Design and me.
A personal take on strategic design and its future.
The original Spanish version of this article was published in Uncommon.
At the end of last year, I made one of the toughest professional decisions that I’ve ever had to make. It felt like jumping from a luxurious, but heavy, cruise ship to a small and somewhat austere boat that, nonetheless, is fast and teamed with a first class crew. Given that the cruise ship is one of those companies that almost anyone would like to work for, my decision was surprising for some friends. Thus, when someone asks me about the move, my answer is always that it was mainly a vocational decision. It was a move in two dimensions: advertising → design, creative technology → strategy. For a long time I’ve known that my personal purpose resides at that intersection and here at Uncommon I found a great opportunity that feels almost like launching my own project along with a team like no other.
And thus the question comes: What does Uncommon do? The easiest answer would be: it’s an innovation agency. And the fact is that much of what Uncommon does has to do with helping organizations to innovate. However, I believe that innovation is an outcome not an activity. For that reason — and also because I’m a bit fed up with the term innovation — I rather be precise and say that Uncommon is a strategic design company. But that only leaves me with the difficult challenge of explaining wtf is strategic design. This essay is a personal and perhaps provisional answer to that question. It includes a few notes about how I see it evolving into the future.
Design and Strategic Design.
Design and me, we go a long way back. But only recently I realized that throughout that history design has always kept me in the friendzone. Literally! For example, in college I majored in Communication while most of my friends studied Design. Later on, I joined a super talented design team not as a proper designer but as a programmer and what we would call now a motiongrapher. As if that wasn’t enough… I married a designer! So, in one way or another, I’ve always been close to design even if I’m not a designer.
Now — almost twenty years into my history of being an orbiter of design — I find myself in an interesting situation: I work at a strategic design studio, I teach at a Master in Design Studies and at a Master in Strategic Design and Innovation. So now I almost feel entitled to say that I’m a designer — at least, a strategic designer. How did this come about? I think that the evolution of the discipline itself and my own professional and academic path brought us together. Let me explain.
Over the last few years, I’ve been invited to give quite a few talks and workshops on “design thinking.” And I almost always begin with the definition of design that Charles Eames proposed in this video.
— What is your definition of “Design”, Monsieur Eames?
— One could describe “Design” as a plan for arranging elements to achieve a particular purpose.
Super clear and elegant. It’s one of my two favorite definitions of design (the other one is by Herbert A. Simon in The Sciences of The Artificial). I like it because it’s abstract and universal.
It’s abstract because, for Eames, design refers not to the elements itself already arranged but to the plan for such arrangement. That is why a design can be copied, reproduced and plagiarized.
Think, for example, of a chair. Its main purpose is to afford a person with a comfortable seating and resting surface. The elements involved can vary widely: a seat, four legs, a backrest, one or two armrests, etc. Moreover, these could be built out of multiple materials. Charles and Ray Eames used plywood, leather, molded plastic, aluminum, etc. The design, though, is the plan for arranging those elements to achieve the aforementioned purpose. If the result is as aesthetically valuable as the Eames’ chairs, even better.
In fact, a quick image search is a good evidence to the fact that the Eames are remembered for their chairs more than anything else.
Nonetheless, their work spanned many other design fields such as toys, tools, radios, houses and buildings, films, exhibitions, etc. Maybe that’s why, as I mentioned above, Eames’ definition of design is also universal for it doesn’t circumscribe design to a particular scope of elements or purposes. Later in that video, he masterfully responds to a question about the limits of design with another question:
— What are the boundaries of Design?
— What are the boundaries of problems?
According to Eames, then, wherever there may be problems there may be design. Indeed, as I will argue below, such universality of design hasn’t but increased since Eames defined it like that.
The interesting thing is that, from this perspective, we could say that most designers operate in a universe where the purpose and elements of their labour are pretty straightforward. Let’s think of a furniture designer that specializes on chairs, tables, lamps, etc. Or a graphic designer specialized in digital advertising. Or even a fashion designer specialized in creating specific garments for a clothing brand. This relative clarity of purposes and elements isn’t bad. On the contrary! It’s precisely what allows them to develop an unbelievable talent for playing with the most important variable: namely, the arrangement of those elements.
However, it’s not necessary to venture far from these practices in order to find challenges and entire design fields where the purposes and elements at play are not at all clear (or where, in fact, it is the duty of the designer to critically question the purpose and the elements that are given to her). For these, designers have developed a whole set of methods and frameworks that allow them to investigate and clarify the variables before jumping to design something. A good example of this practice is this classic TV segment that shows the design process employed by IDEO in the 1990s — before all the design thinking craze of the last 10 years — to re-design the classic supermarket trolley.
Trolleys being stolen, multiple kinds of users with conflicting needs, safety for users, etc. On this road we quickly arrive at what Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Webber called wicked problems: those that are difficult or impossible to solve for a multiplicity of reasons but, most of all, because its “solution” depends on the way they’re framed. Thus, there exists challenges and fields of design where the most important task is not, to continue with Eames’ vocabulary, the arrangement of elements but, first of all, to discover the purpose and elements available to achieve it. In these cases, research and analysis are just as important as creativity and craft. We thus speak of design strategy to refer to the process of elucidating and critically interrogating the purpose and elements available for a design (where design, as per Eames, is a plan for arranging elements… and so on.) In practice, this process involves a methodological suite inherited mainly from ethnography but enriched by theories and techniques coming from the humanities and social sciences at large. In the end, it’s all about understanding humans and their context. That’s why design studios are filled with specialists trained outside of design school (anthropologists, psychologists, economists, etc.) but also with generalists or dilettantes — as yours truly, who has worked in design, advertising, creative technology and innovation strategy at the same time that he has stumbled around different academic fields as Cultural Studies, Philosophy of Technology, Business Innovation, etc.
Now, even if the design of a supermarket trolley seems like an interesting challenge from a strategic point of view, it’s not like it would’ve been considered something fundamentally foreign to the scope of an industrial design studio as it was IDEO back then. In the same video (~1:20), David Kelly argued:
we are kind of experts on the process of how you design stuff. So we don’t care if you give us a toothbrush, a toothpaste tube, a tractor, a space shuttle, a chair…
The keyword here is ‘stuff’. Up to then, the ambition of a design studio could still be measured by the scale and complexity of the stuff it designed. But we’ve seen with Eames that design is ambitious also in terms of the universality of its scope.
And thus, if design is universal, so is it’s strategic process. In this way, design and design strategy quickly became valuable for a multiplicity of business purposes that a few years before wouldn’t necessarily have been considered design problems. This is, for me, what we mean when we talk about strategic design, i.e. the application of design and its strategic process to an infinity of social and business purposes. At Uncommon, for example, we have used it to help a brand to understand opportunities in urban mobility in the same way that we’ve used it to help an insurance company to understand the motivations of different kinds of users, or a large telco to reconfigure around its users and employees.
In 2004, Roger Martin recognized a convergence between the set of business skills and the set of design skills. He declared:
We are on the cusp of a design revolution in business … As a result, business people don’t just need to understand designers better — they need to become designers.
A few years later, IDEO’s CEO, Tim Brown, would sign a seminal article in the pages of Harvard Business Review in which he explained all that design thinking had to offer to the world of business. Already by 2015, the same magazine dedicated the cover and a whole dossier to the evolution of design thinking.
Peak Design?
As reported in the same issue of HBR, some of the largest companies in the world such as IBM, PepsiCo and Samsung have placed design at the center of their management and strategy operations. And they’re not alone. Since 2015, designer and technologist John Maeda has put together a report on the impact of design on business, with a particular focus on Silicon Valley. One of the most interesting indicators to come out of the two reports is a timeline focused on mergers and acquisitions of design companies (see slide 8). According to Maeda, since 2004 — that is, the same year that Martin called a design revolution in business — 42 companies have been acquired, mainly by banks (BBVA, Capital One), management consultancies (Deloitte and Accenture) and tech companies (Google, Facebook, etc.). [Update: Maeda has released the 2017 report.] Have we reached the peak of design as business strategy?
My good friend Jeff Mau and I have been talking about this. Even if we live in widely different contexts, we share some of the same interests, thus, talking about these things always helps us to put things in perspective. For example, not so long ago he told me that over the last 5 to 10 years in USA, in general, and in particular in Chicago, where he lives and works, design strategy firms have moved towards implementation (mainly of digital products and services) given that design strategy by itself is becoming less profitable.
This made much sense because I believe there are three trends that will define the near future of design and strategic design. The first one has to do with what I’ve called peak design: namely, the increasing protagonism of strategic designers at the C-level, the M&A fever (another great overview of this is the report The State of Digital 2016 by Jules Ehrhardt) and the inevitable commodification of design strategy. The second one refers to the challenges and opportunities raised by emerging and exponential technologies — Jeff, for example, has been developing an interesting exploration of the impact by AI on user experience design. The third, and most exciting to me, refers to what I like to call the new ambitions of design.
Regarding the second trend, namely the technology vector, it’s clear that — over and above all the hype that constantly clouds our vision — we are going through a Cambrian explosion of sorts, a technological revolution in the sense proposed by Carlota Pérez:
a powerful and highly visible cluster of new and dynamic technologies, products and industries, capable of bringing about an upheaval in the whole fabric of the economy…
According to Pérez, these technological revolutions have occurred approximately every 50 years in the history of capitalism signaling each time the configuration of a new techno-economic paradigm. The last one, which launched the development of a whole economic system based on digital technologies, happened around the outset of the 1970s. This means that we should be approaching the next transition towards a new paradigm.
It’s not surprising, then, that companies are avid to understand the risks and opportunities presented by the new stack of emerging technologies such as virtual reality, internet of things, robotics and, most importantly, artificial intelligence.
As many others, if I had to bet on one of these to become the pivot around which a new stage of capitalism may turn, it would be the latter without a doubt. However, the AI that may drive this new economy will not be the one portrayed by all those sci-fi movies: robots and computers with pseudo-human intelligence. It will be more like a cognitive force anonymously driving an infinity of productive processes both material and immaterial — what Kevin Kelly has rightly called cognifying.
The weak signals of this incipient revolution have made some companies turn towards technology itself, more than design, as the next source of growth. Nonetheless, I’m convinced that only those companies that have successfully incorporated the strategic mindset of design will be able to take advantage of the revolution and remain successful as they move through the upcoming post-human transition.
Superdesign
I articulated some of the ideas in this essay for the first time when CENTRO invited me to give a commencement speech for postgraduates. Addressing a group of professionally and academically experienced designers was an excellent opportunity to humbly review my friendzoned relationship with design. I took that opportunity as well to talk about how I see design evolving in particular with regards to the third trend mentioned above. My argument is that design is growing in ambition (in the best possible sense of the term) and, thus, in scope, in three dimensions at once. In order to express it — in the appropriately ‘inspiring’ way that an event like that calls for — I came up with the term superdesign.
First of all, design, through its increasingly strategic becoming, has moved from being almost exclusively interested in the arrangement of objects — or, as Terry Irwin from Carnegie Mellon University eloquently puts it, “the design of posters and toasters” — to feel capable of configuring whole complex systems. Tim Brown and Roger L. Martin themselves mention this transition in an article of the same issue of Harvard Business Review. We could imagine this as a movement in the Y axis of a three-dimensional space like this:
From this perspective, we can better understand the development of design fields focused on problems that are ever more abstract and of larger scales such as experience design, service design, business design, organizational design and, most importantly, systemic and transition design. The former is a relatively new field (although it can be traced back at least to the work of R. Buckminster Fuller) that lies at the intersection between human-centered design and systems thinking. Its objective is to apply the design process “to complex, multi-stakeholder service systems” — along with all the material available in the website of the Systemic Design Research Network, and something that I wrote myself, I recommend everything that Alex Ryan has been writing about the topic here at Medium. The latter is also a new field focused on applying design methods to “the need for societal transitions to more sustainable futures” — this monograph provides an excellent introduction.
The second dimension in which design has been increasing its scope derives directly from the first one just described. Arguably, for the design of communications and objects it’s possible to operate in a temporal scale of weeks and months. However, it may be clear that service, organizational or systemic design need to operate in larger temporal scales such as years, decades or even centuries. So design is also moving from being focused on the present to being imaginatively oriented towards multiple possible futures. This could be represented as a movement in the X axis of the space used above.
Here we must include the development of a whole family of practices that share this orientation towards the future such as what Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan have called experiential futures, what Bruce Sterling and Julian Bleecker call design fiction, or Anthony Dunne and Fiona Ray’s speculative design. All those practices involve the construction of design artefacts (either material, audiovisual or experiential) to communicate and detonate social conversations about future scenarios. The book Speculative Everything by Dunne and Raby, Stuart Candy’s PhD thesis and this manual by The Extrapolation Factory are probably the best ways into the field.
Finally, accompanying the first two movements, design has been shifting as well in terms of the kind of relationship it sustains with society. Following the vocabulary proposed by Dunne and Raby in their A/B, A Manifesto, we could say that design has transitioned from an affirmative posture towards a critical stance. This entails a design that poses problems and questions, that works in the service of society more than in the service of industry, that imagines how the world might be, that generates debate, that provokes and makes us think. This involves a displacement in the third dimension over the Z axis.
These are the new “ambitions” of design. While previously designers could perhaps feel satisfied by producing objects that affirmed the present state of society, now designers increasingly reclaim for themselves the responsibility of critically configuring systems oriented towards the future. Thus, it’s a simultaneous movement over the three dimensions. This is why I called it superdesign.
This is utterly exciting to me. There is a coincidence in all these new fields — design futures, systemic design, transition design, etc. — to adjudicate design with a social responsibility that transcends by far the importance it currently has as a strategic mindset for business. Design is increasingly conceived as an engine for social transformation. This is music to the ears of those like me who maintain social and political concerns while working in the commercial space. I believe that design can become the practice through which human beings collectively increase control over our lives through intentionally configuring the technological, economic and political forces that drive change.
At Uncommon we like to say that we help organizations to design better futures for people. We do it because, as human beings, we’re interested in pushing the world towards desirable scenarios and we believe that organizations (that is, our clients) are perhaps the most powerful leverage points that exist today. Moreover, we believe that when organizations orient themselves towards people and their futures they also find success and growth in their business. In this way, we’re trying to align our personal purposes with those of our clients and society at large. On this path, there will be extremely complicated challenges and I don’t feel fully qualified yet to tackle them all. This alignment of purposes, though, is keeping me fully motivated to try my best.
