Podcast appearances and mentions of allan chochinov

Allan Chochinov is an educator, writer, speaker, and advocate for the power and capacity of design. He is the Founding Chair of the MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and a partner of Core77, the design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts since 1995. Allan has moderated and led workshops and symposia at venues from the Aspen Design Conference to the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, and has been invited to speak on design at organizations from frog Design and SYPartners to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The New York Times, and the National AIGA. A frequent lecturer and critic, he has worked with students at schools including MIT, Yale School of Management, Columbia School of Business, RMIT, IIT, and Carnegie Mellon. Prior to SVA and Core77, his work in product design focused on the medical, surgical, and diagnostic fields (early work focused on HIV/AIDS, and later projects included work for Johnson & Johnson, Oral-B, FedEx, and Herman Miller). He has been named on numerous design and utility patents, and has received awards from The Art Directors Club, The One Club, I.D. Magazine, and Communication Arts. He has also served on the boards of the National AIGA organization, Designers Accord, Design Ignites Change, and NYCxDESIGN. Episode Mentions: Tanaka Kapec Design Group http://www.wedesigntosimplify.com/ Change Everything You Hate About Meetings With This One Single Word Follow Allan on Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn Show website link: https://mailchi.mp/designlabpod/allanchochinov This episode is sponsored by: Fortune Brainstorm Design, to be held May 23-24 in Brooklyn is a curated experience for passionate and successful design and design-minded professionals. Join Fortune and be inspired by diverse examples of design excellence, explore how design thinking and practice can be challenged and advanced, meet and network with high-level peers, and leave with concrete ideas and partnerships to drive transformation within your organization. Listeners of Design Lab with Bon Ku can use code “designlab” for a 20% discount on registration!  For more information or to register go to FortuneBrainstormDesign.com. More episode sources & links Sign-up for Design Lab Podcast's Newsletter Newsletter Archive Follow @DesignLabPod on Twitter Instagram and LinkedIn Follow @BonKu on Twitter and Instagram Check out the Health Design Lab Production by Robert Pugliese Cover Design by Eden Lew Theme song by Emmanuel Houston

The ReStart from AIGA is a new content series that helps the design community move forward from COVID by posing salient questions and providing practical strategies. We are kicking off the series here on the podcast, and will be publishing interviews and panel discussions and other expert content across AIGA's channels over the next few weeks. In this episode, host Lee-Sean Huang talks with Allan Chochinov about his research and experimentation dealing with the challenges of hybrid teaching, with some students in the room, and some students on Zoom.. Allan is an educator writer, speaker, and advocate for the power and capacity of design. He's the founding chair of the MFA in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York. How to Teach Hybrid with Zoom and Almost No Money (Short Version!) https://chochinov.medium.com/how-to-teach-hybrid-with-zoom-and-almost-no-money-short-version-950eb22846a6 How to Teach Hybrid in the Fall with Zoom and Almost No Money (LONG VERSION) https://chochinov.medium.com/how-to-teach-hybrid-in-the-fall-with-zoom-and-almost-no-money-8a21bbb9a980 MFA Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts https://productsofdesign.sva.edu/ https://www.allanchochinov.com/ Transcript of the episode https://www.dropbox.com/s/0pie4celdn19fu6/Allan_Chochinov_DFN-Restart.pdf?dl=0 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aigadesign/message

How do we design rich interactions between students and teachers remotely? In this week's episode, we are talking about how to design for concurrent hybrid learning without spending a lot of money on technology, training, and new software platforms. Sam is joined by Allan Chochinov, an educator, writer, and speaker whose recent Medium article titled, “How to Teach Hybrid in the Fall with Zoom and Almost No Money” explores this very topic. Allan chats about the pitfalls of learning remotely and he dives deeper into the factors that affect education via Zoom. Later on in the show, they are joined by Fred Deakin, who runs a studio called FANDCO that specializes in interactive and educational projects. Together they discuss ways to combat Zoom fatigue and designing hybrid learning that works.   For links to resources we discuss on this episode, visit our show page: Designing Hybrid Learning for Roomies and Zoomies

Allan Chochinov, Founding Chair of the MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, joins Lou to discuss how his program approaches the education of new designers—from the belief that grades can hamper creativity and risk taking, to the need for his students to learn the art of careful listening. After eight graduating classes, Allan offers surprises and insights about different career trajectories for design students, and clear evidence that career paths are often non-traditional. Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, the design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts since 1995. More about Allan: https://www.allanchochinov.com/ Allan Recommends: •Girls Garage by Emily Pilloton https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44601186-girls-garage?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ghIzeV0mbb&rank=1 •Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6260997-half-the-sky •Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible by Jamer Hunt https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51203318-not-to-scale •Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff https://rushkoff.com/books/present-shock/ •User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41940285-user-friendly •By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons by Ralph Caplan https://www.secondsale.com/i/by-design-2nd-edition-why-there-are-no-locks-on-the-bathroom-doors-in-the-hotel-louis-xiv-and-other-object-lessons/9781563673498?gclid=Cj0KCQjwreT8BRDTARIsAJLI0KLamLylKCGMu5u7Sz-ZM8lyn8ZgDdugGTwGC7dHJgHBEu_vqp2OL-waAmPQEALw_wcB

Have you ever wondered what it means to be a professional conversation designer? Listen as your host Douglas Ferguson and his guest Daniel Stillman, the founder of the Conversation Factory and a master facilitator, discuss what it means to be a conversation designer and much more in this episode of the Control Room Podcast. Daniel shares how he got started as a conversation designer and why he believes that everything is an active conversation. He speaks about what he would change about meetings and why having a narrative with an opening, exploration, and closing is essential in a productive conversation. Listen as Douglas and Daniel discuss impromptu networking, the best questions to ask, and the definition of appreciative inquiry. They also talk about meeting mantras and why they are so important. Daniel shares his take on why using sticky notes is so effective in the ideation process and how to translate the practice to the virtual landscape. Daniel also explains how to host a virtual rock, paper, scissors tournament; it's both crazy and fun. Order a copy of Daniel’s book Good Talk, How to Design Conversations that Matter', available now. Show Highlights [00:50] Welcome. [01:02] Daniel's journey as a conversation designer. [04:01] Teaching design thinking to non-designers. [04:48] Everything is a conversation. [07:43] Providing an interface for an important idea for a product. [08:34] One thing Daniel would change when it comes to having meetings. [11:06] A narrative is crucial in conversations–opening, exploring, and closing. [13:19] Closing out daily meetings with precision. [16:14] The power of impromptu networking to make meetings better. [19:23] Impromptu networking is a great way to model the participation that you expect. [20:34] Daniel's favorite questions to ask. [22:15] Appreciative inquiry, defined. [24:23] The evolution and significance of Daniel's mantra. [26:27] Sticky note ideation heightens focus on specific concepts. [29:03] Reading the room virtually. [31:16] Virtual rock, paper, scissors tournament. [34:47] Ways to signal during virtual group gatherings. [35:48] Distributive facilitation and the future of work. [39:23] Thank you. [41:02] Waiting forever is not a good business plan for your company or your wedding. [43:24] Do large virtual meetings need comedians to keep people interested? [44:57] Daniel's book. [47:23] It has been a pleasure. [47:36] Subscribe. Links | Resources Daniel Stillman Good Talk: How to Design Conversations That Matter LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube About the Guest Daniel Stillman designs conversations for a living and insists that you actually do that too. As an independent design facilitator, he works with clients and organizations of all shapes and sizes (From Google to Visa, to name a few) to help them frame and sustain productive and collaborative conversations, deepen their facilitation skills, and coach them through the innovation process. His first book, The 30 Second Elephant and the Paper Airplane Experiment is about origami and teams and yes, it’s as strange as it sounds. He hosts The Conversation Factory podcast where he interviews leaders, changemakers, and innovators on how they design the conversations in their work and lives.   Full Transcript Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Douglas: Today on Control the Room Podcast, I have Daniel Stillman. Daniel Stillman is a conversation designer, and insists that you're one, too. He is the founder of the Conversation Factory and a master facilitator. Welcome to the podcast, Daniel. Daniel: Douglas, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. Douglas: Of course. So, Daniel, I’d love to just have the listeners just hear a little bit about how you got started. Daniel: So, this is funny because I was thinking about this during our pre-conversation. You and I have known each other for a while, but there's still stuff we don't know about each other. This came up when we were having a conversation last week, where you're like, “I don't know the story behind that thing. You just assume I know that because I've known you for a couple of years,” stuff I've just never talked about. And so you've heard little snippets. So it's just kind of funny because we're friends, and now I'm telling you my story. I don’t know. Just pulling out for a second on the meta-ness of it all. Douglas: Yeah. And as you know, conversations can get weird. Daniel: Yeah, they sure can. So, wait. What was the question again? How did I—what's my origin story? Douglas: That’s right. Daniel: Was there any radioactive spiders involved in how I got my superpowers? I feel like I found my way into conversation design through design. I remember actually seeing an ad in the New York Times back when people found jobs in the New York Times’ job-wanted section. Like, that was a thing. And I remember seeing this job for an exhibit designer, and I was like, this is so cool, because I had a background in science. I had studied physics in undergrad. And this idea of designing science exhibits—I loved going to museums when I was a kid. I grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I went to the Museum of Natural History as a kid often. That's where they would just send us on a rainy day. Like, just go there. And this idea of being able to walk into a space and automatically learn just by being immersed in a space, just like, I don’t know. It kind of tickled me. And I wound up going to design school because they had a studio in science-exhibit design. And so I was super-duper excited to learn how to become a designer and how to design spaces for education. But while I was in design school, what I really learned was human-centered design. This idea that, wow, you can just go out into the world and talk to some people and learn about their problems, and then, make some stuff for them that they like, and then find out if they like it, and then, try it out again, make some test iterations. This was, like, 2005, 2006. The idea of human-centered design and design thinking we're really, I mean, nascent in design at the time. Pratt, where I went to school, was still very much form. We studied negative space and curves for entire semester-long classes. And so this idea of designing for people and designing for needs is what really inspired me. But when I got out of school and I started working in a design studio, what I realized was that I actually had to start designing—I didn't know at the time—but I was designing conversations: stakeholder-engagement workshops to try to pull intelligence out of various stakeholders to understand user needs. And so workshop design became a real passion for me. And so that's kind of how I got to where I am today was I realized that design thinking and teaching design thinking to non-designers was something that was really important. I had this fantasy. I was like, if we all knew the rules to the same game, we could play the game. Let's make something that matters together, right? And that to me are like—those are the rules of design thinking. Hey, let's empathize and understand and define and deliver. That's what I do now is I try to inspire people to be intentional about how they create. Douglas: That’s amazing. So, thinking back to when you were just post school and you were starting to have some of those early realizations that everything was a conversation, can you take us to that moment? And what was it that really clicked for you? How did that make you feel, or what was surfacing? Was there something that wasn't quite serving you at the time and you realized there needed to be more, or was it just an observation? Daniel: Actually, I can—I really remember the moment. I went to an event that my friend Jooyoung Oh was running. She was a design researcher at the time, and for many years she worked at Ziba. And at the time—I can’t remember what she was doing—but she did this workshop where she had us do collages of words and pictures that she had printed out on stickers. And we did this visual collage of “my ideal experience for blank is…,” and “my ideal experience for blank is not…” So she gave us these sheets of stickers with words and pictures on them. The pictures were evocative, emotional, suggestive. And we made these collages, and they became a focal point for a dialog. And I remember doing this and I was like, “Oh, my god, this is amazing.” And it seemed so simple. But we had this big meeting coming up with some stakeholders in the consultancy I was working on, and we were doing this big kickoff for this bug-repellent product, which I probably shouldn't talk about. And I said to my boss, he’s like, “We really need to understand all these different stakeholders and what they really think this thing should be.” And I was like, “Oh, my god, I've got a thing for that.” The language I would use now is “I have a design for that conversation.” I explained it to him a little bit, and he squinted his eyes, and he's like, “Okay.” And I'm like, “Dude, you got to trust me on this. I can land this plane. It’s going to get us good information.” And I remember going into that meeting, and we did this exercise. I remember—I literally remember printing out these sheets of these words and these stickers and these images. And one member of the stakeholder team was an engineer, and the other was a marketer. And there was a word that was placed on the is versus the isn't, in either case. The engineer did not want the experience of this chemical bug-repellent product to be magical, and the marketer thought that the experience should be magical. And so what we had was this conversation about magical and what it meant for something to be magical, and why the engineer didn't want it to be magical and why the marketer did want it to be magical. Magical to the marketer meant effortless, easy, efficacious. Boom, done—bugs are gone. And to the engineer, he's like, “If it's magical, then that means that people don't trust it. If it's magical, people don't understand why it works. If it's magical, people can't understand that it's safe and scientific.” And so just from that collaging effort, which some people would deride as goofy, mood boarding, or whatever, it provided us with an opportunity to dive into this really important conversation, which is, What do we want this thing to be, and what do we want our customers to think about it? And what we were doing was providing an interface for the conversation. If we just said, ”Hey, what do you guys want this to be?” it would have seemed like, I don’t know, one, we didn't know our stuff. But by giving them an activity to do, it pulled ideas out of their heads and put them on the wall and allowed us to unpack a really, really important idea for the project. What is magical? Douglas: That's amazing. I think that is a challenge that I see in so many meetings, where two people are using two different words to mean two different things, or they're using the same word to mean different things. And that's a real problem. And often it is not surfaced, and I think that's where a lot of these visual-thinking tools can really surface some of those things and then gives us an opportunity to discuss it. Can shape the narrative. And when I asked you about one thing that you could change about meetings, you talked about this need to have a narrative for our meetings. And just “we're having a meeting” is a flat story, and you're looking for something more dynamic. So tell us a little more about that. Daniel: Well, you were in the room when our friend Allan Chochinov, at the first masterclass, Facilitation Masterclass, you came to in New York, when Allan talked about, what was it, like, a text expander that one of his students made? Allan was an old professor of mine at Pratt. Now he runs the Products of Design program at SVA. And one of his students wrote a text expander so that whenever you write meeting, it erases it. You literally can't write the word meeting, because a meeting is a meaningless word. A meeting can mean so many different things that it means nothing. What are we doing at that meeting? Are we meeting to sing a song together? Are we going caroling. Let's meet to go caroling. Oh, let's meet to align on a decision. Let's meet to figure out what our options are. Let's meet to plan the holiday party. It doesn't mean anything. And so Allan's idea was if you don't have a prototype, you shouldn't have a meeting. If you don't have an object or an interface or a list, a thing to start the conversation off with, you shouldn't have that meeting. And so I think the story of “let's have a meeting” is just, it's a flat story, but it's also just a super-incomplete story. “Let's meet in order to blank, and let's talk about these three things, and I think that we should have process x, y,  and z  to discuss about them. Here's who can make the final decision. I'm just going to be gathering your inputs.” “Oh, okay, cool. I don't want to come to that meeting if I can't make the final decision.” Oh, interesting. Now we have tension and a cliffhanger for how this story is going to end. If you told people the real story of your meeting, most people might not even come to those meetings, which people don't like. “Well, what if I made my meetings optional? People might not come.” And I'm like, “Yeah, well, make your meetings better, make them matter, talk about something that people really care about.” Douglas: That’s amazing. Also, I think the super power of that is when you realize that there's actually multiple narratives, multiple tracks, and that you might need to divide your audience. If someone's focused more strategically and someone else more tactical, being able to split those things rather than jamming everyone together into the same conversation and creating so much discord. Daniel: Yeah. Everybody’s sitting around a table and talking over each other. And yeah, so this is why narrative is important in conversations, at least this idea of opening, exploring, and closing. Years after people come to my Facilitation workshops, the one thing people remember, they forget most things, but the one thing they remember is this idea of opening, exploring, and closing, and having time to both open or diverge and close and converge and making some time in the middle for something interesting to emerge. And I absorbed that idea from Dave Gray's coauthored book, Gamestorming, just the importance of having those three modes of thinking. And I think having that baked into the process and communicating that to people, it just means that we expect that something interesting and surprising will happen. Otherwise, just make a video. Just make a video of what you've decided and just tell everybody. Douglas: It’s fascinating because Dave Gray talks about the explorer section also being referred to as the groan zone because no one typically enjoys it. But the funny thing is most people, their meetings just consist of explorer. Let's just start exploring when we walk in the door, and then we explore until we have to walk out of the door. And that's really unfortunate if you don't give people that time, that boot-up time. I just recently read a book on facilitation that was talking about—they were talking about it as clearing, which I thought was a really fascinating way to think about an opener, is allowing people to clear themselves and get ready for the meeting to start. Daniel: Well, you’re basically closing before you can open. As we all know, if you don't close, you can't open the next—like, if you don't—and I'm sure you've seen this in sprints, right? If people don't close on day one, mapping the problem, it's really hard to open on day two, finding a target. And if you don't close on a target, it makes drawing a set of solutions really, really super hard. And if you refuse to close on a smaller number of prototypes, it means that your last day of the sprint’s going to be a bear because you test everything. Douglas: Yeah. And we've often talked about how critical closing is in the kind of more macro sense as well, because if you aren’t closing out your everyday meetings with precision, then it's really difficult to align on anything. The real, I think pathological cases, when you walk out thinking you're aligned, but you're not, and so everyone else is telling a different narrative. And you were all in the same meeting, so it should sound like it. Daniel: The cost is even higher than that, Douglas, because internally—I think one of the reasons why people pay an external facilitator, one reason why people hire me and hire you, is to create urgency. “Douglas is here. We’ve paid him. It’s expensive. Everyone stop what you’re doing. We have to focus now.” When people have an internal meeting, their urgency isn’t there. There’s no burning platform, like Kotter talks about. There’s no urgency. And so if you don’t close, you push off decisions. And work is a gas. A gas at standard pressure and temperature expands to fill the space available to it. So time creates pressure, and a sprint or a workshop reduces the volume of space we have to it. And if we don't cap things off or tie them off and say that this is the decision we're going to have, and now we're going to move on to the next phase, it's very idealistic to say these things. It is really hard to do, right? It's really hard to say, okay, well, let's just try this thing, or let's move on to the next thing, even though we don't feel we're ready. I hate doing it. I still tell my clients to do it because it's hard. I know it's important to do, and I struggle with it myself. But if we don't do that, what happens is we wind up working nights and weekends. That's the cost—not seeing our families. If we can close in the time that we have proposed, then we can have the rest of our lives back. Douglas: Yeah, well, it's interesting. You talked about it being hard, but the answer really is to disagree and commit. If we can come together and not rely on unanimity, this desire to have everyone agree, then we can get to a point where there is a decision, we're all going to support it, and we're going to see what comes out. And I think the thing that I try to coach people on is there’re one-way doors and two-way doors. So if it's a reversible decision, then why are we working weekends to get this? Daniel: Right. Having kids is not the same thing as, where should we go for vacation? Where you go to vacation is still a reversible because you've gone and you've spent that money; you've gone on that vacation. But you can always just leave early. You know, you can cancel a vacation halfway through. You're like, “I hate it here. Let's go someplace else.” But it is very hard to cancel, not to get into any politics, but once you've got the kid, it's really hard to cancel it. Douglas: That's right. Daniel: Still not impossible. All my friends who are adopted, it's a thing. But it creates repercussions. Douglas: Let’s shift gear a little bit here and talk about impromptu networking. It is a really powerful way to make meetings better. And why is that? Daniel: Oh, right, right, right. This was my—actually, it’s funny. I was only a light dabbler in liberating structures before I worked with you. I remember looking at the website, and I know many people have had this experience of, this is a crazy place on the Internet. You get to the website, and you’re like, wow, there’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but this looks like the ravings of a madman. And having met Keith, I still actually have that same opinion. It is definitely the ravings of a madman. And I had done things like that before. I had started most of my workshops in my early days with “Grab someone and tell them a story, and then, listen to their story,” because creating energy in a workshop or a meeting is a hard job, and it shouldn't be the job, the sole job, the sole responsibility of the facilitator. As I like to say, it's everybody's problem we're here to solve. It's just not my problem, presumably. If people are here, they're buying into the problem. So starting with a conversation or a story or a reflection about an important component of it is really, really great. Plus, conversations are complex, and so the fewer number of people in the conversation, the less complex it can feel. And so if you've got a group of five or ten or fifteen, pairing up with somebody just immediately simplifies the conversation and makes it more intimate. I was talking with somebody today about this. He used to be a teacher. And this “think, pair, share,” which I thought I invented because it rhymes, and I thought I was clever, this is baked into Harvard University’s education best practices initiative. And every teacher already knows this. Think to grab a partner and talk to them about blank. It's just such an easy reflex. But I see so many facilitators who try to wrangle a group as a large mass of people, and I just don't think it works. You have to be—it takes a lot of strength. This is a total side note, but I love telling this story. Have you seen The Princess Bride movie? Douglas: Mm-hmm. Daniel: Yeah. There's the scene where Fezzik and the Man in Black are fighting as Vizzini is escaping with Buttercup. And they've just climbed up the wall, the Cliffs of Insanity, and they're about to face off. And spoiler alert—Fezzik loses. And he realizes halfway through the fight why he's having such a hard time. He's like, “I haven't done one-to-one combat in so long. I'm used to fighting groups of people. You have to use different techniques.” And I think of impromptu networking as a really, really great group-fighting technique, because it doesn't matter if you've got two people or ten people or a hundred people, you say, “Okay, everybody grab a partner and have a quick conversation about blank.” And then the room is filled with energy that you did not have to create. People are connecting to other people, they're learning from each other, and then it's up to you to do the next thing, which is take that energy and funnel it, direct it, focus it towards the next activity, get people to do something with that inspiration and that information and that connection that they've gotten from other people at the moment. Douglas: Yeah. And we often talk about modeling behavior. And I think impromptu networking is a great way to model the participation that we expect. So we get them at ease with participating and gaining that human connection that they so need. And especially in the virtual world, it's really critical to start setting some of those expectations, because people aren't used to doing it when they're tuning in the virtual webinars and stuff. Daniel: Oh, my god, I know. I did that with a workshop, super-duper early in the meeting. And one of the reasons why I like to do it early is this idea of antifragile openings. If somebody shows up five or ten or fifteen minutes late, they can still float in, weave in to the second or third pairing. And this woman was like, “I knew you would do breakout rooms. I didn't think it would happen so soon.” I'm like, “Yeah, if you show up 20 minutes late to this workshop, you're going to miss something, but you're not going to miss everything. You're still going to be able to get some…” She was able to come into the third pairing in impromptu networking. Douglas: For sure. And impromptu networking only works if you have a good invitation, and your prompt has to be tight. This means that you have to have a good question. So Daniel, what are your favorite questions? Daniel: Oh, man. That's my favorite question. That’s definitely my favorite question. I actually asked that of somebody on a recent podcast episode that I was hosting, on my Conversation Factory podcast. I interviewed Cameron Yarbrough, who has a scaled coaching platform called Torch.io. And his favorite question to ask people is, what are your blind spots? And boy, oh boy, that's a really—I mean, technically an impossible question to answer yourself, but it's a really, really interesting one. He described it as a cone, like a Zen question that is unanswerable but interesting. And so good questions can be like that. I think the other easy, easy question is, tell me a story about blank. Just tell me a story when you last blank, or tell me a story about how you have blanked. Or just go straight to story because stories evoke emotions and empathy. So don't just say, “Tell me a story of when you were at your best.” It's a hard question to answer still, but it's a really interesting one, and it evokes interesting reactions for people. And that's why I think focusing on positivity over negativity is always hard. Douglas: Absolutely. That was the thing I was going to bring up next, actually, was the fact that I'm a huge fan of, if your questions can be appreciative or express gratitude, that can be really amazing. And if you can make people become introspective. So think about a time when you maybe received—what's the best compliment you've ever received? So lovely. Daniel: Yeah. And just to double stitch on that, by the way, not everybody knows what appreciative inquiry is. And it's, when you look at it, if you come from design thinking or the sprint world, you look at appreciative inquiry, and you're like, it can be weird, but you're like, wait, how is this different than design thinking? And the difference is is that you only focus on the positive. And there's this idea that you can, in fact, heal a system and a person by looking at only the positives. And in my book, I actually, I found a story. I couldn't find the truth of it. I couldn't find a direct quote, but people have talked about it, this idea that—I forget the name of the Dallas Cowboys coach—but at one point during a slump, he was like, we are only going to show you your best plays. You know, they tape the plays, and they go back, and they review things. They’re like, look, we are going to review and analyze your best plays only. And it kind of flips things on its head because a lot of designers and a lot of innovators think like, oh, we're problem solving. And so if I'm problem-solving, I have to look at what's broken, and then I have to fix it. But with appreciative inquiry, there's this radical idea that I can find what's working and ask how I can magnify it and expand it. Douglas: Yeah. there's an amazing book called Super Human, and it goes into a lot of super athletes that are doing just amazing things, like free scaling mountains, and the winged airmen—the Red Bull team that just jumps off of buildings and does insane things. Daniel: Base jumpers. Douglas: Exactly. And one of the things that they discovered—and this is a phenomenon in this world—which is there is something that humans have not been able to do for decades. And the first time one human does it, like 10, 15 other humans would do it a day later, because they've shown that it's possible. It just opens up the world of, well, now I can just go to do that thing that I know—I've seen them do it. Now I can do it. Daniel: Yeah. Wow. I love that. That's really, really awesome. Douglas: And so this is similar to your mantra, Daniel: if you don't write it down, it didn't happen. So we need to be able to see it to prove it, and then we can we can double stitch on it. And we have a mantra that's similar: always capture room intelligence. So why is this so important? Daniel: Well, I, first, have to honor my friend Miles Begin, who gave me that mantra years ago, and that was when I first started teaching design thinking to non-designers. That's the whole point is if it's not on a sticky note and it's not on the wall, we can't talk about it. And having that mantra’s really helpful, especially if you have over-talkers in the room, and it's also really helpful if you have “under-talkers” in the room. If somebody’s really, really overexplaining an idea, you can say, “Hey, can you fit that on one sticky note and get it up on the wall? That is truly, truly awesome. That'll be great.” But we used to tell a story about—have you ever watched Mad Men? Douglas: Of course. Daniel: Yeah. So there's an amazing Mad Men episode where—I forget the team. It's, like, Peggy and a couple of the other people stay up all night to bang out some ideas for something. They're drinking, and they're smoking. And they finally have this amazing insight, and they're like, “Wow, that is such a great idea!” And then they go to sleep because they're satisfied. Spoiler alert—they didn't write their idea down. And so the next day, when Don Draper comes in, and Don’s like, “Okay, what’d you jerks come up with?” And they're like, “Oh, my god, we've got this great idea,” and they're looking around their desks, and they're like,  Wait a minute. What was it?” And their brains are just this empty vacuum of space. And they're like, “Oh, my god, we didn't write it down.” And they're just crestfallen. And Don's like, “I understand. That happens sometimes.” It’s one of the few moments when Don decides to be really, really human. Like, he gets it. You didn't write down the idea, and it disappeared. And so I found an old PowerPoint of mine from, like, one of the first design-thinking workshops I ever taught. And there is a scene—we found a screenshot of Don Draper and some other people, just to teach people this idea of, if you don't write down your ideas, they will disappear into the air. And this is long before I knew that conversations had interfaces and that if you use a durable interface for your conversations, not surprisingly, you can have a more-sustained conversation about it. That’s why when you get it on the wall, we can talk about it. If it's not on the wall, I'm just interpreting what I heard, and it can disappear in the air. So one of the great things about design-thinking workshops is that we create this paper trail of insights and agreements when we go from phase to phase. And if you don't do that, we're having a much floofier conversation. So it's really, really important to get things down. And if we're talking about virtual, it's actually really problematic. I mean, I love MURAL, but MURAL sticky notes are not the same thing as real sticky notes, because on a real sticky note, there's a limit to how much information I can put on the sticky note. With MURAL, you can literally write the great American essay on one sticky note and just shrink it down to infinitely small size. So, you're not as limited. We always used to tell people, oh, use Sharpie on a sticky note. That's because a Sharpie and a sticky note create one idea. But it's way too easy in virtual visual capture to put too much information into one sticky note. Douglas: You know, Daniel, that's a big debate: how much limitations did the software put on us to mimic the real world? I think that's a fascinating conversation. Daniel: I would love to be able to switch on real-sticky-note mode. Douglas: Yeah, that’d be fantastic. And I find as a facilitator, where you talked about virtual being more difficult, and this is just one example. There's a long, long list of why we have to lean in more, and it's difficult to be a lazy facilitator, virtually, whether it's we're looking to see how long the sticky notes are or we're making sure that people are connected and having to do troubleshooting and provide technical support. One of the things we spoke about, this notion of helping teams get unstuck and making sure that they continue the momentum as they leave the workshop and they go start to build their vision. And you talked about that being the magic question, just having to look around and just check and see if everything's fixed. This is something that I've talked to Erick Skogsberg quite a bit about, this notion of, from learning the science, we have to consider assessment points. What is our learning objective and making sure we've built in points of assessment so we can understand if we've gotten there. And even if you're not training people, it's important that you build this into workshops because you're taking people on a journey and you want to make sure that they're hitting the milestones, right? What do we do virtually? You and I have talked about this quite a bit, but what do the listeners need to know about virtual kind of reading the room? Daniel: Well, you have to find other feedback loops. And I think that's where—like, when we've set up MURALS for multiple tables, when you put them on separate MURALS, which I know is something you've recommended in the past, especially if you're doing a larger meeting, putting them on separate MURALS reduces the load, but it makes it harder as a facilitator to monitor multiple tables. So it's nice to have three or—if you only have 15 or 20 or 30 people to just make areas for each of the breakout rooms to work, because then you can just see everything that's happening, because while MURAL does have those preview images, as we've argued over before, the preview images don't update often enough for you to get that feedback loop, but it can be really, really simple. I've seen you do this, where you ask everybody to rename themselves in Zoom. And that's pretty meta because you're asking them to give you some information about themselves, but you're also testing whether or not they're engaged and whether or not they are interested. And if you don't see people—if you see people not doing that, then, we don't have anyplace to go because it's like, oh, they don't know how to use the tool, Zoom, and they aren't interested enough to tell you something about themselves in this area. And so it's just finding simpler, smaller feedback loops to make sure that you're moving forward with people with you, if that makes sense. Douglas: Oh, absolutely. And we've been using two facilitators in most of our workshops, with someone dedicated to looking for those signals. So they're kind of keeping a lookout for those things. So, absolutely. And also, just to keep this a bit evergreen, I'm now on the beta for the new rendering engine, so do not have to make multiple MURALS for even larger gatherings now on MURAL, so that's pretty exciting. And after that launches, you won’t have to be in the beta program, have access to that. So I'm sure listeners in the future will be happy to have that. Daniel: I’m wondering why I’m not on that beta program. Douglas: I think you should talk to some friends, Daniel. So with that, I’m super-curious about Rock, Paper, Scissors online. How does this work? Daniel: Well, so here's the thing. Like I say, I, because I think you're referring to a LinkedIn post that I made, where I didn't even think it was possible. I just sort of assumed. And this goes to your sporting-events thing, right? where when somebody does it, then you're like, oh, that's how to do it. And it partially goes against my lazy facilitation principle. But during some of the facilitation masterclass cohorts that I run, we make spaces for people to try out new warmups and icebreakers that they've never done before. And this one woman, Janine Underhill, said, I'd like to try to do a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament.” And I'm like, “Good luck, sister. I'm going to enjoy this.” And she did it. She did it. It can be done. I think what's interesting about it is that simultaneity in remote facilitation is impossible because of the speed-of-light limit. It’s basically an Einstein-Bose condensate kind of a problem. If you and I tried to snap at the same time, we can’t. Even if we said, “One, two, three, snap,” we wouldn’t snap at the same time, because you wouldn’t hear me snapping at the same time. There’s a delay because we’re in between this piece of software. The software institutes a delay, and sound travels more slowly than light. And so we’re never going to have simultaneity. In person, it is very hard to notice that lack of simultaneity, right? When I say, “Rock, paper, scissors, shoot,” it seems simultanous because we're within, like, two feet of each other. But when we are 100,000 miles from each other, and we are on Zoom, we notice it. And what happens is people start slowing down, because we go one, two, three, shoot, as we wait for the other person to catch up with us. And then somebody always throws before the other person, and so it's like—but we don't have a response action time to metabolize that information. And so it's actually a really interesting learning opportunity to talk about how challenging communication can be remotely. But it is totally possible to do it, and it is fun to do it, and it is ridiculous to do it. Everyone should try it. Douglas: That’s amazing. So structurally, when you do a Rock, Paper, Scissors battle, you're just having people start off in groups. Daniel: Yes. Douglas: And then the winners are laddering up to—it’s like a basketball tournament kind of… How do you do all these groups? Are you doing breakout groups, and then combine them together? Daniel: Yes, I will, in the interest of community, I will tell you all of my secrets. So Janine worked too hard at it, I think. She did all the initial pairings. We only had a group of 15, and she did all the initial pairings, and she did the secondary pairings as well, and she did the tertiary pairings. She called out all the pairings, kept track of it all. And that was to her credit. Douglas: She was recording the brackets. Daniel: She was the bracket-eur. My variation is to have people turn off their video if they lose. That's the easiest thing to do is just have people turn off their video if they lose, because then, at least, the bracketing is easier. Douglas: Yeah. Or someone could raise their hand if they're looking for… Daniel: Yes. Totally. They're signaling. And so here's the thing. We could try to do it a perfect way, or we could let the group solve it and see if we can get them to understand everything there is to understand about group communication, because signaling, oh, how do we signal stuff? Okay. How do we start—how do we keep signaling for the rest of our meetings? Okay, cool. And I've seen groups really develop some great habits around, okay, put your hand over your head if you haven't blanked. And so I don't think the bracketing thing—video makes it easier. Bracketing, the problem is, is that I think bracketing can't be done automatically. It's much harder to say, okay, I'm going to claim blank person as my hand-off person. So I haven't solved it. But I also haven't tried to do it with 100 hundred people. I've only done it with 20. And then it works fine. And it's fun. Douglas: Absolutely. Daniel: It's as fun and as ridiculous, if not more so, than doing it virtually. Douglas: Speaking of distributed facilitation in general, you've mentioned to me that it's weirder and squishier. So I guess some final comments for the listeners around challenges, just why is it weirder and squishier? And then, what are you hopeful for? What are you optimistic about? Daniel: I’ve written about this before. I can send you a link to the article on LinkedIn that I wrote. It's called “This Digital Place,” and we have a sense of place that comes for free by being four-dimensional beings. We exist in space and time, and we've had a long time, our entire lives, to get used to it. And we've had 40,000 years as modern humans to evolve for it. We've evolved in it. This is our—you know, [knocks on wood] this physical space is my native place. And so when we go into this digital place, it feels weird because it is literally not natural for us. But those Post-it notes behind you on the wall are not natural for us either. We designed those for ourselves as a tool, and I cannot imagine having an in-person meeting without those tools anymore, in the short decade that I've had those tools. I remember we didn't always have big Post-it sticky pads. We didn't always have whiteboards. We've grown really used to this environment. In the last 10, 20, 30 years, we've created this built environment around our meetings and our engagements, and we require them now. But I assure you, they are not natural. They feel natural to us because we’ve become acculturated to it and to them. And we do not have a culture for this distributed place. We don't have rituals for this distributed place. We are learning them slowly but surely. The example I love to give is, whatever it was, like, maybe five years ago, that guy from the BBC whose kids tromped in in the middle of his presentation—a little girl in yellow, running in like she owned the place. It was hilarious. And the guy was super embarrassed. The mother of the kids was extra-special embarrassed. And I was listening to NPR yesterday, where this woman was welcoming this man on to share a report about something. And he's like, I'm really glad to be here. Blah, blah, blah. And then his dog barks in the background. And the interviewer was like, “And it sounds like your dog’s excited to be with us today as well, too. What’s his name?” And he’s like, “It’s Buster.” And she’s like, well, hello to Buster. So, blah, blah, blah, let’s talk about blah, blah, blah. And it was seamless. It was smooth. She was like, whatever. We're just here, and there's a dog. Nobody cares anymore. That's something to be optimistic about, that we can adapt to this place, that we can learn new tools, that we can learn new rituals and new patterns. The fact of the matter is this is not natural, but there's very, very little that's natural about our lives. And we make our lives. We design the spaces and places where we have the conversations that we want to have. And so I'm pretty optimistic about the fact that our old patterns don't work as well here and that we have to develop new patterns, and that it is possible that maybe we will learn to retain some of those patterns when we get back to meeting in person in 19 months, my current estimate. Douglas: Well, Daniel, I look forward to continuing this journey with you. I agree, there's lots to learn and there's lots to explore. And we won't know for quite some time where these new norms and these new customs emerge, but I'm already seeing some things happen, and I think you and I are doing our best to be on the forefront of that. And so I just want to say thanks for being there with me, and it's been fun learning with you. Daniel: Likewise, man. I mean, a lot of facilitators say, “I can't feel the room, and it's not as good.” And honestly, I was one of those facilitators. Jim Kalbach from MURAL will literally quote back to you, like, the umpteen times over the last three years that I said to him, like, “I'm good, dude. I'm a great in-person facilitator. I'd much rather not compete on a global scale with anybody who has access to MURAL for facilitation gigs.” And we're in a situation where that's no longer possible in person is a fundamental assumption of what I used to do. That is impossible anymore. And I think if we can't adapt, if I can't adapt, if the rest of us can't adapt, we are royally screwed. We have to learn how to do this. And that's one of the reasons why we did the large virtual meetings things together. I thought it was important to push my own limits and say, is it possible to do the kind of big, crazy workshops that we did in person? If they had value—and we thought they did, and I think they still do—then, can we do them here, rather than, I don’t know, wait 18 months before having a bunch of people come together to make an important decision? I mean, honestly, Janet and I are having a long, ongoing discussion about this. We had to cancel our wedding in June. And what to do about getting married, and do we do a Zoom wedding? Will that be fun? Will that be interesting? Will it feel like a real wedding? Or should we wait an indefinite amount of time to bring everyone together to celebrate the fact that we have something good going here? I don't think that waiting forever is a really good business plan for anything, not for a marriage and certainly not for third-quarter top-to-top strategic meeting. I see you're nodding. You’re like, yeah, they should not be putting off those meetings. And I think people are putting them off, or they're doing them really, really poorly. Douglas: Yeah. I think there are two outcomes we've seen the more we explore this with companies. And some companies have the mindset, they have it figured out because they know how to run a Zoom meeting, or they know how to do webinars. Daniel: Right. One to Many—done. Douglas: Yeah. Like, I'm good. So they're just in the camp of, don't realize all the potential they're missing. And then you've got another camp that says we’ll just wait until we can do it in person because they've got caught flat-footed and they know that there's so much missing, but they don't know what to do. And so that's definitely the inspiration for putting together more virtual offerings. And the large virtual-meetings workshop is, I think, really hits the nail on the head as far as a real challenge around, what do we do with large groups? That sounds troubling. But the fascinating thing to me, Daniel, is that there's so much more that people learn. These aha moments can apply to much smaller meetings, but it's the large groups that people are the most confused by, and so that's where we approach the teaching opportunity. Daniel: Yeah. And large can just mean 15 or 20. It’s not hard to break the two-pizza rule, right? It is really easy to break the two-virtual-pizza rule quickly, and most of us don't have Fezzik-level skills when it comes to wrestling with large groups. And we need them. Everybody needs them, I think, especially if you work in a large corporation. But also, I went to a birthday party on Friday for someone I went to junior high school with. And this guy’s sister, who I was best friends with in junior high, she does stand-up comedy. And we did a call on Wednesday for the party, and she’s like, “What should I'd be looking out for, Daniel?” And I was like, “Well, look, it's a lot of people. You need to have an M.C.” And she's like, “Oh, I can do that,” because she's M.C.’d open comedy nights. And it’s like, “You need to have somebody to keep the energy moving and to orchestrate things and to keep the conversation moving.” It's not trivial. I think maybe this is where comics will find work in this new economy. How the Emmys and the Oscars need Billy Crystal and Kevin Hart, maybe these large virtual meetings just need comics, which is an insight you had for the first Control the Room,right? Just bring in some comedy to keep it going. Douglas: It might work a little better in the virtual setting, maybe. We’ll see. Daniel: Yeah. Are they available for me and my team? Douglas: Yeah. Bring them in, for sure. Yeah. There’s also some companies that have sprung up that allow you to rent— Daniel: Llamas? Yes, I know. Douglas: Llamas and perezosos and all sorts of stuff. Daniel: I don’t even know what those are, but… Douglas: Oh, it’s a sloth. Daniel: Oh, okay. Douglas: Everyone's got to have a sloth at their workshop. Daniel: Yeah, but see, that’s just like shiny distraction. Douglas: I agree. And Daniel, you know, I think this is the exact reason why so many people dislike icebreakers and eye openers and energizers, because they just throw them in, with no reason whatsoever, and without a debrief—in fact, I've started to say, if you can't ask, “Why did we just do that,” and have that erupt into a pithy conversation, ask yourself, “Why did we just do that?” Daniel: Whoa, yeah. I agree with you. Obviously, I agree with you. Douglas: So, Daniel, what do we need to leave listeners with? What should they know? And how could they find you, contact info, all that good stuff? Daniel: Well, I'm on the Internet, easy to find, fairly SEO’d. If you Google “Daniel Stillman,” you might find me. If you Google “The Conversation Factory,” you'll definitely find me. I have a podcast. I have a book coming out, by the way, Douglas. It will be coming out shortly, God willing. It's called Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter. They're advertising it as a step-by-step handbook. It's not a step-by-step guide, because I don't think there's a single recipe that could possibly account for all situations. But it is a map to the territory and can help people learn how to form and shape and guide all the conversations in their lives better, from big-group conversations to the conversations that they have with themselves every day. We have a shocking number of conversations with ourselves, and those need to be designed just as much as quarterly action-plan gatherings and off-sites. And so if you go https://theconversationfactory.com/goodtalk, you can find it. You can download some chapters. It’s a thing. You don’t have to pay me anything. You don’t have to buy the book. The first two chapters, there’s a lot there—although somebody has told me that I ended the first two chapters at the right spot, that made them want to read the third chapter. And to that, I have to thank Kellie McGann, who helped me with the editing of the book. Douglas: It is a fantastic book. I've read it several times— Daniel: What?! Crazy. Douglas: —and I think it's really critical for people that are wanting to elevate their meetings and just their interactions at work and at home. It is a fantastic way to step back and look at your dialog in an abstract way so that you can put terms to it. So just like physics is the science of being able to take the phenomenon in the world, how the air moves past you and how your car functions, and you can put equations to it so you can understand it. You can talk about it in an abstract way so that you can reason about it. Daniel has done that for conversations. And if you think about how many conversations we have and all the moments throughout life where conversations are important, you can imagine how relevant this book becomes. And I can't highly recommend it enough. Daniel: It's really, really—it's wonderful to hear you say that. I appreciate you saying it. Writing a book, as you know, is a terrible, terrible thing. I’d never recommend it to anybody. The fact that it's out there and everyone can read it is terrifying to me. You can see what goes on in my head now, and the fact that I had a love of physics, and still do, and a love of design, it's not surprising, hearing you talk about it, I'm like, “All right. Of course. That's why I wrote the book the way that I did.” Douglas: Excellent. Well, Daniel, it's been a pleasure having you here today, and I can't wait to chat with you again. Daniel: Thanks, Douglas. It's always a pleasure. Thanks, man. Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don't forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

There’s a Difference Between School and Real Life: This week on Track Changes, Paul and Rich sit down with Allan Chochinov, chair of the MFA in Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts and founder of design network Core77. We talk about who is really teachable, building good design from huge problems, the vast applications of "design thinking", and how much time is wasted on meetings. Allan shares two incredible medical UX-design moments that he's witnessed— building an at home diagnostic tool for HIV testing and creating a quick-attach prosthetic limb. Both of these scenarious required empathy towards consumer experiences and pragmatism. These small design gestures can have a big impact.   Paul Ford You’re a— you’re a sensitive, in touch person. Rich Ziade [Crosstalk] Are you in your fifties, Allan? Allan Chochinov I am, yeah. PF It’s a little— RZ You look great! PF [Crosstalk] When you realize . . . AC I’m gonna be 57 soon. PF Yeah. RZ What?!? PF I know— it’s [snickers] we’ve had this conversation. RZ Oh he’s had LSD— PF Look at the beautiful hair— AC My mom’s— [inaudible over crosstalk] PF Yeah, some grey. Some grey. RZ I— I can’t see his face right now but the forehead is tremendous. PF No, no. Alan just won a lottery on this front. RZ Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Are we recording? PF We are. We’re talking about— RZ Steph, feel free to put this stuff in [laughter]. PF [Chuckling] We’re talking about how handsome Allan is [voices fade out, music fades in, plays alone for 18 seconds, ramps down]. Allan Chochinov, a key person in New York City tech and design for a long, long time. Let’s talk about that in a minute but the first thing to talk about, really, is you run a program at the school of visual arts. [0:56] AC Yup. PF What is the name of that program? AC Uh [music fades out] the name is MFA in Products of Design. PF Ok. That— [yeah] ok. Let’s break that down a little bit [laughs]. AC We should. We intended for it to be uh future proof and [uh huh] it actually came true because— well, I mean the idea was that everything is a product of design [mm hmm]. So each and every kind of design: uh graphic design; industrial design; service design; interaction design, social innovation design; tons of business design— PF So a new design— like, you know, suddenly there’s a new kind of way— AC Well, yeah, radically, you know, multidisciplinary or generalist anyway [ok] but what’s interesting is people see the word product design they think that we’re an industrial design program and we do teach industrial design— PF Like make a teapot kind [yeah] of thing, yeah. AC But the fortunate thing is that, I guess about four or five years ago interaction designers kind of like stole the term product design from [snickers] industrial designers— PF Actually that’s— boy, we did, didn’t we? AC Which is— it’s either like funny or heartbreaking depending on which side you’re on. PF No, it’s funny for us. Yeah. We’re— we’re enjoyin’ it. AC So many of my colleagues spent their whole lives trying to, you know, help people understand what an industrial designer was, you know you would— you would say well, “We’re— we design product.” [Oh!] Product design. That was easier. Now it’s just like, “Oh, what platform? Facebook?” PF [Exhales hard] We destroyed everything with that— RZ “We” is a lot— PF No. But you know how many times have we said “product design”? RZ We jumped on it. We did jump on it. [2:17] PF Yeah. AC You know? Many people have said everything is interaction design, everything experience design. So— PF It’s true. AC Alright. PF Alright, so tell us a little bit— this program, it’s a graduate program? AC Yup. PF And it has how many students— AC There’s about 18 students a year. Uh it’s single track; every student takes every course, uh no grades which is really helpful uh cuz we want maximum risk and, you know, it’s point of departure is that uh and, you know, we’re really upfront about this that like everything’s broken. And so that everything can be uh reimagined. We’re I wouldn’t say cynical about best practices but we’re certainly interested in doing things in a way that we haven’t gotten good at doing them. PF You gave me a piece of advice once um [uh oh] um that— No. It was very, very valuable. It was just that there’s a real difference between life and school. AC Yeah. PF And that when you’re in school and you’re learning that’s not practicing for the real world, exactly, it’s not like, “Here: learn these incredibly necessary skills for tomorrow,” some of that has to be there but for the most part it’s like, “Let’s break things; let’s figure it out. I want you to be thinkers.” AC Yeah. I— I’m still really sympathetic with that um I think you need, you know, especially grad school, it’s just a two-year program, and, you know, they’re grownups, they’re people who chose to come back to school so there’s a strange— like when I’m meeting with potential students or prospective students and, you know, they have this idea of this place where they wanna be after grad school [right]. So they’re trying to find either the right grad school to get them from where they are now to this vision of the future or whether grad school at all is the right sort of medium to get them from here to there. Uh but the problem is that grad school’s job is to like mix you up, in that, you know, couple years between where you are and where you wanna be and, in fact, even within the first, you know, two months, where you thought you wanted to be like probably won’t look very interesting anymore [sure]. And also— you’re gonna— grad school’s other job is to show you all these other potential futures that you didn’t even know existed, many of which, as you know, don’t even yet exist. [4:16] PF What are some of the things they do in this remarkable journey? AC You know, we have a— a real mix between very purposeful, very social projects and very fanciful and projects around— we actually have a course called Design Delight. PF Ok. AC Um you know a couple projects that stick out, Smruti Adya’s one of the projects she did— she was doing a project around prosthetics [mm hmm] uh and limb loss and limb difference and um a lot of these theses they can really turn on one sentence, like one of their subject matter experts or one of their, you know, user interviews will say something that will change everything. And so she was interviewing um a woman who had lost her leg and she said, “You know, late at night um when I have to go to the bathroom, uh sometimes I crawl to the bathroom. [Oof] Because it’s just— yeah. Because it’s just so onerous um—” PF “I don’t wanna put my legs on—” Yeah sure. AC And you know, that’s, you know, it really made an impact on Smruti and I think in like one or two days she just banged out this device, it’s actually— it’s on the website, called Swift and it’s essentially just a white tube that can expand a little bit and you would either print it out at Shapeways— you could, you know, measure and— and order a size or maybe there would be several sizes at— at Amazon and it’s just like this opportunistic limb that you can slip on, not have to crawl to the bathroom and then return to bed. So, those kinds of products are amazing to me because there’s not a— there’s a— it’s like an incredible lots for incredible little [right] um and I just love the idea of the power of design where you could make a small gesture and get an extraordinary impact from it um— RZ Usually I— I think what’s— AC And the visuals are very convincing. I mean like you— you should see the work. RZ I mean oft— oftentimes that— when the design or the design arm of some big company, it’s usually driven by markets, right? [Mm hmm] Like it’s time for us to have little teeny Bluetooth headphones because Apple came out with little teeny ones [yup]. PF Right. [6:19] RZ So go do those, right? And that’s not driven by fundamentally a problem. Of course, everyone would like smaller headphones but really [yeah] the catalyst prove to be competition and [trails off as Paul comes in] — PF Well and, “I’m gonna— I’m gonna put my mark on it.” RZ You know and, “I’m gonna put my— we gotta—” AC [Crosstalk] Oh for sure. RZ “— have ‘em.” PF Yeah. “Ours will be purple.” RZ Yeah. Exactly which is— and— [stammers] that sits in such stark contrast to what you just described, right? Which is— AC It does. I mean, you know, one of common denominators, which I actually don’t talk and think much about but for this moment I will, is beauty. I mean this thing— this thing’s beautiful uh and so there’s a whole spectrum of we could say “purposefulness” um in design, everything from, you know, what industrial designers would call like “skin jobs” like, you know, very styling, take a thing and just, you know, shroud it in something beautiful or really rethinking the problem. Some of the stuff that you do in reframing, let’s say you have a client comes to you and they think that they want something and, you know, that’s good enough to start but likely that’s not what you’re gonna end up doing and the problem finding uh the scoping, the reframing of the whole engagement is gonna be the most important part up front. That’s no less true for any kind of design in my opinion including uh product design, just product design’s really [chuckles] hard. PF Right. AC You know: materials; technology; labor practices; supply chain. It’s just endless. PF We find this all the time. Like nothing that— people walk in the door and are ready to get that contract moving [yeah] and it’s we don’t want them to. RZ Well, actually, it’s— it’s counterintuitive, right? We actually get ‘em— we wanna slow down for a sec. AC Yeah, you wanna add some friction which they don’t wanna— [7:49] PF No! Cuz especially if they’re ready to go, it feels terrible— RZ And also we wanna— we also wanna close the business. [Yeah] So it’s a little weird for us too but you also don’t wanna end up— end up down a path where it’s like you’re doing a thing that a) is untenable; or isn’t gonna make a lot of sense down the road. PF You know what I’ve learned though is that everybody knows, like you just— you don’t wanna blow up that— that moment of fantasy is really important where your idea is absolutely transformational. Because the process whereby you actually start to go, “I’ve had a few of these ideas,” and then you start to sort of see them get poked at by reality as you walk around with them and then you figure out what you’re really in the business for, why are you doing this? You know? What change could you affect? Because kind of any— especially with technology, any technology idea you come up with: a smarter watch; a better hat. It’s doesn’t matter. Is going to be utterly world transformational and worth a trillion dollars. AC It’s everything is— and everything is a platform. PF That’s right. AC Even if it’s not like unless you look at it at the platform level, you’re not looking at it. The systems mapping, I think, is the most valuable thing that the students do. Infinity mapping; system mapping [how do they— what’s]; user journey mapping— PF What do those look like? Just— AC The most basic one, and probably the funnest one is a mindmap where you’ll put let’s say the topic in the middle of a piece of paper and you’ll draw a circle around it; and then you’ll have these lines that radiate out like spokes on a wheel; and they’ll radiate out to other circles, the things that are related. So maybe— like my background is in medical design, so it might radiate out to— well, what we’re talking about, industrial design, let’s say ergonomics. And then it could radiate out to regulatory, and then it could radiate out to money. Uh and very close to that is gonna be insurance and then payers and payees will be around insurance bubble and then you start making smaller bicycle spoke wheels around each of the wheels, and all of a sudden you have this map on the wall. And then it’s a pretty quick trip to do what we would call a systems map after that which is— RZ [Crosstalk] Well, ok— AC— where you would start to organize this a little bit, it’s not just a big like blah on the wall. And when you show that to a client or to really anybody, it is likely the first time they’ve ever seen what they do, and it is often just, you know, they’re jaw drops. Because nobody ever showed them a picture— [10:00] RZ [Crosstalk] They finally zoomed out [yeah] and took a bird’s eye view. PF Well, your own— your own process is a mystery, right? Like who knows your own process? AC Absolutely. Same with students like they’re the worst— they’re the worst at seeing what they do or just a little edit that will turn something from good to like, you know, great [sure]. I mean you find with— with your clients, right? That you have to do that in the beginning or you’re— you know, you’re digging a hole that you’re gonna be in, sometimes when I say to my student’s, you know, when they’re like, “How should we write our thesis books?” I’m like, “Well, you know, imagine reading them.” [Laughs] [Right, right] Write them— write them as if you would actually have to read them and they’re like, “Oh. Ok.” PF So students come in, they wanna make things, they wanna do things, design things, what are they— what are they like when they come out after two years? AC You know there’s certainly converse— I wanna say that they’re multilingual [ok]. That’s— that’s ambitious but there’s certainly converse and they understand how, you know, VCs talk and what they worry about; they’re gonna understand how to pitch to foundations; they’re gonna understand UX, UI, lots of principles around graphic design and typography hierarchy. Just like all of it. It’s— it’s ambitious. The thing that we do is we have a lot of short courses instead of [huh] — we almost— we have almost no 15 week courses left. I believe that people can learn things faster than most people think that they can [mm hmm]. Also, graduate students worry, like they’re old enough to know, I— I’ve written about this, they’re old enough to know that they’re uh decisions have consequences so they don’t wanna negative consequences so they don’t wanna decide anything. So they read another book. And so when you have a project that is, you know, 15 weeks long, you know, they’ll start and then by week three or four like it’ll get hard. [Sure] You know, cuz like anything worth working on gets hard. And then they’re like, “Well, maybe I should try this other idea?” So then they go to their other idea and then three or four weeks later, that gets hard too cuz anything [snickers] worth on gets hard. And they’re like, “Well, you know, now I’m getting worried. Lemme go back to my first idea,” and then it’s just like this desperate rush to the finish [right]. I’m sure it’s the same— same in business, right? With a seven week course, you begin and then you middle and then you end, you’re ending after like class two or three um and you have to commit to idea— to an idea and just never, never give up. Like [mm hmm] no changing your idea. Of course it will change and evolve but no like starting like, “Oh well now I’m gonna do something around optics.” So we design out those weeks of anxiety where students will typically have like an [snickers] existential crisis but the best part is if we make a course from 15 weeks to seven weeks, we have a new seven weeks now that we can create a new course around [mm hmm] um and because we’re in New York and because a lot of the classes are in the evening, you know, I can get people to say yes to teaching who could normally never say yes to teaching like 15, you know, afternoons. But you know like Paola Antonelli can give us, you know, five evenings a year, right? Um— [12:45] PF That’s right. She’s the Exec Director of MoMA, right? AC She’s at MoMA, yeah. PF Yeah. AC Uh she’s actually on sabbatical this year but and also like she can kill it in five weeks, you know? PF Sure! Where do they go when they graduate? AC I thought that it was gonna be just entrepreneurship city [mm hmm]. You know? It was so in the air, like I always conceived of it as a leadership program but I did have an idea that there would be more businesses launched out of it [mm hmm] and I think that I was a little naive— I’m Canadian. Still Canadian. I’ve been here for 30— 32 years. PF [Laughs] It’s never gonna leave you. AC Ugh. I wanted to vote. I mean, you know, it was the— PF Yeah. RZ Oh you’re still a Canadian citizen. AC Yeah, I am. RZ But residing here, in the US. AC Yeah, so I underestimated just the— the financial burden of this thing. I mean— RZ I was about to make a joke— AC— you know, grad school is so expensive. RZ— you just left ‘em with a debt [laughs]. PF Yeah. AC Yeah, I know and they worry about that. [13:31] PF “You owe me 80,000 dollars and start a company— go start a company.” Yeah. RZ “Good luck with your startup.” AC And, you know, add— add to that the cost of living and eating and they’re not earning money, right? Like they don’t have jobs [sure] while they’re in school. So it’s a— the opportunity cost is immense, in any event— So they get the jobs at IDEO and Frog and SYP and Johnson & Johnson, like lots of really great companies. And then medium and small sized consultancies as well, and it’s really only in the last couple of years that the students are— are leaving those, you know, probably their second jobs— PF Right. AC— and starting out on their own. The other thing that I knew but I— I hadn’t internalized is that like nobody stays anywhere more than 18 months. So I can— I can calm some students when they’re so worried about like, you know, picking the right first job kind of thing and I’m like, “You know, don’t worry about it so much.” PF “You’re gonna leave.” AC “You’re— you’re gonna leave anyway.” PF “In a year and six months.” AC And this used to be more of like an advertising agency model [mm hmm], you know, you’d raise your salary by leaving every 16 or 18 months or whatever the convention but, you know, creative people are really restless. Um [yeah] and they want new challenges and, you know, school in a way makes that worse because it spoils them with all these fascinating things to do like every day of the week, every week of the two years, and then they get somewhere and, you know [well and also you’ve just given them—] it’s not inventions time every day. PF You’ve given them the leaders of thinking in New York City around the field as their teachers, advisors, and friends. AC Yeah. RZ WHo— whose doing great work right now? [14:56] AC Well, actually, I mean back to one of my students, Souvik Paul, he’s actually turning his thesis into a commercial product, it’s called Cathbuddy. It was called Clean Cath. Two weeks before he came to the grad program, a friend of his was in a car accident and became paralyzed, so sort of back on paralysis. And he knew that for his thesis he wanted to— to do work around, you know, life in a wheelchair, but one of the things that he discovered is that there is a budget for how many disposable catheters you get a month if you are, you know, cathing and that it’s usually not enough, what insurance will pay for, and that people are sterilizing their own disposable catheters and reusing them. This is just like pretty specific design challenge. And they’re using like, you know, Clorox and microwaves and I mean it’s just [Paul sighs] — it’s a disaster out there [yeah], right? And so the risk for infection— RZ Wow. AC Yeah. It’s like — it’s a— it’s a big deal. So he came up with this device that would use a UV sterilization and you would put your used catheters into this device and it would sterilize them and then you could use them again. And he had really kept this dream alive since he’s graduated and worked so it’s gonna— PF That’s great. AC— it’s gonna be a real product. So like— RZ It’s not out yet. AC It’s not out but it’s like you think like that’s really like almost arcane. Right? It’s like a really, really specific but the numbers of people who use, you know, these products is extraordinary, so the scale of something like that could have really great impact. RZ Also there’s no segmentation here. This isn’t a urban problem or an American problem— AC Yeah, I know. PF Yeah, you’re— AC I think it’s a not talked about problem which makes it actually extra fascinating. PF Your persona work is pretty simple on this one. RZ Straightforward and it’s global in scale, I mean. [16:39] PF The other thing uh that I love is you and I love to talk about how we like really, you know, difficult, disgusting, horrible problems. And that’s a— RZ Are you looking at me right now, Paul? [Laughter] PF You and me. Yes. RZ Yes, yes. PF Yeah, we love to— we love to brag about it and that’s an actual like— RZ That’s an actual horrible problem. PF Cath— catheters that have to be clean where you can’t get the insurance money. So you had an agency. AC Yeah. It’s— it was that but it was, you know, sister to uh a design like publication platform. So this is ‘95. I had graduated in ‘86 and ‘87 from Pratt with an industrial design degree and I was— I did my thesis on stick proof hypodermic needles. So hypodermic needles where you couldn’t get an accidental needle stick. PF Gotcha. AC Uh HIV/AIDS was like new and everyone, you know, all the healthcare industry was like freaking out. The world needed a device like this. I mean now it’s like mandated by law but in those days it didn’t exist and no one could spend anymore money on any kind of— RZ State the problem, again. AC Um, you’re taking blood or [huh] you’re giving a shot [yeah] um and you remove the needle from the arm and you turn and accidentally um, you know, stick somebody [mm hmm] or you’re sheathing um the needle with the needle cap, the plastic cap, and you miss it and you jab your thumb. RZ Yourself. AC Um I worked for a year and a half in that area, ultimately it expanded to um a phlebotomy which is a fancy word for laboratory blood collection. So looking at the whole, well, user journey of blood from when it leaves the arm to when you’re gonna get, you know, a result. So things like, you know, when you put blood in a test tube— we’re getting very detailed now, right? Um that blood builds up pressure and so when you open up the rubber test tube top it can aspirate into your face, um and you can contract HIV/AIDS through your eyes that way. Um this is getting lovelier and lovelier, right? Um so I graduated and I knew I wanted to go into medical design. I always had like a big problem with solid waste. I knew I wanted to design things but I couldn’t stand the idea of mass production in just garbage. So I went into medical design. The joke’s on me, of course, cuz, you know, medical design creates more plastic than anything [crosstalk and laughter] and it’s like incinerated so it’s like extra bad, right? [18:51] PF It’s not like a styrofoam wrapper for a hamburger. That’s like [Rich laughs]. AC Oh I mean the mechanics in some of these devices like surgical staplers, I mean and it’s all just thrown out after a single use. I got to continue my interest in HIV/AIDS, I worked in secret on a project for Johnson & Johnson, it was the first home— uh home HIV test kit. PF Sure. AC But they weren’t ready to put their name on it and so like we couldn’t tell anybody we were working on it. Mackenzie was involved; the FDA; [wow] C. Everett Koop, if you remember this very beloved [yeah] Surgeon General [yeah]. Uh you know so I’m like behind the one way mirror like testing the design of this— of this kit that you would essentially prick your finger and then it provided a dry blood sample and then it— it sent in the mail but we knew that we were, you know, we— even in those days, we didn’t call it like, you know, user segmentation but we knew that we were really looking at sexually active teenagers; we knew that we were looking at, you know, in all candor, like cheating spouses [sure]; we knew that we were looking at groups that are high risk for HIV; and that this thing was gonna be done secretly and in some like with a lot of anxiety [mm hmm]. And so pricking your finger— RZ Lock the bathroom. AC So lock the bathroom. So thank you. That’s the first place is where is this is gonna happen? It’s gonna happen in the bathroom. So in the bathroom, not a lot of horizontal surfaces. Right? So we actually had to create— PF Ahhh. AC— a surface, this kit actually unfolded into a surface because we knew that it was gonna be in some sense laying in the sink. PF It’s not a desk. RZ You’re on toilet. [20:15] PF You’re not in a lab. Yeah. AC Well it’s before phones, so— you’re not in the toilet that long. Yeah. Um well and then it gets— so you have to get rid of the evidence, so the kit has to somehow go away. PF Yeah. RZ Alright. So wait, I’m trying to visualize it, so you’re in the bathroom, maybe you got on the floor, maybe you sat on the toilet. You open this kit up, it kinda creates almost like a— I guess a tray. AC Kind of a flat surface. Yeah. RZ A flat surface. Ok. Next. AC The big battle was the pre-test counselling. PF Ok. AC Because there had never been— there’s no precedent for a home diagnostic kit, like a pregnancy kit for instance, of a fatal disease [right]. Right? Um also the false-positive and false-negative was really, really important here because— RZ Stakes are high. AC— even if you were negative, you had to be re-tested in three more months [right]. Right? And it had to be private. So the idea— we came up with this like barcoding system where you would pull out this ticket and we shaped it in the size of a credit card so it was a very familiar shape. And you could put it in your wallet and hide it. PF Right. AC But if you were in a situation where you weren’t hiding this kit, where you were with a partner, and you were both doing it, let’s say, then that number would be on there. Ultimately there was a 1-800 number and the way that it shaked out was that if it was negative, you would get a kind of recording and if it was positive, you would get a live person [mm hmm]. So this was really hard to do and there were two different land sets in the package cuz sometimes you miss on the first one cuz it really hurts [sure]. So even if you miss and you don’t get enough blood, you have to do it again. And you’re really scared to do it again. Like I’d come home with these like sore fingertips for weeks [right] um— [21:48] PF Oh cuz you have to test this thing, constantly. AC The full user journey, right? So now what happens? You haven’t— it hasn’t worked. You take it back to the drugstore and you want a refund? This is supposed to be anonymous. Right? There’s no name attached to this. You’re not registering to do this. So— so thinking through these just unbelievably complex— RZ Sure. AC— thorny user experience design issues. RZ Also, there’s— there’s blood on stuff. AC The whole thing is just— [yeah]. You know back to the pre-test counselling— or the no pre-test counselling because C. Everett Koop was so beloved in those days, I think a deal was made probably bar— uh you know, brokered by Mackenzie and FDA that if C. Everett Koop wrote the— the manual then that, in some sense, would count as pre-test counselling. I mean it really came down— RZ That’s ridiculous. PF Woah! AC — It really came down to, like, “Listen: people should go to a clinic. They should go their doctor.” [Right] And then on the other side it’s just like, “People don’t go to the clinic, they don’t have a doctor, people are dying. Do you want this kit with a booklet? And no pre-test counselling in person? Or we’re gon— or nothing?” And so it became this really— it was an extraordinary— RZ It was a lot at play. AC— moment in time. Yeah. RZ Yeah. AC So as— and every one of these was just such an unbelievable design decision. It comes on the market, it’s ripped off in one day. [Someone whistles in disbelief/amazement] Right? The knockoff like same forward factor; similar graphic identity; basically the same layout. I think it was on the market— J&J was on the market for I think a year or two only, you know they really need a homerun with J&J like just the scale— PF It’s a giant company. Yeah. AC Yeah, so they, you know, have to sell a lot of anything and they’ll— they’ll sink, you know, huge sums of money into R&D for a product and if it doesn’t go, it doesn’t go. Um— [23:26] PF This is not something you can market like Q-Tips. AC No and all of— I mean imagine those meetings. PF Yeah. AC Right? PF Well that’s just giant company, too [yeah]. Like what are you gonna do? You got Mackenzie and the FDA in there. It’s a tornado. [Yeah, yeah]. And little Allan just trying to do his job [laughs]. AC Yeah, you know, I was just— anyways, so um I started teaching in 1995 and that’s where I met Eric Ludlum and Stu Constantine who were the founders of Core77 and Pratt was smart enough— for their thesis they wanted to make a website. So this was like two years into the World Wide Web and um and that was the year that I started teaching and Pratt was smart enough to hire them to design their first pratt.edu website and gave them um a room and a T1 line which you will appreciate. RZ Woo! PF Yeah. AC Yeah, right? PF Wooooo! AC Um and essentially like incubated them when that word wasn’t a word yet [sure] and so in those days I would teach like a full day which was amazing. Like three hours in the morning; three hours in the afternoon; like sophomore id studio. You could show a film; you could have a discussion; do critiques. It was amazing. PF Oh so it was a good thing? AC It was a good thing. PF That much teaching? AC Yeah but I had a lunch hour and I— PF I’m tired just— [24:26] AC — well yeah, now it’s like unimaginable [laughter] but I’d go there— I’d go there at lunch time and uh to the Core77 office and I would like learn HTML. PF Sure. RZ For those that don’t know what is Core77? Let’s— AC Uh so Core77 was actually the first design website online. It specialized in industrial design. So it had a very tight like per-view. And Stu and Eric talk about it that they created the site that they wish they had when they were looking for grad schools. PF Sure. AC Um and it had all of these sections, it had a resource section. Um like you remember what things were like in 1995, right? It was like web 1.0. Um— PF There wasn’t that much web! AC No, no, I mean and it was— you know these were static pages. I actually had a column called Contraptions. Stu and Eric tease that I— they say that I was first design blogger which actually might be true cuz I— I would pick like a funny object and write like some pithy paragraph about it and do like five of them a month kind of thing. PF I’m just worried Jeffrey Zeldman will burst through this door. AC I know. Yeah [laughs]. RZ He’s coming for us from three blocks away. AC Yeah I don’t know [Paul laughs] if there were web standards either. So I— I got to know these guys and um— and then there was a project that uh I was consulting with Ayse Birsel for Herman Miller. It was this brand new— you might remember a system called Resolve, it was based on 120 degree angles instead of 90 degree angles. PF Oh that’s right! It was the future of the cubicle! [25:40] AC Yeah it was— it was phenomenal. RZ Oh! PF Yeah. AC And then the first Dot Com bust happened, you know, eight months later. Like Herman Miller couldn’t build enough factories to make enough of this stuff and just— it was just unbelievable [Paul crosstalks]. No, in the contract furniture industry, that’s the first to go. PF Oh ok. Oh, that’s interesting. AC That was heartbreaking. Anyways, so I started doing some consulting with Stu and Eric at Core77 and uh we did this project for this Resolve system and it actually won a lot of awards like, you know, The Gold Pencil and the Silver Cube, I actually like have those engraved [mm hmm] and all of a sudden, Herman Miller starts calling and said, “Well, can you do that for our system?” [Sure!] And then we started to do all like the physical computing in our— PF Ah that’s for young designers, what’s a better than a call from Herman Miller? AC Well, yeah and [26:19?] was around and, you know, we worked with a lot of amazing artists. From ITP and— PF That’s really close to like the core, right? AC And they’re design-driven, right? PF Yeah. AC So, yeah we couldn’t ask for much. Anyway so I ended up like running a lot of this stuff in between like, you know, managing editing, um— PF I see you’re always teaching. AC Yeah, it’s a long time.  Yeah. PF Yeah. AC It’s probably 23 or 24— 24 years. And then um so that design publishing went on a long time and Core grew, the web grew, like everything exploded. [26:49] PF Are you connected day to day? Are you kind of advisory now? AC You know I’m on— I’m on partner meetings [ok] um you know most of my life is at SVA right now. PF Right. AC But yeah, no, it’s um— PF It’s still very much part of your life. AC It’s, you know, there’s not a lot of things that have lasted that long. PF No. AC Uh that are really about, you know, making design connections and helping people find either fascinating things to care about or fascinating opportunities, you know, job opportunities or finding talent. RZ So, Allan, design— it feels like somebody made two or three billion stickers that say “design” on them [yeah] and gave them out to everybody [yup], designers and non-designers, [yeah] and now there’s— there are design stickers on everything. PF Well there’s design stickers on giant consulting firms around technology, around— just everybody’s a designer. RZ The way a term’s like, you know, “customer journey” get tossed around. I mean it’s a strange— I’ve watched this not as a designer but more as a spectator— AC Mm hmm. RZ— and seen I think it’s the last ten years, more like five I feel like it really started to heat up. PF Well, do we— let’s— let’s actually— you’re saying, let’s ask Allan: do you feel that design has been commoditized in the last ten years? In a way that it wasn’t before? RZ Or describe this, like I— it’s just exploded and one I— I mean you can put on one hat and say, “Isn’t this great? Finally we’ve arrived.” And then there’s the other hat which is, “God we’re being— I mean it’s just— it’s been diluted into shit.” Uh give me your perspective on where we’re at today. [28:28] AC I think the first thing to notice— like so I’m not cynical about this, like the first thing to notice is that design has moved from something that is seen as aesthetic and coming at the end to something that is truly strategic, you know? And coming at the beginning. Adn like you understand that better than anybody. Right? You know? Again, you’ll make something beautiful but in a— in a Bucky Fuller kind of way if it’s the right solution, it will be beautiful. You don’t have to make it beautiful. So I think that there’s a new appreciation that— PF If you like domes. AC If you like domes. PF If you love a dome. AC Yeah. PF Yeah, ok. AC And then the other thing that, you know, people love to make fun of is design thinking which, you know, um even Tim Brown would like argue is just it’s pretty common sense. Right? Like work with your user; uh listen; prototype early; and then do it again. You know and iterate. And like don’t be an idiot. Basically. Like those [Rich laughs] are it. That’s design theory. PF That’s the man who runs IDEO. AC Yeah. PF Yeah, that’s Tim Brown. Ok. RZ Um design thinking is a wonderful thing. PF Well [sighs] — AC Well but people— but people make fun of it. And I think that a lot of people who make fun it— I mean first of all: the word, I talked about this in that no meeting article [https://productsofdesign.sva.edu/blog/nomeeting], the word thinking is in design thinking and everybody knows that design isn’t about thinking, it’s about making stuff. It’s about doing. PF Right. AC Um so right away it’s tricky um and then the idea is that if you thought about something hard enough then you— you would solve it, and that’s like ridiculous. I also think that people who criticize design thinking have actually never been in a design thinking workshop. Like I’ve run one uh with a bunch of um doctors and some managers and med students at Jefferson University just a couple months ago, and it’s like they see God. Like they can’t believe, they come up to you after and they’re like, “I can’t believe . . . I didn’t know about any of this. I can’t believe the notion of iteration. I didn’t even know that word, for instance. I didn’t know that we could make a low resolution like, you know, prototype of a webpage on a three— you know on a mobile app on three Post It notes and actually see something that we’ve been sitting in meetings just talking about and doing nothing about.” It’s like a revelation to them. RZ Mm. [30:24] AC So I think that people would be less willing to criticize— PF Well that’s the conversation where design thinking is brutal in the marketing message. AC Well and that’s the thing is journalists like to talk about the over promise of design thinking [right] and of course that’s bad. And again the over promising is— is part of the problem, the— the— the journalism of the over promising part is— that’s a fun article to write. You know? So. PF Well there was also a moment where everything kind of caught fire and went too far. It’s like TED was a good example like [mm hmm] 90 percent of the TED content is typical magazine style content. It’s pretty packaged up and then 10 percent is a little woo woo [mm hmm]. And fine, ok. Like that’s— that’s how America works and how we consume content but there was so much of it at one point that everybody was like, “I’m gonna make fun of this now.” AC Yeah, yeah, no, and I mean I think everything comes up for parody at a certain point [that’s right]. You know I liked it before it was cool kind of thing. PF Yeah. Yeah, yeah. AC Um so I see the more people talking or thinking about design as an actual process and not as a thing, as an artifact, like the better. That is— RZ It’s really value. AC Especially in a world where, you know, cynically, you know, it’s all about extracting value. Like the design process adds value. PF Right. AC Um and the earlier the better. Um I know Postlight’s like super design driven and you have a place, you know, you understand that everything, you know, starts and ends with design. [31:45] PF Thank you, you’ve saved us 30 seconds of marketing [Rich laughs]. AC Yeah. Ah it’s really, really true. RZ If you don’t mind [Paul laughing, Allan crosstalks] we’re gonna use that clip— AC Yeah, for sure. PF “Allan Chochinov says,” [Rich laughs] um you know a tricky thing too is the process can be really goofy, and that it’s hard to like it’s hard to commoditize like goofy thinking— AC Uh and— and risky, I mean if you’re a designer, you have to be comfortable with ambiguity [yeah] and business is not comfortable with ambiguity. Like they— they’re in the risk reduction business, right? A lawyer is too. Regulatory too. Policy too. So— PF One of the ways that I think we’re able to get stuff— AC— it’s antithetical to a lot of people’s like you know— RZ Sure. It’s scary. AC— way of life. RZ It’s a scary process. AC It’s really scary, yeah. PF One of the ways we get things across the line is just it’s so hard to ship software that people accept— there’s a point about halfway through on a lot of projects where we’re like, “You know, I know when you walked in and you said this and this and we said we didn’t know, we weren’t a 100 percent sure. It actually turns out that instead of A and B, C’s gonna be the better path.” They’re so anxious about not shipping that they’re able to sort of like process and listen and react to that because they’ve had experiences where things haven’t gone out the door because people have tried to do everything for them. RZ Also transparency is key there [yeah] like you can’t show up and say, “Listen: um it’s gonna be path C.” They— they have to have seen how we got there and involved— PF Rich has a wonderful maxim which is nothing’s bad news uh 60 days ahead. [33:10] AC Oh I love that. Mine is everything’s shitty until it’s better. You know? PF Right. AC Everything’s worse until it’s better. PF And if you just keep telling the story and they know that like, you know, path C is probably gonna be our option but it’s two months before delivery date, everyone is gonna calm down. AC Well do you think that— that scale like that number 60 changes depending on how, in some sense, in love they are with their own idea before they managed to get to you, to find you? PF [Exhales] We— we— AC Like how dug in they are to like, “We know that this is—” PF We destroy the love at outset of engagement. RZ Well, it’s— it’s— we have very much— we don’t report back, we’re more like, “Come on in. Come sit. [Yeah] At the table.” And you know that virtual table is Slack today. We don’t do the weekly report. We’re like, “Here’s what’s going on. Come on in.” Sometimes they don’t do it. They don’t come in. And then they just show up and they say, “Hey, what’s going on?” And— PF Actually not— not of the current class. Like we’ve got most of that out of the business. RZ Yup. It’s— it’s very— PF It’s too risky. RZ— collaborative. And because we want them to, first off: we want to have them in the room as we talk through the problem because a lot of times they’re the domain experts, not us. We’re just— AC Oh yeah. RZ We’re still trying to learn their world. AC Well I think appreciation for local knowledge is a nice tenet of design thinking. RZ Absolutely. Absolutely. AC It’s like not everybody— the client isn’t an idiot all the time. RZ Exactly. AC Kind of thing. Um. Yeah. [34:27] PF We are done with that. Like that— when we started this firm, my instinct was the clients were gonna show up and they were gonna show up and they were gonna be smarter than they used to be. The consumer of a platform company services is often a— a product leader on the other side and they— or they are experienced or they— also the— the resources for learning for what apps and what platforms and APIs are are— are so much better than they used to be [mm hmm]. So they come in pretty educated. AC Well and they also have consumer experiences on their devices [that’s right] that are like, “How come our work doesn’t work like this?” [That’s right] Like, “How come I don’t have a dashboard for this for my business but I do for my jogging?” PF Yeah, that’s right. AC “You know my running.” So, maybe half the battle is done for you. Maybe not half but at least they understand power of design, they may not understand the actual, you know, plumbing of it. RZ I think it has to do with— and I think you’ll see this even right up to big consulting, I mean the message now is, “We’re gonna worry about these problems with you. We’re gonna work through this. Design is part of the whole story. Here. Rather than it’s a bolt on.” And— and we say that, and so when people come to us, they kind of have an idea of how it’s gonna go, that we’re not a just raw engineering shop that is gonna take a blueprint and just produce the thing. AC I just wonder— you know one of my favorite quotes is Petrula Vrontikis, she’s a— a designer and a teacher in California, she says, “I work with my ears.” And so I wonder sometimes like well what kind of clients come in here where you’re mostly listening and what kind of clients are coming in here where you have to just help them understand like who are; what you believe; the process; the kind of team that you have. RZ Usually when they come here, there is so much bottled up. We go into pure listening mode. We just— we don’t even wanna actually have a dialogue much. We just sort of let them go. AC Put it out like let us see the reality of what you’re worried about, basically. [36:20] RZ Exactly. PF Around about minute 50 of a meeting— AC Yeah. PF I— I think like, “Oh, you know, we should tell them what we do.” Seriously like that’s— RZ We gotta let ‘em go and do the thing and then little by little we start to get into the— the conversation. You’re gonna know pretty quickly um whether this person is going to relinquish a lot of that control to allow us to do our thing or if it’s— if it’s going to be too tight and it’s gonna not allow this to be a success. And we can see it. Usually in that first or second meeting you can tell. AC Yeah, I’m sure you have really good instincts as well. Well lemme ask you the magic wand question like if you had a magic wand, what would you want that person to ask you or to know about you in those initial meetings where they’re trying to understand like, “Do I need design?” Like, “What is design capacity gonna do for me?” And I mean sort of where we started about choosing, you know, whether to go to school at all or with school and if your organization is the right fit for them. What would they ask you? Or what would they tell you that you couldn’t sort of sort of interrupt them at minute ten, say, “Listen, can you—” PF No, I mean— AC This would be helpful. PF For me, and Rich you might have a different point of view, but for me it’s just it’s very much— it takes a long time to get to the user. People have their— they have their peers and their business— AC They have the wrong user usually. PF Yeah and they’ve got the CEO and they’ve got so many anxieties. They have either money they have to spend or money they have to go ask for and— RZ Promises they’ve walked around for bigger companies. PF And who are we? Who the hell are we? AC Oh right, of course, like you’re not necessarily the only people they’re talking to. PF No and so they’re— they’re trying to figure us out. And so it often takes I think really three or four conversations until you can finally relax everybody and they can say, “Yeah, no, I know exactly who the user is here.” Right? But they cannot relax into that on that first meeting. It’s actually very closely held information. [38:13] RZ It’s often ambiguous. We had a client, the message was: there’s a big event coming in 90 days. And we wanna do a thing so that there’s— we make a good impact at the event. AC Right. RZ Like ideas came out like you know you pop the confetti thing? [Laughs] AC Exhibition design; branding; the whole brand environment. RZ They didn’t know. They had ideas. They had sketched stuff out. And they had what was actually great was they had this timeframe which we were able to use as sort of a forcing function [yeah, that’s true] to say, “Alright, listen: some of these are great and 3D is awesome.” AC [Chuckling] “But 90 days is 90 days.” RZ [Laughing] “But we’re 90 days away.” Right? AC And you’re budget’s your budget. RZ Exactly. That steering process and then eventually you have to give us the keys, right? We’re like, “Ok, we gotta run fast here.” I mean that is the reality. PF You’re gonna set up the server, you’re gonna put it on Rails at that point. RZ Yeah, yeah. And— and— AC And you might not get to test it so much. PF No, that’s right. That’s right like— AC Cuz an event like doesn’t slip. That’s— that’s the scary part of that. RZ It doesn’t slip. AC It’s just like, “Well, if we wait three more, you know, weeks, it’ll be, it’ll be [exactly] —” [39:15] PF No, it won’t get better and we won’t fail. Like we won’t let you fail. And so we actually have to build that relationship. The good news is that the people who are right over your shoulder watching every little bit, they tend to be super cheap. Like they don’t wanna pay. They wanna watch you and they wanna tell you how to do it and they’re gonna— they’re gonna watch every minute and so by the time we get even— even to back of envelope, they’re gone. AC They’ll know. You know that chart? It’s like, you know, design fees? You know whatever it is like 500 dollars, you know, if I do it [yeah], 750 if you watch me do it. PF Yeah [laughs]. AC You know? 1100, you know, if you’re in the room, you know. PF That’s right. AC Um and it just gets more expensive the more um [laughter] — there’s a bunch of these things on Instagram. They’re pretty great. I’m gonna find one and send it to you. RZ It’s also— I mean we think about the designers, it’s pretty demoralizing if you’re just— if somebody took your hand while it’s on the pencil [yeah] and are just constantly in there. It’s very— PF It’s not good. RZ It’s not good. PF Alright, Allan, what do people do to get in touch with you? AC I’m not much on Twitter. I mean I’ll be on it cuz I feel like I have to be on it. I like Instagram for hobbies. So that’s a good place to find me. Um, you know, you go down to chochinov.com but uh probably SVA is gonna be the— you know where you’re gonna see the most exciting stuff. So. PF Where? What is the name of the program? AC It’s uh Products of Design, it’s plural. Productsofdesign.sva.edu. PF Alright. AC Oh and I have this whole essay on changing the word “meeting” to the word “review”. Uh the argument is that if you use the word— if you had a review at three o’clock this afternoon, you know, you’d look like an idiot showing up empty handed to something called a review. But if you had a meeting at three o’clock like whatever, no need to prepare. So um this idea came up um in a— in a staff meeting from Alisha Wessler, our Director of Operations, and, you know, it was like, “Can we— can we reimagine the word ‘meeting’? Can we actually just change it in the department?” And she said, “Well what about the word ‘review’?” I was like, “That’s it!” So I went back to my computer and I downloaded an autocorrect Chrome Extension and I made it correct one word, whenever I typed the word “meeting”, it would change it to the word “review”. And then I went into my iOS and did the same thing. Um and so I spent seven months not being able to type the word “meeting”. [41:22] RZ How’d that go? AC It was awesome. Because you type “meeting” and then it changes it into “review” and you’re like, “Oh no, actually, we should probably ask people to like do something before we take their time and get together.” RZ Huh. I’m applying this test right now, so it’s like— AC Yeah. PF No, it’s not— it’s not— don’t just bring your ideas. Bring a plan. AC Anything— any kind of prototype. PF Yeah. AC Um and so one of our faculty, Bill Cromie, actually built a custom extension called No Meeting. Uh so you don’t have to like type in anything— RZ [Crosstalk] God bless web extensions— AC No, and get this: he came up with this idea to make a Slack bot, which he did. Which you can find at this— at this article. So when you type it into Slack, if the No Meeting Slack bot is in there, then the Slack bot will pop up and it says, “Hey, I noticed you uh typed the word ‘meeting’, would you like me to change that to the word ‘review’ so that people always come prepared to future gatherings?” PF Allan! RZ This was great. PF Yeah. I could listen to stories about medical devices being designed for the rest of my life. AC Well, thanks for having me. RZ Allan, thanks— thanks so much. [Music fades in] This was great. AC Yeah, this has been a thrill. RZ A lot of fun. AC Thank you. PF Hey, if anybody needs us, hello@postlight.com, that’s the email that you could send to and it would go to me and Rich and we’ll forward it to Allan if you have any questions for him. AC Ah, totally. PF Alright, let’s get outta here. Let’s hang out and talk about medical devices [music ramps up, plays alone for four seconds, fades out to end].

The thesis project is the capstone of the MFA in Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City. Learn more about the program at http://www.productsofdesign.sva.edu.

Our host interviews editor, product designer, & educator Allan Chochinov. Recorded on 05/31/2013. Allan’s Links: AIGA Core77 Products of Design Program at SVA Twitter  Stuff We Talked About:

Allan Chochinov is highly influential in the world of product design. He's the editor in Chief at Core77 and recently the Chair of the MFA Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts. On this show, Allan talks about his program and what made him decide to go through with it. We also talk about products, we as consumers, and what's changing in the world today. http://www.listencloseshow.com/

On this episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman, Debbie speaks with Allan Chochinov, editor-in-chief of Core77.com, the widely read design website.

On this episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman, Debbie speaks with Allan Chochinov, editor-in-chief of Core77.com, the widely read design website.