So You've Discovered the Importance of Good Design. Don't Make These Mistakes

It seems like famously engineering-centric cultures like Google are trying to integrate design thinking into their way of doing things. Even the traditionally conservative Harvard Business School now has a new multi-million-dollar I-Lab building (take that, Stanford D-school!) and recently hosted an inaugural design conference. The federal government too is undertaking initiatives to add design to its toolkit.

However, as a veteran of this space -- who has both long observed and participated in such moves -- I’ve been disappointed to see the same ole, same ole thinking about design.

By now, most global corporations (and especially the consumer-focused ones) have already tried, used, rejected, or replaced fossilized design techniques. My concern is that while these organizations move on, others who are just discovering the need for design in their worlds will start from the place so many of us passed long ago. For example, by engaging in endless debates about design thinking or what design really is (and isn’t).

The problem can be traced back to the dogma of design: a collective set of notions built up over the past decade about brainstorming, user focus, failing, unmet needs, and prototyping. These ideas were once radical but are now conventional and not necessarily useful, because we need to move beyond what is now the shallow language of design towards the underlying competency: “creative intelligence.” A sort of CQ where before there was only IQ and EQ; all objective ways to measure such competencies.

We need to move away from the outdated relics of design and towards creative competence, beginning with the following.

Not__ Failing Fast and Often__

“Fail fast, fail often” is more mantra than meaning. It’s pure Silicon Valley startup jargon that has made its way into design thinking. This fetishism of failure actually has no place in the creative worlds of media, fashion, food, film, art, branding, or even in most technology startups.

It confuses iterating with failing. It also misses the learning aspect of failure; many successes include remnants of early iterations (not failures per se). And finally, it conflates the idea of failing once or twice with failing often. Try failing four times in Silicon Valley and then see what happens! Worse, this mantra glorifies a culture of dealing with failure that works for middle and upper class Harvard and Stanford students or rich entrepreneurs -- but not for the vast majority of America.

This is where we need to displace failing and classic problem-solving techniques with a kind of playing. Done well, games can help us see complex social and economic challenges as different outcomes, pushing us to perhaps discover the most unexpected outcome is the best one. This is also where pivoting is key. Oh, not just in the cliché lean startup sense or the valley jargon of “we pivoted” -- but actually taking innovation and scaling it to production, pivoting from creativity to capitalism. That’s the job of people (I call them “wanderers”) with access to financial and market resources who can help curate new concepts and place bets on which will succeed.

Beyond Brainstorming and Sticky Notes

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a swarm of yellow sticky notes filling the air, alighting and buzzing around like bees shifting on a whiteboard surface. With people yelling out dozens of ideas in a room. This is brainstorming at its most intense … and most inane. Sticky-note thinking is so yesterday: It’s a design process invented in the 1930s and copied from the advertising industry. Many have since resoundingly punctured its utility; Keith Sawyer for example shared research in Group Genius where people tended to keep their best ideas to themselves, instead tossing out their second- and third-tier guesses.

But the point of brainstorming* isn’t* about getting a broader set of ideas. As design consultancy Continuum CEO Harry West shared with me, “We are not interested in random ideas. We are not interested in a hundred ideas, but ... in the right idea which can align a complete solution.” Brainstorming focuses too much on the idea and not on the right solution. The other problem with brainstorming is that it focuses on unmet needs instead of culturally meaningful context.

This is why I propose knowledge mining,__ __where we look for what we embody and learn as culturally meaningful -- this approach reconnects us to the ideas of John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and the roots of design. This is also where making elbows aside strategizing and thinking-without-doing. Low-cost digital fabrication, crowdfunding, and a shift back to the joys of craft move us beyond just designing minds .... to designing hands.

Teamwork That Actually Works

Think wide. Think options. Think fast. This was the charter for small multidisciplinary teams led by designers. It was standard operating procedure for design in the 1990s, yet how many companies still do this, are beginning to try this now, or list it as a cultural competence and selling point?

Throwing together strangers into a team doesn’t lead to much creativity. While their efforts are appreciated, their output is benignly insignificant. We now know that teams need trust, familiarity, and deep domain knowledge to actually produce innovation. Good creative groups are like bands or sports teams -- intense, intimate, emotional -- who can intuit each other.

Furthermore, such teams need to link up to the wanderers who make their living bringing ideas to life. These wanderers include talent scouts, coaches, lab chiefs, VCs, curators, and agents whose job it is to provide scale, offer financing, and help make connections to an audience. (Sometimes, wanderers aren’t individual people but communities like Kickstarter.)

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By shifting away from the dogma of design to the competency of creativity, business managers, designers, and creatives of all kinds gain the ability to: (1) identify and assess creative intelligence; and (2) replace outdated, unproven techniques with fresh concepts that tap into rich veins of social literature and commentary.

These veins underlie the very social movements that motivate and drive us. Take, for example, “User Experience” (or “UX”). It is a bedrock concept in design, especially valuable to digital and technology companies. But it is based on a design culture of the 1950s, where passive consumers "experience" something provided by someone else.

One of the biggest social movements today is participation -- and the active making of our identities and products by ourselves. We have the tools to make. We insist on participating. We’re patrons, givers, and financiers; we’re advisors and community builders. In this context, UX becomes passé as a design concept. It should really be “User Engagement” (or “UE”), because that concept reflects one of the social movements we live in.

Once we embrace this shift, we move into richer understanding of aura, charisma, ritual, ceremony, play, spectacle -- classic social movement concepts that serve up meaningful descriptions of the interplay between people and things, people and people. Instead of being born into our social engagements, we create and reframe them as we go.

Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90