Jon Kolko on Finding Joy Changing Careers From Business to Teaching

In Chapter 3 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "What Do You Enjoy Most About What You Do?"  Kolko discusses making the transition working as a design professional to teaching design at the school he founded.  He discusses the rush he gets in the classroom and across parts of the "ivory tower" experience such as reading, researching and writing about complex problems. 

Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: What do you enjoy most about what you do?

Jon Kolko: I loved everything about design. I just love being a designer doing creative design work, making things. I've sort of transitioned in the last couple of years. So being called an academic has always sort of stung me like ah, that’s bad. In the last three years, I've decided that in fact, I am an academic and it's good. And so, I think in the same sort of excitement and personal rush that you get from doing creative design work. I also now get from teaching. And so, that’s sort of have been a revelation to me that it's okay to live in an intellectual ivory tower to some degree as long as you make that ivory tower accessible. I don’t feel bad that I enjoy reading and writing and thinking about complex problems. And so, for me, that’s been something that’s been making me really, really happy recently is any time I can spend actually teaching in a classroom. Weirdly, I'm spending less and less time teaching in a classroom because as the Austin Center for Design is more successful, there's more administrative crap to do. I don’t mind doing the crap. It's called crap because it's not fun but it's also not bad because it's still my baby. I'm still really enjoying it. I could see in the future that would definitely be something for somebody else to do but for the time being, anything that’s related to teaching and design is really, really giving me a lot of pleasure.

Jon Kolko on How Personal Priorities Change With Age

In Chapter 4 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Are Your Personal Priorities Changing as You Get Older?"  Kolko shares how he spends less time worrying and working and more time with family and enjoying the world.  He has transitioned from working over 100 hours a week to roughly 60 to 70.  Kolko learns he can do powerful, meaningful work while not working all the time. 

Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How are your personal priorities changing as you get older?

Jon Kolko:  Generally, I'm spending less time worrying, more time loving my wife, more time reading, and just enjoying the world. I had probably gone from working on average probably 100 or 110 hours a week to like 60 or 70 hours and of those 60 or 70, I probably enjoy 95 percent of them as opposed to like 20 percent of the 100 hours. And so, your like quality of life is off the charts. It's not all peaches and cream. But definitely is, like it seems weird to say like as I've gotten older. Like I don’t feel very old. I still feel like a kid but if we're going to go with that train of thought as I've gotten older, I think I've realized that I can do like good powerful meaningful stuff and I don’t have to work 100 percent of the time to do it, and that I can put it aside and do something else.

Jon Kolko: Why Entrepreneurial Leadership Starts With Passion

In Chapter 5 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "What Does It Mean to Be a Leader in What You Do?"  Kolko looks at what he has learned about developing as a leader through the lens of his students.  For him, he sees drive, passion, resiliency and curiosity form the foundation that help select entrepreneurs thrive professionally and lead in their respective fields.  Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: What does it mean to be a leader in what you do?

Jon Kolko: I think that there are a lot of things around confidence that play into leadership. I think there’s qualities of charisma but I don’t know. I feel like those are ancillary. I feel like there's something else at the core and it might actually have to do with drive and passion. I have a hard time looking at myself through that lens. 

So maybe we could look in some of my students through that lens and the students that are most successful in starting companies, meaning in becoming leaders, seem to have an unending passion for whatever it is they're doing. And so, when you do anything in design or business, it's a constant struggle. When you start your own company, which you know it's a huge constant struggle and it almost feels from one perspective like anything that can go wrong will go wrong over and over and over, and it takes a certain unending passion to get through that because it's very easy and it's almost like the logical thing to do is to give up and at some point to just throw in the towel and say it's easier to go to work for somebody else or do something else. But I've just seen in the students that have graduated that have formed these companies and then going on to be successful, each time something sort of difficult or complicated comes at them or a reason why they should give up, the ones that are truly passionate about it don’t and use it to somehow gain leverage on a situation to turn it into something positive. 

That probably begs the question of what is passion and I'm not sure I have like a ready flip answer for it, but it does seem like just a massive curiosity and a need to know things, and that passion in the context of a business is contained within the business. But generally it's just a thirst to know how the world works right? And how people are and why things are the way they are.

Jon Kolko on How Reflecting Benefits a Creative Career

In Chapter 6 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Has Reflection Contributed to Your Leadership Development?"  Kolko begins by discussing how he has incorporated reflection into the curriculum experience for his design students.  He continues detailing is own reflective process and why it is important to have the inner dialogue before making bold, provocative statements. 

Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How has reflection contributed to you leadership development?

Jon Kolko: It plays a huge role in the process of design sort of outside of my own personal experiences. We bake into the curriculum constant reflection from the students at Austin Center for Design. So a typical agile MVP or always in beta process is one where you do stuff and then you test it and then there has to be a moment where you stop and you go like, “What just happened?” And that is reflection and it’s incredibly easy to skip that and to simply impulsively respond to data rather than interpreting it. 

Reflection is a form of interpretation and so it's an assignment of meaning and it's going to be wrong sometimes. And so, it's easy to skip and simply use the data at face value which will also be wrong sometimes but it feels safer. I have found that the more interpretation and reflection that occurs, the more risky it is to build on that reflection but when you do build on it, the more likely it is to lead to large and magical, and powerful changes. 

And so we do a couple of things formally in our curriculum that drive toward reflection, like I have the students do a, it was called something much more academic and they changed to a peak of the week, so a p.o.w. every week. So they film themselves and they say, “What did you this week about entrepreneurship?” And, “What did you learn this week about entrepreneurship?” And simply saying it is often just enough to provoke that reflection. Actually, watching it is huge. For me, I think I'm overly contemplative because one, I have that constant just self-doubt that I'm not doing enough and I'm not doing as good as I could and I could always be doing more and then second, there's this idea that if I'm going to go out there and say large, provocative statements, damn it, I better be right. 

And I feel like I owe it at least to myself to have that sort of inner dialogue about saying things like problems worth solving and abandon your day job at a big corporation or consultancy and go work on poverty and nutrition. Those are aggressive statements even to me. And so I should really have thought deeply about what it is that I'm talking about. I do like to think of active reflection versus passive. Many designers that I know struggle with internal mood disorders and that’s a path and form of reflection. It's self-destructive and it doesn’t go anywhere. There's a form of active reflection through making where you can -- as simple as writing down your thoughts is a form of it but you can also diagram your thoughts and you can draw them, and you can create art and things like that. It's a much healthier form of reflection. And so, I try to personally lead to the second.

Jon Kolko on How to Turn a Collection of Ideas into a Book

In Chapter 7 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You Take Collections of Ideas and Turn them Into Books?"  Kolko shares both his practical and theoretical approaches.  Practically, he simply writes and takes notes consistently and finds the notes and writings progressively congeal into a theme that then may then become a book project which then goes into the standard editing process.  Theoretically,  Kolko finds he fights himself making the decision to green light a book project and finds it happens around the 35,000 or 40,000 word mark. 

Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you take collections of ideas and turn them into books?

Jon Kolko: The process is pretty simple. There's probably like a theoretical answer as well as a practical answer. The practical is a little easier but my process is typically to just write; to write with no directive, no outline, no goal in mind over a process of about nine months to a year, and I write when I'm at conferences, and I write when I'm in class, and I write when I'm on an airplane. The pro tip here is the more time you spend on an airplane, the more time you have to write. And so, there is sort of a weird relationship with being in extreme physical agony on an airplane, on an aircraft and being massively productive but whatever. And then at some point, the thoughts of all of these different conferences and conversations and writing start to congeal into a theme, and usually sort of in backwards looking. It's sort of like a retrospective. It makes sense, like of course it led to this book theme. But there's never any of that sort of central plan. I've set out to write a book about a certain topic like four or five times and I've never written that book. And so it's much more of an organic process. And then once that clicks and you're like, “Okay, cool. The next book is called Wicked Problems.” Then I deal with standard editing process and outline, here's the different points I want to hit and then revise it and tear it down and write it again, kind stuff. But before that point, it really is all over the place. I'm not even sure that I'm cognizant that I'm doing it when I'm doing it. And so, like on my laptop, I have all my nice little folders and stuff, then on my desktop I’ll have little notepad snippets of just random stuff, you know 500 words, 1,000 words. At some point it all starts to make sense. The tools for this suck. There's got to be a better way to structure that in a way that can start to draw the parallels between disparate ideas more closely. But anyway, that’s the practical way of how you set out and write a book. How I set out and write a book.

The theoretical way, there are points in the process where you're like, “I don’t know if I should write this book. I don’t know if I have this book inside of me.” I've had that over and over and over and it's right around 35,000 words usually, which is kind of weird. A book is 45 to 90,000 words depending on how big it is but right around 35,000 something kick in and you’re like… it's that same old voice, right? It's like you don’t what you're talking about or you're not good enough, or this book will never work, nobody wants to read this. You could squelch that voice, right? You can shut it up. It's weird how consistently that voice shows up and it ran right around at the same point in the process.

Jon Kolko on How an Editor Improves the Book Writing Process

In Chapter 8 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Did You Learn to Work More Closely with Editors to Refine Your Writing?"  Kolko, who has written three books, meets an editor, Ronni, working on a book with the publisher Oxford.  His editor helps carry his voice when telling his story about design and do so in a positive way. 

Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: How did you learn to work more closely with editors to refine your writing?

Jon Kolko: So I have a great editor. I first encountered her.  Her name Ronnie and I first encountered her writing with Oxford. My second book was with Oxford and then I was like, “I'm never working with publishers again!” and the one piece of that process that I retained was hiring a professional editor. And so we were joking about this before. I submit my manuscript to Ronnie and it comes back and literally 50 percent of it is redlined out, like cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. 

In many ways, the first time I experienced that, I was extremely taken aback. It was like “Woah, wait a second, what's going on here?” But in fact, it turns out that having that sort of objective perspective is of huge importance. 

I don’t actually think I'm a writer. I think that I'm a fairly okay person at putting together a book. But I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer in a way that I think like somebody like Steven Johnson is a writer. But because I have I think a different story to tell about design and I'm an okay writer, there is something special that comes out of that but because of that, I think an editor plays a much stronger role in my process. 

Typically, an editor doesn’t give you a voice and they try not to take away your voice. I don’t think my editor gives me a voice or takes away my voice. But anything that she helps structure, what are overly argumentative reasonings into something that’s much more absorbable by someone who just isn’t in the mood to get in an argument. I feel as an academic, like I need to defend the things that I'm saying, and I think one of the big points I learned from an editor is these are your points. You don’t need to defend them. Yeah, you need an academic trail and sure you need to cite your sources but go into it assuming that your reader agrees with you rather than assuming your reader is there to disagree with you. And the book will be much more positive and strong and she’s exactly right.

How to Self Publish a Book - Jon Kolko

In Chapter 9 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Did You Build Upon Past Writing Projects in Publishing Your Latest Book?"  Kolko self-publishes his first book which then was picked up by a publisher, where it found moderate success.  For his second book, Kolko works through a publisher and decides for his third book he will self-publish.  He shares the various aspects of the publishing process he has learned to navigate as he goes through the self-publishing process. 

Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How did you build upon past writing projects in publishing your latest book?

Jon Kolko: I learned a ton doing my first couple of books. Some brief history, is I self-published the very first one and we printed a thousand copies and all thousand of them show up in a truck and then you sell them online, blah, blah, blah, and then that got picked up by a publisher. That was moderately successful. The next book got picked up by an academic publisher, that was not very successful. And so, I got to the point where I was like, “Alright, I'm not working with publishers anymore.” I can do all the things a publisher can do, I can do them faster, and I can do them, I think, better. Again, with a caveat maybe of editing. 

So I was able to do all of those things myself and in retrospect there's actually nothing hard about publishing a book. I'm astounded that actually a lot of the big presses are still in business at all because it is so easy. And so, again there's some really pragmatic steps like acquiring an ISBN number, getting your book listed in the various services, books in print, and on Amazon and stuff. But you can Google any of that and it's all there. The only thing that is difficult that remains is what is the book about and what does it look like. Coming soon will be in which digital formats do you support and that’s starting to start to be an issue right now. Even something as simple as exporting to an EPUB and a MOBI and stuff is a pain in the ass and it won’t be in the future. 

But for the time being, if you have a good idea and you know someone who can lay it out or you can lay it out yourself, you got a book. Your audience will find you. Long Tail or any other catchy name for it like that, that works. And so, I think what I learned from the publishing experience is that I don’t need that publishing experience. It gave me the confidence to say that old, tired machine is not for me. 

Jon Kolko on How to Make Social Impact Jobs a Design Career Choice

In Chapter 10 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "What Made You Decide to Write a Book on Wicked Problems?"  Kolko writes the book as a call to action for practicing designers and the educators who teach them.  The book, available for free at www.wickedproblems.com, offers innovative approaches to the evolving design career options. 

Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: What made you decide to write a book on Wicked Problems?

Jon Kolko: Wicked Problems, the book, is a call to action for practicing designers. I would like to see all designers start to question not just the quality of the work they're doing, but what problems they're actually working on. And so, the initial thought was what kind of project can we do at Austin Center for Design to get the word out about the curriculum we're teaching, the types of projects we're launching, and companies we're starting. And so, it was like alright, we’ll do a book, maybe some videos and then the thought was like why not just give it away for free? And so, the whole project is available at WickedProblems.com and my hope is that there's a couple different tiers of designers, like sort of segments of designers that will find it interesting. 

The most immediate is design educators. There's a tiny, tiny number of design educators in the world. And so, if five of them changed their curriculum, suddenly we've affected a lot of practicing designers to be in 10 years. And so, like, here's a curriculum for you, it's cut and dry, it's already done, now you just have the easy task of pushing it through a curriculum council which is another 10 years at some places. But it's to set a precedent for them. 

Another audience is for practicing designers and for practicing designers that are five and six years out, they really start to hit a wall with a huge degree of regularity and they're looking for both examples of what other things they could be doing and also permission to do it. And I found it really effective to just say that to younger junior designers like it's okay to exit the corporate consultancy game. It's okay. There are other things you can do. You can take design and take it policy. You can take it to finance. You can take it to film. You can take it to art. You can take it to Wicked Problems. You can do a lot of things with design. It doesn’t have to be jammed into business. And that’s really, really refreshing, I think for them to hear or so it has been in my experience. 

The last audience is for designers who are right now like seniors in college who are about to graduate and they're scratching their head going, “You know what? I don’t want to work at --“name your Fortune 20 company, “and these flashy consultancies. I don’t want to work there either.” Those used to be rogue designers and design programs. They're the norm now and they have grown up with a set of ideals that it's part of them to work on things that matter. Well, like, Okay, cool. Here's your handbook. Go work on things that matter and make the world a better place.

Jon Kolko on How Learning Facilitation Skills Advances Career

In Chapter 11 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How is Your Creative Toolbox Changing?"  Kolko notes how his creative toolbox progressively includes "grown up" tools.  He notes these are more about talking and less about making, for example facilitation tools and those that help drive large organizational and strategic change.  He contrasts this to the design or maker skills so fundamental to his early career experiences. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How is your creative toolbox changing?

Jon Kolko: My creative toolbox is starting to have much more grownup tools in it, which usually mean things that are about talking and not things about making. And it's weird that that is true. And so, the examples that I'm thinking of are facilitation tools and tools that help drive large organizational and strategic change as opposed to tools for making things look a certain way, act a certain way, feel a certain way. This strategy, design thinking, whatever catchy name you want to use for it, has always sort of rubbed me a little bit the wrong way because I’d always felt like it wasn’t enough without the making. And so, I think I still believe that. But I'm becoming okay with using a designerly way of working to convince people of things, to get people to see my perspective, to drive an argument. And that will be the way that design plays out in policy and in law. I mean, design is going to be embedded in all of these external disciplines or fields and that’s how it's going to work. There will still be artifacts but that’s not the endgame, they’re a means to an end and I think the toolbox that I have is widened to include those. Before, frankly, I didn’t give them the time and day. I thought they were sort of fake. I still have that same concern that without making an artifact, and I'm using artifact loosely, even digital or a service is an artifact to me but without making something. You're not doing design work. You're doing something else and it's probably just argument. But I'm becoming more comfortable integrating those issues of argument a rhetoric into the toolkit that I have.

Jon Kolko: How to Use Storytelling to Improve Presentation Content

In Chapter 12 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Are You Learning to Give More Impactful Presentations?"  Kolko has built presentation confidence as his experience has grown and has learned to improve presentation content by using storytelling skills.  Specifically, whether it is a presentation, a keynote, or a workshop, Kolko learns not to assume audience knowledge and to use narrative tools to take his room on a ride. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How are you learning to give more impactful presentations?

Jon Kolko: A lot of it has to do with doing it over and over and over. I don’t think I was like nervous of presenting but now I'm extremely confident with it. It's like anything else. It's like having a conversation. I actually don’t think too much about it but I think a lot about the content of the presentation and increasingly it seems like to reference an earlier question an argument, it seems like I'm structuring a narrative, a story if you'd like, around an endgame and the endgame is so clear to me but it doesn’t make any sense to anybody else if they don’t -- aren’t along for the journey. And so, in a typical presentation or a workshop or a keynote, it's an hour, 50 minutes. And so in 50 minutes, you got to take a couple hundred people along for this ride and there's nothing to assume. You have a wildly diverse audience. You can't assume knowledge about design, knowledge about politics, knowledge about the economy. And so, all those things have to be presented. And I think in many ways, it forces a huge amount of empathy with an audience as if they were the users of a product and you’re product. And so there has to be -- You sort of have to ease into it. I've never ever thought of myself as a good storyteller. Increasingly, I'm thinking of myself as a storyteller and that each time I craft this presentation, it's like a once upon a time. It's like a children’s novel. And everybody sort of comes along for the ride with me. There’s cute little things you can do that would be shocking, use really obtuse statistics to support your argument and juxtapose big words with scary images. And every now and then I’ll use those two just like anybody else. But I think ultimately like those are icing on a cake and if there's no cake, it's crap. And so, the substance of the thing, the content is that story.

Jon Kolko on How to Better Articulate Your Vision

In Chapter 13 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Are You Getting Better at Articulating Your Vision?"  Kolko notes the fundamental importance of repetition and how it helps not only hone your message but also increase your believe in that vision.  He notes the importance of getting his vision framework or scaffold solid so he can easily adapt the messaging to different audiences, for example designers or venture capital investors. 

Jon Kolko the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How are you getting better at articulating your vision?

Jon Kolko: The more times you say something, the more you tend to believe it. There is this phenomenon called “sense making” which is part of design synthesis, which is about creating knowledge and one of the sort of theories around how sense making works is that ideas are literally talked into existence, both in your own head. The more you say things, the more connections are made. And then in social psychology settings, the more that I say things and then the more you say things and then we talk knowledge into existence between us, the more we tend to either agree or disagree but at least we understand and empathize with each other. So the more times I say what that vision is, I think that the more I’m able to, the more I'm better able to articulate it and in some respects sell it, gain buy into a controversial idea. I found that the same message in a scaffold works across audiences but the details have to be tremendously different. So I have a fairly succinct story around what Austin Center for Design is, the way that I see the world and the way I’d like to be in 30 to 50 years. But telling that – And so that’s the scaffold. But telling that story to somebody who’s in venture capital and telling it to somebody who’s an NGO and telling it to somebody who’s a practicing designer, the word you use, the way you describe it, the case examples you tend to give, wildly different and they have to be. Just as a quick example, if you talk to a venture capitalist about the same types of things that get a designer excited, it's not that they don’t get it, it actually turns them off and they suddenly are not interested anymore. It seems like a no brainer probably that people speak different languages depending on their backgrounds and disciplines. I think it took me a long time to get the scaffold solid so that I felt comfortable easing in and out of different sort of interim storylines.

Like if I’m changing the story, somehow it's not the real story anymore. But I think I'm comfortable now with this idea that as long as the scaffold is consistent then I'm being true to whatever the vision is and in and out can come the details.

Jon Kolko on How to Make Design Strategy More Implementation Friendly

In Chapter 14 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You Make Strategic Thinking More Implementation Friendly?"  Kolko references user experience or UX managers and how they work to make design thinking actionable or tractable.  He notes heuristics, gross principles, and best practices do not work, putting emphasis on the financial or quantitative metrics instead. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you make strategic thinking more implementation-friendly?

Jon Kolko: That’s a good question. And it’s like the first question that anybody who’s sort of in a UX management role will ask when they learn design thinking or design strategy or any of these fancy buzz words is how do you make it actionable and tractable. And I think the answer has a lot to do with the way that you tie it directly to the wants and needs of the different stakeholders. And so, gross generalizations don’t work, heuristics don work, best practices don’t work. The things a designer does have to be buried in the minutia of details related to the stakeholders in order to get traction and buy-in. Typically, that means understanding numbers and finances and goals and metrics. And it's a lot of the stuff the designers typically sneer at and go like, “That’s not my wheelhouse. I don’t like it. It makes me uncomfortable,” but that’s how you take a design strategy and you create something that’s implementable,  and tractable. Equivalent in softwares, you can write abstractions, different requirements or wire frames but if you want it to be tractable then go write some code, erase all the little metaphors and middlemen and get to the heart of the thing you're trying to do and the same is true to service. So any time that you're designing, any time that your designing the design artifacts or abstractions, and they're super, super effective, those artifacts, but getting to the core of the thing is the way that you can make it tractable.

Jon Kolko on How Organizational Change Affects Product Development

In Chapter 15 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You Evaluate When to Continue a Project and When to Kill It?"  Kolko details his consulting experience and how projects more often than not are killed not due to the products themselves but rather organizational change or corporate reorganization.  

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you evaluate when to continue a project and when to kill it?

Jon Kolko: I don’t think I've ever killed a project. I think typically you either run out of money or time or the project evolves into something else. I’ve had projects killed on me as a consultant and I can think of at least three or four examples of that and they’ve always had nothing to do with the product. It's actually really interesting. They always had stuff to do with organizational change. Quarter after quarter profits lead to organizational reorganizations, which lead to what could be very effective, useful and informative products getting killed because the new organization didn’t support them, because the strategic comparatives have changed, because the team that was working on them is now dissolved, all of which are artificial reasons and not very good ideas because they are all driven by dividends. And so maybe if there's a lesson in there, it's -- don’t take your company public. But it's funny because like even within these organizations where you have almost total buy-in from people all the way down the chain, they still bemoan the death of their products, and it's like, look, they see the value of it, they're not in a position organizationally to fight for it. And so, the product gets killed.

Jon Kolko on How to Design Culturally Relevant Social Solutions

In Chapter 16 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Have You Learned More Effectively Across Cultures?"  Kolko notes how design work is culture-dependent.  He notes how impact-based design is local and often constrained by the cultural environment.  This often limits scalability yet allows students to better focus their solution design for the communities it will serve. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How have you learned to work more effectively across different cultures?

Jon Kolko: Design work is explicitly tied to culture and in a super nuanced way. So, a design solution that works in this particular culture may or not work in a different culture and I don’t necessarily mean country or geographic boundary. It can be culture as defined by style, as designed by fashion, anywhere there are shared values. And so, when you're dealing with design for impact, it's really, really local and micro-driven, which is directly at odds with most impact investing and a lot of the places where you will find big money like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who are looking to fund scalable solutions, solutions that aren’t going to affect 500, or 1,000, or 10,000, or even 100,000 people, that are going to affect 10 million people, 100 million people, a billion people. And I don’t claim to know if that’s a good or a bad process for them. I don’t know anything about their inner workings but for where my students are, which is nowhere near that in terms of impact, their solutions can’t, by definition, can't scale outside of a certain locale without changing.

It's not to say they can't change, but it's not a cookie cutter approach and traditionally design has been all about cookie cutter approaches. That is what design for manufacturing is about. It's about taking a single part and mass producing it exactly the same a hundred million times with no defects, shipping it all over the world. You can see where that breaks down in a really, really obtuse and dumb way with adapters on PCs that the same PC, the manufacturer has to make six or seven different ends to plug the thing in, in different countries. That has nothing to do with culture, it has everything to with these Legacy electric grids but that’s the equivalent of how prepared designers are to deal with that issue. It's like that’s all they know. Well, we got to localize it by changing the language and by using a different cord. No, no, no, it's so much deeper than that. The homeless in Belo Horizonte and the homeless in Austin, it's a different world. And to say somehow, “Yeah, I conducted a thousand hours of research with homeless in Austin and therefore my solution transfers to the middle of Brazil,” is just ridiculous. And so, I don’t know how my design work has changed as a result of that but my philosophy toward it is certainly crystallized around this idea of local design decisions being okay, that we don’t have to design for scale en-mass right away.

Jon Kolko on Teaching Venture Capitalist Thinking to Creative Students

In Chapter 17 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Has Working at a Startup Incubator Taught You to Better Teach Entrepreneurship?"  Kolko shares how his experience taught him the language of business and entrepreneurship and how to talk about products and services from a venture capitalist perspective.  For example, Kolko notes venture capitalists look not only at how a product might sell, but also the product intellectual property value. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How has working at a startup incubator taught you to better teach entrepreneurship?

Jon Kolko: It's definitely led me to understand the vocabulary around VCs and financing and how that game works around funding. It is a game and those involved in it will actually gleefully describe it is a game. And so, I think working at sort of the heart of that helps me understand both what that mentality is like and how to leverage it if you want to or how to completely avoid it if you don’t like it.

It is literally a different language and I don’t just mean in terms of vocabulary and jargon. Yeah, there's a ton of jargon and that takes a little getting used to but it's also just a very different way of talking about products and services.

And I’ll give you a very quick example. When a designer creates something new, irrespective of social entrepreneurship or anything else, they think of the value of that thing to a user. And typically, a good VC, will when they look at something new, will think of the IP value of that beyond the simple investment. Meaning yeah, that’s great. I obviously have to get my 10X return over three to five years. And then how can we continue to leverage the intellectual property that’s inherent in this invention well beyond me actually owning -- you know, having a full stake in this company because that will allow me to sort of tweak up that valuation. The notion of an invention having monetary value outside of its sales price and outside of the value for a user is 100 percent missing in the world of design, for better or worse, and I don’t really care to argue the value or non-value of IP right now. But it's just that it doesn’t cross any designer’s mind I've ever worked with in my life. And it's like the first thing that most good VCs will think about.

And so as an example then, if you're trying to teach a student how to present their work during a pitch, one of the things they need to understand is that the person looking at their thing is not thinking about how much is it going to sell for on the shelves of Best Buy, right? There's this second market of IP that they're considering which is totally in a third plane. That designers are like, “I don’t even know what words you're saying.” And that’s just an example. There’s tons of those. There’s tons of different ways of thinking about stuff.

Ask a designer what derivatives trading means. And it's not just that they don’t know because they're inexperienced. They don’t know because their brain doesn’t work that way. It's the same way when you ask somebody who’s in financial services to draw a teapot. They’ll say they can't but it's literally like their brain will not allow them yet to draw that teapot. And I think the closer, the sooner students realize that, the sooner they can decide if they want to overcome that hump or not.

Jon Kolko on How to Define Social Entrepreneurship

In Chapter 18 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You Define Social Entrepreneurship?"  Kolko first defines an entrepreneur as someone who takes on the risk and reaps the reward of a situation and who sees opportunity where others see problems.  He differentiates between entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs in both the type of problem and the reward. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you define social entrepreneurship?

Jon Kolko: I think it helps by defining entrepreneurship first. And so an entrepreneur to me is somebody that takes on the risk and reaps the reward of a situation. It's also somebody that sees opportunity where others see problems or issues.

And so, that is true of a social entrepreneur, too. The difference is in the type of problems or opportunities and in the type of risk and reward. A social entrepreneur’s reward may or may not be monetary and typically it is monetary and, or plus in a double bottom line context. It's monetary, sure, there's money at stake but it's also about a larger social or humanitarian issue and that can be something as big and broad as poverty or it could be something extremely simple and detailed like getting the homeless in Austin, Texas to have beds when it's lower than 32 degrees at night. But either way, it's that yes and part of the reward. In terms of the opportunity where some see issues and others see opportunity, I think it constantly has to do with that idea of theory of change that we alluded to previously of: I see the world in a certain way and I would like it to be a different way. And so, I hypothesize how I’ll get there. Working backwards, you sort of get this logic trail of if I do this and this falls into place and this other thing happens, then those on the streets won’t be on the streets when it's 32 degrees or colder.

And so, for me then, a social entrepreneur is somebody who is applying all of the same principles of entrepreneurship and a design-led social entrepreneur is taking all of the same principles of the design but the context of the problem has shifted just a little.

Jon Kolko: How Design Career Choices are Changing

In Chapter 19 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You See Design Career Choices Changing?"  Kolko notes how design careers in the United States are going through a massive overhaul.  For the very top craftsman, there will be jobs in furniture design, graphic design and industrial design.  For the majority, however, students career choices benefit from changing design programs, including interaction design, interactive design, service design, systems thinking and organizational management.  

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you see design career choices changing?

Jon Kolko: So, design as a whole in the US is undergoing a massive overhaul whether it wants to or not. And so, typical professions like graphic design, and industrial design, and furniture design still exist and for those in the 1% and 0.01% percent who are just exceptional craftsmen will get awesome jobs doing them and will get awesome jobs and be happy forever after. But there’s always been sort of a middle ground of, the mid-60 percent in the Bell Curve of designers who just aren’t very good. They're not bad, they're just not very good and they will not be able to get jobs doing graphic design, industrial design, and furniture design anymore. And they may or may not have been taught to do anything else, in which case they’re sort of shit out of luck, which is awful. It's a huge disservice to them because when you're 22 years old, you don’t know any better. You trust your professors and you trust the program you're going through. That the stuff I'm learning is relevant, right? Well, you wouldn’t be teaching it to me if it wasn’t, right? 

So, consequently and probably a decade too late, but still consequently all of the programs in the US are starting to reevaluate what they're teaching. And so you're starting to see programs in interaction design, programs in interactive design, programs in service design and systems thinking, and amorphous programs and design management and organizational change, all of which probably have a component of this design thinking stuff and also still this design-making stuff but the making is really, really, different. 

Service design, which I've always thought of as part of interaction design but I realized I'm in a huge minority and that’s probably a topic for a different point. Service design is poised to be the most needed thing in the United States as we transform into an entirely services-based economy. And so, you go like, “Fine, we're not going to do manufacturing anymore and we still have 300 changed million people, like what are they going to do for a living? Well, they're going to provide services. 

And so, somebody’s going to have to design those services and then train them how to do it. And service could mean anything from service in a healthcare capacity, just walk into the hospital and what happens, start to finish, or it can mean the really menial, like McDonald’s service worker, both of which are designed and both of which need a team of designers and all the agencies and consultancies and advertising, all that horse shit that comes with it to support it. And so, that’s what we're starting to see creep up in design schools and you're seeing it, you know, at the name schools but all of the community colleges and all of the state schools will follow.

Jon Kolko on Using Evaluation and Testing to Improve a Design School

In Chapter 20 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "What Roles Have Evaluation and Testing Played in Building Your Design Graduate Program?"  Kolko details how testing, evaluation, assessment and feedback are honing the Austin Center for Design program.  Kolko details the iterative and collaborative process that is taking place in Austin as the school matures and improves how it operates and educates. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin School for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: What roles have evaluation and testing played in building your design graduate program?

Jon Kolko: So we've treated the building of Austin Center for Design as an iterative design exercise and part of that process is testing it with real people. And so, we treated our first cohort as co-designers and to their faces I called them co-founders and I think that the majority of them would agree that they're co-founders in the venture. The venture is a non-profit. They don’t literally own equity in it and neither do I, but they own decision-making power. And it wasn’t all democratic but there was certainly a lot of things that we changed as a result of both explicit feedback, implicit feedback, observation assessment.

And so I think testing—so testing means different things to different contexts but I think it always means trying something, and learning from it and then iterating on it. And in this case, we tested the pedagogy: how we were actually going about teaching and learning. We tested the entrepreneurial idea, the notion that when you leave the program, you’ve started a company. We tested some professors who had never taught before. We tested some course content that had never been sort of used before. And like anything else with testing, we failed a bunch of times and that’s the point. I mean, so, arguably it's better this year and arguably it will be better next year.

What's really nice about being a new school is that if you're not dealing with bureaucratic organizations like accrediting bodies, you can change on a dime. That changes when you're dealing with those organizational bodies and probably in my future, I will deal with those organizational bodies because there's a huge benefit to them. But at least for the time being, it means that I can hone this program, content notwithstanding because the content is always going to change but I can hone the structure of the program until I feel like there's evidence for it being really, really good. As always with evaluation, you sort of take it with a grain of salt. And so, there’s things that I just have pushed back on as changes that were suggested and there’s things that I completely didn’t think of that students were like, “Hey! We should be doing it like this. Why aren’t we doing it like this?” So now we're doing it like that.”

There is something sort of really, really nice about building a program together with the people that are benefiting from it. I wasn’t expecting that at all when I started it. I never really thought of this as like, I guess I do think of it as like, it's my thing but I've never felt overly protective of it from outside feedback but I was not ready for how much benefit I got from that outside feedback, I think is what I'm trying to say.