Patterns in Motion: Examining Design’s Reconstruction

NextD Journal RERETHINKING DESIGN

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Patterns in Motion: Examining Design’s Reconstruction

Harold G. Nelson, Ph.D. President, Co-Founding Director Advanced Design Institute Co-Author, The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World

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

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1 GK VanPatter: Congratulations on The Design Way book, Harold. I can see that you and Erik Stolterman have created a deep well for folks to dive into there. I know you are in Scandinavia this week so we have not had a chance to talk. You therefore may be surprised to learn that we invited you here to engage in a virtual conversation focused on issues and opportunities connected to design’s reconstruction.

Before we get to that and for those readers who might not be familiar with your work, can you briefly tell us from which educational direction did you enter the realm of design?

Harold G. Nelson: Thank you for your kind words about our new book, The Design Way, and for the chance to participate in a virtual conversation with you on some topics that are very much on my mind nowadays.

Now for a quick introduction to my entrée into the field of design. After extensive training in electronics and military technology, I made a compromise decision between my demon’s preference for art and my pragmatic side’s preference for respectability. When I completed my military obligation I entered the Bachelor of Architecture program (a fiveyear professional degree) at Montana State University. After graduation I spent a year in Helsinki, Finland studying and teaching architecture, studying ceramic design and working as an assistant to Reima Pietilla, one of the premier international architects at the time. My experience as an architect in Finland set a standard that I was hardpressed to repeat when I returned to the United States.

I moved to Colorado Springs from Finland where I began serving the obligatory threeyear apprenticeship period required to qualify to sit for the professional licensing exam.

I worked for a wide spectrum of offices doing everything from ski clubs and condos in the Rockies to commercial offices and schools. I worked primarily as designer with a growing interest in architectural programming. A couple of complex (my interpretation) design projects came into the office where I was preparing to assume the role of design partner. These projects were the catalysts for my decision to go back to graduate school in search of “answers”.

I entered the Master of Architecture program at Berkeley initially to study and work with Christopher Alexander. I soon met Horst Rittel, however, a professor of design, who essentially changed the course of my academic career. Through him I met West Churchman, a systems philosopher and professor in the Haas Business School.

Through West I met other faculty and students from across the campus who were all involved in systems thinking and/or different approaches to design.

After completing my M. Arch. Degree and getting my professional architectural license, I was accepted into the Ad Hoc Ph.D. Program at Berkeley where I was able to choose my own faculty and design my own degree—Social Systems Design—under the guidance of West Churchman and an exceptional committee of scholars. As a graduate student, I worked as a research assistant at the Lawrence Berkeley Research Laboratory where I completed the research for my dissertation and worked on other Department of Energy projects related to energy policy. I also worked as an architect for the United States Forest Service and became an assistant regional architect working out of their San Francisco office. After completing my doctorate, I left practice and went into teaching, research and consulting.

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2 GK VanPatter: How do you describe what your primary expertise and interests are today?

Harold G. Nelson: My interests presently are focused on what I would term the reconstitution of Sophia. In the pre-Socratic era, Sophia (wisdom) was considered to be the ‘wise’ or ‘knowing’ hand. During Greece’s classical era, Sophia was split and only that part dealing with reflective thought concerning first principles and other philosophic concerns retained any connection to wisdom. Those who worked with their hands went to the bottom of the hierarchy, as exemplified in Plato’s Republic. Thus, philosophy— philo (love of) + sophia (wisdom)—became associated primarily with the philosophy of science in academic settings. My interest is in the recovery and development of design philosophy as the reconstitution of Sophia—the integration of reflective thought and skilled action. Some colleagues and I founded a nonprofit institute, Advanced Design Institute, to help in this endeavor.

From this overarching interest, I am involved in the development of design learning programs, design as a form of leadership, design as change and innovation in business and governmental organizations, design-competent organizations, large-scale design (governmental programs, etc.) and design information systems. I am also writing or collaborating on three more books.

3 GK VanPatter: Does this mean that Advanced Design Institute is entirely focused on the concept of design as the reconstitution of Sophia? Help us understand how this fits with the idea of design as a form of leadership.

Harold G. Nelson: The triggering idea for the creation of Advanced Design Institute was the reconstitution of Sophia—reflective thought and wise action—but there are several other issues that were brought into focus because of that first intent.

One of the first was the need to make a case for design as its own tradition of inquiry and not merely a combination of, or compromise between, art and science. A related and equally important intent of Advanced Design Institute was to make the case for design as a ‘service’-focused activity. Scientists and artists legitimately serve their own interests—their curiosity or need to express themselves. In contrast, design is defined as a service to the ‘other’.

Design is relationship-based—a social system—and designing is a complex, dynamic process I describe as a ‘conspiracy’—a breathing together—among stakeholders in the design.

Designers, clients (including surrogate clients), decision makers, end users and other stakeholder categories are included in this service relationship. Designers are not expected to be mere facilitators of clients’ concretely articulated wishes because clients are often unable to comprehensively state ahead of time what is pressing to be expressed on their behalf. In addition, certain classes of clients can never be present to represent their interests directly (e.g., future generations, consumers or society at large). The designer must have the ability to hear what is not being said in addition to Page 3 of 37

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what is being heard from clients or their agents. The design dialogue between designers and clients evoke an image of the character of a design towards the end of their ‘dance’ together. The test of a good design is in the client’s ‘surprise of recognition’ of their best interests in the emerging design that transcends what either—client or designer—could have imagined in the beginning.

This would be a good place to introduce my idea of design as a basis for leadership.

Many models of leadership focus on individualized qualities that are identified as virtues of leaders and enablers of leadership. Other models focus on group processes that minimize the individual qualities of leadership in preference for some form of selforganized behavior among the stakeholders. There are many combinations and permutations of these two categories of leadership with one common element: they typically start with a ‘vision’ as the driver of change. How a leadership vision is created in the first place is too often left as an assumption or unexplained. It is also seldom made clear whether the ‘followers’ are being treated as a means only (towards the leader’s ends) or as ends in themselves.

As I pointed out earlier, in a design process vision emerges at the end of a dynamic process, driven from the beginning by the client’s ‘desires’ rather than in reaction to a predetermined vision. Rather than ‘followers’, the leader is in a relationship with clients who are explicitly treated as ends in themselves. Leadership in this case is an emergent systemic quality that appears as a consequence of the interaction of clients, designers and other stakeholders in a managed design process. Leadership emerges as a consequence of a service ‘contract’ and not as an approach to command and control or egalitarian conciliation. Leaders are designers by definition in this case. They play a seminal role in helping people get to where they desire to be from where they find themselves.

Design as ‘service’ is an example of one among many themes of interest for Advanced Design Institute, including exploring concepts in design philosophy, design education and design practice. Our hope is that Advanced Design Institute will be able to make the case to a broad constituency that design is a powerful and important strategic alternative approach to creating intentional change in the real world.

4 GK VanPatter: Are you suggesting that the world that you depict in your book, where design is leadership, that these are conditions that now exist in practice, or is the book presenting a vision, a model for design to aspire to? It is not like a typical business book that is built from case studies, for example. Do you see it as the model, or one of several possible avenues of approach to design?

Harold G. Nelson: Our book approaches design as a form of leadership from two assertions. The first is the belief that good designers (when not acting as applied scientists or artists) are leaders by definition. They play an essential instrumental leadership role in any change project. The second is that good leaders, including entrepreneurs, act as designers even if they do not identify themselves as such or are not identified by others as designers. They do not define their work in the language of design because they have not been brought up in that tradition, but their intentions are nevertheless realized through designerly behavior.

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I have found this to be the case whether the design is of a new nation, a governmental agency, a business or service, a research project, a curriculum or any number of other examples. However, without a common framework or language that is design-based, it is difficult to build a full appreciation for the role that design thinking and designers play in the thousands of ways that design shapes the world at every level, every day.

There are those who are considered to be leaders who do not work as designers.

They push, encourage, threaten, manipulate, or cajole people towards their own preconceived outcomes. There are also those who take the posture of mere facilitators, servants of the collective will, with no espoused motives other than being instruments of a self organizing group process that is somehow able to collectively come to agreement on desired end states. They also do not work in the way designers do.

Leaders, working either implicitly or explicitly from a design tradition, form a service relationship with those who are to be benefited by an intentional change. Leaders are among the beneficiaries in a designerly process, but not the primary beneficiaries as occurs in hierarchical organizations, for instance. People are served by this tradition of leadership rather than being led, or worse, used by leadership. A Chilean graduate student once told me when discussing the political turmoil in his country that leaders forget people like to change—they just don’t like being changed.

When I was a pre-teen, if my friends or I lost something like a penny or marble in a grassy field or on a lawn, we had a strategy to help us in the search. We would place another penny or marble on the grass so that we could ‘see’ what it looked like in the chaotic environment of the play field. Once our eyes got the image of what the lost item would ‘look like’ in that setting, it was a very short period of time before we could ‘see’ the lost item. I believe that design behavior is similarly lost in the chaos of business activity, governmental behavior and public life. If we train our eyes to see what design looks like in these contexts, we will see that design-like activity is going on naturally all around us as a form of fundamental human behavior. It just needs to be ‘seen’ before we can begin to collaborate, build, refine and improve on it.

5 GK VanPatter: I can see numerous thoughts to connect with here, Harold. Let’s talk a little more about the type and scale of challenges that you refer to: designing a new nation, a governmental agency, a business, etc. Simultaneously, let’s explore the idea that design is a fundamental yet somewhat unrecognized form of human behavior.

If we take just those few notions and try to map them to where our graduate design education institutions seem to be focused today, considerable disconnects emerge.

Today we see the majority of graduate design education institutions stressing/selling the importance of specialization. Students are encouraged to learn design as a specialized process, intended only for a narrow range of specialized purposes.

For example, if a grad student goes to “Interaction Design School” what they seem to learn there is interaction process that they can then apply as soon as a challenge is framed as an interaction challenge. If it is a fuzzy undefined challenge or not an interaction challenge, it is unlikely that that person, that designer will be able to engage. Then there is the question of scale. When one looks across the majority of traditional design purposes represented by our graduate design education Page 5 of 37

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institutions (graphic design, industrial design, etc.), those purposes seem to reflect relatively small-scale, clearly defined challenges, vastly different than the scale or fuzziness of designing a nation.

So what we seem to end up with in the community is a vision/rhetoric layer that is seriously unconnected to the reality of what is presently going on in our graduate design education institutions. We see visions of future design leaders engaged in large-scale, complex fuzzy challenges like world peace while the reality is that much of what is presently taught is applicable to specifically defined, matchbook-size challenges. There seems to be a considerable amount of hocus-pocus going on there.

Does that chasm between the vision and the reality trouble you? Might you have any thoughts on how that chasm can be bridged?

Harold G. Nelson: The present situation does offer several challenges, including the ones you have identified. My impression is that the graduate design education institutions in general are not responding to the need for a new generation of designers who can work with complex, large-scale, uncertain and rapidly changing contexts.

I am not surprised at this, however, because our universities are designed to be conservative organizations. Although creative work is done within universities, they are not themselves creative in how they redesign their own organizational behavior.

For instance, a colleague and I have been in dialogue with the Boeing Payloads Concept Center (PCC) for the past couple of years. Their consistent message is that they need a different kind of design engineer to deal with the significant challenges they face in a highly competitive and rapidly changing global environment of great complexity.

However, changing the way design engineers are educated in university settings is typically slow and piecemeal when it occurs. The leadership of PCC cannot afford to wait around for a university-paced response to their clearly articulated need. They are forced to engage in design education on their own. This happens in other contexts, including government and nonprofit organizations.

Although there is a gap between what formal graduate design education institutions are doing and what is desired or needed, this does not mean there is an unfilled void.

The space is being filled by people who have found pragmatic, just-in-time or ad hoc means of becoming members of the next generation of designers, even though they may not formally be identified as designers by society or even acknowledged as such to themselves. They are not graduates of academic design programs for all the reasons you have given.

Therefore one of the primary challenges is to help them become better designers through intentional intervention and support. The answer may be in the development of nontraditional professional education programs. Or new graduate level programs in traditional academic settings may need to be developed for new types of designers.

Because of the extremely conservative nature of universities, new design theories, knowledge bases, curriculum and pedagogical designs may best be developed in new ‘centers for advanced study’ that are broad-based, independent and focused on design scholarship. Such centers have been very successful in advancing scholarship in the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. One of my goals is to help develop such a center.

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Another challenge is to find ways for some of the existing design programs to become more accommodating and innovative of new ideas that emerge from resources such as ‘centers’ or from real-world experiences. Given the interrelationship of faculty and the design structure of academic programs, this may be difficult to achieve. They also need to discover new ways of relating to job markets, the traditional driver of professional education. For example, professional design programs in the industrial world train people in skills that become easily outsourced to developing countries, leaving people unemployed or underemployed. The question that arises is: What do design professionals need to learn to be valuable as designers in and of themselves?

Unfortunately, because of the rewards of the market place, ‘style’ and ‘technique’ are too often rewarded as the essential value of design rather than something more substantive.

The challenge that we have chosen to focus on at Advanced Design Institute is the need for a ‘design culture’ to bridge the chasm between the ideal and real. What we mean by this can be explained using the example of another type of ‘culture’. Recently the Iraqi Ambassador explained her concern that the American focus on installing democratic institutions in Iraq without the creation of a ‘culture of democracy’ in Iraq was a serious mistake. She pointed to all the informal and nongovernmental activities in American society required to monitor and support the appropriate and effective functioning of official democratic institutions. Democracy is an embodied value in each citizen.

In the same way, it is important to have a design culture forming a social crucible within which designers, design education and design practice can be held in a design context.

Without a strong design culture in place, the value and effectiveness of new graduate design programs, professional design organizations and individual professionals will be sub-optimized. For example, I would make the case that a viable design culture does not presently exist in the United States. People in general do not understand design well enough to evoke design as a preferred strategic intention in particular situations.

They may be aware of expensive products that are labeled ‘designer’ such as eyewear, clothes, furniture or custom-built homes, for example, but they do not see design as an approach to the creation of new educational policies, health systems or business endeavors.

They therefore cannot demand and support design institutions in the same way they do democracy. They cannot elevate design to the level of leadership it is capable of because it is seen as a narrow specialization that is merely focused on aesthetics rather than on more ‘important’ issues. It is an esoteric approach that can often be easily replaced with more familiar approaches such as planning, management or scientific problem solving. The challenge is to help facilitate the emergence of a design culture.

My hope is that Advanced Design Institute will be able to play some small part in this.

The challenges presented above are just some of the ways I see to bridge the gap you have pointed out. Some are easier to engage than others obviously and they all require collaboration among a diverse group of people. It may be that it will be easier to approach one type of challenge in a different part of the world than another. The one key thing we need to do, I believe, is to challenge accepted norms. For example, present graduate design programs may not be the only or best leverage point for changing the way design is understood and practiced.

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6 GK VanPatter: When it comes to views on graduate design education, you and I have a lot in common, Harold. At NextD, we learned early on that a big part of the challenge at this moment in time is that there are often very low levels of awareness around many of these issues. Before or in parallel to moving to solutions, we have to create awareness around what the problems are, where disconnects exist and where the possible connecting points might be. We are hoping that sharable conversations like this one can raise the awareness level around many of these issues.

Let me ask you about some of what you propose in your book. You make a connection between design, large-scale undertakings and systems thinking.

Here is a quote from your text: “Design is an act of world creation. The world is becoming more and more a human artifact, a designed place. To be a designer is therefore to be a creator of new worlds.

It is a calling of enormous responsibility, with its concomitant accountability. As designers, we believe that we need to view the world from the systems perspective. The systems approach is the logic of design. . . .Design is a process of meaning making because it is engaged in creation from a systems perspective, holistically and compositionally.”

Help us understand what the intention is there. From your perspective, what is or should be the connection between design and systems thinking?

Harold G. Nelson: Excellent question. For me, this is a key point for making design more broadly relevant and practical in today’s world. Every design is a system or an element of a system. Every design has systemic ramifications. No design exists in isolation. Every design interacts with other designs—within shared contexts and environments. Every design obliges change in the lives of others. To paraphrase someone famous: We create our designs and in return our designs create us.

Every design is a network of interconnections, of patterns of relationships, displaying emergent qualities not apparent in the quality of any isolated element. That is, it is a composition. The behavior of any element of a system or design affects the behavior of the whole design, and the whole defines the expected contribution of the individual elements of the design.

Systems thinking and design reasoning are so closely related as to be interchangeable conceptually. Systems thinking has advanced significantly in the past several decades and as a consequence a great deal more can be known about the field of design when looked at through a systems perspective and acted on from a systems approach.

Design and systems thinking are interrelated in two very important ways. The first is based on the assumption that systems can be regarded as existing in the real world —whether concrete or abstract. Systems as existent things can be understood in two ways. Systems science is a disciplined approach to explaining and describing complex phenomena using systems models and theories. Systems design is the process of imagining and creating systems as designed artifacts. Both approaches are essential in the process of designing because both deal with complexity. And the most complex thing in the world to understand is the ultimate particular design situation.

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The second way in which design and systems thinking are interrelated is in the manner in which we acquire knowledge—that is, as forms of inquiry. Systems science—as a form of scientific inquiry—is used instrumentally to describe and explain things that are already in existence.

Design inquiry is the process of imagining something that is not yet in existence but that which will be. Both use many of the same means and methods of learning about the world—the one existing and the one coming into existence—and share some fundamental understandings of how knowledge is acquired. The departure is in their relationship to action. Only design inquiry determines how knowledge is to be used in action.

Design thinking is a compound of a variety of forms of inquiry that are systemic, including imagination, judgment, intuition and instinct. These forms of inquiry are essential at certain phases and stages in designing, but an essential executive function is served by the element of reason—design reason—which brings a disciplined animation to the design process as a whole. Design reason is systems thinking by another name.

One final thing I would like to add concerns an ethical design imperative taken from a systems perspective. No matter how simple or complex a design may be, it has consequences far beyond the concerns of the immediate clients and stakeholders.

Unfortunately for the designer, there is no clean hands sanctuary. Designers must assume they are accountable in some measure for any potential or actual systemic consequences that are a result of their designed intervention. It is impossible to have adequate knowledge of unintended consequences, but it is better to make a sincere attempt to understand the risks and possibilities than to let the consequences remain unconsidered.

Systems thinking help immeasurably in understanding the causal web in which designs are embedded. For designers to be taken seriously, they need to show a maturity of character in relationship to the work they do from a systems approach. For example, green design is an attempt to informally legislate some measure of responsibility in this regard, but designers need to embody an attitude of responsibility and accountability in all domains of design including, for example, social justice. This elevates the role of the designer from that of a skilled technician or artisan to that of a leadership role.

7 GK VanPatter: How do you respond to critics who suggest that systems thinking is old news?

Harold G. Nelson: I am always startled by such pronouncements, but it is not uncommon to hear such statements from time to time. Ideally I like to ask the person being critical of systems thinking what they mean by systems thinking (or any alternative term they have chosen to use) and why they think it is no longer of interest or relevant. Do they think it has been discredited, refuted or simply fallen out of fashion? Over time I have discovered that there is a great deal of diversity in what people identify as systems thinking. People regularly conflate diverse concepts such as systemic or systematic and systems modeling, systems science, systems engineering, systems design, systems inquiry and systems approach with systems thinking.

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Once I get a sense of what they are actually talking about, I try to discern why they are dismissive of what they have identified to be systems thinking. For example, there have been failed attempts to apply various systems concepts. Most often they are the result of inappropriate or misdirected applications or ineffectual skill levels, but they do offer examples of failures of the systems approach as a consequence. There are a variety of other reasons for criticizing variants of systems thinking. I will give an instance that I believe is exemplary of a good reason for being critical of systems thinking and an instance that is exemplary of an unwarranted reason for being critical.

A good reason for being critical of systems-related thinking is found in the exclusionary and dismissive quality of large-scale social or technical systems modeling exercises.

Large-scale systems models are developed in response to perceived problems or issues. The systems modelers themselves typically identify or define such problems.

They become strident advocates for the implementation of their own systemic solutions to problems that may or may not be shared by others in the system being redesigned and which may have a disproportionate impact on stakeholders affected by the proposed systemic change. The more aggressive the systems modelers become in innovating their systems-wide solution, the more resentful others who have not been a part in the formulation of the problems and in the systemic solutions become. People have an aversion to the work of systems modelers as a consequence.

On the other hand, taking a systems approach requires that we step out of our own narrow interests because of the systemic effects that any individual action or production has on others and the environment. There is an accountability and responsibility that comes from taking a systems perspective. For many people this is an intrusion—a moralistic intrusion—on their personal freedom to serve their own interests in whatever manner they choose. The systems approach is perceived as a subtle form of lay religion imposing explicit ethical norms on personal and professional behavior.

A corollary to the above example is the critical reaction to systems thinking from people who prefer simple, bounded and reductionistic thinking. Traditional scientists simplify and isolate phenomena as much as possible in order to be able to apply the scientific method effectively. Artists avoid any intrusion of external voices that may stifle individual creativity or prejudge personal volition. Professionals prefer to “just do their jobs” without worrying about superfluous distractions. They feel it’s not efficient or productive to do otherwise.

These are diverse examples of what I hear people saying when they express criticisms of systems thinking. The underlying theme seems to point to the dialectic between reductionistic thinking and integrative thinking. Reductionistic thinking works well for traditional scientists engaged in narrow specialized research. The purpose of this kind of thinking is to provide us with invariant or contingent truths, which are neutral to human intention.

Research centers and university curriculums reflect this reductionist perspective in the categories of their formal fields of inquiry and teaching defined as disciplines.

The problem is that outside of research centers and universities, life is not encountered as packets of disciplinary experiences, but as an integrating whole composition.

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in strategizing intentional interventions. Because of the critical difference between the relevance of reductionistic thinking and systems thinking, I believe the hegemony of the discipline-based approaches to inquiry and action are likely to become less dominating in professional fields in the long run. Not even interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches will make a difference in this shift.

Systems thinking is not passé in the manner that styles or fashions become passé in the world of business and physical design. It is as viable as ever and more relevant than ever. There are many professional systems organizations around the world with their concomitant conferences and numerous systems-related journals.

Systems thinking has been insinuated into academic and research programs, and systems language is becoming ever more diffused into public discourse.

Technical systems continue to impress us with their potential, while social and natural systems continue to confound us with their complexity and vulnerability.

A systems thinking perspective has been the essential approach used by humans for making meaning and sense of their lives for thousands of years of human history.

It comes naturally as part of our evolutionary development, and will continue to play the same seminal role in human affairs into the future. No individual lives in isolation from other humans—including future and past generations—and their environments, social or natural. We are all agents in artificial systems. Our artificial systems are all embedded in natural systems. People try to live their lives as integrative wholes, intuitively understanding the reality of systems better than many academics and professionals.

8 GK VanPatter: Let me build on that in a slightly different direction, Harold: Quite apart from the moral, ethical and social responsibility issues is the relatively simple notion that systems thinking is extremely useful in organizational intervention work today.

Many large organizations in the West have gotten themselves to the point of being constructed around vertical silos of expertise, divisions, departments, etc. where everything is broken-down and looked at only in subsets and unconnected pieces.

In such organizations it is not uncommon to find the silos rarely interacting with each other. Many of these organizations have lost their sense of how to think of themselves holistically. By that I mean not as a machine, but rather as a complex interdependent organism.

There are a number of things that human-centered designers can bring to this problem or opportunity condition if our minds are open to the notion that design is about much more than the creation of objects and artifacts.

From a slightly different direction you make reference to similar notions in The Design Way: “From a systems perspective, design is a process of meaning making because it is engaged in creation holistically and compositionally where the end products, or artifacts, of design will invariably be social systems or subsystems of social systems.” (Nelson, Stolterman, 2003).

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“Being able to create distinct complex images and then conceptually model them in relationship to each other as a whole is the function—and ultimately the value—of systems thinking in the design tradition.” (Nelson, Stolterman, 2003).

In our UnderstandingLab practice, we use what we call visual systems thinking to help organizations repair and renew themselves by breaking out of the vertical silo mold and behaving more holistically. It would be safe to say that you and I could have an entire conversation around this subject another time as I know you are deeply interested in systems thinking-related issues yourself, Harold. Let’s come back to this one.

I want to turn now and ask you about a couple of other depictions appearing in your Design Way book that I did not understand. By that I mean I did not understand how those depictions came to be juxtaposed with one another. I was surprised by a couple of things that I saw there.

This is somewhat difficult to access and layout in a few short sentences, so please bear with me for a moment. I will try to compress this as much as possible.

When we work with organizations struggling with the issues around building innovative cultures, we typically encounter what we consider to be the most fundamental struggle in Western business culture. It is a battle taking place every day in many organizations, often without acknowledgement or realization. We somewhat lovingly refer to this fundamental and often unrecognized struggle as “Battle1.”

To be brief, Battle1 involves struggle, often recognized between those humans who prefer to use knowledge to judge and those who use knowledge for ideation. Those with a preference for evaluation seek to position judgment, convergent thinking/behavior above and beyond that of ideation, divergent thinking/behavior.

We understand that such preferences are active in the mix of all conversations regardless of appropriate timing, regardless of phase or activity purpose.

Unorchestrated, preemptive judgment is a virus that infects the vast majority of Western business organizations today. The result is not only the death of idea seeds and the drying up of innovation pipelines, but the death of the organization’s ability to generate ideas and the domination of judgment in the corporate culture. How and with what do we best engage around Battle1 becomes the central question in much of the work that we do with organizations. In organizational settings, one cannot get to continuous innovation without externalizing, surfacing and deconstructing Battle1.

In doing this work we are often asked to analyze various strategy and vision documents generated inside organizations where the dynamics of Battle1 are not understood.

In doing analysis of vision, strategy or manifesto documents, we are often struck by the connections between the strategy and the creator’s own knowledge use/problem solving preferences. There is often a direct correlation, meaning that those who prefer to use knowledge to judge tend to create strategies and manifestos that place judgment as the pinnacle of value. Such manifestos tend to center around not the value of idea creation activity, but rather the activities of evaluation, selection or other forms of convergence.

Part of our task becomes moving the vision/strategy/model to a point where it becomes more inclusive, more than the preference projection of the strategy creator or creators.

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To get there, we have to creatively unpack Battle1.

Knowing what we know about the importance of Battle1 challenges in organizations today and the potential for design to play a new role there, I found parts of your book surprising. In the Index to the Design Way I counted 148 references to various forms of judgment. I could find no references to ideas or ideation. There is a 26-page chapter on Judgment, but no chapter on Ideation. I noticed throughout the book that design as an activity was often being cast as one of judgment rather than ideation, or a balance of the two. Was that the intention? Does that not concern you? In seeing that emphasis I wondered what exactly I was looking at there. Was it the profile preferences of the authors or something else?

Perhaps I am misinterpreting or missing something here. From your perspective what role did your own problem solving preference profile play in your subscription for how design should reconstruct itself? From where you stand, what is the role of judgment in design?

Harold G. Nelson: First a quick response to your initial point. I certainly agree with you that too many organizations have lost the ability to think of themselves holistically.

This is because organizations are challenged by levels of complexity and scale they have never experienced before. New materials, new technologies, new demands and restrictions plus a constantly increasing stream of new knowledge flood their daily operations. At the same time, the social environments they are embedded in are also undergoing dramatic change. Newly emerging cultural expressions colliding with the globalization of people, ideas and markets create unstable and unpredictable environments within which to make decisions and commit resources.

In these extremely complex environments, many organizations feel forced into situations where they experience a potential or actual loss of control over stable operations, in addition to their creative and innovative work. As complexity and uncertainty grows, their reaction is to engage ever more intensely in rationalized behavior—concretized as an intense need for control, reduced risk, and certainty. However, the crucial reach exceeds their grasp. The result is that at the same time the organization is growing in scope and complexity, the intentional composition of the system—its architectonic whole—is disappearing. My colleague and I characterize this is as the emergence of an abandoned center.

As organizations become larger and more complex they often loose the focal point of their work—their center of gravity. Leaders, managers and administrators are unable to control the operations of the organization because specialization and diversification have created a hollow core at the heart of their system. Their challenge in this situation is to find a strategic approach for replacing their abandoned center with a whole center.

Because most organizations lack design competence they rely on science based strategies. Typically this manifests itself in the form of soft centers—i.e. interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary or multidisciplinary strategies—or hard centers—i.e. strategies based on unified theories of universal truths and contingent certainties. When utilized, these strategies actually exacerbate the situation creating even more ‘empty space’ in the head and heart of the organization. The creation of the vertical silos you mentioned is a manifestation these strategies in action.

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I would argue that more suitable strategies in these situations are grounded in a design approach—i.e. strategies that flow from liquid centers—where creative and innovative processes are combined with rational processes. How such an approach would be operationalized in actuality requires a much more extensive explanation than is possible here. The point I want to make for now is that design is a form of strategic intent that is well structured for dealing with the types of situations that have led to the emergence of abandoned centers in organizations using other approaches.

Now to the second point you raised. This is a very important question concerning the role that judgment should play in design. I agree with what you say concerning the frustrations of dealing with what you characterize as Battle 1. However there is a dramatic difference between the ways we have used the term judgment in our book and your own usage of the term. What you call judgment I would call being judgmental, or prejudgment, preemptive judgment, bias, and other forms of none engagement in relationship to authentic creative processes. There are many terms in common use that have different meanings from those that are used in a design context such as synthetic and artificial. Judgment is one of those words that has a profound and abiding meaning in a design context, a term that needs to be reclaimed from common usage and reconstituted for design purposes. Even scientists are reclaiming judgment through what they call naturalistic decision making.

Judgment is essential and common to all aspects of life. Sailors could not navigate, pilots could not fly and doctors could not heal without engaging in high-level acts of judgment. The same is true of designers who could not successfully design without making good judgments.

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As in most things there are any number of examples of both good and bad judgments but that does not diminish the importance of judgment making in our everyday or professional lives.

In our book (Nelson & Stolterman 2003) we discuss the common pejorative use of the term judgment such as “don’t judge me” and “that’s only your judgment”. Judgment is often presented as an enemy of creative thinking and novices are admonished to withhold or suppress their judgment while learning to be creative. In reality judgment is essential to creativity. As we state in the book “without exercising judgment, creativity is diffuse and innovation rootless”. In the book we have tried to make the rich scholastic tradition dealing with judgment in the works of Kant, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Churchman and others visible in a design context. We present an inclusive list of different types of design judgment we feel are important for designers to have competence in.

The problem with the type of behavior in organizations, labeled as judgment in your example, is that it is fear based—fear born at the edge of the abandoned center.

Because organizations are not typically design competent and individuals within organizations are not necessarily design competent (and may not have any interest in becoming design competent since the organization is probably not designed for, nor does it select for, or reward such behavior) they cannot engage with an environment of complexity and rapid change. Their grasp for greater control and guaranteed outcomes takes time, energy and resources away from more promising strategies such as a systems design approach.

Fighting for greater control and reduced risks is very different from intentionally jumping into the flow of events and welcoming the opportunity to be creative and innovative.

Creativity and innovation takes courage. Courage is not the mere absence of fear.

Fear can be suppressed, using scientized methods of decision making that promise guaranteed outcomes. However, this does not result in the emergence of the type of courage needed to be creative. It merely results in the emergence of a sense of false courage.

The courage to engage in creative behavior in an environment that is fluid and complex comes from being design-competent. In this situation, leadership and design competence can be considered to be the same thing. One of many fundamental abilities a designer or leader must possess is the competence to make good, sound judgments.

However, this is not the only or dominant design ability in the design palette.

I also believe that design is not merely a form of problem solving, although there are occurrences of problem solving in a fully developed design process. Design is a fundamentally different strategy, and therefore I do not hold a problem-solving preference as framed in the Battle1 concept. I believe there is a significant difference between what Horst Rittel has cleverly called tame problems and wicked problems.

Tame problems can be solved using clear step-by-step methodologies while wicked problems defy any such attempts. I don’t deny that both types of problems exist; it is just that they should not be the triggers or framework for design thinking and action.

The reason that you did not find a chapter on ideation in our book is because we tried to deal with philosophic foundations and fundamentals of design and not methodological considerations. Those are being dealt with in a book on design praxis that is presently in Page 15 of 37

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the works. In this new book, ideation is one of those terms that will take on a bit different meaning when discussed in a design context as contrasted to a problem-solving context.

I would like to finish by saying that I believe that there are two important ideas whose times are coming around. The first is the idea of a design culture, a social context that understands and nurtures design activity in the same way that science and art is understood and supported by societies, even if imperfectly at times. The second is the idea of organizational design competence. Organizational systems need to become design competent if they are to survive and thrive in the complex dynamics of today’s world. This means that they must have the ability to continually recreate themselves, create for themselves and create for others.

9 GK VanPatter: I’m still not sure if you are seriously suggesting design should reconstruct itself into an instrument focused on judgment. To become a master of new design leadership is to become a master of judgment? Is that what you are suggesting here?

However one chooses to define or repurpose the word “judgment,” I have yet to see you or anyone else suggest that it means anything other than a form of selection and convergence. You might formulate how there can be many types of convergence, but it is convergence nonetheless. Decision-making is convergence. We often see organizations misunderstanding this and trying to make decision making/convergence the engine of their innovation programs.

Although it is possible that some forms of design (in particular those heavily oriented towards selection and assembly of ready-made components) might have judgment driving the train, we would be asking for trouble if we transferred that logic to the broader stage of innovation where ideation and judgment play equal roles. Let me say this another way. Judgment is equal in importance to ideation, not superior to it in the context of innovation activity. To suggest otherwise leads not forward, but rather right back into the same terrain that design is presently entangled in, a terrain that cannot connect to innovation leadership. Continuing to make judgment the focus of what a designer does is a formula for keeping designers out of the realm of innovation leadership.

Organizations are already overloaded with folks who want convergence to dominate.

Un-orchestrated, it is a force that kills organizational innovation. It is a dysfunction that many organizations seek to escape today. It is not a dynamic that we want design to be reinforcing or supporting: we want a dynamic that is transcending. There are big cultural and behavioral forces in play here and if we miss that, design is not likely to survive in a form that will be to our liking.

Harold G. Nelson: I think we are speaking about design from two very different contexts and traditions. I believe one of the challenges faced while composing the ideas presented in our book was the habit of conflating concepts such as problem solving, invention, creativity and innovation with a more comprehensive understanding of design. For example, the concept of ideation you mention was adapted by Alex Osborn, the inventor of the ubiquitous brainstorming method, to describe one of the steps in his creative thinking model. It is but one phase in his seven-part process. The process as a whole is exemplary of many creativity-enhancing processes developed over the last several decades.

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Most of these processes, with a few exceptions, bookend the ideation phase with stages that are analytic and convergent. It is true that the creators of these many processes admonish us during the ideation-related phase to withhold judgment (what I would call pre-judgment or being judgmental, i.e. critical in the negative sense). This is because the free generation and association of ideas depends on the absence of evaluative or critical thinking which can dominate group processes through intimidation or fear, whether real or imagined. It also depends on holding satisficing in abeyance until obvious solutions are aired out and more creative thinking is given a chance to uncover surprising possibilities. In this context, this warning to not prejudge makes perfect sense.

However, these creative thinking processes are not design processes. They are problem solving or issue-based processes, most often in support of the activity of invention.

Both categories of processes—problem-based and design—are valid strategies within their appropriate domains of intentionality. But it is important to make the differences clear between design and invention as creative problem solving so that people are able to match the right strategy with the desired or expected outcome in the right context.

Design is a much more inclusive process involving designers serving the intentions of others with considerations given for those affected by the outcome. The other may be only one person and innovation may merely be the assimilation of that design into that person’s life. On the other hand, design innovation may involve global diffusion in service of future generations. The designs themselves may be of any scale or material and be as concrete or abstract as required. Every design is a system or an element of a whole system.

From our perspective design is concerned with creating a particular or unique response to an expressed desire that may or may not be considered an original or creative response. Design solutions do not need to be creative to be appropriate or suitable solutions in some contexts. We do not presume that design is restricted to a context of competitive free markets where creativity is essential for gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Design is not a process for generating variety from which viable alternatives can be chosen, although it has been adapted to this use. It is not a means of generating a diverse set of solutions to a bounded problem. It is better characterized as a process of composition—putting differences in relationships that result in desired emergent qualities.

The reasons that managers and decision makers in organizational systems short-circuit not just ideation but the whole creative thinking process are manifold, including, for example, the ways in which they are educated and rewarded as managers or leaders of organizations. The reason that they do not consider a design strategy is that design is too often thought to be the same as creative problem solving or invention—even by experts—and is thus never considered in its own terms.

There are serious consequences for organizations that are not design-competent when design is the optimal strategy for intervention. The design way advocates consideration of broader and deeper exploitations of design thinking. Our intention is to make a case for design as its own form of strategic intent, different from art and science, but at an equivalent level of commitment and consequence. Just as creativity and innovation play an important part in other traditions of inquiry, including those I just mentioned, creativity and innovation play an equally essential part in design inquiry and action, but they are not the measure or extent of design.

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10 GK VanPatter: While I am not exactly sure which two traditions of design you are referring to above, this part of our conversation reminds me that the word design continues to mean very different things to different people. It is not difficult to see that you have strong views on what design is and is not.

I would like to unpack at least a few points that seem to be entangled in the mix here, but let me first ask you something that we ask clients who come to UnderstandingLab for help in creating understandable models of their abstract business ideas, strategies, etc. Do you have any kind of visual depiction in sketch form of either the design model, the design leadership model or the design process that you describe? Rough sketches on the back of a napkin will do. You talk about what design is not (not science, not art), what design leadership is not (not command and control, not facilitation) and what the design process is not (not problem solving, etc.), but I believe it would help your case if you were able to visualize what it is, in addition to making comparisons to what it is not.

Do any such visualizations exist?

Harold G. Nelson: Yes, I always seem to do best when I try representing my ideas in graphic form before I try putting them into text. Edward Demming said that if you can’t explain your process, you don’t know what you are doing. I am not sure if that is entirely true, but I always try in any case just so I can say, “I know what I’m doing... maybe.”

I have developed several models of design over the past few years. Three particular examples that I have found very useful in different ways include design defined as: 1) inquiry, 2) process and 3) structure.

My first model is of design as a form of inquiry—a learning process. Because design situations are most often fluid, unformed and difficult to apprehend in terms of process and structure, there is a need for an equivalent design method to that of the scientific method, i.e., analysis and synthesis. Design as teleological process of seeking intended learning outcomes—the consequences of purpose-driven design inquiry—shown below.

SEEKING: • Competence in design • Agency • Commitment • Complexity • Limits • Unity • Form • Realization In this example, the first task is to seek the development of design competence in the designers themselves, such that they can design for themselves in addition to designing for others. The second task is to seek agency—the right to act on behalf of others who will be considered clients, stakeholders, end users, stockholders, decision makers, etc. The third task is to seek to establish a contract—implied or actual—that defines the exchange of value and expected outcome in the process of intentional change. The fourth task is to seek to determine the systemic interconnections and Page 18 of 37

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the interrelationships involved in the design situation. The fifth task is to seek to define limits—conceptual systemic boundaries—so that things can be accomplished realistically within the accepted confines of time, resources, and space. The sixth task is to seek a unifying image that can be used to give compositional or emergent form to the seventh task, diverse and complex elements of a design. The eighth and final task is to seek realization—to make the designed change a real part of the world as an innovation.

Design can be defined as a complex process that integrates a rational and structured approach (x axis) and an open, creative and unstructured approach (y axis), as shown below. Design practiced from this process perspective depends on managing a balanced and proportioned relationship between these two axes. The challenge is to integrate these different perspectives into an emergent understanding of design as a whole.

These two dimensions are not the only perspectives on design that we can take; they just represent the most common perspectives—design as a science and design as an art.

Design can be defined as an integration of design causes. Building on the original Aristotelian causal principles (material cause, efficient cause, formal cause and final cause) used at different times in history to explain things that occur naturally in the

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world, an expanded list of causes can be created to describe things that occur by design in the world. The additional causes—particular cause and design (intentional) cause—fill out the palette of design causes. Each set of adjacent causes is mediated by particular relationships; i.e., technology mediates between material cause and efficient cause.

Design can be defined in greater detail by expanding each type of cause such as in the example of the design cause shown below. This subset of causal principles consists of several domains of volition and will that animate design activity.

Finally, your question concerning leadership. Below is a model of design leadership (i.e., shared vision leadership) that is the reverse of the common understanding of leadership (i.e., single vision leadership) as vision-driven change. Rather than the type of leadership characterized as the vision of a single person driving an implementation process by command and control towards specific goals and objectives, design-based leadership is an emergent vision process. Design leadership is a social process that results in vision (i.e., a shared uncommon understanding and meaning) in which every stakeholder has some authorship. Vision is an outcome of social interaction rather than an input into social activity.

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This, of course, is a very quick overview of a few of the models I have used to delineate my definitions of design and design leadership. They deserve a lot more explanation than we have the time or space for in this interview, but it at least gives you some context for my ideas. A much fuller explanation is being developed for another book.

11 GK VanPatter: Well you have succeeded in throwing the conceptual kitchen sink at me, Harold. Let me try to unpack a few things here with what time and space remains.

Your visual models surprised me as they seem to depict a quite different view than much of what you have articulated in this conversation. In particular, your process visualization appears to be a puzzle-like invitation for others to figure out what design process means.

This seems to contradict your earlier expressed, strongly held views regarding what design is not. I believe these diagrams paint a very different kind of picture of your model for a new design.

You spoke above about challenges that you encountered in your book. In that spirit I can share with you that one of the challenges encountered in undertaking the NextD Journal is that we sometimes find talented thought leaders working in the areas of organizational transformation, strategy, innovation, team dynamics, inclusion and creative problem solving who have no background in traditional design and only a superficial understanding of what it is and where it is today. Conversely, we sometimes find talented thought leaders working in the area of design who have antique, textbook understandings of team dynamics, inclusion, participatory co-creation, creative problem solving, innovation, and organizational transformation. Between those two extremes are many great opportunities, but it is often difficult to talk across that gulf of misreadings and misunderstandings.

Often we see experts with the best of intentions comparing the most up–to-date notions in their own domain to the most out-of-date models from areas of knowledge outside their expertise. If I am trying to convince people that airline travel is superior to travel by car, but I’m comparing supersonic jet to a 1942 Chevy, that is not a very meaningful comparison. We find this phenomenon is widespread on all sides. It is a phenomenon of conceptual convenienc, but it often blinds everyone involved to the real challenges and opportunities at hand. In all NextD Journal conversations, we try our best to find ways to cross that gulf in order to surface the opportunity space that exists there.

It is no secret that we are engaged in a form of problem/opportunity finding here.

Forging such paths across the gulf often involves enduring a few bumps along the way.

You and I seem to be relatively aligned when it comes to recognizing the potential of design as a form of leadership, the value of systems thinking, and the degree to which graduate design leadership education needs to be reinvented. It would be safe to say that where we differ significantly is around the repositioning of judgment in a reconstructed model of design leadership. Interconnected with that, I believe we also have very different views on what the real problems are in organizations today, why those problems exist, how design can play a role to help, and who is already meaningfully engaged there.

More generally, we seem to also differ in what level of theoretical abstraction is appropriate when communicating ideas for learning and conducting organizational Page 21 of 37

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interventions in the real world. In our understanding of design work, we try to get organizational leaders to understand that throwing abstractions at their brilliant employees and then expecting productivity is like expecting peek performance from Superman while burying him in kryptonite. Dare I say there is more than a little kryptonite here in this model, Harold.

In this conversation I am feeling that we are on two different ships passing in the night as they say. We seem to have similar goals in mind, but we are moving in different directions. With that in mind let me try this another way before we each disappear over our respective horizons and lose this opportunity to connect across some difficult issues here.

There are likely 25 different ways that we could approach this, but in reflecting on your comments and book, I believe the most fundamental problem that I see in the mix here is the 1942 Chevy phenomenon described earlier. In your comments above and in your book, I see a comparative model, parts of which are being constructed on a foundation of conceptual convenience. It is a dynamic that undercuts your suggestions for where design is today and why it must change in the particular direction that you are advocating.

In the interest of time, I will zero in on one example here: In correctly pointing out that there are differences between science, art, and design, a couple of little switches occur there that seem to be problematic. At one moment you are talking about traditional science seeking truth, in the next you seem to entangle that goal as if it is the function of problem solving today. Then you link to individual processing. Then you link to the context of organizational transformation. Then you link to fear. It is a problematic chain of logic to say the least.

I noted that you often depict problem solving as reactive and design as proactive, but that has not been the reality of either realm for many years. We should be aware that in the realm of organizational transformation, problem solving has for at least a decade contained the dimension—the proactive activity—of problem finding.

Those who undertake the difficult task of teaching human adults transformation skills, creative problem solving skills, innovation skills in real organizations as part of organizational transformation, have for many years been making it clear that real people need to be proactive in problem/opportunity finding. Problem finding has long been recognized to be a central component in an organization’s ability to remain adaptable. Adaptability is key to continuous innovation.

This awareness is a no-brainer to those with deep experience in the organizational transformation domain. Before we start tripping over our words here, I also will quickly point out that to those with high levels of process mastery, there is little difference between a problem and an opportunity. We try not to get caught up in Western semantics there.

Let’s be real. Design is a late arrival at the organizational transformation party.

For us to walk into that party late, espousing that we own proactive activity and deliberate change would cause quite a scene to say the very least! We might as well put a lampshade on our head while we are at it. Such ownership is simply not the case.

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This is logic without a foundation in the world of today. In such depiction I see shades of the 42 Chevy phenomenon.

Furthermore, since most traditional forms of design have typically sprung from challenges that have been generated and framed by others, certainly a case can be made to suggest that in the context of traditional design, nothing particularly proactive has been going on there.

Simply stated: The reality on the ground that we know of and experience every day is the opposite of the depiction in your model. In your context depictions, I see numerous conditions set forth as organizational problem conditions that do not exist in the world of organizational transformation as we know it today. I had to ask myself several times why would that be?

The entanglement landscape that I see here reminds me of situations where we encounter a riddle, within a riddle, within a riddle. To us, these are not uncommon project analysis conditions these days! There seems to be multiple layers and types of entanglements here, which makes unpacking and sense making extremely difficult.

Typically in practice we track the number of what we call “dimensions of confusion.�

If we find more than five such dimensions in a strategy document we assume that the document is not performing as well as it might be. What that means in our world is that the onus for processing and sense making has been disproportionately passed from the sender to the receiver. In organizational settings this impacts performance when there is one sender and hundreds or thousands of receivers, all expending time processing and sense-making. At ten dimensions of confusion, many adult human receivers become overwhelmed and walk away. At 25+ dimensions, I have had my work cut out for me here.

Below are 25 key problematic dimensions that I found to be causing confusion in this model: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

design judgment is not judgment design judgment is not critical thinking science = problem solving problem solving = truth seeking design = creating that-which-is-not problem solving = reaction design = proaction students of creativity suspend judgment masters of design judge problem solving = creativity enhancement problem solving = individual process design = collaborative process problem solving = bounded problems design = unbounded problems tame problems = problem solving wicked problems = design problem solving = fear judgment is philosophy ideation is methodology Page 23 of 37

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

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design judgment facilitates that-which-is-not-yet design = service (but is also proactive) judgment = holistic judgment = inclusion design is more inclusive than problem solving design is not invention-based, but is more applicable to organizational transformation than problem solving

Acknowledging the many gold nuggets it contains, I believe your model for a new design is confusing as there seem to be several layers of unrecognized, contradictory dynamics at its core. These dynamics exist regardless of whether we are talking about traditions of inquiry, competitive free markets, creativity, wicked problems, tame problems, abandoned centers, soft centers, liquid centers, satisficing, reductionistic thinking, integrative thinking, traditional science, certainty, control, risk, or courage. It is easy to get deflected into any one of those very interesting side streets, but in the interest of time I will try to find a way to the central plaza here.

With all due respect, your explanations above in 8, 9 and 10 reinforce my earlier expressed concern that unrecognized knowledge use/problem solving preferences seem to have become entangled in your strategy and model for a new form of design leadership. Whether we like it or not, all of us who interact and make use of knowledge have such preferences. Their existence has nothing to do with whether we think design is problem solving or not.

In the organizational settings in which we do client work, such unacknowledged entanglements within strategies and various other strategic solution documents are common. With good intentions, humans construct solution visions or strategies, often unknowingly, around their own knowledge use/problem solving preferences.

Without awareness that such preferences exist, strategies are often projections of the author’s way of interacting with the world, with what kinds of interactions they themselves value.

Often clients are astonished to see how closely their preferences map back to their strategy statements, positions and papers, not to mention their person-to-person interaction behaviors. To take it one step further, or backwards if you wish, we often see instances where preferences are not only driving suggested solutions, but also the identification, the valuing and/or creation of particular problems.

There is a lot to think about there.

Such preference entanglements are not always problematic, and would not be in this instance if they did not represent a directional force that, if implemented, would undercut the potential of design leadership by transporting it to a narrow operational geography. To reconstruct design leadership in the form that you suggest would undermine the possibility of designers moving beyond their present problematic position and into roles of cross-disciplinary leadership. I say this recognizing that the noble goal of positioning design as leadership is part of your intention, and so this becomes part of the entanglement complexity. This directional force lies at the heart of my concern regarding your model.

In your proposed model I can see considerable effort to reconstruct the known Page 24 of 37

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patterns of meaning and purpose of design in a manner that is more closely aligned with judgment.

I see a desire to reconstruct a way for judgment to play a more central, dare I say much more important role, not only in design practice, but also in the world of design academia.

This becomes excruciatingly complicated because you are simultaneously seeking to redefine and reposition the word "judgment" while you are reconstructing the meaning attached to the word "design." Regardless, I believe the preference patterns seem to bleed through. In that forceful expression of desire to reposition judgment, in that construction of a proposed model for design, there are what we call preference fingerprints clearly visible.

I believe one of the most obvious examples of such prints can be found in your suggestion above that judgment is part of the philosophic foundation of design, while ideation is merely methodology. There are many other examples that I can list, but in the interest of time, tact and space I think it would be more constructive at this point to take a slightly different route.

I very much liked your story about the penny lost in the playing field, and how placing another coin down in the field can help us “see”. In that spirit I would like to propose a comparative interactive exercise. Let’s call it: WHO IS JACK? WHO IS FRED? This exercise has ten steps.

Two adult humans by the names JACK and FRED have each created very different strategy documents in which hundreds of statements occur, including those examples listed below.

Step 1: Read quickly through the example quotations from JACK’s and FRED’s manifestos as follows.

JACK’s STRATEGY: An adult human by the name of JACK has created a new design leadership strategy in which the following statements occur: “Our purpose is to make the case that a better understanding of design judgments is fundamental to further the development of a designer’s skill.”

“Design judgment is the ability to gain insight through experience and reflection.”

“We argue that a better understanding of the concept of judgment and its different specific manifestations is needed if we want to intentionally improve our design ability.”

“Judgment is a key dimension in the process of design. The ability to make solid design judgments is often what distinguishes a stellar designer from a mediocre one.”

“A lack of appreciation for judgment as a legitimate means of decision making is not only revealed by its absence in curriculums and professional discourse, but in the negative connotations one hears in everyday conversations regarding judgment.

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These conversations are full of comments that are indicative of distrust of judgment.

“Don’t judge me.” “Don’t be judgmental.” “That’s only your judgment.”

“Our distrustful attitude toward judgment is quite fascinating when you stop to consider that people are engaging in judgment all the time. It is as common as breathing. In fact nothing would ever get done without the small judgments being made by people all the time.”

“Judgment is also touted as the enemy of creativity. Students of creativity are constantly admonished to suppress their judgment, to hold it in abeyance and allow the free flow of their ideas to emerge. Creativity and innovation are often proffered as the polar opposites of judgment. In reality, though, well-managed judgment is a necessary component in the synthesis of creativity and innovation. Without exercising judgment, creativity is diffuse and innovation rootless. It is making good judgments in a timely way without the delays associated with never-ending studies.”

“The irony of this is that decision making based on rational analysis alone actually creates more options and divergence than does convergence (in the form of focused outcomes).”

“The ability to make good judgments is as essential in design as it is in business, law, medicine, politics, art or any other profession.”

“Design judgment has a special character, since the resulting design is something produced by imagination, something not-yet-existing.”

“Design judgment facilitates the ability to create that-which-is-not-yet. It is a form of judgment related to creative and innovative processes, and is concerned with the compositional whole of the imagined design. When design judgment is executed well, it can create beauty and evoke the sublime.”

“Design thinking is a compound of a variety of forms of inquiry that are systemic, including imagination, judgment, intuition and instinct. Design inquiry is the process of imagining something that is not yet in existence, but that which will be.”

“Leadership today demands action and the ability to act based on an overwhelming amount of insufficient information within restrictive limits of resources and time.

These demands cannot be met solely from within the traditions of science, art or pragmatic technology. These demands require leaders to imagine and implement adequate responses that are sustainable in all their implications. This is a task that calls for judgment, not problem solving. It calls for good compositions, not true solutions.”

“Design is an act of world creation. To be a designer is therefore to be a creator of new worlds.”

FRED’s STRATEGY: An adult human by the name of FRED has created a new design leadership strategy in which the following statements occur: “(In our educational institutions) we have traditionally put a higher emphasis on critical intelligence rather than on creative intelligence. We hope that the exercise of critical Page 26 of 37

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intelligence will prevent the making of mistakes and help us to resist the blandishments of charismatic nonsense. Destruction of an idea provides instant achievement.

The destruction is an end in itself.”

“The word critical comes from the Greek “kritikos” which means to judge. Judgment thinking is indeed a useful part of thinking, but by itself is no more adequate than would be a single wheel of a car. There is a need to be generative, productive and creative.”

“We need to appreciate the domination of Western thinking habits by the negative idiom, clash, criticism, and dialectics. We need to put negative thinking in its proper place as part of thinking. We need to put creative, constructive and design thinking before negative thinking.”

“Critical thinking by itself is not only inadequate, but dangerous. It is not enough to hope that if you but get rid of wrong things then everything will be fine. This type of thinking originated with the Gang of Three. Socrates was only interested in argument.

Plato believed that the truth was there to be discovered. (This is very different than design.) Aristotle created boxes or definitions from the past and then judged whether something fitted or did not fit into the box. All this provides a very limited sort of thinking which has held back the development of Western civilization by 300 years.”

“Six brilliantly trained critical thinkers can sit around a table, but can do nothing about a project until someone actually makes a suggestion”.

“We seek to improve designs by criticizing the faults and trying to improve them.

We seek to improve society by indicating the shortcomings and demanding their redress.

However, removing the faults in a stagecoach may produce a perfect stagecoach, but is most unlikely to produce the first motor car. Criticism alone is a poor route to design improvement, yet it is one we habitually use.”

“Education is soundly based on the need to be right all the time. The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar there is to new ideas.”

“The purpose of thinking is not to be right, but to be effective. Being effective does eventually involve being right, but there is a very important difference between the two. Being right means being right all the time. Being effective means being right only at the end.”

“Vertical thinking involves being right all along. Judgment is exercised at every stage.

One is not allowed to take a step that is not right. One is not allowed to accept an arrangement of information that is not right. Vertical thinking is selection by exclusion.

Judgment is the method of exclusion and the negative (no, not) is the tool of exclusion.”

“In lateral thinking one is not so concerned with the nature of information, but with where it can lead one. As a process, lateral thinking is concerned with change, not with proof.

The emphasis is shifted from the validity of a particular pattern to the usefulness of that pattern in generating new patterns.”

“Reactive thinking can only function when there is something to react to. That is why the notion of critical thinking can be very dangerous.

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There is a silly belief, based on misinterpretation of the Greek master thinkers, that thinking is based on dialogue and dialectical argument. This belief has done much harm to Western thinking.”

“Unfortunately, design has become limited in meaning to graphic design, industrial design, etc. Yet design in its broadest sense is the most important mental operation for the future. Judgment thinking is not enough in a changing world because judgment is based on the past. We need to design the way forward.”

“The quality of our life in the future will be determined by the quality of our thinking.”

Step 2: WHO IS JACK? Using the Strategy Patterns Analysis Tool below, choose which two of the Red, Blue, Green or Orange QUADRANT descriptions best describe JACK. Step 3: WHO IS FRED? Using the same tool, choose which two of the Red, Blue, Green or Orange QUADRANT descriptions below best describe FRED. Strategy Patterns Analysis Tool: The Strategy Patterns Analysis Tool is derived from and based on the quadrant system within the Basadur Creative Problem Solving Profile instrument invented/designed by Dr. Min Basadur. Copyright 1982-2004. All rights reserved. This Strategy Patterns Analysis Tool has been developed to aid in strategic document analysis and is a result of collaboration between UnderstandingLab, NextDesign Leadership Institute and Basadur Center for Applied Creativity Research. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

QUADRANT DESCRIPTIONS: 1) QUADRANT BLUE 2) QUADRANT RED 3) QUADRANT GREEN 4) QUADRANT ORANGE

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1) QUADRANT BLUE: Prefers to gain knowledge by experiencing Prefers to use knowledge to create options • • • • • • • • • • •

Gets things started by getting involved, gathering information and questioning.

Imagines many possibilities and senses all kinds of new problems/opportunities.

Easily sees good and bad sides to almost any fact, idea or issue.

Views situations from many different perspectives.

Prefers generating options and divergence rather than evaluation or convergence.

Sees relevance in almost everything.

Comfortable with ambiguity.

Interested in people’s problems.

Every new solution suggests several new problems.

Willing to let others take care of details, but dislikes delegating complete problems Interested in problem finding and fact finding

2) QUADRANT RED: Prefers to gain knowledge by thinking Prefers to use knowledge to create options • • • • • • • • • •

Forms quick associations, defines problems and conceptualizes new ideas, opportunities and benefits Distills seemingly unrelated observations into an integrated explanation.

Doesn’t like proceeding until a situation is fully understood.

Dislikes being told “how to do it” Wants the theory to be sound and precise.

Reluctant to move ahead until a problem is well-defined Prefers not to have to prioritize among good and not fully understood alternatives.

High sensitivity and appreciation of ideas; less concern with moving to action.

Likes to visualize the “big picture”.

Interested in problem definition and idea finding

3) QUADRANT GREEN Prefers to gain knowledge by thinking Prefers to use knowledge to evaluate options • • • • • • •

Turns abstract ideas into practical solutions and plans.

Likes situations where there is a single correct answer or optimal solution to a problem.

Can sort through large amounts of data and pinpoint “what’s wrong” in a given situation.

Confidently makes a sound evaluation and selects the best solution to a problem.

Lacks patience with ambiguity.

Likes to focus on a few specific problems.

Tends to be relatively unemotional and thorough.

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Patterns in Motion

Prefers not to spend much time thinking about other ideas and points of view, or how different problems relate to one another.

Interests in idea evaluation, selection and action planning.

4) QUADRANT ORANGE Prefers to gain knowledge by experiencing Prefers to use knowledge to evaluate options • • • • • • • • •

Enjoys getting things done and becoming involved in new experiences.

Excels in adapting to specific immediate circumstances to “make things work somehow”.

When the theory does not fit the facts, will discard the theory.

Likes to try things out rather than “mentally test” them.

Dislikes apathy and unmotivated people.

Risk taker: doesn’t need to completely understand something before taking action Willing to try as many approaches as necessary until one is found that is sufficiently acceptable to those affected by the problem.

Enthusiastic and at ease with people, but can appear impatient or even “pushy” in moving to action.

Interests in gaining acceptance and action.

Step 4: Mapping to Early Stage Process Without getting into a deep process conversation, let’s think now about how the QUADRANTS map to process. Let’s assume for a moment that at the initial stages of design, problem solving and innovation we need to do some problem finding, discovery, and new pattern creation work.

Which two quadrants would seem to best suit this activity? Place yourself in a multidisciplinary team setting and ask yourself which quadrants you would want in the room if your assigned task is to break old patterns and create new patterns?

Step 5: Mapping to Later Stage Process Next, let’s assume that we have moved into the later stages of design, problem solving and innovation where we need to move the proposed ideas and solutions into action.

Which two quadrants would seem to best suit this activity? Again, ask yourself which quadrants you would want in the room if your assigned task is to optimize the patterns and move to action?

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Step 5: Mapping to What We Value Next, let’s now jump to a broader question: What happens when we make one quadrant preference the meta-basis for a new design?

Here are three examples: Option A / Using One Subset to Create Whole What would happen if we took one subset profile, for example, Quadrant 4, and made those attributes the new meta-level meaning and value for next design leadership?

How would that work in the new design context where multidisciplinary teams must work together? Does that mean everyone has to fit within Quadrant 4? Where do we include those humans from the remaining quadrants? Are they not included? Can the behaviors and values of Quadrant 4 become the new behaviors and values of next design innovation leadership? Can designers go with those values out into the community and lead all quadrants, all disciplines? Is it possible to construct inclusion using this option?

Option B / Using Two Subsets to Create Whole What would happen if we took two subset profiles, for example, Quadrants 3 and 4, and made their attributes the new meta-level meaning and value for next design leadership?

Does that mean everyone has to fit within Quadrants 3 and 4? Where do we include those humans from the remaining quadrants? Are they not included? Can the behaviors and values of Quadrants 3 and 4 become the new values of next design innovation leadership? Can designers go with those combined values out into the community and lead all quadrants, all disciplines? Is it possible to construct inclusion using this option?

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Option C / Using All Subsets to Create Whole What would happen if we move the meta-level meaning and value of next design leadership above to the header position so that it spans all quadrants and then equip next design leaders to orchestrate all quadrants, preferences, thinking styles?

Can the behaviors and values of all quadrants become the new values of innovation leadership? Can designers go with those combined values out into the community and lead all quadrants, all disciplines? Is it possible to construct inclusion using this option?

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Step 7: UNDERSTANDING JACK’S STRATEGY Do any of the three options above (A, B or C) represent JACK’s strategy?

Step 8: UNDERSTANDING FRED’S STRATEGY Do any of the three options above (A, B or C) represent FRED’s strategy? *Quotes Note: All JACK quotes are from Harold Nelson. Copyright Harold Nelson. All rights reserved.

All FRED quotes are from Edward deBono. Copyright Edward deBono. All rights reserved.

Step 9: MOST REPRESENTED QUADRANTS Can you guess which quadrants are found to be most represented in corporate business organizations today? (Answer: 3 and 4)

Step 10: LEAST REPRESENTED QUADRANTS Can you guess which quadrants are least represented in corporate business organizations today? (Answer: 1 and 2)

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You can see now why any new model for design that contains 144 references to judgment and none to ideation would concern me. We would also have concerns if there were 144 references to ideation and none to judgment. Herein lies one of the central conflicts in your model. At its core it seems to suggest a subset of values while simultaneously seeking to be holistic. It suggests a set of later-stage pattern optimization values for an activity that encompasses both pattern creation and pattern optimization.

You have yourself referred to designers as “creators of new worlds.” By positioning design as a pattern creating endeavor in one sentence and in the next repositioning judgment as the pinnacle of its value, you are, I believe, proposing a conceptual and procedural Catch 22.

As important as judgment is to design and to innovation, it is not more important than ideation. It would be misleading to suggest that judgment is anything more than a process skill. Beyond that, why would we choose such ground on which to construct our future model? Thanks to the focus and orientation of Western education, the terrain of judgment is already heavily overpopulated. Why would we seek to build the future of our community exactly on top of the overly represented and problematic behaviors that already exist in many other sectors and disciplines?

What becomes super confusing is that while you have chosen the most overpopulated preference terrain to construct your model, you keep insisting that design is different.

I believe such mind-bending entanglements contribute to the riddle-within-a-riddle-like effect.

Perhaps most importantly, the WHO IS JACK? WHO IS FRED? exercise shows that if we follow the road that makes judgment supreme, we cannot reach inclusion. In an organizational sense, constructing inclusion means recognizing that those among us with pattern creation preferences and those with pattern optimization preferences are equal in value. Without that recognition we have no inclusion. Simply stating that design now intends to be inclusive does not constitute inclusion. Making an “inclusive list of judgment types” does not constitute inclusion.

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Let’s be honest and also acknowledge that historically design has been exclusive rather than inclusive. Still today, much of the community struggles with concrete ways to construct inclusion. This is part of the problem condition that the design community now struggles to overcome. We do ourselves a disservice to depict this as something that design has already mastered. That only adds to the confusion and undermines the need for our design education institutions to change.

If our goal is to create an ability to construct innovation inclusion and lead in cognitively diverse settings, judgment cannot be made supreme.

Granted it is likely a suggestion, a model that would be very attractive to the pattern optimizers among us, but in the interest of constructing inclusion, we must now be prepared to stand up and explain why a very different leadership model is needed today. This is new territory for design. From the NextD perspective, these are among the new responsibilities for the next generation of design leaders to master. In such conversations leaders must use their own judgment tools to explain the consequences of making judgment supreme.

Ask the teachers and the students at Kaos Pilot. They know what we mean.

Wherever those new leaders go they must be prepared to take on the deeply entrenched, dominating forces that prefer judgment to dominate and drive the value Page 35 of 37

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train. In this sense we are back to Battle1, you see. Part of the riddle in your model is that instead of ridding us of Battle1 in our own community and taking us to higher ground you seem to be proposing that we make its most disproportionally represented force our highest form of value, our new strategic terrain. This is problematic to say the least.

As designers, we would be undercutting half of our value and reversing its natural logic if we make judgment our supreme value offering. As design leaders, we shortcircuit our ability to construct inclusion if we embark on that route. In that short-circuiting we sacrifice the opportunity to lead. We cannot reach the future of sustainable design leadership in a complex world simply through increasing our ability to make better judgments, however we choose to reposition that activity. Design leaders now have the responsibility to do and to be much, much more.

With our time running out I want to touch briefly, last but not least, on the challenge types dimension of your model since it plays such an important role. I noticed that you made reference to bounded and unbounded problems, equating problem solving with the former and design with the latter. What gets confusing is that the history of design and design education suggests the opposite to be the present reality. You and I both know that in undergraduate and graduate design schools around the world today, students are given bounded problem statements and are then encouraged not to rebound or reframe the problem. In most graduate schools of design, students are still discouraged from reframing under the misdirected guise that this is the way the real world works! The few exceptions we have found to date where reframing is encouraged within a broader focus on process include our friends at IIT in Chicago and at Kaos Pilots in Denmark. If you know of others, please let us know.

What is a design brief but a bounded problem statement? Historically, design has been unable to begin until a challenge is bounded, and most often by someone other than the designer: a client, a teacher or more recently in the marketplace, someone with an MBA. In contrast to the depiction in your model, traditional design has long since become a series of specialized processes customized to address various types of bounded problems. Again, let’s be clear: this is the problem condition we seek to overcome.

If we miss that, many great opportunities are lost.

Can designers take their specialized process skills and apply them to other kinds of framed or unframed challenges? Of course, but that’s not the way design in most instances is taught in our graduate design institutions today.

A foundational process language that allows designers to span multiple types and scales of challenge conditions is most often missing.

If designers find themselves in situations where they face unbounded fuzzy challenges, they are pretty much on their own today. This is the proverbial doorstep where traditional design education has historically abandoned its kids. At NextD, we get many inquiries from young practicing designers who for one reason or another find themselves on that doorstep equipped with small-scale bounded process skills, but looking out into a cross-disciplinary real world full of unbounded fuzzy challenges. Our graduate design education institutions seem presently to be ill-equipped to help.

The disconnect between where the world is going and where design presently is ties back directly to design’s historical connection to bounded problems. Let’s not miss that.

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Our relevance in the marketplace is now tied directly to our ability to move beyond that historical connection, to address and lead in the terrain of unbounded challenges and opportunities. Solutions will remain distant for our community if we cannot accept what the real challenges now are. We will not be doing our job here today, Harold, if we do not make this clear. We do not have to get entangled in the definition of “wicked problems” to do that.

As we begin landing this plane, let’s return quickly to the story about the penny lost in the playing field. I believe the exercise above makes it clear that we are not only simply looking for the activity of design lost among other activities. We are also simultaneously reinventing that which is lost. Jack has created a new penny pattern, as has Fred.

They now present those patterns as the penny being searched for. Of course, as the penny changes, so too does the playing field in which it rests. These are all patterns in motion.

There are likely hundreds of other pennies being reconstructed by designers around the world, young and old, female and male. Some of those new penny patterns will likely align with the needs of the emerging cross-disciplinary realm more so than others.

As designers, we each must decide which penny patterns we want to present to the world; the penny that best suits the world we seek to operate in.

In the land of NextD, we believe we must help create the world in which both the playing field and new penny patterns connected to design leadership can now be found. How we construct such patterns will directly impact the degree to which designers will be called upon to engage across the new playing fields as the future unfolds.

This has been a challenging conversation, Harold. I thank you for participating. The floor is all yours for final thoughts.

Harold G. Nelson: Well, as a final thought I would like to thank you for initiating these design-related interviews and for including me among those chosen to be a part of such an inclusive process. I think one of the most important contributions these interviews make to the field is that they continue the conversation—a turning together—on design, rather than drawing it to a close. For me, it is too early to say how much I think you and I are in agreement and on what points. In the end that may not be as important as how successfully others have been drawn into this dialogue in the process. I look forward to listening in on the other interviews.

NextD Journal RERETHINKING DESIGN

NextDesign Leadership Institute DEFUZZ THE FUTURE! www.nextd.org Questions: Please direct all questions to journal@nextd.org Follow NextD Journal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nextd

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