Double Diamond: Jennie Winhall
We were in the midst of an exciting period of time for design when Richard Eisermann formed our team to develop the Double Diamond. Richard Florida had just named the ‘creative class’ a driving force for economic development, the Labour manifesto had put citizen-centred design at the heart of public service reform, Eric Von Hippel published his thesis on democratizing innovation, the D-School was founded at Stanford — and at the Design Council we were running the first public projects in something beginning to be called service design.
Design was gaining serious recognition for the powerful role it could play in shaping the fortunes of companies and the impact of policies. Famous design leaders were on the cover of business magazines and government reports alike. But much design talent was still locked up under the tyranny of the poor design brief, engaged in what former Design Council director Clive Grinyer used to call ‘putting lipstick on a pig’.
The Double Diamond played a key role in unlocking that power. We could see from our research into companies such as Philips, who were pioneers of strategic design, that what set them apart was not so much their ability to execute consistently high quality design work — but their investment in shaping the opportunity for design in the first place. There was a process happening upstream of the brief, that process had enormous strategic influence over the eventual success of the product, and the Double Diamond was our way of articulating that shift.
And so with its equal weighting of that upstream diamond, the Double Diamond became a critical vehicle for spreading the concept of design as a strategic tool. It underpinned our work helping the NHS to rethink health services from the patients’ point of view and reinvigorating UK manufacturing with industry-leading products. It gave an army of designers and leaders the tools to legitimise upfront investment in design.
The Double Diamond holds that essential tension in design — the divergent generation of possibility and the convergent act of refinement — that balances the risk of innovation. Acknowledging the struggle of collaboration when a preference for one rubs up against the other helped our teams support each other to walk that important emotional line between anxiety and excitement.
As a memorable representation of the design process the Double Diamond was an immediate success — and vastly oversimplified. We saw our colleagues rapidly embrace it in their work — and we also saw them poring over it and arguing about what part of which diamond their project had reached. Of course the reality is many diamonds, and much going back on oneself: not a linear process at all. But it was an important step in demystifying what designers do.
That was particularly important for me, as we had set up the RED Unit and I was trying to create an interdisciplinary approach to reinventing public services — involving economists, sociologists, front-line staff and people themselves and using the design process as their common ground. The Double Diamond opened up the design process to others, it democratised it, it made it manageable.
That great strength however also gave rise to an unintended limitation.
When I was a student at the Glasgow School of Art, there was no design process. We had to develop it for ourselves — and that was the most important part of our education. It gave us a deeper understanding of our own creative practice. Philippe Picaud, until recently design director for French giant Carrefour, later told me as my first boss: “Change is what gives design its opportunity. The skill of the designer lies in designing the process through which to approach the challenge.”
The Double Diamond represented design as a straightforward, universal process. Over time it grew a bank of methods to be applied at each stage. Coupled with the rising popularity of design thinking, it became part of a wider common vocabulary. While this made it possible to move design out of the realm of the ‘lone genius’, in some quarters it also rather reduced it, in the way that business does, to a uniform, replicable procedure: a funnel through which problems are turned into designed solutions.
Design is not an efficient industrial process. It is a messy journey*, with much waste and looping backwards. It is more like a conversation with the context — a dialogue between problem and opportunity in which both change and possibilities are seen anew. There is often a foggy, magical bit in the middle, which nobody can explain but which, coupled with a leap of faith, produces the spark for a compelling direction.
That is because design is inherently a creative act. And we need creativity more than ever. Too much of the design world has fallen prey to a tech-driven process of incrementalism — the long journey to the bland interface — while the social and environmental challenges we face now need us to invest ourselves in radical departures from the status quo.
In 2004, the challenge for designers was reorienting organisations’ offers around the needs and aspirations of the people they served. The Double Diamond responded by successfully representing design as a strategic process.
15 years later, much has changed. The understanding of design as a practice or a mode of being rather than a process is growing. The challenge has changed too: our focus now is on what it will take to remake the increasingly unsustainable systems on which modern society is built.
These are not technical challenges: they need creative responses. And we need the leadership not to manage a process but to cultivate the conditions for stepping into deeper creative endeavour together.
In fact, we need more of the mess. My hope is that in the next 15 years we will see representations of design that help leaders in all fields find the creative confidence to step away from analysing, diagnosing, optimising into the uncertain territory of imagining, modelling, making — and remaking — the world around us.
*Years ago Damien Newman showed me his version of the design process — which is highly unsatisfactory in offering any kind of guidance and probably more reflective of the reality.
