How Do You Use Design To Reshape An Organisation
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How do we link the skill of design thinking to the activity of organisational change?
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How Do You Use Design To Reshape An Organisation
- 1. How do you use design to reshape an organisation? David Jones September 6 2011
- 2. What do we mean by “design”?In everyday use, this is what we attach “design” to: 1. 2. “Posters ” (graphic design) “Toasters”(industrial design) Things a person interacts with Things talking to a person
- 3. What do we mean by “design”? Richard Buchanan stretched the word further. He identified 4 orders of design, 2 of which lie beyond the familiar world of “Posters and Toasters”: 3. 4. Societies and cultures Systems Groups of people and things in interaction with other groups of people and things Groups of people and things in interaction
- 4. Buchanan’s “Four Orders of Design” 4. Groups of people and things in interaction with other groups of people and things 4 broad areas where design is deployed… 3. Complex systems and environments Groups of people and things in interaction 2. Activities and organised services Things a person interacts with 1. Material objects Things talking to a person Buchanan stresses these are these are not to be reduced to categories of design products. They are “places of invention” shared by all designers Symbolic and visual communications
- 5. Buchanan’s “Four Orders of Design”… …beg a question: What is in common in these ways of thinking? C.S.Pierce pointed out that it was not outside of the possibilities of logical thought – it just used a different form of logic. Deduction Induction Begs the question: What is in common that underlies all these? Answer: A third form of logic Abduction
- 6. The “Four Orders of Design” imply a common “Design Thinking” There is another way to approach the answer. Michael Polanyi borrows from the gestalt school when he describes this basic form of human thinking. Question: What is in common that underlies all these? We push – or are pulled – out to a new Focal awareness 2 Answer: a basic form of human thinking We form a gestalt – a new “whole” 3 We always start from a “Subsidiary awareness” 1
- 7. Because of the centrality of this act to our humanity, it has been named again and again. Some notable naming and expositions in my experience have included, in a very eclectic and limited list: We’ve mentioned Logic: CS Pierces “abduction” Science: Poincare’s essay on his creative process, in innovations in science Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur’s Rule of Metaphor and the antecedents he argues in Aristotle, in hermeneutical studies Management: “Integrative thinking” is Roger Martin’s venture into naming the “the predisposition and capacity to hold two diametrically-opposed ideas in their heads.” [34] Physics: NeilsBohr’s exclamation “how wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” Poetry: Various essays about ST Coleridge’s experience of writing Kubla Khan, in poetry. Literature: Phillip Wainwrights Burning Fountain Psychology: Gestalt in the therapeutic traditions World Hypotheses: Genesis 1, in the Bible (Pepper) …and by now you’ll have your own to add…
- 8. Design is “skilled guessing”(But that’s not as bad as it sounds, because it turns out we can be very good at it) When skilled guessing is done by reflective practitioners, it turns out to be quite a sophisticated way of intentionally making up new ideas. Designers are people who know how to traverse this space with a clear intent.
- 9. When a designer is making in the physical realm, the materials form part of the frame, and the designer enters into a dialog. For example, the wood talks back to a carver about what it is possible to do with wood. When the design object is in the realm of ideas, a conversation still takes –place, but now it is (mostly) in the designers head A key generative mechanism in this part of our thinking is language. At their core, language tropes such as metaphor and irony are inherently and deeply about what could be other than it is… Aim Tame Claim A key generative mechanism in this part of our thinking are heuristics. At their core, heuristics are mechanisms for sorting and seeing what we have before we have any idea what it is we are looking at. They are one of our most foundational tools for interacting with our intangible situations. Frame
- 10. Language and heuristics are some of the tools for better guessing in 3rd and 4th order design – not ones most business people have been trained in, but in which real skills and knowledge are available…
Editor's Notes
- 1 – the area most people think of or know a bit about – perhaps because its more imaginable and accessible than whatever it is that a ferrarri designer or a Yves Saint LaurentIt will become obvious from my slides that I’m not one of those kind of designers2. My best effort was using biro tubes and plasticine to make an underwater village for ants in the laundry tubThings talking to a person – cf craft design the material talks back – SchonOn the 10th of August 2011, Apple overtook Exxon as the world’s biggest company. Does this matter. Well, it is having profound effects in shaping the world we live inDesign vs Discovery
- Buchanan (CMU design prof., now Weatherhead business prof.)Buchanan is actually connected to one of my earliest experiences – I worked on a number of projects in the Australian Tax Office in the ealry 90s. Mostly on Tax Law Improvement by changing the lefislation writing process into a design process. But I also got involved when Australai implemented its compulsory superannuation scheme – and I showed a case study of that work to his masters students in Pittsburgh as a n example of 3rd and 4th order designBringing down the Berlin WallDid they design a wall, or a culture?My experience – Zeal – a safety firm that tackles organisational transformation because of the deep beliefs they hold about the changes it takes in an organisation to really do safe work
- Making new syntheses of word and imageIntegrating art and engineering and natural science Working with connections and consquencesSustaining, developing and integrating human beings into broader ecological and cultural contexts(Tony Weirs wiordsThings talking to a person – cf craft design the material talks back - Schon
- deductive logic:we observe the world for long enough that we come up with a rule that says this is the way it should work. Deductive logic is the logic of what should be. I drop this I should observe that it accelerates at 9.8m/s2 so I can calculate all sorts of things about that and I can make all sorts of machinery that would be based on that rule. Inductive logic: the reasoning that goes with probabilities and statistics. If we’ve done a big enough sample of something and we’ve seen enough then we declare the following to be the case beyond a certain level of certainty. inductive logic which is the logic of what is operative. Charles Saunders Peirce made the observation that no new idea had ever come into the world using inductive or deductive logic. So he argued that there is a third form of logic, and it was what he termed abductive logic, making an abduction, which he referred to as “inference to the best explanation” – I call it guessing. He argued is that’s the source of all new ideas in the world
- Herbert Simon argues that everyone is a designer whenever they come up with “courses of action aimed at changingexisting situations into preferred ones”
- Language and heuristics are some of the tools for better guessing in 3rd and 4th order design – not ones most business people have been trained in…This view makes it easier to call out the key distinctions between Framing, aiming and naming/claiming