Toward Principled Design Practice

Leaps in technological advancement have meant that organisations can apply technology to solve problems quickly and cheaply. The cost of trying something new has gone down; organisations can now quickly and cheaply spin up a team to apply artificial intelligence and learning machines to work.

Sometimes if all you have is code the whole world looks like an opportunity to build an app. For that reason I believe we need to be more principled about design — we can and must integrate human need into the design of new services but just as importantly we should think about the consequences the services we design will have on the communities of people who are indirectly affected by our work too.

In discussion with Kriti Sharma, VP of Bots and AI at Sage, on the Invisible Admin podcast, Kriti shared her chat-bot design process. Sage’s chat-bot Pegg is a bot which aims to reduce the pain of financial administration.

To create Pegg Kriti and her team had to ensure it a) fulfilled the needs of people chatting to Pegg to get work done and b) was designed to anticipate the needs of customers as it got to know them. The impact of Pegg isn’t just isolated to the human-bot interaction — more broadly Pegg has implications for the accounting practice.

An unprincipled design team might argue that the unintended and unforeseen consequences of a product on a system aren’t their problem — they might claim that the people and not the code are the problem.

That isn’t good enough though.

A principle innovation practice would consider not just the interaction between person and service but the potential impact on society. Uber and AirBnB are both examples of service design which fulfills customer need with unintended consequences.

I was relieved to hear that Kriti and her team had considered the broader sociotechnical systems impacted by their work. It would be too easy to claim that Pegg’s impact is proximate to the person chatting to it. It is a more complex challenge which needs addressing when one considers that a community of accountants are affected by Pegg.

My relationship with my accountant is characterized by an email subject-line: “receipts?”

I can never seem to keep my receipts organised. I mix business and personal receipts. I mix up receipts for golf with the important ones that link to a cost of a sale, or are materials used in the production of our work.

Instead of giving my accountant this jumbled mess why not share them with Pegg?

But it’s not that simple, to my accountant my relationship with her is through our never ending battle to sort and filter receipts.

Pegg has replaced a dirty and dull process, but in doing so the relationship between my accountant and I has changed, for the better, and via principled innovation practice.

Pegg has been designed to work alongside my accountant and not replace her. Pegg works as part of a team and with my accountant to provide the full picture — an example of what Don Norman refers to as Human-Machine team-work.

Engineers have been heard to say “if it weren’t for people, our systems would work just fine,” usually uttered after some accident has been blamed on “human error.” On the contrary, when it comes to complex systems, if it weren’t for people, the system wouldn’t have worked at all

— Norman & Stappers (2016). DesignX: Design and complex sociotechnical systems

As we enter into an age where we get better at solving complicated challenges using technology and as smart machines integrate more deeply into our homes and routines organisations will need to push their R&D teams to think beyond the consequences of their services on individuals but broaden their lens to view their impact on society too.

We will need to design to work alongside machines and not for them.

Read more on the idea of a principle design practice:

The design industry’s reigning paradigm is in crisis. It’s time to evolve from human-centered design to humanity-centered design, write Artefact’s Rob Girling and Emilia Palaveeva. https://www.fastcodesign.com/90149212/beyond-the-cult-of-human-centered-design