Earlier in the quarter, my capstone class looked at some of the exercises in an ostensibly bootlegged copy of Stanford’s d.school bootcamp document—I’m linking you to the search results on Scribd because they keep removing links that aren’t directly from the d.school. If this strikes you as funny, you’re not alone. There is also a message from the d.school faculty introducing the “bootleg”. I finally got around to reading the whole thing over the weekend, which is one of the reasons my posts are coming in a burst this week. I’ve been reading more than I’ve been writing, which is something I need to balance out. I want to be reflecting on what I’m learning from my research each week, mainly so I don’t forget everything when my brain gets full.
Sorry for the digression and back to the d.school’s document. It’s basically a compilation of what students in the program learn in their introductory course, Design Thinking Bootcamp. The document is made of modes, stages you are in during the design process, and methods, exercises you can do to structure your process. The information is really quite good and I would recommend anyone interested in human-centered design read it, but as a design thinking manual, I think it fell short of its goal. Most of the exercises that aren’t explaining how to do fieldwork assume you have already done user research and fieldwork. While I’m glad that they are focusing on ethnographic research, the document puts the cart before the horse, to use one of my grandfather’s favorite clichés. Maybe it’s covered in the class, but in the document, there is very little to do with where to start if you don’t have a design problem handed to you by a professor, client, or boss—problem-finding in other words.
My other issue with the document is that the writing is full of vague, jargon-y buzz-words. Maybe it’s just because I’m taking a design writing class this quarter, or because I’m also reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, but I was really struck by how bad the writing got at times. I don’t care who you are, “bucket” can never be used as a verb.
