 |
Our modern notions of “design” and
“designing” trouble me. Our normal way of understanding
design decomposes important unities into arrangements of trivial
components. By analogy, in our attempt to understand the design of
a meal as a collection of ingredients and activities, we miss the
chef’s competence and the meal itself. Too often we understand
designs as idiosyncratic arrangements of components according to a
logic that made sense to a “talented” person at the time
it was done. We moderns think nothing of removing activities and
things from their contexts—from the practices and histories in
which they were born. We act as if we can understand things in a
way that is distinct from the worlds in which they exist.
“Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” becomes a
class of error that we cannot clearly assign to the designer.
Not so long ago, if one wanted to become a designer, one first
became a master craftsperson. Apprentices and journeymen learned to
construct distinctive artifacts. Masters innovated in their
tradition. To say one was a “designer” without
craftsmanship in the background would have been Harry
Potter–esque: ridiculous. Then at some moment we began to
separate the “manual” work of craftsmanship and the
“intellectual” work of design into two threads.
How might we begin to recover the essential unity that is
missing in so many of today’s “designs”? We will
need to adjust how we understand what design is, what the designer
is expected to do, and how the designer goes about working.
I understand the role of the designer as bringing new
practices to people. Designs themselves are
components of practices. A pen without ink, paper, hands,
language, and writing is a component and not very interesting. The
designer’s unity is a new or improved practice: human beings
in the midst of concernful activities, supported by networks of
equipment and help, taking care of things that matter to them. At
the end of any successful design project—no matter how modest
or grand—we will be able to observe a community of human
beings working together in ways that are new or changed, and those
new ways of working will bring specific incremental value to
them.
A number of years ago I realized that I was no less susceptible
to falling in love with my “designs” than others, and
that falling in love with a component was a surefire way of wasting
time. So I built a conceptual structure that would let me keep
track of the unity of the shifted practice, and called the
structure Five Domains for Bringing a New Practice.
- Provocation: a designer seeking to bring new practices
must provide big provocations. Changing practices is expensive. To
begin to work in a different way costs money; people lose power and
identity; and it takes a substantial human investment to bridge the
chasm from old to new. Moreover, building a new practice takes more
than one provocation. Each affected party to the changes needs
provocations. Executives, investors, workers, and suppliers have
different kinds of concerns, and need to be provoked in positive
ways. Further, the right kinds of provocations are not stable; they
change over the course of a design project. Provocations sufficient
for a pilot are often insufficient for constructing a whole new way
of working.
- Diagnosis: a successful change in practices is built
upon a good diagnosis. “Problem solving” is a sufficient
distinction for changing suppliers or the brand of some device we
use, moving our office, or adding a computer, but not if we are
changing essential practices. Skillful design starts with a
powerful interpretation about the current situation that provides
an explanation of what gave rise to the current situation, helps us
to select the right team, and guides the design of a broad set of
actions needed as a community moves from one world of practices to
another.
- Offers: commitment fuels the process of bringing a new
practice, and starts with offers. We offer to take a look at some
situation, then offer to provide proposal, prototype, pilot, plan,
and budget, and manage the change involved. The process of bringing
a new practice moves in a sequence of offers. The exchanges of
promises (I offer you x, in exchange for y) produces the force and
authority in which changes are made.
- Mobilization: we bring the new practice to the
community, and when we leave them they are working in a new and
more effective way. When we move our attention from constructing
components to building the unity of a new practice, we shift our
attention from bringing artifacts and discrete components to
habilitating the community to working in a new way. Devices,
training, and the like are equipment to help us with that job.
- Accumulation: the test of a new practice is that it
allows us to accumulate value at a faster rate than before. I use
the word capital to refer to “stores” of different kinds
of value on which the designer puts attention while bringing a new
practice: financial (money), pragmatic (know-how), or symbolic
(identity). If an investment to produce a new practice does not
produce increases in one or more kinds of capital, then the
investment was wasted.
In this framework, failed implementations are design errors. If
a new practice is not effective, unmanageable, or the like, those
are design errors.
We human beings are wired for concernful involvement with each
other. We arrive in a world already “designed” for that.
Every day, everywhere we look, we can see things broken, missing,
and in the way. Those with the audacity to develop themselves as
designers dare to intervene in this world. They invent and
bring new practices, habits, artifacts, tools and systems that
help reshape the way we coordinate in our worlds.
Chauncey Bell is chief operating officer of CareCyte, Seattle. This article is
abstracted from a longer piece.
|
