Intersections blog

The struggle for clarity

Intersections will hopefully provide a chance to step back from day-to-day concerns and pan-out to the long view.

The ground has shifted under designers’ feet over the past decade. Many new influences have come into play, from globalisation and sustainability, to popularity of design amongst non-designers in business and government. The influence of design has expanded into new terrain, and the boundaries between different design disciplines have blurred as the work of designers from previously separate backgrounds overlap.

As we live through these disorientating times, we can either get blown around by forces we don’t understand, or we can grapple with them to comprehend the new terrain. The best way I know of doing this is to air and debate different perspectives with some of the best minds in the business (on and off the platform). So here’s to a robust and lively debate!

In this spirit, here are a few of my favourite quotes:

‘He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that.’
John Stuart Mill

‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’
Voltaire

‘Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.’
Voltaire

‘The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’
F. Scott Fitzgerald

A super-connected mind

I finally caught time on a plane to read Howard Gardner’s ‘Five minds for the future'. I wish I’d made time earlier, as it provides a useful big picture context to many of the Intersections debates. It’s the best book I’ve read for a long time.

The Economist calls Gardner ‘One of the most influential psychologists of his generation’ and the FT lauds him as ‘the man who changed our notion of what it means to be clever.’

He makes a cogent argument that the future demands ‘capacities that until now have been optional’. For example information recall used to be key skill, which near permanent access to Google has made less critical. While mounting quantities of information has made the ability to filter and integrate it an increasingly important skill.

The five minds of the title are his characterisation of these capacities, which are: the Disciplinary Mind, the Synthesising Mind, the Creating Mind, the Respectful Mind, and the Ethical Mind. It is the first three of these that I found the most enlightening.

The disciplined mind

The disciplinary mind refers to mastery of a major school of thought, like science or design, and at least one professional craft, such as graphic design. He estimates that it takes at least 10 years to master a discipline and a disciplined mind knows how to steadily improve understanding and skills.

Gardner makes a useful distinction between subject matter and disciplinary thinking, and contends that the two are mostly confused. Subject matter is the body of facts, figures, formulae and examples of a particular field, whereas disciplinary thinking is a distinct way of thinking about the world and addressing problems. For example scientists develop and test hypotheses, historians look for parallels in other times and places, and designers quickly generate multiple solutions to a problem and then evaluate them – design thinking, if you will. Another way of understanding this concept is to think of disciplinary thinking as the ‘habits of mind and behaviour of the professional’.

So how does this shed light on the concept of ‘design thinking’? While Gardner may not be familiar with this designland notion, he would recognise the concept. However, he would argue that it is a habit of thinking that is developed over years, if not decades of practicing a craft; and would probably question whether it can be taught to MBAs over the course of a project or two.

He concludes The Disciplined Mind chapter with the following:

‘Alas, a disciplined mind alone no longer suffices. More and more knowledge now lies in the spaces between, or the connections across, the several disciplines. In the future, individuals must learn how to synthesize knowledge and how to extend it in new and unfamiliar ways.’

The synthesising mind

The synthesising mind refers to the ability to ‘integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate [it] to others.’ While being able to understand and evaluate disparate information and put it together in new ways has been valuable in the past, Gardner believes that the capacity to synthesise becomes ever more crucial as the volume of information mounts.

So while he asserts that ‘The ability to knit together information from disparate sources into a coherent whole is vital today’, he raises the difficulty of assessment raised in the ‘Yes, but is it any good’ post. Gardner explains that ‘we lack standards for determining when a productive synthesis has been accomplished’. Designers have always been synthesisers, but emergent areas such as design strategy/thinking and service design take it to a higher level, which goes some way to explaining why it getting harder to agree how to assess it.

Laser and Searchlight intelligence

Another distinction I liked was between types of intelligence best suited to synthesising. ‘Laser intelligence probes deeply into a topic, but ignores opportunities to cross-pollinate; it’s perhaps best suited to disciplinary work. Searchlight intelligence may not probe as deeply but is always scanning the environment and may therefore more readily discern connections across spheres.’

Interdisciplinary thinking

Gardner also has wise reflections on the concept of interdisciplinary work. In his view it’s a rare phenomenon, as it requires mastery of two of more disciplines. Just like we only call someone bilingual when they have mastered two languages, genuine interdisciplinary work integrates at least two disciplines and yields insights that could be reached by either of the parent disciplines. He calls most of what is mostly dubbed interdisciplinary work as ‘Multiperspectivism’ – clunky, but useful. By this he means an approach that recognises that different perspectives contribute to a better understanding of an issue.

I’ve over stayed my welcome on this post, so I’ll leave it here. Suffice to say that he believes that those with a Creating Mind will always stay one step ahead of super computers and robots!

Thinking and craft

One of the themes of the conference is likely to be the debate between two often counterpoised perspectives: design thinking and design craft. These concepts are embodied by two of Northumbria University School of Design school's two most illustrious alumni Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and Jonathan Ive, Vice-president of design at Apple.

Definitions differ, but design thinkers tend to focus on: complex problems, new methods and multi-disciplinary teams; and many design and business leaders believe that its strategic focus on what to do, rather than how to do it, is one of the biggest opportunities for design.

Some designers (such as Michael Bierut writing in Design Observer) worry that the in the rush to include more people in the design process, core talents and sensibilities are being undervalued; a point Jonathan Ive makes with the simple formulation ‘Design is not important. Good design is important’. Others (such as Dan Saffer writing on the adaptive path blog)  worry about design thinking’s influence on design education.

Richard Sennett, the influential sociologist, has picked up a similar theme in his latest book The Craftsman, in which he writes about his concern about whether the dedication to craft, and the desire to do a job well, will survive in the fast-moving, 21st-century world. Stefan Stern summarises his case in this FT article:

'Prof Sennett worries that driven executives find themselves constantly manoeuvring to achieve a higher position in the future, instead of focusing on the job in hand now. This undermines the healthy obsession to work on improving professional skills.

But such commitment is not what the modern, future-focused corporation seems to want. As Prof Sennett has written elsewhere: "In place of craftsmanship, modern culture advances an idea of meritocracy that celebrates potential ability rather than past achievement”'

Both sides of the argument have a case. Ive is right to point the finger at the mediocrity of much of design. While it could be argued that this is down to lack of design management vision or an over reliance on consumer research, even smart strategies falter through lacklustre design execution – craft is still critical and in world class talent in short supply. That said, he is fortunate to work within a well thought through strategic framework at Apple. For those designers who don’t have Steve Jobs to clarify the big issues for them, craft can rarely save a flawed strategy.

Clearly we need talented design thinkers and crafters, but is it realistic to expect ‘T-shaped designers' to hone both skills to world-class levels, or should designers specialise in one or the other?

Yes, but is it any good?

One of the most interesting issues that cropped up in discussions with various conference speakers was that of design quality, and how to assess it. Success in design has generally been measured by either recognition from peers in design awards or through sales triumphs – preferably both. Both these yardsticks are being challenged, but without any real replacements being offered.

When I asked Chris Downs at Live|Work how service design should be assessed, he wasn’t sure, but was equally sure that traditional measures of the sales curve and the design award, did not make the grade either. He speculated that service design quality might be better judged on ‘triple-bottom-line’ criteria by multiple-stakeholders. I have to say that I’m not sure what that means in theory or practice.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, said that design thinking was about new problems, new methods and new ways of assessing design. When I asked about the new assessment criteria, he also wasn’t sure and said that this is still being worked out.

The now defunct RED unit of the Design Council, then led by Hilary Cottam, went even further in arguing in a paper called Transformation Design, that designers should get over their perfectionist obsession with slick outputs when involved co-design projects:

'The designer can no longer see themselves as the arbiter of design quality, defining what ‘good design’ is. Instead, what’s working and worth developing further defines what’s good enough. That decision, too, is made by a more diverse range of contributors. This can be unsettling to the design-trained because, as design practitioners have found, ‘including un-trained designers in design work changes the outcome of the solution. Often, we are finding, these outcomes have better staying power, but are not as ‘slick’.’

Unsurprisingly many ‘traditional’ designers raise their eyebrows about such ideas of ‘good enough’ design. Others question the quality of thinking and outputs of the work going on at the fringes of design practice.

However, what’s really interesting about this debate is that not only is the concept of good design being challenged, but also whether design quality should be our ultimate focus. For example, as I mention in an article in October’s Blueprint magazine, changing people’s behaviour has become central to many public service design briefs and therefore the its main success criteria. Also as sustainability is increasingly accepted as a new ethical framework, design is being gauged from a very different standpoint. For example Chris Downs is appalled that the design industry perennially lauds Apple, as ‘they produce landfill’.

I wonder if there anyone out there still willing to put the case for design excellence for design’s sake – a creative and cultural act – with out the need to justify its worth on social or ethical grounds?

It cuts both ways

I’m in Seoul at the moment and had an interesting conversation over dinner last night with some local design managers. They were talking about European designers becoming more cost effective, due to rising labour costs in Korea!

So just as some Western companies are 'Reshoring' – bringing outsourced projects back home from India – some Asian companies are considering more offshoring of design to Europe. An uplifting counterpoint to the globalisation doom mongers!