A future Design practice
The ‘Design Contexts’ module in Masters in Design Futures (RMIT) tasked us to consider our future design practice. Practitioners Dr Zaana Howard, Dr Tristan Cooke, Leah Heiss and Janna DeVylder offered insights into their practice over the course of the semester.
I will begin by setting up the context of my design practice. Following this, I will outline a key learning from each practitioner, referencing their field, supported by personal insights relating to my future practice. This post will offer high level insights, with a detailed view illustrated through the following journey map. The journey map takes these insights and connects them to my future practice, outlining dreams, considerations and ways to get there.
Framing design
Design means different things to different people. A lot of us associate the term with form-giving; some of us with graphics, some of us with architecture, some of us with smartphone apps, some of us with systems, like Medicare or State Transit, and some of us with our natural and man-made environments.
Design is about all these things; everything around us, in fact. The design of our world has been by us, for us. Designers are out there creating new and better ways to live life based on our basic needs, desires, socio-economic status, geolocations, and much more.
To frame design, I’ll refer to a quote from great thinker, Victor Papanek, in his famous work of 1971, ‘Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change’:
‘All people are designers. All that we do, almost all the time is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act towards a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganising a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple pie, choosing sides for a back-lot baseball game, and educating a child. Design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order.’
To build upon Papanek’s quote, I’d like to point out the centrality of human beings in everything he illuminated. Designing with human beings at the core is termed human-centred design. It is this concept upon which my practice is based, and where the practices of the above-mentioned practitioners are based, where it works to unite the insights of the four practitioners with my own personal insights, for the endeavour we are all working to achieve.
Strategic design and building the designers capability
Dr Zaana Howard is Head of Human Centred Design at Charter Mason in Melbourne, Australia. Her PhD focussed on, ‘understanding design thinking in practice in large organisations and how people build capability in design thinking and grow to mastery.’ Dr Howard provides insights into systemic and strategic design and the collaborative practices that underpin optimal design outcomes. She references Helsinki Design Lab to help clarify strategic design:
‘Traditional definitions of design often focus on creating discrete solutions — be it a product, a building, or a service. Strategic design applies some of the principles of traditional design to “big picture” systemic challenges like health care, education, and climate change. It redefines how problems are approached, identifies opportunities for action, and helps deliver more complete and resilient solutions. Strategic design is about crafting decision-making.’
Dr Howard’s input, as well as additional research I conducted, opened up the possibilities of human-centred design to effect real change, where a need for designers to act on their duty to develop social, political and cultural aptitudes is paramount. Design plays a significant role in forming new human practices, therefore requiring a cogent, holistic approach.
Human behaviours and designing with magic
Dr Tristan Cooke is Human Centred Service Design Leader at National Australia Bank. His PhD is in human-centred design for mobile mining equipment. He states, ‘Intellectually, this means I’m an expert in human centred qualitative behavioural research.’ Dr Cooke highlighted methods for research, where observing or shadowing customers (and potential customers) can be an effective way to learn a great deal ‘without being too creepy’, he states.
Mat Hunter, Chief Design Officer at the Design Council defines service design as:
‘A service is something that I use but do not own. Service design is therefore the shaping of service experiences so that they really work for people. Removing the lumps and bumps that make them frustrating, and then adding some magic to make them compelling.’
Behavioural research is a powerful tool for service design, as well as other areas of design. Dr Cooke’s insights on research methods piqued my interest, where he reiterated the weight research has in any design process. Varying methods of research exist and it depends on the problem space as to which method is suitable. Engaging in research as a designer (as opposed to applying another’s research), aids decision-making along the way. This is a powerful human-centred design idea, where exposure to the design context impacts decision-making at every level of a projects process.
Technology for the under-represented
Leah Heiss is an expert in design, technology and health. Her current work investigates the positive impact of transdisciplinary teams using next-generation materials and processes for therapeutic development, i.e: technology enabled augmented jewellery, garments and devices. Heiss’ area of work is unfortunately uncommon, where we mostly see technology-enabled devices existing in saturated markets for healthy consumers.
Transdisciplinary collaboration is an interesting challenge for designers as Heiss points out. Communication, process and documentation are key to her practice, where understanding the constraints of the different disciplines in a team is critical. Heiss works with engineers, scientists, technologists, geologists, academics, just to name a few, where her team rely heavily upon the continuous creation and iteration of artefacts as the main tools for their communication, as well as evidence of a project's progression and refinement of the various constraints as they occur.
Recording process becomes interesting here, as projects notoriously place emphasis on the final outcome, rather than the process taken. Heiss flips this notion on its head and is completing her PhD on new ways to record; to archive project structures as they evolve over time. She casts questions of value upon her practice in this way, endeavouring to uncover her own process for the benefit of others. Forming sound methods to record throughout is key to ensuring integrity of the work, but also creates future possibility in the discarded data.
Heiss highlighted the consciousness required within one’s practice and the effective communication methods required to reach the project goal. Considering the need for teams to develop unified ways of working is a crucial part of a successful project; transdisciplinary teams become most teams in this way; no team has people with exact skill sets, backgrounds or experience levels. Considering human-centred design becomes particularly interesting when considering the methods for design that occur within teams or organisations as well as for customers and the people we partner with.
Defining our practices
Janna DeVylder is co-founder and principal of Meld Studios based in Sydney, Australia. Janna describes Meld as a lab where, through human-centred practices, they use strategic and interaction design to create customer experiences. Discussing Meld’s approach, process, philosophies, tools and techniques with Janna gave me huge insights into the relationships between these three areas of design.
With strategic design sitting at the systemic level, service design works to connect customers to strategic design through their usage of products and services; interaction design supports strategic and service design through the design of interactions and touchpoints, digital or otherwise. As I’ve assimilated from Dr Cooke also, service design as a term can intercept other areas of design too; it is a moving and changing concept across work places, industries and continents.
The prevalence of terminologies and their differences becomes more and more interesting the more designers involved in the discussion. Janna rejects common definitions of ‘service design’ outright as she states:
‘Service design is a specialisation, just as graphic design, industrial design, and interaction design are specialisations. Each of these specialisations work with a particular form. If I’m designing a service, I am either designing the end-to-end view of the service, or designing a service moment. Within that service, there are environments, systems, people, and tools. I may not have the expertise to design the specific system, nor the expertise to design the environment in which the service sits, but I need to know the intent, what these things need to achieve in support of the service. My work as a service designer can serve as a brief for other specialists, or better yet, we are working together, the designers with specialisation, to make a cohesive whole together.’
Without real justification to negate particular definitions, it appears to be on point to decipher an individual designer’s view; if only to open up the discussion for clarity’s sake to aid fellow designers and partners when working together through the design process. Taking into consideration Heiss’ work on collaborative communication, cutting through relatively ambiguous terminology needs to be paramount. Successful project outcomes rely on the adoption of shared terminologies across teams from the first moments of a project.
In conclusion
Referring back to Victor Papanek’s famous quote of 1971, we are all designers experiencing design without exception, without borders. Above and beyond acknowledgement of this and the various terminological accomplices that exist inside the industry, is the underlying fact that design facilitates the world around us. Placing humans at the core of design practice has arguably been done for centuries, but what is left to improve upon is the role it should play in correcting stale traditions that no longer serve modern societies; design can deliver improved systems and services that listen and respond to the new ways we live in 2016 and beyond.
The world has changed and is changing and demands more resilient cities, technology for under-represented groups of people who need it most, systemic re-structuring to improve energy grids and localising them, to simple community engagement strategies and sharing our experiences beyond Facebook, into new practices where we can support each other and learn new skills. The systems that no longer serve us well enough can become relevant again. Designers can work to evolve the passé status-quo beginning with our own human-centred practices, through the way we work inside our organisations and those of our clients, and ultimately to the people and communities for whom we work.
References
Papanek, Victor (1971). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. New York, Pantheon Books.
Hill, Dan (2015). Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary. Moscow, Strelka Press.
Linkedin profile, Dr Zaana Howard, accessed October 8, 2016
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zaana
Helsinki Design Lab website, accessed October 9, 2016
http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/pages/what-is-strategic-design
Linkedin profile, Dr Tristan Cooke, accessed October 8, 2016
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tristan-cooke-phd
Design Council website, accessed October 9, 2016
http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/video-what-service-design
Linkedin profile, Leah Heiss, accessed October 8, 2016
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-heiss
Meld Studios article, accessed October 9, 2016
http://www.meldstudios.com.au/2016/08/31/what-service-design-is-and-what-it-is-not/
Interview with Janna DeVylder via Google Hangout, 31 August, 2016
Meld Studios website, accessed August 17, 2016 to September 12, 2016 http://www.meldstudios.com.au/what-we-do/our-process/
Linkedin profile, Janna DeVylder, accessed August 17, 2016 to September 12, 2016 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jannadevylder
