In response to my last post, Jonathan Baldwin asked the following question:
The idea of designers who are interested in the ideas rather than the finished artefact raises interesting pedagogical issues. How are they encouraged and rewarded in current educational environments?
His own thoughts can be seen in the comments page and ask some probing questions of the way that design is currently taught and communicated. My own answer to this question is central to my current MPhil research and indeed current day job. Thus I’ve reposted and rephrased some of what I wrote by way of response. Having had my annual review this week it fits in quite nicely with an update on some of my latest thinking. Any feedback, correction or diversions much appreciated!
As a designer who evolved to be a ‘design thinker’ as much as a ‘design doer’ largely as a result of my parallel life as a ski racer and professional (yes honestly, professional) ski instructor, the issue Jonathan highlights is one of big personal interest to me.
The problem occurs I think in that education seems rather quick to push or support people people into either ‘doer’ or ‘thinker’ camp. Doers, learn CAD and workshop skills, manufacturing processes and off they go resigning themselves to never seeing an end user again. I jest, but purely to make my point!
Holistic thinkers, in my experience undernourished in many ‘product’ or ‘graphic’ courses procrastinate in the face of unfulfilling practical assignments or labour and over intellectualise their more fulfilling graphic and research/ethonographic oriented projects.
Either way both hop from lily pad to lily pad of academic requirements without necessarily reflecting on why or whether their current task is serving some wider (social or personal) goal.
Frog Flickr-CC by Rainforest_Harley
Often sold the idea that coming to university will guarantee them employment (and worse) that they deserve such employment by default and based on their perceived rather than actual skills and skillsets, the education system generally doesn’t seem to be good at opening us up to genuine self reflection.
That is self-reflection that occurs as a result of thinking you are good enough to win a competition and then finding out that actually you are not. Education as I see it should expose students to these real and yes sometimes brutal challenges, guiding them not towards ‘explicit solutions’ but rather the tools and mindset to reflect upon and redesign their approach. It is certainly something that any junior designer will experience as soon as they start working in the real world, or particularly at present, trying to find employment in the real world. For more on the ‘dark side of design’ see this post.
The parallel here, is the professional athlete (or serious amateur) for whom life is one big systematic and seriously demanding long term process. A process punctuated by a series of competitions (or perhaps design briefs) in which they have the chance to evaluate their performance against a set of defined rules or criteria. If they are successful there might be some prize money, a car or a free trip to Madeira. If they are not they instead go away with valuable feedback on their performance.
Educators and Designers should (from my perspective and as I am currently outlining in my my masters studies) be the coaches in this analogy. Helping and supporting the learners and users to reflect and re-evaluate their behaviour against long term behavioural, ecological, social and basic needs fulfilment. Providing them with proven tools and methods and analysing and experimenting with new innovative methods where appropriate to incrementally push the boundaries.
If I wanted to employ someone, I wouldn’t want to see their portfolio so much as I would want to see their ‘training plan’ and performance objectives for the duration of their employment (or study) with me. At present this seems to be something that only happens at a post-graduate or in research based education in this and to my knowledge any other country.
Such a strategic, performance oriented view would in my opinion also help overcome the whole Black Swan / ego / genius design problem of assuming that an individual’s past success guarantees future performance. Instead, allowing individuals to stagger their satisfaction and intrinsic reward for their pursuits in a much more incremental and balanced manner.
This as I interpret it in my own recent contribution to the ‘Design Thinking debate is framing Design from a situated-cognition perspective. Again, saying that the activity of Design is inherently bound to it’s context of activity and therefore it is impossible to completely rely on empirical definitions of what design is or how to practice it. This is a controversial statement and one that can undoubtedly take a bit of time to come to terms with. I’d like to briefly use this post to elaborate how this idea has evolved in my mind and through my recent research into skill acquisition – as such it can be considered the full fat version of my previous post. It contains about 700 words and will therefore take about four minutes to read.
Concrete courtesy of Katorisi and Wikimedia Commons
‘Design Thinking’ of the sort discussed in the past months online debate and that first brought to our collective attention by IDEO represents “a community of practice” that is to say a socially mediated or mutually agreed definition of what design thinking is and how design thinkers should practice it. IDEO has very successfully wielded old media and more recently new media savvy to leverage it’s definition upon the world, thus increasing the awareness or ‘social definition’ or it’s Design Thinking ‘community of practice’. IDEO has done this so successfully in fact that like so many successful communities of practice the term ‘Design Thinking’ has become hugely widespread in its usage and definition, with the fringes of the community taking this definition and it’s processes and bending and moulding them to suit there own purposes and requirements. ‘Design Thinking’ has thus developed ‘social capital’ in terms of it’s ability to describe the tacit knowledge and processes of designers. A term that many people within the design and now business community understand and possess their own definition of.
What is clear however, is that the broader that ‘community of practice’ has become so to has the definition of ‘Design Thinking’. As I argued in my previous post it is now such a broad term that it is being rejected by aspects of the community it is supposed to represent. Indeed, judging by the comments to Collopy’s article it is being rejected by a large proportion of the design community, particularly those at fringes of the established design community in the evolving service design industry who are seeking at present to develop their own ‘community of practice’ and distinguish it from what has gone before.
The term ‘design thinking’ is not concrete. It therefore only exists as a social construct and it’s application is entirely dependent upon, influenced by and subject to its context.
This week I want to look at how then to develop ‘social capital’? Or more specifically how to teach or engage others with the essence or definition of what it is that you do as a service designer? How you become an Expert Design Thinker or Service Designer without an agreed definition of what that actually entails? More importantly, even if you or the institution that educates or employs you possesses such a definition, how do you communicate this to the rest of the world in terms that are meaningful and valuable to them? How do you interact with their “communities of practice”?
This is what might be referred to as establishing Legitimate Peripheral Participation, a process of individuals in this case entering the ‘design thinkers’ or ‘service design’ community and developing their skill gradually over time so as to become experts in the domain. In the terms of my recent research in Skill Acquisition and Public Engagement, this can be described as the transition from abstract observer to concrete experience. This process is perhaps better known as experiential learning.
I’m aware of a number of initiatives or individuals working on projects that are simultaneously attempting to develop ways of guiding people through this process towards concrete experience and education of ‘service design’ or design in general, I highlighted Participle’s Loops Initiative and Small Fish already. In the next few posts I plan to elaborate my own thoughts on how using the whole body and mind is key to developing ‘concrete experiences’ and key to successful engagement.
For this title I have to credit Fred Collopy who’s excellent article this serves as a response to or perhaps continuation of.
For those who haven’t been following, there has been quite a bit of discussion in the blogosphere recently about the term ‘design thinking’ and it’s relationship with systems thinking.
[Just as] MIT [and] Harvard embrace Design Thinking…designers reject it. Wow. Is Design now too big for designers to handle? Do designers ” get” DT?
From the large number of service designers following this discussion and contributing to it, to name but a few Arne van Oosterom, Lucy Kimbell, Lauren Currie, Jonathan Baldwin my award for the best comment has to go to Lucy Kimbell:
“the problem with the phrase Design Thinking is the word design and the word thinking.”
More Intellectual Gymnastics courtesy of Zaphgod on Flickr
I’m opening the following idea up for discussion, but I think what we are seeing as design’s Cartesian anxiety develops is a transition away from institutionalised definitions of design or it’s processes. A shift that exacerbates or only continues the long documented product-to-service shift that occured prior to the economic melt down. I’m willing to be wrong about this however and I certainly welcome comments or claims to the contrary.
Personally, I’m fascinated that in the same week as the Twittersphere alleged that IDEO (the original proponent of ‘design thinking’) had laid off half of it’s London office and open sourced it’s toolkits, we are seeing the cracks emerge or as Bruce ventures above, the outright rejection of institutionalised design practices. Maybe I’m getting carried away but it seems that even Harvard’s ever provocative Usman Haque was getting in on the act this week – denouncing the 20th century corporate mentality of ‘straight line thinking’.
To take Collopy’s argument a stage further, design is a process inseparable from action. In being inseparable from action, design as an activity becomes heavily influenced or equally inseparable from it’s environment or context of application. This is something that co-design activities and many service and participatory approaches to design appear to have recognised or at least responded to for some time.
However, if true this places us in the realm of design becoming an activity dependent on situated cognition a point I made indirectly in a previous post here and greater elaborated over the last month here and here. Designers becoming coaches or facilitators in design practice within a smaller, more limited and specialised context, as discussed here.
By further leaps and bound of intellectual gymnastics, and perhaps actual gymnastics if you take the whole mind-body thing too seriously, it’s not illogical to propose that the future of design education might in Haque’s ‘Capitalism 2.0 landscape’ come to rely on a more cognitive-apprenticeship approach of designer’s learning and practicing their craft just as traditional apprenticeships taught woodwork and mechanics.
Indeed in a week where there have been well articulated discussions about the large number of ‘surplus’ design graduates it is great to see Participle’s Loops Initiative and the fantastic Small Fish initiative (both via Redjotter). Design thinking might have died this week but as these two endeavours prove design is very much alive and designers can handle it very well thanks!
Our ATTENTION to and RELEVANCE of a message, determine people’s perceptions of its VALUE whilst an individual’s CONFIDENCE will determine their expectancy for success and their perceptions of CONTROL and SATISFACTION.
Whilst the emotionally charged sharing of news and updates is critical for raising AWARENESS or generating ATTENTION amongst potential supporters, in order to induce motivated behaviour parallel strategies need to be introduced to support both those sending the messages and guiding the individuals responses towards a specific short or long term goal. In it’s simplest manifestation this could include feedback on the number of times a particular piece of news has been linked to / read / retweeted, thus through feedback, motivating users that their voice is being heard.
Indeed, this has had a more literal and physical manifestation in the recent Iranian situation as this haunting and beautiful video demonstrates:
Such feedback is hugely valuable in combatting feelings of frustration or at their most extreme a feeling of learned helplessness – which is to say the sentiment that “nothing I do is ever going to make a difference.” But in this situation this is not didactic feedback from ‘a system’ to the user. The system in question here both online and offline are ‘social’ and enable users themselves to feedback to, inform and support each other. As Arne Oosterom elegantly put it a week or so back:
@designthinkers: “service designers should provide people with tools to self-organize around a common interest.”
How far can we as designers design in features that combat learned helplessness? As Nick Marsh highlighted yesterday in reference to this article;
@choosenick: ”People don’t think like the state: “I don’t have ‘needs’, I have something to give.”
Again there are a number of strategies for designers addressing ‘learned helplessness’, something that might also be referred to as demotivated behaviour. How many of these can be wrapped up by changing your focus to design dialectic as opposed to didactic systems.
Amateurs versus Professionals? Something I considered here the other day.
Convene versus Control?
Shirky presents the changing media landscape in terms of the sliding scales above. How can we make best use of the media tools that we all have available?
The process behind this blog has always aimed to be one big post a week that framed a particular aspect of my research, followed by a series of smaller supporting or conflicting posts throughout the week. These smaller posts intending to encourage contribution and consensus by the end of the week and are intended to focus on real world or anecdotal application of that week’s research question. Thus far I’ve shared thoughts and observations from my research into Intrinsically Motivating Design and supported Skill Acquisition in the design of products and services. I’ve also volunteered some of the thinking from my experiences in designing for public engagement.
Ever been left frustrated by a system, product or service that didn't work the way you wanted it to? Photo from: Maryam Kh
This week I’m going to try and do it in more of an active problem solving sort of way, responding to the design brief of designing for democratic regime change. In other words, as a designer of systems, products and services what can I contribute from my research to enable and empower individuals striving to undermine an autocratic regime. Contentious – yes. Interesting – yes. Educational – yes.
Hopefully, if I do a good enough job, this will be a nice theoretical study into motivational design and to positively influencing human behaviour. Indeed, this exercise might provide an insight into understanding contrary behaviour, which is to say systems, products and services that aren’t designed to motivate or empower their users or might be actively implemented to demotivate and dis-empower them. My hope is that this exercise will provide a valuable and unique insight into better designing dynamic systems and services to better support the intentions and will of the majority of it’s users. I hope you will see this as something worth contributing to or at least broadcasting further afield, it is certainly not intended to be prescriptive and as far as it is published here is purely a theoretical discussion, although clearly influenced by powerful recent world events.
Following on from recent posts on the nature of design thinking I want to clarify two things. I am not opposed to design thinking or even thinking about design as this blog demonstrates! Simply, my thoughts as expressed here were that if you want people to better understand design thinking, just get on with it an involve them in it or at the very least provide them with a concrete example rather than an abstract diagram of the process you are trying to sell them. This could perhaps be considered a Constructivist viewpoint as opposed to a Cognitivist world view.
Scenario modelling can also be considered a constructivist tool. As a designer you probably use scenario modelling to predict, impose or evaluate user behaviour by ‘constructing’ that world in some manner. This might be virtually or in the form of organised user testing and evaluation. Do you use scenario modelling to anticipate or communicate your own role within the design process?
Rules by Wm Yas on Flickr
The second issue I want to explore and it relates to this earlier post as well. Is the question of whether design is a skill or rule based process?
Systems and therefore ‘systems theory’ in it’s purest form requires human operators whether designer or user to follow a defined path or at least operate within a set of constraints. I interpret the ‘design thinking’ as practiced and encouraged by IDEO, with their method cards etc. as ‘rule based’ at least in the deductive phase (understanding the context) of the design process.
Do you follow a rule based or heuristic approach as part of your efforts to understand or predict the environment and users you are designing for? Does it work?
Other designers of course may rely simply on their own subjective or ‘skill based’ judgements about the environment or context as opposed to following a rule or heuristic approach to design. This is perhaps symptomatic of the ‘ego-design’ process that Molenbrook refers to here, in describing the differing approaches many designers have to ergonomics data.
Most importantly, which of these ways of conceptualising the design process are easier to engage clients, users and yourselves as designers with?
His point that “any self-respecting profession is obsessed with trying to define itself” is interesting. Do you agree or do you support the alternate idea of some service designers that in creative professions its much better to leave the definition flexible as it encourages innovation?
What is the impact on business of refusing to define the aims and purposes of your profession?
Choosenick and Jeff have been mulling over the respective merits of trying to define the professional discipline of service design. This resonates with me as it is an issue at the heart of a number of projects I have worked on in the recent past, not least my current work on the Ergonomics – Real Design Exhibition that will be opening at The Design Museum in November. How do you define what lies at the heart of what it is you do? Or in marketing speak – how do you define your unique selling point? Is variety your speciality or do you possess a variety of specialisms?
Like Service Designers many Ergonomists work on both a macro (environmental) level as well as at a more focused and specific (product, interface and touchpoint) level. Both work across a broad range of industries and professions with a similarly broad range of users, from novice to expert. Indeed, neither discipline will perhaps thank me for pointing this out – but the these two ‘professions’ are incredibly similar. Not least in their (in)ability to define succinctly where their expertise actually lies. In the words of an experienced Ergonomist Salas (2008).
“Diversity is our strength; our asset . . . and our weakness and liability as well… Our field belongs to many and at the same time to none. We are so broad that at times we cannot find ‘our soul.’”
Indeed, in the course of the fieldwork carried out as part of Ergonomics – Real Design project we asked visitors to The Design Museum what Ergonomics meant to them. The resounding feedback was that most considered it ‘something to do with chairs’. Interestingly, Ergonomists seem to similarly struggle to define the scope of what it is that they do, with none that we interviewed in another batch of fieldwork seemingly able to come up with a consistent definition of where the focus of their discipline lies exactly – They were unanimous however, in agreeing that it was a lot broader than simply thinking about seating configurations.
Now none of this is an attempt to undermine any of the excellent work done by many thus far to define either of the disciplines of Service Design or Ergonomics, indeed I am grateful to all who have (particularly Nick) for stimulating this discussion.
Nor am I arguing exclusively for either heterogenuity or homogeneity in terms of how you foster growth of your profession. This fascinating if not slightly obscure summary does a good job of listing some of the respective merits of each approach in terms of how they relate to developing world micro-credit schemes and community building.
What this list alludes to and Nick’s post also suggests is that if you want to foster creativity and also strong leadership (and thus a clear division between market leaders and the rest of the competition) - hetrogenuity is perhaps a better game to play. If however, you want to foster a greater sense of identity and community perhaps a more homogenous strategy is preferable.
Are you an ergonomist or service designer or simply someone who struggles to explain to people what exactly it is you do? Does your business struggle to put a value on the full range of services and expertise you can offer your clients? What do you think is the best approach for motivating your workforce and engaging meaningfully with your customers?
Is it better to increase the likelihood of people becoming aware of your work by keeping the definition broad (see this) or do you think it’s better to be more specific and goal centred in order to help make your subject relevant to other people (like this)?
Building on my earlier posts about motivational design: Another well documented example are the signs that give you feedback on your current speed, usually in residential areas if you are exceeding the speed limit.
The difference with this example is that above the feedback on your performance is another sign indicating the desired performance – in this case the maximum legal speed limit. These two signs are therefore highlighting both awareness of the speed limit and it’s relevance to your current behaviour. This not only increases the social impact as everyone can see by what extent you are exceeding the speed limit, but also gives you a goal for the extent by which you have to modify your behaviour.
The added beauty of this example is that of course if you’re behaving like a good law abiding citizen then the lower speed indicating sign is not triggered (it only comes on if you are exceeding the speed limit). Thus, if feedback regarding your current speed is not relevant because you are already within the legal limit, the sign doesn’t trouble you with the extra information (or distraction).
Of course some signs in different parts of the world give you feedback on your speed regardless of whether or not it exceeds the speed limit, which has the effect of another social nudge, but this time a positive one as people can observe that you are within safe limits and therefore a good driver.
What do you think is the best strategy – should the sign only come on if the information it is communicating is relevant or is it better that you receive both positive and negative feedback on your driving performance?
Put another way, in the design of products and services should awareness always be accompanied by information that makes it relevant (as in this example) or is it enough sometimes to simply generate awareness of various environmental or behavioural characteristics without necessarily being explicit about why? (Such as awareness of your weight or awareness of the ambient noise level).
![More Intellectual Gymnastics [Courtesy of Zaphgod on Flickr]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3091/2563351997_9b1f91701a.jpg "More Intellectual Gymnastics Courtesy of Zaphgod on Flickr")
