UXA2023 Zoë Rose - Creative thinking methodologies: a lost history

When were diamonds first used to describe the design process?

When was the first 'how might we' question asked?

What were the original steps of 'brainstorming'?

Some answers to these questions can be found in a 30 year period in America after the end of World War 2, when parallel intellectual movements centred around creating scientific methodologies for creativity and design thrived. Many of the ideas, principles, and design processes of that age are still with us today.

Other answers are much, much older.

In this talk, we will do more than describe yet another design process model. Instead, we will explore the historical and cultural origins of the design and creativity methods that are still common in design, and we will explore how they were both informed by and developed in reaction to the emergence of computing and large-scale data management. By the end of the talk, you will have a new perspective on how the origins of our methodologies can embed biased assumptions in the work we do today.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2023 Friday, 25 August 2023 Captioned by: Kasey Allen & Bernadette McGoldrick
2. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 18 STEVE BATY: Our next speaker this morning is going to take us on a little bit of an historical journey, looking at the history of our creative practices and our creative methods. Please join me in welcoming Zoe Rose to the stage. Come on, Zoe. (APPLAUSE) ZOE ROSE: Thank you. Oh! OK. Right! Hello! Cool. So, who knows what this is? Hooray - it's the double diamonds. Classic representation of the design process. We've got our four classic phases. We've got our discover,
3. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 19 define, develop, deliver. A little "how might we?" in the middle. How about this? We all good? Yes. Design thinking. But this is completely different, though, right? Because it's, like, it's five. It's five steps, not four. And it has extra special hexagons! Which I hate, but they do pop up a lot. OK, last one - slight challenge. What's this? It's a bell curve, that's correct. Some of you will also know this as "normal distribution". Not really a design thing. But a foundation concept for data people. You know, like, with those statistics and the numbers and that kind of thing. Right. So, hi. My name is Zoe. I run a training company which is focused on UX and accessibility, based in Canberra, mostly working with governments, and I am also a research student looking at design capability in government. Now, we all know by now that we are on Gadigal country. I am actually from Ngunnawal country down in Canberra. They're both really beautiful places. And they're both places that have been under continual custodianship of First Australians, which is something that I, as a not-First Australian, am really grateful for, and I hope you are too. So, this is a talk about history. Some of that history is terrible. There is a lot of racism in this talk - like, a lot towards the end. There will also be a blank slide where I will be talking about the Holocaust. You will have a 5-minute warning before that happens. I invite anyone to leave if they want but also things like just putting your headphones in - like, that's not a problem. That's a cool thing to do if that's what suits you. Just for clarity, I have actually used AI to extend a couple of backgrounds in some pictures. And I have intentionally not included any photos of anyone who has been affected by the things discussed in this talk because they can't consent to that. I haven't explicitly mentioned Australia but I will take any question you have about how this applies to our history in Australia, especially in relation to Indigenous Australia. You are going to get really sick of photos of white men. There's so many. OK.
4. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 20 Right, this is the full scope of the history we'll cover. It's 1800s to present day. The white bars are World War I and II. One catch - it will not be in chronological order. So, we're gonna do a quick prologue in the 2000s, talk briefly about the history of IQ tests. It's relevant, I promise. Next up, period between World War II to 1973 to talk about the creative problem solving, or CPS, movement. And then in a bold U-turn, we're going right back to 1800, we're gonna bounce through up to 1915 through to the beginning of World War II, to the history of statistics and so-called scientific racism. Now, you might be thinking that's pretty convoluted. It is. But history is convoluted. So, I've simplified a lot and it's still pretty messy. But to be clear, what you're hearing today is not a comprehensive history, it is a coherent history. I have cut out main characters, I have cut out many, many plot arcs, but hopefully it will still be useful. So, there's an old joke, and a lot of you will know this: You've got two young fish, they're hanging out in the lake. An old fish swims past and he goes, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" He swims away. And one of the young fish turns to the other fish when he's gone and he goes, "What's water?" The thing that unites the methods that we use as designers - double diamond, design thinking, "how might we?" statements, data analysis sometimes - they are all presented and we present them as existing outside of culture and outside of history, they're just abstract. They're not. Let's have a look at the water. Cool. So, assuming that a method can be acultural is itself a cultural assumption. The idea that a process can be decontextualised is contextual. The idea that a process exists outside of history is shaped by history. That's why we're going to look at history. Prologue time. British Design Council released the double diamond in 2005. There's a historical note on the website - it says, "Of course, design process models has been
5. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 21 referenced as far back as the '60s." Have they? So, the director of design at the time this came out, he said an engineer at IDEO talked to me about the product development process as being like the classic diamond-shaped kite, with a tail comprised of increasingly smaller diamonds. Interesting. So, IDEO had a role in the double diamond. Who's IDEO? They are the design consultancy that released this Design Thinking model in 2001. Their historical model, it's not as good. It says, "Zeitgeist!" Nothing. Double Diamond is from the UK. Design Thinking from the US. Those two countries, the US and the UK, pretty individualistic. This is the Hofstede culture compass, where there are 89 and 91 out of a possible hundred. Is it problematic? Absolutely. We're just gonna use it anyway how. And if you are feeling cocky about being Australian, this is where we fit in! We're a solid 90, so we're pretty individualistic too. I've gotta go back! No, go forward. Right. So, individualistic, gonna talk about individuals. What field of knowledge deals with individuals? It is psychology. So, we're gonna look at a very early invention in the history of psychology, which is the IQ test, invented in 1905. Does anyone know what the original IQ test was for? Is anyone thinking it's for measuring intelligence? It's not! It's not! It's absolutely not. So, it was actually for help identifying kids who are at risk of falling behind at school. So, this guy, Alfred Binet, he and his team, they assessed a huge number of kids to work out a bell curve of the kind of capacity they should have at different ages. Then they assessed individual children. He really wants academia to take it seriously. They don't have any introduced. Scientists are supposed to have data. Oh, opinions about human behaviour, so he is trying to get that problem sorted out. OK, so he gives the IQ test to the soldiers. Was that the ended use of the test? No. But was it an appropriate use of the test? No. But did it yield useful results? Absolutely not. And the whole thing was abandoned within a
6. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 22 couple of years. OK. So, what's wrong with it? Well, partly it's the method. So, look at this photo. We see a guy filling in the test on paper by himself. He doesn't have a table. It's completely different from the one-on-one. There's two tests - alpha and beta. One is for literate men and one for illiterate men. Who wants to do one? I'm gonna read the script. "Attention, look at 4. When I say go, make a figure one in the space which is in the circle but not in the triangle or square, and also make a figure 2 in the space which is in the triangle and the circle but not in the square. Go!" Did you get it? None of you are officer class! OK, you're all privates. Right. OK, user researchers, how are we feeling about the validity? Yeah? It's good, yeah? No! It's terrible. This is the test for illiterate men, or men who don't speak English. You're supposed to draw in, like, a tennis net in 16. What's missing in 18? Oh! Someone got it, yeah. It's a gramophone. It's missing the bell. Yeah. But most of you didn't get that, right, because you don't see gramophones all the time. Guess what - a lot of the immigrants and poor black men taking this test didn't know what a tennis net was either. So, it's clearly obviously a test of cultural knowledge, not intelligence. Worth mentioning, a lot of these men had never held a pen before. They didn't know what a test was. So, to quote biologist Steven J Gould, in short, most of the men must have ended up absolutely baffled or scared shitless, and I'm allowed to say that because it's a quote from a book. Alright, so here's another one just for fun. I've actually been thinking a lot about the person who drew this. No, because it wasn't Yerkes, it was some unnamed commercial artist. You know, just probably someone a bit like us. Did they know the test wasn't going to work? That's not uncommon that we get us to do things that we know aren't going to work. Tell you what - we're gonna do a little test here, right? I'll do it too. If you're able to do so, put your right hand up like this. Yes.
7. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 23 Thank you, everybody. OK.... No, keep them up. So, if you've ever been asked to do something at work in your design career that you thought was dodgy, leave your hand up. No hands have gone down! (LAUGHTER) None that I can see, not one! OK, let the record show lots of hands! Right, enough of that. Depressing. Let's go to Part 2. JP Guilford - I love him. During World War II, Guilford did a lot of creativity research with pilots. He already knew the army IQ test had failed, so he's looking for an alternative. But how do you test creativity in a quant way? Has anyone heard of the paperclip test? OK, yeah, I've got some nods. So, the test is you give someone a standard object and you see how many uses they can come up with for that object in a time frame. Does this test have a right answer? No. It has infinite right answers but you can count them, OK? So, Guilford is looking for what he calls the kind of intelligence that goes off in different directions, and he is going to call that kind of intelligence... Divergent thinking. Which is the opposite of the ability to find a single right answer, which he is also going to name, and it will be called? Convergent thinking, which is what was being measured by the IQ test! Look, it was relevant the whole time! OK! So, based on his findings, Guilford literally invents the whole field of creativity research. In 1956, he introduces this - it's the Structure of the Intellect model, as you can see convergent and divergent thinking are integrated into this model. What this shows is the pathway that diverge/converge came to us as designers was not a design path, it was a scientific path, specifically psychology, and more specifically personality research via IQ testing, which is to say the study of the individual. Yeah? Cool. Alright. Our creative problem solving methods have individualistic roots. Next guy. Love this guy. This is Alex Osborn, the man who invented brainstorming in the 1950s. Now, he is an advertising executive. He's, like, full Mad Men guy, OK? Who knows what
8. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 24 brainstorming is? Oh! What is it? Is it sitting in a room, coming up with ideas, is that what it is? You're wrong again! I love this! OK. So, brainstorming is, in fact, a 3-step process. The first step is the one we know - group of people, no wrong answers in a room. The second one is pausing. And the third one is coming back later to go through all those crazy ideas and work out which one works. So, first, you use your divergent thinking to come up with the ideas. But, like in Guilford's, but then you use your convergent thinking to get your solution, like a diamond, maybe, yes? OK. Alright. So, the brainstorming fad starts with Osborn's book Applied Imagination in 1953. Now, you might have noticed something weird here, because brainstorming is a non-judgemental, collaborative group process, which is a weird thing for, like, a hyper-American Mad Man capitalist to have come up with, culturally speaking. But Osborn does explain in the book, but it's not really collectivist stuff, it's just that being in groups makes people more competitive. America, yeah! So, starting from about now, the creative problem solving, or CPS, movement really kicks off. As an aside, that's not actually the only time non-judgement comes into the CPS movement. You know how, like, if you go to a counsellor or a psychologist or something, they just refuse to give you advice or tell you what they think you should do? Lots of nods, OK. That's this guy's fault, alright? This is - yeah - this is Carl Rogers. He is the guy who came up with the idea that to experience true change, a person has to solve their own problems creatively. Yes. All connected. So, voila, psychology again. I love Rogers. Interesting thing about Rogers - he was raised in an extremely Christian household. Like, Footloose, OK? Yes, thank you, old people. (LAUGHTER) So, as a young man, he goes on a trip to China with the YMCA, blows his mind. The trip gave him the creative space and imperative to
9. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 25 come up with an idea so influential that most of us in this room have had direct experience with it. Diverge. OK. So, which is funny, because if you check the preface to the 1963 edition of Applied Imagination - which I have done - it looks very much as though Osborn actually got his idea from India. Now, it really hurts me not to tell you about the days I spent chasing this down, but thanks to the help of some friends, I'm pretty confident that Prai-Barshana is an Anglicisation of the Sanskrit Pariprasna? I think Osborn got a lot of the idea of brainstorming from the Bhagavad Gita. Please ask me about this. I know so much! Which means that our creative problem solving methods might have multicultural roots. Surprise! Who knows what this is? It's Sputnik! Yes, if you said Sputnik, you are correct. So, kind of lost history. For most of the space race, the USSR was winning by miles. We can see the first dog in space, the first dogs to come back from space, the first man in space, the first spacewalk. It's all USSR. It's not until 1969 that the USA even gets a run on the board. And it made me think, given that CPS is happening during the Cold War, could it be related? Oh, it is! It absolutely is. The very first example of brainstorming that Osborn gives in his book is actually from the Cold War. So, he says, "If you were Secretary of State, about to go to Moscow, wouldn't you like to have a highly intelligent group of strategists do nothing but think up a hundred possible moves you might make while you were there?" And then, "If only one worthwhile suggestion came out of a whole year's work by such a group, the cost would be but a penny compared to one atom bomb." We're still capitalist and we're still counting that money. Again, Guilford, 1959. "We are in a mortal struggle for the survival of our way of life in the world. We encounter challenges on all intellectual fronts, scientific and cultural as well as economic and political." They are
10. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 26 definitely thinking about this. Which means our creative problem solving methods have ideological roots. Partly for solving problems, but they're also for proving that, like, the individualistic, capitalist way is better than the collectivist, community, USSR way, which was ambiguous. It's also proven that our creative problem solving ways, there's an outside threat. Step back. 1963, Osborn is a bit ticked off about misuse of his technique. This is in the intro. He says, "Too many have erroneously regarded group brainstorming as a complete problem solving process, where it is only one of several phases of idea-finding, and only one of several phases idea-finding is only one of several phases of creative problem solving." Interesting. You won't recognise Sidney Parnes. You will, however, know his work, because in 1967, in the Creative Behaviour Guidebook, he will document the first "how might we?" question. Not IDEO. Parnes. Osborn dies in '66 but before he dies he works with Parnes on all the phases of creative problem solving. Unfortunately, Parnes is not a marketing genius, so the Osborn-Parnes creative problem solving method never gets super famous. But would you like to see it? Ah! What?! 5-step process. Diverge-converge. Remember this? Same shape! (LAUGHTER) Remember this? Hate the hexagons, let's kill 'em. Oh, my God, they match up! Empathise to fact finding, define to problem finding, ideate to idea finding, prototype to solution finding, and test to acceptance finding. Voila! So, at the beginning, our design council person was talking about the kite-shaped process models from the 1960s. Well, there it is. So, both the IDEO design thinking process and the double diamonds have the same root. It is the Osborn-Parnes creative problem solving process, which draws from Osborn's brainstorming process, which draws from Guilford's diverge-converge model of creativity. Ta da! I honestly feel like that's a pretty good mic-drop moment. You want to get a coffee now, I
11. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 27 get it. But you might be wondering, "Well, what happened?" Right? There were loads of these models. There was a whole movement and they're all kind of gone now, apart from those two. So, what happened? Well, basically, they didn't work. For years, people tried to find the one true, universal creative problem solving method, and it kept not working. One of the nails in the coffin came from this guy - design theorist/urban planner Horst Rittel. In 1973, he defines the 10 features of wicked problems. Get your phones out, we'll see them. What's a wicked problem? Well, basically it's one you can't solve using a standardised method. Here's the list. Do take a photo. Pausing, though, to note number 10, which is: The planner has no right to be wrong. I'll summarise the bold text. It is a principle of science that solutions to problems are only hypotheses offered for refutation. So, in science, you can be wrong, you just have to own it when someone proves you wrong. But in planning and design, our solutions aren't for uncovering the truth, they're for actually changing the world in some way - hopefully for the better. Which means planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate. Now, a like this because it points out how annoying science is, right? Science people, they're doing problem solving all the time, they just don't own it. You know, it's just like, "Oh, we're just asking questions." (LAUGHTER) So, time for Part 3. Time to look at the water again. This time, the water is data. And the interpretation of data, which is to say statistics. Now, why talk about statistics in a talk about creative problem solving? Two reasons. First, it's another lost history. And, second, data asks a lot of questions and it tries to solve a lot of questions, but with that dodge that's built into the science thing, that it's objective, it's just postulating a hypothesis, just saying. That means the questions and the solutions really avoid a lot of scrutiny. So, let's scrutinise. Karl Gauss. Have you guys used - you go Gaussian
12. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 28 blur? Right, well, this is the Gauss. In 1809, Karl Gauss identifies the bell curve. Just a reminder, we are going to get into scientific racism almost immediately. Opt out if you would like to. Here it is. Here is the bell curve. It's a way of assessing probability. So, if everyone in this room had a coin and we all flipped our coin a hundred times, some of us would get all heads, a very small number would get all tails, but most of us would get about a 50-50. And we can predict that very accurately on the bell curve. Which means our statistical methods have roots in probability. Adolphe Quetelet - I'm not pronouncing that right. 1850s. This guy is really into measuring people. He's measuring people's height, weight, nose length, and he realises, "Oh, my God, this maps onto the bell curve. Amazing!" Quetelet quickly develops a belief that the average person is kind of perfect. Every increment away from, or diverging from, average is a move towards what he calls deformity and disease, which is the foundation idea of the BMI, which he invented. Oh! Right. So, the bell curve exists. Measuring people against the bell curve exists. What's gonna happen next? Charles Darwin. So, we're gonna get The Origin of the Species in 1959. And Darwin has this first cousin, Francis Galton. He is probably the most interesting person in this story. Unfortunately, he is also probably one of the worst, which sucks, 'cause he did cool stuff. Like, this is the guy who proved human footprints are unique. He created the first weather map. He was the first person to do twin studies. He's obsessed with measurement, obsessed. So, remember how Guilford took the ideas from his recent historical context, combined them and invented the discipline of creativity research? Well, Galton is gonna do something similar, but in 1883 he's going to invent eugenics. Eugenics is the selective breeding of people. It's about selective breeding to increase the probability of desired traits, either by having some people breed more or having other people prevented from breeding. Now, I want to get this out
13. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 29 of the way - it doesn't work. Right? There are species that can be selectively bred. You can selectively breed dogs. But humans actually have a really small genome and you cannot selectively breed people. We're just the wrong kind of species. It doesn't work. Alright. The eugenicists had many identified desirable traits. The most important one of which was...? It's gonna be intelligence, you know, right? OK. Galton will mentor a man called Pearson. Pearson is on the left, Galton on the right. They will eventually be joined by a man called Fisher. These three men are polymaths. They work across agriculture, biology, forensics, geology, weather, you name it, they're in it. But they all have the same passion. And their passion is eugenics. Now, I'm not using quotes from these men. You don't want to hear it. They're very pro-genocide. They're very pro-war. They're very pro-forced sterilisation. And they believe in it deeply. So, they believe in eugenics, they're passionate about eugenics, they're also committed scientists. So, how are they going to prove that eugenics is a good idea? They are going to invent modern statistics. You pop it in Google, "founder of modern statistics," you will get Ronald Fisher. If you scroll a little bit, it will still be on the first page, the only other name that will pop up is Karl Pearson. These men believe passionately that statistics is completely objective. To quote Pearson, "We believe there is no institution more capable of impartial statistical inquiry than the Galton Laboratory. We believe firmly that we have no political, no religious, and no social prejudices." That was a note to go with his journal findings that Jewish children are less intelligent than other children. He got that data doing IQ tests on traumatised little kids that had just arrived in England after escaping from pogroms. Totally impartial. Binet didn't actually do the first IQ tests, Galton did. But he kept getting these results that said poor people were as smart as rich people, so he figured the method was wrong.
14. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 30 Right, so our statistical methods literally have racist roots. Proving that white people are better than other people is what modern statistics was originally for. What does that mean? Modern statistics. Look, it's mostly bell curves, honestly. You've heard of the correlation coefficient, invented by Pearson. I won't explain it. This is his data. It's bell curves. You might know the idea of statistically significant. They made that one up too. What is it? It's the measurement between bell curves. It's all bell curves, OK? Here's a bell curve. This is Galton's chart for representing genetic worth across social classes. Paupers and criminals at one end. And, because we're still capitalists, independent professionals and large employers at the other. So, in eugenics, genes are everything, upbringing is nothing. If you're poor, it's because your genes are bad. If you're rich, it's because your genes are good. That means American society is fair and inequality is natural. It's objective. It's science. And people are really into this. OK? Especially rich people and especially, extra especially rich Americans. Almost all of whom were white. So, this photo is from 1914. It's the first-ever Race Betterment Conference. The guy standing up is Harvey Kellogg, as in the Cornflakes. All these people are doctors, philanthropists, academics, politicians, they're tech bros. No, they are, OK? You are basically looking at South by Southwest. This is like a TED Conference. It's not even a TEDx. It's like a proper TED! So, Winston Churchill is into it, Teddy Roosevelt is into it. Marie Stopes, the contraception lady, totally eugenicist, very into it. Books about eugenics are best sellers. It's everywhere. It's science. This is your 5-minute warning, by the way. So, our statistical methods have ideological roots. But much like we saw with the CPS, they are also a response to threat. Difference being this time, if the threat is not an outside enemy, it is diversity in society itself. Of any kind. So, we are targeting class, race, gender, sexuality,
15. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 31 disability - it's all in there. Every increment that diverges from the assumed perfection of a rich, white, wholly able-bodied man is an increment towards deformity and disease. This isn't actually the wildest part, OK? Here's the wildest part. Most of the data that went into making eugenics popular was terrible. Right? So, most was incompetent but some was outright fraud. Now, this is obviously a doctored photo, right? The little demon child with the messed-up... No, it is, OK? This is a photo, a doctored photo of children from the Kallikak family. Does anyone speak Ancient Greek? OK, no, it's a fraud name that is "kallos-kak", which is "beauty shit." Bestselling books about this family. Cyril Burt proved through twin studies that intelligence was definitely inherited and environment had nothing to do with it. Totally fabricated. His twin studies literally did not exist. The interpretations were terrible. So, we know how bad the data collection for army alpha was, right? We saw that. The interpretations were worse. The data showed clearly that black people in the north, where they went to school, did better on the test than black people in the south. How do we explain that genetically? Do you know what they decided? They decided that it was evidence that, like, because life was better for black people in the north, all the smart black people moved there. Yes! I'm not making this up. Like, these are our objective, like, "No bias on me" people. Alright, so you know who else is a eugenicist? (LAUGHTER) Yeah. Yerkes. Yerkes is a eugenicist. The guy who wants to use cool new statistical methods to prove that psychology is a real science because data. You know what else he wants to prove using data? Maybe data from a sample size of 1.7 million soldiers. Yep. He wants to prove white people are better. But as we know, fortunately, the army knew the results were terrible, and the damage was limited, right? Because the army abandoned the test. Didn't kill the data. In 1923, a man called Carl Brigham will publish a book called The Study of American
16. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 32 Intelligence. The book uses modern statistical methods - the bell curve ones, on the data sets from the army alpha and beta tests. It tidies them up, hides the bad methodology. Makes them easy to understand. On this page, we see a bar chart showing the intelligence of different racial groups. Top of the chart is England, bottom of the chart is negro draft. The book is a hit with elites, especially policymakers who love nice, clean data. Brigham's book was not the only driver of the American Immigration Act of 1924 but it was a very big one. That Act ended Asian immigration to the United States. It dramatically reduced the number of immigrants from nations where the data showed people to be inferior. During the 1930s, eugenicist policies and laws became common place in America. Forced sterilisations of people deemed unfit to breed were legal and common in 30 American states. Laws against inter-racial marriage hardened and eugenics-based suppression became very normal. The eugenic policies, laws and practices of America were a source of ideological and practical inspiration. To the German Nazi movement, as they commenced the forced sterilisations, work restrictions, deportations and murders that we now refer to as the Holocaust. The connection between American and German eugenicists is very well-documented. Less well-documented is the link between the Holocaust and statistics itself. I will now read to you Karl Pearson's words on this topic. "In Germany, a vast experiment is at hand, and some of you may live to see its results. If it fails, it will not be for want of enthusiasm but, rather, because the Germans are only just starting the study of mathematical statistics in the modern sense. " When I asked before, who had been asked to do something dodgy in their design career, every hand went up. What did you do? When you were told to do something that you knew might mislead people or might harm people, when you did research that you
17. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 33 knew was methodologically flawed, when you were asked to use your design skills to create a glossy deck out of research that you knew was bad, what did you do? Did you refuse? Did you escalate? Or did you figure that the client had to be kept happy, the PM needed pacifying, couldn't make too much of a difference. How would you know what difference your work will make? Double diamond again - I can see the "how might we?" in that. Where is the "should we?"? Can you point to it? Is it there? Erin told us yesterday that there are no right answers to wrong questions. Which step in design thinking is the step where we ask if the question is wrong? Everything - everything we do is cultural. If you are educated and white, as I am, there are eugenic assumptions that are still in our shared culture, still embedded in our work practices, and still embedded in us. In the history that we've looked at today, the more people have insisted that their method is objective, universal, beyond culture, the worse their results have been, the more fraudulent their practice has been, and the more harm they have done. There is no purely objective methodology. There is no universal methodology. There never was. Pretending otherwise is wrong. Supporting practices that pretend otherwise is wrong. And when your work can hurt people, as ours can, you do not have the right to be wrong. Thank you. (APPLAUSE) STEVE BATY: I think we have time for just one question, Zoe, if you're willing to take a question. ZOE ROSE: Absolutely. It's OK, we can laugh again now. It's over. It's fine, OK. STEVE BATY: Who would like to ask a question? Over on the left there, right at the front. And we'll just take this one and then we'll have a break.
18. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 34 STEVEN: Thanks for... Like, amazing presentation. One of the things, like, with the shapes of diamonds and hexagons, there wasn't many circles. And that's one of the, like, go-to maybe method in design, that sort of iterative... ZOE ROSE: Sorry. What was the question? STEVEN: The question is there was diamonds, hexagons, but no circles. It's one of the go-to things of plan, act, do, observe, reflect, that is... I don't know, like... ZOE ROSE: Do you have a question? STEVEN: The question is why, where does the iterative approach fit within the creative problem solving...? ZOE ROSE: It fits in the 15 minutes I didn't have, yeah! (LAUGHS) STEVE BATY: Thank you very much, Zoe. ZOE ROSE: Thank you. (APPLAUSE)