Becoming a Priority

What determines whether something becomes a priority or just an option?

People are faced with a lot of choices in life and a lot of things competing for their attention. So how do you become a priority? What guides that decision for people?

It doesn't matter whether it's a product, a service, or our selves. We're always competing for the limited attention people are willing and able to give to the world. With the newest, tech-obsessed generation, attention spans are shorter than ever. But it's by necessity: in order to filter out all of the noise of social media and constant information, attention spans have been reduced to an astonishingly short 7 seconds. So how do you distinguish yourself and rise above the noise?

This is a question I tackle in nearly everything I do: Design for America is about getting design its due consideration at a tech-focused school, FingerReader was about making accessible technology that blind people would actually want to use, getting someone's time of day is about competing for the few hours they have remaining between work and sleep. And at the core of all of these challenges is understanding people. It's about finding what makes people excited and what makes them tick. However, there's a few things that more universally encompass what motivates people. This falls into the realm of psychology, but I'll see what my non-expert perspective can offer:

1) Humans are social creatures, and that means we're driven by communities. A group becomes a community when you start feeling comfortable around them. There's no emotional fatigue of putting up facades and no struggle to understand group norms. Once we're part of an in crowd, we become devoted to our new second family. We attend all our sport practices because we don't want to disappoint the teammates we care deeply about; we stay up until 4AM to comfort our best friends because we know they would do the same. We're motivated by our bonds with others, and that's an idea we can use in becoming a priority. Build communities of supporters and users around your products so they feel connected; be genuine in forming relationships so people know you care. But most importantly, prioritize people above all else. This is something I still struggle with, but it's a time-worn truth that will continue to ring true, even if I need reminders.

2) People dig challenges, and that's not just my inner nerd speaking. Goal-setting theory states that one of the most compelling human motivators is having challenging, specific goals to pursue. There's a beautiful truth to that: humans are innately curious, growth-minded beings, and that's super cool. Offer people a chance to grow and they'll come flocking.

3) Give people a good reason to expect high return on their investment of their most valuable resource: time. Despite being social beings, humans are also selfish. They want to maximize benefit: an urge rooted in survival of the fittest. So make yourself a pleasure to be around, make the interactions of your app delightful for the user, and help them feel valued for being the special butterflies they are.

But what other rules can we apply to becoming a priority? It's hard to say when people are all influenced by their unique perceptual worlds, which changes exactly how they're motivated and what they're motivated by. And depending on ever-changing environmental factors - rain, stress, sleepiness - even those supposedly stable motivators can change. 

So it's something of an art. Deciphering each person's unique set of quirks is comparable to deciphering the meaning of art or literature. Design is considered a art for good reason...but not necessarily for the right reasons. Design is usually thought of in the context of aesthetic design: what something looks like, how something fits into your hand, what color something is. These factors were all determined by the careful eye of a designer. But on a broader level, design is about finding patterns among people and their motivations to make some product or service a priority. And of course that would involve the seemingly trivial details typically thought of as design, such as color, font, or form. Humans are nuanced so we need to pay attention to nuances. Sure we have our base set of human motivators, but after that, it's all a finely tuned dance of navigating human complexity one small insight at a time. Guess it's time to learn to dance.

(re)Defining Directions

I hoped to find direction by moving in a different one.

Cambridge was my way of literally and figuratively moving out. Moving out of MIT into somewhere new, moving out of my comfort zone into the unknown, and whether for better or for worse, moving.

Since then I've found that being out of the MIT intensity has been a double-edged sword. I needed the change of scenery to disrupt my mental bubble, but the lack of like-minded, passionate people at Cambridge quickly led me to complacency. DFA used to be my reminder of why I get up in the morning, but now I didn't have that constant tap on the shoulder.

After a lazy month of thinking about the future only in passing, the internship search catalyzed my focus. "What am I doing this summer" led to "What do I want to do for the rest of my life?" The internal conflict between d.thinking and engineering, people and product, the personal and the physical, kept recurring.

And now I'm trying to find my niche on the spectrum.  Where do I belong? What do I want to spend the rest of my life doing?

I love working with people, but don't want to waste my engineering background. I appreciate the quick iterative process of design, but want physical deliverables to show for my work. I love the buzz of gathering user insights, but am too aware that "understanding people" doesn't sound like a legitimate interest, especially in the engineering world. My background has made it so I will never be completely satisfied by the fluffiness of strategy or organizational design. On the other hand, a completely hardware approach will keep me wanting for more personal interactions.

So where's this leave me? Mike has inadvertently taught me a lot throughout this search. Seeing how passionately he pursues projects, I see my own passion for working with people. His excitement for solving difficult problems is the same as mine for advising project teams or redefining organizational structures. It's clear now that my heart is not in hardware design itself; I'm driven by the people I can affect and the minds I can change. I want to inspire, and that's easier for me to do through interacting rather than creating. For me, product design has always been a means to an end and that's no way to go about things: I know I will never be completely satisfied in hardware design when I am living from the high of one user interaction to the next.

So the struggle is now in finding the perfect balance, and many flowcharts and cafe visits later, the working idea is this: 

Start a design consultancy that has two focuses:

1. Design solutions for impact-driven clients looking to redefine how people live in a meaningful way (vague I know, but it's a start :D). Shoutout to Gravity Tank for doing some damn cool and inspiring consulting work.
2. Redefine CSR by having employees mentor students in design for social impact projects. Take an active role in the community like ideo.org or Vecna do. This will hopefully set a new precedent for corporate community engagement.

So that's where I am now, and I'd say that's a pretty reasonable start. I'm sure this idea will go through many iterations in the next few months, even weeks, but the core is there: I want to impact lives and understand people. The path to get there will likely wind through many obstacles, but I'm more confident with those uncertainties now that the goal is defined.

How Travel is Making Me a Better Designer

Design and travel don't seem to have much in common.

However, there's a lot of merit in traveling to become a better designer. Design today is often driven by user-centered research: a focus on personal stories to influence design direction (Julie Zhou wrote a great article about user-centered vs. data-driven design). One key component to effective user-centered design is empathy. User-centered design is dependent on understanding a wide spectrum of users, making it crucial for designers to have a good conception of people unlike themselves.

And what better way to find those disparate people than through travel? This semester abroad has pushed me to understand people in a way exactly parallel to what a designer needs. Travel elicits an empathy and understanding of cultural perspectives that fosters open-mindedness.

There's a popular theory that there is no such thing as a "real world". Instead, each person has a unique perceived world that is influenced by their past, their present, their personality, their culture, and everything else related to the individual. Thus, each person experiences a unique world, a pretty crazy concept when you consider that billions of people living on the same Earth are actually living in different worlds crafted by their own perceived constructs. (whoa .-.)

Empathy is then just a practice of being open-minded to other people's worlds. And being a designer gives you the master key to access all of those worlds and understand the nuances among them. From my completely unbiased view, I'd say that's pretty exciting. However, the role also holds its own challenges:

• You must be vulnerable: to learn about others' worlds, you have to share a little, or a lot, about your own. It's not a time to hold back from telling your story.
• It's time-consuming: if you want to learn about others, really learn about others, be ready to make the time investment to do so. This isn't a few weeks' process. Building strong relationships and laying the foundations of trust isn't a process you can speed along. It's no wonder that designers invest so much into flying to the far corners of the world just to talk to target users: establishing a personal connection is a crucial part of the design process. 
• You have to be willing to take risks: you're going to end up leaving your comfort zone, and quite often. The only way to expose yourself to new people is to try new things. Go to a swing social, attend a street art festival, make time for a raunchy comedy show. Be the type of person you normally aren't to meet the people you normally wouldn't.

My last few weeks in Cambridge have taught me a lot about building relationships with people who think, react, and experience differently from me. It's coming up on exactly a month in Cambridge, and I have finally started to feel assimilated into the university. I've developed a better sense of self here, and I think that has made me even more resolved that ultimately, I want to spend my life inspiring people to be their best selves. That means seeing the similarities between me and very different people with very different goals, and having the empathy to relate to their situation so I can help the best way I can.

Empowering people is my design challenge, and I thrive to tackle it with the empathy and understanding of a user-centered designer.