LANGUAGE FOR TRANSITION
Article based on the talk of Koen Peters (Namahn) at the World Information Architecture Day 2018 in Utrecht at GriDDs offices.
See the video registration of the talk below
In his presentation on language and transition, Koen Peters talks to us about language, design, and change. The motive behind this topic is to analyze the role of language and conversations in designing user experiences and the transformative nature of language in organizations. Koen also introduces the Systemic Design Toolkit, a set of tools which combine concepts of systems thinking with human-centered design thinking. The design toolkit is created to help designers cope with more complex problems in large organizations.
Language in Design
Language skills are often overlooked by designers. However, language and conversations are increasingly at the heart of our current design practice. There is the growing importance of voice UIs and AI in the form of voice assistants like Google’s Echo and Amazon’s Alexa. This has prompted a growing need for other types of designer job profiles such as dialogue designers. New job profiles also means a new set of skills, deliverables, and tools that designers have to familiarize themselves with to create for instance dialogue flows.
Designers are used to think visually rather than in words. When faced with a problem, designers are more likely to start sketching or visualizing to solve it. For example, during most job interviews, designers may be required to take a design test and produce solutions. They are judged first an foremost on their graphic design skills, UX design skills or visualization skills. But for Koen, a designer’s language and presentation skills are equally important. Since today’s designers have to write a lot and explain their ideas and solutions to team members or large groups. Koen considers the ability to moderate a conversation as an important skill any designer should have. This is because they will often be required to moderate client conversations to co-create design solutions.
Conversations and Co-creation
In a client project, the first elaborate conversation designers have is usually a framing workshop. This is where they try to understand the context and frame the problem together with the client. In this workshop, they will also often try to understand the current culture and language of the organization. Language plays an important role in forming this culture in organizations. So designers have to try to understand this language and see if it really represents the culture that the organization wants to have.
For example, when trying to determine the organizational culture of a company, in line with the Hofstede model for cultural dimensions, designers can ask the following questions:
- Do they communicate individually (‘I’) or more as a team (‘we’)?
- Is the corporate culture more masculine –result oriented or competitive- or rather feminine –cooperative and process-oriented?
Language and transformation
Language has often been linked to societal transformation as it impacts different people, systems, and even whole nations. For example, when you think about Donald Trump, you think about his language, he uses a kind of simplistic language that is quite relatable. This very specific type of language and the way he communicates proved to be very successful in the presidential elections. Language shapes our perspective on society and the world. Words are never neutral, they are always coloured in a positive way or in a negative way and organizations have to be careful when using a language.
Koen gives the example of a Jewish linguist and writer, Victor Klemperer, who survived the Second World War and wrote the book ‘The language of the Third Reich’, the ‘LTI’ (Lingua Tertii Imperii). In this book, he explains how language played a crucial role in the course of events in the rise and fall of the Nazi regime. His analysis shows how language slowly consumed the minds of the Germans, how it poisoned their minds, you could say. He also showed how their language eventually led to a disastrous war. This lends a better explanation of what really happened during the war. You might have asked yourself when watching documentaries on war speeches and military parades, how it was possible that people went along with it for so long, willing to invade other countries. However, after reading this book, you’ll understand how language played a big role in it.
Normally, in a free context, when you use language, it can serve many purposes from helping you think or express your feelings to announcing something or conversing with people. Language can also be used for reflection, abstraction, praying, swearing, and much more. However, LTI was very one-sided: it was mostly used to give orders and to enchant people and indoctrinate them. In LTI, there was also no difference between the spoken language and the written language and you could only shout it out. There was a lot of repetition: the same words and the same phrases were often used again and again — this proved to be a good way to convince and brainwash people. LTI was highly regulated. This ensured that its users only thought in a particular way.
Organizational Language
According to Paul Pangaro in his lecture on designing conversations: “an organization is its language.” The organizational language encompasses its culture, ideas and concepts, values and even the way its employees think.
You’ll often see organizations trying to increase their efficiency by creating a shared, common language. This language is often adopted by their employees, so they can operate more efficiently. This is because having a common shared language makes it easier for a large group of people to work quickly and efficiently together. However, this also has a downside, as it limits the organization’s capability to think out of the box and to evolve and innovate. So, narrowing language makes it more efficient but also increases ignorance and limits future possibilities. Therefore, to regenerate and innovate an organization, you need to find a way to create a new language or start using a different language than the existing one. Otherwise, you stand the risk of staying stuck in the concepts that are there.
A good example is what happened to Kodak which a few years ago was a market leader in photography/films. They were co-inventing a new, digital technology but somehow, they couldn’t make the necessary loop or jump in their branding and in their way of thinking and in the language they were using. The brand was very product and technology-based, they thought that their brand meant really film. Instead of thinking broader, of higher ideals like preserving memories which is what photos are all about instead of thinking in terms of technology. In a way, they were stuck in their language and ideas of their past successes and they could not get this changed in their organization.
So, change and innovation cannot happen when you use existing corporate language. That’s basically the idea and you need to create a new language to find new parts to productivity and to regenerate an organization.
Systemic design as tool
In the last part of his talk, Koen talked about systemic design. Systemic design combines design thinking with concepts of systems thinking.
The systemic design toolkit Namahn has developed, allows you to zoom out and look at a problem on a systemic level.
The tools in this toolkit are designed in such a way that you can bring people together in a room and have a conversation about a systemic problem, without them having to know the concepts and theory of systems thinking.
Zooming out to a systemic level allows you to design for transition.
The Role of Language in a Transition Project
So what is the role of language when you’re trying to change and improve a system or organization.
First of all, fostering conversation is really crucial, you have to bring people in one room and start a conversation with all of the parties involved to get a broader view on things. The first step in this is, of course, just talk to them and understand the current language and culture in their organization. Designers also have to identify the limitations of this language.
Try to bring people with different backgrounds together. These people may normally not speak to each other or may even speak completely different languages. However, collecting these different worlds and different vocabularies, these different languages can allow you to make new connections and spark innovative ideas. This is where your moderation skills come into play, to recognize social styles and different types of personalities. Understanding these social styles will help you to know how to react in situations e.g. when you are confronted with someone with higher authority in a work situation.
Then start creating a new language: look for metaphors that help establish new concepts, and look for a “constructive” language, words that partly contain already the desired behaviour. Use verbs rather than noun phrases: verbs (active) give more possibilities than nouns (static), they make the interventions more actionable.
Finally, Koen advises designers to be very careful when in the process of creating a new language. This is because language can easily be misused and manipulated.
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