What's the question?

Finally getting the chance to start this personal project in earnest, after several months of being pushed to the wings. I have but 3 weeks to do an independent project from start to finish -- starting with nary an idea of the question but simply a topic.. nay, a category.

The idea of this project is to explore an idea and see what may come of it. The hope is that something shiny and sparkly enough will spring from the nothingness and become one of the large projects that our group subsists on. These shiny sparkly ideas come few and far between -- and the pressure is on for true inspiration and pecuniary viability.

The difficult thing presently is in even defining the question. I'd say for a 3 week project one should have the end goal fairly well in mind, and work tirelessly to find the right answers. But I don't know what the questions are yet, I don't know what metrics I want to measure my success by, I don't know what resolution this unformed patch of the ether needs to evolve into in order to have it lure the buy-in in three short weeks... I don't know a great deal of things. My mind map is a spread of small, isolated thoughts, a lot of maybe this and maybe that and having little clue how one should start and leap frog to the rest. And yet because of time and money, I currently believe a clear and decided plan is essential.

I have identified a few clear must-haves and constraints to the system -- I know who I want to at least reach as potential customers, who I at least want to rope in as collaborators, what I want tested, some ideas I must prototype, but how all these come together is a blur. My biggest difficulty now is actually both using this time period to optimize for Science and for Marketing -- deep enough for the research question and broad enough for scoping opportunities for buy in. For one, I think they engage entirely different parts of my brain, one analytical one lateral. Then there is yet the administrative side of it, what forms to write up, what procedures to put in place, what requests to get going in order to achieve objectives I have yet to even craft.

In short, this is a blur. I wrote down several possible directions under a few headings, that try to give a vaguely MECE breakdown of the tasks ahead, but I am clueless as to how to sort the importance of each item and down what road I should travel for a breakthrough. I have an "idea book" that I'm just going to scribble in until something comes out of it. Action/Perception cycles.. maybe I can perceive from my arrant ramblings?

More than one

I've been starting to realize recently just how impossible design thinking is to do on one's own. I remember the night-long debates in front of white boards at Stanford, the engaging, exciting, enlightening repartee. And now I find the dismay of sending ideas into the ether and having nothing come back.

Unrelated to my primary design initiative, I have been trying to solve some issues for an upcoming experiment. Having had a few nagging problems which I haven't had the inspiration or sheer willpower to solve for some time now, I invited a colleague to share my burden, and at least mitigate stress by sharing it.

As it turned out, we ended up flying through the issues that had been bumming me out. As I should have known, bringing someone with a fresh, unburdened perspective shed much new light on a problem which I really thought I had extensively explored already. I'm internalizing more and more every day that design has to be a conversation, because my design soliloquy -- my own opinions just circling each other round and round -- are getting me absolutely no where on my independent project. Maybe there's a way I can dutifully role play different sides of a conversation, but I think not.

One other thing I wonder, and I wonder if it is at all a thought worth wondering, is whether the partnership today made the problem solving more physical. When together, we passed things back and forth, pulled, tugged and played with our material (a couple of data logging receivers), and the problem took on a much more physical significance than when I simply roll it around in my hands myself. Though our different perspectives was the meat of what made it a good brainstorming session, perhaps the co-animation of the materials concerned gave us both a better perspective.

Anyhow, seeing the fruits of collaboration, I am still hesitant to engage it. Everyone at work has their myriad of responsibilities which I don't really want to pull them out of to partake in a bit of brainstorming, which, while productive, takes time. And time isn't a luxury, because there are a great deal of things that just need straightforward, but time consuming, plug and chug work.

I wonder what a Brainstorm-Lite looks like.

Space

So the project I'm currently working on is sort of an independent one. I've some time and money I can spread out over a few months, but I'm also swamped right now with another project and so time available for this independent one sort of wafts in and out. I do it on the bus ride to work.. random snippets of time during work.. sometimes at night, but I mostly fall asleep during the process.

I'm an engineer/researcher and what we do is start projects that either us or our clients suggest. We start on the very conceptual research end, and step by step, funding stage by funding stage, edge it from nothingness into a fully employed product. The independent venture I'm doing now was an arrant request from the client, and I'm seeing if I can turn it into something more -- that elusive Need. If all goes well at the end of this time period, the clients, my peers, my bosses, will smile down upon the work I have done and give it its blessings to grow wings and birth a real project.

Anyway, this is my space (and I begin with space because I know it to be fundamental): I have an open notebook which is going to be my whiteboard and I have these large mirrors in my room I plan to stick post its on once I buy my quintessential post-its. I'll buy them as soon as I decide what color will match my room nicely. I'm thinking about getting a big white board to do my proper doodlings. At work my space is pretty generic, I've a cubicle where not much goes on beyond the computer, but I have carved out the occasional space and adorned it with the occasional A3 paper to do some occasional abstract thinking. We have a lab that most no one uses, so I'm thinking of privately conquering it as my d-think space and flooding it with post-its, scrap wood, foam, tape and glue.

Hello There

A picture of a road to somewhere. Sufficiently appropriate!

Hi, and welcome. I begin this blog with inexperience.

Recently, I left the comfortable and very sunny oasis of college and started work, and despite the routine hours and lack of my midday tv, I'm having a very engaging time of it. Anyway. In grad school I picked up some amazing lessons about design thinking, and coming back, I've picked up Change by Design by Tim Brown to start reading about them all over again, and this is what has inspired me to create this blog.

Thus armed with my meager thoughts on the subject, I'm trying to see what d-think can do in the work I've begun. This isn't quite a napkin, but I hope it'll lend some useful thoughts on what it's like using d-think in an un-d-thunk place, and other arrant musings.