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.)

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

A new Interaction Design institute is being opened in Copenhagen this year. I scanned the overview and philosophy for the school, and so far it seems a little bit heavy on the industry side. I’m not sure how much I can appreciate a school where topics like interaction design theory are mere “possibilities” for a seminar course. A person with a Master degree in any subject should at least understand the basic foundations and theories of the field.

I know interaction design is a lot about hands on studio work and experience, but I don’t think that’s all that is necessary to produce good interaction designers (or to grant a Master degree in the field). As a first year last year, I appreciated the Trials and Tribulations of Dick Buchanan, and as much as it was a brain stretch (and by stretch, I mean ripped apart to shreds), I feel like it allows me now to talk and think about interaction design in a way that is not superficial and surface-skimming. We’re not here for an interaction design workshop, we’re here to become masters of a domain. To be fair, this institute is brand new, so it will be interesting to see how their program shapes up in the next couple of years.

What also bothers me is that the institute seems to pin interaction design as a mix of “design and technology”. Which is not surprising I guess, since most other schools and organizations also do this. But what draws me to interaction design is the fact that we’re trained in methods and theories that don’t necessarily have to deal with technology. If as interaction designers our goals are to shape and mediate behaviors between people and products/services/systems etc, then technology is simply a tool, and not something that should define the field.

Also, this school wants to maintain “high standards” by giving exams at the end of the year. If nothing else turned me off from the program, this definitely did.