How @APStylebook and @FakeAPStylebook spent their Valentine’s Day
Author: Suzanne Yada Date Posted: February 14th, 2012
This lovers’ spat is one for the record. Almost as good as this one.
What Stanford’s d.school hackathon taught me about design, solving problems and, um, life.
Author: Suzanne Yada Date Posted: January 31st, 2012
Burt Herman sent the email to the SF Hacks/Hackers group, just as an FYI. Free food! Free drinks! Free networking! Prizes! And all you have to do is show up at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and rethink their website!
In other words, Stanford want us to work for them for free. :/
I thought about deleting the invite and refusing to go in protest. But as every good journalist would take into consideration, they did have free food. All weekend. And I heard the founder of IDEO would be there. So OK, they would be “paying” us in greasy pizza and high-level contacts, and who knows, it could be fun. I’ve been to a few hackathons before and found them all worthwhile. All right.
I went. I sucked.
It was AWESOME.
First, the background: The Stanford d.school is not a design degree program, and it has little to do with strictly visual design. It’s more of an interdisciplinary school to teach problem-solving, creativity and collaboration skills. (Fast Company did some great write-ups on it when it first opened.)
The challenge was to bring their system of problem-solving to the world so people can change said world. So the designers, programmers, business people and other eyewitnesses set out on the inaugural HACK.d hackathon.
In that 48 hours of little sleep and, uh, lower-than-average showering, here’s what I learned.
“Design” solves problems. And everyone solves problems.
To be clear, the design we are talking about has nothing to do with making things look pretty, though that can be a means to solve a problem. Design is problem-solving, period. Even in graphic design, you have a client that has the problem of looking unprofessional or communicating the wrong thing. Your job as a designer is to solve it.
The philosophy of the d.school was that everyone is creative but not everyone knows it. They just need a little extra guidance. So the d.school offers one specific five-step method of problem-solving, which I happen to like:
- Empathize
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
Or, to break it down with one example:
- Watch and interview someone
- Find out their biggest pain in the ass and define it clearly
- Come up with as many ideas as possible that would fix the problem
- Build one of them
- Try it out on the person
- Repeat as many steps as necessary.
It seems obvious, but there are some important points this process addresses. Such as:
Humans first.
That’s why the “empathy” stage is first. Many of us at the hackathon went through a 90-minute crash course called the Gift-Giving Project. We paired up and asked each other about the last gift we gave and what we would change about the entire gift-giving process, from remembering to buy a gift to purchasing to wrapping to giving to sending the thank-you card.
After the first interview, they had us interview a second time with a deeper emphasis on emotion (“The goal is to make the other person cry,” said the facilitator).
THAT is what was missing from many of these step-by-step plans to solve problems. That emotional connection. I heard a gripping story from a first-time dad, and he heard my story. And we actually listened to each other on a deeper level and worked that into our solutions.
This is why Steve Job’s designs work. They inspire a human-centered emotional reaction. Whatever you think of Jobs himself, you can’t deny the emotional connections he created through his products.
Sucking is a means to an end.
When you’re brainstorming ideas, it’s quantity over quality. I’ve known this for years and am comfortable with letting everyone offer whatever idea they have without shooting it down. It’s a different picture when I’m talking about my own ideas. I’m in self-editor mode even before I begin. The facilitator made a great point about “page vomit”: The idea is to use all your stupid, stupid ideas up, until you come across a not-so-stupid idea. Then don’t treat it as a series of failures that leads to an answer, but a road map you bring to your test user so they can tell you where to go.
It’s not about you. It’s about them. You are helping them find their own answer.
Workspaces do mean a lot.
The d.school is designed so that nearly every wall is a whiteboard, most of the furniture is on wheels, and a main workspace has adjustable walls. There are buckets of Post-its, Sharpies and Expo pens everywhere. But interestingly enough, I couldn’t find a regular pen and a pad of paper anywhere.
That’s because the workspace is designed purposefully to get people to share and collaborate. Your ideas are not precious, to be kept in your binder or entered into an Excel spreadsheet. They’re supposed to be messy and open. There’s not a lot of lecturing in the classes, so there’s no need for taking notes of some teacher’s PowerPoint slides. They call it a bias of action: Less talk, more walk.
Give people limits and they will find a way. Oh, they will find a way.
Yes, some people created amazing projects within 48 hours. That was the whole point of the weekend. But the idea of limitations and quick iterations was everywhere.
In the gift-giving exercise, I had 10 minutes to build a toy car out of a pile of kindergarten craft supplies. I chose Popsicle sticks, tape, magnets and pipe cleaners. In a way, the limitations were hugely helpful, because if your goal is to get good feedback on your prototype, the other person is more willing to criticize something that is crap than if they were presented with a polished prototype.
Become a kid again.
OK, so how many of you draped sheets between furniture and built tents in your living room? That’s kind of how I felt about the architecture of the place. The d.school bridges two buildings and uses the space between them brilliantly:
Outside
Inside
You can still see the exposed walls inside the (yes) well-insulated room. Genius.
And when was the last time you played with Popsicle sticks?
The school brings the concept of play to a university that desperately needs it. Because it’s interdisciplinary, it means that some of the world’s best doctors, scientists, engineers and lawyers at Stanford can all take classes in play.
David Kelley said in his opening remarks that people stopped calling themselves “creative” as far back as elementary school, and that was a shame. Now the school he helped found is putting creativity back to people who may need it the most.
Like, for example, me.
Carnival of Journalism: How universities can fill information needs
Author: Suzanne Yada Date Posted: January 20th, 2011
This post is the second of mine in the Carnival of Journalism. The first is here.
I had a media literacy course in community college. It was an elective. I liked it. It was cool. I don’t remember much from it, though.
I also had a critical thinking course at the same college. It was a requirement. I loved it. It changed my life. It wasn’t a “journalism” class, but it definitely focused a lot on the media. And it was more than cool.
I remember being asked to clip advertisements and identify the marketing tactics used to sway people into buying the product. I remember we were asked to memorize seven most common logical fallacies and apply them to different news articles we found.
Both assignments would have worked wonderfully in the media literacy course. But nope. Missed opportunity for the elective, but thank God students had to take the critical thinking course to transfer to a 4-year university.
We need more requirements like this, for everyone.
Media works best when the public is smart
When I read “Study: Many college students not learning to think critically,” I wish I were more surprised. This is not a j-school problem, it’s a school-school problem. And a painfully obvious one to boot.
So to address the root problems in this month’s Carnival of Journalism, we have to go deeper and wider than just the journosphere.
The Knight Foundation loves to use wording like “journalistic activity” and “information needs” to step away from thinking that only journalists can impart good information. I like that.
So to apply it to the role of the university, how about empowering departments who conduct original research to write for the public? Much of their work is inaccessible because of academic jargon or restrictive publications. If the school has a journalism program, what about a tighter and more in-depth partnership with them? And what if the journalism schools were able to broadcast this to a broader audience?
A scenario
Let’s invent an example. A university with a great biology department discovers an important find. A peer-review journal has published the study and it is passing the test.
To spread it to the community at large, the university PR department sends out a one-page press release describing the research. It’s not very in-depth, and frankly, the poor overworked PR department has other things to do.
If there were no journalism program at the university, an outside entity (such as the Knight Foundation!) could set up content-production training with the people in the biology department. It could give them tools to build their own website, seminars on how to write engaging blog posts, workshops on how to publish a database to the web.
But luckily for this fictional school, they do have a j-school and it has a special reporting class. (Yeah, yeah, I know I said let’s look outside the j-school, but let’s return to navel-gazing for a bit. Humor me.)
The class’ sole job is to maintain different online journalistic outlets — websites, blogs, newsletters, etc. The class maintains a handful of niche websites or blogs, and they keep the content coming every day. The niches could be on science, entertainment, politics, finances — whatever is an identified information need, whether it’s a local or a national niche. (The publications stay the same, no matter what semester.)
So the biology department’s press release lands on the instructor’s desk. She gives it to the student assigned to writing for the science blog that day (each student has to be well-rounded enough to rotate through all the blogs). They notify the established student media that they’re working on this article. They might do a short write-up, or they might wait until the student does something more in-depth on the science blog. They choose that route. The student then acts as the liaison with the science department into helping them translate this finding into English, obtaining some databases or spreadsheets, and posting it in an interactive way to the blog. If the science blog had a national audience niche, even better. The class could also set up a place on the site where the biology department themselves could upload and post articles. The student newspaper does a short write-up and references the science blog in a link or QR code from the article.
How is this different?
I view this kind of scenario as different from the current student media setup in that it encourages national audiences with very specific niches and consistent writers. How many good blogs do you know have gone dead because the person behind them got sick of doing it?
Research needs to be done in each community on what the information need is, however, not what the students want to blog about. That’s for their own blogging time (and it’s good journalism training to write for subjects you didn’t choose).
The flagship student media should represent a general-interest campus niche and should focus all of its efforts on that. But this class would allow students to identify information needs and focus on that regardless of campus relevance — or if there’s a deeper relevant topic on campus, it could fill that need where the established student media can’t devote the resources.
I will say, it IS similar to UC Berkeley’s Mission Local, but I’m imagining an undergraduate class writing for national audiences. I like to dream big.
Ideas more practical than that one
I’m full of too many ideas, and frankly, I need to wrap this up, so I’m going to toss out a few ideas of practical things that 1) don’t involve a brand new class and 2) is related to the Carnival of Journalism topic:
- I like what David Cohn said about getting students to become teachers. School BarCamp, anyone?
- Love Howard Rheingold’s Crap Detection class at Stanford.
- Big fan of Bullshit Detecting 101 by Craig Silverman.
- Love how Dan Gillmor asks his students to correct Wikipedia pages.
I originally was going to use this space to bitch and moan about how journalism schools should never lose sight of the basics, but I’m sure you all know that by now. I’d rather leave you with a sprinkling of ideas that you could turn into actual classroom exercises. Hope you do.