Expert-non-experts
The role designers really play
A little while back I was invited to join a panel about low impact living for the launch event of The Kri, a digital storytelling project I’d worked on with Professor Nick Enfield from Sydney University. In the lead up to the launch I wrote the Facebook spruik below, consciously outing my non-expertness…
“Significantly less distinguished me”…It felt important to be transparent even at the cost of downplaying my role in the project.
On the night of the launch each panelist introduced themselves with an overview of an impressive and hard earned expertise in their given fields. This deep, specific knowledge gained through decades of finely honed focus blows my mind. It’s a stark contrast to the the modular approach myself and an increasing number of my contemporaries live out, switching between a medley of projects and spaces every week.
When it came time to intro myself to the audience, “I’m an expert non-expert”, just came out. And as I went on to describe working across design for social innovation, podcasting and collaborations with a range of experts the paradox started to make a lot of sense — so I chose to own it.
The panel got going and the coupling of deep expertise with expert-non-expert reframing proved to be a powerful mix, allowing the group to find new potential in familiar territory. For example, the untapped potential for storytelling to catalyse new policy and community movements to implement more sustainable ways of living in cities.
The Design for Business team at Deloitte, Australia, consciously enacts this role every day as design consultants. We each have backgrounds in applied design and transpose the principals that are tacit to creative practice including; play, curiosity, collaboration and learning-though-making to help create shared value through change. We’re constantly seeing the roles and definitions of designers evolve as organisations, government and institutions continue to expand designers’ reach beyond the aesthetic to strategic, cultural and educational roles. Although, for a profession grounded in communication we’re pretty bad at writing critically about what we do so I’m linking you to the Deloitte Design for Business page on Medium not as a plug but a hook up to current writing from designers at the frontline. There are faces to the names below.
So what is the difference between consulting and design-led consulting?
Siri (a consultant by this definition) defines a consultant as, a person who provides expert advice professionally, but what I see the Design for Business team doing is providing expert-non expert advice professionally.
Put simply, this comes down to a difference in disposition between knowers and learners. Knowers hinge their sense of self on being expert, on providing certainty, while learners are more concerned with being exposed to new ideas and perspectives, to figure out new ways to solve problems. Of course people are often a blend of the two but the crux of the consulting world and Western pedagogy, for the most part, has focused ambition on knowing, until now.
Becoming a knower is an aspiration ingrained in us from kindergarten. Our education trajectory is shaped like a funnel; it starts broad and then slowly asks us to focus on what we’re most interested or good at through picking electives in high school through to specialising in university. New degrees like UTS’ s bachelor of Creative Intelligence as well as massive open online courses (MOOCs) are breaking with tradition but for the most part the road to being a knower is still the one most encouraged.
Deep expertise is still incredibly important but our shift to systems-based problem solving demands a collaboration between knowers and learners (expert-non-experts) to bring unlikely parties together based on understanding what the people who use the product, service or space really need.*
The other expertness designers bring to any problem is making-to-learn. Sketching, prototyping, rebuilding; all of this is inherent to any applied creative practice. The real value making adds is that it forces decisions to be made and gives people an opportunity to engage with something tangible and accessible as a platform for improvement. I’ve seen this shift occur first hand with some current NSW Government projects. It’s a bit too early to share specifics but I can say the outdated ivory tower approach to delivering services is definitely being replaced with iteratively working with communities and service providers to learn and improve as-you-go.
One of my favourite writers on design, Ezio Manzini explores how expert designers can work productively and meaningfully with Design-orientated individuals and organisations to enact Design for social innovation. The key to thinking about this and a useful way to think about Design was in general is shifting your focus from what you design to how you get there — the process. This encompasses everything from research approach through to where you design, who you do it with and the tools you use. The first wave of expert design tools such as IDEO’s Design Kit or Gamestorming are being used by organisations all over the world to tease out how exactly we can fulfil people’s needs today. These tools have been wildly successful and important in validating the role of human-centred design to catalyse meaningful solutions to today’s problems – but this is just the beginning. Now is the perfect time to keep experimenting with creative methods connect more people to the social, economic and structural changes that shape their lives.
The Department of Extraordinary Affairs, a design consultancy based in Rotterdam are the perfect example of this. They work with Government, arts organisations and corporates to garner public engagement in social issues through disarmingly playful and effective public interventions. I met with the founders at Dutch Design Week who took me through one of their projects on show, The Participation Wheel.
The Wheel of Participation was originally designed to help a Dutch province engage the public in environmental policy and planning. So often the public aren’t invited to contribute to this stuff and when they are the process is dry or inaccessible.
How it works
The Wheel of Participation is big, bold and colourful. When it’s positioned in a public place it draws in the public, like magpies to a shiny object. The look and feel is incredibly important to the experience.
Why it works
Today’s problems are huge and interconnected. We can choose to be overwhelmed or we can work with communities and designers, the expert-non-experts to find goodness and opportunities in the complexity.
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*The big guns like Apple, IBM and Uber have proven that Human-Centred-Design (HCD) is profitable although not always ethical… The tides do seem to be changing however with a visible increase of public engagement and demands for corporate responsibility — Earmarking this thought for a future post.
