Design Thinking, the full package?
What many organizations, institutions, and businesses know as ‘design thinking’ or ‘design’ are missing a key piece in the puzzle–psychology. Strategists come across more and more complicated problems in their practice today. In fact, we’re seeing that how well one can start to tackle those complex problems depends on how well one understands the cause of the issues in the first place.
A healthcare program may not be satisfying its patients because of their complex lives outside of the hospital. A high school curriculum isn’t translating to the classroom effectively because of a sensitive blockage in communication. The leadership in many of these kinds of domains are looking to design to help them understand the problem and then to plan and execute an alternative. There seem to be plenty of design methods to do that.
‘Design thinking,’ which has been popularized, is a condensed, pocket-size version of design that is drawn from several diverse, well-established design disciplines that stem from the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Much like a craftsperson does, each design discipline has its own approach and comes with a set of appropriate tools to build with. Service design is one of these design approaches that’s developed tools like ‘user journey maps, ‘service blueprints’ to name a few. Another approach is human-centered design where tools like ‘brainstorming’ or ‘design probes’ are used. Some approaches adapt existing research tools from other disciplines. For example, design borrows ethnographic research from anthropology, the concept of minimum viable product from product development, and role play and storyboarding from performing arts. Projects that use these approaches and tools have done great work to illustrate that design is more instrumental than ‘making stuff look good.’
Each of these popular approaches within design are focused on being able to grapple with and change what a user thinks and does. ‘Design probes’ are administered to collect notes about users’ day to day, first-hand experiences. ‘User journey maps’ are created to plot in detail how people might navigate a service. These tools and approaches are sophisticated and when used well, are very effective at helping designers and their clients to understand the thoughts and behaviors of users. They’ve also been proven to be great at changing those thoughts and behaviors.
But, behavioral science tells us that human nature consists of more than our thoughts and actions. It is three-fold and is made of thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. We don’t have very many good design approaches and tools specifically for psychological needs.
Outside of the world of a few branches of psychology, it can be difficult to invest time and resources into researching and designing for emotion despite its weighty influence on users’ behaviors and thoughts. We define emotion as our complex states of mind that are formed by each of our social and psychological histories. Emotions also don’t always seem directly related to a problem or project brief. Emotions are harder to understand, predict, and measure than it is for what someone is thinking or doing. Because of these and other limitations, there are significantly less quantity and lower quality of design approaches dedicated to emotion than other popular approaches, making it difficult to make the case for emotion.
We do see some interaction between design and emotion, though. For example, designers apply concepts from color theory that tell us, for example, the color yellow makes you happy. Others focus on the effect of emotions on marketing like tapping into people’s fear and safety in an advertisement to sell a home security system. Rather than using emotions for the sole purpose of designing more pleasant products or selling more products, our work at Matter–Mind Studio takes a holistic approach. When it comes to healthcare, one not only seeks treatment for physical ailments but also for a feeling of security. For example, when it comes to education, a student’s struggle to meet standards isn’t only about learning, but may be rooted in feeling a lack of purpose. We find that emotions are the guiding forces to understanding complex problems. Matter–Mind Studio develops new emotion-based approaches and tools for each phase of a project to complement the more commonly used design methods.
The grey points in this diagram below represent the set of widely accepted design tools and approaches. The points below the horizontal line represent new and developing tools and approaches dedicated to (1) understanding and (2) making objects and designing services for emotion.
Service design is an approach that has begun developing what’s called a ‘service blueprint’ which much like an architect’s blueprint of a built structure is a visual representation of how to execute a new service. Within the service blueprint designers sometimes measure and represent a user’s expected emotional arc throughout the various schemes in a service. This technique of incorporating the emotional arc into the service blueprint is a relatively new one and isn’t yet made standard. Other design tools that address emotion are extremely scarce.
Matter–Mind Studio has a strong focus on continuing to develop emotion-centered design tools that are unique to the field of design. For example, during the research phase, we may conduct ‘sentiment conversations,’ which are interviews where participants’ conversation centers around discussing a sentimental object. We developed this tool based on findings in anthropology and psychology that note it is part of the human condition to use tangible objects and symbols to communicate and understand concepts like emotions. In addition, we extract key insights from existing rituals like weekly family dinners or tea ceremonies. We apply what we call ‘ritual design’ to create a series of desired interactions between people, objects, and spaces. And we use the powerful sentimental objects, spaces and communication techniques within each ritual to improve how a new service or object is implemented into a person’s life.
While ‘design thinking,’ strategic design, user- or human-centered design, service design, and business design, work to address economic, social needs of organizations and companies, there’s still quite a gap to balance out in order for design to provide products and services that affect the core of the human condition–our psyche.
The value of design continues to be more popularly recognized by fields like health, education, public sector, tech, and business. High praises go out to those who take action to challenge their own status-quo. Leaders of these fields should continue to think critically about ‘design thinking’ before they use it and as they practice it–to consider what came before it, and what’s in store for it’s future.
