Eiffel Over

Tag: DesignThinking

  • Framing Design Decisions

    Shall we go to the Italian or the Mexican restaurant?

    Shall we go to the Mexican or the Italian restaurant?

    Shall we go to the Italian or the lovely Mexican restaurant?

    Shall we go our usual Italian or try out the Mexican place?

    Shall we go to the Mexican for main course and then go to the Italian for ice cream? 

    Shall we go to the Italian or the Mexican, or shall we look for somewhere else along the way?

    Shall we go to the expensive Italian place or the cheaper Mexican and spend the money we save on drinks beforehand?

    Shall we try one this time, the other the next, and use the experience to inform future decision-making.

    The last one may be unrealistic, but you get the picture. How we frame the question influences the decision we make. How is the design decision you are making being framed? 

  • Playing poker by the rules of noughts and crosses

    This week I am writing about how we make decisions in design. I’ve written before about David Snowden’s way of describing systems using a games analogy (see reference below). To recap:

    • A simple system is akin to a game of noughts and crosses. You know the rules and you can quickly work out the answer. 
    • A complicated system is like a game of chess. There are lots of rules, but given enough time you can work out all the options and choose the best one. 
    • A complex system is like a game of poker. The rules are one factor, but the game is made much more difficult by the interaction between the players. This is the domain of unknown unknowns. It is not possible to determine the best course of action from the start – the best approach emerges. 
    • A chaotic system is like a game with children in which they are constantly changing the rules. Here it is very difficult to make sense of what is going on as the ground keeps shifting. 

    Let’s look at decision making through these lenses. 

    A decision might appear to be a simple question of A versus B. But many factors might begin to complicate the process. For example, opportunity cost of one option over another. Or competing priorities that don’t make one option clearly better than another.

    When we start to include human factors, the picture becomes much more complex. First, there are the vast array of factors that push and pull our own decision-making – not all of them conscious; not all of them we want to admit to. And then there is how the groups of people around the poker table of design (whose interests might not necessarily be aligned) show up and play the game.

    The complexity grows when we we start to consider the interconnection between lots of the factors that we might consider in design: the long-term versus short-term business model, community wellbeing, ecosystem wellbeing, etc.

    Finally, we have a chaotic decision-making environment when the rules of the game start changing. This could be the case when, say, in a major project one part of the team starts shifting the goals of the project without informing the rest. No one is clear anymore about the conditions in which they are trying to make a decision.

    All of this is to say that decision-making is often much more complex than a simple A versus B. So we need to prepare ourselves for decision-making in complex environments. 

    As ever, our guiding principles can be: to work iteratively, and to look for the emergent patterns. 

    Playing poker by the rules of noughts and crosses is a losing strategy.

    References

    Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, November 2007 Issue.

  • Does power support change?

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    Earlier this week I wrote about designers needing to understand the conditions for change. What enables change and what blocks it.

    If we understand organisational culture as how things get done in an organisation, then culture gives us some strong clues about what – or who might be enabling or blocking change.

    Power is one of the six lenses of culture in the Johnson and Scholes culture web. How people with power wield it in the organisation sets a strong signal for what is valued and what can be ignored. The policy may say one thing, but it is what management or leadership actually do that sets the culture.

    And so back to change. Do the people with power visibly support change? If so, a culture of change will enable you to do your work more easily. If not, you will have more work to do.

  • What’s holding the current situation in place?

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    Design is about making change. Our aim is to turn an existing situation into a better situation. Sometimes that might be about designing a new thing. But other times it may be about allowing change to happen. 

    If we are interested in the latter then a useful question to ask is what is holding the existing situation in place? What is reinforcing the status quo? What is stopping innovation? What is preventing change?

    Sometimes we need both. We need to float a new idea, but to stop it from sinking, we need to also create the conditions for change. But other times, it may be sufficient just to design the conditions for change, and then to allow something that has been waiting to emerge the chance to develop.

  • Designers as insiders

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    Yesterday I said designers are outsiders. Here’s the tricky part: we are also insiders. 

    That’s because we need to earn the right to work with the people we are designing with and for.

    Being an insider means we are trusted and that we are in an empathetic relationship with the people we are seeking to influence.

    Just as being an outsider takes work, so does the trust and empathy building process of being an insider. But if we can’t convince people to move with us, our ideas may be good for nothing. 

  • Designers as outsiders

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    As designers we are outsiders. The norm is the middle lane. But we want to make things better. To change the direction of travel. To advocate for something different. 

    Choosing to be a designer is choosing to step outside. To take a different perspective. To go against the grain in order to see what might be possible.

    And all that takes work. So if design feels hard, it may be because of the extra work we are having to swim  in a different direction. But unless someone is prepared to take that risk, then we’ll all carry on heading the same way.

  • On the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and teaching design

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist website: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    In the first year of my undergraduate chemistry course, we learnt about a concept called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This term refers to a phenomenon predicted by classical physics that people could see just didn’t make sense in reality. This was a major problem for physicists because it showed that their theories didn’t stack up. The punchline was that Max Planck came along and explained the phenomenon in a new way, which became the birth of quantum mechanics. 

    I remember finding the original Ultraviolet Catastrophe concept difficult to comprehend (although I did think it would make a good band name). And now I realise the only reason we learnt about the theory was to show that it was wrong. In a sense, we were being taught chemistry in the order that the discoveries had been made – in the order that predecessors had learnt.

    But does that always make sense? This approach is founded in a ‘positivist’ learning framing. It says, this is how the world showed up to me and I will now pass that story on to you (and then test you on it!). I named our company Constructivist after the more modern learning theory that says that people learn by taking new concepts and mapping them to their previous experiences. Learning is to do with how the world shows up to the learner, not the lecturer. 

    And so this leaves design educators with a challenge. In a sense, the ‘Ultraviolet Catastrophe’ moment of classical design thinking, is that as currently formulated, design thinking is not sufficient to make the world better. I see regenerative design as an evolution in design thinking. One that integrates more fully our responsibility for increasing living-system health. And as we are discovering, it has some very different approaches compared to traditional design. 

    For the ‘classical’ designers, developing an understanding of regenerative design will indeed be an evolution. But for people new to design thinking, they aren’t burdened with that history. Instead, they have grown up with the climate and ecological crises that previous design and engineering thinking has helped to create. This is not an imagined ultraviolet catastrophe, but a real, unfolding catastrophe. We need to be teaching design for their story, not ours.

    [My thanks to Nick Francis at the University of Sheffield for our recent conversation that fed into this post]

  • Design versus Shopping

    If the client knows exactly what they want at the start of a design process, then it isn’t design – it’s shopping. Shopping for the answer that you’ve already decided upon. Because design isn’t the business of dealing with knowns. It is precisely because there are unknowns that we need a design process. 

    By all means we should have an initial brief that describes outcomes we are trying to reach. And then begins a journey into realm of unknown possibilities and constraints to find out what might be possible. What we may discover is that that original statement of intent was not quite right. We might find something based on a better understanding of the situation. 

    And then we get a better brief. Better for everyone involved, including the client.

    Consider the opposite. The client sets a tightly defined brief with highly specified outcomes. The designer is forced to the client’s exacting brief, tantamount to a shopping list (and which has probably become formalised as a contract). The designer discovers a better solution but because it is not on the client’s shopping list, it isn’t considered. 

    And so the client comes back from the shops with what they asked for. But there is no guarantee they are going to fit.