Improv-Design

Category: improvisation

  • Improvising Design

    Improvising Design

    Why is design improvisational?  We talk about design as if it were fixed: as if there were one best way to design everything. We celebrate designers who produce especially elegant or usable artifacts as if they were possessed of supernatural powers. Yet design should be easy. It is the application of “best practice” principles to a specific situation. We can observe how the users of a designed artifact or system work, then design the artifact or system accordingly. Why does that approach fail so often?

    The key issue is the problem of “the problem.” Designers are taught a repertoire of designs-that-works: patterns that fit specific circumstances and uses. Experienced designers are capable of building up a deep understanding over time, of which problem-elements each of these patterns resolves. So they can assess a situation, recognise familiar problem-elements, then fit these with design patterns that will work in these circumstances. The problem comes when a designer is faced with a novel or unusual situation that they have not encountered before. Novice designers encounter this situation a great deal. As designers succeed or fail at successive designs, they accumulate experiential knowledge, that allows them to assess new situations quickly and to understand which design elements will work or fail in that situation. The problem with this is that (as the Princess said) you have to kiss an awful lot of frogs to get a Prince. An awful lot of people end up with really bad designs, because their designer did not recognize elements of the situation well enough to understand which pattern-elements to implement. If you are really unlucky, you will also end up with one of those designers who feel it is their mission in life to prevent the end-user “mucking about with” their design. If you are lucky, your designer will recognize that it is your design, not theirs. They design artifacts and systems in ways that allow people to improvise how they are used — and the role that they play in the work that people do.

    Improvisation takes a multitude of forms. It might be that you customize the color of your screen (often because the designer thought that a good interface should look like a play-school). This may not do much for the function of your work-system, but it does mean that your disposition towards work is a heck of a lot sunnier as you use it. Or it might be that the information system which you use expects you to enter data on one step of your work before another. You might be able to enter data into a separate screen for each step, reordering the steps as you wish. More usually, you have to enter fake data into the first step, then go back later to change this, once you have the real data. This is because IT systems designers treat software design as a well-structured problem. A well-structured problem is one that contains the solution within its definition. Defining the problem as a tic-tac-toe game application means that you have a set of rules for how the game is played which absolutely define how it should work. The only discretion left to the designer is whether to support one or two players and how to present the functions in a usable screen interface. This is not rocket science: most designers can manage this level of design without making the game unusable.

    But information systems applications tend to present wicked problems. A wicked problem is a problem that cannot be defined objectively, but needs the people involved (the stakeholders) to agree on what the problems that they face are, what are their priorities in resolving these, and what they want to achieve in changing things in the first place. A wicked problem can be understood as a web of interrelated problems. It is not always clear what the consequences will be, of solving any part of this mess. Some of the problems may have “obvious” solutions. But implementing these solutions may make other, related problems worse or better. For example, consider the problem of providing State-based unemployment benefit in the USA (see the diagram on the “systems thinking” page). If one State offers such benefits and a neighboring State does not, unemployed people will move to the State which does offer benefit payments. This will place a greater tax burden on that State, causing the more affluent residents and businesses to move out. This increases unemployment, raising the tax burden, causing more people and businesses to move out. The act of offering State-based unemployment benefits leads that State into a downward spiral in which their budget becomes unmaintainable and employment opportunities are significantly reduced. For wicked problems, a wider perspective is needed, that examines interactions between problem elements and which analyzes the impact of one problem-solution on other problems. It is not always possible to foresee all unintended consequences. So solutions must be designed flexibly, for changes to be implemented as the consequences are realized and to permit customization by stakeholders and users.

    People are infinitely improvisational. They develop work-arounds and strategies to manage poor design. But I constantly ask myself why should they have to develop work-arounds for poor design? What is it, about the design process, that leads us to such constraining IT systems, interfaces, and work procedures that are based on the system design, rather than system designs that are based on flexible work-procedures? This website reflects findings from my research studies and reflections from my own experience in design, to discuss some key underlying principles of design, to explore how the design process works in practice (rather than how we manage it now, which is based on unsupported theoretical models), and to present a way of managing design differently.  Improvisationally.

  • Chapter 1 of Book Available

    Chapter 1 for Improvising Design book has been uploaded. The first chapter discusses why we need better models and methods for design … and why design is improvisational. Doubtless, stuff will be shifted around a little, as I complete my write-up of research findings chapters. But this is a good introduction to why we need to change our approach to design.

  • Design as the Serendipity of Location

    As I ruminate on design processes, I can’t help but reflect on the similarities between research methods, processes and outcomes, and design methods, processes and outcomes. I read an article which argued that there were two types of people: people with tidy offices and people with untidy offices1. Tidy-office people are organized and so can find anything they need. These are the people who work top-down, creating an outline then writing or designing according to that scheme. Untidy-office people are disorganized, spend a great deal of time searching for things, but also tend to be more creative because they are inspired by things which they bump into, while looking for other things. These people work bottom-up, assembling elements into a coherent whole. The article argued that there are cognitive rewards in both styles of working, that lead people to subconsciously adopt one or the other style consistently.

    I was reflecting on this as I try to make sense of the piles of material that I have assembled for the book. I am definitely an untidy-office type and I wonder if this has something to do with introvert/extrovert personalities? [My project management students and I just explored an online Myers-Briggs personality test; as expected, I was an INTP type.] Perhaps introverts just prefer a “life of the mind,” where we can construct inductive models of the real world?2.

    My semi-organized and shifting piles of research data, models and representations, interim findings, academic articles, and books provide a three-dimensional, systemic representation of design processes that can be reorganized as I comprehend different patterns. Of course, they are both preceded and supplemented by painstaking (and frequently revisited) processes of categorization, synthesis, and validation. But the kaleidoscope of patterns that they reflect is invaluable in suggesting different views of my findings. The same is true for design – we create the patterns that we perceive as relevant in the problem situation. As our perceptions shift, so do the design patterns that we follow.

    I would argue that innovative design is neither deductive or inductive, but consists of cycles of induction and deduction. It follows a hermeneutic circle of sensemaking, as designers attempt to work from problem to solution and to reconcile those fragments of a solution that they understand back to a meaningful problem definition. The combination of deductive and inductive thinking has been described as abductive reasoning, but reasoning about design is more disciplined and rigorous than most descriptions of abduction [a hunch] would indicate. I prefer Thagard and Shelley’s (1997) argument that hypotheses about reality are layered, incomplete, and too complex to be comprehended easily3. Often, the only way to comprehend complex, interrelated elements of behavior and context is to use a visual, systemic representation.

    As someone who has spent a good portion of their career as a systems designer, I have never considered design creative. Design is more about synthesizing from preconceived elements than creating from scratch4. But I wonder if – just as in research – the greatest inspiration in design derives from the serendipity of location?

    Footnotes (click on ↩ to return to post)

    1. If anyone knows the reference for this paper, please let me know. I saw an NYT article on the subject, but I can’t locate the academic paper again – which was published in an information science journal, if I recall correctly … ↩

    2. There is a neat discussion of deductive vs. inductive reasoning over at the research methods knowledge base. ↩

    3. Paul Thagard and Cameron Shelley (1997) “Abductive reasoning: Logic, visual thinking, and coherence.” Available at http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/%7FAbductive.html (last accessed 11/27/2009). ↩

    4. Like sex, design seems to be 30% inspiration and 70% perspiration … ↩

  • Design as a trajectory of goal-definitions

    The collaborative design of system solutions for wicked problems seems to follow a trajectory of goals, as the group’s understanding of the design progresses. The key to making (and evaluating) progress is understanding what triggers the changes in goal-direction.
    From my research studies, it seems that goal changes are triggered by breakdowns in individual buy-in to the group’s consensus definition of the design vision. Both the breakdowns and the most important parts of the vision are concerned with how the design problem is structured and defined — not (as we usually assume) how the designed system will work. Of course, the solution is important: individual group members constantly test their understanding of the problem against the emerging solution, then realize that the design goals need to change. But it is the consensus problem-vision that drives design goals.
    design-trajectory
    An important implication of this design model is how to manage design effectively. We need to keep influential decision-makers in the loop, when design goals are redefined, or they just see the start and end points. The natural response is “what took you so long?”. Managing external expectations is key to design success.