Emergent startups and concrete production

 I started working at the age of 14. I was bagging groceries and stocking shelves at the neighborhood grocer. The place was kinda gross. Weird things happened. The butcher stole steaks. The stock boys smoked cigarettes behind the building. People slept in the doorway overnight. Daily, I'd have to wander the neighborhood searching for shopping carts, folks had used to transport their groceries home. But we all knew who the boss was. Ken. Ken was a bulky man with a larger mustache. He was in charge. It was a messy franchise, but it was his messy franchise, and he let you know it. Paid only $4.15 per hour, I worked my heart out for him. 

As an adult, I've encountered many organizations including tightly coordinated military units, massive enterprise software providers, high tech cost centers, and horizontal startups.  The last one, the horizontal start up, is tough.

For a long time, I figured horizontal was everything. I tried to practice it too. But I learned through trial and error that many this approach is the result of uncertain leaders. Individuals who never had to lead diffuse their power through others. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. 

When it does work, it is because you have the best talent on hand. Those individuals know how to mobilize, coordinate, and get things done. It works well.

When it doesn't work, it is because the talent isn't there. People work in shadows. People talk too much or not at all. Projects never have a clean end, but sprawl and never get truly finished.

Either way, a company must have the ability to draw a line, to a diagram, end to end how the widgets get fabricated. Maybe Ken designs it. Maybe the team stumbles until they figure it out. Either way, the company is only getting started when there is  visible, universal alignment on the widget making.

If the process is only in your head, trust me, it is only in your head. Get drawing.

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How to Build Something from Nothing

 

The article was initially published on 1/27/16 at www.humanitarianspace.com. It has been relocated here for continuity. 

Trying to explain my day job to the American Geographical Society at Geo2050. November 2015.

Everyday I have to give someone a 15 second summary of what I do for a living.  I often have to say it about 3 or 4 times a day, and depending on who I am talking to, the language shifts a little. Also, every year this task gets more difficult because its isn't always clear if I should describe what I've done, what I am doing now, or what I would like to do in the near future. 

These days it comes out something like "I specialize in designing technologies and processes that shift deeply entrenched problems" and then a rambling line with "...  cities...wars... robots... digital ethnography... machine learning... geospatial technology." 

This is clearly a terrible introduction.

In general terms, I solve really hard problems for others, but it is hard to explain everything in 7 seconds because while the problems are constant, their workings change, and in response my skills change at a rapid pace.  In 2010 I was entirely focussed on postwar reconstruction. A year ago I founded a fast-growing technology company that mobilizes breakthroughs in robotics for processing unstructured data.  Today I work with the White House Innovation Fellows as an innovation specialist, ripping through complex public problems from veterans services to cybersecurity with big transformative leaps.

So rather than stumble through a lackluster introduction on skills, these days I tend to summarize all of my work with a single line.

"I specialize in the ability to build something from nothing."

This is not mere urban planning, management, or entrepreneurship. It is a specific skill to create complex entities that thrive from zero or near-zero resources.  More importantly, the things I build do not require my ongoing participation to continue and flourish.  Initiatives I created years ago still exist in far away places, overseen and operated by people who have never heard of me.  Of course doing this isn't easy. Its a carefully considered and honed expertise founded on some core concepts.

• No Ego. Any given person cannot be central or necessary to the operation of the entity or its continuation.  If you design an entity according to the objectives, emotions, and expectations of one or two people - including yourself- then it will fail to succeed over time because it will forever be limited by the constraints that you alone carry or will carry. You can be a stakeholder in your own work but it should not be about or for you. It should not be designed to serve you (especially if this is to be a profitable business). For successful startups, this is often phrased in an epic mission statement... but it doesn't have to be so bold. It simply must serve others more than it serves yourself.  If it cannot be justified as such, then it is not likely a worthwhile pursuit.

• Build Psychological Scaffolding. The components of the entity exist as a suspension - not a mixture -so that the tensions are just as critical to the success as the harmonies.  For example, if building a business, you cannot expect everyone to get along, so your odds of success improve if the business is designed to leverage hostilities between people. You cannot expect to like all your employees. You cannot expect to always be pleased by performance or to hire excellent people. So what is the plan?  You can rotate through a constant stream of people, but nothing will grow from this except your own frustration. To build something, you must expect have a range of personalities and capabilities, and many will conflict so build for that conflict, not to avoid it.  Certainly there are times you need to ditch people, but typically, as long as they are reliable enough to show up, you can design the work in relation to their strengths and ask little of their weaknesses while leveraging the internal conflicts into new opportunities for the organization.

• Resources are Flux. You cannot plan to rely upon any given resource pools, but must draw from finite resources that shift as distributions, compiled from diverse locations, and all resources have expiration dates. If you design and build an entity to rely upon a specific person, idea, model, or finance strategy, and these variables are orchestrated to come together with the expectation of a particular timing, you might succeed once or twice but then it will fail. Don't bother with that. You are wasting resources.  It is at least a great place to start as people are forever the greatest resource. According to "Lean Startup" you should design your product for a specific person with a specific problem - and I agree - that sensibility must drive the initial design. But people change, and you should expect that user to change as your solution is introduced, so you need to design for change over time, and not just for clients but also for investors, partners, and employees.

• Embrace Suffering.  Do not build an entity with the intention that "all will come together and it will be great."  Instead, design and build it for the  bad times. Imagine the worst possible scenario - what and who do you want by your side to manage that bad time? .If you created pathways for people to manage projects in different ways, to embrace different communication styles, and to maximize agility then you will be in a better position (see psychological scaffolding). But more importantly, seize the pain - its only temporary when it happens but those are the most important moments.  Ben Horowitz likes to talk about "CEOs in times of war and peace." The times of war - budget cuts, lost contracts, massive layoffs - are profound human experiences and it is those moments that define the future of the organization. Build to suffer.

• Generative Action-Thoughts Win. Often a new risky idea is proposed and someone (sadly the boss) will shut down these new ideas, usually because they fail to understand one of the above principals. Many people also want to talk about a given idea or possibility for a long period of time.  A better tactic - always - is to support a very small and rapid physical experiment on that idea.  A pencil drawing on a piece of paper, a quick survey on the street, or a couple phone calls will typically pull in new information and ways of thinking about the problem. Physical things and processes change the conversation and stupid ideas become radical insights. Always veer toward physical things - not ideas.

These principals appear abstract but there is a clear underlying thread throughout. Maintain a constant respect for others, do more and think less, and care less about the importance of yourself, your ideas, or your values.  Work for the bigger picture and mobilize the assets that come to you.  Obsessing about the right idea, the right execution, or the right result will only waste time and energy. Ultimately, if you want to build something bigger than yourself then you need to remove yourself from it, and it needs to be tangible. Everyday.

Advancing New Economic Models by Design

 

The article was initially published on 5/2/17 at www.humanitarianspace.com. It has been relocated here for continuity. 

A few weeks ago I had to opportunity to spend a couple days at the Urban Planning Department of Cornell University. I was impressed by the graceful way this group was able to move fluidly between rigorous quantitive analytics and participatory public processes.  Yet for all the brilliance I found among faculty and students, it became clear to me how much urban planning education lacks sufficient focus on design methods.

I am not referring to design as urban design or architecture. I am referring to the ability to translate a series of complex social and technical processes into physical form.  I am referring to the ability to translate ambiguity into action and to oversee the transmission of that action to generate results. This is not the same as project management or the mere practice of the profession.  Rather, given the massive range of assets are available in urban planning for engagement and analysis, the discipline completely lacks a rigorous methodological framework for what actions to implement by consequence of the planning process.  If the discipline of urban planning stops with pitching the plan - then planners deserve to be disappointed when their work does not reach fruition.

This realization explains much about the disappointments of the planning profession - such as the constant repetition of "off the shelf" solutions such as green roofs, walkable streets, and historic main street development initiatives. These tactics are fine - but why such a small range of possible outputs in a world of more than 2.5 million cities, towns, and villages?  Basic statistical intuition suggests that a profession dedicated to building new futures and generating new economic development initiatives would capture a broader range of possible solutions.

To consider the urban planning process is to recognize that it remains rooted in a Waterfall design methodology - which has been proven to drive up costs and reduce stakeholder participation.  Most socio-technical systems have long since discovered that Waterfall methodologies fail to consider the variability of human actors, and thus tend to fail.  While organizations continue to search for replicable solutions utilizing scientific research designs and clinical trial models, the assets of localized place-based development go ignored or fail to scale.

Private sector technical sectors have shifted toward lean frameworks, agile methods, and other systems rooted in rapid feedback to avoid the high risk approach of waterfall planning. Unfortunately this understanding has yet to see the light in American politics where sweeping legislative action is the norm - not iterative improvement and variation. Urban planning, a field long aligned with design, has an opportunity to update to the 21st century - but it needs to start in education.  Design is more than architecture, it is the execution of ambiguity into meaningful consequences. 

The Art Academy of Cincinnati - Education to be Radical, Relentless, & Radiant

 

I was deeply honored to give the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2017 at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. These last few days, I am now continually reflecting upon the unique and powerful proposition this school makes to the world. There is no other school like it. 

The only other college to which I can compare it is the mythical Black Mountain College of the 1960s that produced revolutionary minds such as John Cage.  To plagiarize someone else’s story, the Art Academy (AAC) doesn’t merely graduate artists or designers, it graduates the critical but hard to find team member of every successful business: 

"there are three kinds of people you want to launch a business: the person with the idea, the person with the financial sense,  and the person who makes you say 'what the fuck?' The last is the person who can rip ideas apart, remix them, and flip everything upside down to generate breakthroughs that no one else can see."  

Blackmoutain College w/ Buckminster Fuller

The last kind of person is particularly hard to find. Many schools can teach people to become accountants or to be entreprenuers but no school teaches students to be intellectually rebellious and operationally radical.  Except for the Art Academy of Cincinnati. No joke. It is even in their mission statement.

Everyday books about Innovation, Design, and Economic Disruption churn through billions of dollars in annual publishing sales. Parallel to the publishing industry, countless institutions argue they offer an education that will transform students into innovators who will change our world.  But do these industries actually generate the change-makers we seek?

In the last ten years, I’ve been fortunate to spend time at the world’s best universities as a speaker, student, or instructor including Oxford University, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon University – and these are indeed great schools.  Their students are brilliant and the faculty are more than competent. The programs are well funded and the students are nearly guaranteed the security of a well-paying job upon graduation.  These schools also attract people who already have a history of success - when Elon Musk attended Stanford, he had already earned degrees in Physics and Economics. Yet I have never encountered another school that transforms unknown students into true innovators.  In fact, when I recently taught Design Thinking at an East Coast top-tier MBA program, my students complained the entire time about the lack of clear directions and the constantly shifting parameters within the course requirements.  I have since learned that this complaint is exceedingly common within MBA Design degrees. These programs are forcing square people through intellectual circles and many graduates come out very little changed. 

2017 Commencement Address

Do all art schools impact students to think so differently?  I'm not sure... there are many art schools in the world. My sister is a student at SCAD. I have friends as RISD. When I was a teenager, I lusted for the attention of the San Francisco Institute of Art (SFAI) and the School of the Chicago Institute of Art (SCIA).  Unfortunately, in 1999, I had so little money for college, I did not even have the 50 dollars to apply to any of those programs let alone all of them.  With little hope to attend any college, I drove my broken-down ‘91 Geo Prism to the Art Academy of Cincinnati for a Portfolio Review Day in mid-October, to present my high school artwork to various colleges.  San Francisco was there, as was Chicago, and at least a dozen others.  Chicago offered a partial scholarship on the spot, which was incredible… yet, as I did not have the money to apply, let alone to live in Chicago, it held more symbolic meaning than opportunity. I was nonetheless motivated at that moment to find a way to go to art school.

Weeks later I happened to cross paths with some artists, Aaron Butler and Christopher Daniel.  Aaron worked at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and pioneered the experimental music group, Dark Audio Project, while Chris was a metal sculptor who went on to found the extraordinary and thriving Blue Hell Studio. They both held Art Academy ties, and with their encouragement, I decided to do everything possible to earn a scholarship. I applied only minutes before the deadline, in person, submitting my application in a massive wooden box crafted from an old PA system pulled from a dumpster in Kentucky (at Aaron’s suggestion that I make the physical application somehow stand out). As a mediocre student in high school, I had only applied to one other school at the time – the globally exceptional design school of the University of Cincinnati, DAAP – and I was not accepted.  The Art Academy took a chance on me, offered a scholarship to cover more than half of tuition, and I will be forever grateful.  Notably, after later graduating from the Art Academy, I received a full scholarship to DAAP for graduate school.

Art Academy of Cincinnati

Visiting AAC this last weekend was not only nostalgic – it was inspirational.  The Art Academy is a weird place. It consistently takes chances on people like me. It is a community of outsiders. It pushes them to build expertise on the ability to make something new  – which is not typical, considering most degree programs demand students acquire knowledge on a longstanding subject or methodology. It pushes students to invent new models of production, new identities as artists, and to take life to the frontier of possibility.  Graduates of the Art Academy of Cincinnati do not need books on creative problem solving, they need wicked problems where all others have failed.  If the Art Academy has a flaw, it is a simple fact that they do little marketing or high-profile partnering, and consequently, the world knows little about this school amid an insatiable demand.  The Art Academy of Cincinnati is not a diamond in the rough – it is a silent A-bomb in the exosphere.

My life has changed much since I attended the Art Academy. I am writing this blog entry while on a flight to San Francisco. Tomorrow morning, I will run a series of design strategy workshops for a Venture Capital firm in Silicon Valley to explore new investment models for Artificial Intelligence. Since attending the Art Academy, I have lived in multiple countries, built companies, and am fortunate that my abilities to tackle entrenched problems in new ways are continually in demand. When I think of the year I started college, 2000, my life is now very different from the future that was most likely ahead.  Though I have my fair share of life challenges, I have a wonderfully creative and satisfying life. It has been a hard journey, but I credit the faculty and students of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. While most colleges chart a path for your future, the Art Academy provided a compass to guide me through the deep woods of the unknown.

The Demand for Fuzzy Science and Explicit Design: Rationalism is Not Universal

The article was initially published on 5/24/17 at www.humanitarianspace.com. It has been relocated here for continuity. 

Whenever I explain Design to non-designers, I essentially describe the scientific method - observe, hypothesize, test, repeat. Many designers work this way, although they might think creativity is something more magical, and are less inclined to describe their work as sequenced trial and error via prototyping.  Also, let's face it, clients will pay for magic but not for experimentation. The differences between science and design are more cultural than procedural. Science is better tuned to the needs of validation and design facilitates more generative insight, but the largest difference is that the scientific method is often stuck in the culture of science - we tend to think of the scientific method within fields like biology or physics, and thus resort to reasoning and intuition for day-to-day matters. Thus we think we use the scientific method all the time, but actually, we rely mostly on the power to reason.  

At the Thresholds of Reason

Unfortunately, human reasoning is not universal. Rather, it is situated in disciplines, as each discipline enforces a particular kind of language and patterns of cognition. The lawyer does not interpret the world the same way as the doctor or the engineer. Yet if forced to work together on a worldly problem, they will each insist on using reason (common sense) to engage problems of magnitude. Yet as each person in the room is attuned to a different way to frame and engage a given problem, it seems that direct experimentation would be more valuable. So why the fear to experiment for results? 

There is a widespread predisposition to assign the scientific method to the profession of science, wherein science is only for science-y things, and likewise,  we assign design methods to the design professions like architecture. Why is the method of science only reserved for biology but not for daily action? By extension, we are prone to work through other disciplinary problems in discipline-centric methods- and those methods are all the same, but get diluted by disciplinary language and habit - so why don't we step outside of our discipline with our methods? Most MBAs for example, never do scientific experimentation, although it is the premise of all worldly knowledge. They might embrace a design workshop (as business has to embrace superficial elements of design), which is a good way to synthesize ideas and create opportunities, but it also is a high-risk endeavor because it lacks any direct role for validation - it is a synthesis of assumptions. In contrast to generating learning opportunities, we rely upon the idea of the "expert" who has knowledge based on previous experience and we expect that knowledge to cross over. 

In contrast, we resort to rationalism and rationalism relies heavily upon our subjective interpretation of previous experiences - and our memories are not the best way to record the world because memory is highly subjective. Design is an approach to understanding the world through observation and experimentation, yet it also considers and takes advantage of personal subjectivity, cultural patterns, and the emergent outcomes of group interaction.  It does not merely accept the implicit assumptions and detriments of subjective memory. Design attempts to leverage those things actively avoided within Science. We could all probably use more science in our lives.

Dangers of Expertise
Dropping expertise within approaching a problem is important because expertise is really the opposite of science and design.  Expertise makes the assumption that experimentation is no longer necessary because the expert has all the necessary information already or can quickly filter available information.  Experts supposedly already did all the hard work to understand a particular worldly pattern. Expertise can be reasonable - in any given problem, we all find a point in which additional experimentation is redundant, and an outlier result will have little statistical significance. Yet what happens when we combine this statistical argument with the psychology of a group? In this context, the value of expertise is diminished because of a necessity to all reach a common understanding. Without a process of experimentation, people will talk about things they understand as individuals with poor translation to others. They will impose known patterns upon new problems. They will fail to experiment.

Patterns of Cognition: Habits
Later, studying robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, this way of thinking was entirely beneficial to advance the state of human robot interaction.  How do you build stronger human relationships with technology? It takes more than mere manipulation of pixels or a human factors design assessment. Yet when I was a graduate student in economics and law, this way of thinking was not helpful.  In fact, economics never touches the same time of reasoning. Economists are looking regularly at the circulation and balance of inputs and outputs - a far more linear and sequential type of thinking. Law likewise was a headache to study, as legal reasoning relies more upon the accounting of evidence to identify conflicts of logic. The reasoning of pattern relations - whatever they teach in art school - has far less to do with sequencing or logic. These different paths to engage and interpret the world establish radically different understandings of a given problem.

The notion of "patterns of reason for knowledge construction" is perhaps a critical element in how we all approach problems. When I was an art student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, I developed a way to see and understand the world that was not explicitly rational or empirical. It was more akin to pattern recognition at large, the ability to identify and symmetries/asymmetries amid abstract collections of information.  Studying historical and contemporary art, I became attuned to the relationship between cognition and body mechanics and to the relationship between physical materials and economic production. I learned to look at the associative relationship between materials and ideas.  For example, I recall seeing a photo with a dogwood tree, and by association bring up a legend about how the dogwood tree is cursed by God to grow crooked. This story implies personal meaning, and thus as an artist, I am inclined to use the tree to indirectly communicate something about religion. Compared to basic arithmetic, this way of thinking makes no sense, and yet, moving through the world by association is an important part of the human experience. 

Scientists attempt to identify and negate their values, yet there is sufficient evidence that all science is situated in the subjectivity of the scientist.  Many scientists accept this.  Good designers also take stronger responsibility for their own values and situated knowledge. Yet both can also discover other paths of inquiry and reason.  In the end, the only ones who fail to adapt to new problems are those who rely explicitly on their own situated reason.  The world is too complex for experts.

Design Comes First for High Tech Entrepreneurs: Quantum Computing, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, BioComputing, Machine Learning

 

The article was initially published on 7/26/17 at www.humanitarianspace.com. It has been relocated here for continuity. 

While the design is increasingly central to the operations of established technology companies, it remains overlooked within research teams pursuing initial research of those same technologies. This is due to the lack of understanding held by high tech entrepreneurs about the role of design. They think it is decoration - when in truth - it is the fundamental process to transform abstract ideas into new realities. Design is the cornerstone to successful entrepreneurship.

In the last few weeks, I have had conversations with dozens of high tech startups that have one foot in the lab and one foot on the path to a new market. Interplanetary robotics, quantum computing, and super intelligent machines are exciting new domains described at length in business and technology magazines alike, yet these ventures struggle to overcome the leap from research in unstructured domains to generating meaningful human-product experiences and viable companies. They struggle to think and work like designers.

How Design Serves Advanced Technology Companies

Computers are everywhere. As more of our lives are inundated with computers - cars, planes, banks, security, government - the software on those computers is getting very sophisticated and difficult to test. It is also difficult to build to ensure that it is testable. Think of the complexity to manage all air flights in a country, the testing of that software is critical to everyone's safety - but with so many airplanes, airports, satellites and so on - how do you test it?

In my engagement with machine learning companies throughout Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh, I found one that has solved this problem. They build tools to help other big companies build reliable software for complex systems.  They can even predict if your company is going to create a bug before it happens. It is incredible.

The company does amazing work and is profitable. Yet they have a terrible website. They know it. Their tools do not really have a user interface that users enjoy using or easily understand. Their software is very advanced and difficult to communicate.  It is challenging to hire for this company. They see every market as possible and yet are not sure how to access them. Their work is in such high demand they are doing well... but will this always be the case?  What are the limits of their current market? How do they know?

Upon offering to help with the website, I've since had multiple conversations with the founder of this company. I understand the technical details of their software. As a researcher, I am equipped to study and understand the problems they face. I also am a designer so I am able to communicate it to people who do not understand.  Consequently, as a designer, I also have methods to rapidly TEST & LEARN from the range of possible consumers on how to tailor the language, the product, and the transaction. We do not, consequently, have to worry about marketing or even business development. With design, we can KNOW and VALIDATE our language, our image, our transaction, and our team to transform machine learning into highly needed customer solutions. With Design, we can better engineer success, not just software.

This is Different than The Current Business Models and Operations

At each startup, the conversation unfolds the same way every time.  I ask about the product and the CEO demonstrates or describes the product. I ask about the business and they display a prepared document or slide deck on the business strategy and organizational shape.  I ask about financing and they tell me about early mistakes made impacting future financing for the negative. I ask about the distinction between the market they set out to pursue vs the market opportunity they have discovered - and they start to get depressed.  I ask about new market or growth opportunities, and they say "we hope to figure that out soon... " and perhaps "if only we could hire the right person for business development."

Hire the right person for business development?

Certainly, the most important aspect of building a company is the team. Yet to assume that the success of the business - to align internal operations to market demand - is the job of a solo individual is misguided.  MBA programs tout the ability to transform graduates into such beings - and there are many times this person can hold an instrumental role - but for highly sophisticated technologies, there is no evidence that a traditional business approach will always work.  To make the assumption is high risk.

In addition, when I ask "do you have a designer?" - the CEO confuses my question, thinking I asked: "Do you have someone to make this pretty?"  They say no or "that is important, but we aren't there yet" or "we know it needs to be attractive so we outsource that, we have someone make it look good." The worst ones point to their current success and say "we don't need a designer, we are doing just fine" and months later are panicking because they had all along been meeting the needs of only one or two clients and could not actually scale their business. By their definition, to have a designer on the team is expensive and the person would sit around most the time with nothing to do. If they learn their lesson - it is often too late.

Design Driven Business is an Optimized Transaction

Every company requires some basic components - they need the product, they need an efficient way to generate the product, they need a clear path to connect to the consumers for the product, they need a very simple mechanism to exchange the product for capital, and they need the ability to do this over and over again.  If this process is well tuned, the capital acquired will outweigh the capital exhausted and the company can flourish.

Nothing in this product demands marketing, or branding, or financial planning. There is no need to hire agile coaches or communications consultants. I also mentioned nothing about aesthetic design. These things - these tasks - are simply tools to help solve the core problem: the material transaction. The material transaction is made possible by the optimized movement of information. It is possible to invest in these things to make that transaction happen, but within an unknown market for an untested product, operating on the thresholds of possibility... it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of these tools. Marketing language, targetted advertising, and agile product development are all just attempts to optimize the movement of information. Yet with advanced technologies, early wins are just as likely events of luck. There is no way to know.

Design is the Process to Optimize Transactions

Designers are specialized in the art of communication. This communication may take place through graphic text, plastic form, or even through the process of a work itself (this is where the post-its come into use). Optimized communication within a team will increase efficiency, to transform a team from thinkers to doers but with less technical debt.  Optimized communication to external consumers will get the two groups together faster for the transaction to take place.

Optimized design of the transaction itself - a form of communication - will result in high satisfaction for everyone.  If transactions are fast and positive, and communication from the buyer can connect to the team (who internally is optimized to leverage it by communicating), the transaction will take place again.

You can call this stuff strategy, marketing, team building, communications, - whatever you want. But to get from lab to market - you are better off to optimize your business by starting with Design.

Digital Marketing and User Experience Design

 

All companies organize themselves into separate buckets to best focus expertise on business needs. The bigger the companies, the more these buckets are usually distinct from one another. Marketing is often a function of sales. Engineering and product development are often separate. This is a reasonable distinction. Historically, marketing and sales relied upon designers, but in different ways. Today, this is rapidly changing, and the evolution of digital products requires a different approach.

Since the 19th century, designers did not design products. Rather their job was only to make things visually appealing. They did this by adding ornamentation or through marketing. Marketing was important to differentiate products between companies that were otherwise the same. If we look at Nicholas Felton's graph below, we can see that for over 100 years, it was sufficient for a company to make a raw product - such as a radio, or a clothes washer - before having to compete. The job of a designer was to make the package appealing, to draw up posters, and assemble advertisements. 

Today the competition between products is very steep. Everyone has a clothes dryer. It is not enough for a company to produce the object. They must design special variations of the product to appeal to specific groups of people. They must import new features. Some features are engineering problems - like drying the clothes faster. Other features are industrial design problems, like the ambiguous question, "if your dryer connected to your phone, what would be different, and what would that do?" For physical products, the separation of marketing and product design might continue to make sense. But what about digital products?  

If we examine the digital marketing funnel, we see a seamless journey across multiple digital experiences to engage and pull consumers into the business. Visual images, videos, white papers, and previews are used to get people's attention and pull them toward trying the product. Ideally, the product is good enough that they want to use it and tell others about it.  Nested within this flow is the work of the product team, wherein the team is seeking to understand and satisfy customer needs. During and after product use, the team seeks input on how to improve the product for repeat use. 

Perhaps it is time to change this. 

Digital marketing should not be a completely distinct domain from the product design. If we consider the funnel, at large, the funnel is a viable part of the user experience. Digital ads pull the user to a website, and through the website one directly utilizes a web application. The outputs of the web application are typically reports and dashboards that other people will see and use. The outputs should also be considered as part of the marketing funnel, as these artifacts directly inform the successful adoption of the product into a business. The feedback forms, customer support tools, are obviously important to product reuse but this information can drive new marketing tactics and campaigns.

By creating a deeper blend between digital marketing and digital product teams, one can more quickly accelerate audience discovery, engagement,  customer satisfaction, and growth. This does not require people to give up their responsibilities. Rather, the implication is a change in team configuration.  Product teams may not want to merely consist of engineers and designers. Marketing is no longer merely the domain of business. The supply of market expertise and product expertise is fundamental in driving success within marketing teams and product teams. 

This also implies that designers need to learn and think through the broader marketing funnel as much as marketing people need to better understand the workings of product design. If all stakeholders do the work, they will discover great opportunities to accelerate their missions and achieve the outcomes they want. 

The PhD Design - Should you do it? How to make it work for you.

The Future Cone: A core concept in design theory on the impact of design to drive change [Source]

In August 2014, I began a PhD in Design and completed it in May of 2020 at Carnegie Mellon University. I did the program full time and worked full time throughout. I am also a father.  Both of my children were born during my time in the program. From 2016-2018, I formally left the program for two years while working for the White House but I continued to work on the dissertation at that time. No doubt, I was very tired and stretched too thin.

I pursued this program with a goal to expand my personal practice into new directions and to reinforce my longstanding history of connecting technology design to economic development. I expected it would lead to a combination of teaching and entrepreneurship.  I encountered deep departmental resistance to my work for reasons I never quite understood. Consequently, I very much had to complete my thesis under great stress and with limited channels of constructive feedback. Yet I achieved all of my goals. Over the years I built companies, products, and unique expertise on AI product design. I am glad I did the PhD Design. It was not a waste but it was not what I expected.

Bottom line up front, should you do the PhD design?
At the end of the day it provides a credential, so will you benefit from this credential? I benefit because I immersed myself into communities and research efforts beyond my department and across the university. I worked on a corporate research contract with the CMU Robotics Institute, which is the world leader in its field. I collaborated with persons at MIT where I also served on an investment board. The name recognition, access to resources, the growing community of friends and colleagues, and exposure to writing on design from over the last 100 years had powerful outcomes. Overall, I accomplished my goals.

At the same time, you don't need need a PhD to do much of that.  The PhD provided opportunities but those paths were not the lone options available. The culture of many PhD programs is total nonsense. Most academic faculty can't help you do anything but encourage you to be just like them. As reported by Bloomberg, there is only market demand for technical PhDs.  So I benefit because I persevered since my goals were to build a technical community, technical expertise, and to build companies. My goals aligned with the market and to create more career options. The PhD credential itself has minimal value unless I seek a teaching position in the future. So if you are interested in the PhD Design, you need to decide what you want first, assess how your goal aligns to the rest of the world, and then decide how to use the PhD experience to make that happen.

If you do not craft clear goals, or if those goals have no value to others, the PhD design will have nominal benefit - or worse, it could be a problem. It is a young degree and few people in the world have one. Individuals around the world hold deep subjective ideas about what Design is as a field. Many people think I decorate houses or design cars. Many engineers think that design is simply a matter of making things pretty or is a tool for marketing. Consequently, you need a very clear plan for using the PhD and proving your value.

Why I did the PhD Design
Prior to the PhD, I had worked in or studied several fields of design including communications, architecture and urban planning. I specialized in working in conflict cities and with displaced, refugee populations. Around that time I also maintained a blog called Humanitarian Space reflecting the previous 8 years of personal practice and published an article on choosing graduate programs. I primarily identified as an urban planner, but with a growing interest in new technologies, sought a PhD program to not just review traditional urban planning subjects. I imagined new planning problems were ahead as robotics and machine learning became integrated in society. The PhD Design seemed like a new way to think about these kinds of problems. There were only a few schools in the world where I could really do this kind of research.  I chose the PhD Design program at Carnegie Mellon University because it had a "practice based" curriculum and CMU is the global leader in AI and robotics, and the low cost of living in Pittsburgh. In comparison other top universities in the US and Europe are in more expensive cities.


What is the result of the PhD Design?
For Others - Among my peers from within my program and graduates of other PhD design programs, most are faculty at prestigious universities. They are paid a modest salary as assistant professors at globally top ranking schools, at around $65,000 USD per year. Most faculty I know make between $65,000 and $85,000 USD annually at the world's greatest universities. They are required to teach 3-5 classes per year and demonstrate evidence of other scholarly work or creative practice. Most are not required to bring in additional research funding. Those who do bring additional funds typically earn more money. A couple others are Design Researchers at a big tech companies on the West Coast. They all care a lot about a handful of academic conferences called Cumulus. They publish in niche academic journals like Design Methods and She Ji.

My Personal Experience - It is normal for goals to change over a PhD program in the US. Mine did not, but they became more specific. I had two children and thus became more concerned with the business of my practice. I also became more specifically interested in particular forms of machine learning as an emerging technology.  From my two years at the White House,  I became focused on combating disinformation as a technology entrepreneur.

Consequently, the PhD Design was a vehicle for executive education. I entered the program as a technical expert and graduated as a business executive.  I created a niche specialization in applied AI research. This enables higher earnings while also observing direct consequences of my research in the world.  This is a creative practice to solve real problems. The degree was not essential, but it provided a platform to consolidate resources, build expertise, and assert credibility.

Should you do the PhD Design?
Design is not a study of "what was" but is the study of invention, to invent something new. Designers are forward thinkers, and consequently, the study of design should be grounded in theories on creating something new. To some extent the PhD Design does this. Readings by Herbert Simon, Christopher Alexander, Christopher Jones, Horst Rittle or Lucy Suchman do well to orient a designers' thinking on the relationship between making things and human experiences. With research, one can become a better designer for social problems, engineering problems, or otherwise. The PhD in Design could be a compelling path to creative invention. 

How to approach a PhD Design program and succeed on the other side

1. Ignore the previous work by the graduate department - what is their plan for future work?
You can review all the work that came out of the department, but as a PhD Design candidate, you will be there 4+ years into the future and the past work doesn't matter as much. Also don't stay 10 years. Just get the damn thing out the door and move on with your life.

2.  You need to get friendly with a possible advisor to get accepted but select a program by the culture.
It is common practice to email possible advisors and build a relationship before applying. Do not be afraid, it is part of their job. But you need a catchy email and a reason. That person will advocate for your admission. Feel free to engage multiple persons. But do not expect you will have a great relationship with your preferred advisor.  I came to CMU because two people on faculty were rockstars in Design and Human Computer Interaction. Then they both left. These kinds of problems are common. I continued to work with those persons, but they could not be my advisors as they were not in my department. I left the program for a couple years and when I came back it was better. I found two faculty members who avoided the politics and wanted to help me graduate. They knew what constituted a good thesis and provided the necessary support to get it done and graduate.

3. Do great work and NEVER stop fighting for what you want.
If you come to the program with specific goals, do not give up, no matter how much other people do not agree or support you. I was told that my goals were the wrong goals. I was told that my reading selections were the wrong selection. I was told that my presentations were too aggressive. I was told that a focus on business is antithetical to the values of academia. This is total idiocy. These were subjective complaints. As faculty in Design, they have a steady paycheck do not have a real risk if their practice/research endeavors fail to generate any meaningful outcomes in the world.  Unless they have done the specific thing you want to do and they are speaking to that topic - their input should be ignored. You own all the risk if your PhD doesn't work out and they have none.

4. Read number 3, again.
Seriously, no one cares about your goals as much you do. If you use the PhD Design for what it should and could be - prioritizing the creation of things that are new - then you will be alone. The more your ideas and work are truly innovative, the more people will criticize what you do and the less they will have to contribute. True innovation is a lonely road. So fight like your future depends on it, because it does. Then celebrate when you achieve the extraordinary. All the naysayers will still be stuck in the same old jobs doing the same old things. You will, however, go on to have great adventures and opportunities ahead.

Product management models of despair and awakening

 

How do you build a good product strategy?  A rather classic, default formula is described above. You analyze the competition, you study the market, talk to some experts and persona some customers. Then build and test and role out and pivot and all that tiresome stuff. This is horrible.

Why is it horrible? Because it is the same as a high school essay. You get a prompt, reflect on your life, maybe read a couple books for inspiration, and then cobble together an essay with 5 paragraphs. You probably start writing a terrible paragraph in the beginning, get more succinct as you go along, then rewrite the intro to align with everything else.  In the end you have a coherent product. The downside is that you wasted a lot of time reinventing the "why." 

There is nothing wrong with this approach. But is standard across the industry because for two reasons - it tends to work - and of equal importance, almost anyone can do it. Most universities are not training students to be product managers. It is a generalist discipline. They are trained in business, or computer science, marketing, social science, or humanities. They become product managers because they see an opportunity to supply their broad knowledge with a specific process. They have some level of authority within an organization. I would argue that most people who are product managers do it because they love the idea of the job, and they might also like the product, but probably not as much as the job itself. 

There are other ways to do this. One should indulge in divergent research.  While the image below is amorphous to interpret, it captures the same details as the standard product management model (above) though with a focus on materiality. This element is key. Products are not ideas. They are things. Digital software is a product. Products are intentionally crafted materials that function as a point of change for the user(s). An insurance policy can be a product, because the specific language of that policy was carefully crafted to determine how a person's life will function in relation to a catastrophic event. The distinction between 20 paid physical therapy sessions or 30 can have a major impact on the person's future. A piece of software is no different - if you must spend time searching for features, are uncertain when you need the tool, or ignore half of the software components - the product might not be well designed for you. 

The questions of product development go far beyond immediate usability. They are questions of market fit, acquisitions, and adaptation. How will demand for this product change over time, and who will have that demand? Under what conditions will the product be successful, and when will it not be successful. How much should it cost to build? How and where do people physically acquire it and at what price?

The answers are not easily distilled, nor should the answers be determined lightly. While a simple conversation might inspire a range of insights - everything should be treated as a hypothesis.  But the constant focus on documents fails to capture the material future of the product, and the only way to reconcile the gap, is to immerse oneself into the environments, the populations, and the materials wherein the prospective product will reside. 

So do the work. Immerse yourself. Make things physical. Quit waving your hands. Stop trying to talk to everyone and spend more time identifying the conversations that matter. Stop trying to be clever, and get personal, become a part of the problem you are hoping to solve. Do you have this problem in your life? Do you actively benefit from this product? If your answer is no, then you are probably the wrong person for the job, or you aren't doing your job right.

Product management that matters is a matter of ingress and egress. Like a good anthropologist, you need one foot in the world of the customer and one foot out. How do you know when you made it? Usually because you broke something "in the system" - you crossed a line of distinction, and are no longer an outsider in the eyes of the stakeholders. You are part of the problem. It is uncomfortable. You might be in jail. You might be injured. You might even just be bored, but now you it the line and it is time to pull back one step. 

Do not wave your hands and apply a generic formula for generic people to generic customers. Embrace the magic that flows through the world, dig into the the problem, become the world's greatest expert on the problem from all points of view, and let the solution realize itself through you. Let it awaken.

Engage the world, have a vision, build a city, now go die in it.

Building a company isn't for everyone, and for those who love it, it is an act of sadism. The impetus to build a company is rooted in deep feelings, deep primitive reactions to the world. It is founded on anger, from not fitting in, and from a desire to own your own destiny. It is not a lifestyle or a privilege or an achievement, it is an act of vengeance upon everything that is wrong with society.

Building a company is not the same as making a product. When you make a project, you take an action and you get a response. You put paint on the canvas and it just remains there. It doesn't change. It doesn't talk back. It just sits there until you push it again. As a leader, your job is to create systems for other people to succeed. You must invent systems to hire people, to give them direction, and to help them flourish. You must create systems to help people communicate, to manage each others feelings, and to make progress toward your goal. You must create systems to make them feel considered, to recognize their own visions, and to passionately work toward yours.

But then what happens? You found and inspired people with a codified approach to realize your dream. What does that become? Where does it go? After you build the ship, can you still steer it forward? If there is a challenge ahead, that might keep you grounded, it will make or break you. But what if there is no immediate threat? Where do you go? 

With or without the challenge, you will find a moment of decision, when it is most difficult to remain clear headed and you must persevere. You will find a moment where your previous methods didn't work. You won't working right. You landed the spaceship on the alien landscape and there is no oxygen in place. You try to stick to your gut, or you open you mind, either way you double-down on the direction to see it through. And then you die. There is no air. There was no lifeboat. You were alone and you died alone. 

If along the way you found others who really understand what it is like to drown and resuscitate, then maybe they can give you the right coaching. They can't make oxygen from ether, but maybe they could have told you to prepare and you listened. Maybe they were wrong and you prepared the wrong way. Maybe it all came together and you made it out alive.

Can you make it out alive? All the anger in the world is not enough to save you, and so at some point, the piss and vinegar that gave you fuel to create will ruin you. You must change. What do trap rappers rap about when they become millionaires? Many of them still rap about dealing drugs and fighting gangs. They never cross this chasm. What do great comedians tell jokes about once they told all their personal stories and stories about travel? They need a new act. Many never find one. 

Heidegger said that moments of revelation are when the scrim is pulled back, and you can see the tower on the hill. It was always there, but you could never see it. Heidegger was wrong. The tower is only there if you want it to be, and you don't pull back the scrim, you build the tower. You incentivize others to build it with you and it becomes a city.

Engage the world.

Craft a vision. 

Build a city.

Now go die in it.

Going beyond the method: The separation between great professionals and true experts

From Chadwicks Systems View of Planning, 1971

There is a lot of industry concerned with method. We buy books for cooking and we watch youtube videos to learn how to sing, play piano, knit, and skateboard. 

I suspect a method, however, is a little more developed than a technique. It is a string of techniques, and thus functions as a form of knowledge in itself. 

Back in the 1950s, the world was transfixed by methods. Lean manufacturing, urban planning, and design methods were all developed as ways to intelligently identify, engage, and solve complex problems. The industry is still booming today, with evangelists covering Linkedin and twitter for Agile Coaching, Service Design, and a range of other "isms." Job ads regularly hire based on method as well. Do you know how to do focus groups? UX Research? Rapid digital prototyping?  It is not enough to know how to write the code, you need to know the method to apply the code in a meaningful way.

Personally, I love methods. I collect them. I collect books on methods (like Chadwicks 1971 publication on systems planning, above) and I am constantly trying to learn new methods across many different fields. Consequently, what I find problematic about methods in industry is not the requirement or mastery, but rather the lack of imagination.

Product designers, for example, have thoroughly codified their profession around methods. Interviews, sketch sessions, value mapping sessions, and paper prototyping are a string of methods to inform product development and strategy. They work fairly well, and are therefore repeated across industries and problem sets. 

But what about the creation of new methods? Whose job is to do that? After all, someone invented many of the methods relied upon today. Specific persons pioneered these canvasses and concepts, then shared or taught them with others. 

What I find alarming is that so few designers are inventing methods. Creativity is a foundation principle of the discipline, and yet the methods are redundant. 

Perhaps then, this is the mark of distinction between good professionals and great ones, the question you should ask at your next interview: "Tell about a time you invented a method to solve a problem."