Hooray for the Olivator!
The Olivator
I recently received a terrific little gift. It is the perfect thing for the person who has everything, or for somebody who likes to play with her food. This product is a good example of the added value that you can achieve with excellent design. The Style dimension of this product really sells it! Read more
Metrics for Design Creativity
Metrics are important to any company. When used appropriately, business metrics enable organizations to take account of where they are and to plan strategically for the future. Nowadays companies are also looking for design metrics, ways of measuring the contribution of the design of new products to their bottom line.
I recently read Deborah Mrazek’s essay in the March 2010 edition of the DMI News & Views. As Design Practice Manager, Corporate Marketing, HP, Ms. Mrazek is well aware of the need for appropriate metrics for communicating design effectiveness. In her essay, she summarizes a paper written by John R. Hauser and Gerald M. Katz in 1998 that still holds good advice.
I found both this review and the earlier paper useful and interesting. My own experience with design metrics leads me to stress some similar points.
It is important that metrics be used strategically — that the metrics reflect the strategy and values of the organization. If they do, the metrics will help the company move forward profitably. But because the metrics selected will affect actions and decisions, it is very important to look carefully at what is proposed to be measured, and at how that measurement affects the strategic direction of the organization.
Hauser and Katz stated that “The firm becomes what it measures.” Because of the focus on the metric, managers and others begin to pay more attention to the thing being measured, and that aspect will become maximized. Since the quality measured becomes important through the focused attention it received, selecting relevant and effective metrics is critical.
Again, this bears a circular relationship with an organization’s strategic position and goals. The metrics must both reflect the strategic path of the organization, and point the way to actualizing the strategy. If the metric can help move the company along that path, it is an effective metric; if it does not, or becomes a goal in itself, if fails.
In selecting metrics for judging design effectiveness look for qualities that can be measured today, but that may also help to predict future outcomes. There is a temptation to pick as a measure what is easy to measure, but that choice might not be a relevant marker of success in the product. Also, look for metrics that are within the control of those whose performance is being measured by it.
This is especially important with designers and engineers, the impact of whose contribution to the bottom line may be clearly manifest only months or years farther down the line. Because of this, it is important to measure what matters to the customer. There are often different kinds and levels of customers, from end users, to distributors and vendors, to stakeholders within the company. It is also necessary to understand the needs of the product manager, and the design team members, in addition to the needs of upper level management.
Hauser and Katz also pointed out the problem of focusing on one easily measurable characteristic, out of proportion to its importance to the customer. For example, focusing intently on metrics for high standards for durability, engineers and designers can be discouraged from attending to other aspects of the design that might be more important to the consumer. I suggest looking at a broader range of criteria based on varied dimensions of product creativity.
Hauser and Katz recommend looking for new ideas outside the organization as well as inside. A “not-invented-here” culture emerges from only rewarding ideas conceived internally, rather than from profitably adapting and applying ideas from inside and outside the organization. This can limit the creative capacity of a design team.
In selecting metrics, precise measures seem intuitively to be desirable, but this can be difficult when measuring aesthetic qualities. Don’t get too caught up in maximizing the precision of the metric. A metric is important in measuring movement and direction, and too much focus on the specific number yielded by the metric can deflect focus from the direction. When measuring illusive qualities like aesthetics and taste, scientists need not be reluctant to use what may appear to be subjective measures. If these metrics help move the organization along its strategic path, they are useful and valuable.
Finally, choose metrics that don’t take so much time and money to implement that they cost more to use than they yield in productivity. Remember that the metric is to be a tool or guidepost along the way, not an end in itself.
The Inventor of Air
Johnson, Steven (2008). The Invention of Air: The Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York, Riverhead Books, 254 p.
Last summer I posted an article here about the personal characteristics of inventors. It was called “Look in the Mirror. Do You see an Inventor?” I got to thinking again about that piece because I’ve just finished reading The Invention of Air. This is terrific book for any inventor about Joseph Priestley. It is not a “how to” book, but rather, a biography of someone whose name you might not remember, but should. I got to wondering how Priestley would stack up using the list of characteristics in the earlier article. I’ll “rate” him on those attributes after I tell you just a bit about him.
Joseph Priestley was a philosopher, a scientist, a Unitarian minister, an inventor, a prolific writer, an educator and someone who put his two cents in on every political issue that came his way. He was also a stirring public speaker. A little too stirring; given the fact that his speeches stirred a conservative mob to burn down his home and his church. Does this sound like a contemporary rebel? It does seem to me that Priestley shows a rather modern character. But he lived from 1733 until 1804!
If you think that a man of that era would have nothing to say to us today, think again. Not only was he friends with Adams, Franklin and Jefferson, he also had been a leading light in the coffee house culture of London before his fortunate quick exit to what would soon become the United States. A flaming liberal, his fiery sermons made many English people of the era question his religious, as well as his political views.
But since the subject here is creativity and invention, not politics and religion, I’ll tell you more about Priestley as an inventor and as a creative person. (By the way, he invented fizzy soda water. I bet that you thought that the inventor of soda water was Schweppes, but, in fact, Jacob Schweppe patented the process for making and bottling the stuff and became rich by improving on and commercializing Priestley’s idea.)
In the original piece there were nine characteristics noted. I’ll designate matches with those characteristics by boldfacing each attribute. Inventors are Problem-Solvers, Motivated, Creative, Curious, Optimistic, Self-confident, Resourceful, Hard-working, and are sometimes considered Eccentric.
If you know anything at all about this man, you may remember from high school chemistry that Priestley is often credited with discovering oxygen, which he called “dephlogisticated “ air, based on an erroneous understanding of the properties of the gas. Actually, he was one of several people who had been experimenting with the gases that allow human life to be sustained on earth. Lavoisier was also working on this problem, and actually named oxygen. And another early experimenter, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, actually predated Priestley’s discovery when he isolated the gas, but he hadn’t published any reports of his findings. This little incident tells much about Priestley, and illustrates several characteristics of inventors that I wrote about over the summer.
First and foremost, Priestley was creative. He read widely, thought deeply, and was interested in everything. He lived in an era when science was the big new idea and when amateurs were able to make contributions to the growing knowledge. We’ve seen many instances where the non-expert eye can see new possibilities better than the established authorities.
Empiricism captured his attention and he uninhibitedly set about to learn more about everything in the natural world. The world was his laboratory and his diverse interests also brought him to question the accepted truths of, not only science, but also religion and political theory. He was open minded and forward thinking, causing some conservative and traditional people to scorn his point of view.
He was also a problem solver, and like Levy in the earlier piece, could be said to be “looking for trouble.” He was not only a problem solver but a “finder” of problems. He tried to find out why a mint plant lived or died in a certain environment, and why a mouse in the same environment perished or thrived. He had to invent the apparatus to do the experiments that he concocted, and built his lab equipment from things he found around his home – especially the kitchen and the laundry room. He was resourceful.
Priestley was a hugely curious fellow. He was somewhat childlike in his curiosity about nature and the world around him. When he was a child, Johnson relates, Priestley pulled the legs off spiders, and as an adult he asphyxiated mice. But these operations were not sadistic torments. They were real experiments in the era that was beginning to differentiate science as a separate endeavor from philosophy.
His huge output of writing is just one example of his self confidence. He marched to his own drum and never gave up the beat. He held fast to his conviction about not only political matters, but also, unfortunately, to his theories about phlogiston. Because he was curious, he was also highly motivated. Dare we say driven? He was like a dog on a bone when it came to his experiments, his opinions, and proving his theories.
Over one interval of eight years (from 1772 and 1780) Priestley isolated ten different gases: nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, nitrous oxide, hydrogen chloride, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, silicon tetra fluoride, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon monoxide. He also invented the apparatus to create his experiments, and wrote and published to disseminate his findings. If this isn’t evidence of motivation, consider it evidence of hard work.
Priestley was considered a bit eccentric, but eccentricity is in the eye of the beholder. Because his interests were so diverse, he had opinions about everything. And because he questioned authority he attracted both positive and negative attention. He loved to talk about his experiences and swap information about his experiments with members of his social clubs, first in London, and later in Birmingham. This may be seen to be at odds with the secrecy of many inventors, but nowadays many are highly collaborative. Priestley was just ahead of his time (by two centuries)!
This network of mutual support helped him clarify his views, and pointed him to new possibilities. He wrote, almost compulsively, about his scientific quests and was not secretive about his discoveries. He gained confidence as he was accepted by the London group of intellectuals, and in Birmingham used his network to fund his research.
We see his nearly childlike optimism in his support of democratic ideals, and in his confidence that science would and could improve the lives of regular people. He wrote strongly, stridently, about the need for improvements in the political system, and after he moved to America, he optimistically sought to build a community of researchers and open-minded thinkers in his locale in Pennsylvania.
As you read Johnson’s engaging book you’ll develop an affection for this quirky radical. Considered at once a genius and a heretic, Priestley was a unique and important person in the history of science and invention.
Be Creative Now! — The Problem with Using Insight Problems as Measures of Creativity
You know those brain teaser questions that you see in popular magazines or newspapers under the heading, “Are You Creative?” These include the ever-popular nine dot problem, the word problems with surprising solutions, and mathematical problems like ones you hear Will Shortz offer up on the Sunday Puzzle on NPR. They may be fun, but when posed as tests of creativity, these little games have always irritated me, somehow, and just yesterday I figured out why.
I was reading an article by Probst, Steward, Gruys, and Tierney about how job insecurity can have adverse effects on creativity, yet increase productivity to a degree. It is an interesting article and I don’t doubt their results, but I do have a problem with how they measured the creativity of their participants.
They did two studies testing their hypothesis that, first, in a lab setting, participants who were threatened with losing their jobs would score lower on a creativity test than those who were not threatened. Second,in another study conducted in the workplace, a survey asked participants to respond to questions about how they felt about the security of their jobs, and then a creativity test (among other measures) was completed.
In the first study they used Duncker’s old insight problem about the candle, matches, and the thumbtacks. Coincidentally, I had recently heard Daniel Pink talk about that one at Chautauqua, and it bothered me then, as well. But I couldn’t put my finger on why at the time.
In the second study they used the RAT for measuring the creativity of the participants. Both of these measures are old and well-established metrics for identifying creative behavior or creative potential. But now I know why I always have felt somehow unsatisfied at the prospect of measuring creativity in this way.
Whenever I’m confronted with the 9 dot problem, for example, I have to really strain to remember the right answer. I’ve seen it so many times that I find it really boring, but in spite of this, I always forget how to solve it. I like doing RAT type problems more, since I am more verbal than figural, but still it is annoying if I miss getting that right answer.
Do you notice anything in the previous paragraph that flies in the face what we know about creative behavior? Right! Finding the “right” answer! This is a convergent task that pretends to measure creative ability. We all know that creativity is about considering multiple options, many of which might work together in a great combination of pointers that will let us solve a problem. It isn’t about being able to do well on Puzzler questions.
In the real world, we are not put in a room and told to solve a tricky problem as fast as possible, and by the way the timer is running. Even in jobs like being an emergency room doc, or a pilot in a dangerous environment, where performance requires quick thinking and the stakes are high, people are in a context where they have accumulated much domain skill that allows them to quickly access the many options that they have and select the one or ones that they will use. They can do this in an unpremeditated, almost intuitive way, but they are at some level scanning their options and selecting among them.
The obvious creativity of Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, the airline pilot that landed his plane in the Hudson River made a quick decision to avoid crashing into a populated area, involved his using an uncannily rapid scan of his behavioral repertoire and choosing the best alternative. He deserves much credit, and he is undoubtedly a highly creative person. I’m not sure, though, that that means he can quickly solve the 9 dot problem or the candle and tacks problem (unless he had seen them before and cared enough to remember them.) It seems a trick, somehow, to ask people to do that.
If we want to see how people are creative, we should ask them to show us what they have done. We could consider a portfolio of writing or art or design. We could ask them to bring in something cool that they’ve made, and ask them to tell us about it. We could ask them to show us some of the ads they’ve created, or the patents that they’re most proud of. Not to count them up, but to be witness to the products of their creativity. With creativity, the proof is in the pudding. Not in inventories of accomplishments or personal achievements or in solving on-the-spot parlor tricks.
George Kembel
I’ve finally found time to post some comments about the talk that George Kembel made on Friday morning at Chautauqua, entitled “Awakening Creativity.” I was blown away by it. I may just become the first-ever-George-Kemble-senior-citizen groupie. His presentation was just about perfect in my estimation. It was like a feast of ideas, all of which support and nurture creativity.
Kembel capably serves the role of liaison between his university program and the public at large. He handled himself with confidence, and with an obvious respect for the Chautauqua audience. The d-school design thinking method is built on empathy, and Kembel showed it for the audience. Empathy writ large. Hmmm… We’ve heard a lot during Week 7 about empathy and compassion.
Another feature of design thinking is story-telling. Again, Kembel soared. His whole talk was a series of stories of the challenges and successes of … the school?? … no, the successes of his students at providing life-enhancing contributions to our larger society, in locations as different from each other as a NY City radio news station and a remote village in the mountains of Nepal.
His first story began after we had a chance to demonstrate that perfect pitch is pretty rare in an English speaking population. Some in the audience did have it, but that wasn’t the point. He said that this special talent is found in only about 1 in 10,000 people of an average population of English speakers. He cited studies by Diana Deutsch, who showed that speakers of Mandarin (a tonal language) had much higher levels of this ability to identify particular tones than are found among most English speakers. Why? Because they need this special skill to manage their communication in an environment where the meanings of three different concepts may be represented by a nuanced verbal differentiation based on one’s tonal levels in speaking.
He asked and answered three questions about awakening creativity. I’ll paraphrase them: Is creativity normally distributed? ie. Can everyone be creative? He says, and we agree, that much creativity lies latent because we misunderstand what it is, educate our children out of it, and misunderstand its nature, not believing that “creativity thrives on constraints.”
His second question was to wonder whether or not this latent creativity can be awakened when it is nurtured? and the answer was “yes.” Here he stressed the value of the design thinking process and noted that it is important to use the process on as many real projects as possible so that the learner can begin to trust the process, while tolerating the times of deep uncertainty and ambiguity.
The third question Kembel explored was about how an individual’s transformation to more creative behavior can scale to the larger level of the work-team or the organization. He stated that it is possible to extend this improved creative performance, but that it is necessary to train for the skills of group process and to find like-minded individuals to work with in an organization that may not seem initially to offer many creative opportunities.
Throughout the talk Kembel frequently showed and discussed his concept of reiterative “low resolution” prototypes. These “quick and dirty” prototypes are used to help think through the problem, and to communicate one’s understanding of it at any given time. Although these low-res prototypes are not intended to be successful on the first go-around, he commented about how much courage it takes to put out your design for testing because we are trained to believe that unfinished work reflects poorly on our ability.
The truth is that it will take many design iterations, and much empathetic testing to thoroughly solve the problem. Here he stated that “the crummier the prototype, the better” because the stakeholders will feel so sorry for you that they’ll want to help you improve it through their own empathetic evaluation.
Because they allowed for this vulnerability, and other reasons, I was so pleased with the work of Martha and Robin who, in one short week, explored their product idea, put a low-res prototype together, tested it, and got feedback on it. This week’s work was only an approximation of design thinking, but it clearly demonstrated the principles that we heard discussed in the Amphitheater on Friday morning.
If you missed it, or would like to review it, go to FORA.tv for the archived video.
Imagine that …