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Today we learned, in an apparent slip, that Richard Buchanan is leaving the School of Design. At the very end of class, in a conversation largely framed around the question of what is design, he mentioned that he would be a professor of information systems, “whatever that means.” There was a pause in the room as we students wondered if we just heard what had been rumored to be the case ever since Dick dropped all thesis advisees a few weeks ago. I took the opportunity and broke the silence: “So you are leaving?”

“Yes.”

He did not say much more, only that it was very difficult to leave the program. Not surprising for the person who has been with the school for 17 years, first serving as the Nierenberg Chair, followed immediately by a 10-year stint as head. He redesigned the undergraduate program and spearheaded the creation of the grad program that I am about to graduate from.

Sources indicate that he has accepted a position at Case Western.

As Buchanan has provided the theoretical and philosophical perspective to design that has influenced everyone that has passed through the grad program and contributes greatly to what makes designers from the School of Design stand out amongst their contemporaries, his departure will definitely impact the feel of the program and perhaps the thinking of its future grads. I’m very curious to see how the school adapts to his leaving next year.

Personally, I have enjoyed the classes I have taken with Dick. I appreciate the broad view of design that he promotes. And there was something wonderful about being beaten down and made to struggle through difficult texts during Seminar 1 the first semester of my graduate experience. If nothing, the experience contributed to a stance of humility and appreciation for different perspectives. It’s difficult to know how much he has influenced my thinking. I tend to believe that I have been influenced more by my peers when talking about the material of his classes than the classes themselves. However, if the stories Dick tells are true, I may not realize the impact of his classes for years to come.

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?

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.

As an unexpected twist to the end of the semester, for my Design, Management, and Organizational Change class with Richard Buchanan, we were asked to design our ideal design consulting company. The class was split into three groups that are to approach the question from three different perspectives: people, products and services (forms), and brand, vision, and values. I’m in the people group.

We were asked if there is a new role for design that we could tap into. Are there new forms or places for design? And although not explicitly stated, where are there opportunities for what Buchanan calls fourth order design, or systemic integration? What problems would we want to address? Would we focus on the internal or external issues of organizations? What kinds of clients would be like? How does the vision affect the firm? What might the implementation of the vision be?

To this end we mapped the competitive landscape of design and business consulting firms. We detailed the problems design companies face moving into newer territory. And we debated endlessly on what it is we would like to do and the problems we would like to solve with design. Albeit, much of our discussions remain somewhat vague. And we are having a difficult time coming to consensus, or barring that, direction.

As it stands, we have not come up with anything too radical. Our ideas are already in the minds of many designers and consulting firms. So our dilemma and deliverable may be to articulate a means to position a design firm in a new space and the value of design in that area.

Will we be able to do that better than an existing firm looking to do the same thing? Or will this will merely turn out to be an academic exercise? In five weeks, I’ll let you know.

“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.

My thesis paper presentation was today, and all went well enough. Though I think I confused a few people, and took some heat from Richard Buchanan, who ask if the design knowledge embodied in the knower is not just habit. The answer, of course, is no.

But that’s all behind me, and a bit of a break ahead (or a tonight off, at least).

While I recuperate, entertain yourself with Tufte talking about the iphone. “If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information. Fix the design.”

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.

Monday we had a meeting regarding choosing a thesis project and paper for the upcoming year. Over the course of the next month, it was suggested we start talking to faculty to see where there is a synergy in interests.

Currently, I have no clear thoughts about what I will do for my thesis. I did meet with John Zimmerman a couple weeks ago to get his advice. He believes choosing a complementary project and paper is better than doing separate theses, and also suggested thinking about what job I would like and think about how my thesis can lend itself to marketing myself to future employers.

While that makes good sense, I still feel like I’m exploring the possibilities of interaction design and haven’t come to a solid idea of what I want to do. It seems that rather than a particular area of interest, my interest lies in the various design challenges, the wicked problems. I feel like I could be successful in various areas.

Perhaps that’s the plight of being a generalist.

The alternative to being strategic with the theses is to do whatever I fancy while I still can. This is the advice Richard Buchanan gives.

I’m not sure which view I feel more strongly about. I like the Buchanan’s idea of doing something that’s more for me and not about getting a job. But I also think doing something that will help me get ahead is smart, too.

Even without clear theses ideas, I already have a general idea of which faculty members I would like to work with: John Zimmerman, Shelley Evenson, Jodi Forlizzi, and Richard Buchanan. I guess looking at that list, one could infer which way I’m leaning, as John, Shelley, and Jodi are also of the pragmatic persuasion.

Still, I need to talk to them. And I will likely talk to others, while I start figuring out what it is will do in my second year of grad school.

My graduate seminar class with Dick Buchanan ended yesterday. For this last class, we discussed pluralism and objectivity, which Buchanan states as the fundamental problem of design.

Why is it a problem? There is no subject matter in design. Designers make their subject matter. “This is a very peculiar thing,” Buchanan says.

I agree. And while it makes sense, it’s not always obvious. For instance, I’m at a school studying design, which inclines one to think there is subject matter to study.

However, Buchanan warns of this temptation to believe design has subject matter. What one may think of as the subject matter of design is really either history of design, or comments on existing designs.

A Cup Is a Cup Is a Cup

Buchanan defines objectivity in design as the object we create. What makes design interesting is that we don’t all agree that a cup is a cup is a cup, and there are different ways of practicing design. Is this something in the nature of design? Or something in the nature of the world? These are questions he asked.

The frustrating aspect of design is that you can’t practice it without some idea of what you’re doing. Though the more you find your own way, you find that other people do things differently. This difference, or pluralism, is what needs to be reconciled.

So how does one deal with pluralism and objectivity? Well, designers need to understand that we don’t have to agree on the values of on how we see the world; we only have to agree on what we’re going to make. Buchanan says designers must help people find their own view, and understand how other people do things.

All Done, But Only the Beginning

I thought that was a nice way to round up the class: stating a fundamental problem, but providing hope that it can be overcome.

Overall, I thought the course was valuable, even though no absolute answers were offered. It makes sense now given the ambiguity of design problems, lack of subject matter, and different ways of practicing design.

While the class is over, it is only the beginning in a likely endless contemplation of design thinking in relation to design practice and it’s impact on the world, and, of course, my place in it all.

In response to a previous comment, I tried to define what an interaction designer does in rebuttal to the assertion that the goal is to build a better mousetrap. I wrote:

From an interaction design standpoint, you might ask why we have mousetraps? Are mice the real problem? How do mice get into areas where you would then want to trap them? The solution to the problem may not have anything to do with a mousetrap at all.

Hence, interaction design is not about building a better mousetrap.

Recently, I read “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” from The Idea of Design by Dick Buchanan. As I read, I realized that what I described above is not an interaction design approach, but a design approach: taking the given problem; trying to find the real problem; inventing a solution.

Because of our use of the term interaction in Buchanan’s course (e.g., the four modes of interaction), I have been incorrectly mixing design and interaction design, especially when trying to answer questions from people outside the School of Design about what an interaction designer does.

While I can answer what an interaction designer does if I stay focused, I do slip into explaining general design practice, which in a case a couple weeks ago, produced a very strong reaction from one of my friends.

My friend had asked what sort of work I would do after my degree. And I told him I didn’t know, because design can be applied to any problem. As examples, I gave a range from redesigning a simply control to designing a country’s tax system.

He was amazed, and disbelieving. He could not believe that a designer would have much business designing a tax system, and thought subject matter experts would be quite offended to have a designer solving a problem believed to be within their domain.

What he didn’t understand, and what I found so inspiring about the Wicked Problem essay, is that designers do not have a domain, and that design is a way of thinking, not an applied art. Unlike subject matter experts, designers can move between subject matter and apply their practice.

While I did try to explain this, my friend would not accept it. And as I read the Wicked Problem and became excited about the potential for design thinking in the world, my enthusiasm was tempered by the hurdle this position faces, as I know from experience my friend’s idea of a designer’s role is not uncommon. In fact, just a few months ago I may have had his same understanding.

It makes me wonder how it will feel to go out into the world and try to apply design thinking as I am learning it, and if we will ever get to a place where the designer is called upon to contribute to the solution of all wicked problems.