Some design principles
I had the great pleasure of spending a few days last week with some eminent designers and design thinkers as part of a World Economic Forum event in Dubai. We were participating as one of over 70 WEF Global Agenda Councils consisting of experts from around the world studying how to improve global institutions. As the Global Agenda Council on Design we felt that one of our greatest contributions might be to help other councils embed design thinking in their deliberations. We created a set of design principles that we felt might be a useful guide and I am listing them here:
Design is an agent of change that enables us to understand complex changes and problems, and to turn them into something useful. Tackling today’s global challenges will require radical thinking, creative solutions and collaborative action. Here is a set of principles identified by the Global Agenda Council on Design that could help your Council to develop ideas and strategies to address the complex problems facing us all.
Transparent: Complex problems require simple, clear and honest solutions.
Inspiring: Successful solutions will move people by satisfying their needs
giving meaning to their lives, and raising their hopes and expectations.
Transformational: Exceptional problems demand exceptional solutions that
may be radical and even disruptive.
Participatory: Effective solutions will be collaborative, inclusive and
developed with the people who will use them.
Contextual: No solution should be developed or delivered in isolation but
should instead recognize the social, physical and information systems it is part of.
Sustainable: Every solution needs to be robust, responsible and designed
with regard to its long-term impact on the environment and society.
What is missing? What would you change?
We are interested in distributing these principles further if there is interest.
The members of the council on design who contributed to the principles are:
Paola Antonelli, Carl Bass, Craig Branigan, Tim Brown, Brian Collins, Hilary Cottam, Kigge Mai Hivid, Larry Keeley, Chris Luebkeman, John Maeda, Mokena Makeka, Toshiko Mori, Kohei Nishiyama, Bruce Nussbaum, Alice Rawsthorn, Sudhir Sharma, Jens Martin Skibstead, Milton Tan, Arnold Wasserman.
29/11/2009 at 4:25 pm Permalink
Some alternate words for some of the above and some newbies.
Sustainable >> Social Business Model.
For e.g., It’s not enough to build a water pump for people who need water. Build a pump that is also a business for people who need water bc they probably also need money.
Participatory>> Co-creation.
Professional designers need to co-create with end users in order to create remarkable designs that are adopted with enthusiasm.
Contextual>> Systems Integration
Designers need to be aware of the “places” where people already gather. Why make yet another website, for e.g., when all a user probably needs is a facebook app.
And some add-ons:
Scope, not scale.
A lot of fantastic design is specific to the culture that uses it or the landscape in which it is to be used. This is a good thing and we need to embrace it.
Coordination of co-located people.
There’s a lot of potential in coordinating co-located people through IT. Think of a multi-story apartment building and all of the env and social benefits that could be gained if the people living there had coordination tools for stuff like laundry, child care, or food.
Metaphor.
An oldie but a goodie. Metaphors help us to understand and adopt new things by relating them to something familiar.
29/11/2009 at 4:45 pm Permalink
One more:
Humor.
29/11/2009 at 9:32 pm Permalink
Meaning is the new frontier for me as a designer these two books are a good point of reference:
Verganti, R 2009, ‘Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean’, Harvard Business School, United States of America.
Utterback, J & Bengt-Arne, F & Alvaverd, E & Ekman, S & Sanderson, S & Thether, B & Verganti, R 2006, ‘Design-Inspired Innovation’, World Scientific, Singapore.
There is also the following very interesting article which the above books take a lot of insight from:
Krippendorff, K 1989, ‘On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Proposition that Design Is Making Sense of Things’, The MIT Press: Design Issue, vol. 5, no. 2.
30/11/2009 at 3:38 am Permalink
A great list. I’d suggest to add »empowering« to existing »inspiring« as solutions should build capacity to let teams/people go on further, as well as »navigational« or »orientational« as today’s complex situations can not be resolved, but solutions should help navigating through them.
30/11/2009 at 3:49 pm Permalink
Here are three more design principles based on my work in Strategic Change (reference my blog entry on the critical success factors of transformation at http://wp.me/pDVnl-33):
Urgency: leverage or build urgency to implement a solution; scope, scale, and criticality of the problem; speed required to overcome the problem.
Value: identified benefits (social, economic, political, and learning benefits); significant positive impact to all stakeholders (communities, individuals, businesses); short-term and long-term.
Surprise: unique viewpoint on the “real” problem statement; non-apparent solution; creative means to implement in the presence of barriers and resistance.
30/11/2009 at 10:48 pm Permalink
Intolerance, Heuristics & the 21st Century Organization
by John Caswell
Founder
Chief Executive Officer
Group Partners Business Consulting
Forgive the long rant…
I think we are suffering from degrees of inertia, intolerance and insensitivity in every day life.
We see this in all its glory in business and politics. Crazy decisions, bizarre explanations for failure and toxic disdain aimed at the traditional institutions. This is now the mainstream. Business in particular could possibly even be viewed as an open laboratory for a failure of 21st Century thinking but it is by no means alone. Systems are at breaking point all over the world. Political and other major systems are also struggling with coming to terms with more current/relevant thinking to reduce the anger of an increasingly frustrating and hostile public.
Take the insensitivity of the services we receive from most automated customer services, the inept experiences in many high street stores, disbelief with the actions of major brands and government services. The dreadful similarity between city streets that are being overtaken by sameness from one city to another. I find it quite distasteful to travel across continents and witness similar trading patterns, experiences and their ‘typical’ attendant issues. On the other hand I find it wonderful to find an entirely innovative, different and charming experience that is heartfelt meaningful and rich in human values. More interestingly this is more often found in the least expected, less westernized parts of the world and the furthest away from the highly streamlined and supposedly sophisticated enterprise.
This lack of human or local sensitivity is bought about by the deeply ingrained preference business has for risk aversion, reliability, consistency and repeatability. And it is these tradition approaches that have brought around a palpable inertia – a seeming difficulty thing for the enterprise to do much about it. But why? And believe me I am optimistic.
For me it is important to bring different forms of thinking to bear and at the heart of this lies the idea of heuristics. A heuristic is really a rule of thumb, a general ‘truth’ that holds up in more cases than not. It is a more fluid, natural and pragmatic idea than for example an algorithm, something that has the absolutes coded into it. I think this coding is what has caused us as humans to question the services and stupidity we see all around us. It is this hard wiring that takes little or no account of how life actually goes on and why I like the idea behind Gregory Bateson’s wonderful epithet – “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way man thinks.” – Gregory Bateson
Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman Business School puts all of this best. He describes the process of human innovation in three steps, something he calls the ‘knowledge funnel:
Mystery – At the top of the funnel he sees humans as staring into a mystery – which contains the random and chaotic ‘situation’ in which we find ourselves much of the time – and is of course where opportunity lies.
Heuristic – In the middle of the narrowing funnel he sees human endeavor as coming up with a heuristic, or rule of thumb, that allows us, especially an enterprise, to address the mystery and manage it in some way
Algorithm – And at the thinnest point of the funnel – the most codified part of the continuum – systematizing and automating the solution – The Algorithm. And in Roger Martin’s words our preoccupation is with turning the heuristic into an algorithm.
“The title “Vice President of Marketing” denotes a permanent position with a set of ongoing tasks. As well suited as that construct is for running known heuristics and algorithms, it is not an effective way to move along the knowledge funnel. That activity is by definition a project; it is a finite effort to move something from mystery to heuristic or from heuristic to algorithm.” – Roger Martin
NB: Worth noting also that this process according to Roger Martin is also the way to define Design Thinking.
It is worth noting that there are lots of mysteries that don’t lend themselves to heuristics, and lots of heuristics that can’t turn into algorithms. There are lots of failures on the way to the next great business algorithm. Not only that, there are lots of successful businesses built on heuristics alone – example, the world of music and theatre, the arts, your favorite restaurant – (if it’s not part of a chain) Roger Martin alludes – in the book ‘The Design Of Business’ – that you can’t build large businesses without this transition to algorithms. You can’t have McDonald’s without a cooking and serving system. You couldn’t have Wal-Mart without its distribution model.
And so -
Introducing the Heuristic Framework
The other important framework against which to understand what is actually going on is the lack of balance in our lives and in the world as it has become. It is the preoccupation the west has with purely analytical (left brain thinking). But optimistically what follows is the basis of the way out – the way and in our view the means of Thinking Differently. 21st Century Thinking.
Analytical Thinking: This is an extreme. It has arisen as a result of many years of us as a humanity just measuring what we can – the tangible assets. A further definition could be written like this – Analytical Thinking is to prove a proposition through inductive or reductive knowledge. This means we rely on existing knowledge, repress further judgment and refine ‘what is’ from the position of our Current Reality. In this realm the goal is reliability and getting a consistent and repeatable outcome. To my mind this leads to an extreme reduction of opportunity and agility. Our traditional analytical thinking often leads businesses to seek proof before making any changes. That generally means no changes, as the data required for the proof is historical and can’t provide the certainty about the future analytical thinkers crave. The dogma that drives us all crazy in any change procedure.
Intuitive Thinking: If we went to the other extreme then we would be purely working with Intuitive Thinking which is to know things internally/innately without explicit reasoning. We could easily describe this as right brain thinking. This approach could be defined as to explore the new by always casting off the past, suppress too much or any analysis, and invent what ‘will be’. The ultimate goal here is simple validity and that provides an outcome that meets the objective.
Design Thinking: Design Thinking is the term now in common use to balance the two extremes by utilizing abductive logic. Abduction in this context is a method of logical inference introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce which comes prior to induction and deduction for which the colloquial name is to have a ‘hunch’. Abductive reasoning starts when an inquirer considers of a set of seemingly unrelated facts, armed with an intuition that they are somehow connected. The term abduction is commonly presumed to mean the same thing as hypothesis; however, an abduction is actually the process of inference that produces a hypothesis as its end result. It is used in both philosophy and computing. Its approach is respect for exploitation and exploration, the design of what should be, integration of future with past, combination of judgment with analysis. Its goal is a productive balance of reliability and validity.
4D™ & Structured Visual Thinking™: A set of ‘heuristic’ frameworks that narrow down the business mystery to a manageable size and shape, by working through logic models based on proven areas of business – leaving nothing out and leaving nothing in – and offering a solution. These are conversation based activities with the people in the direct line of attack on the opportunity or issue. They are allowed and encouraged to test their hunches against rules of thumb that will guide action. From these rules of thumb, they can develop more reasoned, shared and believable answers. This is a simplified approach, based on 24 meaningful conversations. The reward is alignment, coherence, engagement together with practical – communicable outcomes – that are owned by those who have to deliver together with a massive gain in efficiency.
And finally more from the most excellent Roger Martin on this topic…
“Without the logic of what may be, a corporation can only refine its current heuristic or algorithm, leaving it at the mercy of competitors that look upstream to find a more powerful way out of the mystery or a clever new way to drive the prevailing heuristic to algorithm.”
“Organizations worship at the altar of reliability.” They want systems to work efficiently. They want to be able to predict sales next year. They want consistent, predictable outcomes.”
“Without validity, an organization has little chance of moving knowledge across the funnel. Without reliability, an organization will struggle to exploit the rewards of its own advances.”
“Think of Design Thinking being systems to define what could be. This is really all about a systemic, holistic approach to finding something new. It uses inductive and abductive reasoning which many people are not comfortable using. Our educational systems take the creativity out of people over time. Many classes teach deductive reasoning and analysis and how to break things down. They want students to get the “right” answer. This process creates conformity and regulation, and students that break away from that conformity are criticized. Most 5-year-olds are creative geniuses when they enter school, and 20 years later have had that squeezed out of them.” – Roy Luebke
30/11/2009 at 10:58 pm Permalink
John Caswell’s Linkedin Profile
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/johncaswell
02/12/2009 at 1:18 am Permalink
I second Simon Schories’ suggestion to add “empowering.” Empowering is a step further than inspiring; it’s also the step after participatory, since it means giving people the opportunity to reach their potential and have impact during implementation, not just during the design process.
Also, I can’t think of a single word/name for this, but education should be somewhere in this list. A solution must be designed so that future leaders, citizens, generations–both next year and in the next century–continue to understand the needs and the solutions we have identified, even as new solutions are designed. This requires that some form of teaching or story-telling is built into the solution, not just taught in schools. In a way, this is part of sustainability, but that means sustainability is about the human resources required to sustain the solution in the future as well as the future impact of the solution.
08/12/2009 at 2:39 pm Permalink
Я извиняюсь, но, по-моему, Вы не правы. Я уверен. Могу это доказать. Пишите мне в PM, поговорим.
15/12/2009 at 2:20 am Permalink
Another design principle for your consideration…
My own work is on Systems Thinking as applied to organisation design and learning. In my consulting work Design Thinking often enters in various forms; pure at times but more typically random and disjointed as it reflects the dynamic business reality of my clients.
I submit for your consideration the principle that Design Thinking should be SYSTEMIC. This may be implied by some of the stated principles, but I suggest that elements such as interconnection, boundary definitions and the role of autopoeisis may be useful for the Design Thinking process.
30/12/2009 at 10:48 am Permalink
How are the principles you shared in the MIT Lecture about DESIGN THINKING much different than the principles that Louis Sullivan used, Alvar Aalto used, Eliel or Eero Saarinen used or many of the industrial designers from the 40s onward?
19/01/2010 at 8:11 am Permalink
Thanks for the opportunity to comment, I would suggest adding the following Principles:
Emergent: The solution will be revealed (emerge) through and as a result of the process of design thinking. It is very important that solutions are discovered, not pre-empted.
Unique: Every problem (and therefore every solution) is unique and characterised by the process by which it was discovered. This principle would enable innovation and creativity to flourish.
01/02/2010 at 10:58 am Permalink
My father used to tell me a story about a protest rally back in the 60’s. The protestors were, what was called then, ‘Free Thinkers’. About an hour after the rally started things got a bit nasty and fur started to fly. The police set off their sirens in one area to the north of the rally, making as much commotion as was possible. All of the ‘Free Thinkers’ did exactly the same thing and ran for an adjacent park, where the trouble dispersed and everyone eventually went home.
My point, with regard to design principles, is that you have to let your customer feel free, they must feel unique and, above all, they must be free to choose whether they will respect authority or not. Eventually most of us will follow, but it is essential that we feel we lead.
Thanks
Colin
22/02/2010 at 7:30 am Permalink
Based on the original post and the subsequent comments, it seems that one very important word is missing from the conversation. That word is “human.” Of course, design (as in design thinking) is a uniquely human means to a uniquely human end–at least in the context of this discussion. I think it is fair to say, then, the goal of most design is to solve human problems in a way that answers human needs, satisfies human wants, fulfills human desires and delivers human value. By adding human to the list, we acknowledge the importance of a user-centered perspective and a person-centered outcome in the design process.
24/04/2010 at 8:52 am Permalink
Первые два комментатора говорят правду