The Map and the Territory
by Design Partner Alex Smith
It has become fashionable in certain corners of the discourse to declare that Design Thinking is neither special, nor effective — a retread of ideas from the 70s and 80s, or a set of ritualistic behaviors involving sticky notes designed to preserve the privileged position of the practitioner/consultant.
While the rapid adoption of Design Thinking across industry and public policy has unfairly made it a target for thought leaders looking for clicks, this criticism is still a valid take on how it has come to be practised.
Design thinking, when reduced to an algebraic function so that it can be applied at scale will always produce flat results. Stripped down to diagram form the design process comes to resemble any other kind of formal of decision making. As an example, take a look at how closely it maps to the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) developed at the US Air Force to describe structured decision making in combat Operations.
I love making process diagrams as much as the next nerd, but In the hands of some design consultants the diagrams BECAME the process. A cargo cult ritual that somehow involves empathy, sticky notes, and (bizarrely) hexagons.
STEP ONE: EMPATHIZE
The high degree of abstraction and the simplification of the process makes a great powerpoint slide but leads to a flattened approach — one that necessarily leaves out important aspects of the way designers think and work under ideal circumstances.
The incredibly complex process of listening to and learning from all of the human beings that will be affected by a design intervention is reduced to an imperative to EMPATHIZE. This is great for explaining what design thinking is, but terrible as an instruction set for how to perform Design Thinking.
Mistaking this simplified map of the process for the actual territory we are engaging leads us to see design problems as simple, when even the most basic artefact exists within nested series of form/context boundaries of almost ecological complexity. A flattened approach will always lead to flattened results.
WE CAN ALL DO BETTER
Despite the shortcomings of how it is sometimes practiced, Design Thinking remains a powerful way for human beings to tackle the problems they face.
To do better, we must recognize that the process is far messier and more human than those hexagons would have you believe. At its best, it is a really exciting, continuously unfolding conversation. Certain rituals can help capture the knowledge developed in that conversation (hello sticky notes!) and test that knowledge in the real world.
The elements that make a great conversation are the same as the elements that make a powerful Design practice. Inclusion enriches the conversation, leading to promiscuous interactions between different kinds of brains which yielding unexpected points of view. In his introduction to the Design Ops handbook, Dave Malouf shares his observation of the serendipitous adjacencies of studio culture:
“In a pre-digital studio, everyone’s work is externalized, visible, and transparent. This means that ideas are juxtaposed purposefully, passively, accidentally, and serendipitously.”
Those serendipitous juxtapositions result in new lines of inquiry leading to more innovative outcomes. At Group of Humans we are learning how to create those interactions in the digital space resulting in an exciting and powerful conversation.
THE CREATIVE LEAP
I am a huge advocate of the idea that design is a rational, repeatable process. But I have spent enough time around creativity to know that something that very much looks like magic can happen in the studio — the creative leap. The moment someone in the room intuitively makes a cognitive jump that does not immediately appear to be supported by the evidence and results in a powerful solution to the problem at hand. As Louis MacNeice has it in his poem Snow
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
It turns out this moment is not (contrary to all appearances) magic, but an abductive synthesis and extrapolation from the evidence at hand. As psychologist, design theorist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon pointed out
“The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
Everyone is capable of this kind of intuitive leap, creative people have developed it as a skill. Performed with depth, Design Thinking can create a situation where these leaps are a regular, repeatable phenomenon. Or as MacNeice would have it.
“There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.”
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