This document discusses lessons learned from a year spent building a culture of design at Akoha. It describes Akoha's design process, which involves exploring problems, understanding customer needs, ideating solutions, and prototyping. The process uses both divergent and convergent thinking and activities. It emphasizes that design is a collaborative and continuous process. The document also provides tips for participatory design and insights into challenges of building a design culture.

1. Cooking with Fire
Stories, Lessons and Ideas From a Year Spent Building a Culture of Design

2. Cooking With Fire

3. Who’s cooking?

4. Business Bromance
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunsetgirl_creations/3005640482/

5. On Today’s Show: Chef Alex!
1. Talk About Akoha
2. Talk About Design
3. Talk About Learning Design
4. Talk About What We Learned
5. Talk About How Painful Fun it Was

6. Being Akohan

7. Being Akohan
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tojosan/3270422401/

8. Being Akohan

9. Being Akohan

10. Discovering Design

11. Designing for TED
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tedconference/3259314585

12. TED Time Constraints
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianwallace/365651675

13. Breaking Some Eggs

14. How Exactly Is This Useful To Me?

15. The Big Underpants

16. A Dash of Design

17. Cooking Isn’t Easy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wink/344716250

18. Realization: Design Isn’t Easy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wink/344716250

19. Gaining Some Design Direction

20. Cooks, or Cooking?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebenjamin/1449932179

21. Cooks, or Cooking?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/87612113@N00/2974427/

22. Hypothesis: Anyone Can Cook

23. Cooking the Akohan Way

24. Do We Need a Cookbook or a Menu?

25. Building a common language for the team

26. Survival of your coffee?
Building a common language for the team

27. You Need Two Things: Training & Recipes

28. Show picture of Dubberly PDF here and talk about
all the different descriptions of design - 1 min
99+ Ways To Look At Design
http://www.dubberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/ddo_designprocess.pdf

29. Sketching Out a Model

30. The Double Diamond
http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/About-Design/
managingdesign/The-Study-of-the-Design-Process/

31. Akoha Design Platform
How we think about doing design

32. What is our design platform?
• Our design platform articulates the way that
Akoha thinks about and manages design activities

33. What is the Akoha design
vision?
• Our design vision is to “improve the world by
improving people”
• All of the design and implementation activities we
undertake are focused on achieving this goal.

34. What are our design criteria?
• Everything we design must:
1. Be measurable
2. Solve tangible problems
3. Help people to feel better about themselves.

35. Why the vision and criteria?
1. Our vision communicates what we do as a
business. This is our value proposition.
2. Our criteria communicate how we make things.
This is how we create our value.

36. What is the Akoha design
process?
• Our design process is customer centered,
evidence based and focused on learning from our
actions.
• It is inclusive, collaborative and accountable.
• Everything we do is focused on achieving our
vision, and grounded in our core criteria.

37. What is the Akoha design
process?
• Our process, and everything we design is situated
within the frame of a playful experience.
• Our product is a playful experience, and it is
produced through a playful experience.
• Our work is the product of how we work.

38. What does our design
process look like?
1. Explore

39. What does our design
process look like?
1. Explore 2. Understand

40. What does our design
process look like?
1. Explore 2. Understand 3. Ideate

41. What does our design
process look like?
1. Explore 2. Understand 3. Ideate 4. Prototype

42. What does our design
process look like?
1. Explore 2. Understand 3. Ideate 4. Prototype

43. Our process is continuous.

44. Our process can be parallel.

45. Our process can be
asynchronous.

46. What is a divergent activity?
To “diverge” means to
head in different
directions. Divergent
activities allow us
explore options

47. Our process is based on two
types of activities
Divergent Convergent

48. What is a divergent activity?
Divergent activities
allow us generate
possibilities

49. What are some examples of
divergent activities?
Brainstorming
Backcasting
Sketching (sometimes!)

50. What is a convergent
activity?
To “converge” means to
bring together.
Convergent activities
allow us to focus our
thinking

51. What is a convergent
activity?
Convergent activities
allow us integrate
perspectives

52. What are examples of
convergent activities?
Mental models
Sketching (sometimes!)
Creating personas

53. How does divergence help
our thinking?
Divergent thinking helps
us understand our
customers from many
different perspectives

54. How does convergence help
our thinking?
Convergent thinking
helps us develop
insights that we can use
to understand the needs
of our customers

55. How does divergence help
our making?
Divergent creativity
helps us generate a
wide range of ideas.

56. How does convergence help
our making?
Convergent creativity
helps us integrate the
best elements of our
ideas into a focused
solution

57. What does our design
process look like?
1. Explore 2. Understand 3. Ideate 4. Prototype

58. Our process is simple and
adaptable.
1. Explore 2. Understand 3. Ideate 4. Prototype
Divergent Convergent Divergent Convergent

59. Framing the process
Our process helps us to work on answering the
challenge laid out in our design vision:
How do we improve the world by improving
people?

60. Framing the process
Our entire team may participate in a set of design
activities.

61. Framing the process
Different parts of our team may participate in
different design activities.

62. Framing the process
In all cases, we’re collaborating to work towards
attaining our design vision.

63. Cooking as a Team

64. Theory: Get the Right Environment

65. Making a Space For Design

66. Recommendation: Use Healthy Ingredients

67. Going Deeper

68. Lesson: The Devil’s in the Details
http://www.flickr.com/photos/abbyladybug/3627947764

69. Insight: Sometimes the best cooking is fusion

70. It’s Just a Design Problem

71. One Year Later

72. Reflecting on Design

73. Fact: You’ll Probably Burn Dinner a Few Times
http://www.flickr.com/photos/abbyladybug/3627947764

74. Anyone Can Cook. Not Everyone Wants To.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/phdstudent/115127171

75. Lesson: Participatory Design is Tough
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26071225@N04/3038922759/

76. Fact: Design is a Hard Sell, Even in a Startup

77. Facilitate or Die!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/criminalintent/3172180022

78. Opinion: You Can Only Have One Head Chef
http://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/2885960896

79. Design is Conversation

80. Divergent thinking is easier than convergent thinking

81. Tip: It Helps to Use Wholesome Ingredients

82. Suggestion: Use Everything in Your Kitchen

83. Good Design Doesn’t Have To Be Expensive

84. Experience: You Learn to Cook by Cooking

85. Don’t be afraid to play with the recipe

86. Thanks!
alex@akoha.com matthew@normativedesign.com