Beyond UX: Making Sense of Human-Centered Design Now!

Ask NextD RERETHINKING DESIGN

Beyond UX: Making Sense of Human-Centered Design Now! Questions by:

Julien McHardy Graduate Student, Candidate/Master of Research in Creative Practices Glasgow School of Art, United Kingdom Response by:

GK VanPatter Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute Co-Founder, Humantific  Making Sense of Cross-Disciplinary Innovation

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Beyond UX

Introduction Julien McHardy: I am currently a student at the Master of Research in Creative Practices course and of the transformation design course with Irene McAra-McWilliam at the Glasgow School of Art. My recent interest as a designer and researcher are the implications of design approaches that no longer focus on objects or users but on the very processes of design and use.

I follow the transforming-transformation group and the NextD journal for a while now and feel that a lot of the discussions closely relate to my research questions and provide a refreshing vantage point to the perspectives on transformational design within the UK. Your work is an inspiration to my research. I am currently conducting a range of expert interviews as part of my masterʼs thesis on the role of design in the creation of creative communities and I am most excited to interview you in this context.

You are a founding partner in the innovation consultancy Humantific and co founded the NextDesign Leadership Institute. You helped to define a new agenda for design through your work as a consultant and researcher. Allow me to roughly outline some of your arguments, as I understand them, to introduce my first question: The increasing globalization and the consequential acceleration of social, technological, economical and environmental changes leads to interconnected and complex challenges that go beyond the scope of a single discipline.

The fluidity of our interconnected world forces us to constantly innovate to adapt to and influence the direction of these changes. Design, hence, ultimately has to expand its reach and collaborate with other disciplines to understand and make sense of the conditions of innovation rather then merely chasing its materialisation in products and services. (1). There is a fashionable assumption that design can help to tackle the big social and environmental problems of our time. The expanding scope of design however has to be reflected in new design methods and processes to remain credible.

You critically remark that it is much easier to claim WHAT designer can do then to explore HOW they might actually achieve it (2). As a result of your analysis of changing design sensibility you propose a widely discussed framework that establishes three levels: Design 1.0 – Traditional product design that focuses on framed challenges and the design of objects, Design 2.0 – Semi-framed challenges that lead to the design of objects and services from a users point of view and Design 3.0 – The framing of and solution finding to fuzzy and evolving challenges through the creation of innovation capabilities across interdisciplinary teams. This kind of meta-design – the design of design capability – is the field you have helped to establish and the context for our conversation.

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Question 1: Julien McHardy: You argue in a recent interview that divergent thinking and imagination are important elements of what design can contribute to the envisioning and creation of a more human-centred world (3). It seems to me, that you advocate two different roles for design that potentially contradict each other: 1. Design as a form of leadership and 2., design as a universal process-language that can help people from very different backgrounds to collaborate effectively (4). Leadership, as I understand it, intrinsically depends on control and authority while fruitful collaboration grows from equal exchange and free flow of information. How do leading and divergence, control and openness go together? What is the function of design in this context – to lead or to enable – to control or to open up?

GK VanPatter: Hi Julien. Thank you for that introduction. OK let me think in mid-air about your stated subject focus. You are interested in and are studying “the role of design in the creation of creative communities”. You are asking about the “function” of design. You want to know how “leading, divergence, control, and openness could possibly go together in the context of the term “design”. You want to know if I believe the function of design is to “lead or enable, to control or to open up”.

I am so glad you chose such a simple set of questions to kick off this interview Julien.  This should keep us busy for awhile this Sunday afternoon.

We hear from many graduate students trying to figure out what the heck design is and is not these days. I wish I could tell you that there were simple, tidy answers to your insightful questions.

Let me start by saying I can only tell you what we have figured out for ourselves in practice and in our own community based research. Based on synthesis of considerable complexity we have a particular point of view regarding the present states of and possible futures for design. I can open a window into that terrain for you but honestly I have no idea if you are yourself ready to look through and see what we see. Seeing is a lot about being ready. Graduate work is all about getting yourself as ready as you can so I am happy that you are on that journey.

More important than seeking one right answer is the skill to navigate such complexity.

This is all good practice for the degree of disjointed complexity that you will be called upon to navigate today in your work and no doubt even in your school.  In the interest of time it might be useful to you if I do some complexity compression here and share ten streams with you that intersect your questions but not always in a linear way. While I can today explain the streams in a few minutes it took us a long time to figure some of this out in ways that we can explain it to ourselves and to others.As a field of knowledge design is an amorphous time warp that exists across several time zones or paradigms simultaneously. Unlike in traditional science the various paradigms of design do not necessarily replace each other as they emerge.

Paradigms within design exist in parallel. Humans and institutions within one paradigm often have conflicting interests with those in another. Single paradigm views of design tend not to hold up to the amorphous reality.

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Design is a pattern in motion if we choose for it to be. Some among us choose for it not to be. Those forces are part of the everyday picture of the design community such as it is. There are multiple patterns in motion at different speeds. This picture can be confusing to look at.

Those involved in the reinvention of design often have the sensation of “leaving design”.

We find ourselves engaged in activities outside of traditional notions of design. We either left design or design came with us into what we now do. Some choose the “we left” depiction, while others choose the “design is changing” depiction. Those choices are being made by designers every day in the marketplace. It is your choice to make.

To complicate this picture many from outside want into design and so called design thinking. The tricky part becomes what they want into for the most part is not the design of yesterday but rather design transformed. Design has become a club that many want to belong to while some have decided its no longer a club they belong in. Occurring simultaneously in the marketplace these seeking to arrive patterns and seeking to leave patterns present a confusing picture of design.

Enabling creativity, enabling innovation is not exactly the same as enabling design.

There are many disciplines engaged in the enabling creativity, enabling innovation business including designers. How designers engaged in enabling do what we do is perhaps what you are trying to determine in your research. To get there its important to understand the context of organizational transformation today and what the everyday arguments are. Understanding the picture of universal needs helps us to understand how we can pitch in and what we bring to the table.

Underlining much of the discussions on design in the 21st century that are taking place everyday on the PhD Design list and elsewhere on the planet is the operational paradigm, the giant assumption of one discipline / one (process) language. In practice we left that paradigm many years ago. Depending on which design activity space you choose to operate in; 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 you might have to become masterful of more than one process language. Typical forms of design where content and process are intermixed tend to work less well as you move up the scale of complexity to where many stakeholders are involved in co-creation. This is a controversial subject for design. One elephant in the design living room. Many among us are not even aware that the issue exists. Some are resistant as this implies significant skill-building and operational change for designers. It involves the mastery of additional languages.

While so called participatory design or co-creation are relatively new operational realms for designers, others have operated in this space for decades. This is not the age of participatory design as much as it is the age when designers are increasingly arriving in the context of co-creation. It’s a party that started long before we arrived. Study some history. Know your stuff. Lets not walk into the co-creation party with a lampshade on our heads thinking we created this space.

There are many forms of leadership. In the West we tend to think of leadership as command and control but there are many other types. Facilitation and enabling can be forms of leadership. Historically designers have preferred to lead with their content knowledge: Big C (content) focus little P (process) focus.

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We see this continuing to occur in the sustainability movement with design school after school jumping on that bandwagon from a content, not process perspective. Our design schools never seem to learn this lesson and repeat this approach cycle after cycle. It is a phenomenon that occurred during the dot-com era boom years and it is again occurring during the present “sustainability boom�. Process knowledge has a much longer relevance life and is much more sustainable than any content knowledge of the moment. We are most interested in process leadership, not content control. We seek to create more humancentered organizations, a more human-centered planet and future. To do that we seek to create an enabling environment for innovation participation by all. We call this deliberate inclusion or inclusive innovation.

We (Humantific) arrives not to control what gets innovated but rather to first creatively grapple with the forces undermining divergence and innovation and then to build skill.

To do that one has to know what the default battles typically are. In the consulting business one of the jokes is that organizations today regardless of which industry they are in all have the same ten problems. By far the number one problem in the West is that most organizations have judgment dominated cultures. This tends to kill all the idea seeds and shut down divergent thinking. Thanks to the business schools, judgment, convergence, decision-making has been sold as the highest form of value.

That is complete nonsense now that the goal is to grow idea seeds and an innovative culture.

Our work involves restructuring that universe with the goal of increasing involvement, inclusion and innovation. We can do that without even talking about design. We take on the job of creating a safe space for all including those with design backgrounds and we do that as designers. You can see how this is quite different from hitting people over the head and telling them they need design. We work the higher order goal of creating a place for all including ourselves. ď Š This goal of deliberate inclusion implies a degree of control on the process side of the equation. We seek to deliberately deconstruct the default behavior and culture where judgment rules, where only a few are considered creative, where strong personalities dominate and control. While we might bump heads with those who seek to control through the domination of judgment we do so making the case for inclusion. Maximizing brainpower is hard to argue against. Shaping inclusion in real organizations is not for the faint of heart. It involves taking on difficult human forces.

We do so by creatively making those forces visible to all and by making sense of innovation. Making sense through transparency can be a powerful disabler of negative force and enabler of positive energy. Humantific tends to not get hired by organizations that want an old style culture where judgment rules the roost, dominating the everyday work life.

What makes many of these questions complicated is that most leading practices are multidisciplinary today. Inside are numerous fields of expertise being combined. Some of that knowledge has deep historical roots. What is new is how multiple human-centered knowledge forms are being combined, in what context and for what purpose. That is what is exciting about practice today. This can complicate the picture of design but that is the reality of it. Practice is being radically transformed

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Question 2: Julien McHardy: Thank you for this insightful panorama. I would like to come back to your metaphor of design as a universal language. You make the widely accepted preposition that complex problems can hardly be solved by any single discipline.

People from all kinds of backgrounds including design increasingly collaborate across disciplines and therefore need to develop a common process-language in order to understand each other despite the Babylonian divide between professional silos. You suggest two different positions for design in this picture: 1. Designers have to learn a common language in order take a seat at the co-creation table.

2. Design cannot only claim a seat at the table but be the table: A kind of meta-discipline conceiving inclusive spaces and a process language for others to collaborate. Design as the linking force (DMI), the glue and commonly accepted methodology that can bring different disciplines together (David Kelley). Is design one of many disciplines in need of developing a common language; or can design provide this universal-process language?

GK VanPatter: OK well hold on to those metaphoric leaps for just a moment my friend.

Be mindful of superimposing metaphors and clumping one view with another. While it is likely that David Kelley and I agree on numerous design related issues, it would be safe to say that our perspectives differ significantly. If you want to understand these issues deeply look beyond the headline notions like “design is glue”.

What gets tricky is that you are really identifying something as a linking force and then calling that design. Process can be a linking language but lets be honest and recognize that historically design process has been intuitive not externalized so you see how tricky that is.

If you want to call a linking language design then be careful which design you are referring to. In such discussions often designers think we are talking about old traditional intuitive notions of Design 1.0 as glue. We are not. Unless we become mind readers intuition cannot become a linking language.

That does not mean we get rid of intuition but for linking we need to be capable of much more. Translation: We need more, different skills. Linking with others from other tribes takes place outside of ourselves meaning that we have to be able to externalize process, externalize our thinking, whatever we choose to call that process. Externalization of process is in itself a new skill for many in the design business.

While it is true that those operating in the Design 3.0 activity space have and have to have such abilities it is also true that many of those operating in Design 1.0 most often do not. Both are using the word “design”. One is not better than the other. Each involves different kinds of problems and work. It depends upon what activity space you want to operate in, meaning what types of challenges you want to grapple with, whether or not intuition is going to be enough process or not. If you are designing a poster for world peace, intuition might be perfect. If you are seeking to actually work on world peace it will obviously not be enough.

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It would be naïve to expect one mode to transfer to another. The complexity of what design is and does multiplies significantly if you want to engage beyond the Design 1.0 activity space. Embedded in this notion is the realization that we have to rewrite our idea of what design is today. Some among us are simply not ready to do that, others want to do that in incremental baby-steps.

Simultaneously some not among us would prefer that design remain in its preassigned box and not become too strategically competitive. You can see this tactic embedded in the new business press and elsewhere in various surrounding communities. It was present in the IA community for many years unfortunately. Some out there have old hierarchal notions of design as a subservient service to be called upon once the strategic thinking is done by others. That no longer flies but you still see this logic being promoted out there. This dynamic creates competitive turbulence in the marketplace that is only relevant to those who seek or are already operating in the Design 3.0 space. We have done a lot of work to raise awareness around such issues through NextD. These are difficult things to talk and write about. In the dumbed down, promotionally oriented, traditional design press no one writes about such issues.

The design press is strategically brain dead and has been for years. You will not find the future there. If you are not already, you will want to become much smarter than the traditional design press. To really understand what is going on today strategically you have to be.  Instead of me sending more words in your direction, consider these three pictures attached from the ReReThinking Design Series of visual explanation models. We use such models to explain complex developments in compressed time periods. (See NextD Reality Check, http://issuu.com/nextd/docs/realitycheck2011) (5).

Question 3: Julien McHardy: It becomes clear from your ReReThinkingDesign and the Design Is Changing visualisation (See NextD Reality Check) (5) that you speak about a much more connected form of design that links different disciplines and knowledge forms by making processes and content negotiable between many. It seems that design 3.0 is not only a much more interlinked, but also a more common activity. Would you agree with the preposition that linking different people through design equals the creation of communities? Is design 3.0 about the creation of communities and what constitutes a community for you in this context?

GK VanPatter: If I knew less or sought to over simplify I would say that designers are the only professionals out there “making processes and content negotiable between many” to use your terms. As per my earlier comments regarding co-creation, the reality is considerably more complicated. Co-creation is a well-occupied business space, not one that is waiting for designers to show up and occupy. The difference is really how we as design-oriented practitioners engage in that space, with what skills, tools and logics.

As per my earlier comments, what gets complicated is that most of the leading firms doing this work are integrated practices going to market as design or innovation

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companies: Humantific, IDEO, S&Y Partners, etc. Many different disciplines and arenas of knowledge are being combined to deliver this kind of capability.

Again this is for lack of a better term next design as opposed to traditional design.

Ultimately the differences often come from what/who is driving the train in the organization, ie: who the founders, principals or leaders in the firm are. If an engineering, anthropology, business, or marketing orientation is driving, the firm as well as the outcomes tend to look very different from when design is the primary driver. The founders of Humantific come from design backgrounds so this continues to have significant impact on who we are and what we do regardless of what skills we add into the mix. We are happy about and proud of this difference.

Over the last ten years we have become experts in creating what are often called distributed cognition tools, or co-creation tools. This has a lot to do with the roots that Elizabeth and I have in the understanding business, which was itself never part of mainstream design circles. It is an expertise that springs from our orientation towards SenseMaking and inclusion. Today we have a deep understanding of the relationship between SenseMaking and ChangeMaking.

To the other part of your question: does “design equal the creation of communities” I would say yes and no. Since you are studying this subject you must know that the term community can mean different things to different people. We think of organizations as a form of communities and a significant portion of our Humantific work today takes place in this context. Many organizations already exist at the time of engagement so work often involves enhancing rather than creating the community from scratch. Of course design can be used to create communities. Today next design is most often being utilized as an intervention tool, enabler, improver in existing organizational community contexts.

We have been involved in the creation of organizational communities as well as in the repair of existing communities. In a business context there is often an interest in creating a certain kind of community very much in line with your “creative communities” line of inquiry here. The purpose is usually to enhance what is often described as either creativity, design, design thinking, innovation, problem-solving or a combination of the above. We are specialists in creating inclusive innovation communities. To repair, restore and rebalance a community to enable everyone to have a voice and be included in innovation involves an odd-ball hybrid combination of skills. Not everyone finds that kind of work interesting. We do!

A lot of this comes back to the notion of preferred activity space. Ultimately you must decide what altitude and level of abstraction you as a design oriented person with a graduate education want to operate at personally.

You can go and talk with academic thought leaders flying through the subject of “community” at the 50,000 foot altitude level, far above person to person interaction thinking completely in abstract terms, and that might be extremely valuable to you.

There is no one right answer. Organizational transformation, change enabling work tends to be more grounded in the trenches of everyday work life and for this more than white papers are required. In order to be constructive in such settings with real working humans, real tools are most often needed, but again many approaches are possible.

You might focus on designing technology enabled communities and then let human forces battle things out for themselves. This is a lot of what goes on in the blogosphere, Page 8 of 11

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Beyond UX

on the social networking sites etc, and some find that useful while others do not. Does Facebook fit your definition of a “creative community”? It all depends on how you want to define the term and where you seek to engage to hopefully add some value. You might have to make a living so this is often a consideration in the mix too.  Part of the success of NextD Journal is that it became an example of an initiative that continuously sought to bridge these two worlds, practice and academia. NextD was created as an enabler of a new community of design. We did not just write a paper, create a blog or a discussion list. We also went out and starting modeling/teaching the skills very early on. Very few firms do that.

Question 4: Julien McHardy: You use the term human-centered design instead of user-centered design. The latter is obviously based on the conceptual unit of use. What is the conceptual unit of human-centered design; How would you define the differences between user-centered and human-centered?

GK VanPatter: To a significant degree it depends again on the arena of engagement whether or not the term “users” might or might not be a useful term. Quite apart from the debate about whether “users” is or is not a derogatory term, it is as you suggest a term that is reflective of unit of use or scale.

We recognize that there is an entire community with its own specialist firms, skill-sets, values, heroes and conferences focused on so-called users most often these days in the context of user experiences. So-called UX remains an important part, a small subset of the design business.

The problem is this logic has for some years not fit the challenges of the marketplace very well. As a result UX has largely become old news outside of UX. Typically wicked problems including many organizational transformation challenges, are of such a scale that many constituents have to be considered and ideally included in co-creation not just users. Those working in the 3.0 space on the other side of product and service creation typically are called upon to work with and deliberately include many, many constituents. The UX orientation does not scale well to such complexities and challenges. It is not that its wrong but rather that it is of little use in certain strategic contexts. This is hardly earth shattering news to the UX community as it has for some time been struggling to transform itself beyond the so-called web 2.0 work that is rapidly being shipped offshore. Our friend and collaborator Dr. Peter Jones has been among the thought leaders associated with the UX community advocating long overdue changes in that community. Peter operates across several domains of knowledge and communities so he has extraordinary perspective. Not everyone in the UX community is ready for this kind and degree of change. So be it.

Human-centered is a much broader term. Not only is it inclusive of all constituents involved in wicked problems it also signals an approach.

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Engineers do problem solving, as do graduates of business schools and many others.

Such approaches are rarely geared in the direction of human considerations at the same level of concern and detail that is involved in next design. Design is reinventing ways to connect with humans. Leading design oriented practices have for some time been assembling numerous human related fields of expertise under one roof in order to combine that knowledge in new ways. What happens when hybrid, human-centered tools are applied beyond the activity space of consumer product and service creation?

This is the relatively new undiscovered country of innovation today. This is the realm that we are active in and interested in at Humantific. We are happy to be part of an emerging community of firms operating in this space. It would be great if we could collectively make a small impact towards creating a more human-centered world.

Question 5: Julien McHardy: I very much enjoyed this conversation. Let me close the circle by reframing my first question about control and openness: Does the usability paradigm of optimizing the ease of use translate to design 3.0? Does innovation thrive on carefully designed and optimized conditions or on open, somehow unfinished and improvised?

GK VanPatter: “Optimizing ease of use” within technologies is much more framed and certainly radically different from working the space of fuzzy situations. “Optimizing ease of use” is very different than enabling deliberate inclusion. As per my comments above, to do this latter work radically different skills and tools are required.

Enabling the conditions for innovation has for some time involved the art, science, business and design of combining structure and openness. No one said this was going to be simple or easy. Does a jazz musician need to learn scales before he is ready for jamming? Jamming with no knowledge of scales, without the discipline underneath the chaos is just noise. Most people find that working everyday in the context of chaos is frustrating, draining and counterproductive. As humans we can do better. I hope this helps. Good luck with your thesis Mr. McHardy. Drop by and see us in New York after you graduate.

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References: (1) VanPatter, GK (2005) The Infodesign Interview [Interview by Peter J. Bodaards] In Design + Strategy. Points of view from the 2005 Institute of Design Strategy Conference.

(2) VanPatter, GK (2007) The Third Lens: Making Sense of Thesis Complexities Now! [Interviewed by Jaime Barrett]. NextDesign Leadership Institute, New York. available online from http://issuu.com/nextd/docs/asknextd_thirdlens (3) VanPatter, GK (2008) India Design Futures: Reflections: 2008 Leadership by Design Summit in Bangalore [Interviewed by Arvind Lodays]. India Design Futures. available online http://issuu.com/nextd/docs/asknextd.bangalore (4) Kelley, David. (2005) Design as Glue, Understanding the Stanford d.school [David Kelley in conversation with GK VanPatter] NextDesign Leadership Institute available online from: http://issuu.com/nextd/docs/conv2 (5) VanPatter, GK and Pastor E. (2011). NextD Reality Check NextDesign Leadership Institute, New York. Available online from http://issuu.com/nextd/docs/realitycheck2011

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