Down Town with Design Think

Nussbaum has concluded that design thinking is a failed experiment. Norman calls it a useful myth. Design thinking is no longer a cool word to sell your designs, your company, or to get people to think differently. In an effort to bring it to the masses we’ve all trivialized the entire ordeal. Design thinking has been overused, converted into a symbol ridden ritual and turned into a meaningless meeting of minutes memo (Oh for the joy of alliteration!).

While the world awaits something new to play with, I am still going to DT to grab a pint as regularly as I can. I dont have time to find out what process is in vogue and what jargons help people listen to you. I have been lucky to meet a few design thinkers, who have helped me think better. And well I just drew the path from there.

My tip: Get a feel for the subject, dont treat is as thinking outside a box. I think thats why people get frustrated with the endeavor. They live in a box and try to get out of it. Wake up you! You built the walls of the box!

To me design thinking starts with being a polymath. Every design thinker I respect has been a polymath. A polymath is someone who sees patterns instead of compartments, rather like connecting boxes together and giving them porous walls. Technically a polymath is supposed to be a genius with a high IQ, who has a vast breadth of many subjects in commendable depth. These people use their knowledge of many subjects to join the dots and converge at interesting patterns, turning them into novel ideas. A polymath requires strong imagination to make connections between vastly different ideas.

Design Thinking

Think about these people and tell me you see what I see: (I am picking familiar, dead people from Wikipedia for these bullets):

• Charles and Ray Eames

• Pythagoras

• Hypatia

• Buckminster Fuller

• Isaac Newton

• Galileo Galilei

• Charles Sanders Peirce

• Leonardo Da Vinci

Specializing in one field is alot like riding a horse with reins. You look ahead. We need to look to the right, left, above, below and some even look behind. I’m always fascinated by chameleons, they must have the capability to produce such original ideas! I wouldnt vouch for an entire world of generalists and polymaths as well. Specializing in a field builds a niche market which is quite good for anybody’s wallet. Popular design groups in fact apply this approach by employing specialists in different fields and teaming them together. Thus the design thinker is in fact a team of thinkers rather than one studious individual.

In summary, design thinking lies somewhere between recognizing patterns, systems design and vivid imagination. There is no magic wand. You cant roll or sit in a boardroom to achieve it.  Its not about being left or right brained, or ticking a checklist of processes or reading a best-selling book. Instead you think about it so much in your head that you elevate your mind to a state of flow. You wake up thinking about it, you talk about it to the stranger seated beside you on the bus, to your boss, to your daughter who’s four and to the grimy dishes your washing. And most of all it is not about spending time trying and planning to design think when you can spend time thinking and trying out samples of ideas.

Inventia

Re-inventing the wheel is not such a bad thing because the wheel is worth re-inventing..
- Gayatri Spivak

One of those things that make you smile.

When I started off as a conceptualizer, quite a few people told me that I need to spend less time on common problems as sometimes hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people have already worked on it. Why do you want to re-invent the wheel? I was often asked.

It made sense on some level, because I was young and raw and what I needed to do was to first and foremost create things. I spent too much time on just thinking about problems at different levels.

But somehow, I still secretly liked to think of problems that everyone claims to have solved.

You see, maybe there is something better than the wheel. Maglevs for instance.

You cant limit human imagination. Trying to re-invent is an interesting mental exercise. First in trying to break your mental modals of what your familiar with and second in having the courage that you can crack a problem that thousands of people will quite likely resist because they may not be willing to break their mental modals. Its like a battle against all odds.

And like Spivak says, perhaps it is a worthy problem to plod with after all.

Got a Problem?

Know that time when you see something and spot on, you realize the eternal truth that brilliant things are in fact simple things. Things that you always knew but never ‘realized’….

Discovering Polya should offer sheer joy to anyone in the field of science, technology, design, marketing…just about any field which needs a sprinkle of radical and finely chopped ingenuity.

Straight from Wikipedia: (go here)

“If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it.”Or: “If you cannot solve the proposed problem, try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem?”

Sustainable Interface Design

Have you heard of sustainable interface design?

Neither have I.

But there was a white board and well sustainability is really some sort of trend these days and so someone wrote: ‘How do we design for sustainable interfaces?’ on it with a dark green (serendipitously) marker. 

So I Dialled L for Listening. Always seems to have an answer to these kind of things. And well, what I got was a really long, endless answer which I am quoting below. Let me know what you think

Defining ‘Sustain’:

• To Bear
• To Support
• Endure without yielding
• Provide Necessities
• Keep Going

 Defining ‘Interface’

• Point of Interaction
• Between two systems

 Defining ‘Design’

• “Design is everything”-Paul Rand

 So then Sustainable Interface Design could include things like these

• Expandable Interface (Keeping in mind expansion efforts in the future_
• Requires Minimal Maintenance/Redesign
• Focuses on Task/Action and not peripheral decoration
• Minimizes user effort (Don’t Make me Think-Steve Krug)
• Energy Efficient/ Minimizes need to be ‘On’. Can the task be done without paper/electricity?
• Well documented so the work can be continued by another with less effort
• Maintains the right balance between complexity and simplicity
• Has/ Makes use of reusable artifacts and patterns. Don’t reinvent the wheel when it isn’t required
• Collaborate through efficient meetings which are to the point and short
• Use clouds for servers whenever possible to reduce unused server spaces
• Attention to users with disabilities
• Workout, eat well, meditate. Your ‘Self’ will reflect on your yields in work
• Maintain cordially pleasant environments. Friction increases in an unhappy/frustrated environment
• …
• …

Sustainability is more of a movement, a philosophy, some zen way of life..it will need to become a part of you, the way you do everything, from switching off the lights when you leave the room to making good interfaces.

My “P” Story…

The Rebel

I rebelled throughout design school against “Process”..the foul “P” word.  I could never believe that you could take a chart paper, sketch pens and people into a room and come up with ideas (brainstorms they called it).  I’d rather take the bus and mull over a brief in my head. What that resulted in was poor grades, and well the label “Rebel” and “Lost”. You see the thing was I wasnt trying to be a rebel. I was lost yes. But the thing was I was trying to design; I failed sometimes, I succeeded sometimes. I just didnt follow the process very much. 

Well I’ve been with the industry now. And Im a lot more grown up. I still dont follow the process. I think I do a pretty decent job of designing. Until today I never thought I could explain what I did. I said “I dont follow processes. I just do things”. But over the last few days I’ve been talking to this new kid designer who is hungry and eager to learn everything. I had to find a way to explain things to him. 

And I think I just did. You see, all the while I was following a process. I’ve been noticing there is a pattern in the way I work. Its just not the “prescribed process”. So here it goes. I dont expect you to follow me. But I do think its important that you figure out what works for you and to follow that when you design, whenever you can of course. We are all subject to our abilities.

Introduction to Deconstruction

When I was 18, I was introduced to Jacques Derrida. His work arose my curiosity and for a long time he remained one of those philosophers whom I couldnt understand. To over-simplify (all heavy readers, pardon my brevity) Derrida suggests a fundamental way of thinking: Deconstruction. Do go in detail when you find the time. But the crux is to search for meaning, to look beyond words and decorations and then to look through them. Meanings vary with interpretation. I really like the way one of my teachers explained it: “Its like taking a flower, taking it part by part to understand it, the petals, the stems and so on, and then grasping the flower in both its entirety as well as in the fact that its made of individual parts that function on their own. When you take the flower part by part, the flower’s meaning is lost, but you need to understand that its still a flower”. And therein lies the beautiful confusion that I took years to figure out.

Question and Seek

While you get lost in these ideas, let me introduce you to my process.

1) Question

2) Seek, If you can answer, thats great, but seek

3) Depending on time, feasibility, how interested you are and other such constraints, work around with 1, 2. This one needs a little practice, but you’ll figure out your peace along the way.

Question everything you do and seek. Why is the button here? What meaning does it add to the interface? Should it be here? Can I do this some other way? Do I have to do it some other way? What are the benefits of breaking convention here? What purpose does it solve? How many people does it help? Do we want to help those people? What is the cost of changing the button? Can we afford it at this stage? 

Thats it. You may disagree with me. You may argue that design processes all follow this pattern in one form or another. Yes, but in our eagerness, I think we forget that design is really about asking the right questions and continuing on the journey of seeking. So I keep it simpler. Ask all kinds of questions, to yourself, to the managers, to the developers, to the team. 

Assembly line gives birth to rhizome

The world is chaotic. You can’t treat things like an equation or an assembly line. The design process developed when we created products which were conceived in the industrial revolution. It was meant to be iterative on a long term, not on short spurts. But we live in a rhizomic information age today and we have a different set of problems. Modifications maybe required.

Keep moving around and around in circles, till you find all your answers. Allow yourself to get lost. You see, its when you get lost in the forest that your likely to find the witch’s cake castle. If you didnt you’d have found your way back home long ago and the witch would have continued to live. She’ll probably figure out a way to expand her evil self and attack you a few years later anyway. Or maybe somebody else will find out the tons of cake she had at her disposal.

You will never know. But you need to decide first if its worth losing your path in the first place. For me it was. My time with the witch was frustrating, but well she’s a cookie now. And i enjoy every bite.

L on Design Thinking

A colleague shot out an email seeking some answers on an often-discussed topic ‘design thinking’. L as usual gave her opinions:

I: How do you define design thinking?

L: I think the Eames got it right. Design Thinking is being able to think at the micro and the macro levels, the multiple and the singular perspectives.  

Do take a look at ‘Powers of Ten‘. [Thank you Bomi Lee!]

If you can think at many different levels and from many different perspectives your insights and ideas will be richer, deeper and definitely closer to the ‘ideal solution’.

I: How is it different from creative thinking/ innovation in business/social domains?

L: Jargons. The core is always the same irrespective of what you call it.

I: What is the specific role of designers in this process of design thinking? Or put another way, how are designers better qualified to do this, as compared to engineers/MBAs etc?

L: Design thinking is required of everyone and not just designers. One needs to constantly question ‘what if’, ‘how’ and so on. Perhaps in a team the designer can manage the trends in thinking rather than direct or control it.

I: Can you give me some examples of design thinking from your practice/ point to some examples online?

L: How can you design without thinking? 

Meanwhile L’s note of concern to everyone: One must be careful while reading works of design thinkers: there are the purists and the practicalists.  Allow the purists to inspire you, to let you dream and allow the practicalists to support you when you are in despair and frustration.

How much Innovation do we Really Need?

On Valentines day over a classic english breakfast at a small, homely cafe.

B: I’ve been thinking over the services industry in the country. Often clients come to us wanting nothing but lowly work. We know we can do better, come up with new stuff. But the costs and infrastructure often hurdle us into a corner. Sometimes I feel instead of wanting to be, we should rather accept that we are a services country and try to excel at it instead of struggling with odds.

A: We’ve just acquired a new large middle class. Western societies have already answered alot of their common problems. We have a long distance to go to even get there. We really can’t force too much innovation.

L: Why do we feel shy of generating our own, that suits our own needs and situations? You see these highly industrialized societies may not want innovations that stem from their ideologies. We need to have more faith, more self-esteem, more self-driven natures. I agree we don’t have the necessary infrastructure for innovation, but that only makes the creative effort more fun!

A: Like the girl who ran a washing machine with a cycle.

L: Loved that.

H: The thing about moving forward is that often it is not one person’s efforts. A whole team of people at various levels who are committed on their own will to work will drive us forward. We can’t wait for a leader or a magic solution to get us there. 

L: Agree there too. Innovation and development should be in a flow, that goes from one end to another. Each one creates an environment for the other.

…We must begin our journey….

Design Process is no Assembly Line

Conversation over noodles sauteed in black bean sauce and some shiraz in a food court.

L: I’ve seen people follow processes so blindly that they can’t come up with an idea. You can’t get great ideas from a process strictly followed. 

AP: Process should be treated more like a tool that you use to carve something. Is process about coming up with an idea?

L: umm. I wouldn’t know. I never follow a design process. All I do is diverge, which lets me analyze/ introspect and then ideate from silly to refreshing. I jot down as many ideas as I can. I keep thinking about the brief. I do most of this within my head. 

MS: Where did you pick that up from by the way?

L: This book by Brenda Laurel. That was back in design school. She lists some really nice processes. When I came across one particular process I said aloud ‘ Hey what I do has a name!’I think what I described was my takeaway from it.

AP: Isn’t that a process in itself?

L: [Laughs with sudden realization]I agree. But it still opposes alot of traditional methodologies. User interviews for instance. I aint saying that its bad for design. Understanding their perspective is important. But I am not going to rely on their opinions completely. I am going to rely on the fact that I care for them, which I do. You know like a mother-child relationship. A good mom can be defined as one who wouldn’t give everything her child wanted, but will make sure that the child receives the best of everything. 

MS: Alot of designers forget to imbibe the process in them to find their own variations. They tend to lean on the process so much that they get stuck along the way.

L: Agreed if there was a recipie for solving problems the world wouldn’t be this way!

AP: Its always easier to talk to non-design oriented members in the team when you use words from the design process dictionary. It makes them feel at ease. You can’t tell people that your going to sit all day and think!

L: Yes thats why I started this conversation. I did try telling a client once about how I work and I think they understood. I didn’t even use jargons. I told them we’ll ‘Go nowhere’ at first, analyze and then we’ll ‘Go somewhere’ in a bit. It was great to be understood. But I worry if I’ll have more support on this in the future.

MS: Your process you mean? [winks]

L: [Makes a mental note and takes a swig] Aah. Process makes me think of an assembly line. It immediately puts me in a cardboard box ready for distribution. I need a new word to describe it.

Getting past CTRL C,V at School

Browsing the internet is great stuff. You get information at your tips of all types for all needs.

But it also means that increasingly class assignments will cease to be original, driven by pages of information blindly copied and pasted. The question is getting past that and teaching the younger generation what lies beneath strung up words. 

You see its a disheartening to have to imagine a future full of leaders and followers wasted on a high calorie information diet with absolutely no creative exercises.

Emphasis on design thinking as a part of a school curriculum is probably a good idea.