3.2 Exploration with Individuals

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society

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University of Pennsylvania

Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society

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This is a course aimed at making you a better designer. The course marries theory and practice, as both are valuable in improving design performance. Lectures and readings will lay out the fundamental concepts that underpin design as a human activity. Weekly design challenges test your ability to apply those ideas to solve real problems. The course is deliberately broad - spanning all domains of design, including architecture, graphics, services, apparel, engineered goods, and products. The emphasis of the course is the basic design process: define, explore, select, and refine. You, the student, bring to the course your particular interests and expertise related to, for instance, engineering, furniture, fashion, architecture, or products. In prior sessions of the course about half of the participants were novices and about half had prior professional design expertise. Both groups seem to benefit substantially from the course. All project work is evaluated by your peers -- and indeed, you will also be a peer reviewer. This format allows you to see an interesting collection of projects while getting useful feedback on your own project.

From the lesson

Week #3: Design Concepts

The goal of this module is to move from defining the problem to designing a solution. You'll begin by learning about the exploration phase, and you will exit this phase with a number of design concepts for peer review. You'll also learn how to decompose a design to evaluate its overall function, and essential process in creating good design essential to the life of your design. Finally, you'll learn how to critically examine past design artifacts to inform your current concepts so that you can sensibly differentiate your product. By the end of this module, you'll have created 10 solid design concepts, and you will have received feedback on those concepts so that you can move to the next phase of the design process: prototyping.

3.1 Exploration Introduction14:42

3.2 Exploration with Individuals5:02

3.3 Getting Physical3:21

3.4 Decomposition10:25

3.5 Decomposing by Sequence of User Actions9:47

3.6 Decomposing by Function21:35

3.7 Competitive Artifacts6:20

3.8 Scoop 10 Concepts4:49

Meet the Instructors

Karl T. Ulrich
Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation
The Wharton School

Well design and sometimes done as an individual.

It's often done in groups as well, when you are part of an organization or a team

that's trying to create an artifact, and so one of the challenges you face as a

designer or as a design leader is how do you deploy the effort of several

individuals towards the goal for exploring the design concepts.

The normal organisational practice is to call a meeting and to conduct a brain

storming session. And the basic idea behind brainstorming

issue get a group of people particularly three to eight around a table maybe you

have a flip chart, and an easel, or a whiteboard and someone facilitates the

meeting and there is a group you generate ideas Now, I exaggerate only slightly in

saying that's the, probably the single worst thing you can do as a designer or as

a design leader in order to effectively deploy a group of individuals towards the

goal of exploring effectively for design concepts.

Let me make an analogy, Imagine that you and three other people

are on a desert landscape and you are looking for gold.

Let's say, you are miners and you are doing some exploration to find gold.

Now, imagine two alternatives, One alternative is that you all huddle

together and you wander around as a group. And, three of you watch a fourth person

dig and do exploration. That's effectively what we do in a meeting

or in a group setting when we generate ideas together.

The other alternative is that all four of you go off in different directions, and

after awhile you come back and report what you found.

And maybe you go together to explore the more promising areas that each of you

found individually. Exploring and design as a group only is a

lot like trying to work in a rugby scrum. The group is essentially limited to move

together and to explore a fairly limited number of alternatives.

A much better approach is to send everyone off in different directions.

At least for some of the, the time you've allotted to exploration.

You don't have to take my word for it. I've, with some colleagues, we've actually

done scientific research that has tested this idea experimentally.

Let me just tell you a little bit about that experiment.

We compared two different approaches. One we called the group approach, where

four people worked together for 30 minutes.

And the other called the hybrid approach, where those same four people worked for

ten minutes alone as individuals, independently and in parallel and then

those four people worked together for twenty minutes, exploring the ideas that

they generated alone, as individuals. We did this with 44 individuals divided

into eleven groups of four. And we had them work on ex-, exploring for

alternatives in two different product design problems.

We found that with the hybrid approach. The same four individuals could generate

about two and half times more ideas if they worked in the hybrid.

If they took the hybrid approach than if they worked together at the, at a table as

a group. Not only that, but the ideas they

generated were actually better in quality as well.

Here are some basic guidelines for coordinating your group and exploration

for design. There's unambiguous evidence that a hybrid

process is better than a group process. And that you need to have an individual

phase for at least some of your exploration effort.

You need to take your, have your individuals work independently and

parallel to generate or to explore for design alternatives.

Second guideline is that it's very helpful to provide a numerical target for that

individual face. You'll see for an instance, in the

assignment for this week, in this course, that, I will challenge you to generate ten

ideas and to turn those in. That kind of numerical target is very

effective in encouraging participation from all members of your group.

And lastly, some people. Point out that it's very hard in some

organizations to actually get people to do their homework.

That is, to actually do the assigned work of generating ten ideas working

individually. If that's the case for you, then what I

recommend is you go ahead and call a meeting which does succeed or is effective

in getting people together, to have allocated some time.

But then, after you've called the meeting and after you've got people together, you

get them to work alone for the first thirty minutes, let's say of the allotted

time. After which you can proceed to work

together as a group.

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