IDEO: Day 1

IDEO, the award winning product design firm in Palo Alto, runs "IDEO U.", a program designed to propagate its culture of innovation and user centered design. The Digital Vision Fellows are participating in a two-day workshop.

This morning we started out right away with a hands-on exercise in teams of 2 or 3. Using only 6 feet of masking tape and ~60 pieces of uncooked spaghetti, create a free-standing tower as tall as possible in 15 minutes. We created a tetrahedral base supporting a "strut" of two parallel lines of pasta cross-braced (rather poorly, I must admit) with more pasta. The 3 foot strut sagged so that it was only 25 inches off the table top, and exhausting our supply of both time and tape, we finished near the bottom of the pack, winning the "chef's hat" award for being the first team to move out of the planning phase to try construction. I understand that's behavior they're trying to encourage, but given the outcome, I'm not sure that it was the right thing in this case. The group that got the highest
(Jack Higgins and Durga Pandey) reached 45 inches.

We talked about the challenge of complying with a prescription (our pre-workshop homework had been to take a "medicine" of M&M's morning and evening for 4 days).
After a discussion of IDEO methodology and human factors consideration more specifically (including levels of physical, cognitive, social, aesthetic and emotional), we did another fun exercise that was trying to infer as much as we could about a person based upon about 40 pictures they took documenting a "day in the life". It was interesting to see how much you could determine about their family, friends, eating habits, socio-economic status, hobbies and interests just based on the photos.

Then on to lunch and a quick tour of the IDEO campus, including the very cool "technology box" and "materials wall", both of which provided samples that could inspire brainstorming.

In the afternoon, we did a user study related to "monitoring" (following up on the notion of medical prescription compliance). Our group went to a nursery school and the director gave us a tour talking about some of the schedule, regulatory, learning philosophy, security, and instructional issues associated with caring for children from 104 families.

We returned to IDEO to compare notes with the group and characterize the results, abstracting the general themes that were relevant to medical prescription compliance. Tomorrow we'll do some brainstorming and rapid-prototyping.