Even if I was speaking mostly about design, I added some elements of business, strategy and change management as well, because I thought they were relevant.

I admit, this is a quite dense presentation, I would have probably taken out some topics in hindsight at least for UX Conference, trying to be more focused. However, on the plus side, from the feedback I got it was really successful and lots of people asked more. I probably need to do more workshop and less speeches in the future. :)

One method, two tools, three business tips. This is how I organized the presentation, in order to be not too unbalanced toward design, even if that was the focus, but also not being too high for more hands-on people.

One method

The most important part of Social Experience Design is that it can’t be done without a shift from traditional, deterministic thinking to the different Theory of Complexity thinking. This shift is critical because it’s the only way to deal with complex systems, such as people and social dynamics.

That’s why I talked again of the Dot Loop, because it contains all the factors that needs to be built-in in any design – well, in any company – to be really effective. The Dot Loop is an effective abstraction to deal with complex systems without a banalizing approach to them. Every successful company work that way – even, of course, probably they don’t call it Dot Loop, even if I’m starting hearing about it more often. :)

Two tools

The first tool is the Motivational Diamond, a very simple comparative visualizations that helps anyone working with social dynamics to focus on the four Relational Motivations (Competition, Excellence, Curiosity, Affection) and compare different services or parts of the service.

The second tool is the Social Usability and its Checklist, prepared to simplify the approach to it and provides an easy mnemonic. Social Usability works on four factors, that are Relations (the other), Identity (you), Communication (the channel between you and the other) and Emergence of Groups (all the emergent dynamics, again a complex system behavior).

Three business tips

These are very simple, but are also a very important part of a real change management process:

1. Be in-the-flow. This is critical in any good design tied to any change management process, but also for startups that are launching a new product: you have to understand that the day of your user is already
2. Be a double-pyramid business. This is a very important aspect, and might be an article by itself. Luckily it is: I wrote about the double-pyramid some time ago. This means that social businesses needs to engage in a different structure and find a balance between hierarchy and socialization, because the solution is in that balance and not in building a full hierarchic company or a full flat company.
3. Be a double double-pyramid business. Plus, you can’t be really a social business externally if you aren’t internally. You might have a unit that does customer service or social media operations, but if the whole company isn’t aligned, the users will get that, and the rewards are going to be lower (not zero, but lower).

The workshop

The extra part I prepared for Digital Accademia’s workshop regarded a couple of exercises to allow people focus a little more on how to use actively Relational Motivations and Social Usability.

I prepared two exercises to stimulate thinking and discussions:

• In pairs, draw a Motivational Diamond
  This is very interesting because it helps clarifying the four Relational Motivations by discussing it with a peer, and then the public discussions allow to clarify even more. As often happens in workshop, I learned something also this time: I have to clarify better that we are talking about traits that trigger relational aspects. For example, when we talk about “excellence” we aren’t talking about an excellent content, but about how we are promoting people’s excellence… and narcissism. :)
• In isolation, pick an item from the Social Usability Checklist and design an interface for it. Then, merge it with your partner to create a new UI with the two you prepared.
  I liked this one a lot because it shows how very simple solutions and interface can trigger more complex behaviours. One of the participants was worried because her solutions looked “too simple” but actually… that was the value of it! :)

A small joke

At UX Conference I was the last one of the day, so I had to think of something. That’s why I started with a small design practical joke… but I won’t tell what it was, and I removed it also from the presentation above. You’ll see the next time, maybe. ;)

“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine, they’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”
— Peter Bohlin, Architect (2011) A Genius of the Storefront, Too

Peter Bohlin is the architect that worked with Steve Jobs to build the Apple Stores all around the world. The article by James Stewart is interesting, but for me that sentence above is the most interesting one.

When working together people are able to communicate better, avoid communication overhead and create consensus quickly. It’s obvious right? But so often within companies and teams this is taken as granted, and this happens both when there’s a positive outcome or a negative outcome.

When it’s positive, it just happened, so we usually don’t think that the project went smoothly thanks to this. When it’s negative, we just don’t think it was a problem of creating the environment for the team to communicate and collaborate effectively, because we expect that part should just happen. The justifications in the negative case are often external, we blame other things: we communicated badly, the specs weren’t clear enough, the client didn’t approve this in time, and so on. However, to a closer analysis, many times the issue was a team issue, missing a good and healthy collaboration space.

A few questions that could help you to see if you have a healthy team environment are:

1. Do I find effortless to communicate with others?
2. Am I able to get a clarification even for tiny doubts?
3. Do I chat even about non-related things with my team?
4. Am I isolating my work from others?
5. Do I know what each other is doing?

It’s even more interesting because if you think to the effectiveness of Agile, Lean and similar approaches from this perspective you notice that there are many techniques that in fact are just tricks to facilitate the communication and collaboration within the team. Why is the product owner included in the team itself? Why do daily stand-ups exist? Why are kanbans so effective?

Does your team has a healthy collaboration environment?
From this perspective, why do you think it works?

I’m going to present you something obvious. Why? I think it’s interesting exactly because it’s so obvious that usually nobody thinks about it, and it’s dismissed easily. But nonetheless, if you start thinking that this concept exists it can help you a lot in many problem-solving activities and you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

Everywhere.

Let’s start with some example. The computer modeled upon Von Neumann’s architecture is basically a black box with a CPU and a memory that processes an input an returns an output, iteratively. The user centered design process in the ISO 13407 standard is a four phases loop: specify context, specify requirements, design solutions, evaluate. The problem-solving approach of Action Research is split in three iterative phases: plan, action and result. Agile methodologies have the concept of sprint, where you start with a sprint planning, you do a few days of development and then you end with a retrospective. Looking at a different discipline, in biology many systems are based on the concept of stimulus, elaboration and reaction, where in an amoeba we have a chemical process while in a cat the whole loop is mediated by the nervous system. The embodied cognition explains that the process of knowing is a loop between behavioural interaction and perception, between the action on the environment caused by a motor system and the perception of that same environment by a sensory system (thanks Gian). In the nervous system you can easily see the same pattern again in each and every neuron, and within the neuron in every synapse and down to every chemical receptor. In cybernetics you have the analogous feedback concept.

Once you start, you can go on with many different examples from different disciplines just looking around you. Are you starting to see the pattern here?

The Dot Loop

From those examples you can notice some interesting common traits:

• they are all loops, no inherent ending
• they can be all synthesized in three phases
• they exist at very different levels, often one inside the other (think about a living being and its own cells).
• every loop is short, in its own context

Hence, we can abstract it and call it the Dot Loop: do, observe, think. This loop exists everywhere you see something that works.

Why is this important? For three reasons:

• It’s a baseline for processes: any process you are going to use or build needs to have those three levels, nothing less than those, like a dot in geometry.
• It’s a validator for processes: if the process you are looking or the one you are building is missing one of those steps, then something is either wrong or hidden behind something. If it’s hidden, it’s better to understand why and make it more explicit.
• It’s the minimal building block: you can’t have nothing less than this, but also if you have something right like this then you need to go deeper, because it’s not enough, it’s too abstract and needs to get practical. For example you can say that one phase is “Design”, but unless you know how you are going to do that (card sorting, wireframes, visual layouts, prototypes) then it’s too abstract to be useful.

It’s very interesting because it’s something that inside a process can be repeated multiple times at multiple levels. Think for example the sprint in the Scrum Agile process: at the top level you have the building of a software: the client asks something, the team builds it, and it gets released back to the client. But inside that very high level (and not very useful) explanation you have a lot of iterations, again matching the Dot Loop, and inside each one of those each user story is prepared, developed and accepted. Again a Dot Loop.

Notice also that the starting point isn’t fixed. You might think that a project starts with the Observe phase, or analysis. But from another point of view, the clients starts with a request, so it’s a Do phase. And usually you can go back the loop more and more, without being able to define a starting point.

Notice also that in every following iteration each phase can do different things: for example the Observation phase at the beginning could refer to the business scenario, in the middle could refer to user interaction testing and in the end it could be the feedback from the users.

The Dot Loops within Agile: Scrum

The Agile Manifesto explains the four core elements of the discipline: individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, responding to change. Even from this point of view, you see that a Dot Loop process intuitively matches Agile.

If we take the Scrum methodology alone we can get into some details and see that a single sprint is exactly a Dot Loop:

• the sprint planning: Think
• the sprint itself: Do
• the sprint review and retrospective: Observe

But also, if we look inside the Do phase, we notice that the developers are:

• designing the solution of each user story: Think
• coding the tests and the solution: Do
• testing the solution: Observe

It’s obvious now, right?

Of course, if you go even more in depth things start getting a whole more complicated, but if you are doing things right, you are still working in different Dot Loops at different abstraction levels. Jacopo Romei, an Agile coach friend of mine, modeled the agile process as a sequence of feedback loops in its Software Feedback Loop, I think that’s an interesting higher-level perspective.

Some other examples

But how can something so obvious be useful for you? You don’t have to be a business engineer to use this simple and basic concept. Managers, designers, developers, and many more can apply the Dot Loop to their own field.

Think about a company starting to deploy a new intranet. In a typical scenario, it’s going to choose the technology, building the service and then releasing it one day with a communication through mail. As you can see, it’s missing a critical step that’s easily spotted once you see this through the Dot Loop: there’s no feedback, no following Observe phase after the release and probably not even tests with final users during the development of the application.

Another good example is made when companies see the new world of social media and start to use them straight away, creating pages on Facebook, accounts on Twitter and starting to push content through them. Even if the loop goes on, it’s missing the Think phase in between, that would have aligned the company strategy with the correct communication.

Think about the typical waterfall model, that leads so often to mediocre products. This basically happens because it’s like making one single Dot Loop, instead that taking the output feedback from the Do part and analyzing it to perform a following new action. Even when the feedback is take into account, often it’s just “check if we reached our objectives” and nothing after that. Instead creating a virtuous cycle is the correct way to both solve problems and evolve existing solutions.

If you want to build or evolve a social network the biggest error is going to be to start developing it assuming a specific behaviour of the users, but this rarely happens. You need to plan a social network in a sequence of iterations where you check what’s going on and adapt each step to the community evolution that surely happens each time.

You probably don’t have to look around much to see companies and consultants that are proposing their own “magic” process. With the Dot Loop you can have a first insight if they are saying something worth listening, or not: is there a missing step in the process? Flawed. Is it not a loop? Flawed.  It stops with the three steps? Too shallow. It has these three steps, or more steps that could be synthesized in Do, Observe, Think and they go in-depth describing what they do in each one of them? Great. They probably have something. The technical term I use in consultancy for this is “bullshit detector”. ;)

Notice also that sometimes this knowledge can be hidden. I’ve seen once a company that was delivering high quality products, but its formal model was waterfall. In the end it was again a Dot Loop – very similar to agile – but placed inside a structured process that in the end was just a logical explanation, not a process by itself.

As you might guess, the list could go on a lot and every one of those problems could be avoided understanding the Dot Loop, since it’s the minimal possible process.

What I mean about the design process is how we go from having some kind of basic idea for our app to getting at some concrete screens and getting done some real design into running code. In 37signals we are never happy unless the thing we designed are actually running in a live application.

— Ryan Singer (2010) Video “The Design Process of 37 Signals“ at FOWA

Interesting approach, very pragmatic and focused (incremental sequence):

1. Model
2. Screens
3. Design
4. HTML/CSS
5. Live code

Seeing their specific model is interesting for me because I think that there isn’t such a thing as an “universal design process”. Ryan shows a process that fits perfectly what’s know about 37signals skills and clients.

The best process is the simplest one that keeps adapting to the people skills, without constraining them. And that’s exactly what they do.

(thanks to Creonomy for the link)

My problem raises from the fact that I don’t have a vertical interest in anything. Well, yes, there are fields that sees me more “present” in some ways, but in the end they’re quite wide.

Having many interests and many things to be passionate about may seem a good thing. Well, it is, from a personal point of view. But from a communication point of view it’s a big issue. You can say you’re a programmer or a graphic designer in 140 chars, but trying to express all the complexity behind different passions is hard.

It’s also hard for other two reasons:

• profession: if you’re a vertical kind of person it’s easy to communicate yourself, so when someone “needs” someone like you, it’s easy that you’re the one that will be called.
• time: pursuing different interests is very enriching, but it takes a huge amount of time.

The simple answer is that I often “choose” between the different skills I have. Sometimes “I’m the interaction designer”. Some other times “I’m the developer”. Some other times “I’m the graphic designer”. And so on.

So, I’ve tried to think about something else. I’ve tried to abstract a bit.

Smart?

Many people tell me that I’m quite smart. Even if this were true – I leave this as an exercise for the reader ;) – you can’t tell anybody “I’m smart”. That’s a really bad presentation and it usually triggers a response very different to the one you’d like to have. In fact, “smartness” can’t be communicated, but only acknowledged.

Discarded.

Hypercritical?

The piece by John Siracusa “Hypercritical” in May 2009 was something that really made me thinking.

This acute awareness of deficiencies colors all my memories of childhood. Toys, in particular, were a focal point of dissatisfaction. I didn’t understand why toy manufacturers couldn’t see the countless ways that their products differed from the on-screen characters, machinery, or structures that they were based on.

I felt very similar to Siracusa here. But still there were two problems:

1. Being “hypercritical” isn’t a flattering explanation, by itself.
2. It still didn’t felt quite right.

Discarded.

Doubt?

I love doubt, by itself. I think that doubting is the driver of improvement. If you don’t doubt, you’ll never think that “maybe there’s a better way”. If you’re sure, there’s nothing more to add. Slip in some doubt and voilà, you are able to make the right question.
As you can see, the philosphy is interesting… but “doubt” by itself isn’t a skill!

Discarded.

Synthesizer?

No, not the musical instrument. I once thought about myself that my rational part is a huge synthesizing machine. I throw things inside it and it loves to find relations, abstract things, reduce to single words or sentences, etc.

There are many things that could reinforce this hypothesis:

1. I’m fast in remembering paths and I draw mental maps of the places where I pass through.
2. In any situation I’ll try building up an “abstract” structure to hold anything together.
3. I often use this ability passively, simply acquiring information (lot of) and notions in order one day to elaborate a result.

Yes, I’m sure to be quite good at this.

But still, the term is awkward.

Discarded.

More abstraction, less abstraction

I needed something more concrete than the “synthesizer” line of thought and something more abstract than the simple profession. In the meantime I was also thinking about the logo and I was analyzing the lists as I’ve explained in the post about the making of the logo of Intense Minimalism.

During this time I was also looking at the “lists” on Twitter that has me added. It’s quite interesting: interaction design, usability, social media, graphic design, user experience, speaker, tech, geek, and so on (yes, Twitter Lists are probably more useful to see how the others “categorize” you).

Then the “synthesizer” thing jumps in. I wrote the formula:

It’s nice. Complex, but simple in its form. Disciplines above the line and approach below. Simplicity is the result of some kind of complexity synthesis, so together they’re a pair.

Double checking

I think that the “Hybrid  Designer Formula” above is quite on spot, and it’s confirmed by some other sources.

Simplicity is something all around in the design field, almost in any kind of design.

Progress means simplifying, not complicating
— Bruno Munari

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
— John Maeda, Law 1

Simplicity is a function of your scarcest resource at that moment.
— B.J. Fogg (2009)

Complexity is also there, while its important role isn’t always acknowledged.

Good displays of data help to reveal knowledge relevant to understanding mechanism, process and dynamics, cause and effect.
— Edward Tufte (2005)

The most important part is the relation between the two:

Simple design, intense content.
— Edward Tufte (2005)

Simplicity and complexity need each other.
— John Maeda, Law 5

The three elements above works in the means of the two below the fraction. Their interaction isn’t obvious sometimes, but it’s there. You have a technology, you have people (psychology), you have to make them interact somehow (design).
This is true for architects, industrial designers, visual designers, artists, engineers, while probably any of them will tell you a different story from a different point of view.

The term “Hybrid Designer” emphasizes the cross-relation between different fields. Still, it’s just for communication’s sake: for me, a good designer already does this. And the greatest already do and teach this. Any good designer must be intrinsically hybrid.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
— Steve Jobs

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.
— Bruno Munari

More emotions is better than less
— John Maeda, Law 7

Good design is aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
— Dieter Rams, Ten principles for good design

We as designers … we cannot do it alone, we need entrepreneurs, working together with good engineers.
— Dieter Rams (2009)

The more you feel that you can control your environment, and that the things you do are actually working, the happier you are
— Joel Spolsky (2000)

If you can design one thing, you can design everything.
— Massimo Vignelli

So, I can now explain something about me and my professional side in 140 characters.

I think that it’s, for now, a good way to tell something about me.

• What do you think?
• What about you and your identity? How have you solved this problem?

As you might guess by this, I’m also a logo lover.

What is a logo?

A logo is a form of expression, it’s a sign that maximizes a specific meaning (signified) while it minimizes the number of strokes (signifier) to represent it. As you can see: it’s intense and minimalist.

For me, the platonic idea of a logo is represented by a circle:

The circle is a very strong symbol. The one above is an ensō, by Kanjuro Shibata XX. “Ensō” is a japanese word that means “circle”. It symbolizes enlightenment, strength, elegance, the Universe, and the void. In Zen Buddhist painting, ensō symbolizes a moment when the mind is free to simply let the body/spirit create.

As you might guess, the circle symbol is so strong and so common that you can hardly build a logo with “just” it. But for me, it shows the characteristic a logo should have:

1. Simple: fewer lines is better.
2. Self-contained: it doesn’t need anything else to “stand” in a page, on a website, etc.
3. Balanced: it’s well distributed on the two spatial dimensions.

Some examples:

My first logo

When I was a kid sometimes I picked up a paper and started thinking about a “logo” for me. At first I wasn’t thinking about a logo, but about a monogram. I spare you those ones, they were plain ugly. Then one day, during my high school, I drew one I thought it was pretty good. Years later I vectorialized it in Illustrator. Here it is:

Today I think that’s quite naive, and that’s an euphemism. For the most part I regret using it for so much time. You can also see that it’s blue: my favorite color is blue. I just wasn’t sure on what shade of blue I should use, but that’s it.

Problems? A lot:

1. It’s a “D” from my name, but that’s not very clear.
2. The concepts it expresses were mostly in my mind, but they didn’t match anything real about me: yes, it’s something blooming up there (like the coat of arms of Florence). Yes, it resembles a comet. And a sail. Too much.
3. It has small parts so it can’t be very small.
4. It isn’t enough bold to be used with a filler image.
5. It is quite within the “enso”, but not enough.
6. Aligning it with text is a big problem.

So, 2009. I decided to evolve it.

The evolution

So I decided to evolve it. At first I thought I could blend it with the infinity symbol, but it was too pretentious. Still, the task of building it was interesting since very small variations on the curvature of any of its parts was able to “break” the perception of it. I forgot: it was a D, an infinity symbol and in a “perceived” 3D.

It’s unfinished, it was a nice experiment, but it’s still ugly, if not uglier than its precursor. It’s cool playing with the infinity symbol, it’s cool trying pseudo-3D, but well. No. Rewind.

So I simply decided to give elegance and boldness to the first one. Still an evolution, I was trying to build something new with old pieces.

This was fine for me. It was elegant. It solved many problems of the first one. It was also technically “perfect”, built with just a two ellypses in different sizes and positions:

If you read up until now, you should notice that I “forgot” everything I was saying in the first paragraphs of this article. My friends were saying “uhhh nice nice”: I had to convince them it was good.

The months were passing. One evening of october I was talking with Gaetano Grizzanti, a guru for me in the brand design field (go check his company, Univisual and its wonderful and powerful logo). I showed the logo to him.

“It’s good …for a military organization.”

That was it.
No more words.
He changed topic.

I went to sleep with those words in my mind. The next morning I looked again at the logo and it was clear to me that I was ignoring my own ideas. I was stuck in some mental loophole. The logo was good for a Space Marine legion.

I took again in my hands the book about japanese calligraphy I had on the shelf. Then I immersed myself in all the books and websites about logo design, to “clean” my mind.

The process

Designing a logo for a person is both easier and harder than doing it for a company. First of all, I wrote down all the things I wanted my logo to be able to express. A long list of words about me, my profession, my style. Then I killed all the words that were too much “external”: I wanted a logo able to express me, not what I can do or how I appear on the surface. Then I killed all the words that were too common, too “everyone wants this”, too abstract.

Then I did a little bit of copywriting on the remaining words, there were just a few. I wrote them alone on a sheet of paper.

• simplicity
• meaning
• hybrid
• synthesis
• pragmatism

And I simply realized that what I was trying to express was just a variation of Intense Minimalism.

I took another sheet of paper and then for the next two weeks I took some time every evening to draw logo ideas and the next day to think about it. I showed some of them to my friends, got some feedback and started again the next day.

• Simplicity called strongly for “just the circle” but as I’ve stated before, you can’t make a logo from just a circle.
• Meaning was intrinsic in the logo concept by itself.
• Hybrid. An unity made by different parts.
• Synthesis told me to do something that in some ways should converge to an unity (the last synthesis possible).
• Pragmatism meant that it should be some sort of geometry. Or something handwritten (like the enso above).

This is the last of the sheets I filled.

The Intense Minimalism logo

1. Simple an geometric. Just three circles (three one of the “perfect numbers”).
2. The middle part isn’t just the overlapping part between the two external circles: it’s a perfect circle by itself. It expresses well how the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
3. Also, it’s like the additive property of the RGB space: blue + blue = white.
4. It expresses well the hybrid concept: a unity made by different parts.
5. The two external circles are of light blue and dark blue.
6. It’s a little 3D, since it could be viewed as a ring, slightly angled.

My favorite meaning is the second one.

The typography

As Gianfranco hinted me, I didn’t add anything about the logotype itself. I skipped that because in fact it’s the same logotype I’ve used for years on my italian blog. It’s born alongside my attraction to the Univers typeface, mostly in its condensed variations.

The “leaves” are something I took from my first logo but they are there hinting to something living, something that’s blooming, while in a discrete way.

The interesting part about it is that John Boardley of I Love Typography fame gave me an hand in december of 2008 to correct some kerning issues (i.e. “a+l” tighter, “ten” to be readjusted). It’s a small detail but helps in defining a better result overall, and it was a short but interesting conversation with him. He’s a great guy.

Logosheet

As I always do when I complete a logo design, I made what I call a logosheet, an editable PDF with all the important traits of the logo, the inverted form, some rules on its usage and a few more details. The PDF is editable in order to take from it the logo when you need it.