fixated you're going to get on a classic designers mistake is to get fixated on an idea and take it all the way through to the end and then realize no one actually wants to use this thing. Now, that you have all these pieces, you have your journey map, you have the one that is now becoming your ideal journey map and you have potentially some kind of prototype or scenario that writes out the signature moment in the journey. So, think about that hotel key card again, that hotel key card moment or the shopping card moment. Now, that you have the detailed explanation of what that is, what you're going to want to do is pull that back into the journey if you haven't done that yet and think about the entire flow again but in the sense that, how does this affect the entire grocery store experience? What has to change along the way to make this work? So, this is the part of the impact piece in terms of what it means for the grocery store to actually implement something new and then what does it mean for the person using it. So, you want to start to think about the ideal arc of that experience and how you're going to pull it all together to make it happen. So, that may mean if you took the front stage backstage approach, that may mean reorganizing the store floor. So, if you want to go back and just hint at how the journey takes you through the flow of the store a little bit differently and then what has to happen on the backstage to make that work. That's what the journey map should be. You'd be creating a new journey map to show that ideal journey along the way, but what the signature experience is as the guide, the central point 10. Storytelling: Communicating for Resonance: Now that we have our journey map and you've found your key idea that you want to focus on and you've started to rethink the journey or fine tune the journey into an ideal experience built around that one moment, you want to take that moment out let's just stick with the shopping cart for a moment and you almost want to think about it as literally a moment in the journey and you want to start to create a story around that. So, the simplest way is to take the idea of how they might storyboard a film. That's the easiest way to get started. So, some empty boxes in a row and some empty spaces under it to write a story, and you start with the shopping cart. You start with the person and you say this is how they use it. You describe this is how they use it, you tell you drafts or create the story of use. So that could have the feeling of a journey, but you want to get more specific and what I mean by specifics are the moment when you first see it so we call that the 10-foot read when you see something for a distance. What does it signal to you? What does it say to you? What does its form communicate about its function? You want to describe those things in a story type of ways you want to say, "Helen walks up to the shopping carts. She sees that the handle is adjustable, so she can move the handle up and down and find it at her perfect height. She also notices that the shopping cart is smaller." So, that will lead to build the story off of that. So, you want to start to think about the details of how people interact with something or how people flow through something trying to get as specific as possible, but creating it in a sort of story flow. So, to get back to the storyboard metaphor is that you want to think about it like someone's going to make a movie of this and what will that movie look like and how descriptive will that movie be for someone who's going to make that thing? So, design is about the actual drawing and shaping and designing of the form, but it's also the design of the interaction or the user experience if you will. So, design is not just about making the physical thing and how you hold it and how it feels, but it's also how you use it. So, even to the point of being able to say that you put your pen down a paper and the ink immediately comes out. You might forget that detail, but it's an important one, and that is essentially the user experience of a pen. How soft does the tip feel? How long does the ink last? These are all things that are part of user experience. So, user experience is not just about what you see on the screens, it's about the story of use of things. So, that's the story that you want to tell. You want to dive into that moment and extract as many details as possible. If you think about the traditional story arc which is the hero's journey. Someone is presented with a challenge and then they're given the ability to take an action against that challenge and then the resolution of that challenge is the conclusion of that story. So, you want to think about products or the experiences that people have as following that path of the entry point, the attraction point. What gets their attention? What gives them sort of the mental model of how it will work and then how do you draw them through that? Then what's the conclusion? Tell the story of those steps and that is an element of design. It's different than creating the object or sculpting the object or 3D printing something, but it is still a critical part of the design process. Story arcs are good you can sort of go off and do some research about different story arcs. There's a lot of great videos particularly when with Kurt Vonnegut where he talks to the emotional visualization of stories and all the different stories. You can use these story arcs as templates to tell the story of the design. You can use yourself as a catalyst. What you learned along the way. You can use the people that you talk to as the characters in the story. You can just use the grocery store itself and where it fits into the larger history of grocery stores and the larger history of shopping as this sort of protagonist along the journey. But what you want to do is take all the stuff that you have the insights, the findings, the photographs, the journey maps, and find a story thread and use those assets to tell the story. You should be thinking about this as something that can be summarized into say like a two minute video. Something that's very concise and a good example for why you would be doing this is let's say that you actually find a really great idea in there and you want to bring it to a popular crowdfunding site, you're going to have to be able to tell that story and provide the reasoning, the rationale, and the inspiration and why people should care about it. You've got to be able to tell all of that and to think about it in the sort of the idea of a crowdfunding video which is about two to three minutes long. Being able to clearly communicate that and tell the story of why it matters that's going to be the important thing. So, little things along the way like one quote from the person here or this big insight or a couple of the ideas that you had and how you turned it into this one idea. All those tell the story of how design comes to life and that element of articulating how design comes to life is part of the storytelling aspect. So, when you start to think about crafting that narrative, it's what story arc template do you want to use? You want to use the hero's journey the little grocery store that could that became a completely different experience that changed the way people thought about their health. That's a big long journey and you can tell how you're going to help get them to that conclusion or you can just be very factual. This is what we heard. This is what we think should happen, and this is what it will do if we follow this path and we implement this design, and that will sort of help you set that goal and you could even put this out on a crowdfunding site and see if you can get it funded. That's a good way to start to think about the next step for this. But the storytelling aspect is also important in the sense that design is about evangelizing new ways of seeing the world and if you can't clearly articulate that then you're ideas are sort of just fall to the wayside. Your design will almost feel irrelevant in a way and all these elements that we've helped you bring together are the components that you need to tell a good story. So, if you want to take one more approach maybe it's not a crowdfunded way, you can start to think about this as a tool that you might use in other parts of your life. There could be things that are important to you that you thought about all along that you want to change. Maybe you do work in a hospital and you've felt powerless in terms of how can I actually affect change in this place that seems like almost impossible to change. All these tools that you bring together maybe you're a teacher in a high school or maybe you work in a restaurant you just want the experience to be better. There's all these ways that you can use these tools very quickly or you can take more time and create a concise point of view about how to make things better, and that can be in a very elaborate crowdfunded video way or that can be a one-minute pitch with a little tiny drawing that you show to somebody. But when an idea is good and when it has a solid rationale and when it has a clear story and it addresses a clear need, it doesn't really matter how long the story is, the impact can be felt and you can sense that when you get to the way to pull that story together. You'll know that you've reached a good conclusion because if you can tell it in one minute and even draw it while you're sitting in front of somebody, that's when you know that you've created something that's useful and something that other people can start to think about as useful because the cool thing about design is that even if it's not realized yet, the idea of it can become viral and the easier it is for other people to communicate that idea, the more possible it is that that idea will come to life. 11. Conclusion: This class is about design thinking at its heart, but where I want to put the twist on that is the idea of design action. The sense that when you take these skills on as a designer or just even learning a little bit about how designers work, it's going to put you in a different mindset. It's gonna give you a different perspective on the world. Hopefully, it's going to give you a perspective that is more proactive, more optimistic. Give you the ability to see the possibilities for change. But not only see the possibilities and think about them, but to be able to produce something that is relevant and actionable to affect that change. So, when we talk about the power of design to change the world, that's exactly what we mean is that you have these small moments, moments that are relevant to you and relevant to the people around you. You have the ability to think about realistic possible change and bring that to life, because design coming to life is the most important thing. If it's just an idea, then it doesn't really change anything. So, the ability to actually make things real and bring them into the world, that's where impact starts. If we all have this way of perceiving change and being able to affect change, that's going to create a very different world. 12. Explore Design on Skillshare: