Year 2007: curiosity and questioning
Story #3 of 16-part chronicle: ‘The evolution of my social design craft’
It’s a rainy December afternoon in 2007. I’m walking back from the London College of Communication to my box room in Waterloo, to catch up on some much needed sleep. I had submitted my final major project on the MA that morning. I remember having a reflective moment on that short walk. How would I sum up what I had learned on the MA in a sentence?
“I learned how to create new things by asking good questions, and then figuring out ways to answer them.”
Out of curiosity, I’ve just checked the UK Quality Code for Higher Education to see whether this is actually explicitly a learning outcome on the framework of an MA qualification. I found this, which to me uses more sophisticated words to mean the same thing:
“Successful students show originality in the application of knowledge, and they understand how the boundaries of knowledge are advanced through research.” (p.28)
I believe this is particularly relevant to design as a discipline. My take on design is that it is the act of creating things in the world where none existed in response to a gap or a need in society. The process of designing is often informed by a complex sequence of decisions that may be informed by a combination of research (explicit knowledge)and intuition (tacit knowledge). Many design processes are often triggered by our curiosity which questions how the world works and how it could be made better. We either sense or know that there is a problem in our world, a need that people recognise, or a gap for something better. So we ask ourselves the same sort of question regardless of what the problem, need or gap is: What can design do about this? Or what can we do as designers about this? To answer these questions, we then set out on a messy journey of research and experimentation.
This means that most of the time, the questions we ask ourselves as designers are about disciplines that have nothing to do with design; what makes people happy (designing wellbeing interventions), how people get from A to B (designing wayfinding), what drives people’s day-to-day choices (designing for behaviour change), how people find out about things (designing information solutions), how people connect with one another (designing dating and social networking platforms), and so on. All of these sorts of design opportunities require designers to be curious about a lot more than just design, and to ask the right questions (and many wrong ones) to find out more about things like positive psychology, the build environment, transportation, behaviour change, communication studies, social science, and more. There are however, some questions that designers ask themselves that are completely about design, and these are often the questions that we use to help us document or progress our design practice further.
To clarify this distinction, I will draw on something important I learned on the MA. There are three types of design research questions; research through design, research for design, and research into design (Frayling, 1994). I had the coincidental opportunity to experiment with all three when self-initiating briefs in that year back in 2007:
1. Research through design — or research to design new things. I asked myself: “How could music be seen when not heard?”, and set out researching music and colour systems to design a new visual music notation system that confounded the elements of music (pitch, duration, timbre, volume, etc.) with the elements of colour (hue, value, chroma, etc.), creating accurate and beautiful visual representations of complicated pieces of music for the hearing impaired to enjoy.
2. Research for design —or research to develop design practice. I asked myself: “How might political caricatures be used for persuasion?”, and set out analysing verbal rhetoric theories, and applying them across caricature practice to develop guidance for persuasion through political caricatures.
3. Research into design — or research to document design history. I asked myself: “How did design activism shift political discourse between 2005 and 2007 in Lebanon (following the political turmoil triggered by the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq El Hariri)?”. I then set out interviewing people and collecting design activism pieces produced by different players in that context, to analyse key messages, messenger, target audience and impact on the shifting public opinion at the time.
Reflecting back on the work we have been doing at Uscreates since I joined in 2008, I realise that a lot of the questions we have been asking ourselves as a team required us to ‘research through design’. Questions about how we use design to help families lead healthier lives, how we design to reduce homelessness, and how we design in a digital age for example. A lot of the work I do to design the courses I teach in universities require me to ‘research for design’ as I reflect back on my practice in the ‘day job’ and develop principles, methodologies, processes, and tools to shape the emergent practice of social design. A lot of the work I do writing about design requires ‘research into design’ to document the recent history of social design.
I wanted to end this story with six tips I collated over the years, on how to stimulate curiosity and ask questions (or more importantly, start a question) in a design process:
- When you don’t know where to start. The ‘5Ws 1H’ technique works a treat when trying to untangle a problem, topic or question you know little about. Just jot down all the questions you can think of that start with each of ‘what, who, when, where, why and how’. These interrogative pronouns provide a simple checklist to remember to question things like stakeholders/users (who), causality (why), context (when and where), etc. With all the questions down, you can then try to answer as many as you can through existing knowledge (desk research, expert conversations, etc.). Whatever is left would require you to design primary research methods to answer. This means you can be more focused about what you know already and what you’re trying to find out through new research.
- When you’re not sure about the problem. The ‘5 why’s’ can be a great way to unpack and reframe a problem, particularly when working on a complex and systemic issue affected by multiple causes. You write down a description of the problem that is most tangible to you, and where you can see a clear sign that something is wrong (e.g. a third of UK children are overweight). You then ask yourself why, and try and answer that question with as many causes as you can think of (e.g. children are not eating healthily, children are less active, etc). You then continue to ask yourself ‘why’ about each cause until you have exhausted all possibilities. You are now closer to the root(s) of the problem, and you can decide the level in the causality chain or the angle through which you would like to tackle the problem.
- When you’re looking for depth. There are three questions that can help: ‘How is this happening?’, ‘Why is this happening?’, ‘So what? What can we do about it?’. These are questions that my wonderful supervisor Brian Street hammered into my brain over the course of my 6-year PhD research. These are the sorts of questions he would constantly annotate the margins of my drafts with to help me get to the desired level of depth in my questioning.
- When you’re making the ‘creative leap’. ‘How might we’ questions are good when you feel you have enough insight to understand your problem well, but are struggling to move into a space where you can start designing possible solutions. ‘How might we’ questions are about reframing all that is furthering the problem (painpoints, barriers, influencers) towards a constructive mindset where these can be reduced, removed or changed. ‘How might we’ questions are also about maximising what is already working really well. In a nutshell, ‘how might we’ questions are the starting point for your idea generation brief.
- When you’re feeling uninspired. ‘What if’ questions can remove creative blockages by throwing in lateral stimuli that can free up the mind to think more openly. They work in an idea generation space when considering the art of the possible. Examples could be: ‘what if you reversed the brief?’, ‘what if this needs to work in a different place?’, ‘what if it’s the year 2030?', ‘what if you had a lot of/very little time/money?’ and so on.
- When it’s best not to ask questions. Embed yourself in the context and with the people you’re trying to understand. Be silent, stay in the moment, and just observe. You’ll find lots of answers to your questions without having to say a word. This works whether you’re doing research to understand a problem, or whether you’re testing something you’ve designed to meet a need.
Regardless of how we go about it, the process of questioning can help untangle the enormous complexity that is often inherent in social challenges, one question and one answer at a time, in order to provide some steer towards a design direction. So stay curious, and keep asking questions!
Other stories:
Read story #1 — Year 2000: deconstructing and reconstructing
Read story #2 — Year 2003: risk and persistence after failure
Read story #4 — Year 2009: reframing and solving problems
