... a funny thing happened in the way to writing my design journal

So this is a LONG one... but it is a reflective "paper" I wrote in the form of a blog related to re-designing a design journal. I am posting it here because of the length and will reference this post from my other blog (www.designdigressions.blogspot.com).


DESIGNING A DESIGN JOURNAL: PROTOTYPES and ITERATIONS
… a funny thing happened in the way to writing my design journal

My earliest recorded written creative artifact – still in my mother’s possession by the way – is a story from the fourth grade: a rescue St. Bernard from the Swiss Alps turns out to be the dream job of a sleeping dog in the suburbs. I grew up chronicling my thoughts and flights of fancy in many different formats over the years. Short stories, music lyrics, poetry, free thought, travel journals, even futuristic inventions – no matter the form, the act of preservation was inherently fascinating to me. So as you can imagine, even before I attended a workshop on design journals, I was already a bit obsessed with the nature and process of creating them.

The workshop was an optional part of a class I was taking: Managing the New Product Development Process (or NPD for short). Lora, our facilitator, explained the whats, hows and whys of the process. At its core, the design journal captured ideas as well as documented thoughts, reflections and insight into a sharable format (such as a journal or notebook). As a single repository of the design process, the budding (or experienced) designer could track observations, document ideas, brainstorm or “mindmap”, figure out technical details, storyboard usage scenarios, or even reflect on group dynamics. The key: focus on the process, not the product.

Lora said: this is an opportunity for creativity. Regress to kindergarten!

Draw Everything...
Be Visual!
Collect Artifacts...
Be Tactile!

Now THIS was something I could sink my teeth into. I began to observe, brainstorm, sketch, and ruminate to my heart’s content.


Somewhere along the way, something funny happened. Especially as I was afforded the unique opportunity to revisit my design journal a semester later, I began to go beyond the normal critiques of what I could’ve done better – more observations here, better reflections there. No, I began to think about the usability of my design journal itself. Looking at my journal with a fresh perspective, I tried to relive the moments I transcribed: what was I thinking? What was I feeling? What in the WORLD would I do with this monster???

While before I thought of “focusing on the process” as ways to reflect upon the NPD process, whereas now I subscribed unique value in making a design journal, regardless of the outcome of my design problem. Before journals had inherent meaning as an experience I could relive, but now I began to expand my audiences as well as intentions to other uses.

Several new conversations with Lora began to bring my own particular viewpoints into sharp focus. This was not a “gimme” deliverable that would just barely extend my old journal, but a chance to take my old work and both critique and expand upon it as a new member: me from a later date. I would be able to redesign the structure from a new discipline as “business designer” instead of a “businessperson looking at the design process.”

Perhaps the notions of iterations and cross-pollination spanning time seem a little “meta-design,” fairly theoretical. But that is one truth of how each “designer” interacts with their own development processes, be it product, service, experience, business model, relationship, or lifestyle. It is upon this process of redesigning my design journal that this blog (or series of blogs) will focus. From a further theory of the architecture and meaning of a design journal to the structure of this particular iteration, this “diatribe” will be at once both manual and critique, describing the theory and implementation of one student’s journal into the design space.


An Architecture – Why Curate?
“Theory and Ruminations on Design Journal Design (DJD)”

When I was in undergrad, I took a class called The American Landscape: Study of the Built Environment. This class talked about how the physical layout of our environment – infrastructure or architecture, if you will – both reflected and shaped our values as a society. The physical density of San Francisco and early installation of public transportation lead to a very different environment from the sprawl and individualistic transportation infrastructure of Los Angeles.

Much the same way, a design journal is both a construct that can both reflect and facilitate values. As such, this is way beyond pure note-taking. Intentional use of a journal should consider careful the construct with which you communicate to your audience, whoever it may be. At the heart of this issue is the question: Why curate?

Our Design Journal 101 Workshop gave several reasons: litigation, intellectual property, academic communication, team interaction, and for the designer him/herself. Sometimes a journal serves merely as record, other times it is designed for interaction. Sometimes it is a way to exorcise unwanted thoughts in your head, other times it serves as an experience that can continue to inspire new ideas. To every designer, it should be a unique and personal reflection of their journey through the design process, regardless of the form or function.

This is back to Use, Usability, and Meaning 101. There are many areas to explore on the architecture of a design journal. In particular, I’d like to briefly discuss my views of the impact of audiences, cross-pollination, sense and experience of time, and multimedia or other physical constructs on the experience of a design journal.

Showcases – Audiences and Interaction
Back in high school, I used to belong to an improvisational theatre troupe. For exactly one year in 9^th grade, Our Gang Teen Ensemble was a home away from home – providing an outlet for teens to express themselves creatively, while at the same time providing a family or community during an awkward stage of life.

Personal context aside, Our Gang taught me a lot about the importance of considering your audience. Drama games were played both to warm yourself up as well as for your peers’ increasing enjoyment; the experience was to benefit the connection with other improvisational actors. Plays were primarily oriented toward the external audience’s experience, revealing new lessons and peeling back emotions in nuance and inflection; perhaps another audience was the director in helping him or her realize a particular vision. Monologues provided a construct to allow an external audience a window into a performer’s emotional state; but there was no mistaking the monologue was mostly a public vehicle for the performer’s personal catharsis – the value lay in the individual’s journey.

My favorite form of acting was a series of improvised sketches or vignettes, called a “showcase.” Here, there was a true multiplicity of equally important audiences. One part “game”, one part “monologue”, one part “dramatic window” – the showcase focused on the troupe as a whole as well as the audience. At the beginning of (and sometimes throughout) the showcase, the troupe would elicit scenarios from the audience and then act out those selected by the artistic director until asked to “freeze!” This was truly a team effort: the audience provided ideas, the team interpreted them, and the artistic director gave a framework for the overall thematic “discourse” through selecting which scenarios were included.

Notice how the multiplicity of audiences provides a unique opportunity to seamlessly incorporate an element of interaction into the “product” design. The final showcase experience was not determined by any single group or individual unilaterally… nor even by a group consensus. The final experience is at once a conglomeration of the inputs of all these “audiences” or participants that is dynamically changed through interaction and thus becomes a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Through this analogous life experience, my inner actor – inner “designer” – inherently understood that the consideration of goals, vision, and INTENDED AUDIENCE may influence form and function of my design journal. Particularly precious is the ability of the designer to specifically influence the structure or form of the journal to facilitate INTERACTION that may greatly increase the unique value of the design process because of the inability to reach the same creative solution when faced with unilateral creation and decisions.

In a design journal context, interaction can be facilitated through a variety of constructs and media. Intended audiences and critiques of selected constructs are discussed in the section discussing this journal’s specific design.

Travel Journals – Journeys of Time and Multiple Media
Somewhere between my high school experiences and this past semester, my connective relationship with audiences and interactive theatre was paused as I began a more introspective journey. Lost under layers of years of travel journals that were primarily constructs for an individual audience (me) to re-experience a journey, I forayed into accidental experimentation of how different curatorial constructs could enhance an individual’s later experience with a journal. Specifically, I naturally played with different expressions of time and the use of multiple media.

To start, my travel journals were purely logs of activities and stories I experienced during a vacation. I threw in some musings about cultural differences to enhance my memories of my emotions from that time: the awe of discovery, the joy of surprise, the alienation of foreignness, the loneliness of solitude. But upon rediscovering and rereading early journals, I yearned for better cues for my re-experience. I was not the same person that I was during my travels, so I needed a better way to re-inhabit the depicted moments. Thus, I naturally began to play with new cues regarding time. Consistent date formatting including the location of my transcription became an integral component of all future entries; this format elicited both the original memories as well as provided secondary cues of the feelings I had when writing those memories down. Upon each rereading, a holistic picture of the moment would include the original event, my fading memory and emotions surrounding that event, the experience of transcribing the event, and any further perspective I gained in the interim regarding that event. This was experiencing a particular concept or moment THROUGH TIME.

At the same time, I began to notice how monotonous it became to simply write, write, WRITE my experiences. Natural evolution demanded posting of pictures and postcards, artifacts with comments, and personal sketches. As they say: a picture says a thousand words. In this case, a single image could capture several stories or days at a single town; a sketch could re-invoke a range of sensations that words could not hope to match. It was through this experience that I connected FORM and MEDIA with MEANING.


DJD PROTOTYPE – Form and Critique
or “One Iteration of a Designer’s Journal”

Shortly after graduating with my Bachelor’s, I conceived of a framework called “Music Life Architecture.” At once database, catalogue, poetry, art, music, lyrics, free thought, or any other creative impulse you can imagine, MLA was a DYNAMIC framework whose artistic beauty lay in the changing organization, relationships, and growing inclusion of a single artist’s life work. Any individual work could stand alone. And the process to create any single piece of art could be documented in a journal or blog. But this was a collection of processes – a changing embodiment of creativity that was meant to be experienced over time. Much the same, this design journal is specifically designed to be experienced over time – a dynamic process in its own right.

Word of Warning
ITERATION 2.5, if you will. That’s the version-control number of this particular design journal. And as much as I could wax philosophical all day, this is really about implementation as much as design. However, before we delve into the structure of this curatorial artifact, a word of caution/explanation:

WARNING: Much as the NPD process is a function of iteration – a dynamic framework – so is this particular design journal a dynamic artifact. Multimedia and temporal in nature, final design of this iteration will include items that are progressive throughout this semester… until the next iteration can begin.

ITERATION 2.5 FEATURES (conceived)
Original Entries

• FEATURE: ITERATION 1 included all original postings between mid-September and late November 2008. These include a variety of observations, concepts, and reflections.
• CRITIQUE: Original entries were extremely limited in the full extent of reflection and feedback it could include. Primarily focused on idea generation and including several observations and needs related to key customers, there is little in terms of structured concept selection, technical details, or particular feedback on the same page of the original concept sketch. Instead, a user has to read between the lines by reviewing the evolution of concepts. Also, there are several areas that were held for additional consideration that were not used in an explicit manner and therefore would not be useful for communication of the NPD process. On the other side, there are inclusion of key workshops and notes from outside sources that may be helpful in understanding the context of the process in the student’s academic environment.

Reflections and Fill-Ins

• FEATURE: In preparing ITERATION 2.5, the designer was able to go back and review key gaps in the design journal.Sometimes, that meant providing new contextual pages with stories related to change in direction.Other times, that may be additional notes on an original concept.
• CRITIQUE: A unique construct made possible by the revisiting of a project a whole semester later. Examples of reflections and fill-ins are used sparingly or as illustration as the purpose of ITERATION 2.5 changed from documenting the NPD process to including documentation on the DJD process. However, the practice can remind a designer to intentionally review recent work more periodically in order to review intuitive leaps and document explanations for future use.
  

CD-ROM Disk

• FEATURE (pending): Disk that incorporates key files shared by the team that are not as easily replicable in a design journal.
• CRITIQUE: In addition to providing a vehicle for additional concepts and process steps, this feature allows a designer to include relevant supplementary information. Sometimes, it is easier to include a PowerPoint slide or digital image that might not fit on the pages of a journal. However, a designer needs to be careful not to utilize this to REPLACE the journal. Not all users will have access to a computer and a designer must remember that a design journal should be able to stand alone.

Blog Entries

• FEATURE (pending): Entries on a blog that contextually fit the design journal and helped contribute to the process.HTML tags should be used to help audiences easily find the related material.
• CRITIQUE: Blogs have the additional benefit of being both dynamic and creating a natural repository for feedback from journal audiences. Comments on blog entries are common, and this can create a more interactive feature than most traditional design journal features. However, the same caution related to CD-ROM use applies here: blogs should be supplementary in nature.

Tabs and Post-Its

• FEATURE (partial): Tabs and post-its can become the most interactive features of the physical design journal.Colored tabs (not featured) help disorganized journals become organized by tabbing individual pages by process stage or concept iteration.Post-its, meanwhile, can serve as placeholders for team journals for open items, or include concepts that can be moved around within the journal for new context and meaning at will.
• CRITIQUE: Post-its are not utilized here to the full potential. More as open items, future iterations should include “big ideas” or even “details” that can be moved around to appropriate ideas and contexts. This helps with keeping key design concepts at the forefront of the designer’s mind as he moves along to new concept iterations.

“Designspirations”

• FEATURE: This pack of index cards is designed to provide images and words that inspire visceral impact on the user.A user can review individually for inspiration, add new word associations on a card, or even shuffle the cards to make new pairings for individual brainstorming sessions.
• CRITIQUE: While “Designspirations” is untested, it has its origins in other card-related games that inspire reflection. For example, Café Gratitude in Berkeley does this very type of exercise for life lessons. Ideally, this is one construct for a designer to cross-pollinate ideas when they are left without a team (as this designer found in ITERATION 2.5) or brainstorming between meetings. However, the effectiveness of “Designspirations” use remains unclear until implemented.

Table of Contents

• FEATURE (unimplemented): Another feature to help the disorganized journal, this is a three-dimensional table of contents that would provide a grid for an audience to understand which journal pages relate to which process stage.Strings can connect points of the pop-up TOC to further illustrate cross-pollination between stages and iterations.One need look no further than the character “Hiro’s” time model in the NBC show “Heroes” to understand how these interactions across people and time can help an individual appreciate the complicity of the creative process through time.

Final Word
As a process, the design journal iteration is not over. It is still growing as a larger part of the independent study project to better understand the NPD project. Continue to look for updates online at http://designdigressions.blogspot.com/.