A Declaration of Design

There must be something about the stimulus of travelling to other countries that stimulates me to write a blog entry. My last one was written in Las Vegas and this one is written in Washington DC, where I am presenting design to the Cisco IBSG Public Sector team.

This team work across 5 main platforms that embrace the urban, environmental, political, economic and cross cultural agendas.

Speaking to such an audience raises some challenges. They are ferociously intelligent and very analytical people, so fuzzy: decorative design as a topic on the agenda creates a challenge to explain the relevance to their grand themes.

The reason for and return on investment for design in the business environment is almost completely acknowledged. The bar of design competence has risen across all of business, from the giant and global to the small and local. Most businesses see the business reasons to take pride in what they deliver, focus it on the needs of their customers and care about how it is communicated and delivered. This might have gone as far as to make design a commodity, a make-over tactic when sales need a little lift. Design, in the UK anyway, is cheap and plentiful, professionally minded and not too challenging.

But the role in public services and wider social issues is not so well understood or welcomed. But the aspirations of designers to apply their methodology and sensitivities to other areas has led to a number of small but influential design teams engaging with issues that at first sight have little relevance for design.

It might seem ephemeral for design to be involved in prisons, for example, accept to choose calming colours for the walls. Why would a design company work for police force but not to design the uniforms or perhaps give the branding a friendlier feel? Why would designers be involved in food waste, or obesity?

But, as many of you may know, that is precisely what designers are doing. A breed of consultancies has grown from conventional design roots to tackle big issues. Design agencies who work for health providers bring new ways of thinking about both patients and staff; designers who designed products now design behaviour changing campaigns and agencies set up dedicated social issues whose clients are government departments and local authorities, not brands or manufacturers.

The purpose of my presentation was to explore and present what it is about design that could be relevant and useful to the public sector. At the heart of this “mission creep”, as some see it, is that there is a methodology behind the process of design that can be transferred to wider, more strategic activities than the design of a specific thing.

Design Thinking is now a fully fledged term which an increasing number of designer leaders and management gurus use to describe and apply to business and public sector innovation, service and delivery. And despite trying my hardest to think of something better, it has enough traction to remain as the best term.

What is exciting about Design Thinking, and the growing buzz around it, is that the tools that designers use are being articulated in a way that makes them accessible and usable to all. There are two reasons why that’s a good thing:

Design impacts the surface that people interact with. That’s why we understand design as visual, ergonomics, sensory and cognitive. Great design communicates purpose, performs functionally, and satisfies emotionally.

But, like the iceberg of cliché, a great design experience has a lot going on underneath that surface. Whatever object, service or experience you can think of, it’s obvious that a great many actions and decisions have been carried out to deliver that, often micro, moment, of satisfaction.

The act of design, or of the designer, is that of synthesising and visualising that moment in order to create it. The great opportunity for having an understanding of that processes is to understand that we all play a role in the design process. Great design often uses great creative visionaries or who are able to retain a vision and deliver it to close to perfection, as we see with Apple, for example. But the role of all participants, from leader to manager, purchasing to marketing, is critical too and when a mission, focused on the end user, is shared, it becomes clearer and easier to make everyday decisions.

And the other great advantage of design is that it helps put that end user, customer, citizen, patient, whoever we are, into their thoughts at all times, including very early on. If we have a picture of a person in our mind when we make a decision about strategy, we are more empathetic, questioning, aware of barriers as well as opportunities. And if we bring other design tools out of the bag, such as the ease of modelling the experience without having to spend lots of money on working prototypes, we have the advantage of real time feedback with the future and a corresponding reduction of risk.

If I’ve taken you with me so far, then we need to unpack these tools and ask how they might be useful, when to use them and whether we can use them ourselves, or do we at certain points need people who call themselves designers?

So this was the premise of my Washington talk. I set out to explain the atoms of design to explain what they are, how they might be useful and how to use them.

I’m sorry but I’m not going to do that now but I will be starting in the next few weeks to lay out an atom by atom description of design. Having started a redesign of my website, I shall try and bring the two things together to give an easy to find and use toolkit for design thinking that you can use for business or public and social contexts.

The index at the moment (in no order) is:

A Sense of Humanity
Seeing the Whole Picture
The Desire for Revelation
A Desire for Simplicity
A Sense of Vision
A Sense of Optimism
Challenge the Brief
Never One Idea
Make as Real as Possible
Intuition
Emotion in Everything
Perfection, Nothing Less
A Sense of the Future
Holding the Vision
Facilitating Creativity
Co Creation and the Democratization of Design
Courage
Embracing the fuzzy

Feel free to send me your ideas and thoughts to clive.grinyer@clivegrinyer.com


Clive Grinyer, 1 Feb 2010