Hasta La Ideas

By txd, via Wikimedia Commons

Without an understanding of the underlying characteristics of Design, we restrict our ability to improvise and innovate the processes and methods we use to undertake our work as designers. A lack of discourse about Design quickly leads to stagnation, unless external sources provide a transformative—evolutionary or revolutionary—influence. It is a sign of a lack of reflection, self-awareness and critical analysis.

As designers looking to improve our Design work, such reflection plays an important role, for it allows us to look at several facets of Design at once:

» Quality of execution of our process and methods
» Appropriateness of the process and methods to the challenge at hand
» Success of our designs

Project post-mortems tend to look at the first of these two; our customers (or lack) tell us the third. But in order to understand and answer questions of appropriateness, we must first understand the intent of a Design process and the methods therein. What is often discussed are the variants of overall process or variants of the individual methods. An articulation of the pros and cons of these variations focuses on a range of attributes such as efficiency or productivity, but rarely evaluates how the process or method satisfies the intent of the design activity. This omission is due to the fact that the intellectual discourse of design spends little time on articulating a deconstruction of the design process with respect to its intent, and instead looks primarily at its component tasks or methods. That intent is a realization of the characteristics of Design as a means of understanding and solving problems.

Intent

The basic intent of a design activity is the creation of some ‘thing,’ the specifics of which depend entirely on the problem being addressed. That ‘thing’ begins as an idea; it is extended, detailed, tested and refined.

There are, then, several different considerations in operation during the design activity. The first is the origin of the idea or ideas, so as to maximise our chances of success. But more ideas do not immediately or necessarily lead to success. There is, then, the desire for many different ideas to be generated; a method by which these are evaluated and methods by which these are developed, refined and ultimately delivered.

A second consideration is that the refinement of ideas be directed. And directed towards the solution of the identified problem.

Thirdly, there is the question of from whence such ideas are born. What are the triggers, the seeds and the form of each.

Finally, there is the question of how it is we arrive at our understanding of the problem we are serving. And how that understanding is both articulated and shared.

And so, in an attempt to address the various considerations, the design process seeks to:

» Understand the problem to generate and evaluate ideas
» Realise the best ideas from those generated
» Communicate a shared understanding of the problem, the solution and the process.

Understanding the Problem

At its heart, design seeks to purposefully improve the lot of some segment of humanity through the enablement or improvement of some human endeavour. To understand the gap or the current shortcomings of that human endeavour design undertakes direct, primary research with our ‘target’ segment—along with whatever secondary to tertiary research is appropriate. More importantly, and philosophically, design seeks such understanding from the perspective of the people engaged in the end result—our target a.k.a. the people we are attempting to help.

Our tool here, and the vehicle for such understanding, is empathy. Empathy should be employed with eyes wide open to our surroundings, and the broader activity or purpose within which our ‘problem’ resides. From this vantage we have access to culture, personal motivation, meaning and significance. We can see why someone chooses to do a thing and why they choose not to.

We have one more significant vehicle at our disposal in our efforts to understand the problem: a deconstructed worldview through which the designer identifies and critically appraises each constraint, real or perceived, within the problem area. This combination of empathy and deconstruction allow for a third vehicle or tool: that of reframing. Reframing a problem is the path through which we ask the question: “What problem are we really solving?”

All designers have the potential for hubris and arrogance that comes with the belief that we have answers to questions others don’t; an arrogance borne of being correct some of the time and asking questions that most others don’t think to ask. But the reality is that we can be wrong—wildly wrong—and we need self-awareness of this tendency. To temper this arrogance we involve a broad cross-section of people into the process of understanding the problem: people like customers and non-customers, the people who help them make decisions and the people within our organisation that make the products and services they purchase. Although it is ultimately our role to appropriately frame the problem, by engaging these people in the process of understanding, we increase our chances of success dramatically.

Generating & Evaluating Ideas

There is a critical step the designer must take in order to move from an understanding of the problem to a design idea. In many respects, analysis is crucial to realizing the value of our research since good analysis can salvage something from bad research, but the converse is not so true.

Analysis has many component techniques from deconstruction to abstraction and generalization. These provide us with tools to collate individual observations into more and more generalized knowledge about people and to identify patterns within our data. During our research our aim is to learn as much as we can about the problem area. We capture photographs, stories, facts and trends. We dissect the foundations of the status quo and ask “Why?” and “What if?”.

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