Applications of Transition Design in the Industry
Notes from a lecture by Cameron Tonkinwise. Discussion Leaders: Saumya Kharbanda, Calvin Keetae Ryu
The dominant tech industry management model
“Don’t just build things right, build the right thing”
“If you want the most efficient outcome, you have to empower the workers”
LEAN — factory driven model.
There’s a battle at the moment between product managers and designers. Product managers are usurping the role of the strategic designer. The dominant paradigm is: “why talk to people when you can look at large data?” The people who are good at working with data are coders who then become product managers
“Product thinking is the new design thinking.”
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Designing for social behaviours and practices
“We designed the car, but not the traffic”
Whenever you’re creating a platform, you’re also creating behaviors that support the platform. When you’re working in the LEAN way, you’re practicing fast transition design. LEAN and AGILE are too short cycle to imaging these pivots.
Example: Bikesharing in New York:
Somebody made a large scale intervention, with the main driver being to create advertising real estate. However, it led to large scale changes in the psychogeography of New York, to behaviors for traversing the city, push for interventions in infrastructure to support bike lanes etc. It was not intended for transition, but is actually a transition design project.
The job of the transition design is to take all this understanding about visions, futures, political agendas, theories of change, mindset of postures etc and apply it in context of the industry.
Example: Phones
The evolution of phones, a shift from a divergent model (specialized devices for different tasks like gaming, listening to music, etc) to a convergent one (one device for everything). From thinking about specific niches to thinking about ecosystems. Was this a pull or a push? A little bit of both?
Example: iPod
The iPod click wheel as a really clever experiment in socio-technical practices. We all had to learn the model of interaction that shifted us from putting out finger on a button, to a finger now being on a device. It wasn’t just a technology but also a social learning we had to do.
Example: iPad
We had to learn about the link between a phone and a computer and a cloud. This process brings a screen into your lap. If you said to someone in TV that in five years you could hold a tv, they would call you an idiot, because “no one wants to hold a TV”
Fun Fact: The biggest selling item in a tech store is a tablet holder.
Also: Where does an iPad GO? “iGotABigAssPocket”
All of these are transitions, but transitions not with the kind of posture and mindset we’ve been talking about in this class, but we can use these developments to practice transition design.
The types of value propositions you define in the companies that you are working for are the leverage point for transition design.
Example: Peer-to-peer interactions
On September 12, 2001 if you would have told someone that in ten years time, we would all be engaging in peer-to-peer interactions, getting into strangers cars, etc, they would have laughed at you. How did we get here? it’s not the “big man in history” argument
- the economy (people seeking cheaper travel and lodging, people wanting to earn money from underutilized resources.)
- economics doesn’t drive innovation, it capitalises innovation
- smart mobility
- roll out of 2g/3g/4g; creation of geodata; easier to pinpoint the location of things;
- connectivity (pre-2001, characterized by anonymity)
- social media — true identity. Facebook convinced people that they should be identifiable on the web, not anonymous. Move from “yes i can be connected” to “i can be connected AND have my own identity”
All of this culminates in:
- I’m connected, Ican’t get lost
- I can avoid danger because have an escape route,
- I’m more used to handling interactions with strangers
- I need cheap accommodation / need to make money.
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Transitions in the sharing economy:
We moved from sharing things to the sharing of labour. An uber driver owns the car, but the thing being shared is not the car, but the driver’s time. Airbnb hired and etiquette officer who teaches people to be good hosts.
“Capitalism very quickly coopted the sharing of labour over the sharing of things”
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Evidence of businesses desperately looking for value propositions that are no longer “selling stuff”.
There’s a strong shift at the moment from owning stuff to “smaller living”. The 20th century deal was “you want something but you’re not quite sure” — the market offers you “x” — you says “ehh not exactly what I was looking for but it’ll do.”
Mass customization is a myth — when you move to service economy, it is about support — Businsess paradigm shifts from “we offer this to you “ to “what do you want us to do for you?”
“Don’t design a product, design your customers so that you can help them”
eg: Apple, very prescriptive, they don’t just design products, they design people who can use those products.
Shared values recognizes that a company doesn’t only offer value to its customers but also to its employees; treats employees as customers. There isn’t only customers and employees, but also the community in which they are situated.
To create a values at this level is where the role of the transition designer lies. This is the practical application of Transition Design in the industry.
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Quote of the day:
“People are evil because of the systems they are in. Actual sociopaths are quite rare.”
