“Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.”
–John Dewey

Presently, it will be a year since I started working at Nokia. Since starting, I have been involved in several back-to-back projects with the usual short time frames and high demands. If ever ideas began to flourish in the midst of these projects that were outside of the scope, I did not have the time to give them attention to grow. They withered and faded in the bustle of productivity.

One of the great things about my graduate school experience was being in an environment and culture that encouraged exploration, cultivation of new connections between disparate ideas, and tolerance for failure. Even though I had less time and more stress in school than I currently have at work, the conditions made it possible for me to wander, to go off on ideas just to see where they led. Built within the framework of my graduate work there existed space to explore. Pursuit of tangential ideas was expected and it often led to the learning and production of designs that were beyond what could have possibly been asked for.

Reflecting on the past year, and while setting objectives for my next six months with Nokia, I realize I miss the wanderings of my grad school experience, and desire to have those wandering be a part of my current experience. While it may be something my team would support and understand as valuable, the greater organizational culture may not tolerate the sacrifice to production. Wandering needs to be part of the culture and holistic, Just as Google’s 20 percent personal project time is part of their culture, wandering needs to be understood within the culture as contributing to productivity. For that to happen, it needs to be supported as a productive activity, where the ideas that surface are encouraged to become realized.

During casual conversations, others have commiserated their need to wander as well, to have time to pursue an idea when it comes up, to not have it slip away. I wonder how much creativity and innovation is lost when people don’t have time to nurture their ideas. In the innovation gold rush, can wandering be an untapped mine of creativity? How can we use design as an approach to understand the needs of people and business, and help shape organizational culture to support both?

Recently, Jonathan Ive, of Apple, had some thoughts on the key to Apple’s success. He bemoaned designers who always have excuses for their work not turning out as intended. His advice:

“If you really do care about the quality of what ends up getting made, wouldn’t you find an answer, some sort of alternative, and somehow figure out a way to take your idea and do something with it?”

I could very easily be pissed off at the naivete of this statement. But it’s not his fault. After all, he works for Apple. Current Apple culture (I’m assuming I know what this is) is built around the quality of the design. This makes it easy for designers to produce quality work and see it executed as designed. The issue is not that in other organizations designers do not care about quality, it’s that most organizations are not designed to produce designs of the highest quality.

Designers the world around complain that their ideas are not implemented due to myriad outside factors. And they complain because it’s true. Whether it’s power or politics, time or resources, designers are not in control of the forces that affect the outcome of the quality work that goes into the products and services they make.

Unfortunately, in their current positions, designers do not have the power to do what Ive suggests: figure out a way to take an idea and do something with it. There is too much working against that, despite passion for quality or a willingness to do something.

Organizations that prohibit great designs from being realized need to be redesigned. That’s right, organizations are design products, and can be designed. Who better than designers to participate in, or perchance lead, this effort?

Perhaps Ive was onto something after all. If the forces at be prevent good design from being realized, and the structure, environment, and culture of organizations are to blame, we need to figure out a way to change the situation. We need to shift our focus from the ends, and refocus on the means that enable design in the first place. We need to redesign organizations.

Last week I had a chat with Jeff Howard, during which I described the presentations at the Service Design Network conference in November. My observation from the conference is that service designers seem to know what service design looks like. The process shown during the presentations looked very similar. This prompted Jeff to suggest that process is no longer a differentiator.

I’ve been pondering this statement since then. How true is it? And what could that mean? The design process has received a lot of attention over the past few years in part due to the push of user-centered design and a focus on experience over features. The best design firms rely on a strong design process that implements various methods. For the most part, methods are known, but flexible enough for variation. A lot of design education, whether it’s in the classroom, a conference presentation, or workshop, focuses on teaching process and methods. Even in the realm of business, design methods have been adopted to incite innovation.

The design process and methods are not very difficult to learn. For those who want to learn them and for design firms that believe them, there is not much room to grow in the process arena. Sure, new methods are created all the time. But I don’t think they revolutionize the process as a whole.

So that leaves us with all good design firms using a similar process with similar methods. How then do you differentiate? Or what is it that actually differentiates one design firm, or one designer, from another, especially if they have a similar focus, like service design?

While there are several ways to answer this question, one I find interesting is the culture and values that a designer or a design firm possesses. These forces affect the thinking during the design process and the making that results. But they don’t receive a lot of attention. Understanding the role those forces play in design process could be a way of articulating value and differentiation when the landscape of process execution looks the same.

I think it would be really interesting to hear design teams talk about how their culture and values influenced the decisions made during the design process that led to the chosen solution. Perhaps less how and more why.