Beautility

MAKE GOOD CHOICES

Sometimes you don’t need to decide—sometimes that’s a good choice. But it may be a better choice to make a bad choice. Every mistake is a teaching opportunity. Indecision and doubt weaken the process, while problems can force us to be creative and make something better for the next choice.

How does this relate to design? Creating, making, and managing choices is essentially what design is about. Designers, by definition, must literally make a lot of bad choices. Working through bad ideas, getting lost, and hitting dead ends is testing the limits. How else can we arrive at the good ones? For the designer, choices have two aspects: On a personal level, designing is choosing. On a team level, the designer manages the development process of choosing the choices. The design process is a conversation between people and between needs and reality. Designers need to hear all the voices to navigate the rough interpersonal waters innovation generates. Like Meat Loaf sang, designers are constantly asking, “What’s it going to be?”

Right now, bad choices are stacking up like dirty dishes in the sink. Disapproval hurts. The world feels overwhelmed with deep systemic problems on every level, all with an abundance of hard choices.

How do designers help manage the change they are creating? Lao Tzu says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Like a funky drum beat that keeps the music moving, the design process keeps development moving, and designers’ soft skills manage each step. Steering the options and guiding the process takes just as much talent and creativity as creating new designs—and is just as necessary for success.

Real Choices When I showed some sketches to a client the other day, she was surprised that I was sharing a bunch of concepts. I was surprised when she told me that designers usually just give her one final design. They don’t show any choices? How could that work? Starchitects think they already have the answer. They bestow THE design, leaving the client only one choice: Take it or leave it. Maybe they think options confuse clients. Sometimes they also use a long explanation to squelch discussions. By running down the clock, there is less time for arguments. Makes it easier for the designer, but not necessarily a better design.

Another trick is the three-way: Offer the client three possibilities: a bad design, a good design, and a reach design. These seemingly three choices are more than only one, but coercive, not truly inclusive, pressing the client toward the preselected “good” design.

Working with the client by offering real choices is what builds toward the best option that everyone wants. That practice has always been integral to design thinking. The application of a more inclusive collaborative process may have originated with industrial designers, who must satisfy manufacturing needs combined with the users’ and client’s desires. Designers must engage all players and users because they all have a stake in achieving success. Offering choices rather than solutions, like in therapy, makes people feel important and fundamentally empowered. Plus encouraging anyone to contribute is a great way to find diverse voices and create the best solutions!

There are many ways to make decisions: comparing the options, weighing pluses and minuses, listing pros and cons, prioritizing, doing a SWOT analysis (strength,

weakness, opportunities, and threats), conducting cost/ benefit analyses, measuring against the goal or the brand values. There are good democratic voting methods and bad dogmatic rules that enforce bias. Then there are the less effective second guessing, wishing, eliminating by sudden death, and asking the guy in the hall. Also not recommended: rolling dice, rock-paper-scissors, and consulting a dog.

Choices are what propel design. Showing options, offering choices, and even making mistakes are good ways to open up discussion and move projects forward. After years of trying to broker communication between colleagues and clients at IDEO, Fred Dust used design thinking to design the conversation itself with “intention and purpose, but still artful and playful,” he says in Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication. “We don’t have to just be participants in, or victims of, conversations. We can be the makers of the conversations.”

How can we structure the discussion without bias? Jamer Hunt, vice provost for transdisciplinary initiatives at The New School, asks in his new book about scale, How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible, “Who is doing the designing? It can’t be just experts, and it must be all of us. Here again is where scaffolding plays a role: We must all be fully engaged in a well-designed process that encourages our participation, draws upon our local wisdom, and defies the distant experts. When autonomy, agency, and the capacity to change systems is handed back to those who use the systems we’ve created, we will finally start to see a more nuanced and responsive set of behaviors.” Designers expect to choreograph and tailor a journey that can be co-authored by the stakeholders.

All presentation media is inherently biased, and we all know how to exploit spotlights, pedestals, and frames. The pandemic is laying bare the weaknesses of the virtual world. Linear presentations (PowerPoints or movies) are great for telling stories that lead to (happy) endings, but the format, like Twitter is proven to cloud analysis because it is difficult to scan options at once on a screen. Although in Miro you can zoom in on one option, it’s not the same as shuffling papers and actually pressing your nose to the sketch! It’s hard to compare and organize options in any kind of tunnel.

An open development conversation begins by presenting everything, literally putting everything “on the table” and keeping the “door open” to unforeseen opportunities. (P.S. those are not virtual “air quotes”). It’s good to remember the physical advantages of things like pin-up displays where the options are up for all to see, inviting everyone to look and compare. Organize, reorganize, and cull out the weak ones. Dutch graphic designer Gert Dunbar loved spreading out his design options on the floor for presentations. Everyone could see all the work. He said he knew a client was really engaged when they began crawling around on the floor too!

Design Thinking to the Rescue Right now politics is not working well. Politicians are acting like professional wrestlers playing to the crowd. Does that mean democracy is broken? It’s hard to think of a better way to govern. The problem with our polarized politics is that every issue is defined by stereotypes that, like PowerPoint presentations, mask the underlying commonalities. Robert’s Rules of Order may keep the parliamentary procedure civil, but it is the wrong procedure for a collaborative, progressive, and successful working through of the issues. No one wins when the development process turns into a battle between sides. We need to convert politicians into designers who want to solve our problems by looking for teleological and probably nonbinary solutions. Now more than ever we need the most creative and practical leadership to crack the pandemic, the climate crisis, and social equity.

Side-by-side comparisons, like presidential debates, work by revealing differences. A/B testing is the simplest form of a controlled experiment. Two versions of the same thing are matched against each other while a single variable is changed. The 19th century monk Gregor Mendel unraveled the basic principles of heredity with just a handful of peas and a couple of pots. He observed that natural selection builds on the previous generations’ traits, just like March Madness seedings lead to the best team. With A/B tests it’s easy to measure which variation works best. They are great for isolating the critical factors and distilling them into rocket fuel. What makes A/B testing controversial? It works too well! For instance, researchers at Facebook once experimented on 689,003 unsuspecting users to see if showing more positive or negative news impacted sales— and it did! The problem was that people thought Facebook

was manipulating viewers’ emotions for profit. (What if Facebook only focused on good news? Would business boom and hate wither?)

Since industrial designers focus on satisfying the user, the design process has incorporated multiple methods of accessing user responses: psychological tests, interviews, physical measurements, and, of course, observation— always tested with prototypes. Truth comes from listening to the real users who have real things. As John-Michael Ekeblad says, “Your butt decides if the chair is working!” But the most fruitful approach is to engage users in a process that leads to deeper empathy and success. That’s why industrial designers always share options—not just because we are trying to please people (well, we are), but because working through options together is very gratifying.

Today we are faced with a kind of crisis of imagination that requires crisis intervention and de-escalation training. Everyone is getting excited. Choices may help define and contrast the options, but everything is not either white or black. We need to search the infinite continuum of possibilities. Reversing a bad choice is a welcome choice. Now how do we manage an iterative process that can spin wheels or jump to conclusions? Of course, we all have to work within the circumstances we are given. Design thinking is the best approach to making incremental choices and coping with a complex matrix of fluid needs and desires. We’re in an era when design methods and education pedagogy have merged and are now the dominant methodology of big business—everyone is “earning by doing”!

A Better Way Everyone wants to make the world better. The question is how? And for whom? All the interlocking and interacting systems are squeezing us tighter and tighter. Everyone is getting intimate with everybody’s business: their viruses, floods, forest fires, and social issues. Choices and wicked problems seem overwhelming. The consumer is confronted by the choices they made, and the ones industrial designers made for them. We are stuck between rocks and hard places, where each step has many moral choices—and anyone’s actions can be magnified by a Tweet or a semiautomatic rifle.

What if there was a pill that would make everything better?

At the beginning of The Matrix, Neo can pick either the red pill or the blue pill. Red to reveal the truth and blue to continue with things the way they are. We need to take a better pill: a green pill that reveals the vision of sustainable design. That exposes how to make renewable energy more effective, make human power more fun, and organic tomatoes taste even better. That pill is going to be epic. As Jonas Milder told me, “We need some serious leapfrogging!” Don’t stack the dirty dishes! Write your prescription for the beautility pill. We can turn spinach into candy. We must make all options green.

Reach for the Beautility pill.

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com