"DESIGN IS A TALISMANIC WORD with nearly infinite meanings. Design is fashion design and urban design and graphic design and product design; it’s also assay design (biology) and object-oriented design (computer science) ...

But the story of design thinking as such—and of how design reached its apotheosis as a floating signifier, detached from any one object or medium or output—starts with World War II. As the war began, American industrial designers entered government service en masse. They designed everything from liquid propellant rockets to molded plywood splints to a pair of strategy rooms and a giant spinning globe for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And they exposed their collaborators—scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and others in industry, academia, and government—to the idea of the designer as an all-capable architect of clever solutions across domains. "

-- Maggie Gram, "On Design Thinking" nplusonemag, issue 35

Working Towards Solutions

Just about anyone who can make a graphic will try to sell you one for how to perform "Design Thinking." Each vendor with their own variance on how to come up with solutions to problems at hand. Some will even try and sell their methods as cure-alls for whatever technical or social problem ails you.

Rather than elect one specific design thinking mantra, we want to recommend you think about finding solutions as an iterative process and consider no one iteration (or specific way of thinking) perfect. Most problems do not have a 'final solution' until the person working on them stops working. And most frequently, taking different perspectives is the best way to make any solution better. Ironically, we are about to discuss a way of thinking, but this is certainly not to say that there are other or perhaps better ways to think about a particular problem or find solutions. Often people describe their own personal processes as being a natural flow of iterating and reflection. This can work, but may need more formalization and common vocabulary if the same (individually successful) people were to work on a team. Because this is a class, we will be using the vocabulary outlined below for convenience.

Fab Academy:

These are in-depth discussions of topics related to this unit, borrowed with love from the Fab Academy archives. The videos linked here (and on the rest of the webpage) are intended to deepen your knowledge on the topics. They are not required for the Foundations of Fabrication course, but they are often good to watch for more perspectives on the same ideas. We love 🎧 listening to videos while doing the repetitive tasks of making; 👀peeking over whenever they've got something good on screen.

• Fab Academy 2020: Project Management (notes)

• Fab Academy 2019: Project Management Review Project Management

• Fab Academy 2017: Project Management (notes)

Brainstorming

Brainstorming can have some very specific branded messaging (that even Webster Dictionary acknowledges) but when used as a general term, it refers to the process of coming up with ideas in a flurry. Think snowstorm, where each idea is a snowflake. Or, perhaps more fun: one of those cash tornado boxes, where the person brainstorming is trying to grab as much as they can out of the storm. Wikipedia actually has a very good article on Brainstorming, that covers some of the history, example canonical processes and some variations involved. Importantly, Brainstorming is often focused on functionality as a group activity, and is thus typically a structured activity with formal rules and processes. For an individual, brainstorming can look different, or even go by a different name: creativity. Creativity is its own complex topic (with another great wikipedia page), but we want you to be assured that creativity is a part of every person. Rather than being an attribute a person either has or lacks, modern thinking on creativity says that it is a skill that can be developed with practice and deliberate effort. Elementary art teachers have known this for decades, and creativity-as-a-skill is expanding in common understanding. Freakonomics podcast has done several deep investigations on creativity, and you can find some episodes to listen to in their archives. Two favorites of their episode are this one on 'How to be Creative' and 'Where does Creativity Come From? Also there are many books about creativity that are worth reading.

No matter your favorite way to understand brainstorming or creativity, these processes cover the top half of the diagram we supplied above. It takes a good questioning background to really understand a problem, and then you can generate ideas (or connect ideas) to come up with possible solutions. For both questioning and generating/ connecting ideas: the more diverse perspectives you can take, the better. This is why it is often good to work in teams of people that come from all different backgrounds. For counterexample: womens' healthcare needed many more iterations than the form it took back when nearly all OB/GYN doctors were men. Taking different perspectives into account is not a nice-to-have feature on any product going to be used by more than one person, it is a must-have feature. Always keep this in mind when thinking about how to improve a given project.

Ideation

Bringing ideas to life is ideation. Planning and parsing complex thoughts into smaller pieces is the core skill here. It would be hard to imagine building the first Corvette from scratch, if the automobile hadn't been invented first, and many versions worked out ahead of time. What would need to be figured out before you could make a Corvette? How would you break that down into a series of achievable tasks, even if the list of task were very long? Don't go too far down this rabbit hole with any example, but definitely focus on breaking down assignments for this course into parts.

Bringing ideas to reality necessitates iteration. If you have an idea for a fantastic new kitchen gizmo that will make your life easier whenever peeling & chopping potatoes, the picture in your head is probably 'fully' formed and looks like it would sitting on a counter. [If you haven't been enticed to do so yet, go ahead and picture a new kitchen gizmo for such a purpose and then keep reading.] But how do you test this idea of a new potato peeler-chopper? How do you know it will even cut potatoes? Why are you imagining it shaped that way? Building iterations is the solution here. First: you build something to test the chopping and peeling mechanism of the device. Maybe you go with something like a woodworker's card scraper. This is the minimum viable product (MVP). It is the core of the device, and usually the sanity check to see if the solution is possible. From there, you would need to work on building something to hold the potatoes of any size while the scraper does its work. Then another iteration to make it look nice. And another to make it cheaper to produce. Each time you will need to build a iteration/ prototype. Not because you want three copies of this device, but because having a concrete object to look and flip over makes it much easier to think through incremental improvements. This will also be true with your final project: iterating part or all of it will greatly improve the product you have when it is time to present your results. The bottom-right of our diagram above is the part of the cycle where a solution is built. Each time around the spiral a new iteration of the product should be built, so the new version can be evaluated and improved.

Project Management

"You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today/ And then one day you find ten years have got behind you/ No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun/ And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking/ Racing around to come up behind you again/ The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older/ Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death/ Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time/ Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines/ Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way/ The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say" -- Pink Floyd, "Time" from album "Dark Side of the Moon"

Time moves quickly, and we are always chasing. All the more reason to iterate. Create a deliverable first, so something exists if a deadline sneaks up on you. From there, you can always make it nicer, but the core of the product is deliverable.

If you have a more time to plan for a far-off deadline, or a more complex task to tackle, then itnerem goals can be very important. Setting checkpoints for yourself can be an essential part of completing projects on time. If you want to invent a new board game, what checkpoints would you set? Game board design? Writing the rules? Building example pieces to move around the spaces? Complex tasks can often be broken down to make them more achievable. The hard part here is estimating the complexity of these broken down parts. Which part of designing a new board game do you think is that most complex? Another complexity to breaking down projects is that some of the parts may need to happen in a certain order, or be interrelated. For the board game, do you write the rules first? Will the rules need to be adjusted once you make the first version of the board? or after the first play-tests? Breaking complex tasks into pieces is complex enough that Project Managers are employed in all kinds of companies to do just that. Relevant experience and practice are both excellent ways to get better at breaking complex tasks down into more digestible pieces to be completed in a logical order.

Another part of planning is being able to estimate how long the parts of a project will take. An experienced plumber may know how long a task takes, but someone who is just learning may often need more time. For example, it takes Corey 60-65 minutes to remove a toilet from a bathroom and install a new one (not including the time to deal with caulking). If you have less experience with this task, or you happened to buy an unexpectedly complicated toilet to install, this time estimate may not apply to you. Misestimating time required is often a misstep for anyone, learning any new skill. It is best to estimate that tasks will take you longer than expected, and build in some buffer time in case you find an area of unexpected complexity that slows down progress. In a corporate environments, time estimates need more tightly managed because "Time is Money" but for the hobbyist, this is often more relaxed. For coursework, this falls somewhere in between the corporate world and a lackadaisical hobbyist. deadlines are relevant and a class will keep moving forward.

Specifically, in "Foundations of Fabrication" we will be there to help you break tasks down, estimate time requirements, and support you if you start falling behind. Part of having a caring instructor who can work with you locally is that they should be able to support you in classwork. At least, that's what they tell aspiring teachers in pedagogy classes 😉.

Assignment [Unit 6.1]

Go through the process of brainstorming for your final project. Yes, it is far away, but spending some time now to think about what you really want it to be/ do will help guide your work for the rest of the course. It is possible that a well laid-out project at this point can help inform the things you work on in future assignments, so you can pre-produce parts of your final project.

This can also be a great catch-up week from any past projects. 🕚

or: Make a lamp of some kind! (lightbulbs, ideas, insert pun here...)