Designing Designers, Reflection of a learning experience
Designing something is to believe in a better future.
Like most designers, the greater the impact a project may have in that future, the more excited I am. This happens no matter the industry or the people involved.
For the past 3 years, together with various Teaching Team members from around the world, I have been immersed in my most impactful project so far, to design designers.
To give you a brief context, ME310/SUGAR is a 9-month course where participants work on a project proposed and sponsored by an industry partner in a global team setting composed by a local and foreign team. Together they go through a design thinking process of multiple cycles aiming for disruptive innovation which results in a final proof of concept.
Preparing the people who will create the future has been an act of extreme responsibility which has completely captivated me because of its challenges and potential. This is a reflection about those challenges and the experience of learning from them.
Diversity in a Group
When participants arrive at the course, most of their academic track is done in individual circumstances, highly focused on theory-based disciplines that are assessed by using exams which are influenced by their memory capabilities. When on special occasions students have practical work in a group, that group is usually homogeneous.
But this is not necessarily exclusive to straight out of college participants. A lot of experienced professionals that enter the course mentioned they have rarely worked with a diverse group before, as most companies divide their workforce into departments.
To challenge the participants status quo, they are put in groups that maximize diversity, mixing up designers, engineers, and business backgrounds. Sometimes even a nurse or a lawyer gets to join this stew. This has proven to be quite a stress test for most participants, where different perspectives, work attitudes and personalities shake their comfort zone and challenge their definition of “productivity” resulting in many conflicts.
What I have found to be the biggest challenge is to make a team embrace this state of uncomfortness in diversity, by not running away from these conflicts, but to use them constructively.
To achieve this in a group, I consider the concept of assumptions one the most powerful “tool” against negative conflict. An assumption is something that is accepted as true without question or proof. As individuals, we have a lot of those.
By giving equal opportunity to each member to question if something is an assumption or not, and creating equal opportunity and freedom for those assumptions to be tested, the team starts to make more decisions based on facts, rather than on biased beliefs. The result is teams that look at diversity and uncomfort as a fertile ground for new possibilities.
Embracing Failure
Almost every company proclaims it, failure is good.
It is common to see on office walls those beautiful quotes “fail faster, succeed sooner” and all its derivations, which suggest it is good to fail.
I agree, embracing failure allows us to experience more which in the long term helps us make wiser decisions. But quotes on a wall are not enough, culture is what it is needed for that failure to be embraced.
I believe this culture is possible with two important aspects: having a mission and having honesty.
In the process leading to either fail and success, there are always decisions. Having a mission allows teams to know what to fail for.
At the course, this mission comes in the form of a briefing, a problem to solve, a need to fulfill. This mission is the participant’s responsibility to complete, they are the owners of every decision. When they build a prototype, test something, do field research, interview someone they do it for the mission. Whether they fail or succeed, it’s their responsibility.
The goal is to have teams understand that failing has to be considered just a learning process that is leading them closer to fulfilling the mission.
But this mission is not always embraced from the start. And so it is common to have teams putting a higher emphasis on the excuses for why the failure occurred than on the learnings and future steps to take.
This is where the relevance of honesty becomes so important for the construction of culture, and where the challenge of breaking the normal student/teacher relation of result/sanction is necessary.
The main moments of reflection about the development of the project are usually when each team is together with the Teaching Team in an informal setting. The Teaching Team has the responsibility to create an environment where teams feel free to talk about failure and not avoid it, by providing positive feedback, support and push to take risks.
Interpret what the project needs
The current learning environment for design thinking is a jungle.
A big number of players in the industry sell a systematic and linear approach to create solutions that promise to meet all the desirability, feasibility and viability requirements.
To add on top of that, the internet is full of ready to use templates and toolkits that promise instant clarification and enlightenment to any complex situation.
Even though most of this content is legitimate and its techniques and tools are valuable and useful, some of them fail in at least one situation. They assume that by following the same checklist you can achieve the same great result.
The reality is that every project is different, every context is different, every team is different.
So how to prepare individuals that need to be ready to tackle these “complex challenges”, without giving them a list of instructions that most likely will make them handicapped? How to prepare different teams that are on the same course, but one is working on the context of electronic logistics, the other in the context of medical pathway experience and some other on the circular economy of the fashion industry?
It seems quite the impossible challenge. Especially on a course that uses a specific methodology which divides the 9 months in a set of challenges to make teams go throw different mindsets of convergence and divergence, which at first sight sounds pretty linear.
I believe the best way to do it, is to prepare agnostic people. These are professionals that are constantly asking why they are doing what they are doing, and are prepared to tweak every tool according to each situation.
So when at the same time, we have projects going related to different contexts, each team needs to go throw a process of understanding how should they do needfinding? How should they prototype their idea? If they need to do more interviews, or maybe more observation.
As Teaching Team this means: constantly balancing how much of their own input they should give (knowing that much of this sensibility of what tools to use comes with experience and practice); facilitating sessions of learning sharing between different teams, which will generate “why?” moments; and making sure the culture for failure mentioned before is alive.
Self-organization
The dependencies on hierarchy based structures and forced 9h to 5h time schedules are still a big reality in the current work environment. Moreover, most project teams depend on a dedicated project manager leader type of figure to handle disruptive situations. This scenario, which contrasts with the predicted highly flexible and flat structure-oriented workforce of the future, creates professionals that are less prepared for the future and consequently, organizations with the same constraints.
The strategy the course takes to challenge this status quo is to create teams without any team leader and self-organized work schedules, the only mandatory ones being when the team needs to meet with the Teaching Team.
The goal is to progressively have each participant find its place on the team, and each team to find it’s working arrangement that best suits everyone. By doing so, I believe we are creating professionals that are more flexible and can adapt to the different circumstances presented to them in the future.
But it is a risky move. For most of the participants, this is the first time they have found themselves in a situation like this, which means quite often the freedom is not handled properly in the beginning, resulting in problems.
The urge from every Teaching Team to micro-manage and to handle these decisions is natural, the challenge here is to hold on to the micro-management impulses and to create an environment of cooperation and open communication, which will provide the opportunity for learning by failure.
The same mindset towards failure that helps create learnings for the project, is essential to create organizational learnings.
Being naive
Every innovation project has inherently the belief that a better future is possible.
Every team normally embarks on this journey thinking they can do it, they will do it. But along the way, this belief is shaken by the constraints, complications and quite often by the negativity of people involved in the context.
If the aim is to find innovative solutions and opportunities, this premature convergent thinking will result in unfounded decision making, minimizing the chances of finding real opportunities for innovation.
It is a real dilemma. We want ambiguity to be high, but at the same time, teams need to dive deep into the context. We want fresh thinking, but we need to know what are the people’s stories and problems.
To work with this dilemma, teams need to be both analytical and creative, they need to use both their left and right sides of the brain respectively. Something that Rolf A. Faste called Ambidextrous Thinking.
What happens is when teams dive deep into the context, all the information becomes overwhelming, making their left side of the brain the most requested “tool” to manage it all.
To cope with that and to give a little chance for the right side of the brain to shine, it is important that everyone understands the value of being Naive, and how to use it. Being naive is the power to simply believe in something, even if everything and everyone tells you it is “impossible”.
Most of the time, this description isn’t used as a compliment since it is commonly used to describe a childlike way of thinking. But who are the most creative individuals we know? Children right?
The challenge is to balance this mindset during the innovation process, too much negativity and nothing will be done, too much naiveness and the result could be another “Theranos”.
The micro-cycles of development have been one of the most valuable strategies to manage this mindset. Not because they are cycles of iteration over the same idea, but because they are exploratory cycles of different ideas. In each cycle, there is an opportunity for the Teaching Team to infuse a bit of a Naive mindset with examples in its informal meetings, with external inspirations and with the use different techniques like Dirty Tuesday, Drink and Draw exercises, SUDS (Slightly Unorganized Design Session), etc.
An app is not a solution
Digitalization is the future, no one has the arguments to deny it. When companies arrive at the course, most certainly one of their corporate concerns and priorities is digital transformation and therefore want to surf the wave.
As soon as teams start their projects this trend is evidenced again and again every time teams do benchmarking, with digital solutions/platforms being everywhere.
This, together with the natural pressure to create something tangible, usually leads to this premature result: “Our solution is an APP!”.
This is a challenging situation. One that demands a big level of attention and commitment from everyone involved around the team. Why? Because it is not easy to change the way of thinking from a product vision to a holistic one.
First of all, it is important to understand what is the team’s definition of an app. Quite often an app is an oversimplification of an idea, which for the common mortal it is just fine, but for someone who is handling complex situations and designing for the world, oversimplifying an idea quite often results in a restriction of the value of a possible solution.
An app is nothing more than an interaction platform, a touchpoint with a user.
Secondly, to better improve the team’s communication of an idea and its value, it is important to explain the concept of abstraction levels. These abstraction levels work similarly to defining the zoom on google maps, you can have a ground view where you can describe the details of houses and streets and you can have an aerial view that goes all the way up to where you can see the whole planet. When a team refers to an APP as a solution, wherein the zoom scale are they? And what do they see once they zoom out?
By understanding this concept as a team and consequently using it in their conversations, they are better prepared to explore the potential of an idea, define action plans to develop it and communicate it internally and externally.
A significant part of doing Human-Centered Design goes far beyond what potential users see, touch or interact. Understanding the potential impact of what is being created into the world is our responsibility as designers.
Thanks for reading!
This course and what I have described does not create perfect professionals nor works perfectly for everyone the same way. Still, I believe each one that goes through the experience is a better designer than they were before.
Thanks to every student and staff from SUGAR Network and Design Factory Global Network I was lucky to meet, you gave me the chance to learn this and so much more.
