Design Attitude

Kamil Michlewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317152583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Unternehmensstrategie

Design Attitude is a book for those who want to scratch beneath the surface and explore the impact design and designers have in organisations. It offers an alternative view on the sources of success and competitive advantage of companies such as Apple, where design plays a leading role. It sheds light on the cultural dynamics within organisations, where professional designers have a significant presence and influence. At its heart, the book asks a question: what is the nature of designers' contribution that is truly unique to them as professionals? To answer this deceptively simple question the author combines a multitude of hours of ethnographic study inside the design community; in-depth interviews with executives and designers from Apple, IDEO, Wolff Olins, Philips Design, and Nissan Design; and a follow-up quantitative study. Since the author comes from a management and not a design background, the book offers a different perspective to most publications in the area of Design Thinking. It is a mirror held up to the community, rather than a voice from within. Design Attitude makes the compelling argument that looking at the type of the culture designers produce, rather than the type of processes or products they create, is potentially a more fruitful way of profiling the impact of design in organisations. With design being recognised as an important strategic framework by companies, not-for-profit organisations, and governments alike, this book is a distinct and timely contribution to the debate.

PART I
Design in Context

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Chapter 1
Design and the Design Profession

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Professionally Speaking

Let’s suppose that we asked people from three different professions, say tax lawyers, carers and psychiatrists, to each build an organisation of their own. We wouldn’t expect that each would come up with the same formula for motivating people, approaching strategy or setting up an innovation framework. But often that’s exactly what we do. We somehow skip past the fact that people spend their entire lives investing emotionally, mentally and socially into who they are as professionals, and focus instead on the organisations they currently are part of. We talk about building the right kind of cultures for our companies and institutions. Suffice it to say that with the cohort of Millennials, or Generation Y as they are known, this has never been more important.^[1] Companies such as Zappos, the online shoe company, and Netflix, the online media streaming service, are very vocal about the importance of their cultures to their success, yet the issue of professions and their impact rarely enters the debate.

The central thrust of this book hinges on two observations. The first is that professional cultures are often the under-appreciated influencers inside organisations, despite the considerable impact they have on individuals’ worldview and attitudes. The second is that professional designers play an increasingly important role in the success of businesses, non-profit and public sector ventures. These two observations form the framework for attempting to understand nature of the influence and impact of designers in today’s, and very likely tomorrow’s, organisations.

Professional cultures flow through companies and institutions like rivers carrying values, attitudes, mental models and the approaches of their members. Since there is no such thing as a job for life, and since most of us are more strongly linked with our profession than we are with the organisation – just ask which is easier to change – professional cultures have become powerful conduits of belief systems and the way they carry out their work. Consider Google, for example, with its strong engineering mind-set. Look closely and you’ll notice that it’s got a very strong bias towards the engineering profession. As Google grew, it considered dispensing with middle-level managers entirely, as the engineering culture was heavily focused on the actual work and concrete results. Based on a deeply analytical approach, which included sophisticated mathematical modelling, Google eventually relented and now there are about 5,000 managers, 1,000 directors, and 100 vice presidents in an organisation of 37,000.^[2] This is a direct result of the impact the values of their founding engineers had on the company.

Naturally, there are organisations that are influenced by other professions, such as medics (National Health Service in the UK), marketers (P&G) and journalists (BBC). They all have their particular ways of solving problems, managing change and coming up with new products and services. Professional cultures significantly inform how these things are done. More to the point, there are companies and institutions where the family of design professions plays a large role. When looking at the role these professionals play, one needs to ask what happens to the organisations they inhabit. What are the beliefs and attitudes espoused by the design profession? Knowing that can help us to understand in what ways the design profession impacts the institutions it enters. This is precisely what this book is about.

Before we begin to examine what is so unique about the designers’ contribution to organisations, and before we even look at the world of companies teeming with designers, we must look at the basics: what do we mean by design? What do we mean by their professional culture and whom are we actually talking about when we say designers? In Chapters 1, 2 and 3 we will dig deeper and tackle a few relatively heavy issues around definitions of design, culture and more specifically, professional cultures. Then in Chapter 4, we will start to examine the crux of the matter, namely the heart of design attitude.

CRACKING THE DESIGN NUT

Defining design is notoriously difficult, but let’s do it anyway. The ambiguity of the term is almost legendary, not least because it’s both a noun and a verb, and could refer to a process, an object or a function. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the rising profile of design, the number of definitions has exploded over time. In 1986, Peter Gorb counted 26 definitions of the term design. Twelve years later Olson et al.^[3] found some 50 definitions.

Clearly, design can mean many things to many people. Herbert Simon^[4] famously defined design as the process by which one devises ‘courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’. This is the broadest, all-encompassing and, arguably, the most ubiquitous definition of design as a process. It is comprehensive in nature and most forms of design are included ‘… to the degree that creating something new (or reshaping something that exists) for a purpose, to meet a need to solve a problem are courses of action toward a preferred situation even though we may not yet be able to articulate the preferred situation’.^[5]

This definition is still valid, but I can only use it as a starting point, in reference to the domain of the organisation and the commonly understood meaning of design. If we look at Simon’s definition and ask, ‘a situation preferred by whom?’ we see the link between the generic understanding and more specific requirements on the level of an organisation in their particular culture.

According to Friedman^[6] the verb design, describing a ‘process of thought and planning’, takes precedence over all other meanings of the term (ibid.: 200). He dates the usage of the verb from the early 1500s and it first appeared in written form in 1548. Merriam-Webster’s^[7] defines design as ‘… to conceive and plan out in the mind; to have a purpose; to devise for a specific function or end; to make a drawing, pattern or sketch; to draw the plans for; to create, fashion, execute or construct according to plan’ (see also^{[8, 9]}). In the early seventeenth century the word began to be used as a noun, describing ‘a particular purpose held in view by an individual or group; deliberate, purposive planning; a mental project or scheme in which means to an end are laid down’.^[7]

Despite the fact that the word design refers first and foremost to the process rather than an outcome, popular culture and the media have added to the complexity by using the adjective designer to denote an original form, such as found in furniture, lamps or fashion.^[10] Even more confusingly, there are now new terms in popular use such as designer drugs or designer babies, leading to the proliferation of meanings and increase in ambiguity of the word. At the other end of the spectrum, we see the growth in importance of concepts such as Design Thinking or service design – now recognised by organisations and governments as very useful frameworks.

Cultured Design

It is unthinkable to separate design from culture in any imaginable form of inquiry. The two are interlinked and cannot exist as separate entities. This has far-reaching consequences for analysing any issues regarding design. As Buchanan puts it:

The principles of design are grounded in spiritual and cultural ideals, or in material conditions, or in the power of individuals to control nature and influence social life, or in the qualities of moral and intellectual character which stand behind the integrative discipline of design thinking and the productive arts. Such principles are presupposed and pre-existent in the concerns of each designer.^[11]

One of most influential design thinkers, Donald Schön, proposes to see design as a ‘reflective action’ in the context of a ‘conversation with a problematic situation’.^{[12, 13]} He recognises that one cannot extract the design process from a personal or professional context. By engaging the professional practice approach, he positions design squarely in the practical-cultural domain, and lays the foundations for understanding design in its situational dimension. Schön recognises the imperfect and ‘swampy’ grounds upon which all action is based. He compares decision-making and discovery in similar terms as the projection of metaphors with which we are familiar, onto new, unfamiliar situations. The act of designing involves the projection of a partial design onto a particular design situation.^[14] Think about it this way, you create a sketch, or a graph or a business model and, in the process, these creations reveal new insights to which you instantly respond. This process is often unconscious but it can also be conscious and reflective.

As to the demands of professional knowledge, Schön claimed that Simon, in his Sciences of the Artificial,^[4] saw designing as ‘instrumental problem solving: a purest form of optimisation’. He explicitly challenged the positivist doctrine underpinning much of the design science movement and offered instead a constructivist/pragmatist interpretation. He believed that Simon’s view focused too much on solving well-formed problems and not on the most important functions of designing in situations of uncertainty, uniqueness and conflict.^[13] Schön proposed an ‘epistemology of practice’ originating in the artistic, intuitive processes practitioners bring with them. This argument has since been successfully pursued by other scholars.^{[11, 15–18]} For example, Buchanan views design as ‘… partly rational and cognitive, and partly irrational, emotive, intuitive, and non-cognitive’.^[11]

There exist two fairly distinct streams in thinking about design. One group of commentators favours the pursuit of a design science, where design is ‘explicitly organised, rational and wholly systematic. It is not just the utilisation of scientific knowledge of artefacts, but design is, in some sense, a scientific activity itself.’^[19] The other group subscribes to the view that designing is itself either non-scientific or a-scientific.^[20] This is key to how both the designers view themselves and how the societies and organisations view them.

An argument could perhaps be made that the reasons behind the systemising and scientisising of design might be socio-political in nature. As Sargent and Road^[21] poignantly suggest, ‘chasing after an illusionary ‘design science’ is more a characteristic of engineering seeking enhanced status as physical scientists rather than emphasizing design creativity …’ (ibid.: 402). What appears to be happening is that design, being in the process of establishing itself as a highly regarded profession, strives to legitimise itself in the eyes of other professions, government bodies and the general public in order to achieve a certain social status. This process is called a professional project and I discuss it later in the chapter. In order to achieve this legitimisation within the science-based paradigm, design must portray itself as coherent, predictable and robustly grounded in a comprehensive body of knowledge. If, at any point, a consensus develops that there is no general, wholly rational, overarching set of finite methods which could be taught and examined and policed, it would more than likely have a negative effect on the project of design ever becoming a scientific and thus credible profession, in some people’s eyes. Hence, some designers and design scholars seeking social status and recognition for their profession and themselves might, understandably, want to avoid presenting it as inherently ambiguous, subjective and unpredictable. We will examine this point in more detail later.

Schön’s interpretation of design as a ‘reflective dialogue with a situation’ and, in a professional context, his analyses provide an important link between the enormity of the term design, with its overabundance of meanings and interpretations, and the focus of this book, which is predominantly concerned with the domain of an organisation. It offers a conceptual bridge between design, which is on a very basic level a process of mending our environment according to our will and is practised by virtually everyone, and the need to analyse it within a manageable context. The fact that Schön based ...