• Six Senses is a way to unpack an idea or solution space by paying attention to non-dominant ways of perceiving the world.
• Six Senses reconciles traditional and non-traditional ways to think about a topic. It can help you create a powerful metaphor for your user, your problem, your space, or your context that goes beyond the obvious.
• By providing six prompts, Six Senses helps you separate out your sensory experiences, enriching your arsenal of descriptive language. If you’ve been using the same words over and over in your process, Six Senses can give you an infusion of new vocabulary.
• Six Senses helps you generate both literal and abstract descriptions. We all know what a baby looks like – but what does a baby TASTE like? We know what a kitchen smells like and tastes like, but what does it FEEL like?

How to use Six Senses

• Six Senses is an idea generation technique. It belongs in the “flare” mode of the “focus and flare” model. Rather than narrowing down to a single solution, you’re coming up with as many divergent ideas as possible. So do this exercise fast, and don’t worry about whether you’re doing it right.
• Start by generating words to ideate around. Anything goes here. You might use activities (shopping, fishing, exercising), user groups (toddlers, geeks), or environments (the beach, high school, a law firm, McDonalds).
• For each word, divide a whiteboard or piece of paper into six segments: Looks Like, Feels Like, Tastes Like, Sounds Like, Smells Like, and Makes Me Feel Like.
• As fast as you can, surface your associations with your starting word, using the six boxes as guides.
• Even though Six Senses belongs in the “flare” mode, it can help you get perspective and get out of a rut when you’re trying to focus.

• One of the most contentious elements of teamwork revolves around balancing the amount of time and energy each person is dedicating to the project. By making your contributions visible, you can both build momentum in the team and understand how each of you fits into the larger project.
• Making visual artifacts helps make team contributions tangible and transparent.

HOW TO visualize contributions

• Make artifacts to share, no matter what the phase or activity.
• Saturate your team space during every meeting.
• Try different ways to make your contributions visible. You could use your logbooks, a shared blog, other social media, whiteboards, tabloid-sized pieces of paper… experiment with how to leave a trail when you work.

We don’t yet have any techniques in this Bootleg for the “show don’t tell” attitude. Here’s why: d.school faculty rockstars Scott Witthoft and Scott Doorley have created a killer compendium of resources on storyviz.com, the sister website to their popular d.school course of the same name. Go there. Now.

• It is common practice to test prototypes with users to evaluate solutions, but you can also gain empathy through prototyping, exposing different information than simple interviewing and observation might. Of course, whenever you test with a user you should consider both what you can learn about your solution and what you can learn about the person – you can always use more empathetic understanding.
  But you can also develop prototypes or create situations specifically designed to gain empathy, without testing a solution at all (or even having a solution in mind).
• This is sometimes called “active empathy” because you are not an outside observer, you are creating conditions to bring out new information. In the same way a solution prototype helps you gain understanding about your concept, an empathy prototype helps you gain understanding about the design space and people’s mindsets about certain issues.

HOW to prototype for empathy

• Empathy prototypes are often best used when you have done some work to understand the design space, and want to dig deeper into a certain area or probe an insight you are developing. Think about what aspect of the challenge you want to learn more about. Then discuss or brainstorm ways you might investigate that subject.
• You can create prototypes for empathy to test with users or with your design team.
• Here are some ideas to get you started:
  • Have your user draw something (for example, draw how you think about spending money, or draw how you get to work) and then talk about it afterward.
  • Create a game that probes issues you want to explore (for example, you could make a simple card game which forces users to make choices related to your design challenge).
  • Simulate an aspect of what users are going through to better understand it yourself (for example, if your users plant seeds while carrying a baby, get a sling and carry ten pounds while planting seeds).

• Prototypes can serve a lot of functions. Some are meant to inspire and communicate an idea, and aren’t meant to be used. Some, on the other hand, are designed to help you test various aspects of your idea.
• Prototyping to test is the iterative generation of low-resolution artifacts that probe different aspects of your design solution or design space. The fundamental way we test our prototypes is by letting users experience them and react to them. In creating prototypes to test with users you have the opportunity to examine your solution decisions as well as your perception of your users and their needs.

HOW to prototype to test

• Think about what you are trying to learn with your prototypes, and create low-resolution objects and scenarios which probe those questions. Staying low-res allows you to pursue many different ideas you generated without committing to a direction too early on. The objective is not simply to create a mock-up or scale model of your solution concept; it is to create experiences to which users can react.
• Just start building. Even if you aren’t sure what you’re doing, the act of picking up some materials (paper, tape, and found objects are a good way to start!) will be enough to get you going.
• Don’t spend too long on one prototype. Move on before you find yourself getting too emotionally attached to any one prototype.
• Build with the user in mind. What do you hope to test with the user? What sorts of behavior do you expect? Answering these questions will help focus your prototyping and help you receive meaningful feedback in the testing phase.
• Bring resolution to the aspects that are important for what you are trying to test, and save your efforts on other aspects.
• ID a variable. Identify what’s being tested with each prototype. A prototype should answer a particular question when tested.
• You also need to think about the context and testing scenario you will create to get meaningful feedback. It is not always the case that you can just hand an object to someone on the street and get real feedback. Test in the context that your solution would actually be used (or approximate the important parts of that context). For example, if you are creating a consumer food storage system, let users test it in their kitchens at home – some of the nuanced but important issues will only emerge there.

• An important principle of human-centered design is getting deep with the users you interview and observe. However, when you go deep, you can’t focus on everything. Use a user essence statement to articulate exactly why this user is important to you.
• You can also use a user essence statement to identify commonalities that will help direct your empathy. For example, if you notice that you’re really interested in one user who sees herself as a hero for showing up to work, you might seek out other people similar in this way – even if they’re demographically very different otherwise from your initial user.

HOW to use a user essence statement

• You can use the following mad libs to help frame your statement:
  • [user] sees him/herself as ___________.
  • For [user], ____________ is actually ____________.
  • For [user], ____________ feels like ____________.
  • For [user], ____________ seems like ____________.
  • [user] is ______________ in a world of _____________.
  • [user] is ______________ in a world where ____________.

• A point-of-view (POV) is your reframing of a design challenge into an actionable problem statement that will launch you into generative ideation. A POV Madlib provides a scaffolding to develop your POV.
• A good POV will allow you to ideate in a directed manner, by creating How-Might-We (HMW) questions based on your POV.
• Most of all, your POV captures your design vision – your responsibility and opportunity as a designer is to discover and articulate the meaningful challenge.

HOW to use a POV madlib

• Use the following madlib to capture and harmonize three elements of a POV: user, need, and insight. For example, [USER] needs to [USER’S NEED] because [SURPRISING INSIGHT]
• Use a whiteboard or scratch paper to try out a number of options, playing with each variable and the combinations of them. The need and insight should flow from your unpacking and synthesis work. Remember, ‘needs’ should be verbs, and the insight typically should not simply be a reason for the need, but rather a synthesized statement that you can leverage in designing a solution. Keep it sexy (it should intrigue people) and hold the tension in your POV.
• For example, instead of “A teenage girl needs more nutritious food because vitamins are vital to good health” try “A teenage girl with a bleak outlook needs to feel more socially accepted when eating healthy food, because in her hood a social risk is more dangerous than a health risk.” Note how the latter is an actionable, and potentially generative, problem statement, while the former is little more than a statement of fact, which spurs little excitement or direction to develop solutions.

WHY make a prototyping station

• Having prototyping materials at hand lowers the barrier to building. Rather than having to think about where to get materials, when inspiration strikes, your materials are at hand.
• Keeping prototyping materials around signals to others that building is okay. If your materials look playful and low-res, so much the better! It’s hard to put too much pressure on prototypes that are made of post-it notes and pipe cleaners.
• Prototyping materials are a very low-cost way to make your environment more conducive to building. You can buy materials from craft stores, or you can hit surplus stores to get more unusual materials at bargain prices (we love SCRAP and RAFT in the Bay Area). Bonus: surplus materials are a great eco-friendly way to prototype!

HOW TO make a prototyping station

• Prepare your prototyping bins. At the d.school, we’ve made rolling prototyping carts accessible from both sides, with small bins for different types of materials. When we take prototyping materials on the road, we prepare smaller (approximately 2′ x 1′ x 1′) bins with a selection of different materials, then “file” the extra materials back in the big bins when we get back.
• We love our rolling carts, but we’ve seen many different arrangements of prototyping bins that work well for different contexts. Here are some things to keep in mind as you’re designing your prototyping supply station:
  • How many people will be using your prototyping materials at once?
  • How can you use labels and signs to make it easy for people to accurately put materials back when they’re done?
  • Do you want materials to be instantly accessible, or do you want people to have to open a lid or a cupboard?
  • What workspaces are near your prototyping materials? Will you need to move your prototyping station around your building, or can it stay in one place?
• It’s fun to gather whatever catches your eye. Do be mindful of what functions different materials can serve. It’s frustrating to have a lot of paper and fabric and nothing to attach it with. Here are some categories we keep in mind, and some examples of materials from each category:
  • Closures: Velcro, zip ties, magnets, snaps, masking tape, duct tape (we like colored duct tape when we can find it), scotch tape, glue sticks, paper clips, (again, we like colored paper clips), decorative brads
  • Tools: hole punches, scissors, staplers (with staples), hot glue/glue guns, rulers
  • Base materials: assorted fabric swatches, plastic sheets or tiles, textured cardstock, multicolored cardstock, assorted felt, assorted foam sheets, post-it notes of different sizes, foil
  • Large-scale materials: large sheets of fabric or bedsheets, large rolls of butcher paper
  • Costumes for experience/environment prototypes: masks, hats, glasses, shirts
  • Accessories: assorted ribbon, stickers (alphabet, numeric, etc.), yarn/string, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, rubber bands, multicolored assorted foam shapes
  • Writing implements: Fine point black sharpies, thick color sharpies, washable markers if you’re working with kids
  • Avoid (unless you love cleaning up or have very understanding custodial staff): glitter, confetti, tinsel, white glue, fabric paint in squeeze bottles (these take too long to dry to be useful for rapid prototyping), craft knives (the covers tend to get lost in the shuffle), pins and needles (getting pricked in the hand takes the fun out of digging through prototyping materials)

WHY why-how ladder

• As a general rule, asking ‘why’ yields more abstract statements and asking ‘how’ yields specific statements. Often, abstract statements are more meaningful but not as directly actionable, and the opposite is true of more specific statements. This is why you [LINK] ask ‘why?’ often during interviews – in order to get toward more meaningful feelings from users rather than specific likes and dislikes.
• Outside an interview, you can use why-how laddering to flesh out user needs. If your needs are too general (you feel they could apply to anybody) or too specific (you aren’t sure the needs could be generalized to others), why-how laddering helps you find a middle stratum of needs that are both meaningful and actionable.

HOW to why-how ladder

• Start with a user need that feels meaningful to you. This need will be the seed for your why-how ladder.
• Write that need on the board and then ladder up from there by asking ‘why’. Why would your user have this need? For example, you may have come up with a need like “she needs to see a link between a product and the natural process that created it.” Why might this be the case? Maybe she needs to be confident that products won’t harm her health. Maybe she needs to feel she understands a product’s origin. Get these deeper needs by combining your observations and interviews with your intuition. Then take that more abstract need and ask why again, creating another need. At a certain point you will reach a very abstract need, common to just about everyone, such as the ‘need to be healthy’. When your need applies to everyone, it’s time to get more specific again.
• To get more specific, you can ask ‘how’. In this example, you climbed up to the ‘need to understand where a product came from’. Then ask ‘how’ to identify the ‘need to participate in the process of creating a product’. There will also be multiple answers to your ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ – branch out and write those down. Climb up (‘why?’) and down (‘how?’) in branches to flesh out a set of needs for your user. The result (after some editing and refining) is a needs hierarchy that paints a full picture of your user or composite user.

WHY stoke to focus

• A “stoke” is an exercise that you can use to change the energy in your group. Many stokes are borrowed from theater and improv, and they serve different purposes. Stoking to focus helps everyone in your group listen to one another. These exercises all require paying close attention to others’ cues.
• Stoking to focus is a great way to prepare for an intense group work session, especially one in which everybody is coming in with different information to synthesize. Maybe you’re just about to write a [LINK]POV statement or start building a prototype – you need everybody in your group ready to communicate with one another.

HOW TO stoke to focus

• A, B, C… Your goal is to get through the alphabet, one letter at a time. Start by saying the letter “A”. Now, somebody else must say “B” – it doesn’t matter who. Next, somebody else must say “C”. But if two people say a letter at the same time, you have to start again from the beginning! Read each others’ expressions closely to get in the zone where you can make it through the whole alphabet. For an extra challenge, try this with your eyes closed.
• A wise person once said… Stand in a circle. Start by saying a word – any word. The person next to you must say the next word in the sentence. Keep going until it becomes clear that you have created a proverb. Acknowledge your pearl of wisdom by nodding solemnly and saying “Yes, yes, yes”. And remember, a wise person once said, “A watermelon without a dog is no greater than a salad.”