As I’ve reported here before I’m in the middle of an MPhil researching the role of motivation in design and how designers can identify and design to encourage motivated behaviour of a suitable nature. I use the term ‘designer’ loosely as I’m not for one minute proposing that Motivation is something that can be prescribed or even should be. At this stage I am in the process of articulating and visualising from my research to date, what motivation looks like or how people might recognise motivation. Some of you may have seen the Motivational Personas I put up a week or so back – thank you so much to all who commented and contributed their thoughts ideas and experience – I’m very grateful! I’m continuing to develop those.
Motivational Framework v0.1 cc Fergus Bisset (click for larger version)
In parallel to those personas, I’m also keen to develop a “Conceptual Framework of Motivation” and begin to elaborate the different levels on which motivation might be observed in oneself or in others. As most behavioural psychologists would doubtless testify, recognising one’s behaviour is the first step to modifying it.
There appears to be a bit of divide in the behavioural design community as to whether people need to recognise either their existing or desired behaviour in order to change it. Some designers and academics arguing that it may be more effective to change behaviour through design without the user having to be aware of it. I had an animated conversation about this over a beer with Frankie Roberto and Dan Lockton. Like I say this is contentious area, but I’m at this stage putting myself fairly firmly in the camp that believe that if behavioural change is to be sustainable, users have to be aware and undertake deliberate and conscious modification of it. Whilst there are doubtless good arguments for the designer as behavioural ‘god’, and I’m more than happy to hear them and discuss them if you wish to share. I find those arguments somewhat belittling of the people that they aim to ‘help’, the typical line in such circumstances being: “that users aren’t always capable of recognising or understanding their ‘needs’ or ‘capabilities’ “. There was a nice quote via Cassie Robinson on this today:
“Accept me as I am & you’ll make me worse. Treat me as what I’m capable of becoming & you’ll help me to become her”
That is not to say that designer’s should shirk all the responsibility onto the user, indeed with reference to the above it perhaps becomes the designer’s responsibility to help that self-reflective process and aid the user in realising their capabilities. The motivational state should be a shared and negotiated agreement between designer, artefact and user, not a diktat by any of those parties. This also means that the designer has an active role and isn’t just subservient to user demands or “lack of vision or creativity“.
Irrespective of this argument and whether user, designer, user-designer or any other stakeholder in the process you will still need to be able to identify, model and measure motivation or any other form of human behaviour for that matter, if you want to change it. I see my motivational personas as aiding identification, whereas I see the attached model, what I’m calling a Motivational Framework as the next step towards being able to model or synthesise motivated behaviour within the wider context of the product or service lifecycle. This understanding is perhaps fundamental to the process of increasing motivational awareness, capability and thereafter designing to empower users in their motivational capabilities.
I would really welcome any feedback you might have on this, particularly in relation to how this might fit into or overlap with your existing creative practice or world view – and I would especially like to hear from you if it seems incompatible with your own views or established methodology.
Totally love this trip down memory lane from Frankie Roberto. Brings back big memories from my childhood. Anecdotally, I know many folks of my Industrial Design course attributed their interest in design to their early days playing with Lego. It is obviously a well used Experience Prototyping tool as well, as Sarah’s blog header indicates!
Anyway, I thought I’d start to address this lack of understanding about the Lego Universe with a look at some of the companies and organisations that serve the Lego urban-dwelling minifigs. These mostly occur in the sets that have been variously title ‘Lego Town’, ‘Lego City’, and ‘Lego World City’ (I’m not sure whether this means there are multiple urban areas, or just one ever-growing one).”
Lego Train Logos (courtesy Frankie Roberto)
It’s a great read – thanks Frankie. It’s also got me thinking how important, these imagination driven ‘universes’ are. Do a whole generation of designer’s owe Lego, Playmobil and Mechano a big debt? What will the effect on design be of the latest generation of networked entertainment and computer games – will it encourage design collaboration and global interaction?
Will the increasingly vivid toys and computer games make the next generation of designers more or less imaginative?
How could toys be designed or redesigned to encourage and inspire the next generation of designers?
“Philosophy is augmented by design, design is augmented by philosophy”
What this means can perhaps be better understood by Renato’s note that,
“Philosophy is concerned with meaning…to be descriptive is not enough…you have to be concerned with values”
Thus, by this definition design without a clearly defined philosophy has no value, philosophy without a physical or tangible outcome, in other words – a design, is meaningless.
I hope you are still with me, but to me this seems to neatly summarise the wider discussions and presentations that took place not only at the whole Kuopio conference but also at Service Design Thinks a week past Thursday in London. The need to be able to express your ‘design thinking’ , to quote Renato again, in terms of “a truth in which users can all participate”. The discussion of truth takes us to the issue of how users percieve whether or not a product or service is ‘authentic’ or not.
The issue of ‘Authenticity’ has been widely discussed in relation to design, largely off the back of the book of the same name and the Experience Economy books by Gilmore and Pine.
But why is this valuable to designers and why did such discussions, long at the heart of aesthetics and philosophy, find their way to a service design conference in Finland? Largely, I believe because this summarises the core benefits of Service Design and it’s contribution to value generation. It was an inspired decision to invite Renato as a philospher and aesthetician to a conference on the design of ‘intangible’ services. For as it was concurred at Service Design Thinks and as I have learned from my own experience this year attempting to market the profession of Ergonomics. A clearly defined philosophy is central to human ability to engage with your product, service or professional discipline.
Renato proceeded to reference the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader, in saying that like screenplay writers, service designers should be concerned in creating ‘authentic stories and experiences’ by breaking down their creative proposition into:
A Theme or Philosophy (analogous to the ‘Design Intent’ or ‘Service Propostion’)
A Metaphor (analogous to the Service Touchpoints, or the physical manifestation of that proposition)
A Story (the link between the Service Touchpoints. For as Jeff Howard, Nico Morelli and Kalle Buschmann have helped point out recently, service occurs between, not in it’s touchpoints).
I think this and Renato’s thoughts more generally, provide a hugely valuable means of breaking down ‘the aesthetic’ of a design proposition and understanding how we as users identify the authenticity of an experience or service. If we perceive any inconsistency in how a service appears, or if we perceive an inconsistency between the touchpoints of a service and the service itself, we render the service design inauthentic and we lose faith in it. This impacts on our ability as users to engage with the service and therefore impacts on the value it generates both for it’s designers and/or for the bottom line of company who provide it.
I think this also demonstrates, on a theoretical level anyway, the benefits of service design over conventional ‘style led design’ or ‘industrial design’. Perhaps such more established forms of design have a philosphy and perhaps even succeed in representing that philosophy or design intent, but what they lack is the story or narrative that will engage users with them.
Such narratives and philosphies are of course imperative in engaging users in co-creation and collaborative design or improvement of products and services.
For the more pragmatic amongst us, this might all seem redundant intellectual gymnastics. However, I personally find Renato’s thoughts very valuable as a tool for identifying product or service propositions that seem inconsistent with their design philosophy or surroundings. It is in such examples that many opportunities for Service Design lie as we as an emerging disicipline proceed to define our own professional and personal associations and philosophies.
What do you think, is there a role for philosophers and philosophy in Design?
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.
I’ve been mulling over Robert Fabricant’s ‘Ethnographic Defense’ post from the beginning of the week. Mulling because when I first read it I got quite worked up and decided to leave it until I’d calmed down a bit. I’ve just now (via @fredcollopy) seen another eerly similar article by Fabricant on Core77 and felt I had to respond on behalf all designers who believe in empowering rather than diminishing their users:
“users are not very self-aware. Shouldn’t designers be?”
The article serves as a discussion of how some of the currently employed or mooted Persuasive Design techniques might be considered by users to be “contrived or manipulating”. If I’m being honest, there’s not much more contrived or manipulative than his closing statement in the article, I’ll repeat it again:
“users are not very self-aware. Shouldn’t designers be?”
Hardly a statement likely to breed trust confidence or satisfaction in the design profession by their clients and consumers. Coming a few day’s after I’d read this article by Kicker’s Jen Bove summarising this presentation which also addressed the issue of ‘user needs’. I’ve been struck by the conflicting views of designers in their assessment of user needs and the best ways to repond to them.
There appear to be those designers who view their users as helpless ‘pinballs‘ (thanks Dan!) or those who have belief and trust in their users and wait for it…might even be prepared to involve and empower them in the design process. To clarify it seems Fabricant is positioning himself as only willing to engage with users if as a design professional he maintains a superiority or controlling influence. Whilst Bove in her talk seems more content by empowering her users through co-design and collaboration and admits rightly that as a designer she “has more questions than answers”.
I discussed some of these same ideas in my last post here about user’s expectancy for success – as my current research into designing motivationally engaging experiences demonstrates – the first step to engaging with your users is by making them awareof whatever new technology you want them to use. Thus, in a Motivational Design approach encouraging Awareness is the first responsibility of a designer. Making this new pattern of behaviour or technology relevantinvolves understanding not what user’s need, but rather how they learn and adapt to new situations and circumstances – their skill acquisition process. As a designer it is fundamental that you believe that your users are capable of and you empower them for behavioural change otherwise you, the designer and facilitator of their new behaviour or experience, are damned from the start by damning them.
The challenge as I see it for designers is being content to play a secondary supportive or coaching role in the process of persuasive design “Encouragement” as Albert Bandura might refer to it. Too often it seems that designers are more intent on pushing their own “genius of insight or perception” or the latest “cool technology” as opposed to truely recognising and supporting what users need or the best way to engage with them.
Industrial Design may have evolved from a Bauhaus ideology of making things aesthetically pleasing so that users felt inclined to purchase them over less attractive products and I concede it may have done so with some success, evolving to the point where designers are polished and capable enough to address more than simply a user’s perceived aesthetic need but also more recently their percieved emotional and social needs as well.
What if the ‘users’ themselves are the problem? What if users represent not a coherent set of needs but a messy mix of desires and influences?
From where I’m standing it’s actually designer’s messy mix of desires, influences and egos that are the problem. Through the work on my Masters on Motivational Design and Public Engagement I plan to share with you an alternate approach to Persuasive Design, one that believes in supporting a user’s confidence and skill acquisition process, not diminishing it.
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.
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?
In an attempt to better disentangle the continued discussion on the role of systems thinking or ‘logical processing’ in ‘design thinking’, as continued here and here yesterday. I’ve had a crack at boiling it down to basic principles – in true systems fashion!
Phrased in Aristotelian terms ‘design thinking’ or more generally any problem solving exercise, consists of three cyclical phases. Depending on the view to which you subscribe, these three phases are not mutually exclusive, but the overall process could be initiated by beginning with any one of the following processes:
Abductive Phase – Idea - The guess or hypothesis, that intuitive or highly creative leap, the game changing, out of the box idea. A highly skilled and intuitive phase of the design process. The quality of this phase is often assessed depending on the quality of it’s rhetoric or presentation (the design pitch). Highly context specific in the sense that you will need to have a good understanding of the context in question in order to make such an intuitive jump.
Deductive Phase – Development – The logical scientific part of the process where it is ascertained whether this creative leap is in fact valid or appropriate. This is the bit where you have to convince the engineers and money men. My feeling is that it is this context independent phase of the design process that is the area where systems thinking may be most valuable.
Inductive Phase - Testing – Another context dependent phase where ultimately the ideas and that processes that you have used to realise it are tested and evaluated. This could either be formal user testing or this could occur informally whilst the product is in the market place.
As it stands above it is probably more akin to a traditional ‘ego-design’ process, whereby the designer thinks that the strength of his idea alone is enough to justify the end result. As I perceive it, many more recent service and human-centred design processes and arguably the ‘design thinking’ approach as practiced by IDEO themselves might run as follows:
Deductive Phase (Rule Based) (Context Sensitive) - Understanding the context and user requirements, what familar ‘rules’ (or methods) are applicable in this domain?
Inductive Phase(Knowledge Based) (Context Independent) – Prototyping and testing of chosen ‘rules’ to assess validity to identified problem as well as other engineering and financial constraints.
Abductive Phase (Skill Based)(Context Sensitive) – Leading to final design proposal or creative leap (with associated user involvement, empowerment and motivation).
Thus it is clear to from this definition how ‘systems thinking’ or Jaimes Nel’s ‘black box’ i.e. the deductive, rule-based phase of the deisgn process can help deduce appropriate design ideas and solutions to design problems – arguably the true value of ‘design thinking’.
My own feeling from this definition however, is that it is purely the deductive phase of ‘design thinking’ to which any form of systems thinking or conceptualisation should be directed. Attempting to apply it to the other context and skill based parts of the process would as Collopy warns undermine the essence of ‘design thinking’.
but to me this seems to neatly summarise the wider discussions and presentations that took place not only at the whole Kuopio conference but also at 
