Design Needs Constraints
IDEO Futures is running a pop-up incubator in partnership with the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab); this summer’s pop-up is called Bits + Blocks. It focuses on using blockchain technology to solve problems people face not just today but tomorrow — and even ten years into the future. Blockchains are digital public ledgers that can’t be altered, just added onto, which makes them ideal for recording and transferring information, including ownership; as Vitalik Buterin puts it, blockchains are “a database we all agree on”. IDEO Business Designer and Director Matt Weiss writes, blockchain technology “has the potential to disrupt countless industries and create new experiences.” These posts document Bits + Blocks as the Lab unfolds.
Until recently, Ted Ko didn’t think much about death. He thought about electrical engineering, and music, and what to eat for breakfast. The questions he asked himself had less to do with mortality, or the life of the soul, and more to do with hackathons, and interaction design, and whether four eggs, a whole avocado, and a bowl of cereal is too much for one meal. And then he came to Bits + Blocks.
Where human-centered design usually starts with a problem and then finds a technology to solve it, this lab found the technology first. Over the past year, IDEO, the Harvard i-lab, and a small group of member companies have seen huge potential in blockchains — digital public ledgers that that act like a permanent, widely accepted database — which is why they brought together teams of student entrepreneurs and asked them to find problems they could solve using the technology. From the outset, this Lab accepted blockchain as a design constraint.
At the start of this summer, Ted and his teammates Keda Che, Erin Cuevas, and Tyler Samstag began looking for opportunities to improve how people make and verify promises. They knew that blockchains could be used for capturing and storing all kinds of important information. And at first they went wide — sci-fi wide — imagining entirely new ways to capture, store, and share human memories. Then they went meta, asking themselves: what is a memory anyway? They watched experimental films, and listened to spiritual talks, and read neuroscience research. After a few weeks, they considered taking the core of their idea — the notion of creating and sharing a legacy — and applying it to the material world. What about designing an easier, more pleasant way to face the process of writing wills? A will is an important end of life document: if it’s legal paperwork, it’s also charged with ritual and memory.
They knew that blockchains could be used for capturing and storing all kinds of important information. And at first they went wide — sci-fi wide — imagining entirely new ways to capture, store, and share human memories. Then they went meta, asking themselves: what is a memory anyway?
When the group talked to potential users, they asked them to draw the journey through the will writing process, using a smiling face and a sad face as a simple way to mark two poles of emotion. According to Erin Cuevas, those sketches surprised the team.
“People had had really negative experiences,” said Cuevas, who is a dancer and studies architecture. “One person’s graph never even crossed into the happy face zone. It was always just sad. And at first we were like, ‘Whoa, this is an awesome opportunity to design for.’ Because there’s so much to improve. But immediately after we were also like: ‘And that’s actually really scary, because there’s a lot to tackle.’”
The team had touched on a sensitive topic, and saw a huge range of possibilities. It was easy to get overwhelmed. Plus everyone on the team is relatively young, and doesn’t have much experience with serious illness or death. They wanted to learn more — and it was a challenging topic. Which came through in an email sent out to the Lab.
“INVITATION,” read the subject line. “Let’s talk about death tomorrow. FREE FOOD.”
The team took a risk, and opened up a conversation with their peers. But it also felt eerie and a little awkward when a few days later, twenty students tried to reflect on the delicate, finite nature of human life while eating takeout from Chipotle.
The group I joined talked about terminal illness, and whether or not it would be desirable to know exactly when you were going to die — which led to a conversation about what to do if you were told you had one year left to live.
“I’d drop out of college,” said Joel Kwartler, who’s part of another team looking at real estate transactions. “I’d basically do all those things that people want to do. Travel. Take photographs. Eat all the weird potentially unsafe foods I could find. Take more risks.”
“Right. Because it’d be like, ok, now you’re going to die,” said Erin.
“But we’re all going to die anyway,” said Chrisoula Kapelonis. She seemed surprised that the group was detached from that reality.
Everyone went quiet. Joel concentrated all his energy on peeling an orange. Lunching on burritos now felt melancholy. It was uncomfortable.
“The dynamic range that you feel in terms of emotion and energy; I think at most jobs it’s like this,” Matt Weiss had told the group a few days earlier, holding his fingers about four inches apart. Matt is a business designer and director at IDEO, and was talking to the Lab at the end of a long week.
“But what most people find going through this particular process, working out how you do it, the dynamic range is like this.”
Then Matt separated his hands by about three feet.
“Some moments you just want to rip someone’s head off. Or run away. That roller coaster is normal. And just to give you guys a heads-up, it doesn’t go away very fast.”
Every team in the Lab has faced their own versions of that lunch. One team is looking at real estate transactions — but none of them has bought a home. There’s a team trying to protect against identity theft; no one has had their identity stolen. Another group is thinking about how to make business easier for farmers, yet their own farming credentials are limited to a couple scallions and a potted cactus. In one way or another, everyone at the Lab is spending the summer trying to empathize with something they’ve never experienced firsthand. They’re here to build prototypes and ventures, and for any of those things to be successful they also need to build empathy. It’s hard, but that’s what design is about. And added to this particular process is the fact that teams are using brand new technology, which means they’re designing for experiences no human being has ever had. It’s exhilarating — and tricky. As Kathy Wu put it one day, “It’s like we’re designing for 2016, with a 2026 vision.”
Added to this particular process is the fact that teams are using brand new technology, which means they’re designing for experiences no human being has ever had. It’s exhilarating — and tricky.
The highs and lows this inspires — the usual bursts of energy, humor, confusion, and frustration that accompany design, along with the extra challenge of working in an entirely new context — have been part of Bits + Blocks from the outset. Everyone in the Lab has been feeling it, including the IDEO designers working as guides, who move through similar spaces as they design ways to help teams move forward.
I watched the guides do this one afternoon at IDEO, a week before teams had midpoint meetings with members. At the start of the program, they’d planned to regularly take time together to talk about the Lab. But as the pace intensified, the guides ended up putting off those talks to spend more time with teams. As the midpoint meeting got closer, everyone had started to feel slightly untethered. What the teams are tackling is so broad — trust, and technology, and how to better use blockchains — and they have so much freedom that sometimes it makes things harder.
So that morning, designers Dan Elitzer, Ann Kim, Matt Weiss, and Reid Williams cleared a wall in the studio, and pinned up the six original briefs given to inspire teams, with titles like “Tracking & Transferring Ownership” and “Owned Identity.” Next to each brief they put a team name, printouts of their prototypes, and start collecting post-its. They wrote notes about themes each team had been looking at, and what conclusions they’d drawn. They discussed how some teams wandered further from the briefs than others, and how that’s ok. They discussed potential benefits of prototypes for users. They discussed potential issues.
They took a long pause to stand and stare at the wall.
“Some themes that are coming across all over the board: building and leveraging community. Transparency in general around things like use of identity, and use of money,” said Matt.
Ann said that building and maintaining loyalty was also coming up. “Not in a brand sense of loyalty so much as a community sense,” she said.
“Is it an evolution of loyalty into something new?” said Matt. “To some other form?”
There was silence. Pacing. Staring at the wall. The goal was to return to the Lab with something clear to share back. But right then, it just felt like staring at a wall.
“All right, how do we want to spend the next hour?” said Ann.
Matt paused, then said:
“A couple of things on my mind, curious about what’s on yours. One: Should we be imposing more structure? Are there things we want them to specifically look at? And the other thing is, is there any synthesis of this synthesis?”
Everyone, including Matt, laughed at this last part, and the energy seemed to shift. Reid mentioned someone from a member organization — and an alum of last year’s program — who observed there should be more transparency in terms of helping teams understand the goals of the Lab. Reid said uncertainty had even led to rumors about a secret seventh team of IDEO designers hidden away somewhere, working to solve the same problems.
“We really need to make sure we’re giving them enough clarity,” he said.
The guides decided to frame a narrative for sharing all the observations up on the wall. Ann stuck pushpins into notes, and began to string yellow embroidery floss pin-to-pin to chart connections.
What they ended up with looked a bit like an elaborate fifth grade art project. With twelve minutes left before returning to the lab, they stood back and again tried to put themselves where the teams were, asking what would be most useful for them to know, and in what form. An hour earlier, the atmosphere felt amorphous, even slightly edgy, but by this point it felt focused and relaxed. There was still a lot to do — but the guides had managed to zoom out and see a new framework.
A few days after the session, the guides presented to teams. Their share was a mix of observation, groupings, and design principles, all of it drawn in Sharpie on white paper, then projected onto a screen. The teams approved of the low-fi drawings. They seemed bolstered by the chance to step back and see what they were doing, and the common threads that using blockchains has naturally stitched into all the projects — themes like transparency, accountability, participation, and fluidity of exchange. And, as they told me afterward, they definitely liked having clearer guidelines and goals.
The guides flipped through pages. DESIGN and CONSTRAINTS read one piece of paper. Next to the words was a drawing of a hyperbola, with frowning faces at either open end, and a smiling face at the midline.
“Design needs constraints,” said Matt.
Reid flipped to the next page. This drawing was of a face looking into a big open space labeled BLOCKCHAINS. Next to the face a text bubble read: OH SHIT.
“When you don’t have constraints, things tend to get tricky,” said Matt to the group.
Later on, when Tim, Erin, Keda, and Tyler decided to keep pursuing their original topic — capturing and storing memories — this is the phrase they repeated, half-joking, half-serious: design needs constraints. As Keda pointed out, when they tried to use blockchains to humanize the process of creating a will, a lot of interviews naturally circled back to using the technology to preserve memories in general.
“It wasn’t necessarily about us figuring out that we’re more passionate about memory and moving away from wills. It was about using what we learned with wills to guide how we’re looking at memory.”
The team was sitting in a meeting room at the Lab, right after an interview with a mother of two. The woman was charming and warm, and completely at ease — thanks at least in part to the skillful way the team ran the interview. She’d talked about her sons, the tens of thousands of photos she takes to document every stage of their lives, and what she’ll leave her boys when she dies. She was so comfortable, she shared details about writing letters to her husband, and her wish to be reincarnated, as a bird. A cardinal.
“We have a lot of options this summer,” said Tyler after the interview, referring to the team’s decision to continue focusing on memory. “I think one of our constraints is working on what really inspires us.”
From the start, the team had accepted blockchain technology as a necessary constraint; this was what everyone had come to work on. But now, they’d identified another constraint, one that came out of the design process, and making prototypes, and talking to people. A constraint that felt organic, and entirely their own.
“We found it wasn’t necessarily about us figuring out that we’re more passionate about memory and moving away from wills,” said Ted. “It was about using what we learned with wills to guide how we’re looking at memory. It allowed us to focus on enabling people to tell the stories that really matter to them.”
Annie Murphy is a writer and radio producer.
Originally published at medium.com on July 21, 2015.
