One step beyond
Retrofitting Design’s role in the world — Design is a verb and designers its agents.
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Lately, I keep hearing designers talk lightheartedly about design, use very thin definitions, focus on executing by the book methodologies and talk about what’s measurable as the only existing reality. Design has become overspecialized allowing non-designers to dismantle it and utilize its parts for their own arguments. I believe it’s about time designers reclaim Design.
On the shoulders of Wodtke, Simon & many others.
Excellent Design apart is achieving expected outcomes through impeccable execution. Zero flaws nor hindrances. Following Sturgeon’s law, an adage that states that “ninety percent of everything is crap” we could first infer, not all Design achieves flawless results, and second, skilled designers are scarce. As Christina Wodtke says “We all cook, but we are not all chefs”¹.
Over the years I’ve found that to become a great designer, you must actively nurture a passion for designing. Given appropriate nurturing, quoting Jared M. Spool, “anyone can become a better designer”².
Are designers designed?
From ancient artisan guilds to modern universities, learning to Design has always been about observing how to shift some matter into an artifact. Through apprenticeship, designers hone their skills, learning about tools through empirical experience.
By observing and recognizing patterns and their constants and variables, as the sculpted matter experiences them through time, designers to-be seek to assimilate which changes work and which don’t.
As Paul Rand, famous for his corporate identity work for IBM and NeXT Inc. said: “It is important to use your hands. This is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator.”³
The list of possible artifacts is endless. Both tangible and intangible. From simple sentences, binary questions, fully-fledged surveys, household goods, furniture, to fully engineered technologies made of bytes and pixels or wood, metal and concrete. Domain knowledge considered, anything can be designed.
Eventually, competent designers learn these devices are not the end product, but assistants in achieving their client’s and society’s intended outcomes. As Charles Eames said in 1972’s “Design Q&A”, “it’s an expression of purpose”⁴.
Design’s fundamental tension.
Herbert Simon, 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics said in his article “The Science of Design”: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”.⁵
Nigel Cross, who studied how designer’s think for decades, recognizes “We all design when we plan for something new to happen”⁷. Likewise, cameron tonkinwise said “designers have a perverse ability to not see what is there, but instead see what else could or should be there.”⁶
We could infer that Design recognizes the tension between a present and a preferred future. Acknowledgement of this tension gives Design purpose to its actions. Now, Tonkinwise also said about designers “They are considered creative because they generate alternative realities, some of which they make into future realities”⁶. We could then say that:
Great designers devise and create the necessary artifacts to assist them in solving the tension between the present and the future.
Consequently, to Design you must have a purpose set in time, and the ability to take the necessary actions to pursue it. But then, how do designers arrive at the best solution for the tension? tonkinwise gives us a little hint: Creativity
Interlude
Creativity ≠ Salience.
Though they’re related, please don’t confuse salience for Creativity. Salience is the quality of being particularly noticeable or important; prominent. It’s about what stands out to the senses. Whereas Creativity is about reflection and craft. It’s about coming up with coherent associations you had not thought of before and making them tangible, perceivable.
Because of its oddity, Creativity commonly feels salient. Yet not everything salient is creative. Someone shouting is salient, yet not necessarily creative. Now back to our current programming.
A perpetual clash between Thinking and Making.
It’d be naive to think of Design as a purely tactical, auxiliary, and mechanical styling discipline. The same goes for thinking of it as an absolutely rational and strategic resolving discipline. Design as a verb is best described as a quest or a hunt, and its everyday operations are best characterized by two creative action states:
Creating with ideas, also known as thinking, and creating with matter, also known as making.
This is Design’s synthesis engine. Contingent on the characteristics of the observed present, capable designers are able to start their engine at either state. It’s through the perpetual shift between these states that Design works to solve the aforementioned tension and achieve expected outcomes.
This creative engine is fuelled by all the information emanating from the tension. Non-designers usually perceives only but its outcome, synthesis, not its combustions nor its fumes. This is simply because they feels very organic, and not all designers feel comfortable enough to showcase the process.
Framing before Unhinging — The direction of the current narrative.
Design never creates alone. Partners, sponsors and stakeholders hold the keys to the tension. They play their role as invested agents in this present-future continuum. Design ideates and co-creates with them a common frame to inform and align on preferences and expected outcomes. Design won’t succeed if they are not riding shotgun in the quest’s wagon.
Albeit partial, comprehension of the situation’s current significance is crucial to designing its future. The kickstarting question then becomes:
What’s the story told so far about this tension?
Answering this question means recognizing actors and agents, examining their roles, interactions, mindsets, opinions, biases and speculations and laying out how they impact the tension. It also means understanding the tension’s greater context, its past, its existing state of affairs, its perceived boundaries and challenges. Jeffrey Veen, founder of Adaptive Path, said “Good designers can create normalcy out of chaos.”⁸
Marty: You mean the past.
Doc: Exactly!
Design will frame the future based on this reality, so it’s critical to represent as many of the tension’s principles and fundamentals as possible. Not doing so bears the risk of missing preferred outcomes, amongst other unknown and unintended consequences or externalities.
Is there a door? — You can’t solve a tension you can’t describe.
Design’s eternal assumption is uncertainty. Don’t get this wrong, Design does not create in a vacuum but if nothing is assumed, anything is possible, creating space and permission to generate new ideas. Enter abduction, the less “truthy” form of inference in logic. Some of its forms are known as inference to the best explanation, others as conjectures. It does not guarantee a true conclusion, only likelihood, so it’s a very good hypothesis generator.
It might also explain why non-designers “hate” designers.
Abduction provides Design with the ability to describe the tension’s existing situation in order to ideate potential solutions. Feeling bemused, puzzled, confused, or bewildered is a common starting point for Design. Any designer would recognize this as a hard moment to go through.
Charting paths — The many shapes of tension exploration.
Setting the stage — Tracking transformation quests.
Before beginning to unhinge the tension from its current frame, recording devices are created. These devices serve two functions: as a place for designers to continuously record and display their progress, keeping all invested actors informed and as a baseline to explore possibilities.
Early unhinging & proto-shaping.
Charles Eames also said about Design, “it’s a method of action”⁴. Either moving forward through thinking or making, early hypotheses, prototypes or proto-artifacts are always speculative. If invested agents do not allow this riffing to happen or simply pretend to freeze the frame as it’s born, chances of Design envisioning a preferred future are slim.
Note #1: Fail cheap.
To allow moving forward, experiments can’t cost more than the materialized solution. Designers must make sure these are as cheap as possible, ideally a fraction of the returns of expected outcomes.
As designers become observant agents, these experiments provide a wide lens that make the tension’s principles and fundamentals emerge. Diving senses first onto the tension’s territory, scrutinizing it as it occurs and helping dissect it into atoms, molecules and organisms.
Mitigating uncertainty through Design — Design’s exploration goal.
Design also assumes the tension is a chaotic environment; volatile. It does not know beforehand all the states the tension can shift to, nor when or how.
Led by curiosity and embracing serendipity, a.k.a. accidental discovery, Design must push the tension to as many states possible to explore the circumscribed territory and beyond. An incremental risk-reducing activity, the more Design experiments, the more it learns, the more it reduces uncertainty.
Learning is a creative act — Design tinkering.
In order to decide what future is preferable, Design tinkers. Design creates pseudo experimental artifacts to probe the tension. Arguably “in a Bayesian way”, much like machine learning strategies, Design assigns a probability to a hypothesis and updates that probability as it gains evidence. Learning about it in a generative way.
Erika Hall said “Creativity is finding novel connections among familiar ideas”⁹. Design tinkering is provoking. Introducing proto-artifacts into known situations to test reactions. Carrying out an action and looking for feedback. Testing what and how much alteration a situation can stand. Remove all this floundering, this seemingly chaotic stumbling around, and risk Design’s creative engine not being properly fuelled.
Emerging new territories — Emerging new narratives.
As they branch out across the tension’s territory, results fill the gaps, providing more accuracy, allowing new forward exploring paths to emerge when valid, or demonstrating the current implausibility of said paths when invalid. Either way, learning emerges as an outcome to inform ongoing and new experiments, helping evaluate the tension in finer detail. As Nassim N. Taleb says “For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error”¹⁰.
As it moves closer to certainty, gaining speed and accuracy, circling the tension with better and better questions, new territories emerge. A quality of learning play. Decreasing the amount of unknown unknowns, mitigating risk. Doing this, designers successfully unhinge the tension from its earlier significance and interpretations, creating a new narrative, that displays potential paths to achieve the expected outcomes of the Design process.
Note #2: Sacrificing — Finding a Balance.
Design must ensure the legibility of gained knowledge. Synthesis is reductive and carries loss of spontaneity, vibrance and complexity so Design must tread carefully and make sure critical information is not lost when learnings are recorded for sharing.
Note #3: Setting scale — Becoming perpetual.
Time taken for exploration has an exponential impact on the amount of experimentation, hence gathered information. Dependent on the scale of the expected outcome, time spent will range from a couple of hours, weeks, or it can be continuous, for example in a Product setting, where Design can be tool for perpetual learning. Time is Design’s best partner. Can you guess which one is preferred by designers?
Reframing & concrete Shaping
A new frame — Narrative alternatives.
Back to our emerging narratives, proven information helps transformation goals manifest across the board. Discovered learnings manifest new perspectives, potential alternative realities, feeding this new frame.
Design can then highlight preferable opportunities, paths to value, based on expected outcomes from partners, sponsors and stakeholders. Beginning to shape what the artifact to solve the tension will, and won’t be.
Materialization of preferred outcomes.
Once the solution’s shape is decided, Design can then create the finer technical details and plot the final materialization of the artifacts needed to solve the tension for good.
This is the sole outcome non-designers commonly expect from Design, usually underestimating the effort needed to get here. And this is what bothers designers. Mainly because if they were not involved in any of the conscious effort to ideate the solution, they’re allowed very little or forgettable impact¹¹.
The aforementioned is by no means a lesser chore like I’ve heard designers talk lately. Creating the tangible solution is even more important than coming up with the idea to create it. There is a simple logic behind this: an idea doesn’t return the results its tangible form does.
Design’s guarantee.
If you expect the tension to be solved by an artifact, then you must build it and make sure it does. This is Design’s guarantee of assurance. Design’s very own “Skin in the Game”¹². Aside from the almost sure frictions down the path to materialization. Specially if what‘s being created has never been done so in the past.
Good Design leads to more Design.
Does arriving at a materialized solution mean Design has reached an end state? The straight answer is it ultimately depends on the client. Ultimately, if Design has managed to help its principals achieve their expected outcomes, a usual byproduct of Design are new expected outcomes.
Good Design opens the doors to more Design work.
Design is learning to transform, and driving the necessary actions for transformation to occur.
Transforming is Design’s quintessential craft, setting it apart from other future seeking disciplines. Following that train of thought, anyone attempting to perform an act of transformation is “attempting to design”. Though remember, Sturgeon’s law.
Designers are agents for transformation.
Now, regardless of context and isolated from any domain, to design is to recognize and leverage the inherent potential for transformation of an existing situation into a preferable outcome and create the necessary artifacts or devices to make those outcomes happen. Each of these steps require some Design action, and the best qualified agents to achieve such actions are designers. They’re trained and educated in change making.
Areas of application
Great designers also know they cannot achieve great Design without enlisting domain experts onto their transformation quests. Lately, Design has a keen interest in technology, but the present-future tension is also found across science, medicine, religion, industry, finance, politics, and pretty much every domain or territory known to humankind.
So, considering the necessary expert knowledge in any of these domains, Design can and should be leveraged to obtain preferred or expected outcomes in any of them.
Design Continuum
If you’ve read this far, hopefully you’ve noticed driving is needed to go through this process. A good designer will know that driving from the present to an expected future is seldomly a straight line.
My argument is that although overspecialization has created a lot of specificity and detail, it’s also made Design lose oversight of the continuity of this drive for transformation. Design must take back control of this continuum, for it lacks impact in any domain and does not work as a verb without it. Why would you change horses mid-river?
End note
As tonkinwise says “Every time you qualify design with, or add design to, some other quality or practice, you are claiming that design does not already do that.”⁶ If designers wish to be respected, we must first stop dismantling, trampling on and flattening our own discipline simply for the sake of our own businesses.
We must also be humble enough to share our abilities with non-designers instead of being the obnoxious twats we usually are on Twitter or other design-ish watering holes. Simply because we, designers, are nobody without the particular domain experts, but can do a lot to enable Design agency inside historically non-Design territories.
Also, if you’re someone, designer or non-designer, who attempts to transform the present into the future, the hard truth is: You can never observe reality in absolute terms. If 2020 has showed us something it’s that reality is fuzzy, chaotic, volatile and uncertain. Rationality and logical deduction can only take you so far. Alternatively, wielding Design’s creative abduction at it, gives you a better chance to make it make sense, empowering you to leverage some value out of it.
Thank you for reading this far! Please leave a comment below if you feel like starting a conversation.
References
- Christina Wodtke, 2020, “Design’s Unsexy Middle Bits”.
- Jared M. Spool, 2018, https://twitter.com/jmspool/status/1079408237399756800
- Michael Kroeger, 2012, “Paul Rand: Conversations with Students”.
- Madame L’Amic, 1972, Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, “Design Q&A”.
- Herbert A. Simon, 1988, “The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial”, Design Issues Vol. 4, №1/2, Designing the Immaterial Society, pp. 67–82
- cameron tonkinwise, 2015, “Just Design”.
- Nigel Cross, 2011, “Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work”.
- Jeffrey Veen, 2001, “The Art & Science of Web Design”.
- Erika Hall, 2019, https://twitter.com/mulegirl/status/1085226710948147200
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2010, “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”.
- Charles Lambdin, 2020, “Design Thinking as Decision Framing”.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2017, “The Logic of Risk Taking”.
