Burt Herman sent the email to the SF Hacks/Hackers group, just as an FYI. Free food! Free drinks! Free networking! Prizes! And all you have to do is show up at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and rethink their website!

In other words, Stanford want us to work for them for free. :/

I thought about deleting the invite and refusing to go in protest. But as every good journalist would take into consideration, they did have free food. All weekend. And I heard the founder of IDEO would be there. So OK, they would be “paying” us in greasy pizza and high-level contacts, and who knows, it could be fun. I’ve been to a few hackathons before and found them all worthwhile. All right.

I went. I sucked.
It was AWESOME.

First, the background: The Stanford d.school is not a design degree program, and it has little to do with strictly visual design. It’s more of an interdisciplinary school to teach problem-solving, creativity and collaboration skills. (Fast Company did some great write-ups on it when it first opened.)

The challenge was to bring their system of problem-solving to the world so people can change said world. So the designers, programmers, business people and other eyewitnesses set out on the inaugural HACK.d hackathon.

In that 48 hours of little sleep and, uh, lower-than-average showering, here’s what I learned.

“Design” solves problems. And everyone solves problems.

To be clear, the design we are talking about has nothing to do with making things look pretty, though that can be a means to solve a problem. Design is problem-solving, period. Even in graphic design, you have a client that has the problem of looking unprofessional or communicating the wrong thing. Your job as a designer is to solve it.

The philosophy of the d.school was that everyone is creative but not everyone knows it. They just need a little extra guidance. So the d.school offers one specific five-step method of problem-solving, which I happen to like:

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

Or, to break it down with one example:

• Watch and interview someone
• Find out their biggest pain in the ass and define it clearly
• Come up with as many ideas as possible that would fix the problem
• Build one of them
• Try it out on the person
• Repeat as many steps as necessary.

It seems obvious, but there are some important points this process addresses. Such as:

Humans first.

That’s why the “empathy” stage is first. Many of us at the hackathon went through a 90-minute crash course called the Gift-Giving Project. We paired up and asked each other about the last gift we gave and what we would change about the entire gift-giving process, from remembering to buy a gift to purchasing to wrapping to giving to sending the thank-you card.

After the first interview, they had us interview a second time with a deeper emphasis on emotion (“The goal is to make the other person cry,” said the facilitator).

THAT is what was missing from many of these step-by-step plans to solve problems. That emotional connection. I heard a gripping story from a first-time dad, and he heard my story. And we actually listened to each other on a deeper level and worked that into our solutions.

This is why Steve Job’s designs work. They inspire a human-centered emotional reaction. Whatever you think of Jobs himself, you can’t deny the emotional connections he created through his products.

Sucking is a means to an end.

When you’re brainstorming ideas, it’s quantity over quality. I’ve known this for years and am comfortable with letting everyone offer whatever idea they have without shooting it down. It’s a different picture when I’m talking about my own ideas. I’m in self-editor mode even before I begin. The facilitator made a great point about “page vomit”: The idea is to use all your stupid, stupid ideas up, until you come across a not-so-stupid idea. Then don’t treat it as a series of failures that leads to an answer, but a road map you bring to your test user so they can tell you where to go.

It’s not about you. It’s about them. You are helping them find their own answer.

Workspaces do mean a lot.

The d.school is designed so that nearly every wall is a whiteboard, most of the furniture is on wheels, and a main workspace has adjustable walls. There are buckets of Post-its, Sharpies and Expo pens everywhere. But interestingly enough, I couldn’t find a regular pen and a pad of paper anywhere.

That’s because the workspace is designed purposefully to get people to share and collaborate. Your ideas are not precious, to be kept in your binder or entered into an Excel spreadsheet. They’re supposed to be messy and open. There’s not a lot of lecturing in the classes, so there’s no need for taking notes of some teacher’s PowerPoint slides. They call it a bias of action: Less talk, more walk.

Give people limits and they will find a way. Oh, they will find a way.

Yes, some people created amazing projects within 48 hours. That was the whole point of the weekend. But the idea of limitations and quick iterations was everywhere.

In the gift-giving exercise, I had 10 minutes to build a toy car out of a pile of kindergarten craft supplies. I chose Popsicle sticks, tape, magnets and pipe cleaners. In a way, the limitations were hugely helpful, because if your goal is to get good feedback on your prototype, the other person is more willing to criticize something that is crap than if they were presented with a polished prototype.

Become a kid again.

OK, so how many of you draped sheets between furniture and built tents in your living room? That’s kind of how I felt about the architecture of the place. The d.school bridges two buildings and uses the space between them brilliantly:

Outside

Inside

You can still see the exposed walls inside the (yes) well-insulated room. Genius.

And when was the last time you played with Popsicle sticks?

The school brings the concept of play to a university that desperately needs it. Because it’s interdisciplinary, it means that some of the world’s best doctors, scientists, engineers and lawyers at Stanford can all take classes in play.

David Kelley said in his opening remarks that people stopped calling themselves “creative” as far back as elementary school, and that was a shame. Now the school he helped found is putting creativity back to people who may need it the most.

Like, for example, me.

Photo by John C. Liau for the SF Public Press,
a news organization participating in Journalism Innovations III.

I don’t really blog about Bay Area journalism-related events often, but there’s just too many coming up this month to keep to myself. So if there’s a journalist out there in the San Francisco or San Jose areas wanting to network, brush up on some digital skills or just goof around, you got plenty of opportunities coming up soon:

• Journalism Innovations III happens this weekend, April 30-May 2 at USF. Register soon — it’s the most affordable journalism conference you’ll love. I’ve been to last year’s event and it was awesome. This year promises to be even bigger, with sessions on:
  • journalism career coaching
  • the status of Bay Area college media
  • new storytelling ideas
  • using new media tools for reporting
  • future business models for news
  • life after journalism school
  • examining old-fashioned journalism ethics in a new media world
  • building an open-source newsroom

• Also, RemakeCamp is happening May 2 in partnership with JI3. It’s a half-day unconference where all things journo-geeky will be discussed. The beauty about unconferences is that you never know who will show up and decide to speak. The unplanned nature is half the fun.

• The SJSU Magazine Club is sponsoring a panel of editors from McSweeney’s 6 p.m. Monday, May 3, room to be determined. The panel will talk about the San Francisco Panorama, the latest edition of their literary mag that is a super amazing cool newspaper. (I had a very small hand in the production of it: I provided them a high-resolution vector logo for the SF Public Press, and I helped fund the cover story through Spot.Us. But I still treat the paper as my own.)

• On May 7-9 there’s a big collaborative project called the 48 Hour Magazine (@48hrmag), where writers and artists from pubs like Rolling Stone, Wired, Dwell, Gizmodo and GOOD are going to put together a magazine in two days. May 7 the theme is announced, May 8 everything is due, and the magazine is sent to print May 9. Headquarters are in the Bay Area and you’re allowed to produce your work there, within reason methinks.

• If you are interested in developing journalism for the iPad, don’t walk, run to the Hacks/Hackers Unite on May 21-23. There a hack (that’s the journalist) and the hacker (the programmer) will work in teams to explore the unique storytelling capabilities of the journalism’s newest darling, the iPad. It sounds really exciting. I’ve never worked directly with a programmer to tell as story before. I’ve never had the opportunity. Until now, of course.