A software engineer loosely shares what he learned from attending CIID’s IDP course (week 1). This week (2/24~2/28) CIID’s 2020 IDP course started in Costa Rica. This week was a week of learning team building while doing team building.
This article is the English version of this below article.
Day 1: Introduction
On the first day, students, including CIID and teachers, mainly introduced themselves. So, first of all, I’d like to introduce myself here.
I’m 26 years old now, and before coming to CIID, I worked as a web and app engineer at a start-up in Tokyo for 4 years. Since it was a small startup, I was able to experience everything from UI/UX design of the service to system design and implementation/operation in a team of 1–3 people. While I was working there, I took a course on human-centered design at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology (AIIT), also in Tokyo. After taking this course, I became interested in “design” and decided to participate in CIID this time. When I was a student, I majored in mechanical engineering. Apart from college, I did a language study abroad in South America for 8 months and then an internship in San Francisco for 8 months. My level of English is good when it comes to reading and writing, but I’m still very bad at speaking. And I’m very socially awkward and a shady person. Basically, I can only talk about programming and my job.
On the first day, apart from self-introductions, the class was mostly focused on explaining CIID’s culture and I was surprised at that CIID verbalized their “culture” more than I had imagined. Then they explained it to me very carefully. I’m going to go a little deeper into that culture.
Prototype
The first thing they said was, “Anyway, let it take shape”. No matter how lousy a sketch it was, or how much it looked like a child’s drawing made out of cardboard, I was taught to “shape it and visualize it”. I don’t know if it’s because they value this culture or if it’s because we’re overseas, but in any case, everyone praises what we make. They would react incredibly over and look for the good parts anyway, and say, “Well, we can stretch it out more here!” or “I never came up with this idea!” and so on.
From a Japanese point of view, “Isn’t it rather strange for grown-ups to praise each other like that?” But I think it’s closely related to the “Be fun” culture, which I’ll discuss later.
Be fun
The next culture we are taught is to have fun. At CIID, we are taught that learning should be fun, and creating should be fun. As I mentioned above, I really feel that there is a culture where everyone enjoys making things.
At CIID, compliments is paid to those who created something and those who have learned something. To be honest, I’m still getting used to it, but it’s fun. This then leads to “Team”, which will be discussed below.
Team
Every week we are divided into teams of 3 or 4 people to present what we have created on Friday. When working with this team, CIID has a rule called “Equal Talk Time”. It’s a simple rule: “Everyone on the team speaks at the same time. Even though I’m not good at speaking English, the order of speaking always comes around. I honestly think it’s hard to me, but I feel like the work of “talking to the team” has become a “team”. And I felt that “being a team” had a very positive impact on the act of “having fun”.
I think it’s hard to simply enjoy yourself if it’s not your hobby or something you like to do. But when I high-five and shake hands with my teammates after the presentation, it’s a lot of fun. Also, CIID is having a “Celebration Party” after the presentation on Friday. Here, not only a team of 3 or 4 people, but all 27 of them praise each team for the good things they did. This time it’s so much fun to have 27 people working in teams to solve the same subject and feel it.
Lean from each other
The last one is “learning each other”. We are a very global team of 27 people. They selected us so that our area of expertise, country of origin age, and gender would be totally different. We’re taught to learn different perspectives and skills in that.
So far, there’s overwhelmingly little things I can teach to my cohort. Also, I think that each student is not really aware of this. We don’t have a prototype yet that brings our expertise, and it’s ending up in a discussion. However, I feel that in the future, when it comes to machine learning and programming classes, our respective specialties will come into play.
Day 2: Norm
What is a team?
We learned the framework about team building. In that framework, we learned that there are 4 phases and we go back and forth between them. The 4 phases are “Form”, “Norm”, “Storm” and “Perform”. Briefly, the “Form” has just formed a team. “Norm” is the state in which the members of the team understand each other’s roles. The “Storm” is a state of disagreement within the team. The “Perform” is where the team members are performing their roles. The details are explained in the following article.
It was the first framework I had heard of, but I think it was a very useful framework to work with as a team this week. It was very helpful for us to look at ourselves objectively as we worked through what condition our team was in.
I also personally found “Norm” to be very useful. The brief of this Friday’s presentation was “Designing a way to celebrate Costa Rica’s botanical gardens in 2062”. Honestly, it was pretty hard for me to talk about the fantasy of 2062 in English. However, I think I was able to control the team’s expectations by telling them “I can’t discuss something so difficult in English” during the first “Norm” period after the team was formed. (Even so, I think I’m giving the team too much trouble by not talking about it…)
Personally, I always thought of the team as being like “being friends”. However, once I understood this framework, I could properly understand that a team is all about understanding how to make the best of each other.
We are always in bias
The day also included a profound explanation of bias. And I learned the importance of being aware of the presence of bias. In the “Storm” and “Perform” phases of the team, I’ve seen the bias come out in myself and others.
In the Storm, I felt like there was a conflict of opinion due to each person’s bias. I suggested “How about designing a café for retirees to find a job again? “ Then my teammates commented without malice, “I don’t think that’s going to work because retirees don’t want to work anymore”. And then our faculty immediately came to us and said, “That’s exactly the bias”. He taught me that it is a dangerous practice to dismiss ideas with your own hypotheses and predictions. I thought that this had happened when I was working in Japan as well. I also wondered how I could get hooked on bias so easily, even though I understood the word “bias”.
I also experienced the bias at the presentation on “Designing a way to celebrate Costa Rica’s botanical gardens in 2062.” One team was designing to target “people from Mars”, assuming that humans had successfully migrated into Mars. I’m not sure how big or small the possibility of Mars migration is, but I felt like they’ve succeeded in removing their own bias against the challenge. And I felt that in our team, we were bound by the “Earthling” bias.
I was able to experience for myself that I was unknowingly stuck in bias and then I was narrowing my thinking. I also felt it would be a little easier to spot ideas if we were aware of this bias.
Day 3: Ideation
4 roles
I learned the framework about the discussion. We were taught that the roles were divided into 4 roles during the discussion: “Mover”, “Follower”, “Opposer”, and “Bystander” and that these roles would switch from time to time during the discussion. Briefly, the Mover is the person who sets the general direction of the discussion and moves the discussion forward. The Follower is the person who agrees with Mover and accelerates the discussion. The Opposer is the person who stops the discussion from becoming one-sided by disagreeing with Mover. The Bystander is the person who listens to arguments, looks at situations, and offers a different point of view.
This framework has given me so much psychological safety. Before I knew this framework, I had completely lost sight of my role in the team. However, while I can’t join in the discussion very well, I can focus on bringing a different perspective to the discussion at key points as a Bystander. However, I think that we should originally have to go back and forth between these 4 roles. I would like to change my role and participate in discussions once I am more comfortable with discussions in English. (I have to study English…)
I think now that I can look at a discussion in this way more objectively, I’m able to understand what this person is trying to do.
Focus on the question
We also had a brainstorming workshop on the day. When brainstorming, he explained the importance of controlling the abstraction of the question (subject). For example, the question “Designing how to drink coffee at CIID” is very abstract. Some people may get more and more ideas, but for me, this question was difficult to get them down into a sketch. However, when it came to “Designing a CIID coffee cup”, I managed to get it down to a sketch. You can design a coffee cup, or you can design a coffee cup and coaster as a set. However, if we were to get more specific like “Design a CIID coffee cup handle”, we might be able to come up with one or two ideas, but it’s difficult to come up with more ideas.
In this way, we learned that it is important to be aware of the “question” that we are trying to design. I also learned that I use interviews to get inspiration to make this question concrete. When I was in Japan, I was looking for a “question” after the interview. And that’s what we did in the class. However, the questions that emerged from the interview were very abstract questions. Even when we brainstormed about it, it was hard to come up with new ideas.
After that, we set our own “questions” and modified them to make them a little more specific based on the results of the interviews. We were given the question “Designing a way to celebrate Costa Rica’s botanical gardens in 2062” and we brainstormed by revising the interview results to “Designing a way to celebrate the natural feel of Costa Rica’s botanical gardens in 2062”. Then, the revised question is much easier to brainstorm than the original one.
It seems that there are many ways to brainstorm. If you’re interested, take a look at the link below.
This is a bit of a digression, but at CIID, we take the style of “sketch out ideas anyway” and “come up with a lot in a short time”. Each global team has a different context, so I thought it would be very useful to talk about it visually. And if you come up with a lot of ideas in a short period of time, you start to get ideas that you really don’t understand from about the 4th or 5th one. I think it’s unexpectedly interesting to talk about it with everyone.
Real designer
It’s very difficult to evaluate the ideas that come out of brainstorming. In the class, we were taught that people unconsciously stick to their own ideas and that negative opinions such as risk and return on investment tend to creep in.
We were taught that many people make their assessments based on their own expectations and hypotheses. It’s easy for bias to creep into predictions and hypotheses. When I was working in Japan, I was trapped by the above bias. I’m quick to consider the risks. Therefore, I will think long and hard about it until I am sure of it. We were taught that the important thing at this stage of the assessment is to “do it on objective grounds and based on your own experience” and that a real designer is someone who can evaluate ideas killing their own biases.
In terms of how to evaluate, a specific framework was taught to us as follows.
Day 4: Prototype
Understand that you don’t understand
The prototype does not indicate the correct answer to the subject. We were taught that prototypes exist to get answers to questions by using prototypes and letting subjects experience them. In other words, there are 3 elements to creating a prototype. “What do you want subjects to experience?” “What do you want to know?” “Who are subjects? The combination of these three is the “question” that the prototype is trying to answer. It will be “something you don’t really know”.
Again, CIID emphasizes prototyping and trying things out. To quote the founder of IDEO below, we are taught to “let the subject experience it anyway”.
You cannot experience an experience without experiencing it
Bill Moggridge
Also, there was a quote in class that really stung me, so I’d like to share it with you.
It’s about minimising risk while still moving forward.
As long as you’re moving forward, it means you’re minimizing your risk. I’m the type of person who makes a decision after careful consideration. But these words made me want to prototype more and more, and understand more and more of what I don’t understand. (Maybe it’s also because I like making things!)
Control the fidelity
We were taught that prototypes need to be created at a level that doesn’t require a producer’s explanation. When explanations are given, subjects are convinced without getting the subject’s true opinion. Therefore, it is necessary to create a prototype at a level that allows the subject’s raw opinion to be obtained.
And conversely, there is the option of not making things up to make them easier to understand. Incorporating too many elements and features will increase complexity and prevent the subject from understanding. The same can be said for the final product, but even in the prototype stage, unnecessary elements and functions should be thoroughly considered.
The control over the degree of build-up also depends on the phase of the idea. In the early stages of an idea, there is no need to make up pretty embellishments or detail parts. Rather, you should make a prototype that is somewhat understandable and let the subjects see it. In the early stages, we create a concept through prototypes. Gradually, you will be able to verbalize what you should be building and you will be able to increase the resolution of your concept through prototypes. On the other hand, as we get closer to the final stage, the more elaborate the prototype becomes. In this phase, the concept builds a prototype. In other words, the concept will be expressed through a prototype, which will be questioned by the subject. Depending on the complexity of your concept, your prototype will be more elaborate.
Day 5: Presentation
This was the day to present the project of the week. We built a prototype based on the concept of “Evolve Back”. To create an experience where “people 42 years later can feel the sound and light of the Costa Rican bugs as they do now,” we hung a green blanket on a table and created a lighted space there. The sound was processed and played with the sounds of insects actually recorded in the jungle. Photos of the prototype and presentation materials are listed below.
I think the presentation itself went well. I think we were able to give form to what we wanted to do with the prototype and let the subjects experience what we wanted to do. Afterwards, we high-fived as a team, which was great fun. All I could contribute was a few ideas and some presentation materials, but I think everyone welcomed me. (I hope to contribute more next week!)
It was a very low-tech prototype, and I didn’t have much of a say in the matter, but it made me realize that even a simple prototype like this can create an experience.It may be a bias against what I’ve already created, though.
There’s also a post for the week 2, so if you want to read it, please do. There is the link to the English version inside it.