Two talks in the last week in Barcelona and Manchester - very interesting, very different cities, but with similar audiences and similar issues. As usual, I was presenting versions of my talk «Lipstick on a Pig» , dealing with our preconceptions of design and trying to find something of value that people can take away and find useful when they get back to work.

It’s always a wonderful experience, both hearing peoples reactions and listening to other great speakers, whether they be great designers or users of design.

In Barcelona I spoke alongside the Italian designer Mario Trimarchi, a designer who is very different to me and is best known for the brand identity of the Italian Post Office. He famously moved them away from the traditional applied logo on a red background, by placing different images of Italy as the ´«logo» , which changed both the public perception of the postal service and also the attitudes of the people who work for it. He is proud that it costs significantly more to apply these 4 colour images to the postal vans, but points out that it is now paid for from the advertising budget as that is indeed what his design now does, a far more powerful communication than the original logo.

His company, Fragile Corporate Identity Care, works mostly for financial institutions and banks, which made his comment «don’t think about business when designing» , particularly brave and somewhat embarrassing in the context of the Barcelona Design Week event we were speaking at!

But in talking to people from all walks of business in these two cities, I have begun to see what are the basic issues around design and why people may find it difficult to embrace the core messages.

For me, there are three fundamental components of the design process that can increase the chance of success of any development activity. They are very simple, perhaps it is the simplicity that is the problem, but in no particular order they are:

1. Thinking about what something will be like, before you make it

2. Learning about the reality of the people who will use and the situation that it will be used in.

3. Having more than one idea.

Lets take each of these in turn.

1. All the things that are special and useful in the design process are about forming, synthesising and modelling, so we can see, and react to, the thing to be made, before the buttons of production are pressed. These aspects of design apply to all types of activity, architecture, interiors, product, user interface, web, product or packaging. Design is an act where the best possible, most attractive and economically viable solutions are formed, presented and agreed.

So design is fundamentally about picturing the final «experience†» in order to confirm, focus, and specify what will then be built. Of course it is most usually focused on one aspect of the «experience» , the product, web page, package etc, and not so often designed as total experience. But it is only really use before delivery mechanism is started.

The things that go wrong with design are when this is done late so late in the process that design is merely a papering over of decisions that have already been made. This is the main thrust of Lipstick on a Pig.

But the other starting point of my talks on design is that everything is designed. Design is not something that only happens when a person called a designer gets called in. Whether a designer is there or not, the set of decisions, whether accidental or not, still constitute an act of design, just not a conscious one.

Therefore, when a strong minded leader of any company, large or small, uses their intuition to form what their company produces, perhaps with intuition that comes from experience or in depth knowledge of a market, a business, or a technology, as might often happen with the head of a smaller business, or a specialist innovator such as a surgeon developing a new piece of medical equipment , or even some one like Richard Branson, then they become the designers. They combine their knowledge, belief, creativity and leadership to create what they believe is right. They may not go through a design process, where they visualise the product, at all, they just tell people what it is and what they should do to make it happen.

Strong leadership such as this is often seen as a virtue. Many smaller business will aspire to leadership of such certainty and insight. And this might be a reason why design doesn’t happen

Because design, in the sense of modelling and envisioning what something will be like, doesn’t happen where there is such a strong belief in the solution that it is not deemed necessary. Or, just as common, there is such belief in decisions made along the way (or unintended ignorance of the impact of them), that modelling and forming is only superficial.

And at the root of this is the difficulty in accepting that it is important to visualise what we are going to make. But perhaps it is difficult to accept this because at that stage, decisions, intuition and strongly held beliefs are challengeable. And being challenged is something that is not pleasant for many people, either because it undermines their integrity, importance and self worth, or because it undermines their political position and leadership.

We are all measured by our achievements and our role in that achievement. So there is a strong personal desire to be the author and creator of what is produced, and not have that diminished or reduced. And that means that the design process is challenging.

Now lets look at the second component - learning about the reality of the people who will use and the situation that it will be used in.

There are two sides of this part of the design process. One is finding out about things before you design. The other is testing what you have designed.

User insight, user observation, ethnographic research, all these types of things are activities that give us insight into what is really going on. This is not the same as market research. Market research is a much used tool to help people make decisions, either to decide what is required, or to justify decisions they have already made.

And, as I love to chronicle, the results from market research are either at such a high level that they are not very useful when creating solutions, or misleading, because the context is not realistic enough to represent the real context in which a customer might choose cat food or airlines or whatever it is.

So it is all very well BA spending 2 million pounds to find out that passengers on long haul flights would like to sleep well. a), it is obvious and b) it doesn’t provide a solution. The solution, as you will see in Lipstick on a Pig, is a flat bed the cleverly allows the same number of business class passengers to fly in the same amount of space they had before, without a two metre bed.

The benefit of user insight is that the knowledge gained provides very tangible outcomes that drive innovation and product development . What more could you want! And yet there is either lingering reluctance to do it or, even worse, a disconnect from gaining insight and then applying it to the product development process. How many research reports are created and then not used or not used as metrics for subsequent development? Lots.

Why does this happen. Well, most project managers feel nervous about insight research because it has to happen before they can start building things. And it may contradict, or suggest something that managers do not want to build. They may have already a good idea of what is needed so research may be irrelevant or differ from their plans.

So again, research is a distraction, slows down the process and may come up with something different form what we all, intuitively, feel is the right thing. So it’s not done.

Testing during the design phase is difficult to because, although it offers such an obvious way of checking whether our solutions and ideas are going in the right direction and can flag up potential problems we may not have thought of, again it is a delay and may tell something we don’t want to hear. Designers can be the worst culprits here, not wanting their personal visions damaged in any way by the feedback of any old user.

And they have a point. As Richard Seymour put it so brilliantly at the Intersections conference, why listen to the opinion of someone from Croyden who is quite willing to lie for a kitkat and a fiver. And so much of industry is willing to listen to nobodies who are pulled into focus groups and get them out of having to make difficult decisions.

But the type of research I am talking about here is not market research. It is a tool for learning, for being forced to pass someone through the experience that a we have the audacity to specify and hope they will like. So many things in life would be better if executives and engineers were forced to actually do what they specify for others. Sign on to web site receive an internet delivery. Set up digital TV. If they did try it, the wouldn’t ship a thing.

And the final point was having more than one idea.

Having more than one idea is one of the most important and difficult things a design student has to do during their training. It is almost the most valuable part of that training and it is something people find very difficult to do.

We love to have an idea, share it with people, tell them we thought of it, imagine our wealth if this idea is taken up and used by society. We all want to invent another Black and Decker Workmate. Politicians and senior executives are desperate to have ideas and, if good, be seen to deliver them, running with them clutched to their chest like a rugby ball, dodging and weaving until they successfully touch down behind the line. Where they then find out it was a crap idea and not worth running down the wing for, but they will vigorously defend it anyway.

This is a very natural tendency but one that we should try and break. When we have ideas, we should flesh them out, make them tangible and real, another great tool of design. And then have another idea, and do the same. Being pushed to be creative, to have separate and different ideas is rocket fuel for creativity and when analysis and syntheses start, we can put ideas together, see issues that one idea solves where others don’t, and create a better, more robust and ultimately more successful idea.

This is one thing I wish all courses and all people could be taught because although we may not all be able to draw, we can and do have ideas and being forced to have more than one, whilst it is harmless and no one will be effected by a bad idea, but before the ideas are shot to pieces by feasibility and reality, would make a big difference to the quality of products, services, even government that we have.

I wanted to write this to a) identify the three simplest elements of design that I think are so important and we should not do without, whatever we are designing and b) to try and understand the very natural reactions and reasons why these things don’t happen. That people who are interested in design or even call themselves designers, realise these things largely intuitively, is no comfort and maroons us with some sort of faith, a body for goodness, that can be acclaimed or ignored at wish by society.

But I think these things are not ignorable. Everything is designed, decisions are made in every walk of life that are, in fact design decisions because they effect us. I believe these simple principles would make sure those decisions were better made, and the world work better and be more satisfying.