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I’ve heard “fourth order design” thrown around a lot lately. The more I hear it, the more I would rather hear what the the person is really talking about. It makes me wonder whether the term helps clarify anything or actually muddies design. Can we not call design “design”?

To a degree, I think that’s what the Down with Innovation article was saying:

“Design is now so important, it seems, that designers can no longer be trusted with it, and to make it absolutely clear that control has moved into someone else’s hands, design needs to be given a fancy new name. Call it design thinking. Call it innovation.”

Is fourth order design along these lines? Perhaps not now, but it has potential. I wonder if it would be useful if it was a widely used term, or if it would be as meaningful as innovation.

Speaking of which, this wonderfully illustrated piece coming out of Adaptive Path’s recent MX conference contains the “I” word. Reading it, I wondered why innovation was mentioned at all. Could we not replace “innovation” with “design”? Would it make more sense?

I’m a bit against what I’m about to do, but let’s compare the definitions of innovate and design. Let’s start with innovate, which in Merriam-Webster only has one useful definition.

innovate (transitive verb) to introduce as or as if new

Design, on the other hand, is much richer, with lots of definitions. For brevity, I’ll only pull the first.

design (transitive verb) to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan

Given these two definitions, innovate does not work in the above piece: “Why innovate? To create better solutions, organizations, and world.” Introducing something new is no guarantee of better. This is the problem with innovation as a goal. If I were betting on better solutions, organizations, and world, I would put my money on design.

Personally, I would like to see designers call design by its name. That goes for business folks as well. Calling design something else so that it’s not scary will not help the discipline. Fourth order design, at least, contains the word design.

A concern I have for fourth order design is that while it may encapsulate some ideas about (new?) ways to think about design,  it may also splinter design by alluding to a hierarchy. Fourth is better than first, second, and third, assuming higher is better. Though I could see businesses feeling more comfortable dealing with design that is perceived to be on a higher level.

We have a hard enough time being on the same page when talking about design. Throwing around fourth order design does not make it any more clear. To make my point, I purposely haven’t defined fourth order design in this post.

My thesis paper explores the thinking aspect of design to understand what it is designers actually do so that we can understand our value and communicate it to others. To this end, I read several books, including The Design Way, The Reflective Practitioner, How Designers Think, and Thoughtful Interaction Design. In addition, I reference The Sciences of the Artificial, Designerly Ways of Knowing, and Design Methods.

Advisor: Jodi Forlizzi

Abstract

What designers do—the thinking behind design—is not fully understood. Design is still often viewed as a black art rather than a rigorous discipline. Designers themselves have difficulty explaining how they make the connections that lead to the final solution and why those judgments are valid. While good design work can be done without understanding these forces, it is my hypothesis that the more designers know about the forces involved in design thinking and process, the better they will become as designers and the better they will be able to communicate design to others. This paper examines design as an approach to solving problems and what makes it different from other approaches. It examines design thinking as desire for a particular outcome, a philosophic viewpoint, a conversation, imagination, reason, judgment, wisdom, and a skill. And it explores the nonlinear, dialectical, and unique nature of the design process. Finally, it suggests that designers can view the development of understanding and ability as a design endeavor itself, and that it is possible to design oneself as a designer. Though the audience and focus is on designers, it is my belief that a better understanding of design along with increased ability to communicate design’s rigor and value will ultimately benefit and advance the discipline as a whole.

Download the final paper (pdf)

Next Friday is thesis paper presentation day, where each second-year graduate student has 10 minutes to present his or her thesis paper and five minutes to be interrogated about it. This is a major milestone of this year. Lucky me, I get to present first!

In preparation, I had to submit the thesis title and abstract for the program. This was difficult because, while I have around 8,000 words written, the argument as a whole is still being shaped. Naturally, I spent the whole day coming up with the title and the 250-word abstract, finishing exactly at 5 pm. Or you might say that in typical designer fashion, I worked solidly until the absolute last second tweaking it.

Here’s the final tweak.

The Thinking Behind Design

For the past several hundred years, science and humanities have enjoyed prominence in our culture and education. Science and a scientific approach to solving problems have received bias in our educational systems and our work. But increasingly, design is being recognized as a valuable approach to solving complex problems and creating inventive solutions. However, understanding what designers do—the thinking behind design—is not fully understood. Design is still often thought of as a black art rather than a rigorous discipline. If design is to advance as a discipline, understanding design thinking becomes paramount. Design is a relationship between the design way of thinking, the process of carrying out that thinking, and the embodiment of the thinking and the process within the designer. The process of developing design thinking is a design process in itself. It therefore may behoove designers to recognize designing oneself as a designer as fundamental to improving design ability. Understanding design thinking will also help designers articulate their value and communicate what is it they actually do in a way that demystifies the process and instills a sense of trust in their solutions. This paper examines how designers think and the relationship between design thinking and the design process to better understand what designers do, the rigor of their process, and the value of skilled designers.

And if you want to compare, here are the previous iterations:

• Version 3
• Version 2
• Original

“For the past few years, innovation has been a big topic in conversation about business management. A small industry fuels that conversation with articles, books, and conferences.

Designers, too, are involved. Prominent product-design firms offer workshops and other services promising innovation. Leading design schools promote “design thinking” as a path to innovation.

But despite all the conversation, there is little consensus on what innovation is and how to achieve it.”

That is the opening of “Toward a Model of Innovation” by Hugh Dubberly in the current issue of Interactions. He further asks if innovation can be tamed. The article proposes a model of innovation (download pdf), not as an absolute, but as a starting point for further explanation and conversation.

While he is speaking about the innovation process, I draw very close parallels to the design process. “Of course, innovation processes are rarely linear,” the article states. This is the same for the design process, and why people with linear thought processes and a more scientific mindset have a difficult time with the design process. In my thesis, I argue that a better understanding of the thinking behind the design process will enable people to become better designers, and perhaps help the advancement of design as a discipline.

I am also looking at models of the design process to highlight the benefits and weaknesses of models in understanding and trying to practice design. The current slew of publications about innovation and the many links to design within them has me wondering about the effectiveness of the random article has in helping people learn and practice design. While I ascribe to the idea that everyone designs, I worry that there isn’t enough emphasis on the difficulty of producing good designs. Dubberly at least gives a nod to this regarding innovation: “Innovation remains messy, even dangerous. Luck and chance—being at the right place at the right time—still play a role.”

“Dangerous” is a provoking word choice. Design, or innovation, does not necessarily equal good. Many terrible products, movements, and societies have been designed for evil. Should we be worried about the design process increasing the generation of evil?

Another large factor in the design process and the innovation process (assuming a difference) is the role of the individual. The article recognizes this: “The map posits individuals as drivers of innovation—and the source of insight.” In my thesis, I argue that one of the missing pieces of design process models is the designer, who has extreme influence on the process. The designer actually designs the process each time, which makes each design process unique, and thus difficult to produce a single model.

Paul Pangaro, CyberneticLifestyles.com CTO, contributed to Dubberly’s model and raised some other good questions about modeling innovation:

“What parts of the process of innovation are messy, unpredictable, ineffable, mystical, magical, and intuitive? The more that innovation is those things, the less we can help the process and make a deliberate innovation; at one extreme, that phrase becomes an oxymoron. Conversely, what parts of innovation are predictable, likely, improvable, or even deterministic? We certainly resist the idea that the source of inspiration, the source of hypotheses, can be fully known, reduced to an algorithm.”

Good questions and consideration for design as well, I say.

This post is inspired by Jack Moffet’s Mystory, which was inspired by a recent IxDA discussion on when/where/how you decided to become a designer.

To answer this question, I could go through my life story—army » engineering » poetry » journalism » web producer » editor » web developer—but that would be rather long and tedious (for me, fascinating for you!). Instead, I’ll skip to the end.

I recognized myself as a designer some time after my first semester in the interaction design graduate program at Carnegie Mellon, about a year ago. I say “recognized” because in retrospect I had been practicing design, but not fully and without understanding design as a rigorous approach to solving problems. Prior to that recognition, I did not think of myself as a designer.

After being educated about and exposed to the design process and design thinking, I realized that the design way of solving problems was not foreign to me and therefore my experience was not zero. But I began to think of myself as a designer only after recognizing that my thinking and my process were designerly. I suppose it was then that I chose to be a designer. By choosing, I committed myself to the development—or the design—of myself as a designer. Being immersed in a graduate program has enabled me to accelerate this process.

That’s not to say that I think everyone needs to go to school to be a designer (it certainly helps). But transitioning from a non-design role to a professional designer isn’t something you can just pick up by reading a couple BusinessWeek articles about design thinking. In fact, I think the current business focus on design, while good in raising awareness of a design approach, may actually be harmful because it does not emphasize the difficulty of producing good solutions, the irrational, nonlinear nature of the process, the need for experience and design wisdom, and the traits that make people good designers. The need for design has been identified, but not how to shift the linear, number-crunching culture to design culture.

But I digress (into thesis paper territory). My point is that being a designer is a journey, a process. It’s not easy, nor is it for everyone. It feels right for me, despite having somewhat blundered into it. So I feel quite lucky to call myself a designer.

After 13 weeks of working with the UPMC Neurosurgery Clinic, direct by Dr. Amin Kassam, we have decided to produce a small communication design piece. Compared with other projects, which have mostly focused on technological solutions, producing a booklet feels a little uncomfortable. I catch myself thinking, “This is it?”

Well, actually it’s not. In addition, we are also providing the clinic with a design guide that outlines our research, observations, insights, and possible concepts that they can reference as they continue to shape the clinic into a more ideal vision.

Service design is a holistic approach that focuses on understanding the service first before introducing products into the service. I see it as applying design thinking to a system to understand what products or behaviors might impact the system in a positive way, with a perspective that all elements within the system, from product to human behavior, are interrelated and form the service.

What this means is that there are intangibles that make up a service that you can design for but not actually see manifested in the form of a product. This is what has been making me feel uncomfortable, as the potential impact of our efforts and deliverables are not easily viewable.

Despite this discomfort, I know the small communication design piece will have an immediate impact on the patient experience and quite likely the way the clinic sees itself, which may lead to further positive changes in their behavior. And that’s not something I would have felt comfortable about without having done all the research in order to understand how all the parts of the service affect each other.

The design guide—also a print piece—will serve to embody the presence of our design team and of design thinking in the clinic. Embody design thinking? Yes. We found that by having us around and sharing our process and perspective helped the clinic staff make immediate changes in the way they viewed their work and the patient experience, which led to behavioral change that we had not expected. The great thing was that the staff would openly confess to being inspired by our presence and perspective to make changes themselves. This is definitely an intangible that we’ve essentially already delivered. But it’s difficult to see without a bit of reflection.

The aforementioned might not have been successful without having formed a good relationship with the clinic staff. This is a key point to service design. The people who deliver the service need to be on board with what you are doing. To this end, involving them in the process early and often is highly important. We accomplished this by presenting our initial research findings with lots of photos of them and quotes from them to show that we understood their experience. There was an immediate change in their behavior toward us after that because they then saw us as their colleagues.

So while the only design artifact we are introducing that patients will see is a small print piece, how it relates to the whole, and the behind-the-scenes design guide, and the other intangibles I mentioned, means that we delivering a lot more than is apparent by looking at the individual artifacts. Understanding that relationship is the point of service design.

After my Thanksgiving thesis paper writing blitz, I realized I needed to once again revise the abstract to more coherently attempt to express the aim of my paper. While I’m still not 100 percent happy with it, the following abstract represents my latest direction for my paper.

It is difficult to talk about the design process without also talking about design thinking, for almost everything of importance in the design process is a result of thinking. Understanding the design process is therefore not just about procedures and models, but also involves understanding the mindset of the designer and the designer’s role within the process. In fact, bringing design to a situation is not simply a matter of following a predefined model or method, because each process is unique. This is a result of the design process itself needing to be designed. Models of the process, therefore, can only act as abstract representational tools that aid the designer in designing the design process. The effectiveness of the design process is thus contingent on the ability of the designer. To be good at design, designers need to understand the nature of design thinking and how it differs from scientific thinking. Designers also need to be reflective of their process, challenging their own thinking and assumptions. This is critical in tackling complex design problems, which inherently have no given solution. Developing ones design ability, or design judgment, requires critical reflection of both the design problem and solutions. For it is through recognition of good design that design judgment skills are cultivated. Highly developed judgment skills are what form the rigor of the design process, and provide the means to make the creative leaps necessary to transcend the limitations of the present and design successful products and services of the future. It therefore may behoove designers to recognize designing oneself as a designer as paramount to achieving good solutions from the process of design. Understanding the design process, design thinking, and the role of the design will also help designers articulate their value and communicate what is it they actually do in a way that demystifies the process and instills a sense of trust in their solutions.

Feedback is welcome.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

No, this post is not about sex. It’s about Bryan Lawson’s How Designer Think, which is an orgasm of design process and thinking. On nearly every page I found an idea I could relate to as a designer and often thought the book should be required reading for those entering design. If you’re not screaming “Yes!” inside your head, or out loud, while reading this book, you might want to consider another field.

Bryan Lawson is both an architect and a psychologist. But I think everything he says applies to interaction design, and big D design in general.

He begins by defining design and acknowledges that design is “an everyday activity that we all do.” However, “professional designers also design for other people rather than just themselves,” and “are highly educated and trained.” This juxtaposition may serve me as I consider the implication of the design process for non-designers, a possible direction for my thesis.

One of the central themes of the book is that models of design are too logical and not actually useful for practitioners. Lawson says, “Designing is far too complex to be describable by a simple diagram.” This idea is in part my motivation for my paper, having encountered quite a few models that illustrate the design process only to feel like they weren’t quite right, and certainly, never actually using them when it comes to the actual process. “We probably work best when we think least about our technique.”

That said, I did draw several models of the design process as I read the book.

For me, the book was validation of my experience as a designer. (Hence, the “Yes! Yes! Yes!”) Some of the reassuring notions include:

“There is no natural end to the design process.”

On of the essential characteristics of design problems then is that they are often not apparent and must be found.”

The methods of science are perhaps surprisingly unhelpful to the designer.”

“It is often not possible to say which bit of the problem is solved by which bit of the solution. They simply do not map on to each other that way.”

The latter quote perhaps best mirrors my inquiry into the design process. Reflecting on decisions and directions, it is often very difficult for me to say how design solutions came about. I realize due diligence has been done, but there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between research and concept, which is why for my thesis I chose to focus on the leap of faith designers must take create good solutions.

The latter half of the book deals with design thinking, design strategies, design tactics, creativity, traps, and design as conversation. The latter chapter references Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner, which I am in the midst of reading.

“Good designers tend to be at ease with the lack of resolution of their ideas for most of the design process,” says Lawson. True, true, true. And for those who are not at ease, the design process is painful, as I have witnessed on some design teams.

This is not a sensible way of earning a living, it’s completely insane, there has to be this big thing that you’re confident you’re going to find, you don’t know what it is you’re looking for and you hang on. —architect Richard MacCormac

At first upon reading this I thought, how is this different than searching for the cure for cancer. In that case, you don’t know what you’re looking for. But then I corrected myself. No. You’re searching for the cure for cancer. In design, you only know that you are looking for a solution. It’s not a question of getting there. It’s how to get there.

In terms of my thesis and exploring the leap of faith, I worry that the design process—the leap—may be too complex: a psychological mystery. Lawson says, “Unfortunately, the really interesting things that happen in the design process may be hidden in designers’ heads rather than being audible or visible.”

What is it about what’s going on in designers’ heads that makes them good designers? Is it merely experience, developed over the course of doing it (Schön argues that we design all our lives.) Lawson says, “It seems impossible to learn design without actually doing it.”

For non-designers, is that all that it takes? Do engineers and business managers merely need exposure to the design process? Is this the philosophy of the business/design schools? Is design thinking a skill?

Lawson quotes Edward de Bono, Practical Thinking:

“To regard thinking as a skill rather than a gift is the first step toward doing something to improve that skill.”

I agree. But there’s still something more. Not everyone can be a good designer no matter how much experience and exposure to the design process.

Last year, while explaining the five reasons designers are valued, and thus the five characteristics of designers, Richard Buchanan told the class that if we didn’t possess all five, we shouldn’t be in design. I would argue that the five characteristics—whole/part , creativity, comfortable with ambiguity, polysensorial aesthetics, and emotion/empathy—don’t just have to do with how you think, but also who you are.

After reading Bruce Nussbaum’s recent article, Design Vs. Design Thinking, I have to ask, what is design thinking? Why? Because the way he refers to design thinking conflicts with my more or less ambiguous definition.

The first thing that struck me was his reference to design thinking as a new field. New field? Is design thinking a field, or a way to approach problems? I would go with the latter. It just seems really odd to think of someone saying, “Yeah, I work in the field of design thinking.”

I am a designer. Therefore, I bring design thinking to the problems I encounter. I can’t help it, because I’m a designer. Designers use design thinking. Isn’t design thinking merely recognizing what designers do as useful and applying the design process to problems that aren’t typically considered to be privy to designers?

It almost seems like the Nussbaum believes design thinking to be something beyond design, and definitely something that is closely tied to business and management. If so, perhaps he’s got the name wrong, which he acknowledges in the article.

The fact is that design thinking (or whatever we wind up calling this new field) is being created at the borders of design, business, engineering and even marketing. And I don’t know which institutions will take the lead in promoting it. We have the Stanford D-School, the IIT Institute of Design. and the Rotman School of Management in Toronto taking early leads in developing design thinking. The California College of the Arts is offering an MBA in Design Strategy.

Carnegie Mellon School of Design is not mentioned in the article, perhaps because we actually design stuff here. I find the school’s absence intriguing, regardless, especially since we have one of the foremost design thinkers on the planet in the form of Richard Buchanan. I’d love to get his perspective on the new field of design thinking.

This post is really just a collection of thoughts stemming from my last thesis paper meeting. I’m still mostly reading at this point and sort of framing the argument along the way.

My original inquiry had to do with the leap of faith from design research to design concepts. This has led me to a focus on design process and how designers approach problems.

Some ways of shaping my argument include:

• Can we teach the “black art” of design to non-designers?
• Ways for non-designers to become comfortable with the design process.
• If we can’t talk about design, how do we tell it to others?
• Clients are OK with visual design and product design, so why is everyone so freaked out by interaction design?
• Why do people want models? Process?

Some recent great quotes I’ve pulled from How Designers Think include:

• “None of the writers quoted here offer any evidence that designers actually follow their map.”
• “It is often not possible to say which bit of the problem is solved by which bit of the solution.”

One idea that has some resonance with me has been that the actual design process cannot be explained, and that every attempt is a reflective act that makes the process seem more logical than it actually is. This may be the problem I have had with trying to define the design process all along, as I recognized mid-process that I couldn’t explain how things were moving forward while acknowledging that the progress was in fact fruitful.

I’m not sure if that notion makes the step-by-step lists for plowing through the design process a useful act of faith or just completely useless to non-designers. Perhaps I will gain more insight the more I read and digest.

After finishing How Designers Think, I plan to move onto The Reflective Practitioner in earnest, and also Thoughtful Interaction Design, which arrived today.

So why do people want to model the design process? It’s complicated and mysterious, and like me, people want to understand. But what if the answer turns out to be, for all our effort, we can’t understand the design process, at least not in full?