What Is Design Thinking

Introduction

The future design I’m most passionate about is exploring big opportunities that have not been defined. The projects I’m most passionate about tackling aren’t ‘normal’, and that’s intentional. The projects that need to be tackled are the most complex problems, along with exploring which emerging technologies could have the most impact on a long-term horizon with undefined, unknown, and uncertain outcomes.

Design — as broadly understood — exists to make things beautiful, produce things at scale, and put the finishing touches on something. It’s typically employed when projects switch from ‘research’ to ‘product’, when we select materials, finishes, form and function, and polish the interaction design. So why do we need designers, storytellers, and tinkers? Well, in a word, we prototype. 

Prototyping is often regarded as the realm of the engineer. For example, a loosely cobbled-together linkage made from Lego and tape, a cardboard version of a gadget, or a sketchy code. But I view prototyping in its broadest possible terms. For us, a prototype can involve everything from an imaginary corporate website to a receipt for a future dinner. Let’s discuss this.

Prototyping the Mundane

Prototyping is a catch-all term for rapidly trying something to see if it works, but a good prototype also offers a secondary function. Creating an embodied thing helps people move beyond conversation and loose ideas. It brings people together behind a single articulation of what might otherwise be a broad range of possibilities and helps them point at the parts where they disagree. It encourages detailed discussion as opposed to abstract opinions. We use prototypes to do this regularly, jumping forward in time to show where we think something might be going without being sure. 

Many times during a project, we reach a point where we can’t be exact about something because there are too many unknowns. There’s no clear path forward, and this can be paralysing. Our approach is to put ‘something’ there, our best guess, just for now. Let’s be provisionally specific. This can be a model of something, a photoreal 3D image, or a piece of software which appears to work (although someone might be pulling strings in the background like the Wizard of Oz). It can be focused on a tiny detail or the big project vision, but making something — anything — can almost always accelerate thinking, help make decisions, uncover blindspots and bring teams together. Our design work is many things, but in most cases, it’s prototypical.

The scale varies from the granular to the grand, from the near term to the long future, but importantly, this work is non-linear. There has been a trend in design circles over the last couple of decades towards analytical and sequential tools, frameworks and processes with their phases, stages, and arrows. To some extent, these approaches offer a generalised introduction to design, but we find them inadequate in an environment such as this. In truth, thinking/designing is messy. It follows no clear path and doesn’t flow naturally from one step to the next.

In this new inflection, we must be nimble, jumping from detail to exploration to strategy to fiction in an hour. In many regards, we rely on instinct. We pull on our collective experience and deploy approaches ad hoc, often creating methods and tactics on the fly. We reference emerging techniques in academia and develop the tools that best fit our needs. Some approaches we’ve been introducing into my practise over the last few decades fall under the enticing banner of a ‘near new project’.

Design

Design (sometimes called critical design) has been around for over twenty years and pulls on a grand history that goes back to the Italian radicals of the 1960s and beyond. These approaches serve a powerful function. They use the tools and techniques of design not to solve some well-defined problems (make this fit in there, or make this thing work), but to ask essential questions. In some sense - to borrow engineering or business language - they serve to ‘de-risk’ a project. Speculative design prototypes often look and feel like the prototype I described earlier. However, they don’t exist as a statement of ‘things-to-be-made’; they exist to provoke, as a means to facilitate conversations, and to pre-visualize issues and impact. They help design teams tackle problems before they become problems, understand the second and third-order impacts of their new ideas, and understand the whole shape of disruption caused by new technologies when deployed at scale. 

Design Fiction

On occasion, I’ve adopted a speculative design technique called design fiction. This involves assuming a project is fully deployed and adopted and then imagining what that world feels like. We produce prototypes from that future-changed world to help us have a conversation about it today before we’ve even finished. The power of speculative design is that it allows us to tackle our projects' neutral and negative outcomes. By speculating on the impact of these interventions, we can think beyond the ‘perfect’ solution, discuss externalities, and consider people who might be averse to the idea or whose livelihoods may be negatively affected. By producing prototypes of these events (a newspaper headline, a protest poster, a poor review) the design team can think more broadly about the shape of their work, explore how to avoid missteps and focus their engineering efforts. It’s not a perfect or foolproof approach; any project will have countless unseen blindspots. However, producing these prototypes forces awkward conversations to become tangible, unavoidable, and focused, hopefully making our teams at IUC more able to address them. Imagine a Moonshot team focusing on the subcultural implications of all possible futures. In this way, the weather report can play a key role in helping IUC understand our world in new ways and prepare for the coming times. The power of stories and the techniques of popular media to explore the cultural implications of new technologies. We need to understand these technologies and the various futures they set in motion so that we may become more critical consumers and producers of our kinds of futures.  There is a need to misread technologies so we can start asking more questions about the technologies that will define our lives, spaces and cities. 

The future does not rush over us like water. It’s something we all must actively shape and define. When I think about the future of the creative industry, are we customers or citizens? The tools of fiction and speculation can preempt what might come so that we’re not just waiting in line for the next iPhone to be released.  The aim is to start scaffolding ways to think about how we might get the technologies we want rather than focusing on the technologies themselves. The word “design” has so many interpretations and incarnations these days that I was confused about what design means. If someone had questioned me before the start of this year regarding what design is, I would have presumably quoted Paul Rand: Design is relationships. Design is a relationship between form and content. “Your glasses are round, and your collar is diagonal. These are relationships. Your mouth is oval, and your nose is a triangle — this is what design is.” Paul Rand (Kroeger & Weingart, 2012)

Phil Gilbert, from IBM Design, later refined that into a statement which made a little better connection with businesspeople.  “Design is about creating relationships which drive businesses.” (Phil Gilbert, 2017)

However, this description engendered so many uncertainties. What does “creating” mean? What are “relationships”? How do they drive businesses? And does it not influence anything else? These ambiguities influenced my process, thinking, and work. I was uncertain about my responsibility as a designer. Was it just executing a few screens, optimising specific business metrics, or something more than that? How do I balance users' needs with the business's demands?

The first book I read this quarter was Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Alexander, 2002) by Christopher Alexander, whom I had earlier heard of from his work on pattern language. This changed my view on design and the function and purpose of designers. I will use the term “Alexandrian designer”, as Alan Cooper calls himself (Cooper, 2015), to explain Chris Alexander’s take on this topic. The “Alexandrian designer” is someone required in the tech industry. 

Where to Start 

Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the content defines the problem. 

According to Christopher Alexander (Alexander, 2002, p.15), the Alexandrian designer does not have the luxury of redefining the problem to suit their taste, desires, or aesthetic vision. The Alexandrian designer synthesises a fit for a given context. It’s the design with an externally defined end purpose. It's not intended to make you feel good, and it is not schemed for aesthetics - it’s the act of moving somebody else towards their goal. Alexandrian designers working in the digital world today address problems presented by their users - or their clients’ users - and solve them in the best interests of those users. The designer’s taste and style play little role in the task. 

Alexander believes the ultimate object of design is form. However, many developers, managers, and other practitioners in the digital product world — along with many users of digital products — imagine that the designer is an artist, albeit one with technical skills. Using “Alexandrian” theory allows a clear distinction between the role of personal expression versus the role of problem-solving in our design. Let’s use the examples of some of the most successfully designed products in tech history — Amazon, Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We can surely agree that they are not the most attractive products in today’s world. With the push of “trends” set by Dribbble and other similar platforms, designers are always lured towards designing lush and visually attractive sites. However, while beauty is good, it is not the same thing as getting the user smoothly and effectively to their desired end-state. The obsession with users' needs is critical at these organisations, and successful businesses value “Alexandrian design”. “Misfit provides an incentive to change; good fit provides none.” Christopher Alexander (Alexander, 2002, p.50)

How Do We Design?

But how do we design? Alexander describes two approaches to creating: the unselfconscious process practised in traditional or “primitive” cultures; and the self-conscious process of modern design. (Alexander, 2002) The difficulty of solving modern design problems arises from having to satisfy dozens of potentially conflicting requirements simultaneously. Furthermore, this solution must be assembled from whole cloth. In contrast, the unconscious process deals with simpler contexts and proceeds gradually through minor adjustments within the bounds of a strong tradition. At the same time, unselfconscious cultures are not automatically good at producing solutions. Indeed, they are fragile and can be disrupted by contact with self-conscious cultures. Think of the wilful forms of our limelight-bound architects. Alexander states that since the individual's livelihood depends on the reputation he achieves, he is anxious to distinguish himself from his fellow architects, make innovations, and be a star. Christopher Alexander (Alexander, 2002, p.57)

This differentiation between self-conscious and unselfconscious design was fascinating to me. Having worked with some of the biggest design teams in the world, I always discerned strife among designers. Design at a large corporation seldom hints at an unconscious process with self-conscious designers. Where there is “gravity of rituals” (Alexander, 2002, p.48)-  making it impossible for the form to be changed - with the directness to fix anything, failure and correction go side by side; there is no deliberation in between the recognition of failure and the reaction to it.  While designers struggle to make a mark because of these constraints, they make changes for their own sake. This has led to a new era of product thinking based on optimisations and error reduction. A/B testing, beta launches, and multi-variate testing are all steps businesses take because of the struggle to balance tradition and progression.

Problems We Face Every Day

Real-world problems can be divided into minor problems that can be solved individually. To accomplish this, Alexander proposes listing all possible misfits (or requirements, if you prefer) and identifying links between them. The links are to be undirected and may be weighted +1 for concurrence or -1 for conflict. Identifying which misfits are linked is undoubtedly a complex problem, and they might be discovered by observing correlations among successful forms already in existence. “Instead of looking for statistical connections between variables, we may find causal relations.” Christopher Alexander. (Alexander, 2002, p.108)

The Collective

Sets of misfits can be thought of as a graph, a now standard data structure. Alexander observes that when the graph consists of loosely interconnected clusters of strongly interlinked misfits, we have some chance of finding a solution. Solutions are nearly unobtainable when the graph is fully connected — every misfit affects every other misfit. This resonates with the idea of modularity in software engineering. Well-designed systems have cohesive modules that are loosely coupled.

Nevertheless, how do we know when we’ve solved a design problem? While talking about satisfying a set of requirements is common, Alexander emphatically puts this in terms of misfits: does the design fit into its context? A problem is solved when all misfits are eliminated. However, as Horst Rittel explains, “wicked problems have no stopping rules.” (Rittel & Webber, 1973) Solutions cannot be accurate or false, only good or bad. These complex problems are never solved. At best, they are resolved. Over and over again. Tony Fry states: “Every design decision and form has an ongoing directional outcome — the design always goes on designing.”(Fry, 1994, p.191)

Herbert Simon’s masterpiece, The Sciences of the Artificial, was the other book that significantly influenced my reflection on design. (Simon, 1968) Simon proposes many theories and models that support Alexander's observations. “Complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity.”(Simon, 1968, p.1)

The complexity 

Simon suggests that a complex system is composed of many subsystems. Interactions between these subsystems are weaker than interactions within them. Moreover, each subsystem is almost autonomous, implying that each is independently functional and useful while providing value to the overall system. 

This idea correlates strongly with many of today’s most successful businesses. Let’s take Amazon as an example. It comprises hundreds of products, each self-sufficient. At a granular level, these “business units” function as simple startups with independent goals and functions. At a higher level, Amazon is the most complex organisation on the planet. To outsiders, it may seem like a pit of chaos and disorder. However, in all this chaos, there is a form of order that makes Amazon the most successful business in the world.

“Bounded rationality is not the same as irrationality. One makes a rational decision while understanding the surroundings' complexity and the situation's limitations.” Herbert Simon

The limits

He also introduces the concept of a “satisficer” (Simon, 1968, p.29) who accepts ‘good enough’ alternatives, not because he prefers less to more but because he has no choice. Bounded rationality (Simon, 1968, p.38) curbs our limits to understanding everything about the context. This leads us, as designers, who are limited by our ability and knowledge to be content with a non-perfect solution. As mentioned above, the design always goes on designing. Recognising that, while working for a business, there are time and budget constraints, one must sacrifice the quest for the ideal design response, which, as Rittel advises, is quite impossible.“Solutions to wicked problems cannot be accurate or false, only good or bad.” Horst Rittel (Rittel & Webber, 1973)

The logic

Moreover, Simon proposes a model to explain the “logic” behind the design. (Simon, 1968, p.114) The logic is to find an admissible set of values of the command variables (defined by the inner environment), which have constraints that maximise the utility function for the given values of the environmental parameters. This utility function could be a combination of business or user needs. However, since it is almost impossible to find the best resolution, it is necessary to come up with the most optimum solution: a resolution which satisfies most of the design criteria. This can be done by searching for several tentative paths until it succeeds completely or fails. This process is iterative, going through a cycle of making and testing.

Conclusion

Design is about formulating alternatives to the prevailing situation and examining them against the constraints of the need. An artistic designer looks inside themself for inspiration and vision. An Alexandrian designer, on the other hand, looks at their users. Like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, designers must observe their users' lives and needs. And that’s when designing happens. This is required worldwide: a bridge between the user's necessities and businesses' resources. Perhaps this is what Phil Gilbert intended to say: “Design is about creating relationships that drive businesses.”

So, in the words of Bruce Archer(Archer, 1965), “There can be no solution without a problem; no problem without constraints; and no constraints without pressure or need. Thus, design begins with a need.” 

Thanks for Reading.

— Q