Coffee. Coffee fuels hackers, coders and security wonks alike. For hackers of my generation, we tackled many a problem and brewed many a pot with a Braun. And within its hourglass shape lies a lesson for today’s security professionals.
The chief designer at Braun from 1961-1995 was Dieter Rams. He was behind the ubiquitous Braun coffeemaker from the 1980s. (I had a hand-me-down pot in my workshop in the 1990s.) Now you might think the shape was for decoration. Makes sense. One of Dieter Rams’ ten principles for good design is that good design is aesthetic. You’d be wrong.
Attractiveness for the sake of attractiveness isn’t Dieter Rams point. His design aesthetic was first solving the problem, and then solving the problem in a beautiful way.
The hourglass coffeemaker’s shape stemmed from a problem with the plastic. Plastic casings were still relatively new at the time. The process wasn’t producing plastic that was strong enough. The fluting provided strength and structure. As Dieter Rams wrote, “what was often misunderstood as some kind of post-modern decorative element had in fact a definite structural function.”
Applying this to cyber security: first design to meet the security requirements, then redesign using the same elements to provide a good experience.
Braun KF 157 Coffeemaker, Photography via WorthPoint.
Good Design is Aesthetic
I’m nostalgic about Braun KF 157 coffeemaker. But I’m in love with the Braun KF 20.
The KF 20 was ahead of its time. It looked like science fiction. In the futuristic world of Alien set in 2122, there was the Braun KF 20.
Florian Seiffert designed the coffeemaker in 1972. Following Dieter Rams direction and principles, every stylistic element has a functional purpose. The end result is well-designed, well-intentioned, beauty.
“It is truly unpleasant and tiring to have to put up with products day in and day out that are confusing, that literally get on your nerves, and that you are unable to relate to.” Dieter Rams spoke of products like coffee pots. But he just as easily could have been describing security controls.
Good security has a design aesthetic that is relatable and understandable.
Braun KF 20 Coffeemaker, Image via Dan Gorman
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
So said automotive designer Lowie Vermeersch about the Pininfarina Nido. When you make something so incredibly simple, a bit extra makes the entire thing pop.
The equivalent of nice rims in a security capability is that one thing we do that goes just a little bit further to make the end-user happy. It’s not something we have to do. We’re going to need wheels anyway. It’s a little extra.
It’s not something that adds much to the cost of the project. A nice set of rims runs around $1,000 with the average price of a car being $40,000. But its something the end-user notices and appreciates far above the price tag.
The path for designing a security capability goes from complexity to simplicity, taking those steps with empathy and understanding. As we follow that path, keep an eye open. Find opportunities to spend a fraction of the budget (say 1/40th?) on one detail that pleases people.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
“I want to be Batman.” This is the greatest answer I’ve received to the interview question, “where do you see yourself in five years?”
I hired him. Of course.
If only stopping criminals and villains was as simple as hiring superheroes. But we need equipment. We need partners and support. And before we get our batcave and police commissioner Gordon, we first need to reach people.
Leaders excite and engage people to get things done. We use strong clear communication that cuts through debate and doubt, and provides a solution we can agree upon. It takes strong visual and verbal communication.
Superheroes
One more thing about superheroes, what happened to them visually? The Golden Age and Silver Age comic books were full of bright bursts of primary colors. These days, superheroes have been drained of color. DC’s Superman’s original bright blue and bright red are so muted, they look nearly black-and-grey. Marvel has taken a similar approach. Looking at you, WandaVision. The Scarlet Witch isn’t scarlet but a dark burgundy. Modern heroes are a study in dark contrast.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy takes the blame. The films defined the noir look which has played out across all recent comic book movies. But who inspired Nolan?
Visual Contrast
The answer is Johannes Itten from the Bauhaus. That’s Bauhaus the design school, not Bauhaus the band. t’s final form was in Berlin, where Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was the director. Before that, the Bauhaus was in Dessau, getting its start in Weimar in 1919. Many great names, and many great designs, trace back to this time. But in Weimar? In the start? There was Johannes Itten.
Johannes Itten taught art and color at the Bauhaus. Had a blast doing so, from what we can tell. “Play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes play.”
While with the Bauhaus, Itten studied colors, establishing the fundamental categories for contrast: hue, light-dark, cold-warm, complementary, analogous, saturation, and extension. This work, specifically with contrasting seasonal color palettes, inspires painters and artists to this day. And nearly a century later, Christopher Nolan would turn to Itten’s desaturated and muted color palettes when establishing the mood of The Dark Knight Rises.
Contrast is what makes the visual beautiful.
Verbal Contrast
The communications expert Nancy Duarte studied storytelling and presentations. She looked at superhero movies, she looked at boardroom talks. “After all this study, it was a couple of years of study, I drew a shape,” Duarte recounted on the TED stage. “There is this commonplace of the status quo, and you need to contrast that with the loftiness of your idea.”
It was a pattern I followed when establishing the vision for my monitoring program. I explained the status quo of audits and manual efforts. I painted the picture of automation and visibility. I showed where we were weak, and pitched how my team could be stronger. I leaned into the contrast. In the end? I obtained the funding for the SIEM and equipped my team’s Batman.
Contrast is what makes the verbal actionable.
Sell the Vision
“The objective laws of form and color help strengthen a person’s powers and to expand his creative gifts,” Johannes Itten once said. Duarte’s research shows similar laws of form and content strengthen a person’s persuasive powers.
Explain your vision by contrasting what is and what will be. Use this approach to gain buy-in, support, and budget. That’s how hire the Batman, and that’s how we get those wonderful toys.
A noir color study in contrast.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
Lack of sufficient budget and inadequate staffing, those are among the top challenges CISOs report when surveyed.
Oddly enough? No one ever asks CISOs what they have too much of.
With that one question, Gunpei Yokoi created the handheld video game console market. The Nintendo game designer was behind the Game & Watch and Game Boy. He called his combination of disciplined focus on play and radical use of legacy components “lateral thinking with withered technology.”
It’s a philosophy with repercussions for security leaders.
Withered Technology
When Yokoi spoke of withered technology, he meant technology which had matured to the point where it was plentiful, affordable, and well-understood.
The Nintendo Game & Watch series was built on an advantage in the market which Sharp and Casio’s competition created. These two companies emphasized leading edge technology. The result was older black-and-white LCD calculator screens where readily available at a very low cost. Yokoi embossed the screen to compensate for manufacturing imperfections. To get color? Yokoi had colored lines printed on the embossed screen. This also reduced the need for lighting up the entire display, saving battery and extending game play.
The first way to apply Game & Watch thinking is finding similarly seasoned technology in our security stack. We might not have budget for an advanced user behavior analytics platform with machine learning. But we do have a logging platform. How far can we take what we have? Find the correlation-and-alerting equivalent of embossed-and-painted calculator screens.
A deeper way to apply Yokoi’s philosophy returns to the question: what do we have in abundance? I once collaborated with an organization that had built out an access review and certification process in IT service management. Why? Well, they had extra ServiceNow licenses. Abundance isn’t only technology, however, it can also relationships. I know another organization with strong relationships with marketing and corporate communications, who used this to great effect, producing a slick internal campaign which drove adoption of password vaulting.
In one context, it is withered. In another context, it is ripe. The trick is to see a new context.
Lateral Thinking
As a discipline, lateral thinking offers several methods for seeing things differently. One that comes to mind when studying Yokoi is the provocation and movement technique.
The first step is stating a provocation. This statement can negate the status quo, change the logical order of things, or exaggerate an aspect of the strategy. If our current security model depends upon network visibility, for example, one provocation would be “our defense doesn’t require anything from the network.”
The second step is determining how we move from our current thinking towards a context which satisfies the provocation. The general path is to extract a principle, focus on the difference between the contexts, imagine a movement to close the gap. Using the above example, that may be “we shift monitoring from the network to the endpoint.”
The Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong offers a perfect example of provocation and movement. The arcade version of Donkey Kong required a joystick. The variable resistance joysticks used in arcades required bulky potentiometers. The provocation is an exaggerated arcade joystick taped onto a Game & Watch. The underlying principle is up/down and left/right movement.
The resulting move was to create the plus-shaped cross control pad. These controls require only four buttons, fit the Game & Watch, cost a thousandth of an arcade joystick, and became Yokoi’s most widely copied innovation.
Ripening on the Vine
Yokoi’s “lateral thinking with withered technology” principle culminated in the Nintendo Game Boy. Released in 1989, it had a cross control pad and a black-and-white LCD. The processor was from the 1970s. Specifically, Sharp’s response to the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80. In every way, the Game Boy was under-powered compared to the competition.
The Game Boy went on take the market, and to sell 119 million units. It remained Nintendo’s highest selling game system for nearly two decades. Nintendo DS finally overtook the Game Boy in 2016. And withered technology? Withered won.
Gunpei Yokoi began at Nintendo as a maintenance man working the assembly line. He once said, “I don’t have any particular specialist skills. I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” His strength was finding strengths in areas others overlooked, then strategically applying them to great advantage.
When determining how best to protect the organization, think like Yokoi, and look for areas of abundance ripening on the vine. Calculator screens, surplus processors, existing technology, working processes, strong relationships. Identify strengths. Be provocative.
Nintendo Game & Watch: Donkey Kong. Photo courtesy WikimediaImages from Pixabay.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
“So does a table whose name is Ingo,” sang Jonathan Coulton in his IKEA song, “and the chair is a ladder-back birch but his friends call him Karl.”
I can’t speak for Karl. But Billy, well, Billy has an interesting backstory.
In the late 1970s, an IKEA advertising man named Billy Liljedahl complained about the state of bookshelves. They were heavy, expensive, and often missed the point by not actually being sized for books.
Gillis Lundgren, head of design at the time, began to sketch. “I drew the first sketches on a napkin,” Lundgren would later recall. “That was often the way we worked. Ideas are perishable and you have to capture the moment as soon as it arrives.”
Billy the bookcase would debut in the IKEA catalog in 1979. By 2009, IKEA had produced and sold more than 41 million bookcases. It remains one of the most popular products to this day.
Why? Regardless of Billy Liljedahl’s complaint, there were other shelves. IKEA had previously produced the Tiga. An early competitor inspired the Tiga: the Lundkvist shelf or Lundkvisthyllan. Not to mention the countless options we have today for shelving, storage, and more.
The reason is modularity, scalability, and extensibility. If there’s a room, if there’s a style, if there’s a need, there is a Billy configuration. The result has been pages on pages of Billy hacks. (Here are 45 ideas to get you started. Ironically, many without books. Sorry, Billy Liljedahl.) We’re seeing the power of architectural patterns playing out over 41 million use cases.
When IT security leaders envision future security capabilities, we must ground them in repeatable patterns. A thousand apps individually implementing controls can quickly lead to sprawl, gaps, and waste. Equip these same teams with a pattern, say for authentication or fraud detection, and we can standardize the building blocks. Even if each app is different. Even if it looks as different as a standalone bookcase in a young person’s first apartment, or a built-in bookcase in an adult’s work-from-home study.
“Books should talk but the bookshelf should be silent.” This is the motto of the Lundkvist shelf. They never said hello. Perhaps that’s why Billy won the market.
And there’s a lesson for IT security. Products should talk but security shouldn’t be silent. Architectural patterns speak softly long after security has left the room.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
Early hacker history is intrinsically tied to the telephone. Early hacker movies, too. Sneakers, WarGames. Hackers, Matrix, all have phones central to the plot. Yet before there was hacker history, there was phone history.
The form factor of the telephone, at the dawn of the twentieth century, was the candlestick. That’s where the mouthpiece is on top of the stand, and the earphone is a cup you hold to your ear. This was the way a telephone looked for nearly forty years. The first phone to break free of this form? Came from the Bauhaus.
Richard Schadewell and Marcel Breuer designed the first cradle telephone in the late 1920s. Created for the Fuld Corporation and used in 1929 for the Frankfurt housing program, the phone is often called the Fuld or Frankfurt phone. Regardless of what you call it, Schadewell and Breuer’s design re-imaged the telephone. But it didn’t get much reach beyond Frankfurt.
Johan Christian Bjerknes and Jean Heiberg took the Fuld phone further with Ericsson’s Bakelite telephone. Ericsson began producing the phone in 1932, and it became popular across Europe. But the design did have problems. The handset was heavy, a problem when holding for an entire conversation. As time went on, repair and maintenance also became a growing concern.
Henry Dreyfuss began working the problem for Bell Telephone Laboratories. Dreyfuss studied the Ericsson and Bauhaus phones. He did field research with telephone repairmen. Dreyfuss studied how people used the phone, held the phone, moved with the phone. Dreyfuss then spent over two thousand hours prototyping, testing, and refining for usability and maintainability. The resulting telephone — Western Electric Model 302 — went into production in 1937. Dreyfuss designed the successor, Model 500, a decade later. The form factor of the 302 and 500 was the dominate phone design well into the 1990s.
Arguably, for fifty years after the 302, the only innovation on the American stock telephone was changing from rotary to push-button dialing with the Model 2500. Ask any hacker who was a kid in the 1970s or 1980s, and they’ll have a story about how they messed with the ubiquitous and cheap 2500 phone. Mine involves playing spy as a kid, “wiretapping” the phone. When Windows 95 and 98 arrived on the scene, the icon for telephony? The iconic Western Electric telephone.
Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone in 2007. He did so with an icon which traced back in time to the Bauhaus school. Our collective understanding of how a phone looks runs from Dreyfuss, to Bjerknes and Heiberg, back to Schadewell and Breuer.
The telephone offers many lessons. Adoption can make or break an innovation. Thinking about the end-user can lead to devices better tuned to their needs, even something as simple as the swoop of plastic that makes a handset comfortably rest on the shoulder. The customers are more than the end-users. Considering how the device will be serviced and maintained over its lifetime leads to sustainable designs. The backwards compatibility, too, provided by telephones is admirable. But when it comes to determining security controls, there’s a more powerful lesson.
The choices we make today will shape how the organization thinks for years to come. Ideas have staying power which outlives any given technology. Choose wisely.
Bauhaus Fuld telephone, Ericsson Bakelite telephone, Western Electric Model 302, Model 2500, Windows 95 telephony icon, iPhone 1 phone icon
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
The device changed our homes. It changed our perspective of time. In a way, it’s a story of miniaturization. They used to take up entire rooms, and suddenly could fit on a desk. It’s also the story of economics. They once were so costly only corporations could own them. With falling prices and shrinking sizes, it wasn’t long before every house had one.
The personal computer revolution? No. The sewing machine.
Our story begins a hundred years into the revolution. For most of those years, Singer dominated with black cast iron machines. Our design hero is Marcello Nizzoli, an Italian who refused to commit to any one discipline. He worked as a draughtsman, designed clothing and accessories, made advertisement posters, started magazines. Nizzoli’s collaboration with Olivetti was so successful, it set the standard for how Olivetti created teams of artists and engineers, paving the way for Ettore Sottsass to create the Valentine typewriter. When Necchi approached Marcello Nizzoli in the 1950s, Nizzoli had deep skills in precision machines and an instinctive understanding of those who stitch and sew.
The resulting Necchi Mirella Sewing Machine arrived in 1956. Nizzoli’s machine was light and beautiful. It features brightly colored enameled aluminum with a finely crafted metal drive mechanism. The Mirella won a number of awards and, today, is on permanent display at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). From contemporary accounts to modern documentaries, the consistent theme about the Necchi Mirella is this: user-friendly, ergonomic, and simplicity.
It was simple. We see this theme frequently when reading about good design. I return to the theme regularly in this series. Make it appealing, and keep it simple.
But simple is hard. That’s the problem.
Agreeing to Protect the Organization
Many CIOs and CISOs bicker like an old couple in a bad marriage. We make points, not progress. I wish we could watch pairs of executives argue it out and find what works. It’s too bad there isn’t an IT equivalent of what John Gottman and Julie Gottman have done with couples in the Love Lab. How can leaders have the tough conversations which lead to agreement?
Peter Coleman, inspired by Gottman, founded Difficult Conversations Lab to explore this question. What Coleman found is shocking: the root of the problem is our desire to simplify.
Our goal gets in the way of reaching our goal.
Coleman’s advice: get complicated. In conversation after conversation studied, complexity provided the space to reach agreement. When researchers framed the issue in black-and-white and primed the people with a similar simplified issue, the conversation became intractable. Often times, it was a short jump from intractable to “destructive spirals of enmity.”
The more we oversimplify requirements before speaking with peers and stakeholders, the less likely we are to come to an agreement. When we oversimplify early on, we fail to get buy-in. The resulting security controls won’t fit what the workforce needs.
Take the example of an identity. Let’s suppose we have people who change roles, going from contractor to employee. Suppose some people have multiple roles, say customer and employee. Start the conversation with the black-and-white control of all access and data being removed when a person is terminated. Watch how fast we get shutdown. An oversimplified approach leaves no middle ground for negotiating how identity gets defined and protected.
A Word of Caution
The lesson from Coleman, Gottman, and Nizzoli: Explore the complexity of the problem with the stakeholder, from their perspective.
Don’t explore the complexity with them from our perspective. If we want to enforce multi-factor authentication, we shouldn’t start by explaining complicated protocols and standards which enable MFA. But we should listen to the complex ways people work. Marcello Nizzoli’s success came from understanding how people sewed, not from explaining machinery to customers.
As we move from exploring the problem towards exploring possible solutions, we move from complexity towards simplicity. When defining the security capability, starting simple with an ugly prototype and iterating from there. When determining security controls, selecting the minimum requirements. Complexity as a starting point mustn’t be prolonged.
A Design Principle
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming,” Donald Knuth once famously said. If you spent effort optimizing things before they are fully developed, you end up creating unnecessary work.
While the Necchi Mirella is praised for simplicity, Marcello Nizzoli arrived at the machine’s design only after spending years absorbing the complexity directly from those working in the clothing industry. Complexity, next empathy, then understanding, and finally simplicity. That’s good design, good programming, and that’s good security work.
Premature simplification is the root of bad security.
The Necchi Mirella Sewing Machine, designed by Marcello Nizzoli, 1956.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
This article comes with a recommended soundtrack: the soothing sounds of the IBM PC. The article also comes with a suggested color: beige.
If you’re thinking of beige and playing the sounds of yester-year, you’re ready to come with me on a trip of nostalgia. It was the late 1990s and several years into my career. I had spent time wiring up IBM computers to Novell NetWare servers. I had run a systems integrator business, assembling computers for the local market. The turn of the century found me at a value-added reseller who specialized in mixed Microsoft and Apple environments, which was tricky back in the day.
That’s when beige turned to color. That’s when the world grew quiet.
The Apple iMac had arrived.
The industrial design work was led by Jony Ive. Ive pushed the Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable (MAYA) principle to its limit. The original Macintosh was an all-in-one form-factor. The iMac was, too, but with a Googie spin. It felt like a Jetson’s computer. But Apple was clear it was an Apple. The 1984 Macintosh said “Hello.” The 1998 iMac? “Hello again.”
As pretty as it was, the iMac was no toy. “The iMac isn’t about candy-coloured computers,” Jony Ive said. “The iMac is about making a computer that is really quiet, that doesn’t need a fan, that wakes up in fifteen seconds, that has the best sound system in a consumer computer, a superfine display. It’s about a complete computer that expresses it on the outside as well.”
The iMac featured:
Sleek, curved, translucent in a time when all computers were square
A departure from legacy tech; such as the floppy disk drive, serial port, and the SCSI port
An embrace of emerging standards; USB, Ethernet, and WiFi
An integral architecture; say when a CRT mount also reduces heat and increases beauty
None of this is an easy leap to make in a design. We tend to benchmark and copy the success of others. For example, a wave of translucent colored plastics crashed over all product categories following the iMac’s success. Walk the vendor arena at the next major conference to see the same thing happen in cyber security. Another challenge is in letting go of the past. Dell still offered computers with floppy disk drives in 2006, nearly a decade after Apple moved on. Many security programs have a similarly hard time letting go of processes and technology, long past when they’ve stopped adding value. It’s hard.
When developing the technology architecture for a new security capability, channel Ives by asking the following questions.
How can we challenge old assumptions about how things are done?
What are we currently doing that we can simply stop doing?
What technology do we have today that we can repurpose into something useful?
How can we make our work attractive to end-users?
I never forgot the first time I saw the iMac, when I heard the iMac. Beautiful. Whisper quiet. The VAR I worked with at the time was an Apple partner. They also sent us a full set of promotional posters. One still hangs in my study today. Think Different. If only it was that simple.
“The thing is, it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.” – Jony Ives
Afterward
Ken Segall is an ad man and the author of Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success. Segall is also the man who put the i in iMac. Steve Jobs originally had a different opinion. “He wanted us to come up with a really good name, he called us in one day and said I have a name that I really like, we’re going to go with it, but if you guys can do better we need you to do better within the next two weeks. So his name was, yes it’s true, MacMan.”
Apple iMac G3 and iBook, image courtesy Wikipedia.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
All maps are wrong. They simplify geography. They obscure detail. All maps are wrong. Some maps, however, are right in the moment.
Take cartograms. These are one of my favorite data visualizations. You’ve likely seen one during an election, abstracting states to show the population. Cartograms relish being wrong about geography. They toss land accuracy to the wind. Instead, they show one key datapoint. Clearly. Convincingly.
Tobler pioneered computer-aided cartograms in the 1960s and provided researchers software into the Internet age. Frustrated with manually drawing maps, he tapped into the computing power of the University of Michigan. The results were the first algorithms for cartograms and one of the first computer movies: A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit Region. Take that, Pixar! Anyone who wrote to Tobler would get a reply with a floppy disk of code and research. As technology evolved, that little floppy would become a compact disc (CD), and finally posted online as free software (2003).
In a remembrance of Tobler, Benjamin Hennig wrote: “He made no distinction between the hierarchies in academia and gave young scholars the same respect and attention as senior academics, acting as a mentor and source of inspiration to many of them.”
Tobler was an open source map hacker.
Cyber security is in desperate need of data visualizations. We have numbers about port scans. We measure the easy things, from the number of emails received to the number of phishing emails reported. These roll up into bar charts, trend lines, and pew-pew maps. But do these visualizations actually communicate the data point we need to take action?
We need maps of what matters, not what’s happened. We need to see how data relates to fact.
“Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” This is Tobler’s first law of geography. It’s applicable to security design. Consider the paths people take to complete work: number of steps, familiarity, and friction of each step. The more steps IT or cyber security places in the way, the longer the path, the greater the friction of distance.
We need visualizations that surface work arounds and work hacks. These security policy violations appear in result to friction. Identify these, and we’ll know where to adjust the design of controls.
All metrics are wrong. They simplify and obscure. A well-designed metric, like a well-designed cartogram, can surface hidden truths about how people navigate the systems we build.
Identify friction with better data visualizations, then reduce the steps and improve the experience. That’s one way to increase compliance and adoption.
Source: Cartogram Visualization for Bivariate Geo-Statistical Data. Sabrina Nusrat, Md. Jawaherul Alam, Carlos Scheidegger, Stephen Kobourov.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
Good design starts with listening to the user. This is the starting point for good security, too. But if we look at the LEGO playsets my kids grew up with, we can see how simply listening to users only gets us so far. In fact, given some of the outrage LEGO faced, it’s clear listening can even get us into trouble.
After nearly going bankrupt, LEGO turned to design thinking to reimagine its toy line. LEGO partnered with PARK to develop a design process. The process begins with exploring, begins with field research, beings with actually talking with the kids.
Imagine LEGO researchers sitting with ten-year old boys. Imagine it is around 2008 or 2010. Imagine the researchers showing the boys posters of minifigures. Minifig super-heroes fighting aliens. Minifig samurai. Minifig ninjas. Minifig action-heroes fighting mechwarriors. The question was, which stories were most exciting to the kids? What sparked play?
Ninjago was the result. A set of ninja minifigs which battle with skeletons on a spinning or flying disks. This would spawn over 250 playsets and a television series that ran for ten years, and is still being produced as of this writing.
Fresh off the smash hit of Ninjago, flush with excitement of finding great ideas by actually talking with kids, LEGO replicated the design process with LEGO Friends. This time imagine LEGO researchers sitting with ten-year old girls. Same process. Different results. Girls expressed different play and different preferences. One insight I read, for example, was the minifigs needed fashionable shoes.
When LEGO Friends hit in 2012, it faced almost immediate public backlash. Many felt it reinforced stereotypes with pink bricks and scenes like shopping and childcare. Others felt it reinforced gender segregation, as the minifigs (redesigned for shoes) in the LEGO Friends set weren’t compatible with other minifigs and standard sets.
Seven-year old Charlotte Benjamin wrote a letter that captured the frustration. “Today I went to a store and saw LEGOS in two sections, the pink and the blue. All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach and shop, and they had no jobs but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks.”
LEGO had learned how to listen carefully to the kids. The problem was they hadn’t listened to the opinions of the parents, educators, and other stakeholders. Both young boys and young girls gave great feedback, feedback which resulted in great toys. Like Ninjago, LEGO Friends currently has over 250 sets, with television and other media. But the tight lens on the end user during exploration meant LEGO didn’t look beyond the playset. By not considering the wider context in which play happens, they fumbled the release.
This is an easy mistake for cyber security architects and designers to make.
We embrace the idea of empathy as the heartbeat of the design process. Flush with early successes, we listen closely and carefully to one segment of our workforce. Let’s suppose it is the finance team. Let’s further suppose we collaborate to reduce some security controls here, tighten others there, reducing friction for the team. Success! Except, six months later when the auditors come in, we realize our changes resulted in audit evidence no longer being collected, leading to a failed audit.
We addressed the needs of our target audience without considering the wider system in which they played. Hypothetically speaking, of course. Right. Back to LEGO.
“We listen very carefully to the opinions and input that people share,” LEGO wrote in the press release in response to the LEGO Friends uproar. “We will continue to do so as we develop the LEGO brand to deliver the best experiences with the strongest appeal, and we will review our communications to ensure that we represent LEGO play for all children.” With sets like the Research Institute (women chemist, paleontologist, astronomer) and with the LEGO movies, we can see LEGO’s design thinking process improves by widening the lens for field research.
Listening to users is the start, not the end.
When designing cyber security capabilities, listen carefully and consider all of the stakeholders. When our work helps people swim with sharks, we better remember the shark.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
