design thinking

Intelligences

Believe in A.I.: Will You Pray for a Chatbot?

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ANDRE TORALES PechaKucha Presentation Automation and Artificial Intelligence are defying the status quo making us rethink our jobs, our relations and, philosophically, our lives purpose. This emerging trend will affect every aspect of our lives: economically, cultural and socially speaking. If you think that Ethnographic Research is a safe harbor from all these changes, because it is so human and qualitative, you may be wrong. In this Pecha-Kucha, I want to share a story that I, as a researcher, in face of users’ pain points bigger than which button to click on an App, thought about products and services to help people using design thinking. During this side-quest, I’ve faced a lot of challenges and found the answer in developing a chatbot, characterized as a Virtual God, to help people and give advice for better lives. People would tell their problems to a chatbot? People would rely on the chatbot, powered by artificial intelligence, advice, and readings? People would truly believe in the chatbot to make their wishes come...

Perspectives

Ethnographic Thinking, from Method to Mindset

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a book review by DAVID RUBELI Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset Jay Hasbrouck 2018, 120 pp, Routledge I’ve been reading Jay Hasbrouck’s Ethnographic Thinking this spring, sneaking its pages into gaps in my daily routines. It’s part of my longer-term project of reading across the fields of service design, design anthropology, and applied research over the last few years. I’m doing this reading survey at a time when practices, fields, and disciplines are converging, when design thinking, service design, and innovation are democratizing or—depending on your perspective—reifying and commodifying professions and practices that were once the domains of specialist practitioners. Interdisciplinary groups and teams within and among organizations are being assembled to tackle complex corporate and societal challenges. And these assemblages bring together constellations of stakeholders from industry, government, and other sponsoring organizations. In workplaces, labs and think tanks, there’s a growing...

Perspectives

Scaling Empathy through IBM Design Research

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by CHRIS HAMMOND and JESYKA PALMER, IBM Design Research As consultants we practiced the basics of design thinking and user centered design for years with a range of organizations. However, upon joining IBM and learning to apply the IBM Design Thinking mindset, we both realized this way of working differed from our past experiences. This difference is largely expressed by the addition of “the Keys” or IBM’s way to scale design within a large, geographically disparate organization. As researchers and strategists, the most resonate Key is Sponsor Users. A real challenge for enterprise and healthcare programs is access to users and their environment—rarely can you approach a hospital and ask if you can walk into an operating room with cameras and notepads in hand. In the healthcare space, we overcame the challenge by creating partnerships with clinicians and hospitals. These relationships brought clinicians onto our teams and closed the expertise gap. Clinicians shared with us a day in their lives and showed us their struggles...

Perspectives

What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and (Empathic) Understanding

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by JOHN PAYNE, Moment In the early 1970s, Nick Lowe wrote a song from the perspective of an old hippie character. This character laments change as he witnesses the cultural pendulum swing from the peace and love 60s into the hard-edged 70s. It’s not clear whether Lowe—or Elvis Costello, who later recorded the song—intended a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the character or a straight-forward critique of the times. But in the years since, “What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding” has become a sort of call to action—an anthem to lost empathy. As I walk through This wicked world Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity I ask myself Is all hope lost? Is there only pain and hatred, and misery? When I read the increasingly frequent criticisms of empathy, that same cultural pendulum comes to mind. Yale Professor Paul Bloom, the architect of much of the recent anti-empathy opinion, has written critically of empathy for several years. His thesis: Empathy is a “parochial, narrow-minded” emotion that misleads...