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.

Richard Buchanan presented the “Core Competencies of Design” in class this week, offering a slightly different version of the list of why designers are valued. I’m not sure if this is just a further iteration or different due to the shift in focus from designers to design itself. The language is fairly similar, though notably different in a few areas. I’ve included both for comparison.

Core Competencies of Design

• Vision: see the whole
• Facilitation: work across disciplines
  • Why? Something to do with being able to see the whole. To see the way things fit together
• Visualization: polysensorial awareness
  • Many senses: aural, touch, smell, as a way of grasping the situation we are in
• Prototyping: rapid experimentation
  • This is close to how we work. It’s not a comfortable way of working for most people.
  • Opposite to: if you don’t do it the right the first time, you fail. Philosophic difference.
• Human-centered focus: focus on people and their goals (individuals and organizations)
  • Look a people as individuals and as groups. Also in context of an organization, because humans work in teams or groups

Why Designers Are Valued

• Whole/part: designers look at the whole in relation to the parts; they see the big picture
• Bring to life/creativity: designers have a passion for making things
• Comfortable with ambiguity: openendedness; not prejudging the solution; take chances, take risks; try multiple solutions
• Polysensorial aesthetics: an aesthetic of many senses; this is about the actual making: prototyping; drawing; visualizing
• Emotion/empathy: emotion is a way to engage with the world; passion; designers care about people

Also, Buchanan said the core competencies list will be part of an upcoming publication, which I think is not his own.