I have always liked Don Norman’s ideas and attitude. A couple of weeks ago at Core 77 he questioned the feasibility of human-centered design – [Link]

In today’s connected world and global market, he argues, culture matters little to design. Designers should center their effort less on establishing people’s needs and more on understanding activities:

A few decades ago, I believed that cultural differences were fundamental. Moreover, they were exciting and interesting. Today, I believe that cultural differences are still just as fundamental and exciting but they primarily exist in governing social interaction, the types of foods that are eaten and stylistic preferences. Modern products are designed to support particular activities, so that it is the activity itself that controls how they should be designed and used. Traditional activities are heavily determined by culture, but modern office practices, manufacturing, communication, financial accounts and transportation are dominated by the technology used to accomplish them, or in the cases of financial accounts, by world-wide standards intended to make transactions and accounting uniform. As a result, many of our activities are determined by the technologies we use, such as the automobile, computer, cellphone, train or airplane, or by the need to interact smoothly with other countries and cultures across the world. Once the technology determines the activity, the influence of culture dissipates.

These observations have important implications for design. Modern products are driven by technology, which in turn dictates the activity. Designers talk a lot about Human-Centered Design where it is important to design for the needs of the person. Well, this doesn’t work when the goal is millions of people all across the world. Computers and software, phones and applications, automobiles, kitchen appliances and housewares are intended for consumption by millions. Human-Centered Design can no longer apply: what does it mean to discover the precise needs of millions of people? Instead, I have argued for Activity-Centered Design, where the activity dictates the design.

Don is assuming, as many do, that culture accounts for human difference and individuality and can be radically separated from function, activity and technology. (see also his piece on activity-centered design a while back – [Link])

But what happens if we deny this separation of culture and technology? What happens if we question this model of what it is to be human? (See my previous comments on the nature of humanity – [Link])

As an archaeologist I work on the material remains of things, places, people and their activities in attempts to understand what was going on. For a long while many archaeologists have felt considerable guilt over their focus on things. Mortimer Wheeler, an influential archaeological character back in the 1950s and 60s and Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, famously declared in his book Archaeology from the Earth that the whole purpose of archaeology was to find out about the people behind things – societies and cultures are the true object of archaeology. This was archaeology’s higher purpose – to move beyond material goods and technologies to human-centered accounts of the past.

Many of my colleagues who are cultural anthropologists share such an embarrassment about things, holding that it is the world of cultural values and meanings that makes us truly human. Too much focus on material goods can be a symptom of commodity fetishism, of a reductionist materialism, or even of our consumerist modernity.

In contrast, my colleagues in design and engineering schools are rightly looking beyond their focus on materials and processes, beyond artifacts and things, to embrace human factors, interactions with things, experiences and emotions, putting people before technology, as Don says.

But while I usually play the role of an archaeological humanist and argue that engineers and designers do indeed need to understand how people get on with things, I also find myself making the opposite case to my archaeological and anthropological colleagues, arguing that they need to take artifacts and materialities more seriously and not put them in second place to cultural values and structures of meaning (see my new book about all this – [Link]).

This is a curious academic schizophrenia, and, of course, another manifestation of C.P.Snow’s old notion of two cultures – Science versus the Arts and Humanities. I believe we are still bedeviled by such a separation in our schools and colleges. In spite of all the calls to be inter-, multi-, trans-disciplinary, the norm is segregation. But I don’t want to elaborate on this here. I explore it enough elsewhere in this blog.

I suggest that design, as practiced and taught in the likes of our d.school, offers a modest resolution of the separation of humans and things, culture and technology, and also entails a quite radical redefinition of what it is to be human/inhuman.

The modest resolution comes from centering learning and education on practice, projects, and iteration rather than academic disciplines and schooling – practical worldly mixtures.

The radical redefinition of the human?

What makes us human is engagements with and through things. And, crucially, these practical engagements precede our definitions of person and artifact. Distinctions, and they are very real, between the likes of culture and technology, are not absolute, a priori, but achievements – local, historical, provisional.

My friend Cliff Nass wrote a book about some of about with Byron Reeves – The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places [Link]. People treat their machines like people, because the distinction between things and people, between technology and the social or cultural is local and provisional, rather than abstract and absolute.

If being human is all about making and getting on with things, then human-centered design is simultaneously about activities and technologies, materials and processes, values and experiences, the tangible and intangible, individuals dispersed through networks of material flows, human being flowing through cultural assemblages of artifacts, people, values, architectures, landscapes, emotions …

So human-centered design is not about people and cultural differences, in contrast to other kinds of design that deal with materials and mechanics, activities and technologies.

Human centered design is as much inhuman as human, because for as long as we’ve been human we’ve been cyborgs!

“All is full of love” – video by Chris Cunningham for Björk – from Homegenic (1999) [Link]

It is about the wonderful environment of the Peterson Building, home of the d.school, how it came to look the way it does, with its customized fittings, studios, prototyping facilities, spaces to meet and create. Scott and Scott were key figures in its design and offer, with the help of other d.schoolers, a menu of ideas about how to make creative spaces.

Flexible spaces that can be configured to the different stages in the design process.

The d.school’s enlightened White Room, Booth blanc, where you can write ideas on all the surfaces

I am particularly interested in just how environment affects what we think and do. My class on urban planning [Link] uses the design of ancient cities to define the human qualities at the heart of sustainable urban life – the way architecture interacts with creative urban experience.

Stanford Strategy Studio involved a series of experiments in staging conversations about matters of common and pressing human concern [Link]. We realized the power of saturated environments, places that resonate through rich ambience, staging, artifacts, media.

Crucial also is persistence – how certain spaces, with their artifacts, can maintain conversation, engagement with a task, shared experiences and findings, over time, by offering mnemonics

- rooms with memory

Our Revs Program is considering, under its aim of promoting a broad human-centered appreciation of automotive engineering and culture over the last 150 years, the way a museum can be a design space – offering artifacts and archives that inspire through their arrangement in a museological space,

artifacts reminding us, through their materiality, of where we have been, and hopes and prospects of realizing our projects to design a better world.

In the d.school the standard rule is to “reset” a studio after using it – tidy up, put the furniture and fittings back in storage, clean white boards, tidy up tools and materials. Wipe the space clean and erase the traces of what has been happening there. It means that most of the d.school, most of the time, looks remarkably clean, minimalist, and somewhat sterile – only ready-to-be-used.

From the studio of artist Terry Winters

I think that memory, history, the archaeology of a place, the embodiment of experience and event in a place, a building, a landscape, a studio is immensely important to creativity. Every artist’s studio I have encountered is saturated in such memory.

But we can drown in the past.

This is actually the manifestation of a classic conundrum of

an archaeological sensibility

- how much to conserve, how much to discard

Metamedia – my lab at Stanford – 2006/2007 – a saturated space here as an authoring studio, then
used for modeling conversations, now becoming again a studio space for the Revs Program.

We still radically separate ornament from style and meaning, treating it as superfluous and superficial, yet it is the primary experience we have of much of our artifactual world – surface treatment.

After the likes of Owen Jones (Grammar of Ornament -[Link]), there are few works like Gombrich’s Sense of Order [Link] that take pattern seriously and liberate it from the fine art :: decorative craft distinction. (Though I also constantly return to Alois Riegl, Henri Focillon and George Kubler.)

The topic fascinated me in my own study of ancient Corinthian ceramics (at the beginnings of the Mediterranean city state), where I refused the distinction and dealt with surface treatment, including both figurative painting as well as geometric and floral pattern, in a contextual study of design [Link]. My broad point now is that ornament/pattern is precisely the worked ground against which subject matter is set, even to the point where ground is more significant and eclipses apparent subject matter (this a variation on my obsession with signal-noise relationships in the history of design).

But how can so much be encompassed in a single synoptic view? Diana and Christina offer a bold thematics, set in a timeline, from antiquity to modernity. Their wonderful topics include: flamboyant gothic, glowing grotesques, the dramatic and the divine, floral perfection, compositions of refinement, patterns of richness, bold colors and abstracts, tartan grids, all accompanied by acute commentary and contextual reference.

This is a reminder of just how much analytic attention we still need to apply to the world of design and making, and how hampered we are by the narrowness of art and design history, even when they mobilize the likes of semiotics (as Tilley and I attempted as part of our contribution to the emerging field of material culture studies in the 80s [Link]).

Quick recap.

For some time I have been interested in the notion of the “T character” – an attitude or disposition, a skill set, that facilitates the kind of interdisciplinary practice that is the heart of good design, bridging the different expertise and interests in a team.

This is how I put it last year [Link]:

Real world problems don’t fit into neat disciplinary categories. We hear much about the importance of interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary work. (Multidisciplinary implies keeping the disciplinary distinctions we need to bridge?)

Stanford d.school ‘s mission is to promote design thinking as such a bridging field. And one that involves close attention to the human component in addressing real world problems.

Tom Kelley and Tim Brown have outlined the character types they think are the heart of design thinking [Link]. The kinds of people who contribute to innovative design.

One is the “T” character – able to combine in-depth knowledge of a particular field or method (the vertical in the “T”) with an ability to connect across specialist expertise (the lateral). And Tom and Tim identify design thinking with this creative, human-centered work of connection.

I have described how design thinking is a kind of pragmatism [Link] and this notion of a “T” character intrigues me. I want to sharpen up the idea, but am not sure how. Is it really a character type?

Well, yes and no.

Bridging different interests is all about diplomacy and translation, sensitivity, being mindful of others; it is about representing different interest groups.

Last summer, at EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) in Tokyo [Link], I suggested that we should think of the things we design as

… assemblages, bundles of materials, features, potentials, affordances, values, even different times – think of how they gather and connect people and possibility.

Message – think of the human as being distributed through these assemblies and gatherings.

(This is why it is so right to hold that better design will come from an emphasis not so much on a particular product as on what it may offer – focus more on experience, interaction, service, platform – the assemblages.)

A word that means “thing” and captures all this is the Latin RES.

And it is entirely right to think in a collective way – RES PUBLICA is the commonwealth, the state, the assembly of the people and their goods, cultural and political ecologies. Keep in mind the missing masses in these assemblies that are our human being – not just things, but other species too, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses.

Have a look at the range of meanings and usage of RES – [Link]

In such an ontology of distributed human being, the apparent substantiality of a person or artifact is simultaneously vacancy, emptiness, openness perhaps; and the past haunts, present in its absence. We are no longer faced with the problem of connecting, for example, tangible and intangible, materials and immaterial values, pasts and presents, functions and emotions, people and their goods: these are already connected. The task is to discover how.

Under such an ontology, how do we perform research? What is the way, the DŌ of ethnography, in the terms of the conference theme?

• look to the qualities of human being – the quiddities and haecceities, the qualities of sustainable human living, and tell their story, lest we forget

• methodology – don’t look for tight systematics – plunge IN MEDIAS RES, into the imbroglios – be pragmatic and opportunistic

• the challenge is one of re-presentation (in the political sense too), of giving voice, speaking-for, witnessing

• consider research (ethnographic, design, contextual, whatever) as intervention in the RES PUBLICA

• intervention in cycles of ideation/design/manufacture | exchange and distribution | consumption | reuse | discard – a political economy

Here then is a diagram that aims to capture this. Experts in teams drill down into a design problem. One connection is precisely the messiness of problems – they don’t fit into disciplines. And things don’t fit either. Issues and themes offer connection – this is often how we configure messy spaces – according to themes such as sustainability, or health and wellbeing (see my comments on the Durham conference last year on “Water in Antiquity” [Link]).

Design thinking, as an iterative process or pragmatics [Link], offers a connecting medium. And theory enables translation across radically different fields. Praxis is a term that refers to such thoughtful practice.

Crucial also is how we get on with others, a constitutional arrangement that enables sensitive, mindful respect and care for others.

This is the human in human-centered design

I was going to talk about this at the COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks) Conference in Basel last week [Link], but a family emergency stopped me going. There are some fascinating matters being raised in relation to this political economy of design by social software – collaborative and cocreative authoring worlds.

Eddie Hall’s Bentley in Naples, Florida

The aim of our Program is to create a new transdisciplinary field connecting the past, present and future of the automobile, bridging the Humanities, Social Sciences, Design, and Engineering, centered upon the human experiences of designing, making, driving, being driven, living with, dreaming of the automobile.

The Revs Institute of Naples Florida, one of the world’s finest car collections, library and archive of automotive history and design is our partner. Stanford Revs Program nestles within CARS – the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford.

The ultimate goal is to create a new kind of museum of the car, working closely with Stanford Libraries to build cutting edge digital collections management and delivery systems.

Automotive Archaeology

With me fronting the Program are Chris Gerdes (Engineer), Cliff Nass (Psychologist and Cognitive Scientist), and Sven Beiker (Executive Director and liaison with the car industry).

After introductions from Provost John Etchemendy, Cliff Nass, and Miles Collier (Business Executive, Artist and Philanthropist), whose generous multi-million dollar gift is starting up the Program, came vignettes from the car’s life. Bianca Carpeneti, Gary Devore and Chris Lowman (Archaeology, Heritage Management and Design Research, my Metamedia Lab) dealt with cultures of speed and performance in the 1930s, engineering in the run up to WWII, and choices faced when the car retired from racing and became a collector’s item. Michelle Mederos (Product Design Program and Cliff’s CHIMe Lab – Communications between Humans and Interactive Media) and Lassi “Al” Likkanen (Cognitive Science and CHIMe Lab) showed how we might instrument and quantify experiences of driving. John Kegelman (Mechanical Engineering and Chris’s Dynamic Design Lab) focused on the car itself and how we can instrument and quantify our experience of its performance.

Doug Nye (Motor Racing Journalist and Historian) took us back to the 1930s with some remarkable restored film footage – racing at mad speeds along the country lanes and through the towns of the Northern Ireland Ards circuit for the RAC Tourist Trophy.

In a session on the human interface with machines, Joy Taylor (Clinical Psychiatrist, Associate Clinical Professor (Affiliated), Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science) and Cliff Nass unpacked some of the emotional and cognitive interfaces with artifacts. Chris Gerdes took us into the future with intelligent and autonomous vehicles, and a movie showing Shelley, Stanford’s autonomous vehicle, going through its paces. David Kelley (Mechanical Engineering, Stanford d.school, and founder of IDEO, the design consultancy) is one of our key supporters, but had to miss his presentation.

Julia Landauer (Stanford Freshman and Auto Racer) and Duncan Dayton (Auto Racer and American Le Mans Series Team Owner), interviewed by Murray Smith (Bibliophile, Sporting Motorist, Automotive Archaeologist), shared with us their first-hand experience of extreme human-machine interactions.

This theme of the cyborg driver came up again with presentations on how we can deal with the cultural history of automobility from Fred Turner (incoming Director of our Program in Science, Technology and Society) and Ursula Heise (Professor of English and Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature). Fred flagged up a crucial issue we wish to tackle – the mediation of experience – how experiences are documented, represented, visualized.

Chris (Gerdes) wired up for driving the Bentley

Lawyer Dan Siciliano (Senior Lecturer in Law and Associate Dean for Executive Education and Special Program) raised the question of when a car is not a car – when it’s treated by the law as a horse (or horse-less carriage) – and now the car is increasingly a platform or system. Sven covered the different institutional connections across the history of the car. Miles Collier talked about the intellectual world of the car collector – issues of authenticity, conservation and restoration, connoisseurship and authority.

The Library involvement in the Program was explored by Stu Snydman (Libraries Manager, Digital Production/Web Application Development) – outlining the development of open source systems for organizing, searching, and sharing collections, of books, papers, cars!

Archaeology of the recent and contemporary past

Let me say a little more about the archaeological agenda in the Program.

We’re developing and expanding the anthropological archaeology of Material Culture Studies. We’re taking up again what Bill Rathje called “the archaeology of us”, and taking seriously what, ironically, has been overlooked – the car as popular culture, as icon of modernity, as a key moment in twentieth century engineering and industrial design.

The expanded scope is a design perspective – a focus on human-centered design. Design – informed by history, archaeology, ethnography, as well as engineering, science, technology, psychology, cognitive science – starting and ending with human experiences in the richest sense.

And the legacy of the material past – where the museum becomes a design studio.

What will a discipline of things, encompassing this Program centered on the car, look like?

I see three components:

All three rooted in the histories, genealogies and archaeologies of what we’re calling Archive 3.0 – the animated archive of digitally enabled interactive stores of sources, knowledge and collaborative exchange. We’ll be sharing everything we can and inviting contribution, reaching out to that community fascinated by this major part of our contemporary heritage.

Revs at Stanford – a project in human-centered design – where archaeology and history inform design, where the museum and the archive combine with the design studio.

Press and publicity links -

New York Times

Automotive News

KQED – PBS News

Stanford Report

Press and publicity links -

New York Times

Automotive News

KQED – PBS News

Stanford Report

I got thinking seriously about its themes this weekend at a fund-raising event organized by Castilleja School, where Helen teaches and Molly learns, on the theme of “Optimism” – engaging possibility. Optimism at the heart of social change.

Not inappropriate in these times.

Zainah Anwar shared with us her great effort to create a feminist caucus in Islam.

Jill Tarter gave us a cosmic perspective with thoughts about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life (an optimistic counter to “The Day the Earth Stood Still”).

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, foregrounded listening in any address to social hardship. Classic anecdote – he visits a senior resident in a run-down housing project, wanting to offer help. She takes him out into the neighborhood and asks him to describe what he sees. Cory lists the problems, hardship, poverty, urban ruin, and, as he does, she grows more and more impatient with him, eventually saying he can do nothing for her. Why? Because, if that is what he sees in the neighborhood, that is what he will perpetuate. He needs to see the potential and possibility.

We heard Tim Brown (IDEO) on design thinking and the crucial importance of empathy, collaboration and risk taking, making mistakes – all key components of optimism.

Elizabeth Vargas, Anchor journalist with ABC News, did a fine job of interviewing.

Anna Deavere Smith wound up the inspiring evening with three of her monologues (she interviews and listens to people then acts out their words). They were about the way that struggle is at the heart of optimism – a mid-west rodeo rider’s experiences of medical care (a flat rate of 1200 dollars to sort out the kidney the steer kicked), a medic in a charity hospital abandoned by state and federal agencies in the wake of hurricane Katrina, a feisty feminist governor of Texas facing cancer.

This is extraordinary “documentary theater”. Anna is precisely the “representative” – listening, respecting, conveying, authentically witnessing those whom she represents, in her own voice. It is a model of political representation

(Inspiring for the class – listen and witness in your design work, and also resonant for me, because my new book on the archaeological imagination has an extended discussion of eighteenth century debates about authenticity in the voice from the past.)

Seed magazine brings together a unique gathering of prominent scientists, artists, novelists, philosophers + other thinkers who are tearing down the wall between science + culture.

We are on the cusp of a twenty-first-century scientific renaissance. Science is driving our culture and conversation unlike ever before, transforming the social, political, economic, aesthetic, and intellectual landscape of our time. Today, science is culture. As global issues—like energy and health—become increasingly interconnected, and as our curiosities—like how the mind works or why the universe is expanding—become more complex, we need a new way of looking at the world that blurs the lines between scientific disciplines and the borders between the sciences and the arts and humanities. In this spirit, the award-winning science magazine Seed has paired scientists with nonscientists to explore ideas of common interest to us all. This book is the result of these illuminating Seed Salon conversations, edited and with an introduction by Seed founder and editor in chief Adam Bly.

[Link - Amazon]

[Link - my site]

[Link - Seed Magazine Issue 12 - with video]

It is my latest presentation of the argument for a living past, a transitive past, tied now to a call for attention to matters of common and pressing human concern. In Stanford Strategy Studio we have been modeling foresight thinking and planning rooted in the Humanities – a long term historical (and necessarily archaeological) perspective. Key components of this have come through my recent posts on human-centered design [Link].

Here is an extract:

… Great voids in the antiquity of humankind came in the eighteenth century with the challenges to senses of history based upon religious teaching, biblical chronologies and Graeco-Roman historiography. Archaeology has worked so successfully over two centuries to populate the past with sites and artifacts in a global time-space systematics of timelines and distribution maps rooted in universally applicable systems of classification and categorization. While this inventory of archaeological remains has become the foundation and instrument of the management of the past in ministries of culture and planning departments the world over, it has nevertheless, indeed necessarily come with a growing awareness of threats both to the remains of the past and to the possibility of creating any kind of meaningful knowledge of what happened in history, if access to sources is overly restricted, if contextual information is lost or never acquired.

Here we experience a new kind of threat or risk to the past itself as well as to the potentiality and richness of pasts in the future, based upon new modern dynamics of presence (of the remains of the past) and absence (of past lives themselves as well as future memories and histories). The past is conspicuously not a datum, but subject to contemporary interests and concerns, infused now with the interests of knowledge and also with erosive threatening interests. Just as the natural environment is now seen as a thoroughly socialized and institutionalized habitat, a hybrid that includes threats, culpability, and responsibility on the part of humanity to care and curate, so too the past is a matter of concern, a matter of foresight, another risk environment affecting whole populations’ needs and desires for history, heritage, memory. The paradox or contradiction is that the control that knowledge affords, for example, in managing the impact of development or of the trade in illicit antiquities on the possibility of a past in the future, comes at the cost of a senseof security. It is not just that the past is threatened; senses of personal and community identity are threatened. …

Folk singers at the Durham Miners’ Gala UK 2010 – celebrating industrial and regional heritage [Link]

The iTunes Facebook page is today featuring the event hosted by Stanford’s “Leading Matters” last May when we debated the future (and past) of automobility – see my blog entry here – [Link]

Here is what Apple says (on its wall at the moment – [Link] and [Link] )

iTunes is listening to Stanford’s finest professors on iTunesU

Leading Matters is an audio podcast that illuminates the pressing issues of the day. Compiled from over 80 presentations given at Stanford alumni events across the globe over the past three years, this series focuses on finding innovative solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges facing the environment, health, education and international relations.

We must have hit the mark – considering that there are more than 600 universities and 350,000 free lectures on iTunesU, we are incredibly proud that Apple have chosen to feature our Leading Matters lectures.

We’re top of the list at the first link given above.

How to improve the design of things -

• take people seriously – be human-centered
• look beyond the artifact – design systems, scenarios, stories, experiences, interactions
• don’t assume the designer knows it all – find out, pursue research and conduct fieldwork

Ethnography, anthropological fieldwork aimed at understanding a culture and society, offers a suite of research practices to achieve precisely these ends. Intel, among a growing number of companies, has invested heavily in this design research, contextual research, design anthropology, as it also gets called.

[Link - Ken Anderson from Intel in Harvard Business Review]
[Link - Genevieve Bell from Intel]
[Link - Business Week 2006]

Have a look at Xerox’s PARC Forum, here in Palo Alto -
[Link] – a special series this year on ethnography – [Link]

The theme this year is the nature of this ethnographic practice -

My line – if we are serious about human-centered we need to consider what we mean by “human”, and the Humanities are a good place to start doing just that.

As an archaeologist I naturally take a long term view, and one that sees things (artifacts, places, ecologies) as an integral part of being human – maybe human-centered isn’t quite what many people take it to be.

I am in Tokyo University at the iSchool [Link], a new research and teaching initiative focused on creativity/innovation and human centered design. Visionary leadership provided by Hiroshi Tamura and Hideyuki Horii.

I am here as part of a symposium with Hideshi Hamaguchi, Director of Strategy at Ziba Design.

The topic – does innovation have a method?

Hideshi’s answer – No. (If radical innovation were susceptible to specification, wouldn’t there be no end of solutions to seemingly intractable problems?)

You can’t specify procedures, provide a rule book. But there are what Hideshi calls protocols.

When I arrived at the iSchool, Hideshi and a team from Ziba were running a week-long student workshop focused on innovation in schools. Not incremental improvement of the classroom experience, but radical innovation, down to the roots. I was surprised that it all looked very familiar – just like the classes at our Stanford d.school, and about which I have been writing a good deal this last nine months.

Hideshi has an extraordinary facility in thinking outside the box. It comes from immense experience, from many careful assessments of what led to successful design solutions, and, above all, I think, from a passion to keep learning, to keep taking in more and different techniques, viewpoints, facts. His protocols are about how to break out of cognitive bias, how to reframe perspective, how to map out the territory of a design problem or field such that hidden spaces or blindspots are revealed.

I was fascinated with the way he uses visualization in all this. Diagrams, plans and concept maps, both concrete and abstract, make group discussion external; they mediate discussion, give it new form – an alienating effect that enables fresh review.

Hideshi is that Odyssean character that I identified at the core of design thinking – [Link] Speculative reasoning rooted in tacit experience and know-how.

Method? Protocols? We talked of tool kits. I have called it a pragmatics [Link].

In reflecting deeply on what he does, Hideshi was offering another contribution to the field I call

pragmatology

- the study of “pragmata” – things, things done. [Link]

Members of CARS (Center for Automotive Research at Stanford), now including myself, talked about the past, present, and future of auto-mobility. Great presentations came from Sebastian Thrun (robotic cars and Google), Chris Gerdes (driving at the limits – he brought his drive-by-wire Audi TT-S) and Cliff Nass (“the John Nash of the group”).

Clinton Stark has run a very entertaining (and informative) summary on his blog – StarkSilverCreek – All Things West Coast.

“The one hour presentation wasn’t so much a soup-to-nuts prognostication of all things cars, as it was an entertaining cross-section of what researchers are working on deep within the Stanford labs …

Some sound bites astonished me. For example, “Even during peak, 92% of a highway remains unoccupied.” We learn that this inefficiency results from the infrastructure required to support modern roadways. Also, automotive deaths and injuries impact global GDP anywhere from 1-3% annually.

The stakes are no doubt high. So what would the panelists propose about the future of autos? And, I wondered: how long would it take before the conversation turned to the electric vehicle?

Turns out that latter question would not be explored until the session had almost ended. Thankfully! It was a breath of fresh air. Not because I don’t have interest in electric and hybrid cars, or believe they are a potential part of a larger environmental solution, I just wanted to hear something different for a change.

Each of four panelists was given about 5-10 minutes to present. Then the session concluded with an informative Q&A moderated by the Jeremy Clarkson-like archaeologist (of course!) Michael Shanks …”

Our point – human centered design covers engineering, psychology, math, computer science … and, yes, archaeology!

Real world problems don’t fit into neat disciplinary categories. We hear much about the importance of interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary work. (Multidisciplinary implies keeping the disciplinary distinctions we need to bridge?)

Stanford d.school ‘s mission is to promote design thinking as such a bridging field. And one that involves close attention to the human component in addressing real world problems.

Tom Kelley and Tim Brown have outlined the character types they think are the heart of design thinking [Link]. The kinds of people who contribute to innovative design.

One is the “T” character – able to combine in-depth knowledge of a particular field or method (the vertical in the “T”) with an ability to connect across specialist expertise (the lateral). And they identify design thinking with this creative, human-centered work of connection.

I have described how design thinking is a kind of pragmatism [Link] and this notion of a “T” character intrigues me. I want to sharpen up the idea, but am not sure how. Is it really a character type?

I talked about the implementation of broad principles and policies in heritage management, represented in the likes of the convention, at the fabulous new Gallo-Romeins Museum at Tongeren (the size and splendor of the museum a testament to the significance of the past and of “heritage” in this town of but 30,000 people) – [Link]

Binchester – VINOVIVM.org

I presented a pragmatics for running field projects. I explained the idea of such a pragmatics in my commentary on our team taught class in the d.school [Link]

My argument is that archaeology is a creative field, working on what remains of the past – designing the past. The convention supplies a framework, an attitude  towards participatory heritage, one that, albeit implicitly, recognizes the multivalency of the concept. It is a kind of design brief. Archaeological field projects are not only about researching the past. They are typically connected with much broader agendas relating to regional development, conservation, legislative instruments that protect the past, aspirations, stands taken in a cultural politics, like the Faro Convention, to recognize the importance of the past to the present and future, to enrichen, and to open it up to people.

Scientific methodology isn’t therefore enough. Archaeological project design is always located, “actualistic”, dealing with specific conjunctures between past and present. It needs to be iterative and adaptive, a flexible process.

Here is a synopsis of the pragmatics I presented for our Binchester field project, the imagery and a copy of the Faro Convention – [Link].

Pragmatology [Link] – the (non-existent) discipline of things – doesn’t deal in objects. Things are not discrete, but nodes, gatherings of otherwise distributed flows, relations – fields of connection, not objects with attributes.

This point is made so well in a movie I have just been watching.

“Objectified”, directed by Gary Hustwit, is a documentary about our relationships with manufactured objects and the people who design them.

Jonathan Ive, of Apple, describes how the aluminium pressing at the heart of the Macbook Air is not so much an artifact as a process – articulating different key stages and components of manufacture as well as the other components of the laptop.

Bill Moggridge designed what has been called the first laptop. He describes how his encounters with it, taking it out of a briefcase, opening up the screen, typing on the keyboard, transported him from the physical manipulation of an object into that space behind the screen – an indeterminate world of intangibles, of interactions and experiences. The object, the laptop, dispersed.

Pragmatology and Pragmatogony

I like to say that archaeologists deal in the history of people’s relationships with stuff, with things. And this covers a lot – basically 150,000 years of human living.

I also say that archaeology is about the history of design. Given the definitions of “design” that I outlined the other day [Link], and particularly the way that design is fundamentally about certain (post)modern(ist) attitudes and trends, it is the case that archaeology covers the history of design. And there is much more.

Since the 1980s archaeology has been allied with that branch of anthropology that calls itself “material culture studies” ([Link] [Link] to a couple of books from University College London) – though I also think this is something of a tautology – all culture is material; we should reconnect the tangible and intangible.

The “Handbook of Material Culture”, a textbook from Sage, does a great job of introducing a range of approaches to things. Most come from the disciplinary field of anthropology; archaeology is not so well-covered; design and design studies are hardly mentioned, likewise art history and science/technology studies.

There is actually no discipline of things. Archaeology, in its long history from antiquarian studies and the early days of experimental natural philosophy, is certainly a candidate for the title. But only in principle – few of my archaeology colleagues would want to cover this ground.

This non-existent discipline or field of study doesn’t even have a name.

I suggest pragmatology – the study of “pragmata” – things, things done.

Acheulean lithic – 1.6 – 0.1 million years b.p.

As for the history and geneaology of things, under this expanded agenda – pragmatogony – where things come from.

Pragmatology and Pragmatogony are the subject of my class this quarter called “An archaeology of design: ten things” – [Link]

The diagnostician – a contemporary archetype – Gregory House MD [Link]

Design thinking is problem oriented and human centered. The aim is to identify needs, often not even recognized and requiring deep research in their definition, then to adaptively, iteratively develop a design solution to address those needs. There is a series of techniques and methods that might be applied at different stages of the design process, but there is no linear, standard or even predictable methodology. The process is pragmatic and opportunistic. A couple of the class have voiced some concern over this, asking when might it be right to use certain techniques, regarding observation of behavior, for example. The IDEO card deck, covering 51 ways of being human centered, may be dealt in any number of ways. There’s an indeterminate art to deciding when to do what.

At a certain point(s) in the design process, again indeterminate, there comes synthetic, holistic insight – the “aha” or “eureka” moment(s), when the research comes together and a solution, not necessarily the right one though, presents itself.

I said – “is this is like medical diagnosis?”. Moving from symptoms of a problem through tests to diagnosis and treatment; and with a fundamental underdetermination of the decision – hunches, rooted in deep experience, are crucial.

House MD deals in the most intractable of cases. Even the tests often fail to give any clear indication of what the problem is. He breaks the rules because, ultimately, there’s no right way to do all this. Then something, usually completely disconnected with the case, triggers a eureka moment of insight and House delivers the diagnosis. He’s supreme at pulling everything together, at synthesis.

My design colleagues say this is too teleological and centered on getting the right answer, whereas the best design might instead open up all sorts of possibilities. My response is to precisely point to the pragmatic character of design, that while human centered research may well reveal the nuances of human tasks and behaviors, in the end a choice has to be made to make something, a diagnosis has to be made and a product delivered. Otherwise there’d be no economic viability.

Charles Peirce subsumed the likes of diagnosis under what he called abductive reasoning. I dealt with abduction in comments on archaeology, art history and connoisseurship in my book about Classical Archaeology – [Link]. The Wikipedia article on abductive reasoning is quite good – [Link].

Of course House is Holmes, based in part on Conan-Doyle’s encounter in Scotland with medic Joseph Bell.

Leslie Witt of IDEO came to talk to us about design and behavior change on January 13. Last week I also posted a comment about Banny Banerjee’s exhortation to use design to change behavior [Link].

Leslie began with a convincing scenario that people today so often want or need to change – in relation to health, finance, the environment, for example. (I have mentioned this orientation in relation to “risk society” – [Link].) This, Leslie described, is a market opportunity. Human centered design can help bridge the gap between desire and action. Give people the tools for changing their lives. Unfit? Use this!

She outlined some very sound opportunities or tactics for inculcating change, rooted in behavioral psychology. “Speak joy not fear” (make change positive); “create crowds” (and so exert peer pressure); “show, don’t tell” (don’t preach); “remove choice” (make change obligatory).

These tactics, or tropes, are a kind of rhetorical field – ways of developing convincing arguments. And isn’t all design an (implicit) argument for the “good life”?

We are at the heart of human centered design – the human component.

Our graphic says “values”. What does this mean?

Bill has outlined for us the key components, the key “human factors” in human-centered design:

(get measuring! – headphones have to fit human ears)

(get counting! – the old nineteenth century project of quantifying the human, gaining statistical control over aggregate features, and now relating to matters such as ergonomics)

(matters such as human-artifact interaction).
Then Bill mentioned all the issues surrounding

We have seen how the likes of Don Norman, cognitive scientist and design commentator, pioneer of human factors in design, has come to emphasize the emotional relationships we have with things.
Design Thinking does offer some fabulous ways of engaging with people and learning about them – wonderfully sensitive, emotionally empathetic, indeed human centered. (Outlined on our web site – [Link])

And I have to ask – is it only about behavior and psychology? I have to argue that very often the real need is to change society and culture; human behavior is so much more than simply what people do.

Here I am into those vast arguments about action and intention, about the structural constraints and contexts for human action in the world.

We may well want to address the stresses of contemporary urban middle class life in the US. This can be treated as a design issue. Design artifacts that will make time management and multitasking less onerous. Our first class project was to do just this – address a specific concern in a class partner’s daily life – food and diet, exercise, family etc. Research, interview, observe and dive deeply into the concern, draw empathy maps, identify point of view, brainstorm solutions, prototype and get feedback, repeat the cycle, evaluate. We came up with some very creative results – even after just a few weeks at this process.

The social scientist in me saw that most concerns were about senses of personal responsibility in a neoliberal world that emphasizes individual choice. They focused on work practices and alienation, career expectations, performance measures arising out of the distribution of competitive advantage in an institution like Stanford. Behavioral change may be able to alleviate the impact of all this on an individual. It could equally strengthen these structures. Design that offers enhanced opportunity and functionality in taking personal responsibility for changing daily experience, for example, may well weaken social ties and support networks that are crucial to individual well-being.

How can design thinking take in this broader scope? I immediately think of the political purpose behind some of the great design movements of the last couple of centuries. William Morris and Arts and Crafts, the modernist optimism and social engineering of Bauhaus.

Politics and philosophy, dreams and utopias, are a key to design thinking.

Society is more than an aggregate of individual behaviors.

Design thinking is a systematic process for generating innovation. Last week we offered a crash course – learning by doing – designing a briefcase – [Link]

Design thinking is a pragmatics, a set of algorithms, tried and tested tactics for observing, listening, engaging with people, interpreting and analyzing their circumstances, then iteratively and adaptively offering interventions in those circumstances so as to effect improvement.

Today we covered IDEO’s card deck – 51 techniques for connecting with people – learn, look, ask, try.