Research Revisited: Design Elevation

It has been a long time since my last post and the following will begin a series of post from my sabbatical here in Chicago, IL. I am using this year to follow up on research that I have wanted to return to and have neglected for program direction and teaching. The start of this series will be to document my discovery and renewed enthusiasm I have for design theory and some to the more important methods and processes I have missed or dismissed over my career for one reason or another.

The importance of these theories will primarily be to shape my own thoughts on design but will ultimately influence my teaching and approaches to design research. My current literary research includes four notable writings, which I will describe and add to in the commentary I have set out here. Starting with Charles Owens' Structured Planning, followed by Horst Rittel and Werner Kunz's theory of Issues-Based Information Systems or IBIS to identify case studies that follow methods laid out in the writings. The others I am working on through prototypes, employing the Repertory Grid technique and followed up by the Design Principles described by Schermann, Kremar, Gehlert, and Pohl from the Munich University of Technology, and the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany respectively.

Structured Planning, developed by Charles Owen who is a professor emeritus at the Illinois Institute of Technology extends the idea of user centered design practice to formalize the design planning or what he calls 'metaplanning' using design factors, a document that states, "information about the problem detected (opportunity)" and, " information about what might be done about it (action)". Owen goes on to describe his process of documenting the information under observations, extensions, design strategies, speculation, structuring, and synthesis operations. One of the more important aspect of this theoretical framework is the value in the resource itself. Few designers approach the process of design in this manner and even fewer document their work with such meticulous detail for two main reasons. First, designers feel they have little time to formulate such documents because of time they feel is wasted on a process that has been internalized and now naturally follows from their experience. This is short sighted in its inability to recognize the value in a documented process. Using structured planning helps to clarify ideas and connect conceptual thinking with practical responses and identifies opportunities for clients (an invaluable skill), and demonstrates a deliberate methodology for tackling projects of a larger scale also making designers more valuable. The second reason designers fail to see the value in documentation and deliberate methodology is the notion that they will loose their 'mystic' quality as an unpredictable artistic genius. A sentiment that has all been lost on the business community and discounted by the technology industry. It is no secret that I have little admiration for 'creatives' that believe their value lay in the aesthetic qualities that veil intellectual gems for the trained observer, and for the untrained you get a cool looking cereal box. What is also important is the early implications of this theory to lay the ground work for service design and experiential design practice. Its approach is inclusive and particulates complex problems establishing relationships of all people and issues involved. What service design and experience design have in common is the scope and complexity of design problems each face. Structured Planning is particularly suited for these types of problems giving designers tools to demonstrate their particular ability and expand the practice of design to include strategic planning and systematic approaches to handle complex problems.

To read a detailed description of Owens work and examples of a design factor document see:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/07479360152103813

Re-direct to System Design

After reading an article on service design from Live|Work a company that specializes in service design and thinking I am drawn back to the idea because it poses to overturn processes that are unsustainable in design. (see article Live|Work here) As a follow up from my last post changing point of view or approach to a design problem will significantly alter the interventions iterating from you sketch pad. If you are thinking of designing from a users perspective service thinking only extends this further and may help to justify ideas you have direction and creation of new communications. The most significant is the idea of sustainability and what that means for design. In the article, the writer uses the natural metaphor of the water cycle that is a closed loop on a large scale. The process of how water is used and returned to the system varies but does so continuously. If we think of design in these terms we would consider the brochure after the information is consumed immediately impacting the process we typically think about as graphic designers. In a more contemporary scenario we design and develop for web products or services but do we consider the energy that is being used by the electronic devices we are using to access information? How can you modify consumers energy use in the products and services you buy to offset the energy used to make the purchase of those products and services? Sustainability is a difficult variable to integrate into the design process but its impact on thinking about design solutions is immediate and complex. I often ask my students a question that is intended to be difficult for them to answer but one that was posed by my old school friend Rosan Chow. "How do you design a (fill in the blank) with kindness as a central criteria"? It is difficult for a number of reasons but it is often the first time my students have thought of a project in those terms. It forces them to think about the design from a position outside their own, kindness to whom, to what, how is kindness understood? These are the tenants of service thinking and should be encouraged from all our students. I am encouraged by our university to recognize students involvement with social learning and am rewarded by my own efforts to engage students in these ideas but they must extend beyond the classroom and be embraced by business leaders who are interested in real innovation. I believe there are a great many people capable of thinking in these ways but are stifled by tradition and old models that are entrenched by years of integration and investment. It will take a great deal of power and motivation to reconsider these approaches but proving their worth on smaller projects that have high performance and efficiency may encourage growth and an effort to adopt service thinking. My next few posts will discuss a case of service thinking. 

Something from the French

It has always been of interest to see what the French design establishment has embellished by way of industrial, graphic and fashion design. I say embellish because it feels applied to me whenever I see french design and yet it projects sincerity in its execution. From Yves Saint Laurent to Philippe Starck the material is designed with the human form in mind and a rightful approach to design function. Then there is something more - a detail, a finish that is not just stuck on but not without whimsy. It feels like a later idea in the design process with enough relationship to the bigger concept it becomes essential to the work. It adds more than the big idea expanding its luxury, wit or complexity. As I said to artist Sonya Clarkson, cheap is never funny. I will write more on the subject of French design and other cultures that have defined 'style' and the role style plays in design.  

Create what you love or what other people love?

We have often heard the advice to young writers, "write what you know and write what you want to read". This may be useful advice for writers but is it applicable to design? It is a conversation that I have with my students in terms of defining design as a service versus design as self expression. In talking with clients I often find the conversation coming around to this issue of "point of view" on how they develop new products or services. The conversation goes something like this:

Me: So, what do you think your customers see in the work you do?
Client: Well they like what we like. We built this company around our passion for the thing we make and a number of people asked, "how do I get one?", and the rest is history.

Me: How do you now tap into other things those same people like to expand your business?
Client: (paraphrase) We do what we did before and make what we love, and they will like it too.

I am always surprised to hear that companies are willing to bet that lightning will strike twice. They are also willing to forgo all they have learned or been told about understanding audiences and working from a user center perspective. Often they believe they are working with the user in mind but have suffered from a psychological bait-and-switch. "Our customers like what we offer so we must have understood what they wanted and filled that desire". In fact that is not the whole truth of the matter. Many businesses started off with a product or service that filled a need because the audience found it, not the the other way around. Products and service that do go out and find their audiences have an advantage of going through the process of positioning and fine tuning to the needs of the audience, but even that can have specific audience data of a particular product. It does not lead that audiences are understood because they like this particular product. Audience analysis requires both micro and macro perspectives to get a full view of who those people are. People come together around a product and service for different reasons but are seen from a marketing stand point as being similar. If you define these audiences as a collective the next proposed idea probably will only appeal to a small segment of this group. How often have we seen the sequel not do as well as the debut. Yes, some of it has to do with rushing the product to market, and not having the same originality of the first, or sadly just trying to milk something that has run its course, but often it has to do with assuming the same audience who liked the first will like the second product. Why, because they are the same people? Looking at smaller segments as discreet/overlapping groups of people will offer more insight into who may be interested in what. This is not a new concept it is just an observation of businesses failing to stay innovative after having success. Duplicating success is difficult and fresh points of view are always good. Change the dynamics of the conversation by bringing in someone new to the conversation. Maybe its a client you didn't know you would attract, maybe its a customer you want to attract, or maybe its just shaking up the meeting of the usual suspects and re-looking at the audience data and separating them into discrete groups based on unrelated interests rather than your product that brought them all together.

Novice to Intermediate Interaction

Yesterday, the group show "Shift" opened at the Elizabeth Patrick Dunlop Gallery. I had two pieces in the show, the first was a video piece in collaboration with photographer and colleague Phil Moody. The second piece was also a collaborative work with Shaun Cassidy and Seth Rouser that deals with communication, and information distortion over networks ( I will post video of the piece soon ). Viewers interact with the work by moving in front of it which triggers the movement of objects on the screen in a circular pattern. As the viewer gets closer the pattern movement speeds up and distorted sounds are triggered. What is interesting to me was the focus of the work became the viewers movement, even for themselves. As they became aware that it was them who was in control of the speed and sound they began to experiment with where they were in space. The focus shifted from the screen to, "what is the ideal location?" or for some "is it better if I move faster?". We have not fully become accustom to interaction where it demands attention and can override the visual experience in spaces that have an expectation of visual predominance. There is still novelty in interacting with technology even in very simple forms. I asked a few people who had spent some time in front of the work if they had seen something like it before? Many had responded that they had and gave various examples. I would categorize them as 'intermediate' users so their input was very valuable. As designers we tend to focus on the visual content which is important because 'expert' users will return to the visual communication over time. The interaction acuity diminishes as they become more familiar with the actions. However, the novice and the intermediate user must divide their attention between the content, the context and the interaction. A measure of time would be useful to determine how long it takes for users to transition from novice to intermediate and then from intermediate to expert. The gallery piece relates directly with the idea of communication technologies and how little we know about the information we upload on to it. We are too focused on what we are doing to notice the effect it has on us and on the rest of the web.

Design-by-Menu Challenges Why We Make

To begin, I would like to say that I am wholeheartedly in support of computer based design education. It is no surprise that the forms of digital media are not only how we design, but what we design and will continue for the foreseeable future. The important aspects of design education in the beginning of ones design life can not be compared to yesterdays methods of making. One simple example of incredible change is the advent of the database and what that means for storing, retrieving, and connecting to photos, color systems, font libraries, and general layout options that were difficult to do prior to databases but were also proprietary, guarded assets of individual studios. Storages of photos and fonts consumed space and time that has been cut extensively from the process. This continues to break down the notion that design is about the form and more about the ideas of communication that are carried out through design. This idea has come to me after watching my students over a number of years plowing through networks of databases, searching for photos or illustrations, finding free fonts online, and more recently using color systems to guide their choices.  General layout schemes also influence how they organize information based on what they perceive as successful and found again, in some archive somewhere.

You may be thinking that this is "design by menu" and you would be right. It is not that this method has not been employed in the past and we see copy-cat commercials and ads all over the visual landscape, but it is becoming the method of some design students who are no longer motivated by "originality" or "uniqueness", but rather by ease and their misguided idea that form is the most important aspect of making design work. It is easy to spot and with little experience one can analyze the pedestrian compositions or insipid ideas that grace the page but what is more difficult is demonstrate that these competent, glossy layouts are not as good a design as sloppier, yet sophisticated ideas created by those less enamored by database diving. What is more difficult is encouraging students to continue to question their designs to make them more appropriate, more interesting, clearer in their communication or communicate a more sophisticated idea. The final product has a particular level of polish and feeling of doneness that is hard for students to abandon in pursuit of better design. Design-by-menu still requires students to make choices but there is less analysis about what they are communicating because of the speed and ease at which compositions can be generated. It is not difficult to see that this kind of design making could be simplified further by having these database components of the menu talk to each other. It may seem futuristic but it is a direction of developers and content holders to make "menu coordinators" out of designers. Assemblies of components come in a variety of iterations for the menu coordinator to filter and propose as possible solutions to clients. Can we legitimately call this design?

This gets at the heart of the question of why we design and make things? There are psychology PhD dissertations a plenty that discuss this topic and attempt to answer this question but I would like to refine it a bit further. The reasons for making communications generally serve the purpose of informing people. The function of form and visual application have long been established and seem logical in the context of the arts to serve communication needs, whatever they may be. The question I have is more fundamental in the fact that there are those human beings who make for the purposes of their own interest and find that the inner dialogue with themselves is somehow insufficient. Self expression comes to mind, but this too seems to have a purpose of showing others the thoughts of an individuals genius, perversion, importance or some other ego centric motivation. If we make purely to visualize some idea with no intended purpose other than to clarify it for ourselves, we may tap into the best motivation to design. Design thinking attempts to solve problems based on the thinkers understanding of the dilemma in a given context and that is all. Moreover, we have anchored design education on the basis of communicating ideas and this would solidify the foundation of design education in cognition and analysis. If the motivation of making is held in the minds of those who are selflessly attempting to clarify ideas in their own minds we stand a chance for design to be sustainable. However, if overestimates of the importance of form to attract attention persist we will compete with database technologies making it more difficult to get passed the design-by-menu advantage. I question my students on why they make, hopefully they answer; "to better understand an idea".

The System Designers Role

The System Designer is the organizer of time, material and space for audiences to experience. The 9/11 memorial was an example of this in the organization of circulation, the bronze plaques, the large pools and trees surrounding the area. It will be an experience that varies for visitors but there is an attempt to encourage feelings and thoughts that are reverent, mournful, and reflective. These are managed by they system designer and the design choices that are made and carried through in all the aspects of the environment. The formality of the space in the way it is ordered, the symbolic references to the fallen buildings and their footprint, and the natural elements all add to the experience that says, "this is a memorial". We might even consider the fountain as a de-facto memorial trigger.

Systems may be large scale projects like the memorial or they can be small but analyzing the success of a systems design is based on the way that elements within the design interact, inform, and add to teh experience. I am reminded of a very simple stir stick I found at a local coffee shop in Athens, Greece. It was a beautiful, slender, clear plastic paddle with an oval hole at the end to allow the coffee to swirl through it as coffee, cream, and sugar co-mingle. It is the choice of a single coffee shop owner to select this stir stick and adds to the overall experience at his store. In a way the coffee shop owner is a system designer considering the total experience from coffee to chairs, from newspaper ads to stir sticks. It is not every business owner who can bring together all of the aspects that give customers some impression of the coffee shop nor is it something that they should do but they should know it is important. 

The advertising guru Claude Hopkins states that, "if you don't understand the common man and what they want you will never sell them anything". The "common man" Hopkins refers to is the customer of the coffee shop owner. This may seem obvious but all to often designers focus on their client rather than the customers of their clients. Naturally, the person holding the money gets the most attention but Hopkins and avid follower David Ogilvy agree that pleasing the customer is the main concern. The best way to do that is testing designs with sample users before it is released. A system designers will have a difficult time doing this given because it is precisely the interaction between all of the designed components that make the system work.  It is the nature of the connections between designed artifacts and the context in which they are used influence the artifact itself and ultimate the user within the system. This can only be tested and observed once the system is in place. How can accurate testing be achieved at early stages of the design process? The potential for modularity may be a consideration but it is the value of the custom design of systems that makes it interesting and the salable point. If we prefabricate subsystems and offer them as plug-and-play components we loose the overall connection to the experience. An approach that uses visualization tools through 3D models offers many benefits but little information about these tools and their influence on the users experience has been published. The benefits to visualizing are well known but that is useful to the designer to predict scale, orientation, relationships of objects and so on, but what influence have they had on potential users or the customers of our clients to predict experiences that are generally the same?

Here are a few more questions to consider:
How does the virtual 3D environment measure up to the actual experience?
What were the expected emotional, cognitive, social, or political responses to the design, and did the system encourage, handle, deflect, discourage or change over time?
How does the user interact with the virtual environment?
How can you integrate prototypes that are easily made physically with environment prototypes that need to be virtual?