Creativity & Innovation

Better Sleep On That

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One of the roadblocks to designing better libraries can be our inability to creatively explore ways to achieve goals in non-traditional ways – or with radically different ideas. As past research has shown, as decision makers and idea generators we humans tend to rely on methods that have worked well for us in the past. The problems is that our old, reliable ways of getting things done may no longer be suitable for new times and new situations. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple way to open up our minds to fresh and untried strategies that would offer creative solutions.

A technique for doing just that may be closer at hand than we think. It’s called sleep. According to a recent NYT article, new research is showing that sleep – or the period directly after sleep – is one in which creative ideas and solutions can bubble up to the surface from the recesses of our minds. According to the article:

While traditional stories about sleep and creativity emphasize vivid dreams hastily transcribed upon waking, recent research highlights the importance of letting ideas marinate and percolate. “Sleep makes a unique contribution,” explains Mark Jung-Beeman, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies the neural bases of insight and creative cognition. Some sort of incubation period, in which a person leaves an idea for a while, is crucial to creativity. During the incubation period, sleep may help the brain process a problem. “When you think you’re not thinking about something, you probably are,” says Dr. Jung-Beeman, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology.

Scientists are learning more about the function of sleep. Once thought to be mostly about resting the body, current theories suggest that our bodies could move endlessly as long as we had the necessary energy but that it’s the brain that needs regular rest in order to process information and help us integrate it in ways that enable us to manage our existence. We could all likely share a story of waking up and just having a great idea pop into our heads in the shower. We may think it’s the shower but it may actually be our sleep refreshed brain feeding us the solution to a problem. Then again, there are other creativity theorists who believe that any period in which our mind is set free from routine activity and allowed to roam freely we may experience a bolt of genius – or just a simply good idea. My preferred method is a visit to the campus fitness center where I think about anything but work-related matters. It’s the post-workout shower where my best ideas are likely to emerge. Some of the toughest challenges are the type where an opposable mind is needed to develop a good solution to resolve two conflicting ideas that stand in opposition to each other. I can recall several instances where potential ideas emerged either right after sleep or an afternoon workout.

All this new knowledge about the value of sleep for priming our creativity should change our thinking about sleeping on the job. As the NTY article suggests, it may actually benefit organizations to promote daily naptime for staff. Some companies are even investing in hi-tech napping pods. It is ideas such as these that influence my thinking about how to create a library organization that is constantly engaged in the design of a better library. Encouraging library workers to take a 15-minute nap may sound outrageous, but it may just be the sort of radical thinking we need.

Creativity & Innovation

Latest IN (Inside Innovation) Now Available

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The latest edition of BusinessWeek magazine’s design and innovation supplement, IN – Inside Innovation, is now available online. The focus is quite timely – how can America use “innovations economics” to restore and achieve sustainable global competitiveness. Despite nearly $5 trillion dedicated to research and development since 2000 the country is experiencing economic stagnation. Of course there are the usual charts and articles about innovation. It’s worth taking a look at.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking Blog Started By Tim Brown

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You know I’m always on the lookout for new and valued sources for reading and learning more about design thinking. Well a good one appeared this week, a new blog by one of the gurus of design thinking. It looks good and should continue to be a useful resource for learning about design thinking.

Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO and I’ve mentioned his work before or quoted him. Few individuals are as closely associated with the discipline of design thinking as is Brown. Now Brown will be sharing his thoughts in a blog. His blog is simply called Design Thinking. Turns out Brown is writing a book based on his well received June 2008 Harvard Business Review article on design thinking. In his message about the blog he refers to the book and says he will be sharing his ideas and gathering information from readers’ comments. I have to say that the comments I’ve read are pretty good. In fact the comments from just one post lead me to three different resources related to design thinking that were totally new to me. So clearly there are lots of folks out there interested in design thinking who have resources and ideas to share. I expect that Brown’s blog will be a focal point for the design thinking community.

Perhaps of less importance, but possibly of interest to those who would like more detail on the inner workings of design at IDEO, I came across another blog called IDEO Labs that takes you inside the process that the IDEO designers go through as they work on projects. It appears that it might appeal to those with more of a technical interest in IDEO’s prototyping process, but it could also be a good way to learn more about the various stages of the design thinking process. I’ll check it out from time to time.

Design Thinking

Education For Design Literacy and Thinking

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One way to stay abreast of the design world and the latest thought and practice in design is to follow new developments at design firms. Some ways to do that are to follow their blogs, use a web page change detect service to monitor their websites, or use your library databases to set up an alert to track new articles and announcements. I use the latter method to identify any new items with terms like “design thinking”. In my latest search alert results I found an interesting article about MAYA Design.

You may recall that MAYA is the design firm that consulted on the major interior renovation at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. MAYA’s work came to my attention a number of years ago, around the time the Carnegie work-practice study was being disseminated, and greatly influenced my thinking about how a design process could help a library to develop a better user experience. In fact, I asked Aradhana Goel, now with IDEO, to give a presentation about the Carnegie project at the Blended Librarians Online Learning Community. That happened about two years ago but we still maintain the archive of Goel’s presentation. If you need a reminder or refresher you can view these slides that describe the Carnegie project. They also serve as a good source of information about designing an experience.

Just recently MAYA announced a new innovative service to address the emerging need for design thinking in organizations. The press release names Chris Pacione as the new director of advanced development education. In other words Pacione will lead a new venture to help firms integrate design thinking and improve the design literacy of their workforce. According to MAYA’s CEO “people can learn how to think like designers.” I learned that MAYA offers a three-day boot camp in human-centered design methodologies. Sounds like a program I’d really like to attend.

Now, how do we get Pacione to a library conference so we can learn to leverage design – which Pacione describes as “the discipline of bringing about intentional change through the making of “some thing” – in our library organizations?

Simplicity/Complexity

Misguided Thoughts About Simplicity

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Designing a better library also means designing better library systems. If our search systems are broken then that reflects badly on the rest of our operations and results in a degraded user experience. For many individuals their only interaction with the library may be through the online library catalog, the website or a specific electronic database from EBSCO or ProQuest. Even though the latter may be commercial products over which the library has no design control, they must still be considered a part of our total user experience.

I have written previously here and here about the challenges of bringing simplicity to library systems for research tasks that almost always involve some degree of complexity. For example, all of the incoming freshmen at my university take a course in which they write several research papers. One requires them to compare the media treatment of two individuals, possibly celebrities or politicians, across different countries or time periods. This is not simple. It requires a variety of knowlege at multiples levels. Yes, I’m sure the students would like to instantly find articles from which they could gather and synthesize information into an essay, but it just doesn’t work that way. Some critical thinking, some actual searching of library systems and some analysis is involved. For freshman accustomed to webpage/wikipedia cut and paste jobs, this complexity can be a rude awakening.

It is easy for librarians to acknowledge that our search systems must be simpler and easier to use. It’s an almost no-brainer type of statement, and one sees this all the time in librarian blogs and in the library literature. I’ve probably said it myself. But saying it needs to happen and actually making it happen are two different things. Even if we could simplify all of our systems would that be the right outcome? According to Don Norman, the design expert, simplicity is not necessarily the right answer or the goal. He writes:

I conclude the entire argument between features and simplicity is misguided. People might very well desire more capability and ease of use, but do not equate this to more features or to simplicity. What people want is usable devices, which translates into understandable ones. The world is complex, and so too must be the activities that we perform. But that doesn’t mean that we must live in continual frustration. No. The whole point of human-centered design is to tame complexity.

What is Norman’s solution to the simplicity-complexity conundrum? Design, of course. He states that “complexity can be managed”. I agree. He mentions that three simple design principles must be followed: (1) use modularization to take an activity and divide it into small, manageable modules; (2) mapping in order to make sure the relationship between actions and results is apparent and understood; (3) provide an understandable, cohesive conceptual model. So where does this leave librarians? What if Norman’s three priciples, particularly modularization, could be adopted for commercial database projects – and it follow more of a step-by-step approach – modularizing the search process.

Assuming the user has a reasonably well thought out search approach I envision five modules for completing a search. The modules are simple and guide the user through the process. They are:

  • Search
  • Review
  • Revise
  • Cite
  • Get/Share

    • The interface would be more user friendly and intuitive, prompting the user through each module. This might work by presenting the user with a screen for a basic search. Norman points out the importance of meeting the individual’s need to feel in control of the device. Prompts could be constructed to keep the system understandable yet allow the user to make decisions that provide that feeling of control. As each module is completed Norman would also say that a feeling of accomplishment must be delivered. I could see possibilities for that as the user moves through each module. Normal also says that the system requires “continual, informative feedback that can be pleasurable” and mentions Apple products as examples. One area where current library research products fail their users is they lack the design for letting users know where things are going wrong and what to do about it. This requires designing in expectations about problems users will encounter, and suggestions for how to improve search performance. Perhaps that requires some sort of sophisticated back end programming that isn’t available just yet.

    While there are no exact answers here, one thing that should inform our thinking is that by stating library research tools need to be simpler we get no closer to making that happen. It’s a nice idea, but I agree with Norman that the focus should be on making the systems usable and understandable, and that design can help manage the inherent complexity of these tools. Norman also mentions that tools should also be enjoyable. While that’s a nice goal – and it certainly would be desirable to have library users looking forward to doing their research – I’m not anticipating that we can make the process a joy to experience any time soon. I do know that students and faculty who are passionate about their reseach are often passionate about the library research process. They don’t see it as a necessary evil, but rather as an exciting discovery experience. How do we tap into that passion, and exploit it for the majority of our users? That’s a subject for another post.

    User Experiences

    Service Design Vs. Experience Design

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    I previously stated that customer service is not that same as a user experience, and gave some reasons why user experience goes beyond the concept of customer experience. Innovation Playground is a blog I’ve been directed to a few times recently, and Idris Mootee offers some pretty interesting discussions about experiences and designing them. In a recent post Mootee explains what he sees as the relationship between service design and experience design. Are they one and the same? It’s not all that clear, but I think I get his point.

    Service is a key part of the customer experience, and Mootee asks the question: can a service or experience be designed. He provides some examples of firms that have developed the “service journey”. The journey: consists of numerous touchpoints between the customer and the organization; these touchpoints need to be carefully design and managed; each touchpoint has a potential for innovation. Ultimately Mootee concludes that “you can design a service but you cannot design an experience.” I had to re-read that section a few times because I’m apt to disagree with it – you can design an experience – it must be designed.

    Mootee connects the two when he says that “service designers can only stage or create favorable conditions for great customer services to happen.” The post is a reminder that a great library experience has to incorporate the totality of the organization. It points out that you can do three things right but get one wrong and you’ve greatly reduced or eliminated the possibility for delivering a great experience. Service design may certainly set the conditions for a great library user experience, but it’s the design of the experience that can ultimately determine what happens at the service touchpoints and how the service is delivered.

    Creativity & Innovation

    Innovation Means Change And That’s Not Popular

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    My last post about Procter & Gamble and their Design Thinking Initiative was largely about change. If the people involved in the Initiative were resistant to change it would never happen. And that’s what sometimes, maybe frequently, happens in libraries. Resistance to change is a surefire innovation killer. Likewise, organizations can thwart innovation and change with questionable tactics. An article from the July 2008 issue of University Business titled “Stifling Initiative” provides 10 simple rules for crushing innovation and maintain a culture of inertia. Here are those 10 rules in summary format:

    1. Request a formal written proposal – make the innovator meet as many administrative requirements as possible

    2. Send the proposal to a committee – this ought to make it take as long as possible to get a show of support for an idea

    3. Schedule meetings to discuss the concept – it’s important to make sure all the key players are involved in the decision

    4. Lose the proposal – another stalling tactic to avoid making a decision on the proposal

    5. No money for that project – “This is a great idea…but…there’s no money for it”

    6. Have you talked to…about this – put the innovator on the bureaucracy merry-go-round

    7. We don’t, haven’t, won’t, can’t… – just be completely inflexible

    8. Sounds exciting but give more detail – a good tactic for wearing down the innovator

    9. Yes, but – there’s always a catch and it’s usually not a good one

    10. Go Nancy Reagan and just say no – the ultimate power play to stop innovation

    There are abundant ways to destroy the spirit of innovation in an individual or an organization. This article provides a reminder that it’s not that difficult to find ways to make it happen.

    Design Thinking

    Shifting To A Design Thinking Culture

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    It can be a challenge to communicate what the design thinking process is and the benefits to be gained from implementing or using it in an organization. So imagine an initiative to shift the entire culture of a large industrial corporation to a design thinking mentality. It sounds nearly impossible, right? Well that is exactly what Procter & Gamble accomplished over the last few years. An article in Business Week profiles how P&G “changed it’s game”. If you are comtemplating how design thinking could be used to transform the work and innovation processes in your library, read up on P&G’s Design Thinking Initiative.

    Now it’s true that P&G applied some considerable resources to this Initiative. For example, they’ve conducted over 40 design thinking workshops using over 100 internal facilitators. They also brought in design thinking gurus like Roger Martin from the Rotman School of Management and David Kelley of IDEO and the founder of Stanford’s D.School to help them develop and prototype their workshops. But there are some things that P&G has learned and developed that could be of help to other less well-resourced organizations – like your library.

    One goal of any transition to a design thinking organization is to teach leaders to use it to reframe their problems. Here is how the change in approach at P&G is described:

    “The analytical process we typically use to do our work—understand the problem and alternatives; develop several ideas; and do a final external check with the customer—gets flipped. Instead, design thinking methods instruct: There’s an opportunity somewhere in this neighborhood; use a broader consumer context to inform the opportunity; brainstorm a large quantity of fresh ideas; and co-create and iterate using low-resolution prototypes with that consumer.”

    As an example of this reframing, for one of their personal care product lines the emphasis changed from telling the consumer why the product was right for them to creating a web-based interactive consultation that engages the consumer through a series of questions that allows consumers to identify, on their own, which P&G product is the right one for their specific needs. It is based on an empathic design process. Through the use of design thinking P&G employees are encouraged to work in groups to brainstorm new ideas and they are using much more rapid prototyping of products to learn what works and what doesn’t. Another key to the transformation process is that it must involve the entire organization which is why P&G is approached this as an immersion process. It seems like an enormous effort, and I don’t doubt it is. But this quote provides some insight into the benefits the company is gaining from its Design Thinking Initiative:

    “Design thinking activates both sides of the brain—it makes participants more creative, more empathetic toward the human condition P&G consumers face. Our managers don’t leave their analytical minds at home; instead they are able to operate with their whole brain, not just the left hemisphere.”

    What library couldn’t benefit from a more creative workforce? Though the article doesn’t come right out and say it I see a company that is going through a transformation that allows it, through the design thinking of its workers, to ultimately give their customers a better user experience with their products. To me that sounds like the effort required to shift to a design thinking culture is well worth the effort.

    User Experiences

    Knowing The Mind Of The User

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    Librarians engage in endless dicussion about what we can do to make our organizations successful, and by success we mean achieving a high level of relevance to our user community. Do they care about us and the services we offer? Do we add meaning to their work and lives? Although we largely lack the tools to measure success on these terms, beyond the basic satisfaction survey, our motivation for change is to move in the right direction on the road to success. Marginalization. Obsolescence. We do know the signposts of failure.

    In our search for that elusive formula for library success, I found some ideas worth contemplating in a blog post over at Branding Strategy Insider. Jack Trout, in writing about the relationship between strategy, positioning and success, writes that we all know it’s important to have the right people, the right tools, the right attitude and the right role models. We hear this all the time. But Trout points out that it’s the right strategy that makes the difference. But even the right strategy can fail without good positioning.

    Positioning, he writes, “is how you differentiate yourself in the mind of your prospect”. That really fits in with past discussions here of user experience. It is about being different in the mind of the user. In a world with increasing information options and competition, libraries must differentiate themselves. There are five elements to the positioning process, and they all require us to really understand the minds of our regular and potential library users:

    1. Minds are limited and will only allow information that is new and different to compute – but even then only if it relates to old information (sounds familiar to stage three of Gagne’s nine points of instruction).

    2. Minds hate confusion so keep it simple. We are already familiar with the simplicity-complexity conundrum with which librarians must cope.

    3. Minds are emotional not rational so taking advantage of the “bandwagon” effect and word of mouth can be critical to gaining new users. More good reasons to study the findings of Dan Ariely.

    4. Minds are more comfortable with what they already know than with what’s new. That sounds like our greatest challenge. How do we get a generation of minds raised on Google and now, Wikipedia, to get out of that comfort zone and into a whole lot of new library resources? We must learn to differentiate them and make clear what value we add to the proposition of learning something new.

    5. Minds have trouble dealing with choice and variation. Another huge challenge for us because we offer dozens of variations of information products and overwhelming numbers of features. How do we turn this from a weakness to a strength?

    As you form your library’s strategy and decide how best to position what you do and offer, it seems wise to keep in mind these five important points about the workings of the mind. Trout provides a final reminder that should give all librarians something to think about – the importance of focus and specialization. I suspect that many of us are trying to do too many things, provide too many services and to trying to excel at all of them. Perhaps an important part of any position we take must be to identify what we do well – and to get better at it – and to figure out what we need to stop doing. Not an amazingly original thought, but one well worth remembering.

    Creativity & Innovation

    Taking The Slow But Steady Path To That “Aha” Moment

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    One of my favorite moments in The Deep Dive, the 1999 Nightline segment on IDEO and their design thinking process, is when they discuss the myth of the lone creative genius. Though we often imagine that great ideas and innovations come from a sole, highly creative person who gets his or her ideas in flashes of brillance, that is rarely how innovation happens.  That’s why this article, “Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work“, captured my attention. It echoes this theme of innovation, not as a magic moment, but rather the end product of a team of creative workers putting in many hours to finally reach the point where a form of innovation occurs. The author, Janet Rae-Depree writes:

    As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Innovators and other creative types, we believe, stand apart from the crowd, wielding secrets and magical talents beyond the rest of us. Balderdash. Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

    What librarians trying to design better libraries need to take away from this article is that there are no quick fixes or overnight solutions to perplexing problems. It’s possible, but highly unlikely that a librarian will suddently devise a great solution that offers a new innovation. Instead we need to put into place a process that will accumulate the needed information and ideas so that library workers work towards change, be it innovative or otherwise. To support this process library administrators should consider allowing library workers a segment of weekly time to get “Kept-Up” by reading magazines, listening to podcasts watching great lectures on YouTube. Some time away from e-mail, IM and tweets can allow us to collect our thoughts and reflect on understanding the depth of our problems. Those may be the best moments for organizational innovation. In fact, this article discusses the negative impact that e-mail overload, and other electronic distractions, can have on creativity.

    It is possible to achieve good results by taking time to be thoughtful. Steve Erhmann, of the TLT Group, recently wrote about “ the idea of “Watching the Donut, Not the Hole”” in which he speaks to the merits of avoiding the fast technology solution, opting instead for the slower but better designed implementation process. He writes:

    Our approaches to faculty support and course improvement, to cost modeling and time-saving, and to formative evaluation all focus on helping educators and institutions improve teaching/learning activities over time: small steps and, ultimately, larger changes.

    I find that one of the key character traits of a good librarian is patience. Whether answering a reference question, connecting with students in an instruction session or working one’s way through a complex cataloging assignment, our work requires us to thoughtfully work through problems and situations in order to find the right solution. We need to realize there are no quick fixes in our profession, and that those “Aha” moments are often the result of many hours of thought and reflection. That’s where our patience may prove a powerful asset. That said I know that some newer to the profession librarians would like to make their mark and be discovered quickly. I’ve advocated the slow but steady approach before. Seems like Rae-Dupree’s article provides some support to my way of thinking.