GigaOM » ideo

Live video talk: The power of storytelling for early stage energy tech

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:15:10 +0000

Creating compelling narratives and telling solid stories can be a game-changer for early stage energy technologies — for developing products, for pitching investors, and for gaining customers and partners. At the fourth annual ARPA-E Summit on Monday around 4:30PM EST (1:30PM PST) we’ll be live streaming a discussion between Otherlab’s Saul Griffith, IDEO’s Dave Blakely, and myself, about the power of narratives for energy tech.

Don’t miss this! It’s one of the only live, free online events for the show. ARPA-E is a program created by the Department of Energy to give small grants to early-stage, high-risk energy technologies that can be game-changers. Here’s to moonshots! They need some powerful stories. Watch to find out why. (If we’re running a few minutes late, be patient, we’ll start soon).

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How Sitegeist used great design to make census data cool

Eliza Kern — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 16:00:34 +0000

Can census data be fun?

At first glance, you might not think median home prices or transit data would be all that interesting. But Sitegeist, the location-based open data app from the Sunlight Foundation and famed design firm IDEO, is proving that good design can make public data cool.

The concept seems simple when you open the app, the app uses data and information pulled from a wide variety of sources. Sitegeist allows users to set their location and then flip through several screens to explore data tied to their specific location. The screens include: people (median age, age distribution, household income, gender, and political contributions), housing (median home value, average rent, percentage renting v. buying, and commuting patterns), local attractions (popular businesses, local movie theaters, and restaurants), environment (weather), and history (median home age and number of housing units.) The app is available for both iOS and Android.

The sheer volume of data that the Sitegeist app provides for each location is a reminder that between census data and public APIs from companies like Yelp, Foursquare, and Dark Sky, users can put together a relatively comprehensive profile of a geographic location. The Sunlight Foundation put together a “how we did it” blog post, explaining the technology behind the app and how they used different APIs to build a comprehensive product:

All of this wonderful data resides on our servers. When you select a location, the latitude and longitude are passed along with the ID of the pane you want to view. Of the various geographies we keep track of (census tracts, ZIP codes, etc.), the boundaries of any shape that contains your location is found. This uses a customized version of Chicago Tribune’sboundary service. We then match those geographic boundaries with any data we have, making calls to third-party APIs as needed. The collected data is rendered into templates and returned to you as the beautiful infographics you see in the app.

But presenting the information in an intuitive manner with help from IDEO was just crucial to the app’s success as the data that went into it. The Sunlight Foundation won a grant from the John and James L. Knight Foundation to hire external designers to work with them on the Sitegeist app, which was the third in a series of data apps the group worked on. The Sunlight Foundation is focused on using technology to promote openness and transparency in government, an idea we’ll be exploring at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York in March.

“These apps are designed to make the case for why open data is important to people,” said Tom Lee, director of Sunlight Labs. “And I think it’s really accessible for people. It’s visually striking, which is a credit to IDEO’s designers and Sunlight’s designers, and everyone has an investment in their neighborhood.”

I downloaded the app about two weeks ago, and I’ve found myself opening it in different neighborhoods around San Francisco to see what kinds of people live there. The app would be an ideal travel companion for exploring completely new areas, but even comparing two spots in SOMA (on the left) and Telegraph Hill (on the right), was eye-opening:

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What every designer working in a startup needs to know

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 18:30:22 +0000

At the core of any startup is a passion to satisfy unmet needs. At the core of a designer there’s a passion to craft a bold vision for the future. But being a designer and being a designer in a startup are two very different things. After working at IDEO for about five years, I took the leap into a startup. Here are the three most surprising things I’ve learned from the past year about design and the role a designer plays in a startup.

User research doesn’t produce user-centered design.

At IDEO, a team conducts “unfocus groups” where consumers were given a buffet of prototyping materials to build their perfect running shoe

Traditional quantitative user research does not help you envision the future. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Using focus groups and surveys to measure and predict what consumers need and want are incremental at best because they’re focused on present realities.

User-centered design is something entirely different. It’s a way to run your company — with users at the center — where you uncover, understand and are inspired by people’s needs, wants, hopes, and aspirations; what they say, feel, do (and don’t do). So asking a focus group to imagine the future is akin to asking them to do the designer’s job themselves. It’s nonsensical.

Steve Jobs introduces the iMac, or “what [computers] will look like from today on.”

Steve Jobs was notorious for his belief that good design could create products that anticipate consumer needs. As he said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” But Apple is a deeply user-centered company. Instead of relying on focus groups, they designed products they’d want to use. Which is why, in 1998, they opted to put a lot of memory into the new iMac, to give it an optimal screen size, and to simplify the overall user experience. As Jobs explained at the time,”This has to be the computer that we want on our desks too.”

One way is to get your design team into the homes of people who would use your product, and let them experience these people’s lives first-hand. Your offering will look quite different when you begin to see the context that will exist around it in people’s lives. Another way is to randomly conduct “man on the street” style interviews where you show someone a low-fidelity prototype and get their feedback. These are fast and dirty — and really fun to do. A final way to better understand your customer is to host what IDEO calls a “Whine and Dine,” where a focused conversation happens over food and drinks.

These methods aren’t about measuring, and they’re not about predicting. Rather, user-centered design is about starting with people — to uncover their unmet needs, aspirations and behaviors. And once you identify whom you’re serving and what they need, hold onto those insights as the sacred, core opportunities of your company.

Design and engineering don’t make great bedmates.

Hundreds of logo studies were done before converging on the final Mailbox identity.

The traits that make for a good engineering culture are rarely the same as those that make for a good design culture. Design teams thrive in the experimental, the quick and dirty, in taking leaps and being daring, and they aren’t afraid of failing as a means to learning. Engineering teams, on the other hand, thrive in understanding, in the elegant solutions that account for edge cases, in heads down and focussed spaces, and the engineers I know aren’t too keen on failures of any kind.

IDEO’s San Francisco offices have an open layout for cross-pollination of ideas through conversation.

During this past year I worked in an office that was modeled after IDEO — big communal tables, no walls, and lots of team space. You’d think this open format would foster discussion, keep the designers and engineers in lock-step and promote visibility across the company. But that just wasn’t the case. The designers were noisy, they liked their music at full volume, and they hashed through design reviews passionately. The engineers were cranking and found the noise and activity distracting.

So instead of trying to convince the engineers to be more like the designers, or for the designers to be more like the engineers, we went to Home Depot, bought some giant sheets of foamcore and built a wall. Suddenly, the engineers had a coding cave that was quiet and took over two-thirds of the office, while the designers had the other third of the space to pump their music and debate over button styles as loudly as they wanted.

The result? On the day-to-day level, people were suddenly excited for weekly meetings instead of being at one another’s throats. And at a deeper, cultural level, a respect began to emerge between the teams.

Embrace the fact that design and engineering cultures are different. Design is really well-suited to answer the “How might we?” questions, while engineering is really well-suited to consider all of the details that go into making a concept real. And if you want to build a world-class product, you have to surround these two unique cultures with the tools, space and support that will get them there. They’re complementary – you need both. It’s where 2 + 2 adds up to 5.

You can’t add back in design at the end.

Design thinking touches all aspects of your company.

A startup expresses the values of the founding team. Period.

If the founding team isn’t made up of designers or design-thinkers, design will have a hard time offering much more than window dressing. The founders represent the heart and soul of the company: What the founders burn for will be what the company burns for, and when a company is run by a team that loves product, the results are magical. Because a design-led startup is going to design not only their product, but also their culture. (It’s this mission that started The Designer Fund — a group solely dedicated to investing in designer founders.)

Dropbox’s product helps you upload and share your photos, documents and videos simply and easily.

Take Dropbox, for example. It has only three official designers and the founder, Drew Houston, is a self-professed software engineer. But the Dropbox team has obsessed over the design of their product: It is a wonderfully simple, easy-to-use, intuitive product that serves a clearly defined, core need. It is magical. And this is because — even though he doesn’t call himself a designer — Houston is a design-thinker, which is expressed through the entire product. Dropbox is clearly the result of design thinking operating at the core of the company. So for design to be effective in a startup, it has to be at the center of the organization.

But design isn’t just about product; design is a way of thinking about everything. It’s how you handle the unknowns when talking to investors; it’s how you approach ambiguity within your earliest ideas and explorations; it’s how you critique — not criticize; it’s how you talk through those ideas that could potentially alter your engineering schedule by months; it’s how you know when to keep pushing past “good enough” and on to great; and it’s how you get from why you’re solving a problem to what you’re building and putting out into the world.

Let’s call a spade a spade here and reframe the role of the designer — design isn’t simply making things look pretty, design is about creating a vision for tomorrow. And it’s difficult — if not impossible — to dream, create and ship amazing new products when the foundation of the company isn’t set up to solve really complex problems, deal with uncertainty, and align on a definition of what “good” looks like.

Since the designer’s role is to envision tomorrow, and the startup exists to bring tomorrow into existence, that fundamental partnership is what’s really needed for a designer to effectively do their job in a startup. So if you’re interested in building a design-led startup, do it fully. Be bold in designing the future. And make that vision a reality.

Elle Luna is the Design Lead at Mailbox — a mobile email app. You can find her on Twitter at @elleluna.

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How emerging technologies will influence collaboration

David Coleman — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 06:55:35 +0000

Workplaces are changing because of trends like BYOD and gamification. But other emerging technologies are also altering not only what our work and space look like but also how we collaborate on that work. This piece delves into the different types of collaboration to provide a baseline of concepts. It then examines how emerging technologies like driverless cars, brain science, and 3D printers are being used to further collaboration in the near and far future. These advancements will not only support more and better types of collaboration in the workplace but will also impact where we work, what a workspace is, what we work on (literally), and how we share our work.

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