I first fell in love with architecture as a shy kid who found great pleasure and comfort participating with my surroundings as a quiet, pensive observer. During social events and in public spaces, I was keen to step back and explore the ways in which people move and interact. I developed a deep sensitivity for space and the ways in which different people find safety and pleasure in different environments. Being in chaotic social space, I would create temporary refuge, finding the space that allowed me to step back and feel my surroundings at my own pace. I loved observing movement and behavior.
I moved about the world so cautiously, never taking risks, never falling, never climbing trees. I was very careful. And as a careful, cautious kid, I would approach new frontiers through observation before action. What does this mean? If I were to cross a log bridge, I would first need to see how other kids crossed it before me. Where did they step? What did they hold on to? How fast did they go? Did they fall? And then the observation would deepen….is the log dry? Is it wet? How high is it? Exploring patterns in movement, I would draw insight, synthesizing diverse interactions and deciding on my own approach. I would cross carefully and with an informed plan of action. Acting in my environment always began as a reflective act.
Without knowing it, I was beginning to develop the most precious design tool I have at my disposal, the art and science of observing. What began as a necessity- observing my environment to ensure my wellbeing and safety- blossomed into a lifelong love affair. I have an insatiable curiosity for how people move, feel, and interact.
As an architect, design researcher, and business designer, a skill I bring to the teams I work with is my ability to structure observation and learn from people interacting in digital and physical environments. My lifelong passion for people-watching has become the core of my professional endeavors. There is infinite depth of information in the way people do the things they do and what I love to do is explore the why behind everything. I love finding opportunities in the patterns. As a designers and researchers, the deeper we dig, the more insightful we become and the better products, services, tools, and spaces we can design. This is human centered design.
As a business designer with Polymath Ventures, I guide our human centered design endeavors in Mexico. At Polymath, we build massively scalable businesses that serve the middle class throughout Latin America. In order to design products and services that are meaningful to millions, we are constantly building new research and design tools that allow us to understand the real needs, desires, and dreams of our target. Each day we grapple with big, beefy questions, that when explored with real people open up new spaces for wild ideation. The more we understand, the more bits and pieces we have to build with.
I began with Polymath three months ago first in Colombia where I took a deep dive into the business design methodology through working with several teams from other companies that Polymath has built, ranging from financial inclusion services to auto repair. After two months in Bogota, we moved to Mexico City to begin work building new ventures based in the megapolis. At Polymath with use Bogota and Mexico City as our urban laboratories, where we build and implement tools that help us understand real needs and desires of millions of people. All of our ventures or born from insights related to desirability and as a team of expert business thinkers, we dream up and test new business models that respond to these insights. Our happy space is where desirability meets feasibility and scalability, and it is our responsibility to find this sweet spot and build big. So how do we do this?
We begin by defining the questions, what do we really want to know?
Every week for us is a new adventure, we work in week long sprints, and begin the week by defining the juicy questions we are tackling. What do middle class parents think about credit? What are the biggest obstacles for homeowners trying to make their homes more safe and and vibrant? What inspires people to try a new service online?
Then we design tools that help us answer the impossible.
With the questions clear, we design the tools that will help us shed light on these mystery spaces. Who do we need to talk to? Where do we need to look? How to we explore the questions? There is no clear recipe to any of the work we do, rather, tried and tested methodologies help guide us in developing the next generation of tools and approaches. Since beginning our work in Mexico only a few months ago, we have been doing groundwork to build a radically new home improvement company. We have talked to hundreds of people on the streets, led dozens of in-depth structured interviews, conducted over 10 focus groups, many co-creation sessions with collaborators, over 20 online campaigns to test different ideas, and spoken with over 100 industry experts.
To understand real needs and desires, we have to temper our bias and approach our exploration with neutral curiosity. We cannot let our assumptions or personal experience distract us. Each week, our six person team interacts with anywhere from 20 to 20,000 people, digitally and in person. During this phase of our work, we ask and absorb, look and learn.
Interviews with small business owners about their experiences with using credit.
Focus group with homeowners exploring their home improvement priorities
Once we’ve asked around (and around and around), we share our findings with the rest of the team.
We write our initial findings on to millions of post it notes. Every conversation we have had, observation we have conducted, interview we led, or element of research we have conducted gets broken up into all of its pieces and we write down all the juicy stuff on post its. Post its go up on the wall, and this is what enables everyone on the team to learn from everyone else’s research. We call this the download.
We then begin to search for patterns and possibilities.
The information we download is rich, but it is really meaningless until we start to look for the patterns and opportunities. We take information that is anecdotal and sometimes super specific to a person’s particular life experience and try to connect the dots between what lots of different people see, feel, and experience. One person telling us they hate the idea of credit but love to pay for things in interest-free monthly installments really does not tell us much, but when we see hundreds of people saying the same thing, we start to have an ¨ah-ha!¨ moment.
Synthesis however is never as clear cut as this. We look for patterns in how people feel about certain things and what are the particular factors in one’s life that may influence their feelings. We try to zoom into different variables that influence experience, from socioeconomic to geographical factors. How do people who live in houses feel about this? How to people that live in apartments think about that? What about new homeowners? What about renters? We never generalize across a diverse public.
During synthesis we look at all the post it note chaos we have downloaded on the walls and start to group things to represent themes and patterns we are discovering. This is where post its become an invaluable tool because they help us to think and build spatially. We can start to group together diverse responses to a single prompt or find conflicting opinions around a common theme. From here we start to develop big insights. In building our home improvement venture, some tried and tested insights we have unearthed range from ¨no matter how distraught a house can be, home is always refuge when compared to the chaos of the city¨ to ¨the middle class in Mexico seeks out home improvement services only through trusted networks and recommendations from friends.¨
We move from insights to ideas.
Insights provide fuel for ideation. These moments of realization are powerful constraints that inform our design work. We start to find the white spaces and new opportunity areas. This is where we let the creative juices flow and go expansionary. We dream big and bold and start to develop ideas of services and products that respond to these insights.
Then we test our ideas, with real people under real circumstances.
Our cities are our labs, and as such we take advantage of our urban labs to test the strength and potential of our ideas. Something that we have learned is that people say differently than they act. That means that testing an idea is not as simple as asking someone what they think about a concept. We need to really test an idea under real circumstance.
Our mantra is fake it until you make it. We are constantly building fake companies and products (prototypes) and testing them with real people to see measure and learn from real response and interaction. For example with home improvement, it seems each week we are inventing new kinds of companies, building out an identity for them and hitting the streets as real, fake employees to see how people respond to our offerings. For example, it is not uncommon for us to run a facebook campaign for a fictional home improvement company with an interesting concept that gets people to reach out to us for an initial visit and quote. That gives us the opportunity to sit down with real potential clients in an intimate one on one session and learn from their response to our new offering. It was through tests like this for example that we learned that although people say they hate credit, they love the idea of credit if it helps them finish a home improvement project they have been trying to save for for years.
Once an idea starts to prove powerful, we then explore feasibility and scalability.
We get excited when we see dozens to hundreds of people responding positively to a wildly new kind of service or product that we are offering. But a fictional service is exactly that until we can find the business model levers and innovation that allow us to break through with something truly innovative. Since we are focused on serving the middle class, that usually means that we build new efficiencies into our business models that allow our constituency to have access to new products and services at a price point that they can access.
We have to understand the industry mechanics better than any other player. Similarly to our work related to client desirability, we also have to understand the pains and pleasures behind the scenes across all the professional players. In the industry what works? What does not work? Where are the innefficines? And what really needs to change?
To understand this, we talk to experts from across industries and value chains. In home improvement for example, on any given day we will have half a dozen interviews with CEOs from major home improvement companies, developers, contractors, product designers, suppliers, distributors… We pitch our ideas and build together from their years of industry experience. This top-down industry-focused approach compliments our bottom-up client-focused desirability work. Where these two roads meet is where we go big!
In short (lol) I love observing people and designing from real insight. I love my job. I love my team (in Mexico we are a team of seven from five different countries!), and I love what I am learning each and every day. I will be posting now regularly, sharing learning and insights from my adventures in entrepreneurship, business building, and human centered design.
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