Pink* at Confluence

Designing the Service

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.

Imagining the Possibilities

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.

At the Whiteboard

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.

Back at the Barn

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.

The Lunch Phase

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?

The Research Phase

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.

We designed a service in one day.

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.

If you’re attending the conference, we’ll be handing out cards with sticky notes attached. Everyone who returns their sticky note to our booth between 3pm - 6pm will have their names added to our project documentation as participants (here’s your chance at immortality).

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.

Wait, what?

Yeah, it sounds crazy. Who knows what we’ll come up with. But this is an exploration of the design process and its possibilities, finding opportunity in uncertainty.

We’re setting out to design a service that is in line with the goals of Confluence, specifically for students in search of jobs in an economic environment riddled with uncertainty.

Our venue, Confluence 2009. The day, Thursday February 19th.

Giving back to our Alma Mater.

We see Confluence as an opportunity to better understand the dynamic between students in search of their dream job, employers in search of new talent, and universities seeking to unite the two.

With more resumés submitted for Confluence than jobs posted by employers attending the event, it’s clear that we’ve got a problem here worth addressing.

So to give back to the community that helped us get where we are, we have tasked ourselves with designing a service that supports students during this time of uncertainty, and developing the resulting service into something that can be offered to future generations.

Designing for the students, with the students.

We’re used to having a lot more time for this sort of thing, but let’s face it, the challenge is exciting. We’ve tweaked our design process to make up for the time constraint and came up with a way to engage students during both the research and brainstorming phases.

This blog will document our process, from initial research to final concept.

Stay tuned.

A unique opportunity.

Attending Confluence 2009 as an employer means you’re looking to recruit the best and brightest from one of the nation’s top design schools. At least that’s one reason we’re going.

Pink* is interested in both graduating and non-graduating students in graphic design, communication design, and interaction design programs for part-time contracted work sometime between March - August 2009.

We will not be reviewing portfolios or resumes on Thursday, but we have open slots on Friday for interviews.

An unconventional method.

We’re looking for unique individuals who are ready to step up to the white board and do some serious design thinking. Come by our booth on Thursday and join in the action. If you like how we work, and the feeling is mutual, consider yourself invited for an interview.

Questions?

Email me at steve (at) pinkservicedesign.com and I’ll be happy to answer questions.

For more details about what we’re doing at Confluence 2009, keep reading the blog.