Opportunities for Cross Disciplinary Designing

As designers, we all share a goal of creating environments that “work great, and are great places to work.” Recognizing that what is designed in one domain affects the others, we’ve found common ground by beginning to appreciate each other’s “Elements of Design.” We’ve articulated these specific elements in the environments that we create through the design of:

Physical Space: Form and groupings of spaces; public, private, gathering, and connection; technical details the support the function and use of space; adjacency and proximity of people within space; flow of people (patients, family, staff), information, and materials; sight lines and views; materiality and light, color, sound; infrastructure systems that control air quality, energy use, communication, security; flexibility for change

Organization: Service groupings (for example, by function or by specialty); roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes within these groups; deliberation processes and other tools used to deliver service; measurement & monitoring systems; systems for people (hiring, development, promotion, performance management, justice, compensation, and incentive systems); systems for planning and continuous innovation

IT Systems: Interfaces between business domains (HR, finance, marketing, production, etc.); capabilities for monitoring & decision-making using information; relationships of the modules (for example, order entry software has to connect with customer module, and modules must connect to each other; required “uses” for the software and impacts on systems, data

To help navigate the challenges of designing across disciplines, we’ve adopted a set of principles from the discipline of SocioTechnical Systems Design2 that we find helpful as ‘glue’ to hold the multidisciplinary team together:

Performance Principals

When designers follow these principles, the organization as a whole is more likely to move toward a state of higher performance.

• Provide minimum critical performance requirements – don’t over-specify

• Optimize requirements of the processes, the people, the organization, and external stakeholders

• Ensure work is controlled and coordinated at the level where work is performed

• Support individual quality of working life for all

• Leverage strengths, both individual and organizational

• Support process optimization while also supporting innovation and agility