The Design process
I remember when I initially read about IDEO’s design thinking methodology, which filled me with excitement. I experienced the power of concretizing an abstract problem & how it could be applied, felt limitless. This introduced me to the world of design processes & the different tools. These are the processes that help a designer in providing a scientific orientation to the chaotic creative thinking for solving a problem.
At the start of my M.Des journey, I used to get excited when we were introduced to different processes & tools. Now, creative thinking is a highly demanding task (a small undisclosed clause that tends to get overlooked while signing up for this profession) & we, humans, are evolved to be energy efficient. We try to save the calorie-resources as much as possible to increase the chances of our survival. It makes sense to build ourselves a template and follow a fixed pattern which could be applicable to the maximum possible situations. The feeling of collecting & knowing more processes felt safe & comforting. The feeling is similar to collecting better ammunition & power-ups in videogames or having a feeling of a stocked grocery at home. The more I read & learnt about these processes, the more I thought I was growing as a designer. We naturally start taking comfort in these known processes to face the ambiguity before us. The comfort of knowing what comes next; to be able to apply the set template to any situation or problem. It felt good learning about the design processes. It felt empowering to find such tools at my disposal to solve the problems. The world, for once, felt easy. I thought, “So, if this is the problem, this is how it should be solved. If this is the design stage you are at, such and such tool can be used”. The conventions keeps building & start to numb our creative faculty so much so that the person hired to think outside the box is confined to one. Rather than opening ourselves to the problem, we start closing ourselves to the possible solutions.
While in an academic setting, things are easier for you. You are expected to follow the process diligently without the considerations of industry factors. When one steps out of academics & gets into the industry, things start to be different. In the industry, the resources & the cost are of primary consideration. When I was interning at Flipkart as a product designer, I was tasked with a project. I thought to myself, “I knew so many processes, right? It should be easy”. And then it struck me — While I did learn many processes, I never gave it a thought of learning about the situational application of it. I ended up asking my mentor: “How to know which design process to use?”. For me, it was a puzzling experience. I was taught about the processes & I was confident about them, but the problem was in the ability to make the decision in a real-world project where every penny was accounted for. The answer I got was: “The one that you think will help the most in solving the user’s problem”.
What ‘I’ think !?
No wonder it put me in discomfort. How do ‘I’ decide what’s best for solving the problem at hand? Isn’t this what the process is there to help me with? I realized that while being extremely engaged in learning about hundreds of different processes & building a one-size-fits-all template, I had completely ignored its proper utilization. I realized that ‘design’ cannot be reduced to a bunch of processes & tools.
Thus, the search began.
Many days, weeks went by in self-deliberation on this question and this is where the power of being at one of the best design-schools in India plays its role. These are the difficult questions that a design school affords you to think of, because it also contains the capacity to provide with an answer. I went ahead & asked this question to one of my design profs: “How does a designer know which process to use & at what stage? Given the fact that utilizing a process in the industry will have a cost. How, then do we evaluate which process to use in order to have an optimized pipeline in solving the problem?”
“You can never know. The secret to this was never to be found in the design processes or the tools. The secret– is always within the designer. It is the designer that gives power to the processes. And to be able to practically demonstrate that a designer has realized this, they need to have case studies as a part of their portfolio”.
This was it!
This statement lit up my neurons & carved out a path to design-enlightenment. I was able to connect the dots & found myself rejuvenated once again. The primary objective of the design schools, what I once thought, is not just to teach students about the processes & tools but to make them internalize this magic. Let there be hundreds of processes to come & countless of unseen situations. It’s the magic that ‘I’ bring will add up with the process & solve the problem. To keep working on my design magic, to continuously develop the faculty of connecting the dots & present a story forward. This is how I will grow in my design journey. Throughout the M.Des, I continued to work on this aspect. And today, I feel much more comfortable in handling ambiguity & confident in stitching my own processes to approach a problem. This is painstaking, no doubt– but isn’t this what makes the journey so much fun?
Here, I would like to share a prediction with you all. I think that in the coming future, Generative AI will seamlessly integrate into design-thinking methodologies & new design processes will come up. The foundation model will be fed & trained with all the available design-process literature & org-specific design processes will get built on top of that. The result will be that, this novel piece of tool should be able to act as a facilitator not only to the org design teams but any other teams within that company which can potentially benefit in solving problems using design processes. The tool will suggest the most efficient & effective processes depending on the available data & the stage, the team is in. The size of the design teams in the future will be reduced & output will be highly optimized.
In such a future, where & how do you think the role of a designer will fit in? If such happens to be the case, we now hopefully understand ‘the design process’ a little better, don’t we?
Curious to know more on how I found this ‘magic’ for myself & how it works? Stay tuned for part 2: ‘My design process’
Until next time. Design-out.
Connect with me on LinkedIn & check out my portfolio at nileshmodak.com
