Disposable design
TL;DR: Embed actual design within design thinking pitches (doesn’t matter if it is researched or not)
In the current age of reduce, reuse and recycle; I am going to commit an unpardonable crime: I’m going to propose maximise & dispose. Now, hold onto the idea and run with me before you take up your cudgels against the heathen ill(eco)logical me.
Design thinking is broadly categorised into five steps. Empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test — all arranged in a seemingly interlocked hexagonal pattern. (don’t ask me…) I don’t want to run into details but heres a primer: empathise with your target audience, define success factors, ideate success scenarios, prototype those scenarios, test for validation. Ok, simple, straightforward and to the point. More often than not though — i have seen this thinking process being applied as a swiss army knife-y solution. A one single solution to all problems — disregarding their shape, size or context. (Hey man! thats why the process’ so great! — NO!)
And, don’t get me wrong: this isn't a writeup about my quixotic charge against design thinking; its more evangelising common sense. Imagine a scenario: you are a stakeholder; with an eye watering budget for a digital overhaul
a budget that would make Solomon blush
a budget that makes the word ‘budget’ sound conservative
And, you invite potentials to come and present their ideas to you. What would you expect? to be treated like royalty? Made to feel special?
Well, the least you would expect is to be given a glimpse of the future. A glimpse that would give your ‘analog’ way of thinking, digital manna. A promise of rainbows, clear skies and unicorns. Of course you know its mostly hogwash — but you want to live in that moment, a promise of heaven that promises more than it can deliver. I say this because of 4 things: men, machine, method and marauding bunch of political detractors inside and outside your control. Because lets face it; organisations are made up of people united by their pursuit of individual agendas.
(its actually, men, machine, model, & method)
Enter Disposable Design. Unintelligently, it alludes to the provision to sell to people who don’t understand design. Now, I know that in one fell swoop — I’ve offended a significant part of the population. But the minuscular dim comprehension, when design nuances are communicated to people; pain me to no extent.
The intent of disposable design is to allow the seed of design to germinate within a sell conversation. Often, I have noticed the inability of people not comprehending the solution / not being able to visualize the result of the song and dance being played to them. Its like pied piper being given a dog whistle. It just dosen’t work.
By now you must be thinking “well, this isn’t new… we have tried all that before — people get biased!”
I know, and i agree that they do! but selling the same old loop of…
- designing for →insert customer name ← target audience by researching them
- empathising with →insert customer name ← target audience
- defining →insert customer name ← target audience problem area,
- ideating a solution for →insert customer name ← target audience
- prototyping and validating for →insert customer name ← target audience
…isn’t going to cut it anymore. Agencies are getting smarter and smarter. And, they are getting wider in their offerings too. Its one thing to peddle dreams and another fulfilling them; and increasingly, agencies are doing just that: they promise fulfilment. Today, its via sub-contracting or acquisition (you know i’m talking about you wink! wink!) but tomorrow it may as well be a bunch of madly paid unicorns tucked away under a basement manufacturing dreams for the Solomon’s of the world.
Ok, now i hope i have scared you almost enough to start considering this dis-possibility (couldn’t resist)
Selling, at the end of the day is storytelling — no matter how well your solution stacks up, no matter your strength and market presence, no matter your political stratagems, no matter your ability to sustain and prevail for your long standing customer; (don’t trust me: these matter — i’m just doing this for effect)…
…what your pitch defense leader babbles in front of a judgement room impacts whether you make it or wreck it. And God forbid if your pitch defence lead isn't bought into your story / empathetic / defined / ideated (Inceptioned design thinking — woha!) You’d ideally, want this guy to be up and at ’em. Disposable design: the art of the possible gives this guy a new lease to talk through. The confidence that this radiates in a pitch is enormous.
“how does one validate whether disposable design makes sense?”
You’re right, you cant fully validate whether disposable design will be watertight. One cannot, thats where your relationship with the marauding bunch of political detractors matters.
But,
this isn’t the right answer. In fact, this isn’t the right question to begin with. the question really should be:
“How do we make disposable design an accepted part of the sell cycle?”
To elaborate, how do we embed disposability into the weirdly interlocked hexagonal pattern shown upstairs.
For years, implementors have been asking this question — but in different words. Here are samples:
“You are going to take HOW MUCH TIME?”
“Do we really need to do so much research with so many users?”
“Why is your ‘crayon work’ so expensive?!”
Agreed! These are flippant, but there is a fundamental need here that needs to be addressed. It is that design needs to be much faster, more agile. AH! AGILE! Now we’re getting somewhere!
Agility and disposability are quite different. But in a way, the latter is an effect of the former. Im going to go to the development side of the fence to explain this: (yes, the fence still exists and it forever will)
Sprint retrospectives are in reality a fancy way of saying ‘ok lets partially / dispose our understanding of that user story and build it with the new understanding.’ (Yes, its harsh but then this whole writeup has that tone and you’ve got so far anyway)
Insofar to say that code development got commoditised years ago. Those fancy front end developers were really in demand sometime back (Site administrators anyone?) but all these roles got swept under the mythical unicorn wave. Now, we all know unicorns dont exist; and hence ‘sprint retrospectives’
I hereby give a war cry to commoditise design thinking. ‘Agilise’ user empathy, definition and ideation. These are the last bastions of waterfall-ish working; after prototyping and testing got all agiled-up!
And, what better way to do that than to introduce disposable design. Start ideating and prototyping even before you’ve spoken to an end user, a stakeholder, a partner or a competitor for that matter. Surely, design research firms have enough data to start creating disposable designs and tweaking them after winning the bid / pre-validation! Dont they?! I mean, its like that silly joke of a skeptical patient being surprised that a specialist doctor is still ‘practicing’ after 20 years! (dont worry if you dont get it — its silly)
Embedding disposable design into the design thinking process will be add the needed chutzpah to the porridge.
So, how DO you encompass disposable design around those four other hexagons shown in the figure?
Ill allude to the 4 M’s i referred to upstairs (careful: there’s some intermingling of subjects so watch out for that)
MEN:
People are important (well, at least till today. A.I. and machine learning may change that soon). Unicorns that don’t exist for real have driven this already mature market to the brink. Throw a stone in a crowd and it will probably hit a frontend javascript developer who is amazingly proficient in a new fangled library that you’ve never heard of. Add to that your stakeholder’s dim perception of design and non existent grasp of systems (i like that word: its so systemy without meaning anything at all!) and you have got a disparate set of skilled, egoistic people not ready to listen to anyone. Marshalling these vectors could only be done by a combination of factors.
Well, First you have got to be above the big 3-O to talk sensibly about design and its maturity over the years. Add in a dash of cynicism and a healthy dose of creative liberalism when it comes to requirements specs. One must also have the skin texture of a Triceratops — eats leaves for sustenance but can fend of a Tyrannosaurus if required. (comes from years of listening to self proclaimed customer design gurus). In other words, one must be experienced from the ground up, should have had experience in the trenches and taken a bullet or two for themselves and their men.
MACHINE
Two: Should have built a formidable creative set of resources over the years. This only means (today) interface templates for various form factors — ready to be deployed at a moments notice. Ideally, at an enterprise scale (ooo, big word) it probably could be a design language system thats flexible enough to twist and adapt to super changing needs at short notice.
MODEL
Taking the above argument to the next level (and i’m tripping here…), make that a Unified design language framework — UDF (an unabashed love child of masculine yet geeky Code fallen head over heels for feminine curvy Deezine). A deployable, reusable, adaptable code snippet library / framework that functions in a dozen different ways within a set context (remember left shift y’all) to materialize workable prototypes before the late Stephen Hawking’s synthesiser can say ‘materialize’. Now, this is a sales guy’s wet dream right there but, as hard as it sounds — it isn’t! Ask my good friend Marcos from work!
METHOD
Yeah, this one is tough. Since its a changing beast. Its like ‘Mahishasura’ (the mythical transformational beast in Hindu lore that kept changing form before dying of Godess Durga’s hands)
Three: Heres a visual to explain that though process, the idea is to learn to run before walking but coming back to learn to walk after you’ve run some way. (I know that makes no sense but stay with me)
Disposable design intends to operates on two levels:
- Engagement layer: The active engagement pursuit that houses the design thinking hexagons within it.
- Knowledge layer: The core support to your active engagement, unsung hero’s, behind the scene, toiling away in the shadows.
The engagement layer begins with the pre-proto stage. The pre-proto stage is essentially the heart of disposable design. ‘Pre proto’ is the ‘learn to run before walking’ bit. And that translucent black band that goes out from the research and ideation into the pre-proto stage is not what you think — its not going back in time to align the pre-prototype; its to dispose the misaligned aspects of the pre-proto to dovetail into the prototyping stage and onwards to the proto++ stage where actual, contextual learnings define the end user experience.
And, this is the ‘coming back to learn to walk’ bit.
The day you really engage with your customer/user/stakeholder/insert persona here; you have a rough idea of the vision that your target audience is working on. And, you have an artefact to potentially communicate through. Not just a spoken spiel thats already canned. Moreover, since you know you’ve begun this engagement with a ‘disposable’ mindset; designer bias (this is my baby and i wont let anyone touch it) wont set in and derail the entire engagement.
In essence, you have brought agility to the first part of this engagement. I mean, lets face it: sooner or later someone is going to start doing this at scale. Rather you than anyone else right?
Now, there’s short & long term value augmentation here:
- A serious head start to the design cycle
- A serious head start to the dev cycle
- An orgasmically happy product owner and stakeholder
- Building from experience with AND for your MEN
- And finally, a rich, ever expanding knowledge base esp. around your UDF, front end and integration based resources. You are leveraging your MACHINE-ations to make this happen, meaning you are confident enough that changes can be accommodated on the fly within your systems when ideation and research indicates it to you giving you the ability to dispose redundant / inapplicable ideas.
Points 3,4 and 5 above are the Knowledge layer. Depending upon your collective faith in the process, it is formed of a healthy and kicking UDF populated by a:
- creative library: A sample set of predefined iconography, visual components, imagery, interaction design elements, standard concepts for popular use cases (e.g.: ecommerce)
- frontend library: All of the components described above in a responsive, progressive, native / adaptive format on all popular(one can dream right?) frontend (.net, java , MVC, placeholder for latest new fangled tech)
- backend library: Predefined API connectors, component-ised middleware platform elements (at least whatever can be component-ised) enabling rapid use for the front end components above- and eventually the ‘engagement layer’ in the diagram.
and more importantly, the
- people who make up your troupe.
A UDF allows you to create disposable design without actual wastage. To be honest, my opening lines about encouraging disposable design to maximise consumption was shock and awe (it got your attention…), but in reality; its a different perspective on reduce, reuse, recycle without apparently making your audience feel underprivileged.
Right… so by now if you are not convinced -then youll never be. Maybe you just want something else? Like a potato…
Cheerio!
