Web Directions South 2010 Design Thinking & Doing
by Digital Eskimo on Oct 24, 2010
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A talk by David Gravina, Digital Eskimo's Creative Director and founder on using Design Thinking to expand the digital designers problem domain.
A talk by David Gravina, Digital Eskimo's Creative Director and founder on using Design Thinking to expand the digital designers problem domain.
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ibox2000
couldnt agree more with your passion for japanese books and design
Kenya Hara - Designing Design
IDEO have written books about it,
Fast Company is in a lather about it,
MBAs are doing it,
Management consultancies are charging a fortune for it
its been around as an idea for a while now
- and despite Don Norman’s protestations .. it IS the hot new thing.
explore why its an important idea for people working in the digital design space
and why for us its as much about the doing as the thinking.
follow a design approach here and break our big problem up into smaller pieces.
Defining design is one of those things designers try to do from time to time - with really no definitive outcome.
The bottom line is it means many things to many people - Wikipedia states confidently that no generally-accepted definition of “design” exists
We could have a whole conference on it.
Some see it as what designers do, or the artefacts of this - the things they design,
or just the surface or the look and feel of something.
All of us in this room know of course its much more than these things ...
“… a process of creative and critical thinking that allows information and ideas to be organized,
decisions to be made,
situations to be improved,
and knowledge to be gained.”
.. A creative way of solving problems.
its interesting to think about thinking isnt it. (pause!)
Dont worry im not going to get all edward de bono on you!
I’ll keep it simple ... thinking in this context is the thing we do to create the why - and to a large extent - the what part of a project - otherwise known as the strategy.
SO thinking creates strategy - its strategizing.
or ... Strategic Design
or ... Strategic Design
or ... Strategic Design
or ... Strategic Design
You get Kick ass super powers.
The Mgt/Business/Strategy people do the thinking
The Designer then uses design process (with some thinking of course)to create a solution to what is already defined. Dont get me wrong ... Briefs are a useful communication tool ...
but in this model of design the overall direction in which the project is going - the strategy - is more or less locked in.
- rebriefing or even encouraging total directional changes
but more often than not the reality sits somewhere between slapping the proverbial lipstick on the pig to .....
at best .... executing someone else’s idea - making it better sure -
but in the end really only working within the predefined vision already conceived for the project.
(with their butchers paper and post it notes of course!) and help to DESIGN the STRATEGY.
(WITH the other stakeholders that are already there btw - a key tenant of Design is after all collaboration - and great design relies on multi-disciplinary teams)
- we're augmenting their skills
-and providing the design process and some guiding principles to follow.
What this means is that Designers - who were once only the Doers
- are now also able to be the Thinkers and can begin to influence the way in which strategy is created.
Because designers are doers
- we use our hands to think
- prototypes allow us to evolve our ideas well before they are finalised (in fact they are never finalised!)
A Design led strategy values experimentation and iteration
over fixed plans and major investment in unproven ideas.
there are many more
And the Business community is taking note.
Why should this interest you.
Well one reason is this graph
This is my highly unscientific approximation of all the problems of the world.
The white wedge is my guesstimate of how many of those are being responded too with any form of actual Design.
Not Design Thinking mind you - JUST Design.
On one level its about the enormous opportunities to grow your business (if you own one)
or getting involved in challenging projects at someone elses company if you don’t
or maybe its about working on stuff you believe in.
There's a world of challenging problems that designers simply arent getting involved in.
It's such a HUGE opportunity for us all its hard to overstate it.
For me the extremely exciting projects in that rather large pie up on the screen includes:
- mixed mobility public transport systems
- healthy food systems
- working on water and other resource scarcity issues
- and of course the mother of all problems
- climate change.
A good Design Process can be applied to almost any problem.
There are domain specific techniques and approaches
that make certain designers more suitable to particular problems
but we all share a similar top level process - or atleast all good designers do.
I'd like to share an example we've been working on at Digital Eskimo - designing our own Strategy.
Our industry isn't renowned for strategically planning our own businesses.
we work off instinct and respond to the market demands
often designers aren't particularly business savvy & we certainly don’t like doing traditional business planning.
In 10 years of running Digital Eskimo we have only ever written ONE business plan.
founder had MBA - occasional update in the first 6-12 months it pretty much stayed in the drawer. After he left i lost it.
Since, we've developed specific strategies/tactics
- mimicked traditional business planning and strategic approaches.
take off our jeans and put on our ill fitting business suits
try to be business strategists for the day.
not another SWOT driven list of strategies and tactics (though we did this too)
not a standard business plan that would please an investor or my old business partner
one we could iterate,
one that embraced prototyping.
It had to be collaborative and highly visual - very flexible ..... and lots of fun!
but still with the rigour that would allow ultimately for tasks to be assigned to people
to be delivered in time and budget constraints.
In short .. i wanted to design our strategy.
I havent seen anything like this ..... so we prototyped it.
one we could iterate,
one that embraced prototyping.
It had to be collaborative and highly visual - very flexible ..... and lots of fun!
but still with the rigour that would allow ultimately for tasks to be assigned to people
to be delivered in time and budget constraints.
In short .. i wanted to design our strategy.
I havent seen anything like this ..... so we prototyped it.
one we could iterate,
one that embraced prototyping.
It had to be collaborative and highly visual - very flexible ..... and lots of fun!
but still with the rigour that would allow ultimately for tasks to be assigned to people
to be delivered in time and budget constraints.
In short .. i wanted to design our strategy.
I havent seen anything like this ..... so we prototyped it.
one we could iterate,
one that embraced prototyping.
It had to be collaborative and highly visual - very flexible ..... and lots of fun!
but still with the rigour that would allow ultimately for tasks to be assigned to people
to be delivered in time and budget constraints.
In short .. i wanted to design our strategy.
I havent seen anything like this ..... so we prototyped it.
one we could iterate,
one that embraced prototyping.
It had to be collaborative and highly visual - very flexible ..... and lots of fun!
but still with the rigour that would allow ultimately for tasks to be assigned to people
to be delivered in time and budget constraints.
In short .. i wanted to design our strategy.
I havent seen anything like this ..... so we prototyped it.
one we could iterate,
one that embraced prototyping.
It had to be collaborative and highly visual - very flexible ..... and lots of fun!
but still with the rigour that would allow ultimately for tasks to be assigned to people
to be delivered in time and budget constraints.
In short .. i wanted to design our strategy.
I havent seen anything like this ..... so we prototyped it.
one we could iterate,
one that embraced prototyping.
It had to be collaborative and highly visual - very flexible ..... and lots of fun!
but still with the rigour that would allow ultimately for tasks to be assigned to people
to be delivered in time and budget constraints.
In short .. i wanted to design our strategy.
I havent seen anything like this ..... so we prototyped it.
because its happening right now and is in constant flux
Following our process - firstly we immersed further into our own business
- we conducted research on key clients/prospects and past clients for instance.
an external consultant from the CIIC to provide valuable objective advice
our own staff about what they’d like to see happen.
(1/3 of our team have direct involvement in and ownership of aspects of the strategy)
We then spent significant time in Ideation - and continue to do so
- first creating our 6 core objectives for the next couple of years for the company - followed by multiple brainstorming sessions generating hundreds of outlandish strategies and tactics to achieve them.
a system that would also allow our team to at a glance see our strategy,
input into it and develop
a clear sense of where we are going.
The result of this work is the DE Strategy Wonder Wall in our studio
the use of post-its on a wall - as simple as that sounds - for our strategic plan - is actually critical.
it affords behaviors that we wanted to encourage
provides a highly visible and collaborative snap shot of our company strategy for all to see and interact with.
Most importantly its A LIVING SYSTEM... not a dead document.
So what other things can Designers design?
specifically what things can UX and Interactive Designers design most readily?
One of the newest and grooviest areas
where Design Thinking is starting to take hold is Service Design
designing an interactive system is a form of service design albeit, in a constrained domain.
if you're designing a system to meet the needs of users or customers
- then you can view that system as providing a service to them and design it accordingly.
This is how we approach our UX work at Digital Eskimo.
designing the physical and cultural support systems,
business processes and other components that create a great experience for people engaging with an organisation.
Suze Ingram touched on this a while ago in a talk she gave at a Usability conference
and we certainly believe it at Digital Eskimo
Human Centred UX people make great Service Designers.
We live in a service economy - so there's a nice big slice of that pie i showed you earlier up for grabs.
And of course designing whole services
- whether they be transport services or medical services -
almost always means a better outcomes for people and the planet.
.. but the ones that i find the most exciting are those that respond to the very messy problems of the world ...
in particular climate change and social change.
Not only is Design capable of solving almost any problem
- its REALLY good at embracing and engaging with these complex - or wicked - problems.
The project aims to facilitate the creation of an open source toolkit
to help designers to become capable of taking on the broader design challenges in the world ive been referring too.
Consider it a share library for you to draw on (and input into) as you embrace these bigger problems and design for them.
We’ll be co-creating with the design community
- method libraries, case studies, stories and processes
- a lot more we’ve yet to imagine.
Designers and agencies will need time
will provide road maps to assist in the process.
- as we increasingly engage with
- embrace - and sometimes even solve the messiest problems of our times.