In my previous methodology post “The “Anti-Methodology” – A different approach to application design?” I talked about breaking down the barriers of role. This post is a continuation of that theme but we’ll be talking about the breaking down the barriers of the customer.
Remember that excited feeling you had at the beginning of a project where the sky was the limit and you were chomping at the bit to get started conceiving your next, greatest masterpiece? It’s now three-months later and you’re biting your nails raw in anticipation of the 3pm presentation of your concepts to your customer. It’s been a great exploration, you’ve done your best work, researched the heck out of the topic, and yet you are still praying they will love your ideas. What’s wrong with this picture? You may not know it but this situation is exactly the situation you don’t want to be in. The problem I’m illustrating is the conceptual disconnect that is causing you to lose sleep hoping they won’t dissect your concepts or worse combine them (not to mention that you are showing more than one concept). It’s the fact that the people sitting in the boardroom don’t know what they are about to see. Put bluntly, if your client is going to be surprised by your concept presentation deep into the project, you are risking failure. Sadly traditional methodologies encourage this pattern and the potential disconnects that often arise. To us, it’s just gambling.
How do we do it differently? We put our clients to work. A good friend of mine often refers to “Consultant’s Hubris” or the feeling that as a consultant we know more than the client. While we may be an expert at what we do, we hardly know the issues and opportunities the client faces on a daily (yearly) basis. We are not experts in their business, period. Face this and become more powerful.
Our contracts require client participation, sometimes significant hours weekly. When we kick-off we ask our client to designate a “steward” who will participate in the project heavily. The steward must have deep experience within the client organization and products we are working with. They are a Subject Matter Expert (SME).
We start with a working session to clearly define goals (or at least the first draft of the goals) and plan out how we are going to attack them. Following this are short 2-3 week work cycles (sprints) that involve twice-weekly working sessions where the client-steward and team are locked in a room discussing, researching, sketching and prototyping. Because our people are very experienced, they guide the steward’s ideas to merge with relevant trends and technology and result in beautiful solutions. At the end of each sprint we evaluate our collective success, present status to the larger client organization (gather additional feedback) and plan the next sprint. At the end of the project we have developed one concept with the steward that is not only extremely relevant but also co-owned. That’s right, the steward owns the solution because they co-developed it and they actually help ’sell’ our collective solution to their organization as we develop it. Of course this means they are circulating pencil sketches and prototypes well before the final presentation, but they are also translating the thinking into meaningful dialog with their colleagues. It’s very powerful to watch. The best part is we together are all heroes at the end and if you can make your client a hero, you’ve done your job correctly.
The first thing people ask me when I talk about this approach is how we handle the “bad” ideas stewards bring with them. The answer is communication. We’ve had stewards bring us wireframes of the application with full expectation that we would build exactly what they had specified. We embrace their concepts and talk directly about them with the steward. We explore the concepts that inspired them and the needs they are trying to solve. These concepts are immensely valuable windows into the mind our partner/client. During this conversation we share experience, industry trends, competitor approaches, and user-centric best practices. We do the drawing – together we are each the best at what we are. I’m proud to say that in every project we used this approach, the results have been stellar. The solution is something both we and the client are immensely proud of.
Because this method is designed to break down the walls between the client and our team it works very well with companies who have stakeholders with competing needs. Our process works very well in this “federated” situation because we incorporate stewards from each department in our working sessions. The debates happen in real-time and if they can’t be solved on the spot, they are resolved within the week with follow-up discussions.
There isn’t enough room on our blog to talk through every detail of this approach but if you’d like to learn more about this process we’re happy to help. Drop us a line or post-back here and we’ll be glad to share. If you like we can present our approach, train your team, and even collaborate on your next big thing!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on June 24, 2010
Last week I attended a conference at the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela. The International Congress of Aesthetics (Simposio Internacional de Estetica – Arte, Ciencia es Technologia) brought together philosophers, writers, scientists and others together to discuss the role of written text, ideas and their ability to create aesthetic experiences through semiotic analysis.
Professor Edgar Yanez Zapata invited Aleksandra Giza, a professor of design from Northern Illinois University and myself to give several lectures to faculty and students of the School of Art and Design as well as present at the international congress.
Merida is a town nestled at the beginning of the Andean mountain range and runs along a ridge that is overseen by Pico Bolivar, over two miles above the city. For over 450 years the town evolved into a small city of about 20 square kilometers. The University of the Andes is the main function of the town and its impact is felt at all levels of life and activity.
There were four presentations given:
1) Introduction to Design Methods focusing on a contemporary perspective of design methods building on the original discussions in the early 1960’s and the publication of John Chris Jones seminal 1970 book “Design Methods.” Misunderstood and often maligned as a concept, design methods began as a way to question purely scientific post-war advancements and proposed a more integrated, multi-disciplinary perspective to integrate logic and intuition into a stronger approach to identify and solve problems. The presentation will focus on what design methods means in 2008, and how to structure and apply concepts to both problem solving and problem seeking.
2) Managing Ambiguities : The Role of Decision Modeling and Visualization focused on the development of diagrams and maps that described statistical and geographical relationships and the advancements of cognitive theories of how humans make decisions. The premise of the presentation focused on how the visualization of data through different content lenses can provide humans the needed cognitive and workload assist to provide options when faced with making decisions.
3) Urban Design Assistance Teams : A Different Approach
A Regional Urban Design Assistance Team (R-UDAT) is learning by doing, a type of accelerated practicum/charette to help towns and municipalities in distress. Teams interact with a variety of local stakeholders as well as to regional legislators in hopes of securing resources to implement UDAT recommendations. Randallstown, Maryland, a town of 30,000 residents in northeast Baltimore County was the backdrop where landscape architects, design architects and architects with experience in public policy, a traffic engineer, and a graphic designer mobilized to help Randallstown seek its potential.
4) Chicago : Innovation of the Past, Present and Future focused on the history of Chicago and innovations in architecture and engineering such as the modern development of the steel i-beam skyscraper and the load bearing cassion foundation which transformed a marshy prairie into one of the 25 largest cities in the world. The presentation highlighted the Village of Oak Park, 14 kilometers west of Chicago and home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s early architectural career as well as on key Chicago architectural icons that are not usually highlighted with a short discussion on the city’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
The presentation for the congress was attended by about 150 people as there were concurrent presentation sessions. Most of the attendees were focused on written language that describes the world and can generate aesthetic experiences using Sassurian frameworks and models. My presentations focused on Percian semiotics which extended linguistic semiotics into any form of thinking (metacognition, visual and written).
The second presentation to the congress was part of a panel that Edgar Yanez Zapata put together that addressed the role of digital technologies in aesthetic thought. From my observations, most conference participants would read short papers to the audience. A few had electronic presentations that endeavored to share richer stories.
The last night of the conference there was a small dinner at a wonderful bar called Mogambo (Chama Hotel). We had the opportunity to sit next to three philosophers from the University of Venezuela at Caracas. As you may surmise we ended discussing issues of reality, meaning and how subjective or objective reality is (or is not). Over beer and wine (a necessary ingredient) we did not come to any firm conclusions, but it did raise some interesting ideas.
Over the weekend, Aleksandra and I were invited to an evening with faculty from the Art and Design department at the house of Argentinian architect Carlos Caminos and his wife Donna. Their home is nestled on the side of a hill designed by Simon, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate. The simple home is beautifully appointed with artwork, functional objects and the history of this interesting collaborative couple.
We talked late into the evening about design, culture and other topics as Aleksandra and I moved around the house. I would like to thank Leo Chacon, John Villarroel, Carmen Grisolia, Eduardo Araujo, and Julie Colasante for making time out of their hectic schedules to share cultural ideas. We also had a wonderful dinner with Nory Pereira Colls, Dean of the Art and Design school at ULA.
I would like to thank Edgar Yanez Zapata, Director of the School of Art and Design for suggesting the visit, coordinating all activities and making Alexandra and I feel at home in Venezuela.
Posted by akallish on November 21, 2008
Nate Burgos sent me a link about a new institute that is being created between Stanford University and the Hasso-Plattner-Institute to investigate design thinking. They defined it as a methodology that “melds an end-user focus with multidisciplinary collaboration and iterative improvement to produce products, services or experiences.” Their theme is – innovation – which is no surprise.
This got me to think about how this term has fluctuated since I heard it twenty years ago. My approach to the topic was around several attributes:
Wicked Problems
A Focus on Customers/Users
Finding Alternatives
Ideation and Prototyping
Qualitative Performance
The question is how is design thinking different from other types of thinking? If we take a Western European approach to thought, then critical thinking models revolve around observation, asking questions, research, making new connections and creating a model that integrates new insights.
If you agree with this foundation, then there would be little differentiation between design thinking and other forms of thinking. Can non-designers do design thinking? What is the role of the designer if design thinking is practiced by a wide variety of disciplines and professions?
What has remained constant about design thinking is linked to an improved future. Victor Margolin, in his book The Politics of the Artificial stated “Design is continuously inventing its subject matter, so it is not limited by outworn categories of products. The world expects new things from designers, that is the nature of design”
I used to have conversations with fairly progressive designers twenty years ago about design thinking and that design was as much about frameworks, strategies and approaches as about media artifacts. At the time, they were not ready to embrace this idea and only wanted cursory approaches that could add more legitimacy to the making. Contemporary designers have finally embraced in enough of a critical mass that design is as much about thinking as making.
A few years ago John Thackara proposed to the London Design Council the Project Red Initiative which would have the UK design community address specific social, political and economic issues facing the United Kingdom. The backlash from the design community that the initiative was not in the bounds of design.
The good news is that design thinking, design methods, and design management are all coalescing to create new opportunities for designers to collaborate effectively with other professions around wider areas of interest that are not discipline specific.
Designers have an ability to interact with the the unknown, and the shifting relationships between the meaning of things. This new type of designer is linking design (as a plan) to outcomes that are not necessarily objects. It is here that methodology can help and this is where design thinking comes into play.
Maybe there is hope after all.
Posted by akallish on August 22, 2008
Adam Kallish, Delivery Director for Tanagram Partners has been shaping the design industry for 15+ years. A few years ago he collaborated with good friend Nate Burgos and decided to publish a Wikipedia post defining Design Methods. As active citizens of the internet, we here at Tanagram have partaken in far too many discussions about the value of the information presented by a system that can be manipulated by anyone. Despite the fact that this debate will continue forever, we can’t ignore the fact that good content can be found on the Wikipedia site. The Design Methods article is one of those pieces. Adam tells us when he and Nate were posting to Wikipedia the adventure occurred on the discussion tab. Both tabs are amazing reads.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on August 1, 2008
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