On this episode, we talked to Sean Munson, Ph.D., an Associate Professor in the Human Centered Design & Engineering program at the University of Washington. Sean shares how his childhood interest of building model Naval ships led him to the study of Engineering, and how design gave him a framework to get himself, and his peers, to ask the right questions and create the right solutions.

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Chad:

Sean, thanks for coming and talking with us today.

Sean:

Thanks for having me on this rainy morning.

Chad:

Yeah, it is very rainy outside… To start the conversation off, one thing we’re interested in is what your story is, your background, and kind of what you’re doing now. And then, what your journey was to getting there.

Sean:

Yeah, so I’m currently an Associate Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. I feel like the way I ended up here is more from the technology side and more from the engineering side.

So, since I was a kid I’ve wanted to be an engineer. Starting first with designing ships at the encouragement of, you know… I was in kindergarten. I sent this battleship design to Navy. They explained, “No, we don’t build battleships on specs from kids. But, maybe you should consider being an engineer, and if that’s what you want to do later on…” That shifted to aerospace engineering and I went off to college with that goal, but also a sense that engineering happens in a world. And, I wanted to learn about engineering also being connected to public policy, or political science, or business. So, even then, I was, kind of, a little more interested in something beyond engineering as a way to produce technology that meets the spec.

In college, I focused mostly on systems engineering, which I really enjoyed as a way to think about how do you avoid the biases that you have if you’re a mechanical engineer or a software engineer? A mechanical engineer is always going to be like, “We can fix this in hardware,” and the computer scientist or the computer engineer is going to be like, “Oh, we’ve totally got this in software,” right? And, how do you trade that off? And, you need people who are kind of in the middle and maybe aren’t biased, according to their own tools, and that systems engineers.

So, in parallel to that, I was doing some political blogging and had very much been enjoying the process of trying to get people to talk about things until I realized it was not actually getting people to talk about things with people they didn’t already agree with. So, I was mostly making people a little angrier or maybe some people voted a little more. I don’t know. But, I wasn’t really facilitating the exchange of ideas. And so, sometime after the 2004 election, I was just kind of done with it. I woke up and was like, “I’m not helping.” So, I deleted the blog.

And, around that time, I was also in an ethnography class and the professor in that class, Caitrin Lynch, and my undergraduate advisor, Rob Martello, both kind of were pointing at me and saying, “You know, maybe rather than just burn it all down there is actually a research question here that you should go study.” And so, I went off to grad school at Michigan to work with Paul Resnick who was looking at social capital online, and it seemed like the right place.

And then, somewhere around the Affordable Care debate, I started thinking, “Well, maybe rather than get people to talk about health, I should work on health. And so, my research started pivoting towards healthcare.

And, also in grad school, I had the opportunity to teach and realized I liked it. So, up until then, my plan had always been I’m going to go answer this research question, and then go back to industry and just have my normal life. And then, teaching turned out to be really good and so I wanted to go to academia. And, here I am.

Chad:

Here you are. So, one part of that story, that I’m kind of interested in, is like the… I mean, you talked about having a lot of different interests and you were originally studying engineering, what was your thought process of being able to figure out how to integrate some of those other interests in? And, how did that shift kind of slowly shift the direction that you are headed in? Does that make sense?

Sean:

Yeah. I think it was a slow process and not always deliberate. At first, it was, “How do I make space for both?” And so, when I was looking at colleges I’d go and I’d talk with big state schools that had a really strong aerospace engineering program and also had some sort of strength elsewhere, right? And, it took big schools, really, to find that in a lot of cases. And, even then, it was really clear that even if I was integrating those ideas, that responsibility was entirely on me. They’d talk about things like, “Well, Monday Wednesday and Friday you’ll be up here taking your engineering classes. Tuesday and Thursday you can go do that other thing that they would never even really recognize as another thing.

And then. I ran across Olin College, which was, “Oh, no no! Engineering actually happens in context. And, for engineering to be competitive in the U.S., you actually have to think about the context. You have to think about policy. You have to think about the people. And, the language that they were using was not design, but it was design. And, that really resonated with me. It ended up being where I went to undergrad.

Then, along the way there was kind of this shift toward systems engineering. At some point I started questioning whether systems engineering that helps figure out the best way for me to spec is really what I wanted to do when there’s much more interesting work to be done in figuring out what even should the spec be? How do you know if you’ve met it? What are the right things to measure and value and choices like that, that I found much more interesting a place for me to work.

Jp:

You said it was design, but not design. Can you explain that a little bit further?

Sean:

Yeah, so when I was applying to Olin, I don’t think they were using the language of design. But, at the same time, they were talking about a lot of the things that I find myself doing in my world of design now of working closely to figure out what the right ends to achieve, right? So, actually defining the problem space. And, I think a lot of the more classical engineering programs train people who are phenomenal at solving a well defined problem and not very good at questioning whether that definition is good. And, that was a concern that Olin’s founders were responding to.

By the time that I actually showed up as a student they were starting to realize that design was a big part of this and soon started hiring design faculty, and adding design courses and… But, up until then, design as, kind of, this process for working through these challenges with something that certainly wasn’t on my radar and it took taking a required class to find that out.

Jp:

And so, what was the epicenter of that design project, design class, or design reading that flipped the switch?

Sean:

I don’t think it was a switch that flipped. I think it was going through the process and realizing it was something that I enjoyed and was potentially good at. And then, basically taking other classes to see if that was true. And also, kind of a little bit of retrospective of saying, “Oh, well in other things I’ve done where I’ve enjoyed that kind of work, that’s what I was doing,” right? And, I could go all the way back, in hindsight, to high school projects, even earlier, and recognize the elements that I enjoyed and start seeing that there was a career here. But, you know, it would be completely dishonest to say that it was that much intentionality.

I also still applied for an internship at Boeing for the summer and thought I was going to go, basically, do standard aerospace engineering things. And, somewhere in the phone interview I was talking about the projects I’d done and the things that I liked doing, and interviewer paused and sort of, “Oh, we have a place for people like you.”

All:

(Laugh)

Sean:

And, they sent me off to this concept center that was basically a design studio at Boeing doing this incredibly eccentric mix of projects looking at 5 to 15 years in the future, as well as some that were little closer in. But, I was saying these things, but not recognizing them. And, it took the interviewer hearing and kind of reflecting on it for me to make that placement happen.

Chad:

What were the types of other people that you are working with there?

Sean:

All over the map. There were physicists, there were folks had come more from, “How do you work with customers to configure the plane?” Someone who’d worked on accident investigations at some point, there was a tattoo artist. It was just a really great mix of folk. Visual designers, industrial designers as well. Some folks from Teague. And so, within that still relatively small 20-ish person group you could find the right sort of expertise to do something interesting in a space and learn something.

Chad:

So, from there, then what was the decision point to go pursue academia?

Sean:

Yeah. So, it was that I had taught at Michigan some. And, I really valued it. And then, when I was thinking about career, it was, “Well, how do I still make space for that? How do I make space to teach? How do I make sure that I have colleagues who are great and will push me and I’ll still get to learn as I go? How do I have enough freedom or at least I’m in a place where I’m working on things that I care about and think are important?” And, academia seemed to offer the most of that.

There were some other considerations such as, “How do I live somewhere that I would really be happy living?” And so, my ordering when I graduated was not, it must be academia. It was, academia somewhere I want to live in that supports its people and where I’ll be happy . And then, maybe I’d consider industry somewhere I want to live, where I value the mission of the company, or what I’d be working on. And then, I really hoped I didn’t have to start making tradeoffs below that.

Chad:

Yeah, I mean. I think that’s interesting that you’re talking about factoring all of those things in. ‘Cause I think like when looking for jobs in academia it’s always, like, one of those things where I think there has to be a tradeoff almost.

Sean:

Yeah. I think I spent about two years being moderately angry everyday that no one had explained that to me before I signed up for a Ph.D. And, it was really only after I had come to accept it that it worked out that I was at UW. But, there was a while where I was kind of like, “Ugh, there’s going to have to be trade offs and I don’t quite know what it’s going to look like.” So, in the end I just ended up incredibly lucky.

Jp:

And so, what does life look like now as an Associate Professor? Is that correct?

Sean:

Yeah. So, right now I’m on sabbatical. So, it’s not the clearest, most accurate representation. So, maybe we’ll fast forward a year to what it should look like, or I think it will look like.

There is the classic 40 percent teaching, 40 percent research, 20 percent service model, and that’s pretty true if I probably average across the year. I don’t think that I’m able to neatly draw distinctions between teaching and research. The students I’m mentoring, it’s teaching, but we’re doing research, and things like that. There’s a lot of work.

I think one of the things that I find challenging is that because we have the freedom to work on things we care about there’s this duality between job and hobby at the same time. And so, I will often find myself working at night, when friends are doing various other hobbies that they have, and I think, “Well, this is messed up. If only I had a 9-to-5 job back I could do my hobbies. But, what would I be doing? This.” Right? (laughs) So, I kind of go in this little circle with myself where I get annoyed at the workload, and then I realize, no I’m doing this to myself. I don’t know if this is something that you’ve experienced…

Jp:

Oh, definitely, yeah. In fact, often my wife will say to me, “What are you working on?” Like it’s… For instance, the newest thing, is a map. Like, “You’re still working on that?” “No, no. That’s another map that I was working on. But, this was another one that came because I was thinking about this other project.”

Sean:

Right. And, there is, I think, a danger that because as faculty we are immersed in that work all day and then we go at home, it’s, at least for me, I find it easy to not give myself space. So, for me, a lot of what I’ll do in the rest of my life is go hiking or backpacking or places that are really disconnected and that crowd out any of that active work on it, so that I actually do get a step back. Because otherwise I do think that there’s, at least for me, there would be a risk of burnout.

If I think about a lot of my projects that have felt more impactful, they’ve been the ones that have been side projects, or less urgent. And, I was talking about this with one of my collaborators, Evelyn Point. Like, “Well, maybe there’s actually something to that, right? Like just having that time for them to percolate in the background makes them better, in some way, even if it makes them slower, right? And, there is that tradeoff where it’s better, but never out in the world, is also a real problem. So I don’t know how to balance that, yet.

Chad:

What’s an example of one of those projects?

Sean:

Matt Cain had been to this talk on robots as caregivers. And, all of the imagery in the project, or in the talk, was women as caregivers and the robots replacing these women. That was kind of, “Well, why is this? Why do we assume that women are in these caregiver roles or caregiver careers? And, then I think it was Cynthia did a search on Google, an image search, for the various professions and all of the images were women. And, so we… Basically through, like, happy hour complaining were like, “Well, it seems like there’s actually a research question here. What happens if this is the representation of genders in fields? And, what does that mean for people’s expectations for how they’re further illustrated? If Google image search is how everybody illustrates their talks, then that’s going to perpetuate these stereotypes, and probably actually, then, perpetuate the representation on Google image search.”

And so, we did a study where we looked at, “Well, what is the actual representation?” And, one of the final experiments in it was we showed people, or we asked people what their beliefs were about the representation in different fields. And then, we had them come back two weeks later showed them an image search result, and then ask them what they believe the proportion of men and women in each field was. And, the actual search results were enough to move that perception even though it was just a subtle manipulation. So, we see that the tools that you use actually influence your beliefs about the world. I think it’s a really interesting challenge for Google of, do you represent the data set that is out there? Which is probably what they’re doing pretty accurately-;representing the images that they can find of people in these professions. Do you try and represent the world the way it is? And so, the image is kind of skew more extreme in their bias than the actual representation in professions now. Or, do you actually try and represent the world the way you think it should be or could be, which is an interesting and contestable definition, too?

But in this case, it might be to show balance. But, for us, we wanted to just start the conversation. But, that whole project happened over, kind of, a series of happy hours. We’d get busy with other projects and then, another happy hour, sit down and code like crazy for a couple of days, or a couple hoursm or something. And then, return to it a couple of months later. It turned out really well, but it was slow.

Chad:

Well, yeah. It’s interesting that even in defining that space you’re going after the technological tool based off… Well, I mean, it’s it’s all human generated content, and like, where does that actually come back to the human, or whomever is actually producing that content and putting it out there?

Sean:

Right. The search engines are representing our own biases back to us, right? This is not a blame Google project. This is a what might be the role of search engines in the space given that we have these biases in the data that have been produced over years and years and years, and also in how people are currently producing images.

Chad:

That’s interesting. What do you want to come out of that work?

Sean:

I would be happiest if this is a question that people who are working on the algorithms for various search engine results are now saying, “Okay. Well, now I see how what we choose to represent affect people’s beliefs about the world.” And, I am not going to try and have that conversation for them of what they should do with it. I think that there are a lot of really wonderful folks working in that space, and if giving them some data that says this is… or some results that say, “This is what can happen.” And then, they can have that conversation in their product teams. And, I don’t think every product team needs to or should arrive at the same conclusion. If we start good conversations I trust people to take it from there.

Jp:

Do you think that we are ready to have that kind of conversation in our current climate?

Sean:

Yes and no. I think different people have different levels of readiness for that conversation, or different organizations have different readiness. I’ve been really heartened to see a lot of posts including, you know, from Microsoft folks about, “Here’s how to think about how if your algorithm might have bias.” Or, “If your tool has negative effects.” The financial community has actually had to think about this for a long time because of the tools they use to approve and deny mortgages. Having bias in there is not just wrong, it’s illegal in cases. And so, they’ve had pressured to address that. I think there are other folks out there who still believe that algorithms are near purely neutral.

Jp:

Do you feel that your students come with that awareness now as they are more digital natives to the technology? Or, do you feel that there’s still an area of knowledge that still needs to be placed upon them?

Sean:

I don’t even know if it’s an area of knowledge in every case. I certainly hope that the students that we train come out with that awareness and with the preparedness to have those conversations. One of the techniques that a colleague recommended recently, just making sure that every project that someone does has two questions in it. They answer what could go wrong with this?, right? And then, what are you actually hoping to achieve? So, you can’t pretend that you’re being neutral. You have to actually acknowledge your own biases and aims, and then you have to see how maybe that could end up poorly for someone. And, certainly they won’t anticipate every outcome, but at least making space to think about that is an important part of the design process. And, it should probably be more emphasized in some of our courses. And, hopefully that will be further emphasized, then, when people go out into the world.

Jp:

So, sabbatical… Enjoying the pause in the academic world. What’s next after this? What’s the next research area? What’s the next class. What’s churning in the old mind?

Sean:

Yeah so, my flippant answer is I have two more quarters to figure that out. But, one of the things that I’ve become a little bit dissatisfied with, in my own work, is that a lot of the projects that we do will do some nice descriptive work of the state of the world, we’ll design a system that suggest some possible remedies, or ways to address challenges, or opportunities that we see. And we’ll display it for somewhere between three to eight weeks. We’ll learn what we need. We’ll write our paper. And, we’ll publish it. And, we’re hoping that industry will pick it up. But, it doesn’t happen immediately. And, in the mean time, we say, “Well, thanks for the participants. Thanks for using this. We’re going to take this away now.” Or, best case is, “You can use it. But, we can’t support it because we don’t have the resources. And so, at some point, it will just stop working. You’ll wake up one morning, your operating system on your phone will update, and it will be broken.” For getting the ideas out there, that’s not entirely satisfying in terms of immediacy. It’s also, just in terms of how it feels at the end of the study, not great. And then, I think it gives us too much credit for writing good papers, too, that people are able to implement. And, it also limits the questions that we can answer, right? So what happens as someone is using the health app over a year when they have questions and they can put it away, they can come back to it, and put it away again? What happens when a lot of people use it and we can start maybe making more population level inferences or something like that? Those are questions I can’t answer right now. And, I would like to get to a place where we have applications out there longer. I don’t know if I want to make the trade offs to do that because it requires a different funding model. It requires dedicating more of my day to supporting those, or more of my students days to supporting those. It raises big questions about what happens when the PhD students graduate and go into the world, and… So, a lot of my sabbatical has been trying to visit other places that do that and see what the tradeoffs are, see how they talk about the projects that seems to enable successes with longer term studies, and then figure out if that works for me. The group I was visiting the last six weeks in Chicago is in a phenomenal job of doing that with mental health applications, and is currently doing a small business grant to try and launch one of them. And so, a lot of what they did seemed like a group to emulate. But, at one of the first launches I went to, I was asking about, “Well, you have this kind of staff of people that seems to enable it? What was that like, and…” First words were how that was horrible, right?

All:

(laugh)

Sean:

So, there’s also things that I may not want to do, and learning that without having to do it would also be useful.

Jp:

Always learning from someone else’s failures is not a bad way.

Sean:

Yeah, and then, even if we do exactly the same thing going in with an awareness of the ways in which it will be horrible will hopefully make it better.

Chad:

I wanted to also talk about… Well, the department you exist in. And, essentially what it’s been like teaching in that sort of environment, because the idea of like a human centered design and engineering program is relatively new one. And, I imagine, like, as a program or area, working together to figure out and define what that is, I guess, there’s probably like a little back and forth going on. And, what it’s like existing in that space, too.

Sean:

Yeah. I think there’s definitely back and forth going on. I think every person in our department has a slightly different definition of what Human Centered Design and Engineering is, or should be, or could be. Some people get really excited about thinking about it as a field, other people get really uncomfortable about thinking about it as a field. I think that one of things that defines the department is a collegiality and respect for other ways of knowing and other styles of work. But, that’s not a central identity. And so, for me a lot of it is biased by my experience as a systems engineer where you would take a well spec’d problem and turn it into a design that meets those specs, and then make sure that it’s delivered on time or on budget. And, I think at least my aspiration for the program is that our students will graduate and be prepared to help define those specs, to find specs that actually can be achieved in technology and understand how they can be achieved in technology. To contest problems when they are not well defined or when they’re problematically defined. I think that, right now, we still are a little biased toward screen based design. And, it’s somewhat reflecting, just, where there’s jobs and hiring. And so, I think we’re serving students immediate needs and hopefully also preparing them with this long term sensibility across technologies. But, I suspect we’re a little too screen biased, at least in the short term.

Chad:

Yeah. No, I agree even in our thesis projects in our masters program… We were encouraged to be pragmatic in a certain sense, but otherwise we really had carte blanche to just like go and explore something. (laughs) Whatever… I mean, it was certainly… I remember getting pushback from faculty being like, “Well, where is this leading you in terms of what you want to do when you get outta here?”

Sean:

So, the career pragmatic.

Chad:

Yeah. But, not in terms of, like, what solution you come up with? Because, you know, we very much were well defined in that. Like, our role may be to sit alongside somebody that’s building it. But, that won’t be our role in the world. Like, we will help somebody build it and define what that should be. But, ultimately we recognize that we don’t always have the skills to do that.

Sean:

Yeah, and I teach one of HCDE’s, at least in the undergraduate program’s, more technical courses. And, that’s been an interesting one because they’re are students that come in partly with that view of, “Well, I’m going to sit alongside the person and so I don’t need this class.” And, other students come in and they’re more of… They want to be that person where they want to not have to have someone sit by them. And, I think there is still this space where even if you’re not building it yourself, being able to communicate efficiently and clearly with that person is important. Because, I’ve definitely seen what happens when a designer does and doesn’t. And, the mock up for the prototype comes back and it’s unrecognizable, or doesn’t doesn’t do what it was supposed to. But, then there’s also a piece of… I think that being able to explore things yourself without having to wait for someone is really valuable. So, the extent to which students are able to at least do a prototype, even if something that could never be deployed to tens of people, let alone thousands or millions of people. But, at least for them, they can work with it and tinker with it is a skill that many will benefit from having in their toolbox.

Chad:

Yeah, and it’s one that I wish I would have gotten a little bit further along; learning Processing and things like that. But, like, there’s limitations in that. And, it’s not really efficient. But, even having a general understanding of programming, like the technologies that your project will end up in, or that it’s being designed for, having that I think even just a basic literacy in allows you to design with that in mind. And, being able to talk to it, and understand it…

Sean:

And help the ideas, or the solution, have a chance of existing as you envisioned it.

Chad:

Yeah, exactly. Like, I’ve had great conversations with people who are building the work I’ve designed, and they come across a road block of like, “Well, I’m not sure how that would actually work.” And, me knowing, like, theoretically how things might work, at least to have a conversation would be like, “Well, have you thought about approaching it this way?” And then, that, you know, sparks a conversation and it’s usually worked out pretty well of where we figure out together, like, how to find it somewhere in the middle.

Jp:

Yeah, that combination or common ground.

Chad:

Or, it may be, like, doing it in a different way than they would normally think about it.

Sean:

Well, so I’m curious how you would each advise students on when to be pragmatic and went to maybe take a little more risk, or how you do that in practice?

Chad:

Yeah, I think in terms of being pragmatic, I think there’s a time and space to be pragmatic and not. Like, when you’re at the beginning in an ill defined problem, you know, there is a little room to be a little less pragmatic and think about, well, “What could this be?” Knowing that ultimately if you think of something crazy that will probably get distilled down into something that is more pragmatic. But, it will have hopefully evolved out of something that makes it more unique or novel than it would have been if you would have started from a place of being a little more realistic. But then, also thinking about students coming out of school. I mean, I think I’m a little biased in that I came out of a program where very tangible visual skills were always important. In that there… Like, it’s hard for me to disassociate at times how well somebody is able to visually represent their work from the thinking that can come behind the work. ‘Cause you can have a really beautiful, or well executed project, but it’s not really exciting. And, I think when I’m in class, in teaching students, they’re like, “Oh, we’re going to use X data set.” Or, “We want to be like this app.” And, I’m like, “Well, that’s a really useful thing and that already exists out there in the world and there’s a team of hundreds of people behind making that…”

All:

(laugh)

Sean:

Right. You’re probably not going to beat 100 people.

Chad:

Right! Yeah. And, that’s an admiral goal. But, at the same time, would doing something that is smaller in scope, that’s really well defined, and doing that really well, that’s going to mean more. And, you’re going to be able to talk to it better, and it’s going to tell a better story. Whether you’re talking about that while you’re trying to get a job, or presenting it at the end, or even sitting down and testing it with people, the more well defined it is the better the outcome is going to be. But, does that kind of answer your question a little bit?

Sean:

I think so. I always kind of want to poke at it with counter examples of… Some of the projects that I have been most excited about have been the most, kind of, on the surface, the most mundane possible.

Chad:

Like, often times on the first day of class, what I’d often do I’d take a mundane object, and I’d make everybody go around a circle, introduce themselves, do all that. But then, they’d have to pass around this object, saying a different thing it could be based off of its shape, or its color, or something like that. And, passing it around…

Sean:

So, what would be an example?

Chad:

I used to use a ball of twine a lot. ‘Cause you can pull it as a string, but it also has a hole in the middle. So, you can use it around… And so, I’d say, “Okay, this isn’t a ball of twine, it is a looking glass.” And, you could look through it. And then, you pass the next person, and the next person would have to say, “Oh, this isn’t a looking glass, it’s a tin can!” Or something. Like, imagining what it could be, and you’d go around, and then, “Okay, now we’re going to do a-whole-nother circle.” And, they’d all go, “Ugh.” But, by the end, they would kind of wrack their brains, and you could see them, kind of, reimagining using these basic shapes, or like things like that, to see everything it could be. Then, I would end it and being like, “Okay, this is kind of what we do in design. We recognize normal patterns around the world, and things like that, and we see commonalities and we reshape them to meet other needs. Or, see things like that. And, part of being a designer is being able to see and reimagine the world in that way. And, that’s kind of like what you were talking about, in terms of like, we have these normal perceptions based off of context and where we are of these words. But, as a designer we have to understand that context, but also know, like, is there a way we want to change that? But, we have to understand both sides of that to do that.

Jp:

Yeah, I kind of like that. I may steak that idea.

Chad:

Please do.

Sean:

So, there’s a lot of different programs or ways of thinking about design out there. Even being here, right? I’m a little self aware that the design that I do, or that I was trained is certainly not the capital D Design that represents your training and your experience. And, I guess one of the questions that isn’t super well formed in my mind yet is, when does design need to be in a program or what pieces should be in a program as a specialty? Where do we build it out so it’s kind of underlying what other people do, right? There’s been the push to put design thinking into pretty much anything now. And, sometimes I feel really good about that, and sometimes I feel like, well, does it kind of reduce it too much or simplify it in a way that people will not know when to go get help of people who have maybe more training and more experience. And, what do you think is the future of kind of field or fields and the way that we train students across the different programs?

Chad:

I mean, I guess I think of, like… There’s the skill of Design, and there’s a process of design. What we’re seeing now is the process of a skilled designer being pulled out and defined as its own thing, and being applied to multiple things. And, that, in and of itself, redefines what design is. And, in some ways that’s really exciting because, you know, there’s value in that. In some ways it’s frightening, because there’s a lot of designers out there that are like, “Okay. Well, if somebody else is taking away what they think is their unique thing, then all of a sudden I just turn into somebody that does.

All:

(laugh)

Chad:

Because they’ve offloaded, like, the thinking to somewhere else, somewhere out on the chain.

But, for me… And, this is one thing, like, we were talking a little bit before we started recording about, what is Human Centered Design and how is that different than any other design process? Or like, what other design processes are out there and how are they different? And, having that conversation. And, it’s made me think about there’s Human Centered Design, which I very much think of as a particular process that has certain values associated with it and also limitations with it. And, if you compare that to something like adversarial design or speculative design, it’s like, “Well, those could use a human centered design process, but they’re doing it through a different lens as like an approach. Or, they’re overlaying a different set of values over it, which makes you think about it. You could do the same thing, but it’s like you’re looking at it through a different lens.

Sean:

Now I’m almost wondering if there’s, kind of, a training around the repertoire of values or that people can approach the design space with, right? I don’t want to say, like, a problem because part of what they’re doing is defining it. You know, maybe it’s that there’s a certain kind of core element that, maybe the most common discipline that people are trained with, but you go outside when you need someone who can bring a perspective outside of whatever your group is most used to using.

Chad:

Well, yeah. ‘Cause, I think the other part of that is, like, there’s a lot more hyperspecialization in design than there used to be. (laughs)

Jp:

Yeah, definitely.

Chad:

I mean design is existing in a lot more places than it did. And, because of that there’s a lot more specialization in areas.

Sean:

Which also creates the same problem that we probably have in engineering of people become biased in using their tool, or their hyperspecialization, even when it’s not quite the right one for whatever they’re facing.

Chad:

Yeah, exactly. And so, I think that’s a really tough thing facing the field, is like this, we’re getting more and more specialized, but we don’t always have really good language to define what that means.

Sean:

Or, inconsistent language.

Chad:

Yeah.

Jp:

Well, we’re nearing the end. And, we usually end the show with a couple of quick questions. We call it the recommendation list. Quick. Simple. Easy. Do you mind if we ask for a couple of recommendations from you?

Sean:

Okay. I will tell you that I’m often very bad at recommendations.

Jp:

(laughs) We’ll make it as painless as hopefully possible. You were just in Chicago, what would you say is your favorite place to eat in Chicago?

Sean:

There was a restaurant about three blocks near where I was staying called Gather. And, I had to set a quota of I could go, at most, once a week.

Jp:

What kind of food?

Sean:

Basically American. But, they had a nice seasonal fall menu. Really good Arctic char, despite being in the center of the country.

Jp:

Deep dish or thin crust?

Sean:

Deep dish is casserole.

Jp:

I like you already.

Notepad, sketchbook, or iPad or tablet?

Sean:

Yes. (laughs) Usually I have a notepad. But, if it’s text I’ll try and keep it in an iPad because it’s searchable.

Chad:

What have you been listening to you?

Sean:

So, Genevieve Bell has this nice podcast on changing academic life. So, for that conversation we were having about, like, the duality of hobby, and work, and some of the other pressures on academics. I think I valued it a lot—one I like my students to listen to because it gives them perspectives different from mine.

Jp:

Nice.

Sean:

And, I’ve had Metric’s most recent album, Art of Doubt, in my head a lot, too.

Chad:

That’s good.

What’s a reading you think is important or hasn’t gotten enough attention? It could be a book or an article…

Chad:

Tad Hirsch, and some others, wrote a paper, “Designing Contestability: Interaction Design, Machine Learning, and Mental Health.” I think it’s important as we get more and more sensor data, and more and more, kind of, algorithmically generated recommendations for thinking about, well, how do we help people push back on what the system says about them?

Chad:

Yeah.

Jp:

Is that available in a book, or?

Jp:

It’s paper, and it’s public access because it was NIH funded. So, thank you taxpayers.

Jp:

Oh, definitely. Well, we’ll link to that in our show notes.

Chad:

The last one I was going to ask, is a good hike you’d be willing to share with the public. I know on your Instagram you always post beautiful pictures of the wilderness.

Sean:

I know. And, I recently had a conversation about the appropriate level of specificity to geotag things with, and I think that’s also a challenge. It could be a whole other podcast on the effects of social media.

Jp:

Season Five, we’ll have you back.

All:

(laugh)

Sean:

What won’t get me in trouble with folks, too, right? Where they’ll be, like, “You just shared my favorite!” Rather than recommend any one hike, I would encourage people to check out the Pasayten Wilderness. It’s… Many of the hikes are a really long walk in, but it’s beautiful and underexplored despite having probably hundreds of miles of really beautiful trails. And, you’ll have to look at a map and look at other resources to figure out what’s right for you.

Chad:

That’s a great answer.

Jp:

Get people out there into nature.

Chad:

Well Sean, thanks for being on the podcast with us. It was great talking with you.

Sean:

Thank you.

Jp:

Thank you.