 All right, so who am I? My name is Grant Blakeman. I'm a designer, developer, product guy. I live here in town, independent. And I've got a background. I started in branding. I've done a lot of different things. Eventually ended up, I work almost primarily in web applications and software design these days. And I want to talk to you guys a little bit about design. But before we get into that, I kind of want to talk about what this talk is not. I can say this because I'm in the company of developers and not designers. As much as I love what I do, as much as my income depends on choosing fonts and colors and worrying about pixels and things like that, I find a lot of those discussions really boring. They're at a very low level in comparison to what I think the potential of design really is. I think they're short-sighted and they just kind of miss the point. And a lot of that stems from how we define design. You see, it is on some level some of those things. There is color choice in fonts and worrying about line heights and all of that. But those things really should be outcomes. They should be responses to the problem or the task at hand. And yet we often end up talking about them as if they are the problems we're solving or the solutions. And they really just shouldn't be an end in and of itself. So just so you know, I'm not here to make you guys fall in love with ampersands or dissect shades of the pseudo color gray. I just want to give you some vision for what design thinking is and how you can be a little more aware of it and how that might benefit you in other things that you do. So I feel like design is about intention. It's really a succession of choices, a culmination of choices toward a desired outcome. To put it more simply, it's supposed to help us solve problems. And yes, there's a visual component depending on the type of design you're doing. But there's also a process component. There's a logic component. There's a bunch of different facets of design. And as designers, we try to train ourselves to work through these problems and find solutions that address these different components. And we often do it in a very second nature type way. And it looks like all we're doing is saying, oh, I think the color blue is really, really nice. And we should use that. But those choices really are bigger than that. And a really good design thinking takes advantage of some recognizable techniques and themes and processes. And really good designers often don't even call themselves designers. They may not even be aware that they're designers. And they certainly might not even be guys that wear black rimmed glasses and worry about typefaces. So I almost titled this talk, Being a Beer Snob Makes You a Better Person. I don't know. Those of you that are not from Colorado, you might not know that we kind of have an obsession with this beverage. My favorite pub is right down the street. It's a place called Mountain Sun. Exactly. And every February, they have this thing called Stout Month. And over the course of the month, they can sample 30 to 40 different stouts brewed by themselves and their friends. They just rotate taps throughout the month. It's really amazing. And they've got stouts. You'll taste a stout that has a mint taste to it or a stout that has a coconut in it. There's just all these amazing flavors that are niches within what is already a niche of beer itself. And one of the things as you do this, if you ever get one of their samplers and you go through this process, is you very quickly realize that what makes a good micro brewer, what makes a good beer really in general, is balance. It's just something where a little too much coconut or not nearly enough coffee might actually ruin the whole thing. And the order in which you add the ingredients as you're making it is really, really important. And these are decisions about balance. And they can affect not only just the entire beer, but they might even affect something as well as the way the flavors work in the aftertaste. And one of my dad's friends is a former engineer, turned designer, or I mean beer brewer, sorry. And he's as meticulous about brewing his beer as you might think an engineer would be. But when you get him to talk about the flavor and how he creates those flavors, he lights up. And he's no longer an engineer. He's now an artist. And he's taking these delicate balance of ingredients and combinations, he's experimenting. But he's always working within this very rigid process, which is how do you make beer? And he's creating something new and spectacular. But he's juggling all of these different pieces to do that. And any time any one little thing falls out of balance, he knows it can ruin an entire batch. And all of that works for nothing. So for me, as a designer, balance is one of my favorite tools. I tend to think of it actually as more of like an indicator than a thing you take action on. It's something, a lot of times you can look at a process you're designing and you can exactly see that something's out of whack or something's out of balance and compensate for it. But a lot of times you just have this kind of gut feeling. You're like, there's something off with this. And you have to back up. And you have to figure out where you went wrong along that way. And that's not something that, as designers, we hold the corner on. We've just worked really hard at recognizing it and getting good at working through that process. You're probably already using balance as an indicator in your teams, in your projects, in your life itself. And you know when something's off and it needs to be addressed. But the problem is when we ignore those indicators and we just power through to get something finished. Because balance is harder to correct the longer you wait. I was out in Moab, Utah a couple years ago at a place called Gemini Bridges, which is pretty popular if you've ever been to Moab. And I was watching some guys tightrope. And these Gemini Bridges are these giant land bridges that are a few hundred feet off the canyon floor. And they had ropes strung across between them. And they were roped in themselves for safety, but they were literally tightroping across the canyon, you know, a couple hundred feet above the canyon. And it was fascinating to watch. And they made it look really, really easy. But if you watched closely, what they were doing is they were constantly adjusting themselves. They were constantly making these tiny little course corrections. And without those, you know, when you would watch them as they're practicing, if they waited too long to make an adjustment, it would eventually compound itself and they would fall. And that's one of the things that is important about balance is, you know, when you're managing a product or build, or managing a project or building a product or even designing processes, you have to be constantly assessing the balance along the way. And if you don't, it'll just get out of whack way too fast. So let's switch gears and talk a little bit about style. That's another thing we talk a lot about with design. From an aesthetic sense, you know, there's all sorts of styles. There's grunge, there's postmodern, there's gothic. And one of my favorites is minimalism. And the thing with style is they all, all of these styles usually come from a guiding philosophy. And those philosophies are bigger than just the visual representation of that style. And the philosophies tend to be applicable outside of just how do you arrange things on a page or on a website. With minimalism, it's the idea of taking things and stripping them down and removing unnecessary clutter and streamlining a process. One of my favorite design gurus, Dieter Rams, calls it less is better. Obviously you can take it to an extreme, but one of my favorite tenets of minimalism is this thing called white space or negative space. And the idea is that as a designer, you allow things room to breathe and interact with each other. And the way I extrapolate that out of design and I apply it to my actual life is if you've ever thought of solving code problems in the shower or you have a great idea while you're mowing the lawn, those are your brain taking advantage of negative space. For me, I do a lot of trail running living here. So that's my negative space. That's what allows me to take a few precious moments, clear my head and respond to whatever kind of comes into that empty space. So I think that's really important. That's just a personal level thing. I think you guys should all figure out what your negative space is for you and make that important, actively protect it, put it into your calendar or your daily routine because there's just something magical about leaving yourself a buffer to process life with. Speaking of trail running, Boulder is really famous for its beautiful open space parks. It's one of the reasons that a lot of us live here but there's a bigger story behind it. Citizens themselves started purchasing land for preservation in the 1800s and the cities kind of continued that tradition. And if you actually start mapping it out, it's not perfect but what essentially happens is we've built a donut around our city and you can't develop in it. And this land is preserved and it effectively creates this constraint. It's artificial but it shapes the way Boulder is today. It's one of the reasons we have higher density housing downtown and we have things like cycling corridors and public transportation. We've used this artificial constraint and responded to it and it's really shaped the way the city is. And if we didn't have it, I really don't think we would be much more interesting than any of the other forgettable Denver suburbs. So constraint is another one of my favorite tools as a designer. I'd go surprise to say it's one of the most necessary aspects of good design. Any project, you guys know this, have natural constraints, time, budget, things like that. But one of the things you can actually do is use constraint and build in additional constraints because solutions as designers that we propose, they're all responses to constraint. And so we can use constraints to move projects forward. Without them, projects don't get finished, things can be unfocused, not executed well. And a lot of people wanna talk about like, oh designers, we wanna think outside the box, that old cliche. But what a designer who says that really means is they wanna trade one box of constraints for a different box with different constraints that they think might fit the project goals better. So you can never eliminate constraints, you can just find different ones to play with and respond to them differently. So those are just a few different things that I think about through my design process and how do I pull them all together? What makes it possible within a task or project to make good decisions or balance things well or take good advantage of negative space or implement constraints? A big part of it is simply observation. The key is we going into anything, life projects, teams, whatever, we don't know what we don't know. And the sooner we can kinda just face up to that, the better. And the best way to figure out what questions to ask and what new things to solve is to observe. And observing can come in a lot of different ways. There's testing, there's market research, there's all of those formal types of processes. But there's also just simply watching and actively trying not to have an agenda and trying to see what catches your eye. And when you do that, observation like that, I mean it can be as simple as walking a new way home or it could be talking less and listening better. You know, you guys are about to head out to lunch and you could easily just like Boulder Pearl Street is a great place to people watch. And you just sit on a bench and watch people and you'll start to notice patterns of behavior when you pay attention. You'll start to find things that you think are really interesting and things that confuse the hell out of you, because humans are just funny like that. But the main idea is you're actually now aware of what's going on around you. You've taken a moment to pull yourself back a little bit and not just push forward with your daily life. And design thinking really is all about awareness and that awareness comes from observation. So I've lived in Colorado for most of my life now and it's a beautiful state. I've seen rattlesnakes, I've seen bald eagles, I've seen bears, I've seen all of these elusive creatures but I've never actually seen a mountain lion. And sometimes when I'm out trail running at night, at dusk, I don't go directly at night. I get that feeling that something's watching you. I don't know if you guys have ever gotten that. It makes a hair on the back of your neck stand up. And I've had it a couple of times that was so powerful that I actually had to stop running and look around. And of course I've never seen anything but I know they're out there. And mountain lions, they never really attack humans. I mean they do but it's very, very rare. But if you're a deer, that's something you're constantly vigilant for and you know what areas they are because if you see one, it's too late. And obviously that's incredibly overly dramatic but problems are a lot like that. And using this kind of awareness of design thinking, just being able to observe and be intentional about your choices and the decisions you make will give you a better framework to process issues. And it's not foolproof but it'll help you anticipate problems. It'll help you keep projects, teams, life itself moving in the right direction. So that's some of my thoughts on design thinking. And I try to take those things and actually apply them outside of just where I put pixels on a webpage or in print. But if you guys have any questions or other thoughts I'd love to hear them. But thanks for your time. The question is how do you convince yourself to do this when you're really busy? I'll be the first to say I suck at it. But that's part of, for me the negative space thing is becoming much more intentional in the last few years I've done better at this to become much more intentional about finding space. And that can be as small as like 20 minutes in a day. But recognizing that when I'm pounding my head against the wall about a problem I'm often not making any progress. And I'm not allowing whatever that secondary process is that happens in our heads when we give ourselves a little time or space to happen. So building it into your schedule and just being a little more intentional about leaving space for that is huge. Anything else? Cool. We'll have a good lunch, guys.