jamin.org

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.

Last week, Tony Golsby-Smith, CEO of 2nd Road, the Sydney-based consulting company that focuses on shaping large-scale change, visited Richard Buchanan’s Design, Management, and Organizational Change class. Over the course of three hours, he shared his perspective on design and its role within 2nd Road. What follows are notes and thoughts from that conversation.

Tony is an interesting character. He can easily reach the top of any white board and gives thoughtful responses to the questions put to him. He believes that 2nd Road is fundamentally challenging the world view of organizations. “I’m driven by a revolution in organization fabric,” he says. Organizations have been built for stability and not innovation. They kill innovation. His firm helps organizations build what they call innovation capability.

Essentially, his firm seems to be an alternative to industrial age management thinking. And while design thinking is part of their process and information design is a core skill within the firm, they prefer to call themselves management consultants and work with upper management to create vision and strategy, build skills for new thinking, change systems, and change organizational culture. They are already at the table where designers sometimes desire to be. I’m a bit unclear how 2nd Road got there, but it seems like that’s where they started, or at least very near there. Tony argued that if you start in the marketing and consumer space, it’s harder to move up because you’ve been put into a box.

I wonder if designers in the consumer space really want to be at the table, or at the table in the same way in which 2nd Road participates. Transforming organizations seems like an entirely different wicked monster to deal with. But it certainly does pay well. While I won’t divulge the numbers, a three-day Strategic Conversation costs their clients more than you make in a year. Interestingly, I had a conversation with a San Francisco design consultancy that seemed to suggest their consulting workshops with management did not yield much income.

If I had to pull a definition of design from the way he talked about it, I’d say it is upfront conceptual thinking. “Tomorrow doesn’t exist,” he says, “You can’t analyze it.” Through rhetoric, 2nd Road invents tomorrow through dialogue, creating worlds through words (or visualizations). It seems that conversation plays a large role in their offerings. As much as possible, they want the client to own the process.

In terms of where they operate, Tony says they work in third and fourth order design. If you’ve never taken a class with Richard Buchanan, you likely don’t know what that means, which makes me wonder if it’s useful to describe design in this way. Simply, it means they are using design for services, environments, systems, and the interconnectedness of systems as opposed to design that is concerned with communication and forms. They work on highly complex and highly ambiguous problems that take place over the course of years rather than days, weeks, or months.

I’m curious about how design works in this arena, which is why I am talking to 2nd Road about opportunities to work with them. I’m curious about how this type of firm is different from design consultancies like IDEO, Frog, and Adaptive Path. I’m also curious how similar or dissimilar they are to the big management consulting companies or an innovation strategy firm, like Doblin. Good questions to ask in the next round of talks, I suppose.

Overall, Tony’s visit makes concrete some of the more abstract ideas about the role of design in organizational change that we have been discussing throughout the semester. But it’s noteworthy that they don’t call themselves a design firm. I wonder what that means for the discipline. Is design something that business consultants can consume and make their own, or can it stand on its own, and as Dan Saffer recently said, smash the table altogether?

The innovation debate continues in the NY Times this morning with “The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It?” After wading through the reporter’s anecdote about not being able to  operate his Prius, a task that apparently requires the owner to adapt behavior (”I don’t think I can adapt to the behaviors required by the Prius.”),  we get to the thrust of the article.

“Whether humans will embrace or resist an innovation is the billion-dollar question facing designers of novel products and services.”

I like the reference to the billion-dollar question. I’ll have to use that when speaking about my projects.

So, what can we do to help solve the billion-dollar question?

“FOR technological innovators, the cash register can ring either way. They may achieve a smash-hit breakthrough, or simply make a slight improvement in a technology that humans already feel comfortable with. Most innovators no longer even try to predict human reactions to their creations.

Henry Kressel, a partner at Warburg Pincus and a co-author of ‘Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations Are Changing the World,’ says, ‘You throw technologies into the market and see what sticks.’”

Apparently nothing! Just make stuff and see what happens!

While there is some truth in saying that you can never determine for sure what people will do with a new product or service, I believe the whole point of human-centered design is that we can do research that allows us to design product and services that actually improves peoples’ lives and that they desire rather than just throwing technology into the market.

I’m surprised to see that most innovators “no longer” try to predict reactions, as that is antithesis to a major theme of my graduate school education. Though I recognize that is how a lot of products and services appear to be currently design (perhaps why so many fail or suck), I would like to believe that with the increased focus on human-centered design the situation might be improving.

Maybe not.

“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.