Box & Button (Workshop #004): Part 02

Continuing from day 1 of the Box & Button workshop, all of the participants reconvened in Art Center’s Ahmanson Auditorium to develop their team’s business. The participants entered the groups previously delegated to discuss the findings from their personal research and investigations over the past week. The groups were asked to spend the first 30 minutes discussing with their fellow partners the discoveries from their week long hiatus.

Each group was given a toolkit for developing a prototype to communicate and submit their venture for review. The toolkit consisted of a tub of clay, a business plan worksheet, and blank pieces of paper for sketches. Over the course of the next two hours, 10 businesses were developed based on the dehumanized entrepreneur’s vision (a selection of these businesses will be highlighted in separate blog posts to come). The participants consulted the facilitator for various rounds of critique and advice to ensure that the business created met the standards of the dehumanized entrepreneur’s output.

Upon receiving approval, one representative from each group approached the stage to deliver a pitch for their business, and officially submit their business plan (worksheet) and prototype (sketch or 3D mockup) for archival purposes.

In thinking about how to measure the success of these proposals, in the interest of developing the thesis work farther, I have come to the conclusion that the projects that were the most interesting were able to free themselves from any reference, and creatively find a cohesive narrative that was capable of connecting each of the dehumanized entrepreneur’s exported key terms.

Reflection / notes for improvement:

• The setting in general needs to be considered as part of the design process for developing my thesis workshops further.
• The prototypes, in combination with the business plans, added a lot to the project in terms of communicating these ideas. What other kinds of designed tools / artifacts can better foster these proposals?
• For the next iteration, I would like to play up the backstory of WHY the participants are creating these businesses, making it clearer the role they are playing, as well as their own assumed weaknesses (inability, as humans, to perceive problems).
• How can I better facilitate the elimination of reference to existing businesses? How can I better facilitate a cohesive narrative to connect the key terms to one another in innovative ways?

Box & Button (Workshop #004): Part 01

A third workshop took place in Ahmanson Auditorium at Art Center College of Design with 70 participants from a wide range of academic focuses including: Graphic Design, Entertainment Design, and Illustration. The workshop explores the end of humanly perceivable problems, a massive problem in-it-of-itself that will result in the end of entrepreneurship, a practice that defines our species. The activity is set in a time in which each participant is incapable of identifying new problems. The workshop’s center-piece is a machine (a diegetic prototype) that is designed to aid in the entrepreneurial endeavors of the small groups. This machine does not claim to be capable of foreseeing or identifying problems that are not perceivable to mankind – that would be impossible (practically speaking). Instead, the machine, and the workshop as a whole, aims to spark conversation around the theories that drive my thesis by providing un-perceivable combinations of perceivable terms that are meant to inspire the development of business.

Some of the participants. Ahmanson Auditorium, Art Center College of Design

To start things off, the audience was prompted to develop 10 groups of 5-7 team members. 1 representative from each of the 10 groups was then directed to the front of the auditorium in order to approach the machine, and activate it’s vision.

The Dehumanized Entrepreneur (prototype) about to be activated by a participant

By pressing the big green button, the participant activates the Dehumanized Entrepreneur and, in doing so, generates 5 terms (Problem, Opportunity, Scenario, Industry, Audience) pertaining to the business they are being called upon to create during the workshop. The following is a sample of some of the terms generated during this initial session (check out an online version here).

Each group of participants is then prompted to record the data provided to them from the machine, and spend a week researching each of the terms in order to come back to the final session, part 2 of the workshop, with a strong knowledge of each of these generated terms. This knowledge will be necessary for the final outcome for the workshop: the creation of a rough business plan and prototype to communicate the human’s (participants) interpretation of the machine’s exported vision.

Further Reading / Concept Background: This workshop builds upon early prototypes of an Executive Summary Generator (1,2) that I developed as well as an initial, smaller-scale, workshop held in the Art Center Graphic Design Department’s Business 101 class with Terry Stone. Special thanks to Mateo Neri for sponsoring this two-day workshop.

The (Dis)Embodied Entrepreneur System Flow v3

For the third iteration of my flow chart, I took a more birds-eye view look at the system as a whole. I realized, from the conclusions made in my paper, that the two main outputs of the machine are the problem, and the knowledge required to approach the problem. The system right now lacks in specificity, something to work towards for future iterations.

The Dehumanization of Entrepreneurship Part 05: Conclusion

The research and development of both the human-centered workshops, and the machine-centered prototypes, shed insight into my own personal strengths and interests to inform the ultimate direction and strategy for the The Dehumanization of Entrepreneurship.

”The facilitator is usually someone who gets something done, the lubricant in a process to achieve a goal. But, I think it can be more like a dirty lubricant. It can fuck up a process a little bit, make it self-reflective, inefficient, awkward, etc.” – Sean Dockray in conversation with David Elliot

Dockray frames facilitation as an art form that flips the corporate strategy on its head to yield interesting results. As an entrepreneurial practice, The Public School is an interesting model that provides nothing more than a space, and a framework, relying on the audience to define the rest. Both the system and the user rely on each other’s participation and existence for something new to be created. Without the framework, mankind’s output can not exist. Without mankind, the system’s framework is useless. While the resulting image of generative art can be beautiful and provocative, the piece is not actually the artwork itself, but instead the by-product of the piece, which is the code or process that generated it.

In the Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen argues that, to truly innovate, the entrepreneur has to partner with the consumer to create a space for collaborative discovery. This relatively modern theory (dating back to the late 80s / early 90s) recognizes success not as the result of one individual, but instead as a collaborative effort.

“Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together. Not only are the market applications for disruptive technologies unknown at the time of their development, they are unknowable.”

This collaborative approach to innovation that takes place between the supplier and the customer allows for a voyage into unknown spaces, where communal exploration, dissemination, and discovery can emerge. If collaboration between the entrepreneur and the consumer, as Christensen explains, is the true seed of progress, perhaps automation and the complete dehumanization of entrepreneurial practice is not a strategy that matches the aspirations of this system. Instead of automation, then, the final system aspires to lay the groundwork for innovation by making visible our present condition, and inventing our past experience to give us (mankind) the tools to innovate on our own. The Dehumanized Entrepreneur, then, is not a system for autonomously generating business. It is an entrepreneurial seeing machine.

Fig 09. Compilation of on-going design research. These graphics aim to visualize the plan for a system that operates with two key functions – Function 01: Problem identification – the illustration of our existing condition. Function 02: Past Experience generation – the authorship of a knowledge that can inform mankind’s reaction to the discovered problem.

Works Cited:

1. David Elliot, The Public School, http://spd.e-rat.org/writing/david-elliott-interview.html (May 2008).
2. Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (New York: Harper, 1997), 165.

The Dehumanization of Entrepreneurship Part 04: The System

The Dehumanization of Entrepreneurship is a design project that lays the groundwork for a system that aspires to heroically take the place of mankind in entrepreneurial practice. The system is a parallel being, a mimicry, and a representation, of the thoughts and values of an individual that starts things. It dehumanizes entrepreneurial spirit by leveraging it’s capability to create the bridge between our existing condition and our past experience. It creates these bridges by identifying a problem, and authoring the knowledge required to design a solution.

Of course this project, The Dehumanization of Entrepreneurship, cannot simply begin with an abrupt abandonment of the practice’s current human-driven methodologies. Instead, to begin working towards systematizing the process of innovation, I created a series of games and workshops that are designed to strike a balance between mediated decision making, and free-will. These initial projects range from workshops on defiant innovation at the Occupy camp in Downtown Los Angeles to card games that generate business plans. The human-centered research component, as developed in these workshops, is brought to a formal conclusion through the development of a final workshop, the Serendipitous Business Plan Generator, which took place in the city of Merced, California on November 11, 2011.

Fig 04. Presenting the game mechanics, and introducing the workshop designed specifically for the community of Merced to take full advantage of.

The City of Merced, known as the “Gateway to Yosemite,” is home to a population of nearly 80,000 individuals, about 30% of which are currently living below the poverty line. Homes at the median level in Merced saw a dramatic loss in value, 62%, the biggest drop anywhere in the country, according to data from Forbes. According to Zillow, by the end of 2009, house prices in Merced had returned to the levels seen over a decade earlier. This crisis has established a strong community of individuals and organizations that are actively seeking rich new ways of thinking about commerce and innovation, in order to transform the community into a rich space for survival, ingenuity, and break through.

Several organizations within Merced decided to take action on these aspirations by developing a town-hall meeting of sorts to bring leading voices from around the nation to lead the community into new modes of thinking. I was fortunate enough to have been approached to develop a workshop for the community of Merced at this gathering. The attendees of the gathering were a richly diverse audience of about 100 individuals that collectively represented the community of Merced. From farmers to students, all cultures and professions within the community were accounted for, making it a rich space to design a workshop that was very specific to the context and histories of Merced. In this space, I piloted a version of my Serendipitous Business Plan Generator (SBPG) that was designed specifically for this gathering. The SBPG works by juxtaposing three components: Scenario, Opportunity, and Modify Element.

Scenario: The situation (i.e. Growth, Collapse, etc.) in which the participant is starting their business. This element is designed to give insight into the resources they will be able to leverage for their business plan.

Opportunity: The emerging opportunity (i.e. Augmented Reality, Cyborgs, etc.) that the participant can take advantage of and consider when conceptualizing their business plan.

Modify Element: The specific space, industry, product, or service (i.e. Coffee Shop, Lamp, etc.) your business plan is in conversation with, adapting, or transforming.

While the Scenario and Opportunity decks were only slightly developed from earlier iterations, the Modify Element deck was completely re-visited to speak to this specific community. For the Modify Element deck, students from UC Merced were prompted to explore the community, and take photographs of spaces that illustrated both an essence of the community, and prominent issues at hand in the county. By getting the students (residents of Merced) involved in this preliminary aspect of the experience, the system became specifically designed for the City of Merced as a way to tease out ideas and concerns unique to this community.

These images were placed on 10 different roundtables around the community center, and participants were prompted to select their seat based on the space depicted in the photograph, assuming that the participants would select based on some kind of prior experience or emotional connection with the imagery depicted in the photo. Shortly after, the additional two cards (opportunity and scenario) were administered to the participants along with a business plan template, and full instructions for the exercise.

Fig 05. Each table housed a diverse group of Merced community members, working together to strategize their business proposal for the community of Merced, using the Serendipitous Business Plan Generator (left). Throughout the the activity, I spent time at each table to work with the participants on their ideas, and clarify any issues or concerns centered around the system itself (right).

In 30 minutes, the participants were prompted to develop a concept for a business that would exist in Merced that considered all three of the generated components as restrictions in the making process. In order to foster a bit of friendly competition amongst the groups, the community was informed half way through the exercise that some tables were given the same opportunities to capitalize on, thus creating direct competition between the groups in order to push the ideas beyond the top-level, initial, concepts.

After 30 minutes of rapid business generation, each group delivered a pitch to the audience as a whole, presenting the details of their business plans while their ideas were noted on a series of posters. After each presentation, the posters were pinned to the walls of the community center, and the community was asked to vote on the venture that would best benefit the community at large.

Fig 06. A participant pitches their group’s idea to the community (left). The participants as a whole vote on the business they wish to see come to life in the community of Merced (right).

After the Merced Project, I realized that all of the experiences designed thus far could be categorized as a kind of performance art, in the sense that my own presence is required in the administration and facilitation of each activity. What would happen if I remove myself from the process entirely? This iteration of the Serendipitous Business Plan Generator steps closer towards an automated system in order to explore the kinds of business plans an entrepreneurial machine could be capable of writing. 1,000 Businesses is a compilation of 1,000 algorithmically generated executive summaries that are written by the Serendipitous Executive Summary Generator, a semi-autonomous web app I developed that pulls from a series of word lists and sentence structures in order to generate an Executive Summary, the basis of all business plans, and entrepreneurial endeavor.

Fig 07. The Serendipitous Executive Summary Generator in action. Each exported statement is placed in one of one thousand folders to be archived in preparation for the development of 350 Business Plans.

The prototype works like this:

1. The algorithm begins with a sentence structure that has certain words differentiated from the rest of the sentence through the use of {brackets}.
2. The words within the {brackets}, and the sentence structures themselves, are randomized by pulling from a list of options for words and sentence formations that I provided in a database.
3. Every time the user clicks “GIVE ME ANOTHER BUSINESS MODEL,” the page is refreshed, and a new statement with randomized key words, and an alternative sentence structure, is generated.

Fig 08. Data input process. Opportunity: The Cloud. (left) Demographic: 18-30 year olds. (right)

After generating 1,000 of these summaries, a series of key-terms are extracted from each executive summary (i.e. opportunity, demographic, etc.), forming a database of words to pull from for each plan. These terms are then manually inputed into the designated space(s) within 350 business plans, as dictated by the business plan algorithm I wrote by averaging business plan templates found online. The system has produced a range of businesses that begin to go beyond the first-level “silly,” and more into the believable, yet strange, realm. The algorithm that produces each of the 350 plans revealed a critical dimension that questions the same-ness of business plans, the “templatization” of innovation, and the seemingly automated nature of the field of entrepreneurship.

The Dehumanization of Entrepreneurship (MFA thesis paper) on Scribd

I have uploaded the paper on my Scribd page to allow for easy downloading, sharing, and reading. I am currently working on creating a few other versions of the paper in the form of: a series of blog posts, a keynote presentation for an upcoming lecture at UCLA, and a “tweetable” version. More to come…

View this document on Scribd

The (Dis)Embodied Entrepreneur System Flow v2

Taking from the knowledge gained in my initial attempts at building the (Dis)Embodied Entrepreneur, this second iteration of the algorithm is designed with more complex layers that further remove the human / maker from the process of development as a way to push it further towards an autonomous existence.

Where the system, in this mock up, falls short is the final selection. Something that algorithms do especially well is selection based on detailed paramaters. This objectivity is what interests me in developing the entrepreneur. However, because the final step of the algorithm is simply a random selection, the algorithm becomes very subjective, and in a sense loses it’s purpose.

Initial future considerations:

• How can each component of the automation process be drawn out in an obsessively detailed manner?
• How can the system itself become embodied? Can there be a physical / illustrative form to add to the message as a whole?

Thesis Paper Draft 01

“Diegetic Entrepreneurship: A Documented Attempt at Inventing the Embodied Entrepreneur” is the first draft of my MFA thesis submitted to the Art Center College of Design. The paper establishes a new theoretical stand point on the role of entrepreneurs and the field of business, and then acts on this theory through a series of design systems. 8,758 words. 28 pages.

View this document on Scribd

The Merced Project

The City of Merced, known as the “Gateway to Yosemite,” is home to a population of nearly 80,000 individuals, about 30% of which are currently living below the poverty line. Homes at the median level in Merced saw a dramatic loss in value, 62%, the biggest drop anywhere in the country, according to data from Forbes. According to Zillow, by the end of 2009, house prices in Merced had returned to the levels seen over a decade earlier. This crisis has established a strong community of individuals and organizations that are actively seeking rich new ways of thinking about commerce and innovation, in order to transform the community into a rich space for survival, ingenuity, and break through.

Several organizations within Merced decided to take action on these aspirations by developing a town-hall meeting of sorts to bring leading voices from around the nation to lead the community into new modes of thinking. I was fortunate enough to have been approached to develop a workshop for the community of Merced at this gathering.

The attendees of the gathering were a richly diverse audience of about 100 individuals that collectively represented the community of Merced. From farmers to students, all cultures and professions within the community were accounted for, making it a rich space to design a workshop that was very specific to the context and histories of Merced.

In this space, I piloted a version of my Serendipitous Business Plan Generator (SBPG) that was designed specifically for this gathering. The SBPG works by juxtaposing three components: Scenario, Opportunity, and the Modify Element. In this exercise, one component from each of these three decks are drawn by the participant, often resulting in a bizarre mashup of ideas that are then played straight through the development of a business plan.

Scenario: The situation (i.e. Growth, Collapse, etc.) in which the participant is starting their business. This element is  designed to give insight into the resources they will be able to leverage for their business plan.

Opportunity: The emerging opportunity (i.e. Augmented Reality, Cyborgs, etc.) that the participant can take advantage of and consider when conceptualizing their business plan.

Modify Element: The specific space, industry, product, or service (i.e. Coffee Shop, Lamp, etc.) your business plan is in conversation with, adapting, or transforming.

While the Scenario and Opportunity decks were only slightly developed from earlier iterations, the Modify Element deck was completely re-visited to speak to this specific community. For the Modify Element deck, students from UC Merced were prompted to explore the community, and take photographs of spaces that illustrated both an essence of the community, and prominent issues at hand in the county. By getting the students (residents of Merced) involved in this preliminary aspect of the experience, the system became specifically designed for the City of Merced as a way to tease out ideas and concerns unique to this community.

These images were placed on 10 different roundtables around the community center, and participants were prompted to select their seat based on the space depicted in the photograph, assuming that the participants would select based on some kind of prior experience or emotional connection with the imagery depicted in the photo.

Shortly after, the additional two cards (opportunity and scenario) were administered to the participants along with a business plan template, and full instructions for the exercise.

In 30 minutes, the participants were prompted to develop a concept for a business that would exist in Merced that considered all three of the generated components as restrictions in the making process. In order to foster a bit of friendly competition amongst the groups, the community was informed half way through the exercise that some tables were given the same opportunities to capitalize on, thus creating direct competition between the groups in order to push the ideas beyond the top-level, initial, concepts.

After 30 minutes of rapid business generation, each group delivered a pitch to the audience as a whole, presenting the details of their business plans while their ideas were noted on a series of posters. After each presentation, the posters were pinned to the walls of the community center, and the community was asked to vote on the venture that would best benefit the community at large.

The problem with Social Innovation is that it puts the entrepreneur(s) on a pedestal. In doing so, the process of innovation becomes framed as for the community as opposed to with the community, inevitably neglecting the edges of an issue at hand, resulting in a lot of clean looking shiny things that impose a set of values and beliefs around a community’s problems. I am interested in how The Merced Project was able to leverage corporate innovation tactics within a specific community as a way to tease out information about the culture of this space of crisis. Ethnographers often work with entrepreneurs in communities to seek new markets and opportunities, but what if the end goal was not to walk away with a set of solutions to capitalize on? The Merced Project begins to explore design’s ability to shift the role of an entrepreneur away from solving problems, focusing instead on working with a community to tease out new problems specific to their interests. I am interested in how this trajectory could be pushed even further through the development of a series of design interventions inspired / informed by the results of the workshop in order to bring the ideas to the forefront of the community at large.

Special thanks to Kate Slovin for the great photography work.

Serendipitous Business Model Generator (SBMG Part 06) – User Studies Round 02

After a successful first round of user-studies, I chose to shift my focus for the second round away from the design audience, and invited my colleague Kelvin Ho to participate. Kelvin received his MBA from UCLA, is the Executive Director of My Own Business Inc., and is a Board Member of the Social Enterprise Alliance.

Because it is in a designer’s nature to think in the speculative realm, I was not surprised that my initial series of user-studies did in fact produce these kinds of results. I became curious if these outcomes could be replicated across disciplines, taking it into the business world itself. A bit to my surprise, I found that, while the results were still interesting, the imaginative qualities produced by the designers in the first round of user-studies were not replicated. Regardless, the study lead me to a series of discoveries that will greatly influence a second prototype of the decks.

The following are a list of changes that I will be exploring in the second prototype, which is currently underway:

1. Re-frame “horizon element” as “opportunity.”
2. Eliminate point system / competitive aspect. While this may be re-introduced, the system as it is does not work, and is not desired.
3. “Opportunity” deck should not include opportunities that already exist, but instead focus on concepts with more layers of interpretation.
4. “Scenario” deck should not include “transformation,” but instead should include more instances of collapse or constraint.
5. Make the user independent. The cards each require explanation – this should not be the case, as the system will eventually require an independent understanding from the participants.
6. Initial framing of the system needs work. How much time should be spent? How many people should work together? One-on-one is not the only option.