Blog | imz-design

ideating in ink.

September 2nd, 2011
imraan aziz

We used computers when I was in college… for word processing. Drafting was done on vellum, renderings on Canson paper, and getting to buy some new pens at the art store was the height of excitement.

After graduation, my first job was with a technology consulting firm. Just about everyone I worked with was an engineer, many with 20 or 30 years of experience, and everyone was expected to bring something special to the table. Things were old-school by today’s standards; drawing packages were done by hand, checked, and “rapid-prototyping” meant you might only wait a month to get your parts back. In that environment, one of my first vectors of success was in helping people “see” the implications of the decisions they were making. Someone would ask me to draw their idea, and I would give them extra; their idea, and a couple more of my own. Pretty soon people were inviting me to their brainstorms and asking for my ideas up front; There was such a long lag and large investment to produce products that it was critical to aim before the trigger was pulled. That role of “seer” still exists today- the clock just ticks faster…

As the tools of our profession make it easier and faster to create “finished” looking parts and renderings, a lot of engineers and designers skip the sketch/ ideation phase & jump straight to CAD; shortchanging both themselves and their clients on the up-front work which goes into developing well a conceived product. Being able to communicate visually was my first professional opportunity to be heard; working to build your fluency will benefit you every day you practice. A product designer who can’t draw risks being relegated to executing someone else’s vision or becoming entirely irrelevant until all the decisions have been made.

Drawing is a visual expression of your thought process. Efficient, articulate sketching is a great technique to not only generate, but organize, refine, and share ideas quickly, and to explore many directions before investing heavily in detailing a single solution.

In days of yore, industrial designers were the de facto gatekeepers of ideas as we were the ones who could articulate them fastest- to some extent, we had everyone else over a barrel. What I see these days is it’s computer tools which have many designers over a barrel. As tools have lowered the barrier to express ideas, designers need to take a little more responsibility. Today designers need to advocate more, not just present images, but organize and make sense of the idea space for the team- tougher, but a much more valuable skill set in my opinion. What’s interesting is that in either scenario drawing is still fundamental to how others will perceive your grasp of the situation.

Strong rapid sketching skills can help your ideas be heard. help to organize your thoughts, allow you to quickly ideate and communicate, and allow you to clearly and efficiently document concepts. When you get good at it, you’ll be able to draw as you think- which allows you to forget about the act of drawing and focus on articulating what it is you want to say. So what would I hope your takeaway be? Drawing is a developed skill- you’ll get better with repetition, and Practice, practice, practice.

Just like a game of Pictionary, the trick to sketching is not to make the most elaborate drawing you possibly can, but to figure out how to communicate your idea as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is particularly crucial when you’re brainstorming, and afterwards when you’re sifting through the ideas generated. While you’re up at the whiteboard, you should be focused on how to cut to the heart of the kernel of your idea. If it takes you five minutes to explain your concept you’ll loose people’s attention, and if you’re sketching in your notepad trying to work through a concept, that means you’re not participating in the discussion at hand.

What I like about Mind Mapping is that it’s stream of consciousness- probably the closest I get in my day to the doodling I did on my jeans when I was little (used to drive my mom crazy). In not being precious about a sketch early in the process, we get a little extra freedom to wing it; which can often lead us in interesting directions.

At the start of a project we typically immerse ourselves in the context of our user and sift through the results for patterns in behavior, areas of opportunity to improve a user’s situation, and opportunities to streamline their experience. As we begin to develop our understanding, I find myself continuously sketching- words, scribbles, details, whatever it takes to block out an idea.

Much of this background work doesn’t make it into our outward facing work product, but it forms the foundation for everything we do subsequently; the clearer we are in our own heads, and as a team, the better we’re able to provide value to our clients.

Category: industrial design, Method, Process, sketching | 1 Comment

Design for Extreme Environments

January 31st, 2011
imraan aziz

Many of the most interesting products I’ve worked on have resulted from the efforts of dozens or even hundreds of people, each an expert in their field, and each creative in their own way. I’m talking about systems with dozens or hundreds of parts, stringent performance requirements, and severe constraints. Typically the team is inventing the technology in parallel to doing user research and initial design and engineering. On the best projects, everyone has due diligence to do so that as we move through the process the transitions from idea to proof-of-concept to design to product are as seamless as possible.

To get to work on complex system design, you need to tackle complex problems; it helps of the environment in which these products must function is demanding, and of course, if human performance is also limited in some way. No surprise then that designing space hardware is a lot of fun.

One of the first projects I had the opportunity to take a lead role on was developing a Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer for Space Station Freedom (later to be absorbed the International Space Station Program). I was young (and cheap) and ready for a challenge. Industrial Designer wasn’t an officially recognized contractor designation, so I got bumped to Systems Integration Manager. I’m pretty sure nobody above me had a clear idea what my role was to be, but it was one crazy roller-coaster ride.

A mass spectrometer is used to determine the make-up of a chemical sample; most people have seen them used at airports being used to detect explosives. Our task was to develop a pistol-like hand-held device the shuttle crewmembers could use during EVA (Extra-vehicular activity) as they assembled the International Space Station. The goal was to be able to check the integrity of couplings & to detect toxic chemicals which could prove harmful or fatal if brought back into the crew compartments.

ID as Sheepdog. On this project we had chemists, electrical, mechanical and thermal engineers, managers, senior managers, super senior managers, client liaisons… the list goes on and on. Part of every day involved spending time with each development team, understanding where they were at, where their research was leading them, what their requirements were, how that would impact the overall design, and brainstorming workarounds to make sure that nobody painted anyone else into a corner. Meanwhile, I also was responsible for human factors and doing my own exploration into mobility, reach envelopes, NASA standards, and how to create a truly usable system.

A picture is worth a thousand words. The second half of my role involved creating the packaging concept (and use model) for the device itself. As the development progressed, each team had a series of choices to make (often with multiple concepts that were equally acceptable to them). One of my projects was to create a packaging underlay of all the systems, and spend some effort focusing on how they all were coming together to stave of problems down the line.

Pistol vs. Plate. Pretty quickly it became clear the pistol concept wasn’t going to work. Given how crewmembers translate and stabilize themselves in space and how long the device was, the front of a pistol concept would continuously be banging into the surfaces the crewmembers were trying to sample. If there was a leak, the sample inlet of the device would be flooded, making any nuanced measurements impossible. Our solution was to reorient the drift tube 90° and build a flat package which would fit between a crewmember and whatever they were working on. Problem solved, right?

The Grumpy General. Design reviews are a big deal on government projects; anywhere from a few dozen to close to a hundred people could be involved. Everyone from the NASA team, the prime contractor, the sub-contractor, visiting reviewers from sister NASA facilities, principal investigators… you get the idea. So I’m presenting the Plate packaging concept, walking through the components, layout, etc. and this general straight out of a movie starts getting restless. It’s distracting, but I keep going.

Finally he stops me and expresses his displeasure and says, “I was hoping for something a little more Buck Rogers…” Gulp. I walk him through the use mode, why we’ve designed it the way we did, and how this was a logical direction forward. He wasn’t convinced.

The Happy Astronauts. Fast forward a few months and I’m in Houston at Johnson Space Center evaluating form factor models with the team. We’ve got a crewmember in their EVA suit and we’re looking at usability, reach, and interface design preparing for WETF testing. As we wrap up our day, the astronaut says he wants to take me by the crew office so everyone can see what we’re working on. I ended up giving an impromptu demo to four or five crewmembers that happened to be in, and they seem pretty stoked. One of the big guns seems reluctant to return my model to me. Finally, as he’s handing it back to me he says:

“That’s great. It’s about time someone designed this stuff for us!” –Story Musgrave.

Moral of the story: keep open to the possibility that your preconception of the ultimate solution might benefit from some up front research.

Category: Process | Leave a comment

Ethnography?

September 24th, 2010
imraan aziz

To an outside observer, the fruits of our brainstorm sessions can seem like magic. People often wonder where our ideas come from & chalk it up to us having some secret process or capability. The truth is I work with a lot of talented, creative people so to some extent, it is magic. The caveat is that without clarity as to what problem or unmet need is, the chance of coming up with a relevant solution is pretty slim. Particularly when you need to innovate on demand.

This challenge of defining the problem before attempting to solve it also comes up when individual inventors approach us. Often they’ve come up with a solution, and are ardently trying to find a problem or application they can apply their idea to. Sometimes, drawing from their personal experience, they hit the nail right on the head. Sometimes, not so much.

When most people think of product research, visions of focus groups, one-way mirrors and ad men spring to mind. This kind of research is predicated on a user being aware of what’s confounding them, and being able to articulate it.

Enter ethnography (also known as contextual research), which is a methodology developed to try and get beyond a user’s verbally stated preferences and understand what actually motivates their behavior. As I attempted to convey in the cartoon, the interactions, overlaps, and inconsistencies between what a user thinks, feels, does, and says are fertile sources of insight into how to make their experience more satisfying. Think of ethnographers as the Jane Goodalls of the product world; by watching users in their natural habitat and by observing rather than leading the interaction, we can often identify obstacles or barriers in a user’s path, conscious or subconscious workarounds, and areas of opportunity for a breakthrough product.

In contrast to a focus group, we’re not trying to determine simple preferences such as color or button shape, but looking to understand the fundamental needs or desires a successful product will address. To do that, we go deep into a small number of user’s experiences rather than cover a large sample population in a shallow way.

Over the past two decades I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to dozens of user research efforts examining product experiences as diverse as space & military hardware, furniture, children’s toothbrushes, soft goods, personal electronics, surgical tools, medical devices, information systems and all sorts of user interfaces. I’m looking forward to sharing some of those stories here.

Category: Method | Leave a comment