Here are several additional thoughts about The Green Machine.

First, we discussed that it might make more sense for the energy consumption feedback to occur at a time and in a location that are in the natural path of the behavior that we want to change. An example I thought of is the "These Come From Trees" stickers that have been deployed around Stanford's campus. These stickers are placed on paper towel dispensers to serve as a reminder to reduce consumption just when you're about to use a paper towel. In CS 377V on Thursday, BJ Fogg noted that he believes the winning solution for behavior change is to "Put 'Hot Triggers' in the path of motivated people." It still is not entirely clear to me whether The Green Machine intended to motivate or to change behavior, which are two different tasks.

Secondly, The Green Machine used social networks to allow comparison and also competition. An interesting study might be to look at whether explicit competition or casual social comparison is better at effecting long-term behavior change.

Lastly, mobile phones can most likely be used to influence energy consumption, but they're not necessarily the right platform for all of the features expressed in The Green Machine. For example, why not integrate the monitoring service with existing social networks to provide the social functionality while keeping the mobile app itself focused on personal energy monitoring? Additionally, it will likely become increasingly inexpensive to add interactivity to home appliances, so prototyping and researching these interactions could prove to be highly valuable.

Great comments so far! It is very interesting to hear first-hand accounts about the influence and impact of PBL. On the whole I am excited about the expansion of PBL, especially in the first year of engineering education. Several details in the paper raised questions that I'd like to share:

First, the conclusion suggests talent loss in the engineering pipeline, but how did talent enter the pipeline in the first place given that design education was missing? I wonder whether it makes more sense to think of "missed opportunity for continued advancement" instead of "loss of talent" since engineering design curriculum is claimed to be largely the same as in decades past. Perhaps changes external to engineering design curriculum (culture, common values, etc.) have occurred to reduce the effectiveness of past teaching methods.

Secondly, quality and quantity of sketching is suggested as a cause of team project success, but it is unclear whether (1) the investment in sketching itself is the cause of success or whether (2) the preexisting ability of the team members is the common cause of both sketching and project outcomes. On a related note, how should design success be evaluated in an educational setting? In industry, success is more easily measured economically and even experts are often surprised by the results, but the evaluation in educational settings seems much more subjective.

Lastly, I question ABET's ability to motivate engineering faculty to embrace design education. I wonder if there might be more effective way to motivate the desired teaching practices and avoid catch-all classes for seniors to make sure the curriculum meets accreditation standards on paper.

I liked this quote from page 15:

"The wisdom of the knowing hand, that of making, producing and acting, must be connected to the wisdom of reason. But, wisdom—in the realm of design—requires that we take a step back. Design wisdom requires the reconstitution of sophia. Design wisdom is an integration of reason with observation, reflection, imagination, action and production."

This makes me wonder about how design teams should be formed: groups of specialists or groups of generalists or both?

@Rob - this quote reminds me of an ongoing theme in your responses and inquiry about the culture at Stanford: "Getting people in different disciplines to treat one another as peers is just as important as getting people within disciplines to do so. But it's much harder." - page 9

I really appreciated the comments in the reading about how strong leadership is key to keeping the organization on track. It seems like it must be a difficult task to maintain high standards for how the organization functions and for finished products. I also agree with the emphasis on creative freedom. I am curious to discuss the interplay between strong leadership and creative freedom. In some ways they seem to be conflicting requirements, but at the same time it's clear that they are both serve unique roles. Is there overlap in the way the lead to a desired process and desired product outcome?

1) On page 3, Resnick writes "Most of today's electronic toys are pre-programmed by the toy company. Children cannot design or create with these toys, they can only interact with them;" This sounds like an opportunity, and one that only a few teams are exploiting (Resnick's teams included).

2) Consider this quote from page 4: "We have found that construction and community go hand-in-hand in the creative process: children become more engaged in the construction process when they are able to share their constructions with others in a community, and children become more engaged with communities when they are able to share constructions (not just chat) with others within those communities." This clearly extends to professional design teams. I think it's easy to forget the importance of a design community and instead focus too much on the individual designers at times. These are echoes of some of Catmull's sentiments about why Pixar works the way it does (culture, community, etc.).

3) I also agree strongly with the importance of reflection. One dimension that can have a serious impact on learning in a classroom setting is turnaround time between assignment submission and receiving feedback. For example, in one class this quarter, I've completed four programming assignments and have yet to receive any feedback. I've still been learning by doing the assignments, but there are probably things I could have done better. Certainly I need to examine the quality of my own work, but the graders should also be part of this feedback and reflection process. Writing classes often do this well. Before a final draft is due, there are often one or two rough draft deadlines, each followed by feedback and time for personal reflection. Why only writing? Even math classes could benefit from reflection and iteration: "If you had to solve this problem again, how would you approach it?" "Can you think of a better way to solve this same problem?"

Kirsh's paper really made me think, and it yielded several insights and questions about the design process:

• The constructive process drives interpretation: as you get real and build something, you are forced to answer questions that you didn't realize were there before. (page 3)

- Questions: What does this imply for the designer - is the designer who is less skilled at machining or programming limited in his or her ability to design? Do teams solve this problem? What are the implications for a design education?

• For an external representation to function as a medium of thought, it needs to be highly manipulable. (pages 10-11)

- Questions: Are existing design tools meeting this requirement? What about virtual representations used for design?

• Lastly, a personal point of resonance:

On page 5, Kirsh writes "Certainly there are some people–coreographers, dancers, and people with wonderful imaging abilities–who can hold clear ideas of projected structure, and use them to think with."

This ability–being able to "just do it in your head"–was sometimes glorified in my earlier education, perhaps to my detriment. In geometry and single-variable calculus, I often tried to solve problems in my head - I usually got results that way and it made me feel smart. Now, I'm doing much harder problems that involve other people, but I'm still prone to believe that I can just do it in my head. How silly it now seems to admire people who seem smart. How critical it is to learn learn from those who actually make real impact in the lives of people.

That was a well-written paper–it made me want to try out Protovis!

Since this week's focus will be on visualization of data, though not necessarily Protovis in particular, I've listed some ways in which design thinking applies to visualization:
• Creating tools (e.g. Protovis, etc.) for making visualizations
• Creating visualizations
• Introducing interactivity into visualization
• Facilitating iteration on the visualizations of self and others
• Considering the intended audience of a visualization

I'm looking forward to the 547 talk. I think there will be much more to discuss after that.

In "Designing Adaptive Robotic Services", Lee and Forlizzi suggest a modification to the service blueprint to show how a service adapts to users over time. Unlike the original components of the blueprint, which depict a detailed process for how the service will work, the added line of adaptivity and associated marks give little insight into the specifics of how the service will work as it changes over time. In fact, it even confuses the horizontal time scale in the diagram by placing a scale of many service encounters in between two scales of single service encounters.

To improve on this design, I suggest the creation of a tool to allow designers to specify several service blueprints, each for a different phase of execution. The tool would then automatically animate the changes between the different phases. For example, if a step of the service is removed over time (streamlining) then the block that represents it could fade out. The use of animation in this way would help guide the eye to notice important changes or other details that might be missed by a less dynamic design medium. Additionally, it would be much more effective than the line of adaptivity at communicating changes over time since it uses a more natural mapping.

The system I propose is not without its drawbacks. It would take significant effort to build such a system in a way that maintians its easy manipulation by a designer and thus effectiveness as a design medium. Additionally, it might take longer to compose a blueprint, and dynamic viewing would preclude printing on paper or other static media.

It is possible that such a system exists already. Does anyone know of something like this?

Numbers!

In contrast to any other paper we read this quarter, Brandt's work relies heavily on data. How does this data get turned into useful design feedback? Did the numbers really drive design changes, or were the user interviews more effective at directing iteration? Despite the data, I am under the impression that the feedback from individual users had a greater impact on the design than did the aggregate data generated by thousands of users. This observation contains both a warning and an opportunity for designers:

1) Warning: Stories are more salient than statistics, so use them carefully. A good story from a user early on in the design process could dramatically change the direction of a product, but who knows whether that early feedback will generalize to the rest of the target audience?

2) Opportunity: If you're trying to explain your project to someone else, use a stories before statistics. Brandt did a great job of this in his paper. His scenario about the character Jenny helped me understand the power of Blueprint much more effectively than did the statistical results.

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As a design tool, Blueprint gives designers an increased ability to manipulate the design medium (source code). As shown by the data, increased manipulability has lead to better outcomes in code quality. Interestingly, the improvement in product quality was not statistically significant. Would users in the Blueprint condition (if given the opportunity) explore more alternatives than those in the traditional browser condition?

Also, as possible future work, I would suggest facilitating the contribution of examples that are formatted in a way that is easily parsed by Blueprint.