Methodical Carissa Carter
2014-2015 1
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About
Methodical
I’ve made this magazine with myself as the main target audience. These are methods that I evolved primarily through the 2014-2015 academic year and want to remember, synthesize, and iterate on in the future.
Stoke
I built these methods for a few different audiences: pop-ups, full-quarter classes, teaching team design sessions, experience assistant training, executive education workshops, and for guest appearances in the courses of others.
Hyper-coached Needfinding............19
Some of the methods in this magazine are well structured and have been tested multiple times. Others are simple stokes or warm-ups that happened once or twice. Sometimes I have photos and worksheets to show. Other times I only have small sketches. Of course, everything in here is a work of collaboration. In each case I’ve attempted to list everyone that helped develop and/or test the tools on a range of different levels. Carissa Carter carissa@dschool.stanford.edu
Design Thinking Olympics.................19 Using LEGO.......................................22-23
User Research
Synthesis Salad Mapping....................................6-11 The Rainbow.....................................14-15 Empathy Matrix...............................24-25 Image Perspectives.......................28-29
Ideation Inspiration to Activity..........................4-5 Stretch Armstrong.........................16-17
Critique + Reflection Rant Spew Proffer...........................12-13 Round Robin Critique...........................18
Course Design The Final Final.........................................18 Curriculum Flow..............................20-21 Microcourse Design......................26-27
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Inspiration to Activity
Using posters to spark new in-class exercises Inspiration to Activity Explore and describe your inspiration. What catches your eye? Why? What does that make you think of in terms of your course and content?
Part 1: Free association from your chosen postcard to your course content.
In Fall 2014, Ashish mentioned that he’d found a neat book showing Japanese matchbook covers. I was motivated by the idea of those graphics and my own love of art postcards and decided to try using those postcards to Translate this inspiration into an activity or piece of curriculum for your class. inspire curriculum generation. I first tried this When might this activity be used? What scenario? How does it work? Include details about artifacts, space,in time, people, group mechanics, etc. Use the space activity a small meeting and then below as a place to dump ideas on all levels: iterated and ran it during our first teaching teams design session of the year. I’d like to modify it and use it in a classroom setting with students, possibly as an ideation technique. Part 2: Flesh out the details of how one of the above ideas might be used.
Developed or tested with: Ashish Goel, Sarah Stein Greenberg, Alissa Murphy, Erik Olesund, Tania Anaissie. 5
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Salad Mapping From lettuce to verdance
Salad Mapping is my favorite new activity of the 2014-15 academic year. It’s an exercise that introduces the concept of mapping and remapping a data set on a variety of base frameworks to look for patterns and insight. Each student is given a pre-prepared salad. This is their data set. They need to deconstruct this data and then experiment with mapping it on one of the base frameworks shown on the following page: Continuum, Downtown, Amorphous Venn, TwoxTwo, and Scale Shift. Additionally, students browse map books for other frameworks
and experiment with those as well. Students then use the same frameworks to map data (empathy-based or otherwise) as a synthesis tool on their own projects. Developed with: Ashish Goel, and adapted for executives with Kathryn Segovia.. 7
Amorphous Venn Now, map your salad with the Amorpho us Venn diagram below. How might differen t categories combine, overlap, or stand alone?
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Now, look for insight by map ping your salad Each axis should in a Two x Two rep diagram. as well as the data resent two ends of a spectru m. Play around inside the qua with both the drants.
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Rant Spew Proffer Three steps to wisdom Rant
Spew
Proffer
Let it all out. The good. The bad. The crazy. Whether you taught a full quarter class, a pop up or a workshop, how did your teaching go this quarter? Write solo. This is only for you. It doesn’t need to be coherent.
Whew. Now let’s move into sharing with a partner. You might take a second to decide what pieces of your rant to share and jot them down here, but mostly use this time to talk through things that are top of mind with your partner.
Together with your partner, decide on one to three big design principles, learnings, or things you will incorporate into your teaching going forward. Capture one on a post-it gigante.
Part 1: Write it out
In an effort to incorporate more writing into design, I first developed Rant Spew Proffer as a reflection tool for teaching teams at the end of winter quarter. I’ve also used it in Design Thinking Studio. Essentially, it’s a three phase reflection tool. At first, everyone writes (rants) 12
Part 2: Talk it out
Part 3: Offer wisdom
solo about anything and everything they want to reflect upon. Next, they partner up and talk it out with a partner (spew), and finally they take one big learning and offer (proffer) it to everyone on a Post-It Gigante. Developed or tested with: Tania Anaissie, Sarah Stein Greenberg, and Thomas Both.
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The Rainbow
Using nesting to find and keep connection PROTOTYPE POSSIBILITIES Systems
What’s the larger ecosystem that your experience and objects are part of? What systems affect the experiences you are attempting to craft?
Experiences
Record your favorite brainstorm ideas that are complete experiences. Remember the Ax4 of experiences: Atmosphere, Artifact, Activities, Actors
Objects
Capture a range of things you might prototype that are physical artifacts. Remember that more than one physical artifact might be needed to support the experience you are attempting to craft.
As a way for students to understand and address the intersections between objects, experiences, and systems, I like using a rainbow both to have them evolve their concepts as well as express final projects and use as a measure for critique. While students might be designing primarily for only one of the layers, having them address and understand the relationship with the others only strengthens
their work and gives them the ability to talk about it in a more sophisticated fashion. Developed with: Scott Doorley and Tania Anaissie in @Stanford and Thomas Both in Design Thinking Studio. 15
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Stretch Armstrong Amplify along the axes
Inspired by the cornstarch-filled toy of the 1980’s, I first tried this technique in a Fall 2014 teaching teams design session. People worked in pairs and were encouraged to stretch their teaching practice along four directions: collaboration/influence, environment, experiential factor, and time/pacing. You place your current practices towards the center of the diagram and push yourself and your partner to get more and more extreme with what you could try as you move outwards. In the end, partners select things that they think each other
should try and then decide what they’ll put into practice. I’d like to bring this into a student setting as an ideation technique. Developed or tested with: Sarah Stein Greenberg and teaching teams.
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The Final Final
It’s due and then it’s really due.
Round Robin Critique
Allowing your work to speak for itself
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I’m sure many other people do this already, but it’s something that my co-instructors and I worked into our classes in a big way this year. Essentially, we make the students turn in their work in final format and resolution, and then give critique and feedback and have them revise and turn the work in again anywhere from two days to one week later. It’s important that round one isn’t a rough draft, but real final presentation. In every instance we saw the caliber of work increase in a neat way.
Students often desire feedback from their peers in addition to learning the opinions of the teaching team. Ashish and I tackled this in From Maps to Meaning. Essentially, each student places their work on a table. It needs to include enough information to speak for itself. This might include a title or short sentence description. Students then shift one seat and attempt to interpret and offer feedback on each others work according to some specific prompts. They record their ideas on sticky notes and then place them face down on the table. They then rotate again, and repeat the process, but each time we add one more feature they should respond to regarding the work in front of them. After three to four rotations they return to their own seat, read feedback and begin iterating on their work.
Developed with: Ashish Goel and Thomas Both
Developed with: Ashish Goel
Hyper-Coached Needfinding
Hovering over students to set good habits from the start
Design Thinking Olympics It really is a sport.
Building off of a desire that Michael Barry had to re-think the format of his seminal Needfinding course, we decided to partner on a pop-up class where the main concept we tried was to hypercoach our students. Essentially, we hovered over them as they tried on a number of needfinding techniques and made micro-corrections to their questions, note-taking, processing, etc. in the moment. We signaled our interruptions by calling ‘time-out’ in a gentle fashion. Overall it worked really well. I will use this in all of my courses.
This is a new stoke invented for one of our teaching team design sessions. There were three main events: (1) White board cleanup, (2) Used marker toss and (3) Rapid scenario setup. In the white board cleanup teams needed to clean a whiteboard and reset their space as fast as possible. It seems simple, but cleanup materials weren’t easy to find and boards had permanent marker streaks to contend with as well. The used marker toss was pretty clear cut. Teams received different point values for bins of varying distance from the line. Rapid scenario setup was the event given to the top two teams vying for the title. They were given a scenario such as “debrief session for a group of 10 people” and needed to set up a space that supported hat behavior as fast as possible. Judges scored the results. The overall winning team was presented with a golden Sharpie on a blue ribbon that was painstakingly crafted by Kelly Schmutte.
Developed with: Michael Barry, Virginia Rath, and Daniel Steinbock.
Developed or tested with: Ashish Goel, Tania Anaissie, and Kelly Schmutte. 19
Curriculum Flow A primer for planning a class
This year I’ve planned two full quarter courses and two pop-ups. In the winter, I did a curriculum design primer for the EA cohort and synthesized the process that Ashish and I developed that worked well for planning our maps course. The key step involves a vertical flow of parallel topics, projects, guests, etc. that helps stage how the course should run before you jump into week by week schedule planning. Developed with: Ashish Goel 20
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Using LEGO
Building blocks as gateways
I’ve been experimenting with using LEGO as a warm-up for other exercises. In Sarah and Erik’s Public Policy course, we had students create three iterations of continuums out of their LEGO kits as a precursor to using continuums to map their own policy data. In the teaching teams meeting we had instructors 22
model both the worst date they’ve ever had as well as the feeling they want to create in their next classroom experience. I know there is a big body of work on LEGO and look forward to pursuing it further. Developed or tested with: Sarah Stein Greenberg, Erik Olesund, and teaching teams.
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Empathy Matrix Eight is great
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As I’ve incorporated the mapping frameworks it’s become clear that there needs to be a procedural and visual transition between empathy capture and synthesis that helps students begin to parse their collected research in a meaningful way. The empathy matrix has been successful in this regard. Students make a large matrix of eight squares on a whiteboard. In each square, they download a piece of their research. This
might include a story from a user, tensions, excuses heard, images from observations, etc. After filling the matrix the students question each other about the qualities of what was put in each square. “Why is this interesting?” They make a second layer of notes with small stickies and from these select about ten to use as their main mapping data. They then use the mapping frameworks to search for insight. Developed, tested, and evolved with: Ashish Goel, Sarah Stein Greenberg, Alissa Murphy, Erik Olesund. 25
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Microcourse Design A workbook for Stanford Faculty
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The idea of microcourses, small tastes of subjects meant both to get students excited about a topic before committing to it and faculty reinvigorated to teach what they’re passionate about, is one that came out of the 2025 project. This workbook helps faculty create microcourses. I used it at a geoscience department meeting in the fall and in the spring with Leticia, Petra, and Mariatte on our CS+X experimenter sprint.
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Developed or tested with: Stacey Gray, Kelly Schmutte, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, and Mariatte Denman.
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Image Perspectives Practicing pattern finding
In Design Thinking Studio, Thomas and I focused a lot of time and effort around getting students to craft a unique perspective on each of their projects. As a primer for this, we gave them each a stack of images, asked them to sort and frame them to convey a perspective, and then build something that expresses that perspective. This was meant to
be a primer for framing the observations, interviews, images, writing, etc. that they would find when working on their own projects. Developed with: Thomas Both 29
Want to use these methods? Please do! I ask that you share back what you learn, modifications you make, new worksheets you craft, etc.
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