“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.

“Posters and toasters are swell.” If you ever listen to Richard Buchanan talk about design, you’re bound to hear this phrase at least once. I’ve heard it many times, most recently in the course I’m taking this semester, Design Management and Organizational Change. Buchanan believes this to be the most exciting branch of design today, calling it a “new branch of design thinking.”

As an interaction designer, an instructor for a foundational interaction design course, and a frequenter of the IxDA discussions, I know that the majority of practicing interaction designers work in web and software. But I believe interaction design has much more to contribute to design and humankind than screens.

The design management course represents a different arena for interaction design. The course is about taking what we know as designers and applying it to organizational life: how people interact in groups and work together. We can think of organizations as environments, and design for the environment and the interactions.

As to the significance of and relationship between design and organizations, Buchanan says that you could argue organizations are the most important design products of the 20th century. The complexity of organizational life make the subject matter very difficult to tackle: a perfect candidate for design.

Related to my interests in the unrecognized power of design and the troubling disparity of design as a discipline, I find the subject matter fascinating. Buchanan hypothesizes that management and organizational thinking are unrecognized products of design. With the view that there is no absolute right answer for an organization, and that the complexity makes organizations too difficult to understand in full before making decisions to bring about change, the likely candidate for the force behind organizational change is design, as design is well suited to such wicked problems.

Another point that Buchanan postulates is that from a design point of view organizations are products and that they serve human beings. If the purpose of design is to serve others, as stated in The Design Way, and organizations are products, this indeed is a ripe area for design. As an interaction designer, contemplating the idea that organizations are products that can be designed possibly to serve people better intrigues the hell out of me.

If at its simplest definition interaction design can be said to be designing for behavior, the behavior of organizations appear to be fair game and an exciting move beyond screens for interaction design.