think carrie, think!

Moved into my new apartment in Pittsburgh this weekend. Thank you mom. She’s a superhero.

I like the place. It has windows that don’t look straight out onto pavement and the underneath of cars. I see actual trees! The sky! Oh the luxury.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with the Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital to figure out what I can do for them for my thesis. And to hopefully start all the IRB goodness that comes with working with little people. The Children’s Hospital is conviniently (for me) opening a brand new unit right under their Critical Care unit in October. That means there will be lots of room for me to go in and evaluate their current services, and hopefully find something lacking, or something to improve with respect to their current service offerings. It also helps that Bonnie Dean, the director of clinical education/research/professional development and patient care support (phew, long title), has enthusiastically agreed to be my second mentor for my year-long thesis.

As for my thesis paper, I know I will be doing something about music notation and services… but I’ve been thinking lately more along the lines of improvisation and how that can tie into services. Improvisation takes on a whole new notation system in terms of music. And improvisation in services is a whole lot different than fixed and planned service processes. It seems that a lot of problems with services occur because of the lack of proper improvisation, if that makes any sense. I dealt a bit with this over the summer at IBM. Example: routine checking-in at the airport, vs. finding out that your flight was canceled at time of check-in. Canceled flights can be a mess, but they don’t have to be if planned properly. So, planned improvisation, if you will. How do companies currently deal with out-of-the-ordinary situations? Do they know what goes on in their customer’s head as they try to deal with crisis scenarios? How can designers create a strategy for service providers for creating better customer experience? Would proper service notation and blueprinting help?

(Speaking of music stuff, I got into one of CMU’s orchestra classes this year. Very excited.)

ICSID/IDSA Connecting ‘07

The 32nd International DMI Conference

MSI’s Service Innovation by Design

I know there are a lot of other conferences but these three have recently put themselves on my conference radar. Looks like a collection of great speakers and interesting topics. If only I was made of money. Well actually, seeing as how MSI’s conference is only open to specific members, and the DMI conference would put me out over $2K, it looks like the ICSID/IDSA may be a possibility.

I’m in the middle of packing/cleaning the apartment. For one, my mom is coming tomorrow, and plus, I’m leaving in a week and figure I won’t really have that much time to lounge around cleaning or packing during the week.

Anyway, while packing I found the pamphlet I picked up when I went to Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s IDEO Selects exhibit. I leafed through it briefly because my attention span is worse than that of a goldfish. I noted that the three lenses that they chose to frame the items in the exhibit were inspiration, empathy, and intuition. “While we could have chosen any number of lenses, these three neatly distill the design thinker’s sensibilities as he or she solves a problem.”

Contrast this to something I read earlier in the week from Jeanne Liedtka (whom I quoted earlier today): “Great design, it has been said, occurs at the intersection of constraint, contingency, and possibility – elements that are central to creating innovative, elegant, and functional designs.”

Inspiration, empathy, and intuition. Constraints, contingency, and possibility. (oh my!). All important to designers. But the two groups seem to be somewhat disparate, no? Not that I’ve had time to dissect this thoroughly, but I find it interesting that IDEO chose to showcase their design exhibit from the first group’s frame of mind, while the business director described design from the other frame of mind.

That is all. I’m tired.

After working here for a couple months, I’ve naturally drifted towards reading a lot of articles on bringing design thinking into management. Because my brain is a bit fried from the work I’ve been doing this week, I’m going to cop out from expressing my opinions for now and instead share some interesting pieces I’ve gathered from some of these articles. A lot of these articles have got me thinking whether or not I should rethink my thesis essay topic. Being that my current topic deals with the exploration of classical music notation (or scores from film soundtracks, I haven’t yet decided) as a means to discover new service notations, it would be a big shift of topics. But most of me knows I’m a musician at heart, and it would be nice to dive into that area with respect to interaction design. Anyway.

On bringing design simplicity to business strategy

“What if we used the Little Black Dress as a model for business strategy? We would end up with strategies that would be neither incomprehensible to all save their creators, nor banal and self-evident. They would eschew the faddish and focus on enduring elements, incorporating a versatility and openness that invited their ‘wearers’ to add adornments to fit the occasion at hand. Perhaps most importantly, they would emphasize our positives while acknowledging our flaws–all in the service of offering us hope for a better (thinner) tomorrow.” -Jeanne Liedtka, executive director of the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business

On Design Attitude

“We were working at a large table, and Matt was leaning far onto it, marking the final changes. As he pushed back from the table, we were joking about how tedious the process had been and how glad we were to have it over. As we joked, Matt gathered all the sheets of onionskin and the marked up floor plans, stacked them, and then grabbed an edge and tore them in half. Then he crumpled the pieces and threw them in the trashcan in the corner of the room. This was a shock! What was he doing? In a matter-of-fact tone, he said, “We proved we could do it, now we can think about how we want to do it.” -Richard Boland Jr. and Fred Collopy, professors (Information Systems and Cognitive Science, respectively) at the Weatherhead school of Management at Case Western, while working with Matt Fineout from Gehry Partners

On Risk

“We’ve found that this traditional, negative definition [of risk] doesn’t exist in the lexicon of most designers. For them, risk isn’t a measure of ‘the downside’; instead, it is a measure of upside and opportunity. If the risk isn’t great enough, designers might well ask themselves, “why bother”?” -Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Jacoby, IDEO

Today at work we had a couple different roundtable discussion sessions with some HR staff. The point of these discussions was to give feedback about our internship experience at IBM. I had some major problems with the way these discussions were run, but anyway…

I mentioned that my idea of IBM Research as a corporation was still very technical – there is very little room for exploring and introducing new methods and ways of thinking. Granted, there is a lot of room for freedom in doing whatever you want in terms of a project and I am grateful for that. But thinking back, all the job offers I received for this summer were similar in that respect, surprisingly – either way, I would have been given my own project and space to innovate. The reason why I chose IBM Research over other companies was because I knew IBM would benefit most from the addition of design thinking (especially since I would not be working at the IBM Research Cambridge site).

So now that my internship is nearing its end, I am still asking myself whether what I’ve been doing will really have an impact on IBM. But most of all, I am asking myself what my role is as an individual designer, contributing to a corporation such as IBM. Is it in my place to try and change old ways of thinking? Or should we wait for other up-and-coming companies to show IBM why new ways of thinking are beneficial? Or is IBM so large that it doesn’t matter what other people say and/or do?