Design Thinking workshop with Justin Ferrell of Stanford d. School at The Irish Times

I would like just to thank firstly the Irish Times and specifically Johnny for helping us organize this event in the Irish and we are very delighted to have Justin here and thank you very much Justin for coming here and with us today um so I guess I'll just before passing on to jny I just would like to announce two things as the next event we are we would like to organize a hackathon h it would be most probably late February or sometime in March so if any of you have ideas specific ideas for the hackathon

or if any of you have data sources which you would like to share with us for the hackathon or if any of you have developed interesting apis or software tools which you would like to be used or to share with us for for the hackathon please uh let me know it's great to have everyone here in the building we're going to be opening the building up more and more of over time we're only really getting to groups of how to do this anyone who's paid any attention to what's going on in the Irish times in

the last few years would probably be increasingly frustrated that we're not doing more things faster so thank you for coming here so you can help make that happen we've a mix we've some of our own Newsroom people and creatures people here today and maybe we' made a mistake because we've scared away the other media people in the city so hosting in the AR may or may not be a good idea in future um let me just say a big thank you to the US Embassy because it was the US Embassy that covered Justin's flights and

his his travel uh and we've been talking for quite a few months about you coming over really really Keen to see what you have to say tonight but you know we wouldn't have been able to pay for it without the US emby so a big thank you to them and without further Ado H Justin please thank you so much all right all right thank you so thanks for having me so my name is Justin frell and I am here from uh California I teach at Stanford University at the dchool which is that's what we call

it it's the design Institute at Stanford has anybody ever heard of the D school at all oh okay some of you okay cool so the D school was founded by uh David Kelly who is the founder of idio has anybody heard of Ido it's a design consultancy firm Okay cool so we teach human Center design at the D school and what I thought I'd do tonight instead of me talking a lot is actually give you a crash course in design thinking that's what we call this human centered design process are you guys up for that

you have some energy okay good so everyone's going to need uh something to write with and and and something to write on um and preferably like multiple sheets of paper if you don't have paper we can pass some out um you're also going to need to sit at a table with an even number of people because this is a paired activity so you'll be pairing with one other person so I'm much more hacker than Hack i i before I joined the D School a couple years ago I used to work at the Washington Post I

was was there for uh s years I was a digital design director when I left so um I was not a programmer but I hired programmers into the post Newsroom uh and really brought in programmer journalists to work with the design team and graphic artists and and writers and others um which was is was a huge thing um the post is doing a lot of really interesting uh digital storytelling now because there are programmers in The Newsroom and having programmers and journalists work together is hugely important and in fact hacked hackers was was founded by

a friend of mine in California who started it in San Francisco and to see it move around the world as a as a local movement is really cool so it's really awesome to be here and uh maybe afterwards if anybody's interested in uh The Washington Post or stuff that we did there then feel free to come up and talk to me about that um the first question I have for you guys basically is uh how many of you think of yourselves as creative raise your hand okay pretty good okay I want to give you I'm

going to give you 45 seconds now to draw a portrait of your neighbor okay 45 seconds ready [Music] go now I want you to share the portrait that you drew with the person you drew what yeah how did that feel how did that feel pressured pressured okay good yeah I didn't give you very much time what else how did what's that bad bad why did it feel bad because I can't even remotely draw cuz you can't draw right so you felt bad about okay what else how else did it feel felt fun helpful fun fun

oh cool yeah creative okay good so the reason why I wanted to do that exercise is because um research shows that it usually if you ask that question of do you feel creative or not in a room full of adults only about half of the adults will raise their hands and the reason why a lot of adults don't feel creative is because when you're 8 N9 10 years old somebody told them they couldn't draw right or some other artistic thing that you opted out of when you were a kid because you didn't feel like you

were any good at it and we tend to equate creative ability with artistic ability but that's not what we think of as creative ability at the dchool so yes artistic ability is important but what we we are really teaching is the ability to show unfinished work right and the ability to participate in something that you might not be good at right so that's what we we think about when we talk about creative confidence the ability to take on problems that don't have a clear answer right and that sort of framework and posture is really important

to coming up with innovative ideas because innovative ideas by their nature are things that are not yet defined right so your your willingness to take on new things whether you can draw or not is much more important than your ability to draw so the experience of being at the dchool as a student is you might be a u a computer science Master student and you could be on a team with uh a MBA student and somebody from the medical school and somebody from the school of education and within your different expertise you're finding out you're

sharing your expertise with people who are very different than you and you're finding the innovative ideas and the space between your expertise so it's all about how you collaborate with people who are good at things that you're not good at and how do you share what you're good at without trying to you know Bigfoot the process without traditional hierarchical leadership okay so uh very much about in the similar way of how you would bring journalists and programmers together we're not focused on outcomes we're not focused on the Innovations we're focused on unlocking the potential with

each innovator right because if we can bring out that aspect in you then you can create things that are going to be great right and you don't have to be in the D school at Stanford in order to do that so we believe that everyone has creativity inside of them and it's about bringing it out so this is we call this creative confidence and how confident you are with you know approaching problems as opportunities and uh leading teams toward unimagined outcomes and trying new things and failing to learn and things like that that's a very

important aspect of of creation of of new ideas the other thing that uh we always do is we always work on real projects so this is our executive director he's standing on a train platform and he's giving these Executives uh uh a lesson about empathy and how you how you interview people for empathy right before they get on the train and interview strangers about their commuting experience so we do things like that a lot we go out into the world and we talk to real people in order to uncover what their needs are um everything

we do is Hands-On it's all experiential learning so we think that you know it's one thing to stand up in front of people and talk to them about stuff but the best way that you're going to learn is by doing it so you guys are going to experience that in just a second um Innovation is not an event right the it's not the the sort of per you know area of one genius sitting in a dark room coming up with the Eureka sort of moment we think that Innovation is a process and it's a human-

centered one and that if you work the process then you'll you you'll be able to come up with the ideas um this is the process that we're going to run through really quickly and we're going to get started in just a second and this will probably be the longest time in a row that you'll hear me talk but I'll talk about the process as we go through it step by step okay how are you guys feeling good are you ready okay all right so you need some paper one other thing about this process is it's

not just about creativity it's also about abductive reasoning and analytical thinking right and most of the people that we encounter are really sharp analytical thinkers because that's what you've been trained to do your whole lives so in school it's all about finding surveying the landscape and zooming in to the one right answer but we also believe that people are really good at creative thinking it's just a a task that hasn't been asked a lot and so it's about unlocking that potential So within this process as you go through it there are times when you will

be focusing and really analyzing and coming up with what you think is the way to go and there are times when you will be flaring which is really generating ideas and zooming way out the key about this is separating the two so a lot of people will try to do both at the same time and that doesn't work very well so we very purposefully separate so for example like in brainstorming if you've ever been in a brainstorming meeting where people are throwing out ideas and selecting them at the same time right or one person says

I'm not so sure about this and nine people say they like it but that one person that kills it right it's gone so in brainstorming we separate that out right there's the first rule of brainstorming is to defer all judgment so there is no selection during that part because you're just doing creative thinking so you'll experience that in just a second okay let's do some very quick sketching as we get warmed up here okay so again I'm not going to ask you to draw your neighbors this time but uh take about 10 seconds or so

and I'm going to flash a word up on the screen and I want you to draw a little sketch of it okay okay baby okay good all right door house okay last one you ready Innovation how many of you when you drew a baby you put like one little curly C hair coming out of the baby's head anybody do that okay all right cool how many have ever seen a baby that has one little curly cucumber oh my sister oh okay all right there you go okay but that's not the the point is that we

have this visual Shand right that people understand and it's easy to sketch very simply you know things that that are common and are you know if you draw a baby you might draw one single hair coming on the head whether that exists or not how many of you like Drew like a light bulb or some kind of light for Innovation anybody okay good all right so this little drawing exercise no matter whether you think you can draw or not this is the highest level of fidelity that you need to be able to sketch out your

ideas right because it's not about how great the drawing is it's about how you communicate it to someone else so when we're doing this activity and I ask you to sketch an idea instead of writing it out in a paragraph form this is as good as you need to be okay so all of you are good enough at drawing to be able to draw to communicate your ideas all right all right let's get started so for this you're going to need some paper and um what we're going to do is decide who in your group

is partner a and who is partner B so everybody needs to have a partner go ahead and decide who's a and who's B the first thing I want you to do is by yourself I want you to design a better wallet the ideal wallet okay so take a minute to design the ideal wallet actually take 4 minutes and I'll let you know when that time is up you're going to do this by yourself though okay okay everybody stop how many of you in the course of your work somebody gives you a problem and you're like

okay I have to fix that I'm going to go right to the solution does that happen design a better wallet you got to go about it and do it right you got to do it right away okay so that's a little bit of a false start that we just did right this is the way that that we often work somebody gives you a problem you have to come up with a solution you don't have time to talk to anybody else so you just Dive Right In and you do it right so now you're going to

experience a longer process of what it's going to be like to design for someone else so the first step in this process is empathy what do I mean by empathy what does empathy mean is that put yourself in somebody El's Sho yeah exactly put yourself in somebody else's shoes perfect yeah empathy so looks like this it's when you can feel what another person is feeling when you can mirror their expression their opinions and their hopes right putting yourself in their shoes Okay so some of the aspects to practice empathy are um without judgment right by

being a beginner by being curious about somebody else by uh being optimistic and Always by being respectful if somebody else is sharing uh their practice or what they do right you you're not there to judge them you're just there to to learn and and hear what they have to say okay so what we're going to do now is now I want you to design something useful and meaningful for your for your partner first by gaining empathy with them so we're going to start thinking about how designing a wallet for your partner so in just a

second I want partner a to interview partner B right about their wallet so to do this you'll probably need to bring out your wallet and walk the other person through what you carry in your wallet why you carry it okay and for the person doing the interviewing this is not like journalism interviewing right you're not interviewing toward a particular Point you're not writing a story about it I want you to try to elicit as many stories as you can okay based off of what they carry in their wallet does that make sense okay partner a

interview partner B make sure you take notes I'll let you know when it's time to switch roles okay okay you guys hearing some pretty good stories are you learning something about each other no no good stories yeah okay good all right I'm going to give you a chance to do a second round now because usually what happens in a first interview like that is you get a lot of information right you get like what they carry in their wallet and you know where maybe where they got their wallet and and you know some some other

bits like that right and so that's all sort of the explicit reasons why they have their wallet right now I want you to get at some of the emotions underneath it I want you to find out the implicit reasons of why they carry what in their wallet and the best way to do this is to be like a child and to ask why right so if somebody says oh I only carry cash in my wallet why why do you only carry cash well I don't really trust credit cards why don't you trust credit cards well

because when I was a kid my parents said that credit cards were evil and blah blah blah why did your parents say that you know what I mean and the the the thing is if you ask why five times usually someone will end up in tears you know cuz it'll be like because my parents didn't love me the way wanted or whatever right I don't necessarily want to see that happen um but I do want you to get to some of the reasons underneath okay so I'm going to give you a little bit of time

to dig deeper I'm going to give you three minutes this time so I'd like switch back again you have three minutes and ask why and try to get to some of the emotions underneath what they carry okay three minutes so you heard some interesting stories good you ready for the next step all right the next step is called Define so so you know how I showed you that focus and flare part right so what you were just doing is you're gathering information so you're coming out like this right and in defined stage you're going to

be focusing so what do you do with that information so um to talk about that a little bit take a look at this picture okay can you see you guys see that okay all right what does this little girl need information information what else what was it what did you say metal adult an adult yeah maybe she needs adult supervision okay what else lower shelves lower shelves all right socks a ladder okay good all right what else information yeah figure time to figure it out for herself okay so now I want you to think about

a little different way and I just realized that this is cut off but in my picture I can see this is definitely an Irish girl cuz there's a bottle of J Jon's right up here okay um I want you to think about um needs as verbs instead of nouns okay so nouns are more solutions what does she need she needs a latter she needs a book she needs an adult right but needs if you think of needs as being verbs that can be a lot more generative right so instead of a latter if you think

of she needs to reach right then the solution for that could be a ladder it could be a pogo stick could be a bionic arm right so needs if you focus in just on the need and hold off on the solution right then the needs will generate ideas for solutions that you wouldn't come to otherwise does that make sense so if you guys ever heard you know the Henry Ford quote he said if I ask people what they wanted they would have set a faster horse right and then and Steve Jobs used to use that

to talk about why he doesn't do focus group testing okay this isn't about focus group testing but it is about finding out what the needs are so if if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted and they said to go faster then the automobile is one such solution to go faster right it could have been a rocket ship it could have been something else so what you're trying to do now is you're trying to identify the needs that your user has based off the interviews that you just did so needs are human physical and

emotional Necessities they capture the goals and the motivations for whom you're designing right a need to carry no wallet at all right that's one of the needs okay um their verbs not noun so they're opportunities not Solutions the other thing I want you to think about and this is a little trickier given that you've only just met this person but I want you to think about insights so if needs are a verb then the Insight sorry is the why response to the need so maybe if you spent time with that little girl at her house

you would realize that you know her parents are having a dinner party and it has nothing to do with a book at all she's perched precariously on that bookshelf because she needs their attention right because they're not paying any attention to her or something like that that would be an Insight that you might be able to uncover if you did got really deep into your empathy work if you were doing observation and immersion like in the moment so what I want you to do is think about um what are some of the insights based off

the needs that you might have uncovered from these interviews all right and this is a solo part of the exercise so you're doing this on your own based off the interviews that you just did I want you to jot down in this model right here so describe your partner a little bit what are the things that they're trying to do right which we can categorize as needs and try to use verbs if you can and ways they want to feel and those are your insights so what are they trying to do and ways that they

want to feel based off the stories that you heard in the interviews that that you made okay so you have three minutes to jot down some of those in each category okay okay so a lot of people when they design uh a new product or a service you think about a certain segment of the market right and you try to design for the middle in some way so you can reach a lot of people right at the D school we actually teach a focus on individuals and to not design for the middle the reason why

is because a lot of times if you try try to design for the the most people possible you try to you try to design for the middle you end up making a lot of concessions along the way and you design something that has a lot of features in it because you want it to appeal to a lot of people and it ends up appealing actually to no one okay so we tell people to focus on individuals when you're designing who knows what this is what's that yeah it's a peeler right this is actually this is

an Oxo good grips potato peeler or carrot peeler or whatever does anybody know the story of how Oxo came up with this Innovation and kitchen utensils okay so the CEO of Oxo his wife had really bad arth Artis and you guys remember when peelers were all metal right I still have one of these these the metal ones and they're really small and they look like they were from like the 1920s or something do you remember those and his wife couldn't hold on to it because it was too smart small right and it was too hard

to hold because she had arthritis and so he had the company come up with this one with this big cushy handle right and it turns out that whether you have arthritis or not everybody would prefer a big cushy handle and oxog good grips are all over the place now with all kinds of their on all kinds of kitchen utensils right all the utensils have this kind of grip so by focusing on an extreme user somebody who had an extreme need in the in the space her needs and the insights around those needs were really Amplified

because she had arthritis and so ideally when you're working on a new product or service you should figure out who are the extreme users in your space you know people who are hardcore users of your product already or you know they you know people who are using that type of thing all the time or people who never do sometimes people forget that extreme users can also be people who never use your product right and if you uncover those needs sometimes they can be Amplified okay so what you're going to do now is you're going to

focus on the individual that you've been talking to you've come up with some needs and some insights and I want you to craft what we call a point of view statement this is your point of view about your user this becomes sort of the driving force of the thing that you're going to design later on okay so the components of a point of view there's a description of your user there's a need that you've uncovered and there's an Insight that goes with that need okay so here's an example of a point of view from a

class we taught at the D school that was around um health and student lunches right and here's their first crack of it teenager needs to eat healthy food because certain nutrients are necessary for physical and cognitive health and development what do you guys think of that point of view teenager needs to eat healthy food because healthy food is important blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah doesn't sound like it comes from the teenager yeah it doesn't sound like it comes from the teenager that's right you know some teenagers huh yeah that doesn't come from

the teenager that's like a projected need does it sound like you could have come up with that need whether you talk to somebody or not sounds like sounds like not person yeah it's not personal what else no emotion there's no emotion there yeah there's no real tension what else what about teenager are they all the same I don't think they cons they're not concerned with healthy foods yeah yeah so what are they concerned with right you really need to get it out of them but what about the what about describing the user as just a

teenager spe you know it's too broad right it's too General yes exactly right and um okay and we sort of covered this so here are the here are the components of a of a very strong point of view statement okay so they went back and they took a another cck crack edit sorry jet leg and the user said so the user they came up with with was not a teenager just a teenager but a nth grade girl at a new school okay there's a little something there you're 14 years old you're a girl and you're

at a new school it's a little bit of a tough environment right she needs to feel socially accepted while eating healthy food so like you said so that's a deep need that's her need not a projected need that's something that came from interviewing this girl and and seeing her in her school environment and why does she need that because in her crew a social risk is more dangerous than a health risk so this is a a surprising finding that's rooted in your empathy work so now let's see what that problem that point of view statement

looks like ninth grade girl at a new school needs to feel socially accepted while eating healthy food because in her crew a social risk is more dangerous than a health risk does that sound like something you could start to think of ways to help her things that you could design for it has a lot more tension and Intrigue in it than teenager needs to eat healthy food in order to be healthy right so this is what you're shooting for in your point of view you want to have a specific user you want to have a

deep need and you want to have some surprise and finding so what I'd like you to do now is look at your list of needs and insights that you came up with describe your user and create this sort of Mad Lib Fillin the blank sentence who is your user what do they need and what's the best Insight what's the most interesting one that you came up with so you're only choosing one here and you can't mix and match you can't just choose a cool need and a cool Insight they don't have anything to do with

each other they have to be at ated okay and I want you to write a problem statement sorry we call it problem statement or point of view statement a point of view statement about your user The Next Step we're going to do is id8 that's just a Silicon Valley jargon way to say brainstorming basically there's more than one way to ideate but we primarily we're going to brainstorm brainstorming is a high energy activity you got to have the blood flowing okay and you're about to do some brainstorming and I've never liked this about this particular

activity because we never brainstorm alone but you're going to be brainstorming alone which is weird Okay but you got to have a lot of energy so you remember we talked about focusing and flaring so this is the brainstorming part right here it's like the height of your flare okay um this is a two-time Nobel prize winning chemist line is Pauline the only individual to win the Nobel Prize twice he said the best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas right the more ideas you get the more possibility you're going

to come up with something good okay so these are the rules that we teach around brain me I told you before the first rule I can't believe I'm so out of breath I need to exercise the first rule is to defer judgment okay and this is particularly hard for yourself because you're the only one doing it so don't sit there and think oh I got to come up with the with a great idea you know some people will be like ah the first idea has got to be good you know and they just can't get

started when we start this I want you to just write the first idea that pops in your head try to open the spigot right and then things will start to come out so don't judge your ideas the second one is go for as many ideas as you can I want you to be visual if you can remember you guys can all draw babies and doors and houses so you can draw the ideas that pop into your head too and I want you to get as wild ideas as you can okay you don't even have to

think about whether they're feasible or you know how much it would cost to come up with this thing so your brainstorming just to be clear your brainstorming ideas around your problem statement okay so in the problem statement of the girl with the food right it's you know she she's uh social risk is more dangerous than a health risk so how might you help her make you know eating healthy food cool right how might we serve healthy food that's has a cool bent how might we redesign the cafeteria so that the healthy choices are more evident

right I want you to come up with as interesting ideas as you can to meet the needs in this problem statement okay and I'm going to give you just a couple of minutes to do it you should just write down or sketch whatever pops into your head and come up with you know as many ideas as possible and really encourage wild ideas okay now comes the fun part you get to share your ideas with each other right and the beauty of this is that you're not looking to try and say hey I came up with

the perfect idea for you don't you love this idea I got you down man I listened to what you said and I came up with a perfect that's not what you're trying to do here what you're trying to do is get feedback you're trying to get them to tell you you know what they think of the idea and how might they do it differently and you know do you have it you know do they think it's right or not right so this is gold for you right this is the thing that's going to push you

closer to coming up with a design Solution that's useful to your user okay so I want partner a to share their ideas with partner B you can share your point of view statement too remember to go easy on each other don't argue about the point of view statement did you get some good feedback how about did you hear some good ideas okay all right cool so the next thing I want you to do is just take a minute to think about choose the the idea that seemed to have the most traction or that's your favorite

okay and think about it as if it were a product or a service If This Were a company you were going to manufacture these things whatever they are these headbands that project Holograms or whatever it is right what would that product look like or if it's a service what does the service look like is it an app that helps connect people with different things or or what is it so take just a minute to think about of your favorite ideas adding the the thoughts that you got back from your user what would it look like

as a product or a service okay so one of the things we talk about at the dchool is we one of the the the sort of mindsets we teach is this bias toward action so instead of sitting around and talking about something or maybe arguing with colleagues in another team about the right direction to go make a rough prototype it and test it in the field and then you have some feedback from a real customer right so stop talking about it get it out of your head and into the real world so that's what you

guys are going to do in just a second I've pulled out Johnny and I have have grabbed all these prototyping materials there's some really nice stuff up here we got some rubber bands and we got some tape and we got some cups and we got some paper and in just a second I want you to create a prototype of your idea okay a fa simile a representation of your idea okay but very quickly two things about prototyping so one thing if you spend any time out in the valley or other places to when they talk

about rapid prototyping you want to fail early right in order to learn when it doesn't cost you very much so in the case my case at the Washington Post we would design the iPad app for the Washington Post say and we wouldn't know until it went into the Apple Store whether people really liked it or not well at that point to make changes we got to go back and recode things and Objective C and it's really expensive right but if you start out designing an iPad app by drawing The Experience on pieces of paper and

I take it to you and I say when press this button here and here's the next screen press this button here's the next screen right then the changes aren't going to cost me very much cuz I just drew them on a piece of paper not only that but like how many of you have ever made something and you spent a lot of time on it and then you went to ask somebody if they liked it or not and you didn't really want to tell you didn't want them to give you honest feedback you just want

them to say I love it right so the other thing with rough prototyping is it makes it really easy to get feedback because I didn't put a lot of time into this I'm just testing an initial idea well this little chart here shows sort of you know this is the project timeline against launch and against cost right so if you test it over here you're learning early on when it doesn't cost you very much if you wait up here it's going to cost you a lot the other thing about prototyping is then you want to

test often so you start out with paper and you test that and you get some feedback and then you go back and you make a little bit higher resolution prototype maybe you get an artist to draw it or something then you test that again then you go back and then maybe you start coding something you test it again and each time your resolution gets higher and higher and you do so much testing right that by the time you actually launch it into the real world you've mitigated your risk because you've done all this testing you've

learned as you went along you've gotten a higher and higher rest okay you're only going to do one prototype here today but those are the two main things that I want to leave you with about prototyping fail early and test often okay so now you have eight minutes eight minutes to make a real prototype using these types of materials or you can use whatever you have that you can then test with your user after eight minutes okay 8 minutes design your product or service okay this is the testing phase the main thing about testing I

don't know what I did with my remote oh thanks this is the thing to remember about testing you don't want to be like this guy okay you're not a used car salesman you're not trying to say have I got a thing for you this is exactly what you need right testing is just another chance for you to get more feedback so you could create a higher res prototype that suits your user needs a little better okay so go ahead and share we're not going to do multiple Cycles this is the last step but go ahead

and share your prototype with your neighbor and explain to them why you made it for them okay has everyone gotten a chance to share their prototype who would share something that somebody made for you any volunteers right here okay cool awesome so yeah my big problem is that I really don't like having to carry a wallet at all I it kind of hate it so um the design that was made for me the Prototype that's been made for me is more a a cover for my phone which also functions as a wallet so that sounds

like something that you might use yeah actually it's a nice idea all right cool all right and what was the story that he told you that sort of got you to that kind of design um pretty much he just doesn't like wallets he does carry wallet in his pocket he carries it in his bag he doesn't want one you know what I mean you know in an IDE world could be no wallet there be your phone you pay with your phone you do whatever like but so I guess it's it's pretty much the idea that

he doesn't want a w you he actually doesn't want this product you but basically I I just wanted to expose you to these methods and also you know help you realize that as you're all a new community and you're just meeting each other like it's very easy to get to know each other and to and to just engage and try to create something together all of you tonight made something for someone else which I think is really cool and all of you receive something that someone you didn't know probably made for you right so certainly

you can figure out how to work together and combine your skills to come up with things that you do really care about not new wallets right so um thank you very much for uh participating and uh going to back over to you guys