Category: Business Design

An AIGA/Apple Store event…

As designers, we have an extraordinary capacity to help any organization rethink and reinvent itself from within. Yet many of us unwittingly limit ourselves — by assuming that our value is limited to adding design at the end of strategic thinking, as a byproduct, or by focusing too much on artifacts, rather than the experience we want to create. In their presentation, three leaders from Stone Yamashita Partners will challenge us to change the conversation about design. They will argue that we can add extraordinary value to our businesses and our lives if we rethink our attitude to our craft, and start to consider it much more holistically. Drawing on case studies from companies such as HP, Nike, Gap, and eBay, they will argue that design can be central to the conversation in any business, and a powerful force for change.

Wednesday, July 20, 6:00 pm at the Apple Store, One Stockton Street, San Francisco. More info.

Shaggy at Core77 reports that the Design Council’s Hilary Cottam has won the Design Museum’s (UK) 2005 Designer of the Year award and the resulting controversy around her selection. It illustrates the confusion and emotion possible when designers of the intangible mix it up with the traditional sort.

The Observer reports two points. One is that Cottam didn’t work alone. But what designer does these days?

The other point is that she’s not a designer. This assertion can get us into a long semantic debate, but the design community has persistently pushed for larger and more inclusive defintions of design. Now that someone who embraces that larger definition and applies design thinking to intangible problems wins a traditional design award, we’re surprised.

I needed to ask, why was she actually nominated? The Design Museum says,

Hilary Cottam has been nominated for the Designer of the Year prize for her achievements in championing a more inspiring and efficient approach to public sector design by demonstrating how design can be used as a tool to “tackle some of the more intractable social problems of our day”.

and the chair of the award committee says of the award decision…

‘Hilary Cottam is not a designer in the traditional sense, but she is a wonderfully worthy winner of Designer of the Year for the imaginative and innovative way she uses design as a strategic tool to modernise schools, prisons and other critically important areas of our lives.’

I applaud the Design Museum for taking such a progressive stance. It’s unfortunate they may make a few enemies along the way, but hopefully the award will act to widen our understanding of how design thinking helps solve problems and not just make things.

The architectural planning for Ground Zero in New York serves as a good example of where design thinking could have helped. Paul Goldberger’s recent New Yorker article, “A New Beginning: Should Ground Zero be Used for Housing?” (unfortunately not online) describes the emotional situation four years ago when it failed to occur to anyone that the new World Trade Center plan should focus on housing, not office space. In retrospect, it seems obvious. Manhattan needs more residential space, has an office surplus, and the trend in lower Manhattan is toward residential offerings.

An approach that explicitly goes looking for more and different options might have uncovered the obvious sooner. But it requires diligence to honestly question the available options in the midst of emotional rhetoric. Design thinking is, as the name implies, a particular way of thinking, and so not easy to invoke against the tide of conventional judgment thinking. I think some of the advantages we attribute to design thinking will actually come from the courage and cleverness to evoke design thinking at all.

I’m reading Skunk Works, a book about the famous Lockheed Advanced Development Project that has an amazing record of innovation. It reveals the source of the F-117’s stealth technology not as an American invention, but as an idea that was passed from scientist to scientist for a century. The idea centers on calculations describing how a given geometric configuration will reflect electromagnetic radiation (e.g. make a plane invisible to radar). Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell first derived the set of formulas, a German electromagnetics expert Arnold Johnnes Sommerfeld refined them, and the Russian radio scientist Pyotr Ufimtsev further developed them. They lay hidden by obscurity, in an untranslated Moscow scientific journal for ten years. Eventually the US Air Force translated it and Lockheed radar specialist Denys Overholser read Ufimtsev’s dense 40-page paper out of pure geek interest, finding the key to stealth technology near the end. It’s ironic that an American used this information, as it was 1975, during the cold war.

There’s a lesson here we all know already, about connecting research and development, about helping academia and industry cooperate in ways that profit both parties. It happens now, but there’s still plenty of universities and companies that could benefit from a relationship.

I recently had a good conversation with Sara Beckman of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Comparing what MBA students do in relation to designers, it’s hard to identify what skills they’re missing — other than hard skills like illustration — that designers have. What business students learn in courses like product development is surprisingly similar to product development that designers learn. Sara’s students even do ethnographic studies and build personas.

And in my experience, it’s easier for business people to make the leap into business design activities than designers. Maybe it’s because business is a broader base of training, or because it doesn’t focus on the design of artifacts.

But, business people sometimes have deficiencies in two areas: empathy and abductive thinking. Some designers also lack empathy, unfortunately. But designers can’t get far without the ability to create new ideas. I think designers (and other creative people) are good at generating ideas because they’re allowed to be silly (not because they have a monopoly on the right side of the brain). Silliness leads to new ideas, whether the goal is silly ideas or just new ideas. It’s hard for business people to be simultaneously silly and fiscally responsible; we traditionally view these qualities in opposition. This is a fundamental challenge in business design: how to help clients perceive the potential benefits when they’re used to looking for business rigor or creativity, not both together?

In design language, silliness is often termed play. In Managing as Designing Boland and Collopy describe play:

An open, liquid design process involves playing with ideas, alternatives, and elements of the design. The design emerges through playful interaction with materials, models, and alternatives being considered. Playing with meanings, implications, and purposes of a design project can lead to emergence of unexpected insights or discoveries that can be opportunistically included in the project.

Augusto Grillo writes,

It is play that sparks creativity, creating contexts in which freedom, gratuitousness and passion produce their fecundating action.

Play fascinates and absorbs to the point of making us infinitely repeat our attempts to improve our performance, to create new paths, new ways to arrive, in our case, to the ‘right’ product, the most suitable solutions.

It is in this sense that play can enrich the design process, and that the concept of playfulness in design may justify more exhaustive study in this research area.

We may conclude that ‘play’, so necessary in that it precedes and gives rise to the creative act, like beauty, will save the world.

When Grillo says play compels us to “infinitely repeat our attempts to improve our performance” I’m reminded of the instructional power of play.

I’m hesitant to offer a definition of design thinking because there’s probably no one definition everyone could agree on, as with design and its many sub-genres. But after hearing more and more people having trouble referencing it I figured a half-baked blog post couldn’t hurt. I’m reminded of how Lao Tzu said “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao” yet still managed to write a book about it.

Design thinking is…

• Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
• Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
• Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk
• Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
• Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
• Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions

I’m sure one could play with the language and categorization to find more or less characteristics, but I’m happy with just those six.

Chris Conley’s A New Kind of Professional declares

There is a need for professionals skilled in navigating innovative work

No specific professional discipline owns this space

There is a lack of professionals who do this well

In my mind I see a castle surrounded by a moat. On each side are designers, engineers and business people. Those willing to leave the comfort of their present situation and explore the castle could leap over the moat, but only if they leave their baggage behind. Doing so means living with others that think and work very differently, and working together to find common ways of working. That’s the place the new kind of professional is creating.

Bruce Nussbaum, editorial page editor for BusinessWeek, continues his crusade to spread the good word of design thinking to the business community. In The Empathy Economy he quotes GE Healthcare Technologies (GE ) CEO Joseph M. Hogan as saying,

Today, when we think about designing, say, a new MRI system, we don’t just think about designing the product, we think about designing the whole radiology suite. Design in the next 10 years will move beyond the product. It will move beyond workflow. Hospitals in the future…will have different ways of interacting with the patient. We have to think about setting the course for how design can affect the whole health-care experience.

And with Rachel Tiplady he reports Insead has joined with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., to offer a joint program that teaches the role of creativity in business decisions.

Bill Breen’s new article on business design in Fast Company does a good job at bringing the topic down to a more concrete level than other articles to date.

The below quote resonated with me emotionally, as I encountered this situation exactly during a seminar I taught last week:

The trouble is, when confronted with a mystery, most linear business types resort to what they know best: They crunch the numbers, analyze, and ultimately redefine the problem “so it isn’t a mystery anymore; it’s something they’ve done 12 times before,” Martin says. Most don’t avail themselves of the designer’s tools — they don’t think like designers — and so they are ill-prepared for an economy where the winners are determined by design.

The link is courtesy Diego Rodriguez, whose blog entry has an interesting discussion of where the “good enough” in design thinking should be applied.

Everyone I’ve come across thus far who has written about design thinking cites Herbert Simon’s book The Sciences of the Artificial. Simon was a great thinker in economics (Nobel Prize), computer science and cognitive science. For considering the construct of design at the cognitive level, this book is part of the canon. In it he identified one aspect as what we now call abductive thinking — the mental creation of something new — as opposed to inductive or deductive thinking. A favorite quote:

“Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting
are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent —
not with how things are but with how they might be —
in short, with design.”