alan wells

I was recently invited to be the alumni speaker at the UC Davis Design department graduation reception, and honor that I quite enjoyed. I had been thinking about what to to say for the last few months, and I settled on telling a few stories about what I’ve been working on since I graduated three years ago, and trying to explain some lessons through those stories. I believe that now is an incredible time to be a designer, and I hope my optimism provided an encouraging counterpoint to the ominous economic situation we’re all struggling with. Here’s what I said to the new graduates:

UC Davis Design Department Graduation Reception
June 12th, 2010
by Alan Wells

I have to admit that I find it a little strange to be standing before you today. Three years ago today I was sitting where you are now, happy to be finished with school but anxious about heading into a future that held all sorts of uncertainty. I’m still trying to figure out how this crazy place called the real world works, so I thought I’d share a little bit about what I’ve been doing and a few things I’ve learned along the way.

During my time at UC Davis, I studied both design and ecology. I started with an ecology major but became interested in design and how it could be applied to solving the problems in the world around us. Shortly before graduation, I was quoted in UC Davis magazine as saying that I wouldn’t take a full time job until untilI found a position related to sustainability. I thought that I could continue the freelance work I had started in school and find a job. Optimistic about my chances, I moved to San Francisco, signed a lease, and tried to get started – but the freelance work I had in school had slowed down, and I wasn’t making enough money to support myself. I needed a job – fast!

I applied for several positions at design studios but didn’t get anywhere. I also applied for a job as a web producer at a small startup called Affinity Labs. The word “design” wasn’t even in the job description, much less anything about sustainability, but it looked like something I was qualified for and I needed the work. I was offered the job and happily accepted it, acknowledging that my interests in sustainability would have to be put on the back burner for a while.

When I started at Affinity Labs, I spent most of my time sourcing content, writing emails, and engaging with the users on the social networking sites the company ran. Despite the fact that design was not in my job description, I found that I was able to bring my design skills into the position – first by designing emails and helping other producers with HTML. I was able to find ways to show my design skills, and was quickly moved into a position where I led the user interface design and software development process for the company’s social networking software platform – a job I would have NEVER been considered for had I applied for it originally.

Here’s the funny thing about the work I did at Affinity Labs – due to class scheduling constraints, I only took one web design class at Davis, and I definitely didn’t consider myself an “interaction designer”. But this is the first lesson about design that I’d like to pass on today: the design skills you’ve learned here can be applied to a wide range of problems. There is a trend in design to segment the field into an increasing number of very specific titles – “graphic designer”, “interaction designer”, “user experience designer” is particularly hot right now. But in my experience, these distinctions are fuzzy at best. The design process you’re now well-versed in is a framework that you can use to solve many different types of problems. Sure, different mediums have different tools and jargon, but those are the easy things to learn. The ability to develop an appropriate solution to a problem while working within constraints is the hard part, and you’ve been well prepared by your teachers here to use that process. So my advice to you is to broaden your design horizons as much as possible, and to open your mind to all the ways that you can use what you’ve learned here.

The willingness to work on a wide variety of projects was key to the next stage in my career. I was offered a position as a product manager at a growing gaming startup called Zynga. For those of you who don’t know Zynga or their flagship game Farmville, the company has turned into one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups. At Zynga, I was hired to design and manage iPhone games – another area I had never worked in before, but again, I found that the design process that I already knew transferred easily. Zynga should have been a dream job for me – I was designing at the hottest gaming company around, working on Apple’s then-new iPhone platform, and being well compensated all at the same time. But that quote about sustainability kept coming back to haunt me – I couldn’t get much further from sustainability than making an iPhone poker game.

I desperately wanted to work on a project at the intersection of technology and sustainability, so I decided to build an iPhone application that would help San Francisco residents recycle. I needed data the City had collected to make the application work, so I pitched the project to them and asked for the data. I think they were skeptical that the project would actually happen (I was proposing to create the app with no financial support from them), but they gave me the data I needed. I spent the next three months working nights and weekends so I could release the app to coincide with a recycling campaign they were starting last June. Along the way, several incredible things happened that made the app a reality. I found a programming team to build the app, and when I told them I was volunteering my time to design the application, they offered to develop the app at no cost. Shortly after we started development, Mayor Gavin Newsom got wind of the project and decided he liked it enough to issue a press release about the app. Later in the summer, we were invited to participate in the Mayor’s press conference about Government 2.0 technology in San Francisco. Because of the support from the Mayor, our app was covered in Fast Company, Fortune Magazine, CNN.com, and several other major publications.

Just before we released the app, when I heard that Mayor Newsom was going to put his weight behind the project, I came up with a company name to brand the app with. That turned out to be a good decision – the app put Haku Wale on the map, before we even existed as a company!

The lesson that I’d like to convey here is about the power of working on things that matter to you. When you put your heart and soul into a project, you’ll be surprised by the support the world sends your way. I know this may be hard to believe, but it’s true. W. H. Murray, the Scottish mountaineer, once described this phenomenon: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back – Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”

The danger in not doing work that is meaningful to you is that you will find it hard to fully commit yourself to the work. And if you don’t fully commit yourself, you’re missing out on all that Providence has to offer. And you don’t need someone to hire you or give you permission to do work that matters – find a way to do it own your own, you’ll be surprised by what comes from it. When you do work that matters to you, magic things can happen.

Shortly after the success of the EcoFinder app, I joined forces with a high school friend of mine to officially start Haku Wale New Media Studio. We didn’t want to lose the momentum we had gained during the EcoFinder launch, so we quit our jobs, said goodbye to our full time salaries, and tried to make a go of it. While our studio is less than a year old, we’ve been fortunate enough to work on some interesting projects with great clients, most of which have strong connections to sustainability and social impact.

The final thought I’d like to leave you with today is that I believe that now is the best time in recent history to be a designer. I know the economic context that we live in today doesn’t paint a rosy picture, but I believe the graduates in this room are better positioned for success than just about anyone else graduating today. In recent years, the value of good design is finally starting to be acknowledged as a key component to commercial success. In many fields, technology is no longer the limiting factor or primary challenge – the challenge is in creating things that are desirable, understandable, delightful. At its core, I believe design is a process for creating something that didn’t previously exist. So the question for those of you graduating today is: how will you use that process? What will you choose to create?

I’d like to close with a thought from Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect who built the first skyscraper: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work… Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

Think big.

Thank you and congratulations to you all.

Yesterday I gave a brief talk about web design at the Pixel graphic design club Alumni Day at UC Davis. Here are some of the notes I wrote down when I was thinking about the talk. The slides for the talk are included below, but probably aren’t as meaningful without the verbal component.

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The complexity and reach of the projects I’m working on has increased exponentially since I graduated. But the questions and process to solve the problems are fundamentally the same. Design provides a framework that is rarely taught in schools: a method for creating intelligent solutions to complex problems.

My advice to you: embrace the fact that everything in your life can (and should?) be a design problem. Think beyond graphic design, exhibit design, fashion design. See the world from a more holistic perspective – the world is a place full of complex problems in need of intelligent solutions.

Read the rest of this entry »

After reading “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative” by Ken Robinson on and off for the last year, I finally finished the book on a plane flight home from San Diego tonight. Since I’ve spent so long finishing the book, my thoughts on it are biased toward the last few chapters:

“Creativity often comes about by making unusual connections, seeing, analogies, identifying relationships between ideas and processes that were previously not related. This is precisely why some of the most effective creative teams are interdisciplinary.” (pg 188)

This bit comes to me at an interesting time, as two weeks ago I was reading a post on Futuristic Play that discussed models of viral growth in Facebook applications. I was surprised to find graphs and models that were similar to those I worked with when I studied ecology. One important component of the post I was reading about viral growth discussed the difference between growth in an unlimited vs limited market – when growth models account for the 60 million or so user population of Facebook, they change from looking very healthy to showing a scary looking crash. Interesting to me, as these look eerily similar to the concept in ecology known as carrying capacity, and the crash idea similar to what happens when a species or ecosystem surpasses the carrying capacity of it’s environment. The similarities between these two ideas lead me to believe that there might be some useful overlap in models I studied in school as an ecology major and my current interest in social networks and web apps. Hopefully more to come on this in the near future (by hopefully I mean two things: 1) hopefully I’ll make more interesting connections and 2) that I’ll be able to write them down and post the them here). 

One more bit from Out of Our Minds, this time a bit that is applicable to challenges I’m working with at Affinity Labs as we grow from a small startup into a bigger division of Monster Worldwide:

“The most creative periods in the lives of organizations are often in the early stages of its work where there is a rush of excitement about the possibilities to be explored and before the organization itself has settled into fixed institutional structures and routines. Stimulating or reviving the creative impulse in organizations often requires that existing borders be perforated or dissolved so that ides can flow freely between different specialists who are too often kept apart from each other. The point of these collaborations is not for different specialists to impose their own ways of working on each other. It is to benefit from the stimulation of each other’s expertise” (pg 188)

It’s also worth noting that the reason that I started reading this book in the first place was because I watched Ken Robinson’s TEDtalk, which I found to be both entertaining and thought provoking. I include it here for convenience, but I recommend downloading the higher quality MP4 file from TED.

It’s been a while, a long while, since I’ve written here. My last post, on June 11th, was written a few days before I graduated from college (UC Davis), and began life in this crazy place known as the “real world”. I suppose it was slightly prophetic to end my last post asking, “Will I blink? Or will I take the step forward?”I think I’ve taken steps forward. I’ve probably taken almost as many backwards, but progress is being made, at least that’s what I keep telling myself. Much has happened in my world in the last four months. I finished school and continued my freelance design projects, and managed to build a business that made enough money that I thought I was going to continue freelancing for the foreseeable future. Things change quickly though… more on that later. At the end of July I moved out of Davis, a place that’s been a great home to me for the five years I spent in school (minus a long trip, and then a shorter one, to Australia). Although I didn’t think much about it when I was moving out, Davis is and was a wonderful place to be a student, a great place to do some serious growing up. I grew fond of that place, maybe more so now that I don’t live there anymore, but looking back 5 years to a time when I lost sleep over deciding between UCLA, Cal, and UC Davis, I’m fairly certain that I made the right choice.—

“Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than its worth.” – Baz Luhrman.

—A few days after I moved out, I spent almost a month traveling in South America with my dad and my brother. I haven’t spent this much time with them since I moved away to college, and it was great to reconnect with them and spend sometime learning about the person that my once little brother has grown into.I have a lot of thoughts about some of the things I saw in South America… I think I’ll save them for another day, but it was an eye-opening trip in many ways.I came back to California ready to get back to work, and moved into San Francisco the day after I got back… Unfortunately, my once burgeoning freelance business had pretty much come to a halt in the August slowdown that (apparently) is typical of corporate america. It was a nerve wracking few weeks until things finally started to get rolling again, but that kind of slowdown was new to me, and it spooked me. A re-evaluation of priorities (the flexible schedule student life becomes less important, a steady paycheck and professional development becomes more important) and a very strong desire to continue living in San Francisco sparked me into looking around for a full time job.Serendipity stepped in, and I figured out that what I’ve been doing in the freelance world is called web production, and after finally figuring out what to call the skills that I have, I found a job with an exciting startup (Affinity Labs) as a web producer, with my first task being to help grow an online community for artists and designers (ArtBistro). More on Affinity in a future post, but a month to the day after I started and I’m still challenged and learning new things every day, and that’s exactly how I want it to be.

“When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful… and you blink and take a step back.

That’s the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.

All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck is nothing compared with the ability to not blink.”
- Seth Godin

I’m graduating from college on Friday. I’m fortunate enough to have a lot of options concerning what I want to do when Monday morning rolls around. But in the last few days, since I’ve been done with finals and have had time to think about things, I’m less sure about the future than I ever have been. Will I blink? Or will I take the step forward?

Milton Glaser brings clarity to some ideas about design that have been swimming around in my consciousness for a while.

“One definition is that design is the intervention in the flow of events to produce a desired effect. Another is that design is the introduction of intention in human affairs. A third rather elegant description is that design moves things from an existing condition to a preferred one. This last one reduces the complexity of the idea, but I like all three definitions. Design doesn’t have to have a visual component. Ultimately, anything purposeful can be called an act of design.”

I’ll even add fourth: Design is a way to figure out how to do things that haven’t been done yet.

When I say I want to be a designer, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about… to me, its much more than print design, web design, product design, or any of the specific disciplines that seem to dominate design.

Marketer/Blog Superstar Seth Godin takes on the problem of Fight Global Warming campaigns:

As a marketer, my best advice is this: let’s figure out how to turn this into a battle to do more, not less. Example one: require all new cars to have, right next to the speedometer, a mileage meter. And put the same number on an LCD display on the rear bumper. Once there’s an arms race to see who can have the highest number, we’re on the right track.”

In other news, the wiki I’m creating for my Sustainable Exhibition Design project at UC Davis is functioning and populated with some information, most of it actually useful! Available for public access at: ucdgreen wiki

A while back, I posted an image in the indexed style to describe a conversation I had with my friend Tom. I’d like to post an updated to that image with some further considerations.

The last few weeks have seen lots of interesting things going on around me and in my head. Sometimes I’m afraid of forgetting the details of these things so I write them down, and then I can stop worrying about forgetting about them.

“There are things in this life I would rather not sacrifice…” – John Butler Trio. JBT has a new album out, and I’ve been listening to it almost every day. Great music matched with meaningful and current lyrics, and a political edge if you choose to listen that carefully. They’re playing at The Fillmore in June, I’m gonna get tickets for sure.

I’ve been feeling really optimistic about things in general lately. I feel like there’s a tipping point approaching for environmental and humanitarian concerns, that people are interested on genuine, positive interactions more than ever, and that people aren’t buying the bullshit of governments and major corporations. The disconnect that I feel betweent the marketing and advertising I see every day and the actions of my peers makes me hopeful that we may be the generation to really turn some things around and redefine this unsustainable system we’ve created. The fact that the most valuable information these days seems to be coming from person to person, very human and very personal interactions. Blogging, social networking, all of these things are building human capital in ways I know that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. I’ll admit that I might be biased in my perception of this because every project I’m doing for every class this quarter is focused on sustainability, but I still feel like that tide is turning, and its a very exciting time to be a young person about to leave college and enter the working world.

And then Virginia Tech happened. My heart goes out to all those people at VT. I just can’t reconcile this general optimistic feeling of growing goodwill and humanity with something like that, it completely upends the faith that I have in my generation to do great things with this world. I don’t know how to rationalize those two things. Maybe its just a fluke, but something we’re doing as a society is allowing these kinds of things to happen more often and with more bloodshed. How do you get around this? I have no answers here, its just so hard for me to understand that mindset of someone that does something like that… and it seems like it could happen at any school.

Last week I went to two events. On Sunday my parents took me to see the Dalai Lama speak in San Francisco. A great opportunity to see a very interesting man speak. He said a lot of things, some of which I think went over my head, but two things that he said stood out to me:

1) You can disagree with someone and still have respect for them. Disagreement combined with respect creates dialogue and through that conflicts can be resolved. Compassion is key to this interaction.

2) The idea of one “right” religion applies only at the individual level. Whatever religion, whatever god is right for someone is the one that fits them personally. The idea of a universally “right” religion is just not something that people should concern themselves with, much less kill eachother over.

3) People are generally good, and don’t want trouble. No one wakes up in the morning looking for trouble, and people want to be happy.

On Thursday, I went to a mini-conference at Stanford put on for their Creating Infections Action d.school class. The conference focused on a newly coined idea called social entrepreneurship; basically the idea of business for social good, not just bottom-line profits. I say newly coined because apparently people have been doing this for years but it was just recently given this name. The speakers were the founders from Kiva, GlobalGiving, and Benetech. The conference was one of the most interesting lectures I’ve gone to in a while and made me even more sure that the path I’m following with my own professional career is the right one. Just a few highlights/thoughts:

The GlobalGiving founders, former World Bank people, explained that they thought one of the problems/limitations with the world bank system is that it deals in huge quantities of dollars (hundreds of millions to billions), and deals directly with governments. Now, there are some things that you have to interface with governments to affect – taxes, trade laws, etc. But their point was that in many cases, the governments are not the best people to be distributing this aid. Their anecdotal story goes something like this: A government gets a huge sum of money from world bank, and they decide how to disperse it. 6 months to a year later, a bulldozer shows up in a village and starts building a school. The villagers stop the bulldozer and say, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m building a school.” They say, “We don’t need a school, we’ve already got one that works well enough. What we really need is a new water well.” He says, “Thats too bad, because I have orders to build a new school, so that’s what’s going to happen.” The orders from higher up don’t necessarily reconcile with needs on a local level. To counter this problem, GlobalGiving fills the gap in the WorldBank system of local, smaller aid packages. This seems to be much more efficient, much faster, and ensures people get exactly what they need. Sounds like a great idea to me. Then, as a guiding principle for trying to effect change, it seems wise to try to work as locally as possible. Want to encourage education? Lets build schools and train teachers in the places they live, not make a top down command to make it happen. I’m sure people have been saying this for years, but the clarity with which I understand this point is new to me. The exciting thing about technology an the Internet is that it allows the global connection between highly specific, localized efforts. I think this is going to be on of the most exciting things to watch in the near future.

Kiva is an organization started by a current Stanford MBA student, and they connect lenders with borrowers for micro-loans. Their minimum loan is $25 dollars. Over that past 2 years they’ve raised $5.5 million in loans. And the great thing is that these aren’t donations – these loans get paid back in a fairly resonable time frame! To me, it seems like they pretty much just created $5.5 million dollars, and in the processs are helping to create a lot of local businesses that will sustain families and communities for years to come. It seems like all of this sucess is being driven by creating the connections between lenders and borrowers – people are much more excited to participate when they can see the face and here the story of the person they’re loaning to. Right now update come back on a monthly time scale, but if you combine this idea with the ideas presented by Ray Kurzweil that I’ve talked about before, and look down the road of mobile technology a few years, I forsee a time when lenders can get weekly, maybe even daily, picture and text updates about the progress of their borrowers. Great idea that’s accomplishing great things.

One common issue with these organizations that they can’t seem to get the high school and college demographics involved. Surprising, because we’re usually the first to adopt these kinds of internet-based communities and networks. I have a few ideas about why this might be:
1) Most of the people on the other end of these systems, on the receiving ends, seem to not be in the high school/college demographic either. I don’t go on facebook to connect with the 35-50 year olds that I know, so maybe I’d be more interesting in getting involved with an organization like Kiva if the people on the other end were my age or closer to my age – right now they seem mostly like middle aged/married with family types.

2) High school and college students are a powerful consumer demographic, and we spend money, but disposable income is still a very precious thing for us. As financially well of as many in my position are, we are MUCH less financially comfortable than even a college grad with their first job. Working full time, even if its only 30k/year, gives you much more freedom to give or loan $100 here or there (Kiva’s average loan is $92). In my exporations of career and living options for after college, I am absolutely amazed how many things are possible with a 50k/year job that were just completely out of reach in college. So how to get around this? Maybe a new system needs to be created – sort of like the facebook $1 gifts, where we can donate smaller amounts more often. Another idea – maybe the best way the college/high school demographic can contribute isn’t with money. What other skills do we have, what can we do that requires time and not money (we usually have more of the former and less of the latter). I’m not sure what form this would/could take, but I think there’s something worth exploring here. I think there’s an opportunity for partnerships with companies that sell to this demographic – something along the lines of the RED campaign, but maybe each purchase adds $1 or $5 to a cause?

Once upon a time I bombed a Stanford undergraduate application because I really didn’t want to fight the battle of explaining to my parents why I didn’t want to go there if I did get in. I still think it would have been the wrong place for me as an undergrad, and I wouldn’t trade my UC Davis education for anything, but the interesting stuff they have going on down there and the access to the resources of Silicon Valley makes me strongly consider that as my best option for grad school in a few years should I choose to go that route.

I had dinner with a great friend of mine today, and we had an absolutely fantastic conversation about business, technology, and ideas. One of the best conclusions to come of the conversation:

Adapting people’s behavior to work with technology: works when my generation’s demographic is your target audience

Adapting technology to work with people’s behavior: works when my parents are your target demographic.

Meaning that the key to accessing the more mature markets for the technologies that already dominate the lives of teenagers and twentysomethings is to turn the problem on it’s head. Ask not what your customers need to do to use the technology, ask what your technology needs to do to be used by your customers. Finding a market beyond the early adopters requires a refining of your product so that it fits in naturally with the lives of your customers, because unlike the younger generation, the older generations will not remold their lives to make your technology/product/gadget/service fit into it better.

Louis Pasteur, the scientist famous for confirming the germ theory of disease said once said:
"Chance favors the prepared mind."

I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot lately, mostly because I’ve recently acknowledged that the only thing I’m lacking in my aspirations to run my own business is that great idea to base it around. I feel confident with the idea of running my own company, and would start doing so tomorrow, if I had an idea that I felt was worthy of that commitment. Knowing this, the next question is naturally: how do I find this great idea? Perhaps it is just chance, and great ideas are things that wake you at night with a start and force you to write them down before they slip down into the subconscious again. But I’m inclined to agree with Pasteur, and I think that there might be a method.

A few months back, I watched Ray Kurzweil’s TEDTalk. A few days ago, I read an article by Kurzweil in Inc Magazine, and I was reminded of his lecture. Kurzweils’ point that interested me was that certain things in the technology world are very predictable. You may not be able to predict what Google’s stock price will be in two years, but you can very accurately predict how expensive computer processing power is, or how cheap bandwith will be, or how much a gigabyte of storage will be. Furthermore, these trends increase not in a linear way, but in an exponential way.

The implication of this is that things that today seem impossible, prohibitively expensive, or too far ahead of the technology will be possible in the future – and the future is coming sooner than you think. In his words, "With the doubling of price performance each year in every kind of
information technology, you just need to wait a short while to find
that you can have your cake and eat it too."

OK, so what does this have to do with the next big thing? The way I figure it is that the secret to finding the next big thing is being able to recognize what is theoretically possible in today’s world but unfeasible due to financial or technological constraints. Take that idea, look down the road after 2-3 years of exponential growth, and try to see where the idea stands. Since data about bandwidth, processing power, and storage are so accurately predictable, the secret to the next big thing is being able to figure out what we can’t do today but can do three years from now – and then be the first one to do it, and do it well. I think this applies particularly to disruptive technologies – things that really change the rules of the game. In these cases, a certain market application is made possible when the growth of those predictable trends reaches a level that suddenly makes something possible that wasn’t before, in a critical point/threshold kind of model

Examples of this:

- Declining prices, increasing availability of broadband internet, digital camcorders, and consumer-level video editing lead to the YouTube explosion of user generated video content.

- Declining price of computer hard drives and digital video hardware allows the creation of a reasonably priced digital video recorder – say hello to TiVo!

- Decrease in bandwidth costs and increase in processing power make Vonage and other internet telephone services possible.

I’m not saying that coming up  with a great idea is easy – the conceptual connection between recognizing the predictable trends and realizing what (successful) products those trends will make feasible in the future is no small feat. But it’s one step closer to a methodology for identifying these ideas. And I’m convinced that the time I invest in keeping current with tech trends and learning about the bleeding edge of technology is worth the effort for the insight it may give me into the future.