It’s been a while since Confluence, Carnegie Mellon’s job conference for designers, where we foolishly fearlessly set out to design a service in one day and, defying all odds, actually pulled it off.

Well, we decided to revisit the concept and give it a name + obligatory promotional PDF (mostly because we felt like playing with InDesign). So without further ado, Pink* is proud to present: Confetti!

First, what is it? Well it’s a research method for designers used at Pink* developed by Shelley Evenson at Carnegie Mellon. From her article “Directed Storytelling: Interpreting Experience for Design”, it is a method “useful for helping teams get to the three to five most significant ideas or themes that are central to an experience.” And is useful when time or budget are limited. Considering we wanted to understand the Confluence experience in 2 hours, and we had zero budget, this method seemed like a good fit.

The nuts and bolts are fairly simple (for an in depth look at how to do it, google that article). Basically you have a design researcher and a participant. The design researcher will start the conversation with an opening question like “Tell me a story about last year’s Confluence.” The participant will tell an anecdotal story, and the researcher will guide the story to uncover the who, what, when, why, where, and how of the story. By asking such an open ended question, the answers will obviously vary a lot and may seem off topic, but that’s great. One strength of this method is that you aren’t looking for a specific answer to a specific question. By asking for a story, you are asking the participant what was salient or important in that experience. Doing this onsite is great too, as it helps jog the participant’s memory. Asking to use props is also great. The more involved the storyteller, the more depth the story will have.

As you collect data about the experience, in our case Confluence, you write down each idea, concept or salient point in time on a sticky, like we did. Then you put the stickies up on a white board and move them around, clustering them into themes. It’s hard to see here, but we separated the stickies into different points of interaction: students interacting with employers was a theme, along with students interacting with other students, and students interacting with the school, the physical environment, and so on.

The results of this method vary, but it’s great for getting consensus within a design group and getting to a few major themes of an experience quickly. During Confluence, once we arrived at the themes, we used it to narrow down our focus in the project from Confluence, to helping students interact with employers, and with a little designerly nudge, to helping students interact in a more humanistic way with employers who don’t make it to Confluence. After you get the themes it’s really up to you to decide how to deal with that information, but if you want some quick and dirty results, look for that article (I’ll try and find it and link it) and try out Directed Storytelling for yourself.

Rant

So that’s the nuts and bolts of the process with a little example thrown in for good measure. I was going to talk about the history of the method and how it’s mainly derived from ethnography and Contextual Inquiry but figured you could read about that somewhere else. Instead of giving you some research paper about it, I figured this space could be used for me to talk about whatever I want… within the space of Directed Storytelling of course.

So this post has brought up something I learned from Shelley Evenson. She told me “designers are fakers.” Sometimes she says things that are so fundamentally true, that the statements cannot be refuted, and this is one of them. She didn’t mean to say it in a negative way, what she meant was really that we are great at faking. To design is to create, and creation is fundamentally in that space of imitation and innovation. When we design for pregnant women, we put on “fat suits” and are fake pregnant women. When we want to create a new type of cell phone, we make a fake cell phone out of cardboard and foam. To me, Directed Storytelling is fake ethnography and fake Contextual Inquiry (CI), and that is where it’s strengths and weaknesses are as a method.

Contextual Inquiry is rigid. When you get all those stickies in a CI you put them into clusters, but each cluster has to have no more than four stickies. You then cluster those clusters and so on creating a hierarchy, but that hierarchy can be no deeper than four levels. Coming from Human-Computer Interaction, I am all too familiar with the CI process, but sometimes I’ve got a cluster that has 5 stickies, you feel me?

The strength of Directed Storytelling is in the adaptability to different situations. It’s in taking the general and applying it to the specific. But the disadvantage in my opinion is that the looser the method, the harder it is to get better and refine that method. Directed Storytelling is also fake ethnography. In the most abstract sense, Ethnographers are relativists at their core, and realize that the information gathered should never be handled outside of context. Designers on the other hand can take a more positivist approach (read). What this means concretely is that its harder for a designer to go out and do research with a completely clear slate. Even with our casual Directed Storytelling for Confluence, I definitely felt like we asked questions which could have been more open, less leading.

We are designers, we look for answers, and it’s hard to start looking for perspective and individual truth in place of a solid answer. What we found was a general experience of Confluence, and we also found out what some of those findings might mean to the people doing the experiencing, but we did not find out what those meanings meant. In other words, there was a level of depth that we could not penetrate beneath mostly because of the time constraint, but also because in the spectrum of observer to participant, designers are always a bit closer to the observer than an ethnographer.

And because of where we stand within that spectrum, there are two “sub-reasons” that our insight is limited. First, because of our perception of the participant. To allow yourself to be completely relativist, to see and understand and more importantly believe views of the world which are unlike yours, is a true talent that ethnographers have developed far more than designers, and the second because of the way the participant views us, still as outsiders.

So I would say that Directed Storytelling is fake ethnography, because true ethnography is not just a set of methods, but also a philosophy and a perspective, and you can tell when someone is just going through the motions.

So just to repeat, designers are fakers. It’s not a bad thing or a good thing, it’s just a thing. The lesson to be learned is for many occasions, faking it is good enough, but in some instances, faking it is just not good enough.

5:30p - 6:00p

Our service essentially developed out of a lack of west coast companies at Confluence. We figured if Carnegie Mellon couldn’t get those companies to come to Pittsburgh, why not take a cue from what students were doing outside of Confluence and send them, the students, to the west coast. With that in mind, our service was designed around three themes:

1) turn logistical problems into assets;

2) reverse their roles: student as interviewer, company as prospective employer;

3) create a venue for real conversation.

Turning Logistical Problems into Assets

Our research showed that many students were traveling to interview with companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, sometimes 4 or 5 times in a single semester. Even though these companies tend to cover travel expenses, this amount of travel takes a huge toll on the students’ school work.

We saw that a few resourceful students organized a group trip to California to connect with several companies at once. The problem with their ad hoc field trip, however, was that they had to take care of every detail themselves: coordinating with each company, arranging for group rates on flights and hotels, collecting money, and as more people got involved, the trip became almost impossible to manage.

This is completely backwards.

Instead of thinking of California as a barrier to connecting students with employers, why not think of it as an asset? I mean… it’s California.

Our field trip service aims to bring back the fun of going to a new place and reduce the headaches associated with planning and coordinating the trip. Instead of shopping for tickets, organizing group rides to the airport, and calling to setup interviews, our service lets students sign up, choose the companies they’re interested in, and watch the attendance go up as the price of the trip goes down, letting someone else worry about everything else. And the more top design students we have going on these trips, the more we can expect companies out west or in other countries to pay attention and subsidize the service as a serious way of finding new talent.

Student as Interviewer, Company as Prospective Employer

Another advantage of the field trip model is that students get a better perspective on what these companies are actually about. Instead of meeting two people from HR or a particular design group within the company, why not meet the people that might actually be on your team? Why not visit the city and get a good sense of corporate culture instead of asking someone on the other side of a folding table to try and describe San Francisco and what it’s like to work at Google, all within a seven-minute time span.

Creating a Venue for Real Conversation

And finally, what we at Pink* are really excited about is using this service as a platform for real conversation. If we had blindly followed our research, we would have ended up improving or redesigning TartanTrak. While we believe that incremental improvements in efficiency can relieve tension, it could never make for a meaningful experience.

Our service aims to get students and employers interacting away from the booths at a conference, away from the suits and resumes and portfolios. It aims to tap into the School of Design alumni who can act as leads within hiring companies to interact with students not only during interviews but over beers, on the town.

It’s a refreshing concept.

One student suggested online dating as a model for the hiring practice, but we want to bring it back – bring it back to analog. Getting a job and hiring for a position are a lot like dating, and using the online dating model could be a great way to get companies and students to learn about each other. And without qualification at all, I’d say some people do fall in love over the phone or over the internet, but for the rest of us, the thing that makes us love another person or place or job has nothing to do with stats or pictures or descriptions. It has everything to do with that which can’t be related through pixels and text. It’s the smell, the flavor, the vibe of a place.

And essentially, that’s what we’re bringing back to the hiring process.

4:00p - 5:30p

This is what we do best.

And it all happened quite organically. Students returned with sticky notes full of fresh ideas for how to improve Career Center resources and aspects of the Confluence experience, ideas that were still valuable despite our decision to deliberately focus on the creation of a new service.

One suggested looking at online dating as a model for job search services. One suggested leveraging relationships with alumni. And students passing by our booth had brainstorming sessions of their own; I jumped in on one where a senior designer and junior engineer discussed a concept that enabled students to attend job conferences in a virtual environment a la Second Life and the Sims.

We tend to give ourselves plenty of time to draw from our inspirations and influences, reserving judgement until we’ve exhausted our imaginations. Ultimately we saw great potential in an idea based on the concept of a “field trip”. Remember those?

After validating the concept with a senior design student, we shifted our focus to flushing out the details and developing a model to illustrate how the service would work.

3:00p - 4:00p

Next step, understand the research.

We transferred each bit of data from our directed storytelling sessions to sticky notes, then arranged and rearranged them at the whiteboard using several conceptual models, each yielding a unique set of insights.

Arranging the data according to the academic timeline of an undergraduate student revealed that Confluence and the job search become salient their junior year. It’s at that point we see a need for job experience on their resumé, a portfolio that showcases unique projects, and the ability to speak confidently with prospective employers. Conversely, we see a lack of salience prior to their junior year, a period of time that could be leveraged to fulfill those needs.

Rearranging the data according to relationships and the four orders of design, we uncovered four distinct potential focus areas:

a) redesigning the Career Center resources to support the specific needs of students applying for design-related opportunities;

b) redesigning aspects of Confluence to optimize the experience for designers with regard to their specific set of needs and expectations;

c) designing a service that supports and enables peer-to-peer collaboration, such as resumé and portfolio design, peer reviews, and critiques; and,

d) designing a service that connects students with employers, alumni, and university resources to support them in their job search.

We considered the suggestions and feedback from people passing by our booth, but despite their overwhelming desire for us to redesign aspects of Confluence and Career Center resources, we decided it would be best to focus on the creation of a new service.

Photos from our stationary camera.

1:00p - 3:00p

We traveled back to the barn to gather supplies (e.g. whiteboards, markers, etc.) for the main event. We also printed out a tag cloud of all the resumés submitted by students, and photos from our research phase that morning. We wanted to recreate our studio space at the conference, to have all of the research data, inspirational images, photographs, and the monolithic whiteboard space that we’re used to working with, there at our booth.

I wish we had pictures of us trying to carry those whiteboards into the building. Let it suffice to say that we were quite the spectacle carrying 2 x 100 lb whiteboards that are 8′ tall x 4′ wide, through several doors, into an elevator, past a dining area, and finally, to our booth.

There were many laughs, and possible worker’s compensation claims.

12:00p - 1:00p

Yeah, we’re human. And social beings. And we’re at a design conference.

Naturally we spent the lunch hour eating (tacos), but more importantly, catching up with old friends and making new ones. And I stole the show when my taco spontaneously burst and spilled the meat. But nobody saw that, right?

10:00a - 12:00p

We began our project in the halls of Margaret Morrison, home of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design. Sophomore communication designers, junior and senior industrial designers, and a graduate student in product development participated in directed storytelling sessions where they described salient moments from the job search, preparing for Confluence, and working with Career Center resources.

After each session, we handed out cards with sticky notes and asked that students write one idea inspired by their (unique) Oblique Strategy. Example Oblique Strategies* included:

Change ambiguities to specifics.
Humanize something that is free of error.
Emphasize the flaws.
Water.

*Oblique Strategies were created by Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt
 

Directed storytelling with a senior industrial design student at Carnegie Mellon.

Career Center resources for students preparing resumés and portfolios.  

Junior communication designers during the open studio session of Confluence.

A very special thanks to everyone who participated! If you didn’t provide your contact information, please email steve (at) pinkservicedesign.com and remind me of our conversation. We definitely want to include everyone in our project documentation, you deserve it.

What follows will be a series of posts on how it all went down. We’ll spend a significant amount of time elaborating on all aspects of the project, with new posts every few days, so stay tuned.

On the sticky note, please write either:

a) something anecdotal about your job search experience, or
b) an idea inspired by the oblique strategy written on your card, with regard to Confluence.