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The Future is Life-Centered - Jane Fulton Suri, IDEO Mixed Methods Download Today’s guest, Jane Fulton Suri, always seems to be looking at the world in a new way and helping others to as well. She is currently a Partner Emeritus at IDEO, where she has been working since the late 80s in a number of different roles, including Chief Creative Officer and Executive Design Director. Jane is an expert observer and has a way of approaching each project with a voracious curiosity that has been inspiring the research world for decades. She is unequivocally one of the founders of the field of design research, a psychologist by training, who pioneered the idea that observing behavior and bringing principles of psychology into a design context could create a more human centered world. Listen to this episode to find out more about Jane’s path and her passion for not only Human-Centered Design, but something she is now calling Life-Centered Design. Listen Now Interview TranscriptAryel: Welcome to this week’s episode of Mixed Methods and the third in our series about the future of UX research.As you’ll soon notice, I didn’t host today’s conversation myself. Nadia Surtees a talented design researcher and friend did. Mixed Methods at its heart has always been about building community around research and what better way to show that than to include as many voices in the conversation as possible. So today is a first, but hopefully not a last. Here’s this week’s show:Jane: I'd always thought about human beings as living beings, part of nature, not separate, personally. I began to want to talk about the opportunity to think of ourselves not just about human and human culture, but ourselves within a broader system, a broader ecosystem of other living things of which we are apart.Aryel: Ever since I became a researcher, I’ve loved the work of today’s guest Jane Fulton Suri. She always seems to be looking at the world in a new way and helping others to as well. She is an expert observer and has a way of approaching each project with a voracious curiosity, I find so inspiring. Jane is unequivocally one of the founders of the field of design research, a psychologist by training, who pioneered the idea that observing behavior and bringing principles of psychology into a design context could create a more human centered world. I struggled with what to call this episode because Jane and Nadia managed to pack so much wisdom and insight into such a small amount of time from how to inspire and inform your team to how biomimicry and the circular economy will change the future. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation as much as I did.This is Aryel Cianflone and you're listening to Mixed Methods. Today's episode, The Future is Life-Centered.Today’s episode is brought to you by dscout, a platform that makes qualitative research fun again. From recruitment, project design, to interviews, you'll get that feeling that got you interested in user-centered work in the first place. Capture remote insights that spark your next big “a-ha!” moment. Check out dscout.com/mm to get startedNadia: Jane, you're a psychologist by training. What inspired you to bring these philosophies and practices into the design world?Jane: Yes, that was a long time ago, remembering back to being a psychologist. I think the thing that really got me excited about psychology was the application to everyday life. There are lots of branches of psychology that look at different things like education or, say, mental health. But I was just fascinated by people's behavior and the relationships that they had with stuff in everyday life. I wanted to understand more about that, and find ways that we could apply understanding to the things we make and the spaces we create and the services we provide. I just felt there was a big unmet opportunity to apply what seemed to be fairly academic and distant to everyday life.Nadia: How did you get started with IDEO, and I believe it was ID2 back in the time that you began?Jane: It was, yes. It was a lucky find for me. I had for many years, been struggling a little bit to find how to ... The idea of application of psychology, how do I get to meet the right people in order to do that? I started out working on finding things that had gone wrong. I had a job with a research institute that was basically troubleshooting mismatches between people and the stuff that was being designed, and mismatches meaning companies were discovering nobody knew how to use their product or they were having accidents with the product. I would go in and explain why, which was usually some sort of design assumption that had been made that was faulty.I was coming from a place of, "Oh boy, it's too late. I need to get with designers when they're making decisions about things." So I knocked on doors of design companies for many years, and I did some early teaching on design courses, thinking, "Well, talking to students as they're becoming designers and helping them think about people a bit more deeply might be a useful way in." All of that was useful. But it was only when I had this almost chance meeting with Bill Moggridge, who was the founder of ID2 at that time.I was staying in San Francisco, and a friend of mine said, "You should meet this guy. He's a designer and he thinks about people." So I went to meet him, and we just had an amazing conversation, and it ended up with him asking me, "What would you like to happen as an outcome of this?" I said, "I'd like you to offer me a job," which was very unlike me to just come out with something like that, but that's what happened. He said, "Well, let's see what we can do about it," and that's what we did about it.Even then, in the early days, I had to meet everybody, I had to meet everybody in the studio in San Francisco, and of course being British, I was on a visa, short-term visa, and I had to meet everybody in the UK office. I just loved everybody. There was obviously really good chemistry, and I wanted to continue living in San Francisco and not go to London because I knew what working in Britain was like. Not that it was bad, but it was a special time back then of a new technology that was beginning to take hold, basically personal computing, and of course, San Francisco and Silicon Valley was ahead of the UK at that time, especially in a ... well, Silicon Valley, just being where it was all happening creatively.I'd had the experience in London, I think, of failing to get people excited about the idea that I had. It seemed like a moment, in what was happening around Silicon Valley, including San Francisco, to be involved in those conversations because it was clearly something that companies were asking themselves, "This is a new thing. How are people going to work with this, and what should we call it, and how should we do it?" There were lots of firsts of happening, and a lot of uncertainty about how to design things. Yeah. In the UK, one of the phrases that I'd got used to hearing was, "Well, we've always done it this way. There's nothing wrong with what we're doing," and maybe some reluctance to think afresh, and it was inevitable in San Francisco. That was my thinking.Nadia: You just brought up a really interesting point about how do you get people excited about design, and for me, what's really striking about your approach is how you've infused inspiration into design. How did you begin with thinking about how to bring inspiration into the design process?Jane: I think I learned about that pretty swiftly, because ... I mean, even going through the interview process with Bill and meeting all the designers, I became aware of the responses that were excited and seeing possibility and seeing opportunity in things that I was talking about. I told them about my experience, and about things going wrong, and of course, they could see why things had worked out the way they had worked out. I could see the excitement that certain kinds of stories I would tell about things in the world would meet them where they were, in terms of, I'm a designer so I can do something about it. I can make a decision, I can do it differently.I just learned, from day-to-day interactions with the designers, that certain ways of approaching things would result in action. I think I had come from more of a tradition which was that ... especially, a researcher would come with information, and you would present information, and a long list of points or things to consider or more academic way of rapportage out of the observations or discoveries that we were making. But I found that by working with designers together and making discoveries together, we would own it together and they would feel empowered to act.That's a really important thing in design and innovation, is not just to hear how things are, but for that to be a jumping off point and a point that makes you want to actually do something. That's what I think of inspiration as that, really the thing that makes you ... I guess, the word comes from breathing in, and that gives us power to live and move and use our muscles' energy. That became a phrase, to inspire and inform. It's not just about inspiration, but it needs to be informed. That's become a catch phrase in a way to inspire and inform, or information and inspiration. They have to live together, one feeding the other, and they relate.For me, the idea of inspiration does relate to insight, because I think I mentioned discovering together with the designers. I think that idea of, "Oh wow, I never saw that before," or, "I never thought of it that way," or, "I didn't really interpret it that way." That moment of discovering something that you didn't know before is inspiring, and that, I think, is what an insight is; when something hits you as a new frame or a new piece of information that ... and you have a relationship with it because it makes you want to react, respond.Nadia: The phrase you used before about empowering these designers to act, can you share a story of how a designer who wasn't so familiar with human-centered design, perhaps a designer from a graphic design background, was empowered to act through this process of inspiration?Jane: I remember a very early project was related to the design of a scanner for use in retail, a laser scanner that reads barcodes. The big idea that the client had about this was, it was great because the unit would sit just on an existing counter, so it didn't need to be built in. It was a really easy thing to adapt, and it was very inexpensive because he was using very few lasers, which meant that, when you brought a barcode into its realm, you had to be very careful and specific about where the barcode would show up, otherwise it wouldn't read because it was a bit scarce on laser beams.We spent quite a lot of time understanding the pattern of laser beams and where the place was that these barcodes needed to be introduced and how were we going to communicate that to regular shop people, users, and how could they learn to use it accurately really, really fast? Because right now, it was taking ages to teach them. We all got a bit seduced into ideas that related to how to communicate the sparked, by describing the lines that the laser beam was taking. We did some quick user trials, just inviting people in to try out some of our prototypes.That was always a bit of a struggle with designers, like, "I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready yet." I'd be like, "No, come on. Let's just try because we're going to be spending time investing in this. So we should be checking ideas quickly." Checked the ideas, and then we quickly realized, I too in a way, just through that experience, that we were really focusing on the wrong thing. All the person needed to do was to have guidance to ... We came up with the idea of a target to point at, that might have nothing to do, whatsoever, with the way the things working.But if we did just a little target graphic, it was very clear that you're supposed to match this with the target, and it worked straight away and we just were like, "Well, this is why we show people things and do things with people and look at their behavior, and we don't spend all our time thinking about it in our heads and drawing things on our drawing boards. We'll build it, test it, we learn really quickly. That was a very quick learning for both of us to learn together and see how to reach a conclusion that was incredibly successful.It was so successful that people that we were testing the devices with thought that we were using completely different technology, because they could make one work, the one with the target, and they couldn't make the other one work, which was actually exactly the same, but it wouldn't work.Nadia: Where did you get the inspiration for the target, to place on the scanner to begin with?Jane: The idea of the target would have come, I believe, through a conversation between myself and the designer, when we were talking about, what is it that people need to be successful? They just need a target. A target. Well, there's an idea. Let's try a target. I mean literally. It was used metaphorically or figuratively, originally, the word, but the word, the conversation led to the solution, I think.That's very literal example of the conversation leading to a solution, but I think that actually is core to the idea of collaboration, that the conversation struggling with the what did you see, what did we make of it, how together we're reaching some sort of insight, and then of course trying it out. Then it became really obvious, like, "Why didn't we think of that in the first place?"Nadia: One thing that inspires me about your approach is how you're constantly experimenting with so many new methods to the world, and borrowing from many different disciplines and infusing it into human centered design. How do you have the confidence to weave together so many different methods and continue to experiment?Jane: That's interesting. Is it confidence? It may be confident, it may be desperation. I'm thinking ... I think an important idea there, for me, is trying to get to the root of what I'm trying to learn. In any design challenge, I think I'm trying to unpack what it is that we don't know or where we might learn something that could help us think differently about something that seems intractable, or just we're bored by the challenge and we need to get excited because we need to do this.I think it's a little bit about stepping back to first principles to ask that question, "Where might we learn something interesting, inspiring, new, and who might we involve, and how might we do that?" I'm sure I've done things that didn't really work, and haven't probably talked a lot about those. When you said confidence, I thought, often, we have no idea where the answer is going to be. I would probably be wanting to try several things. It would be more about, "Let's try this, and see if we can learn something." If that isn't fruitful, we would try something else.I think one of the things I've always struggled with is the idea that there is a way to do this. As we've formulated good practices and we've shared with the world ways that design research can weave into a program, it always makes me slightly nervous that we're defining activities to do because, in actuality, we need to create space to allow exploration and failure along the way, and pivoting, reset where we're headed. That can be hard when you've asked somebod…
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