Design Thinking, Super Strip-ed
How BIF’s Patient Experience Lab expanded my notion of design for the better.
Before coming to the Business Innovation Factory (BIF), I had never heard of design thinking and had only vague, mostly inaccurate notions of its meaning.
As a former teacher, medical interpreter, and operations manager, the only time I had ever heard the word “design” in a professional context was in curriculum planning. Despite that brief encounter with design’s potential place in our social systems, it still conjured images in my mind of Picasso dabbing the last bit of paint on La Guernica or Frank Gehry sketching the plans for the Guggenheim.
So basically, I thought designers were geniuses on the cusp of creating their next great work. Design thinking, I figured, must be that mysterious phase of creation before the great work was made public.
I’m sure it’s not surprising to learn that upon hearing the phrase “design thinking” in relation to BIF’s work (a.k.a. my work), I felt a sweat-inducing, stomach-emptying panic. To combat irrational thoughts, like, “Is it a bad sign for my design-thinking capabilities if my drawing skills plateaued at stick figures?”, I immediately resolved to devote some of my first hours with BIF observing and analyzing the work processes in the Patient Experience Lab (PXL), hoping to catch design thinking in action.
The very first conclusion I drew was that design thinking definitely has something important to do with Post-its.
Design Thinking in PXL
As it turns out, design thinking is much more ubiquitous, accessible, and intuitive than I had ever imagined — not unlike its mascot, the Post-It note.
Drawing skills that have progressed beyond stick figures are not a prerequisite (although, as our PXL Experience Designer Kara Dziobek demonstrates in this video on graphic facilitation, they are a plus). Nor are paintbrushes, or being a renowned architect.
What is essential is purposefully remaining open to the possibility of new solutions, and creating the conditions to be able to do so.
Take the latest happenings in the PXL, for example: our Experience Designers are prepping for a Participatory Design Studio. After interviewing Dallas families — with the aim of understanding what shapes a family’s well-being and what challenges to wellness exist for families, through the lens of the families’ own lived experience— they’re planning for their return to Dallas for what one of our Experience Designers called, “an intense design phase.”
The Participatory Design Studio is an opportunity to reconvene with families, community stakeholders, and members of Children’s Health System to start talking solutions. With the data collected from families around what contributes to or hinders their well-being, the next phase is asking what the Dallas community might do to create conditions in which family well-being flourishes.
Essentially, it’s a brainstorming session - to begin to imagine using existing community capabilities, to foster conditions in which well-being for diverse families can flourish.
I bring all of this up because the task of the Experience Designers is to carefully craft a Participatory Design Studio that will facilitate open, honest dialogue around the capabilities of the community and the challenges ahead. No small task, to be sure.
And when I asked about the design process for the sessions, one Experience Designer started talking about progressive dinners and amuse-bouche as a metaphor for the brainstorming structure.
This struck me not only because I am perpetually thinking about dinner, but because the metaphor made me realize:
Design thinking is as a mental space in which cross-pollination and inter-disciplinary thinking are encouraged.
As I type, the PXL Experience Designers are continuing to refine a role-playing technique as a tool for having conversations about family well-being—an idea that was in part sparked by a spontaneous discussion about dinner courses.
Certainly, design thinking signifies more than simply pulling from different sources and perspectives; the Experience Designers use iterative processes and myriad frameworks. But this conversation demonstrated to me that the spirit of design thinking is to approach problems with adaptability, practicality, and spontaneity — even I, a non-Picasso, could engage in that.
There have been many lived glimpses of qualities of design thinking in the PXL. But as the old adage goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher who happens to be her co-worker appears.”
Our very own Chief Market Maker and Citizen Lab Director, Eli Stefanski, proposed an experiment that would allow me to live the power and process of design thinking myself.
Design Thinking, Super Strip-ed
Eli sent me an email about Super, a new app, as a way to experiment with mediums to share our work on the family well-being initiative with Children’s Health System of Dallas.
I seized the challenge. I was excited to represent the powerful insights of the Experience’s Designer’s work on well-being in a new way. I also thought the Super Strip was an easy-to-access, visually appealing, and fun way to tell a story.
I was right about Super being easy to access. But creating the Strip? It took hours of hunched posture and mouthed curse words — not because the app is hard to use, but because my expectations for my work were hindering the actual work (confession: not the first time this had happened). In hindsight, though, the takeaways about the value of design thinking were big ones, and worth the mini-struggle:
Design constraints are liberating, not limiting.
I spent hours making the Strip. I combed through photos from the project; I chose from Super’s list of tag-line titles; I played with the photo editor; I decided on the scope of the nine-slide story I wanted to tell.
Then the app started to quit after Slide 4. Repeatedly. Maybe I should’ve gotten the IPhone upgrade (or deleted all those podcasts).
I won’t bore you with the details of how I was finally able to resolve this dilemma, but I will say that in the process of creating the same story over and over again, I was forced to refine my message.
How could I convey the story of the PXL project in only four slides? How could I use limited space and scope to my advantage? Considering these challenges improved my understanding of the conditions.
Technology platforms can strengthen the impact of our message by limiting the parameters in which we can communicate it; design challenges and constraints create the tension that begets creativity.
Design Thinking is a process, not a product.
I initially decided that designing the Super strip was an experiment in telling the BIF story through new mediums. You know, I would conduct the experiment and then have something really cool to show for it.
Because design thinking + a little effort = Guggenheim.
But when I approached the actual telling of the story, I witnessed an inherent tension between wanting to tell with my usual verbosity and wanting to embrace the benefits of Super (e.g. highly visual, fewer words for greater impact).
Designing the Strip won me a Strip, but it was also an opportunity to see how our mediums might shape our BIF stories. Design thinking lends frameworks to navigate tensions like these.
Design thinking is human.
Every time I heard this in the PXL, I interpreted it to mean that the BIF PXL — like its other labs — places human users at the center of their business model innovation process.
This is true, of course, and the research in Dallas detailed above is a great example of how that’s true.
But design thinking is also human because, as a process, it allows for human complexity.
I still can’t really draw. My strengths as a storyteller are still firmly in the realm of words. But my capacities as a design thinker are not limited by my preferred mode of creation.
In fact, design thinking encourages exploration of unfamiliar methods and even ultimately failed solutions to see things more clearly.
Did I emerge with a Super strip that conveyed every single aspect of our well-being initiative? Nope.
Is it the most engaging story I’ve ever told about our PXL? Probably not.
Is it the most beautiful bit of design the Super app has ever seen, or will see? No way.
But it did teach me that design thinking is much less illusive than artistic inspiration, and much more rigorous and fruitful to boot.
Design is much more than creating our final product. It is the process of being open to the constraints and challenges of creation, and contains all of the failures that ultimately lead to success.
