Why, where and how to put lived experience into Design Thinking
The concept of lived experience comes from phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that explores the way in which the phenomena of our human experience appear as meaningful to us. It is a technical term closely related to life worlds, and demonstrates to us the need to always be open to the myriad ways in which the same physical world can be experienced depending on many different individual, collective and social factors. For this reason, the first half of our book Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter helps people explore and enter into lived experience in order to better understand the human and natural systems in which we are embedded.
To help leaders understand how to integrate lived experience into design initiatives, we developed our Customer Experiences with Soul framework, and so in this article in order to demonstrate its importance, I would like to explore two real-world case studies in order to highlight just how powerful this concept can be.
Some of you who are already involved in design thinking practices may already be working with lived experience to some degree and that is great as you are already practicing a conscious form of empathy. However, as you will see in the two case studies in which lived experience has informed the design of interventions in medical and health environments, when you work with the concept using formally structured onotologies, you will be able to better understand the why, how and where to integrate this concept into your own particular initiatives.
The first example comes from Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design in which we describe our in-depth case study from Hospital Sírio Libanês in São Paulo, one of the most important hospitals in Latin America. The senior team had spent some years developing their business strategy and their strategic map, and so their challenge was how to communicate this map to the entire hospital, i.e. every single person at every single level?
Together with the strategy, marketing and HR teams at the hospital, I was asked to help develop a communications event to enable them to do this, and our solution was based on utlising gamification and storytelling in order to be able to do what I call melting the social hierarchy, in other words, breaking down the social barriers between doctors and senior medical staff and the rest of the organisation, in order for each person to be able to develop an empathic understanding of the challenges, tasks and daily experiences not normally discussed.
You can watch a short video of this case study in our opening keynote which we presented at Sustainable Brands London:
Over the course of one week we ran one-hour sessions with up to 100 people each, training 2,500 people in total. They were able to select where to sit on one of ten tables, which had up to ten people each. Through gentle guidance, each table ended up with a wide mix of collaborators from every area and department in the hospital.
We made no attempt to communicate the strategic map as a strategic map — very few people would have understood or related to it in this format. Instead, a sensitivity to the lived experience of the many different backgrounds of collaborators led to my idea of re-designing the strategic map as a story which was laid out on tables which had up to ten people. Each story was so long that one person could only read a part.
Normally in this scienario with this composition of people on these tables, the most senior person would naturally take control and read the material to the others present. However, what happened in this instance was that we had doctors and surgeons listening to secretaries and nutritionists tell the story of how the hospital aimed to reach their five-year vision, and so the traditional social hierarchies started to melt away into an experience of wholeness.
Phenomenology is a way to understand experience in all of its wholeness. While many neuroscientists have given up talking about the divided brain, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist provides an important and revitalised analysis. The world as comprehended by the right hemisphere is entirely different. It sees things in context and understands implicit meaning, metaphor, body language, and emotional expression in the face. As McGilchrist puts it, the right hemisphere ‘has a disposition for the living’, unlike the left hemisphere, which is dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yielding clarity, and the power to manipulate things which are ‘known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless’.
Those of us who work in the area of customer experience therefore must always be mindful of the livingness and wholeness within experience. If we only focus on understanding the content of our experience, we miss the more subtle qualitaitve and dynamic aspects. As designers we can therefore work with phenomenological methodologies to help instil in senior managers a more intuitive understanding and connection with the customer experience of their products and services, and the lived experience of their employees.
The second I would like to explore example comes from Chris Lawer’s assemblage model of embodied experience which he has developed into a structured process for understanding, modelling and developing health ecosystems. This framework is an excellent example of how we work using our Holonomics approach, where lived experience provides the foundation for its non-dualistic approach towards mind and body, society and nature.
He describes his assemblage model in the following manner:
Umio Health Ecosystem Value Design® (HEVD) deploys a philosophy of ecosystem, emergent, relational and affective design thinking to advance the health and social (care) sciences. It goes beyond the dominant biomedical, reductionist and individual person-centric view of health as normal baseline functioning, end-state absence of disease, risk mitigation and a resource for living. Rather, HEVD adopts a wider socio-cultural-material-spatial view of health as individual, family, community and social group powers of acting in the pursuit of valued affective capacities that form positive real experiences with life.
The framework and toolkit was created in order to provide “a complete end-to-end ecosystem value design model and approach for creating more health, building superior lived experiences and recovering illness and disease”. It is based around a design process and twelve templates which are structured into a U process, shown in the figure below:
The problems we seek to address relating to lived experience, such as the management of long-term chronic pain, are mainly based on fragemented practices. Because lived experience within this framework is understood as being whole, it opens up entirely new ways to thinking about the problem space, and allows us to discover radically different forms of systemic solution.
And as I have already mentioned, lived experience is a dynamic phenomenon, one in which we fully encounter in our intuitive minds, an aspect that many quantitative research methodologies fail to capture. (You will see us reference the way in which intuition relates to our ways of knowing the world in our Hospital Sírio Libanês case study in the video included at the start of this article).
In order therefore to understand the complexities and dynamics of a complex health ecosystem, I really recommend that you watch this recent presentation in which Lawer animates the templates in order to fully convey the livingness within lived experience:
It is interesting to consider how Lawer’s U process relates to the most common ways of depicting the typical design thinking process of empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test and implement. The first six stages of the Umio framework are a structured way to enter into the lived experience of those people being researched and the problem being studied, while locating the findings into a formally defined onotology (published in Lawer’s book Umio Health Ecosystem Value Design). This is extremely rare to find in the majority of design thinking projects.
A structured ontology allows a designer to construct hypotheses which can be tested using scienfically replicable methodologies, and which therefore provide insights which can complement the exploratory stages of less-structured informal ideation and co-creation sessions. While experience is a fundamental aspect of all design, it is rare to find the dynamic dimension of wholeness within our lived experience explicitly articulated in the specification of many design thinking and user-centred projects.
So in relation to the why, where and how of lived experience, I would like to conclude with the following three points:
- Lived experience is non-dualistic, while the solutions to problems related to our lived experience are often fragmented, piecemeal and non-systemic. When we consider the ontological factors which generate our lived experiences, we gain the ability to develop more accurate hypotheses and more powerful insights about where solutions may lie.
- We often jump into the ideation stage of design with people from the communities we are wishing to help too soon, without developing a suitable ontology based on lived experience, meaning that our research does not have a clearly articulated foundation within which to locate our findings.
- Lived experience is encountered most fully in our intuition. While quantified and analytical methodologies can provide approximations of descriptions of lived experience, developing complete end-to-end frameworks such as the health ecosystem of Umio or gamified interventions such as the one created for Hospital Sírio Libanês can help us work with lived experience while not necessarily needing to codify every aspect of it.
Good design is always the result of the appreciation, combination and integration of art, science and technology. Exploring lived experience reminds us that some of the best designers are those who have mastered the art of intuitive understanding. So ultimately this is the aim of design thinking: developing better solutions through understanding the human condition in all its dimensions, principally life as it is experienced in all its livingness.
