Design leads us where exactly?

Why I'm joining the Young Foundation as head of social design

2011-12-21T09:36:00.002Z

Sketch of service ecology by my MBA students during a collaboration with MDes students from London College of Communication

In January I’m taking up a new role as head of social design at the Young Foundation. I will remain an associate fellow of Said Business School at the University of Oxford where I have been teaching an MBA elective on design and design management since 2005. I am excited about the opportunity to join the Young Foundation and contribute to its work on social entrepreneurship and innovation. Especially at a time when the existing ways of doing things are failing or are under severe stress from climate change, funding cuts in the public sector, and increasing inequalities between resource owners and others who could use them.

Here are some of the reasons I’m taking this role.

Working in the spaces between research and action.

Having been inside academia for some years I’m not sure that universities are a good place to do social or organizational research that leads to effective change. But “do tanks” like the Young Foundation potentially are. For every example of excellent scholarship that is engaged with public matters and communities outside academia (“Mode 2” knowledge), there are many others that produce research that is made use of by only other academics. I love reading a brilliant paper but brilliant papers are usually not digestible by non-academics. Many papers sitting in academic databases are hardly read by other researchers, let alone engaged with by people working in organizations or communities. So working with the Young Foundation and its network of ventures and partners will provide an opportunity to create faster feedback loops between research and action, at a time when there is a significant need to understand what is going on, try out new ways of doing things, and learn what the effects are.

Working collaboratively across different kinds of expertise.

The institutional incentives in academia are not geared to rewarding and supporting interdisciplinarity. The UK Research Councils have been trying to change this. For example they host “sandpits” where researchers from different fields, who have often not met before, and have quite different research cultures and agendas, construct project outlines during a residential workshop, that they then may work on together. But unless you are a senior, tenured academic, your institution generally rewards you for publishing in discipline-specific peer-reviewed journals, not for taking part in messy, cross-disciplinary projects that may or may not contribute to the various fields involved. And it is often hard for small organizations like SMEs, or the shifting practices and people that constitute local communities, to get involved in such research. Organisations like the Young Foundation which have research expertise and strong links with communities, businesses and policymakers, have the potential to be involved in and set up multi-expertise collaborations that generate learning and outcomes, without being overly shaped by discipline-specific practices and rewards.

Developing a culture of strategic design and collective experimentation.

The Young Foundation’s activities include creating new ventures, prototypes, research, advisory work and consultancy. In establishing this new role, the Foundation wants to build on its experience of working with service designers, and learning from members of its team not trained in design using approaches from design practice in their work. At a time when people in different contexts are turning to design, and designers are finding new sites for their work, including in public services, communities and sustainable living (eg MindLab in Denmark, Participle in the UK, The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, Project H in the US, and the DESIS Network), I am pleased to have an opportunity to help the Young Foundation develop its own vision of what social design might be.

Just as the term “social” immediately generates questions – is it the social of social media, or of social innovation, or of social theory? – so, too, “design” is very hard to pin down. The way I think about this is to combine the practices of the art or design studio with creative, collective research and experimentation in the field: what I call the fieldstudio. Having explored some of these ideas in my consultancy, in academia, my arts practice, and most recently at consultancy Taylor Haig, the Young Foundation seems an appropriate context to try and contribute to explorations of design in the expanded field.

Creating learning environments.

One activity I’ll be working on is a new venture called the Global Innovation Academy. Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, NESTA, the Gulbenkian Foundation and others, this aims to create a learning platform, tools and an experience for people in different kinds of organization who want to work in response to contemporary global challenges. Potentially this initiative is a disruptive intervention into professional higher education, currently being challenged because of high student fees and to what extent students are prepared for a complex world. My work will focus on the curriculum and learning experience. I will bring to this some of what I have learned by teaching a design elective in a business school for six years, and collaboration and dialogues with other educators such as Parsons The New School for Design (with programmes such as the MFA Transdisciplinary Design), UC Falmouth (setting up a Creative MBA), London College of Communication (with its MDes Service Innovation), and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee (with its MSc Design Ethnography and MDes for Service).

Helping grow a culture.

Although it’s 60 people, the Young Foundation feels like it has a start-up culture. It builds on the legacy of Michael Young, who created what are now well-established institutions such as the Open University, and was under Geoff Mulgan’s leadership until his recent move to NESTA. To date, it has been involved in creating or supporting over fifty ventures and initiatives from neighbourhood websites to community schools, new models of healthcare to training community campaigners. But it’s an organisation that is still creating itself, now under the leadership of Simon Tucker. With a matrix structure and several women in senior positions, it seems to have the flexibility and openness that I value in an employer.

My focus.

Over the coming months, my two main questions will be:

How to lead and facilitate the Young Foundation’s move to develop design capabilities, not so much by hiring designers, but increasing the whole organisation’s design literacy, understanding, knowledge and skills to develop a more designerly culture; and finding ways to understand its effects and impact and articulate a perspective on design in the expanded field.
How to use design to set up and enable creative collisions between the worldviews and practices of policymakers, community members, activists, researchers from interpretive social science, designers and artists, managers and technologists, to produce radical reconfigurations of resources to grapple with the challenges facing local and global communities.

We’ll be starting a blog in the Young Foundation’s new social design practice area, so this personal research blog will become quieter. I look forward to continuing and deepening many existing dialogues to explore the potential for this work in the UK and internationally.

------A bit more background---------

For anyone who’s interested in my previous work, it ranges from

Keynotes including

Keynote at Service Design Network conference (2010): text or video

Keynote at Design Management Institute conference (2010) text

Writing including

Design Thinking and the Big Society, co-authored with Simon Blyth (2011)

Peer reviewed academic papers on design thinking, service design and organisational aesthetics - see my website for more

Teaching design and design management to MBAs at Said Business School, Oxford, since 2005 including an elective called Designing Better Futures - see my teaching blog

Installations such as the Physical Bar Charts, shown nine times internationally including at TEDGlobal in Edinburgh and currently at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (both in 2011)

Creating digital tools such as The Powerleague, now hosted by Futurelab

Physical Bar Charts in Declining Democracy, Florence

2011-10-12T11:10:00.014Z

My Physical Bar Charts installation is currently at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, part of the group exhibition Declining Democracy at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea, open until January 2012. This is thoughtful exhibition exploring different means by which publics give voice or shape to their concerns.

Other pieces include Francis Alys' When Faith Moves Mountains, a video which documents a process in which the artist involved around 500 volunteers in moving a large sand-dune close to a slum in Peru in 2002. This shocking piece asks the visitor to consider how "social" purposes take shape and are acted on. The apparently pointless act of moving of the sand-dune reveals how people are captured and engaged by ideas and then contribute to making things happen. Roger Cremers' photographs show different people are involved in a hobby of re-enacting aspects of World War 2. Michael Bielicky & Kamila B. Richter created a digital installation called Garden of Error and Decay in which data from Twitter and stock markets leads to a changing animated landscape.

In some ways Declining Democracy picks up and develops themes from the 2005 show Making Things Public at ZKM Karlsruhe, but where that was a monster exhibition involving many academics as well as artists, designers and others, this is a smaller, tighter exhibit which carefully constructs a way of thinking about how people make present their questions, criticisms and concerns about the world we live in - how we engage and to what effect.

Declining Democracy also subtly interacts with the exhibition upstairs at the Palazzo Strozzi. Entitled Money and Beauty: Bankers, Boticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities, it uses a mixture of paintings, historic artefacts and documents to trace connections between the development of international finance in Renaissance Florence and the emerging mercantile class and signifiers of wealth such as paintings. See the review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. All relevant to today in the current economic, financial and cultural crisis.

For this version of the Physical Bar Charts, the question posed next to the installation is "What did you do last week that made you a citizen?" in Italian and English. Badges in English and Italian in eight tubes offer ways to answer this question. People can take as many badges as they want.

When I left Florence the night after the very busy opening, the badges which had become most popular (ie approximately 200-300 people had taken them) were, in order:

I said what I believe (most popular)
I did nothing
I broke the law
I raised issues
I used public services
I helped someone
I kept myself informed
I obeyed the law (least popular).

The Physical Bar Charts do not purport to constitute "real" research that is statistically valid or reliable. But somehow the piece tells us something about a predominantly Italian audience at a time when Italy's democratic institutions are being questioned. The aesthetic qualities of the tubes and badges draw people in, adding a qualitative dimension to the typically dull routine of filling in a questionnaire or other data-gathering interfaces.

But they do more than this too, since when people start wearing the badges, this triggers new connections and engagement. A Dutch journalist at the opening told me he had selected, worn and then taken off the badge saying "I broke the law" because he didn't want people to start asking him the circumstances. As a device the bar charts represent a low-tech way for people to reflect on their own participation in public questions and see how others do too. They make us public and potentially accountable too.

Photo credits: Martino Margheri, CCC Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze

Behave: New services to change travel behaviours

2011-09-16T10:10:00.004Z

Why do people use cars for short journeys when there are more sustainable alternatives?

Behave: New services to change travel behaviours from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

This short film proposes new service concepts to change the travel behaviours of car owners for short journeys. The ideas were created in a two-day workshop held in Oxford in 2011, by mixed teams of MBAs, MDes and MSc students.

Focussed on the Oxfordshire town of Bicester, the project is based in the idea that 'travel behaviours' cannot be separated from other social practices. The film suggests that shifting towards new travel behaviours involves creating new combinations of meanings and stories, infrastructure and stuff, skills and competences, and emotions.

This collaborative project involved 55 students including MBAs taking my elective in Designing Better Futures at Said Business School, University of Oxford; students on the MDes Innovation and Creativity in Industry at London College of Communication at University of the Arts, London, and students on the MSc Environment Change and Management at the University of Oxford.

Collaborators included travel planners from Oxfordshire County Council.

The film and workshop were financially supported by Samsung Design Europe.

For more information visit the MBA Designing Better Futures teaching blog at designingbetterfutures.wordpress.com/

Physical Bar Charts in Declining Democracy

2011-09-12T15:30:00.005Z

My Physical Bar Charts will be part of the group exhibition Declining Democracy at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina in Florence.

DECLINING DEMOCRACY

Rethinking democracy between utopia and participation

23 September 2011—22 January 2012

Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Tuesday–Sunday 10.00–20.00

Free Thursdays 18.00

Artists: Francis Alÿs, Michael Bielicky & Kamila B. Richter, Buuuuuuuuu, Roger Cremers, Democracia, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Thomas Feuerstein, Thomas Hirschhorn, Thomas Kilpper, Lucy Kimbell, Cesare Pietroiusti, Artur Żmijewski

Contemporary art as a platform to explore contemporary social and political issues: the exhibition presents the diverse artworks of twelve international contemporary artists that create a reflection on the values and contradictions that typify today’s society, addressing the possible declinations of the principles of democracy, which is being challenged more and more today.

The exhibition was born out of a consideration of the contemporary international situation. While the current economic crisis has triggered deep social unrest in Western countries, a new sense of revolutionary political utopia, different from, yet parallel to developments in Europe, appears to have gained a foothold in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East.

The artworks on display will consider such themes as the clash between the individual and the community, the growing gap between the average citizen and the political classes, the power and influence of economic lobbies and mass media, the issues surrounding immigration and new potential forms of democratic participation.

Declining Democracy is a project devised by CCC Strozzina with the scholarly contribution of Piroschka Dossi, Christiane Feser, Gerald Nestler and Franziska Nori.

Recent publications

2011-08-30T11:15:00.009Z

Here are some of my recent publications in peer-reviewed journals. Some of them have been years in the making, a combination of major life changes (having a child, serious illness, moving house three times, family illness, being made redundant, etc, etc) and some are to do with the slow pace of peer review. But another important factor is that sometimes it takes time to get the ideas right - working out what you are trying to say and to whom. In contrast to the world of twitter and blogging, the slower speed of academic writing, reading, reviewing and dialogue can - if things go well - produce rich, more thought-through contributions. Or at least this has been what I have been telling myself as I revise and revise again. And then of course there is the pressure to perform as a researcher by creating public, traceable outputs that locate yourself in relation to other academic productions. Ironically now that I am no longer an academic (in the sense of having a faculty post), here, at last, is some product.

Only one of these papers are easily available through an open access journal; the others are in journals that require subscription, which means they are therefore inaccessible unless you have university library access. Please contact me directly if you would like a digital copy of my original text.

Kimbell, L. (2011) Rethinking Design Thinking: Part 1, Design and Culture, 3(3): 285-306.

(Accessing this journal requires a subscription).

ABSTRACT The term design thinking has gained attention over the past decade in a wide range of contexts beyond the traditional preoccupations of designers. The main idea is that the ways professional designers problem-solve is of value to firms trying to innovate and to societies trying to make change happen. This paper reviews the origins of the term design thinking in research about designers and its adoption by management educators and consultancies within a dynamic, global mediatized economy. Three main accounts are identified: design thinking as a cognitive style, as a general theory of design, and as a resource for organizations. The paper argues there are several issues that undermine the claims made for design thinking. The first is how many of these accounts rely on a dualism between thinking and knowing, and acting in the world. Second, a generalized design thinking ignores the diversity of designers’ practices and institutions which are historically situated. The third is how design thinking rests on theories of design that privilege the designer as the main agent in designing. Instead the paper proposes that attending to the situated, embodied routines of designers and others offers a useful way to rethink design thinking.

KEYWORDS: Design thinking, practices, designers, innovation, organization design

Kimbell, L. (2011) Designing for Service as One Way of Designing Services, International Journal of Design, 5(2): 41-52.

(This journal is open access and the paper is available here)

ABSTRACT This paper considers different ways of approaching service design, exploring what professional designers who say they design services are doing. First it reviews literature in the design and management fields, including marketing and operations. The paper proposes a framework that clarifies key tensions shaping the understanding of service design. It then presents an ethnographic study of three firms of professional service designers and details their work in three case studies. The paper reports four findings. The designers approached services as entities that are both social and material. The designers in the study saw service as relational and temporal and thought of value as created in practice. They approached designing a service through a constructivist enquiry in which they sought to understand the experiences of stakeholders and they tried to involve managers in this activity. The paper proposes describing designing for service as a particular kind of service design. Designing for service is seen as an exploratory process that aims to create new kinds of value relation between diverse actors within a socio-material configuration. This has implications for existing ways of understanding design and for research, practice and teaching.

KEYWORDS: Designing for Service, Service Design, Service Management.

Kimbell, L. (2011) An Aesthetic Inquiry into Organizing Some Rats and Some People, Tamara: Journal for Critical Organizational Inquiry, 9(3-4): 77-92.

(Accessing this journal requires a subscription).

ABSTRACT Rats crawling, an art gallery, rats as art, warm furry bodies, bright plastic tubes, disgusting, chilled dead frogs, rats for science, a preparation, a sweet little rat, a village hall, women in white coats, rats in cages, a rosette, urine, a rat in a pouch, cuddles, rats for art, the winner is, strong black tea, how many do you have, in the literature, breeding, get more rats, a rat down a sleeve, I’’ll give you a lift, sign in, a rack of cages, what is that, the data shows, please wash your hands, they can smell your perfume, protestors, I don’’t know, a knock out, brain surgery, squeak squeak, the Morris water maze, toys, slice, you are a messy boy, the critique, I haven’’t got a licence, drawings, rats in art, do you mind, a duvet, insurance, a queue, a drawing device, sugar rats, chunky knits, where’’s the nearest rat, black rubbery tails, video camera, a T-maze, sawdust, a cleavage, nail clippings, face painting, artist rat, drawings, it’’s different, two young women, a judge, art for rats, agility training, he remembers from last time.

KEYWORDS: Art, Aesthetics, Rats, Research, Rancière

Physical Bar Charts at TEDGlobal 2011

2011-07-11T12:01:00.014Z

Today at TED Global...by Lucy Kimbell. Video timelapse edited by Kiersten Nash; timelapse data grabbed with help from Mike Femia of TED.

My Physical Bar Charts were installed at TEDGlobal 2011 in Edinburgh in July. Over the conference, people helped themselves to badges from the installation, which together revealed a picture of what this temporary community was thinking about and how the conference shaped their activity.

The eight badges for this version of the Physical Bar Charts had these texts (from left to right):

I surprised myself
I was inspired and acted upon it
My ideas were challenged (least popular)
What am I doing here?
I stayed up too late last night
My ideas had sex with another TEDster's
I delayed judgement
I said what I believe (most popular)

People are invited to help themselves to badge(s) that say something about what's on their mind or what they have been doing at TED. Most of the badges are deliberately in the first person and refer to acts in the past. They of course mean different things to different people, but once selected and then worn, can spark conversations among members of the conference community. At the same time, the Physical Bar Charts reveal a collective picture - what the community says it has been doing as a whole.

Together, as a device the Physical Bar Charts are an example of social data gathering, collaborative sense-making, playful research, real-time reporting, experiential inquiry. They spark conversations and prompt a community such as TED to reflect on its concerns and practices.

This is the eighth time the piece has been shown. It was first developed and shown, in collaboration with sociologist Andrew Barry, for the group exhibition Making Things Public, curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2005. (See the catalogue published by MIT Press.) In other versions, the piece has explored how people think about citizenship and political activity and to what extent they want to make public their participation in collective life. The bar charts have been installed in venues such as public libraries, a university campus, art institutions and also small galleries on a city high street.

The next version of the piece will be one created for the specific context of contemporary Italian politics, in a group show on democracy at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, opening in September 2011.

TED Blog interview with me about the TED Physical Bar Charts

Thanks to Hermeet Gill who suggested the piece to TED, and to Kiersten Nash for helping realise it this year

Five things people designing solutions to social problems should know

2011-06-23T10:46:00.005Z

Designers are now working in a range of contexts that are quite different to what many of them were educated for. Some are designing public services, others work on humanitarian or development projects, others are creating social enterprises. Common to all these is an interest in social problems and the belief that designers’ ways of working – in particular “Design Thinking” – has special ways to solve them. We think designers have much to contribute to different kinds of community, but we suggest there are some important things they need to know.

1 Social problems don’t just exist “out there” waiting for socially-minded designers or social entrepreneurs to trip over. On the contrary, they are constructed by the interplay of individuals, organisations, things and what brings them all together. Designers should focus their attention as much on how they and others construct social problems rather than just working towards solving them.

2 Objects too can intentionally or otherwise spark a social problem into existence. Designers who have got busy designing “intangible” services rather than mundane things should be aware that their special knowledge about how to make stuff is of immense potential value in constructing problems as social problems.

3 Design Thinking and its optimistic process pushes designers ever onward in pursuit of a solution based on responding to stories of personal troubles. This might not be right for messy, intractable social issues. Designers should attend to the nuances of the social worlds they work in and consider what they are driving themselves towards, and who and what is shaping this and why.

4 Like any other actor in a social world, designers are able to interpret the world around them, and come up with ideas to change it. Those who look, uncritically, towards Design Thinking to answer the world¹s most wicked social problems are missing some important resources. We¹d encourage designers to draw on ideas and concepts from the social sciences - not just borrowing ethnography as a methodology but going deeper into understanding how social problems are constructed. For example concepts such as reflexivity can help designers become aware of how their own commitments shape how they understand what is going on and what they think they can change.

5 Unlike architects, engineers and many other professionals, designers do not have clear disciplinary boundaries, strong institutions or professional codes of ethics. Designers with ambitions to design solutions to social problems are working in dangerous territory and should develop credible tools to reflect on the nature of their work and its possible and actual impacts.

The provocations are drawn from “Design Thinking and the Big Society: From Solving Personal Troubles to Designing Social Problems” by Simon Blyth (Actant) and Lucy Kimbell (Taylor Haig).

Thanks to Cassie and Alex for pointing out the missing no.4.

Physical Bar Charts at TEDGlobal 2011

2011-05-30T16:18:00.007Z

My participative installation Physical Bar Charts will be installed at TEDGlobal 2011 in Edinburgh for the duration of the four-day conference in July. This is the eighth time I have made the piece, which was initially developed in collaboration with sociologist Andrew Barry. The work has changed slightly since the first version, then called Personal Political Indices (Pindices) in the group show Making Things Public curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, at ZKM Karlsruhe, in 2005.

People respond to a prompt or question by taking badges that answer it in some way. For the TEDGlobal conference, there will be new badges with questions relevant to the conversations at TED. The resulting Physical Bar Chart shows which badges are most popular, and being viewable in a public space within the conference, allow people to have a bigger picture about what the conference is thinking. Meanwhile the badges prompt new discussions as they are worn around the conference and city, or back home.

The piece operates on a number of levels.
- By creating a way for members of a temporary community to make sense of what they are hearing and discussing
- By creating a near real-time record of how participants are engaging with the ideas at the conference
- By revealing the creation of data and its analysis to be a thoroughly social process
- Sculpturally, by creating seductive forms that draw people in

The photo shows a version of Physical Bar Charts, installed at Said Business School, Oxford, in 2008 as part of the Imagining Business conference. More about the piece: Pindices and Physical Bar Charts.

Design innovation workshop, Philadelphia

2011-05-28T05:54:00.006Z

In March I co-facilitated the four-day Design Challenge 2011 for students at Temple University, Philadelphia, with James Moustefellos who with Youngjin Yoo directs the Center for Design + Innovation within the Fox School of Business.

An open call to students across all departments at Temple resulted in around 18 teams signing up for the day. All of them had to be mixed in terms of disciplines, drawing on at least two departments, although the majority of participants came from the Fox Business School.

The challenge to the students focussed on the area of the city close to the Temple campus, North Broad St. The project asked students
- How can we use increasingly pervasive digital technology to re-imagine the future of the city?
- Can we use digital technologies to inspire, mobilize and create social, economic, cultural, political and intellectual connections to solve the complex challenges that cities face today
- Can we build a sustainable open platform that encourages and supports a vibrant ecosystem of neighbors, entrepreneurs and communities?

Over four days, students worked together to do first-hand research in the North Broad area and then come up with service concepts to address issues they identified. This included a detailed briefing with input from community leaders and from city organisations (on Monday) and a one day workshop (on Thursday) led by James and I, which was a day of intense idea generation and visualisation. The presentations at the end of the day, judged by a team of entrepreneurs, community leaders and academics, showed what a wide range of responses. Students presented their insights from their research, and then proposals for a new service journey or service encounter, communicate in a range of media from collage, to sketches, to role play. The successful propositions combined an understanding of the service ecology around North Broad St, and a creative reconfiguration of community resources supported by digital technologies.

As a learning experience for the students, it showed how design-based approaches support rapid collaboration and proposition development. As a way to build relationships between the university and its community and city, it showed how to engage student energy and entrepreneurial drive. I look forward to next year.

Service design performances at Parsons DESIS Lab, March 2011

2011-03-08T20:28:00.004Z

Guest post: Derek Miller: Design Ethics for International Peace and Security

2011-03-08T19:51:00.006Z

Intro
This is a guest post by Derek Miller, founder of the Policy Lab and senior fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). The Policy Lab provides research and design services at the policy, organization, and field-levels to reduce barriers, create conditions, and design solutions for strategic engagement with local communities. It is the successor to the Security Needs Assessment Protocol (SNAP) project of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva (2006-2010). The SNAP project was an innovation initiative to explore the potential for best process approaches to the design of local action on security matters by UN operational agencies. With Derek and his colleague Lisa Rudnick, and ethnographer Gerry Philipsen of the University of Washington, I co-organised a three-day conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy at Glen Cove, NY, in June 2010, the brought together specialists from design, policy and cultural research to explore the idea of bringing local knowledge to the design of local action in the context of security and disarmament.

Design Ethics for International Peace and Security
October 2010

Lecture delivered to the University of Gothenburg, Business and Design Lab, 6 October 20101
by Derek B. Miller

Thank you for coming today. I hate it when I’m booked into a large room and no one comes. I have to suffer the double indignity of talking to myself and then having my own words echoed back at me.

My thanks as well to professor Ulla Johansson, whom I met at a conference in Cleveland on the convergence of design and management.

I do want to discuss a topic that I believe is important. It is not a topic I have seen addressed in any great detail or with particular urgency, and yet the topic deserves both. If we to boil it down to just a phrase, I’d say the topic is design ethics, and my particular concern is better ensuring that the ever-closer relations that design is forming with public policy is informed by the necessary seriousness of mind required to achieve some real good in the world. Underlying that aspiration is also a concern. The concern is that failure to do so could mean that we actually cause a harm.

As designers look towards ever-new domains for social innovation, especially in public service, it would be wise to ensure that this aspiration towards social betterment is guided by the tutored consideration of our actions and their impact on others.
My perspective on design comes from outside the field looking inward. My vantage point for reflecting on design has been Security Needs Assessment Protocol project at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva. Started in 2006, SNAP was an innovation initiative into the design of community-level peace and security projects and programmes by the United Nations. I designed and ran that programme with Lisa Rudnick.

SNAP was supported by the Swedish, Dutch and Norwegian foreign ministries and its purpose was conceptualize, design, and test new ways to A) generate local knowledge at the community level and B) turn it into a strategic asset in the design of local-level interventions. Our work was thematically concerned with community security — that is, attending to matters of violence — though the applicability of our work extends rather farther.

Recently, I’m pleased to say, the 22nd Biennial of Industrial Design (BIO 22) being held at the museum of Architecture and Design in Slovenia selected SNAP as one of the “good practice examples” in the field of Service and Information Design to recognize this innovation in bringing social research, design, and international peace and security closer together. I’d like to add that our introduction to the field of design was assisted by our colleagues at Live work in London and Oslo. This wasn’t a client relationship but rather, since 2008, has been an on-going conversation into the relationship between our professional domains. Our conversations with Lucy Kimbell at the Said Business School at Oxford further contributed to our induction into the profession of design. Those conversations continue.

The process of bringing together the professional domains of socio-cultural research, design, and international peace and security was a revealing exercise. And today, albeit briefly, I want to share a few things it revealed. The center of gravity for this discussion might be termed “responsible design.” The framework for considering responsible design is the topic of ethics.
To discuss this properly, I find it helpful to begin with a distinction. The distinction is between an ethos for doing good, and the ethics of doing good. An ethos is a general orientation, or set of guiding principles. It is like choosing a direction, like facing east rather than west.

Many designers today, especially the younger generation of designers, want to do some good in the world. They no longer seem satisfied simply creating objects of desire for profit. This is laudable. But for the good intentions of the design profession to actually result in some good, it is going to be necessary to carefully attend to how we design. Design is both a social process, with implications for others who are participants to that process, and also brings something new into the world that may have social force. Attending to both matters responsibly will be essential as the field moves forward.

This is especially true as design steps into the wider world of international peace and security — given that the issue here is not consumer value but life and death.

If an ethos is an orientation, then ethics is the set of rules we establish and enact to guide and judge to our actions.
There is some limited discussion about ethics in design, but in comparison to codes of conduct in, say, anthropology, architecture, and medicine, one would be forgiven for finding them undeveloped. Design ethics appears to be under-theorized, and under- codified given that design research is now crossing the borderline into social research, including ethnography, which involves research with or on human beings. It is worth recalling, for example, that since 1947 and the establishment of the Nuremberg Code, the voluntary consent of people to research has been treated as “absolutely essential” by many organizations. Though written in direct response to medical experimentation, design research is now stepping into a world, as mentioned, where the process of learning, and the outcomes of learning both have social implications. It is time to turn an eye towards the ethics of design research.

Perhaps even more importantly, design is also stepping into the area of social action, through such activities as social innovation, whereby the outcome of a design is a social change in the world. This invites a rather obvious question. What, exactly, is guiding your conduct? It is a profit motive that allows the market to regulate value? Or will you uncritically adopt the mandates and missions of the organizations that hire you? Will you trust your own inner voice to lead to you to proper conduct, or will you endeavor to determine what common ethical grounds can be created for cooperation? How will you do that?

We are not going to solve this today. But we can take some preliminary steps to map out the terrain that we are going to face. That terrain is conceptual. It is a place of ideas, and the relations between ideas that in turn guide our actions. Clarity is helpful in that regard. So let’s first try, for just a moment, to conceptualize and situate design in continuum between knowledge and action.

Close your eyes for a moment. Try to remember the world before Powerpoint. Imagine two circles beside one another. They do not touch. The circle on the left will be labeled knowledge. The circle on the right will be labeled action.
What is the relationship to be between knowledge and action? And where does design fit in that relationship both conceptually and procedurally?

In my field, of international peace and security, we can actually see the institutionalized distinction between knowledge and action. The university system and think tanks, policy centers, and research NGOs constitute the “knowledge sector.” They get money from governments to go generate knowledge and then bring that knowledge across the street to the decisionmakers in the operational agencies as well as to the politicians. These latter people are the decision makers. They are the consumers of knowledge. (If we’re lucky). This is not ideal, but it is real.

Those who generate knowledge are welcome to advocate for certain types of actions. But ultimately, it is the elected leaders, representatives or the civil servants who will really decide. (I’m speaking here about liberal democratic systems, and the international institutions modeled on them. That might not be the whole world, but it is that part of the world that cares about design.)

Notice how something interesting has happened here. One of the inadvertent functions of democracy is to keep knowledge distinct from action. Action is to be a product of democratic choice, and bureaucratic implementation, not professional knowledge.

That is, action comes from decisionmaking, and decisionmaking is a political process, subject to political correction. You don’t like the decision, you throw out the decisionmaker and elect another one. Design exists only in debate. Not as a process for moving knowledge to action.

What is absolutely crucial to understand here is that the legitimacy of actions by decisionmakers — whether they are policymakers or civil servants — is derived from the political philosophy of democracy itself. Liberalism. The social contract. Self-government. We the people. That sort of thing. That is why it’s OK for them to do things to you. Raise your taxes. Tear up your roads. Go to war on your behalf. Change your health system. Legitimacy, in political processes, is presumed by the system. Is not a product of the system.

Here’s what’s good about the democratic model: It allows for, and creates, systems and processes to try and ensure that the will of the people is expressed in the action of decisionmakers — whether at the highest or lowest levels. Said differently, social action is meant to be derived from democratic processes. Insofar as democracy is good, social action will be legitimately enacted.

Here’s what’s bad about it: There’s no mechanism for good designs to be introduced into the system, because no one is really wondering what to do. When answers are dictated by political processes, people don’t entertain a lot of questions. Instead, they are given platforms, mandates or missions to fulfill. Because that’s what people want. The knowledge-to-action nexus simply does not create space for design process.

So is that end of the story? If there’s no design space in public policy, isn’t that the end of the road for design?

Actually, no. I think it’s just the beginning. And here’s why. The times are changing. Deep in the bowels of democratic nations, the very definition of legitimacy is starting to evolve. People don’t just want a voice anymore. They don’t just want to elect people who will advance their will. They are starting to demand results.

If at one time governments simply had to make hard decisions about peace and war, the economy, and other matters, today, the systems into which they are making decisions is so complex, so non-linear and dynamic, that sheer force of will and character is no longer enough. Climate change, global terrorism, the depletion of fossil fuels and the energy crisis, the shortage of clean water, the threat to the nation-state system in most of Africa and the Middle East, the breakdown of almost every social service including transportation, health, and education... these aren’t decisionmaking issues. They can’t be solved by leadership alone.
These are design issues. They require tutored and fastidious attention to the process of both generating knowledge, and moving it to action through processes of design.

I think the door is opening for design if we conceptualize design as a process for moving knowledge to action in innovative, rigorous and ethical ways. Design is the application solution for knowledge.

It's time to go back to the circles. I want you to push those two even farther apart now and make space for one right in the middle. And we will label that one “design.”

If we see little space for design in public policy due to certain philosophical premises in democracy — which become manifest as routines in bureaucracies — we do see comparably more space for design between knowledge and action in industry, where results somehow depend on the design of solutions to problems. Here, legitimacy isn’t presumed. It’s earned.

It is no wonder, then, that designers and business leaders are thinking that design can now be applied to public policy.
After all, if people want results, and we design results, it should be a pretty smooth transference of skill sets. And so, with energy and a whole lot of money, design is stepping into the unknown and promising that it can lead.

And yet, for those of us who are serious researchers and are serious public policy people, one can’t help but sense a certain loose relationship between design today and the simple notion of rigor.

I had a professor at Oxford who once said, “the less you know about something, the easier it is to develop a theory about it.”

As design moves away — or at least broaden from — its creation of objects of desire to social processes and systems, it is reaching a point of creative tension with its own premises. These premises are challenged as it steps into new domains, and also as it steps into new cultural systems. Premises about value. About utility. About rationality. About social relations. Even about the very nature and use of time.

This is a wonderful moment because design now has a chance to step through the open door being offered by the re-imaging of public services and government. It is a formative period too, because the directions you set out on will have profound implications down the road as the paths further diverge. Get it right, and design will take it’s place between the philosopher and the king at the high tables of social influence. Get it wrong, get distracted, go the easy route, and design will be a trendy, marginal field that could never gets act together.

My concern right now — as I advocate for design in public policy — is that the field is adopting some rather under-developed theory at what seems to be alarming rate, at a very formative moment. In the rush to be useful, to be seductive, to be creative, to be responsive, the professional field of design might be taking shortcuts that will lead it quickly to irrelevance. There could be a “design bubble” developing and it could pop.

One way to avoid this is to not mistake the panic of industry to find new ideas with the quality of ideas its finding. Panic buying tends to push the price of ideas, and therefore the investment in them, down. In a panic, any old idea will do.
However. If the goal here is really to achieve some social good in the public service, lead design into a more socially influential future for the greater good, and actually mainstream design at the nexus between knowledge and action, then we might just need to slow down, and grow up.

Those are two odd requests for design because, historically, it hasn’t needed to. But as design looks towards public service, and as business looks towards emerging markets, fragile states and conflict zones, business as usual is going to get people killed.
That’s not a mere turn of phrase. Here are the topics I deal with at UNIDIR, in no particular order. Small arms and light weapons, landmines, conflict prevention, crisis management, post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding, weapons collection, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants, crimes against humanity, child trafficking, gender-based violence, conflict analysis, conflict sensitive operational programming, and that’s just the small stuff. Add biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, weaponization of space, terrorism and counter-terrorism, state fragility and just basically war, and we’re starting to fill out the topics that come up on Monday mornings at 11 at UNIDIR’s staff meetings.

These are real, grown up issues that need real, grown up attention by people who are committed — professionally – to trying to figure out what is wrong with their own ideas, and not what is right about them. Designers are worryingly not involved in that process. Design is trying to prove itself, rather than disprove itself. It is the latter, though, that will serve the social good.

Allow me to explain. What my don at Oxford meant by his quip was that every idea seems like a good idea until you learn what’s wrong with it. And generally speaking, you learn what’s wrong with it by trying to.

There is a very strong school of thought in science, and I count myself in this camp, that believes we cannot truly prove things. What we can do, however, is disprove things. We try to figure out, not what’s right about a given course of action, but what’s wrong with it. If you turn it over and over and over again in your mind and can’t think of anything, you give it a go. We haven’t proved it’s a good idea. But we’ve hopefully weeded out the worse ideas and in doing so raised our confidence in the course of action we’ve chosen. Karl Popper is a key reference here.

Today, design does not seem to be centrally concerned with building theory or processes that can be disproved. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be interested in process at all. It seems to be interested in thought. And yet, thinking and acting are not the same. If one can engage in “design thinking” then it stands to reason that one can have “design thoughts.” But ... now what?

The problem with so-called design thinking is that it is about just that ... thinking. Mapping out — or just speaking metaphorically — about ways of thinking is not the same as producing systems, processes or frameworks for mobilizing thought to action.

Design thinking — though a catchy slogan to be sure — is not a developed analytical concept, is not distingusiable as a means of thoughts from other forms of thought, and let me go on record saying it is not a “methodology.” In the words of Gertrude Stein, there’s no there there. If it cann’t be distingusihed, defined, enacted, or falisfied, I’m not sure what it can do other can sparkle and hypnotize.

For “design thinking” to be worthy of serious consideration, rather than just rhetorical appropriation, it will need to evolve into an actual analytical framework that tells me something about the world, and in turn allows me to differentiate it, genuinely, from other forms of thinking. Right now, it doesn’t. In a nice blog entry at the Harvard Business Review, Peter Merholz (9 October, 2009) shared a smiliar lament. He wrote, “We have librarians, and historians and fine artists. All of these disciplinary backgrounds allow people to bring distinct perspectives to our work [in business], allowing for insights that wouldn’t be achieved if we were all cut from the same cloth. Do we need to espouse ‘library thinking,; “history thinking,’ and ‘arts thinking.’” Merholz was right to call this absurd and to point out that design thinking is merely clever repackaging of some social science — but sadly, not good social science.

The reason this troubles me, rather than just distracts me, is that “design thinking” is directing creative attention away from the pursuit of intellectual clarity, and the progression of design as a serious endeavor. And part of that failure is ours. Ours as a design community. And at this point, for this reason, I will include myself among this world of designers.

Our collective failure to demand clarity from ideas — especially when our ideas lead to actions of moral consequence — is an expression of moral weakness. It takes courage to demand clarity. To stand in front of the masses and say, “I don’t understand. You are going to need to explain that again.” And an idea continues to make no sense, we must entertain the notion that the fault is not ours. Some things in the world are wrong. And it requires courage to say so.

I would like to see a new contract formed between design and public policy. But only if that contract is well written.
I want to end this presentation by briefly mentioning what we’ve done to establish a new agenda and programme of work for design and public policy.

In June of this year, the SNAP project at UNIDIR, in cooperation with the Said Business School at Oxford, and the Center for Local Strategies Research at the University of Washington, hosted an agenda-setting event called Strategic Design and Public Policy. It included top thinkers and practitioners in cultural research, design, and international peace and security. It put together a real and serious agenda. It is not as shiny as some of the other things on offer today. But I assure you, isn’t dull either.

In considering those three circles again, it is now clear – following that event – that there are serious issues between and among all three of these thematic areas that are going to need attention if a new model for legitimate and socially beneficial design is to be developed. We need to step away from metaphor and mystical thinking, and get serious about strategic design.

The Strategic Design and Public Policy agenda, created at Glen Cove in New York, explicitly notes the theoretical, methodological and practical gaps between the generation of knowledge and its application to design processes, on the one hand, and the integration of design processes and products into public policy on the other. We view these as matters for attention, and challenges, not obstacles.

In the discussion that drew the event to a close, participants from cultural research, design (especially service design) and public policy suggested next steps as an agenda for strategic design and public policy. These steps are already being implemented in at least half a dozen organizations including UNIDIR at the UN, the University of Washington, and live|work, among others. It is a detailed agenda, but there are four categories for action.

These are:
1. Supporting cooperation to develop new methods, tools and practices to learn more about each others’ ways of working;
2. Developing resources for cooperative action;
3. Promoting awareness of strategic design and its value for public policy and programming; and
4. Pursuing solutions for social betterment through social action.

This cooperative agenda opens possibilities for research, design, and public policy to start working in closer synergy in a rigorous, ethical and systematic manner to build the foundations we all need to take more confident action for the public good. And I hope you’ll join us.

I’m delighted to speak here at Götenberg on this topic, and my hope is that is the beginning of a conversation and not the end.

Making Crafting Designing, 2011

2011-03-04T21:09:00.023Z

Image: Dials showing different levels of near real-time twitter activity in several locations, British Library

This is a short summary of the MakingCraftingDesigning symposium held in February at the wonderfully-named Akademie Schloss Solitude, near Stuttgart, organised by Sarah Owens (Zurich University of the Arts) and Björn Franke (Royal College of Art, London). Attended by around 100 people, mostly from design schools in Europe with a sprinkling of others, the event was particularly enjoyable in the way it ranged from discussions of design thinking and practice to questions of new sites for human activity in creating the artificial such as bio- and nanotech. By drawing such a huge canvas, I think the organisers succeeding in raising some big questions about whether the term design is useful to cover both the former and the latter. As usual please be aware I may have misunderstood the speakers and any mistakes in presenting their ideas are mine.

Richard Sennett (New York University/London School of Economics) is a well-known sociologist, recently fashionable among designers because of his book The Craftsman, which asserted the importance of material skills and practices within a range of contemporary contexts, not just those we call 'craft' industries. Sennett gave his keynote on the first night, giving some insight into his next book which he had just finished. The basic idea seemed to be about the difficulty and critical importance of co-operation in the contemporary world especially getting along with and working with those we don't like or understand. Sennett made a distinction between the dialectical and dialogical underpinnings of cooperation and also between sympathy and empathy. Acknowledging difference was an important part of this thinking.

The rest of the symposium took place the following day. Sarah Owens and Bjorn Franke gave an introduction explaining a series of distinctions they wanted to make between making, bricolage, crafting and design, the latter seen as detached from specific design disciplines, with a higher level of abstraction than the other three terms, and a greater level of planning and awareness of the possibilities and consequences of productive action.

Rick Poynor, a well-known design writer and critic, kicked off the day with a wide-ranging review of key developments in design over the past decade. He mentioned four, starting with Design Thinking in its various, not-always-complementary instantiations including the Kyoto Design Declaration, Tim Brown's book and Roger Martin's book. He noted "There's a lot of stories we could tell about design but Design Thinking is the one getting attention." Second was Critical Design which for Poynor started with Bruno Munari, author of Design as Art (1971), as well as Jan van Torn, about whom he has written a book, and Dunne & Raby. The point of critical design, he thought, was to make it clear that design is loaded, and to reveal the codes by which it is produced and consumed. The third theme he noted over the past decade was design criticism, with a wide range of print and now online journals and sites for discussion. As a co-founder of Design Observer, Poynor knows what he is talking about - a fast-changing, urgent hunger to make sense of the worlds we have made and which make us. Finally, Poynor raised Design as Politics, the title of Tony Fry's new book, which offers an important challenge to how design is currently understood within and without design practice and education. (Rick's description and photos of the environment in which the conference took place is a beautiful read.)

Next up was activist (in Reclaim the Streets) and cultural theorist Stephen Duncombe (New York University). His talk "The Art of the Impossible: The Politics of Designing Utopia" reminded us of one important aspect of design and art practices - creating artefacts that fire the imagination. He talked about how Thomas More's Utopia was both satirical and sincere. The point, he said, was that if a designer or writer leads you into an imaginary world, you begin to question what is normal or absurd. The self-conscious absurdity built into More's Utopia is a prompt for the reader - what is proposed is so ridiculous that it has to be modified, and this is the starting point. Contemporary examples he gave of people doing this included Julian Bleecker, and the Yes Men. "These impossible dreams open up new realities..they ask what if, without seriously saying, this is what...They are models that stimulate invention...left out for all of us to imagine with..."

Next was my talk, Designing Future Practices, which I will publish below. This paper speculated that what designers are designing is future practices.

Susanne Küchler (University College London) is an anthropologist whose background includes extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and Polynesia but who has been studying contemporary design more recently. Kuchler reminded us that in ethnography, researchers repeatedly ask "What difference does something make?" She emphasized the long-standing preoccupation with material artefacts that is part of anthropology which has revealed something about how designs shape cultures. But now, she said, maybe it is the end of any idea of there being a unified idea of design because of the advent of new materials. She described the recent development of materials libraries and where these come from and what they are doing. There are new materials that have been designed and developed way before a product design or architecture project might happen. Materials scientists and engineers are involved in inscribing properties into new materials that in a way makes design proceed in a particular direction - design before design(ers). She asked what kinds of thinking and making environments do we need in the 21st century to liberate ourselves from the stranglehold of existing disciplines? And how can we develop a language to engage with scientists who are designing things that design? Since I mostly notice the intersection of design and anthropology focussed on designing new things/services/organisations, it was fascinating to hear an anthropological discussion about design that focussed on the thingness of materials before designers get their hands on them.

Alas at this point, the adrenaline had worn off and I was less focussed on the presentations by the next speakers, to whom I apologise. One was by philosopher of science Alfred Nordmann (Technische Universität Darmstad). He described how technoscience is trying to do things that exceed the imagination but result in the creation of mundane things in the world that evade rational control. His concern seemed to be challenging to the idea that technoscience can steer human nature in planned and predictable ways, something that I would hope designerly designers would be modest about. Finally, Oliver Müller (University of Freiburg) used the idea of Homo Faber to reflect on the implications of biotechnologies that support to enhance humans. By interfering directly with our biological selves, he suggested, we are the craftsman, tool, and product all at the same time.

Designing future practices

Notes for talk for MakingCraftingDesigning, Akademia Schloss Solitude, February 2011

Lucy Kimbell
Director, Fieldstudio
Associate fellow, Said Business School, University of Oxford

Introduction

The question I want to pose today is, what is it that designers are designing when they do design? We think we know the answer to this because it’s clear that many designers design things: stuff. The tangible and digital objects that are part of day-to-day life.

But in the past decade something has been happening in professional design practice, and in other fields that traditionally we didn’t think of as design, that makes it important to revisit this question.

There are design agencies that say they help tackle big social challenges. There are design entrepreneurs who set up new ways for public services such as the police to engage with the public. There are consultancies using design-led approaches to design new social ventures to reduce dependence on the state.
There are multi-disciplinary teams who say they use a design process to re-think environments, products, experiences, and curricula for schools. There are people working in international security who want to work with professional designers to redesign disarmament programmes within the UN context using local knowledge to design local action. And of course there are conferences and workshops at which people come together to try to make sense of all of this.

Ways of thinking about what designers design

First let’s review some of the different ways of thinking about what designers design.

1. The first is the artefact-centred approach. This is embedded in the ways that most Western design education is currently taught, as you can see from this slide from a well-known art and design school. This institution offers post-graduate courses based on different kinds of designed thing, from communications to textiles to products.

Although there are projects and indeed courses that challenge this convention, with moves to “post-disciplinary design” or to a generalised “design thinking”, the artefact-centred categorization is broadly true. To be more accurate, the focus of design is not just an object, but the object and a user’s engagement with it. An echo of this object-based division of design is the idea of there being “four orders” of design which are signs, things, interactions and action (Buchanan 1992; 2001).

However there are a number of problems with this approach. The most important is that a focus on specific types of thing, such as a toothbrush, can miss the situated nature of our engagements with designed things in relation to many other things in our social worlds. Taking one type of artefact and idealised user in isolation from the practices and contexts that link it to many others, amputates many of the important sets of relations that make things meaningful and purposeful.

2. A second way of thinking about what designers design is to say they design systems. This has been developed by scholars and practitioners influenced by anthropology and sociology over the past two decades. Key names here are Pelle Ehn, Winograd and Flores, and Lucy Suchman, and others working in the communities known as participatory design and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), working mostly on the design of computer-based systems. Their insights came from studying not just artefacts – although those are important – but what people do with them, in spite of them, around them and in relation to them. The focus on users’ work practices shifted attention away from artefacts to the idea of designing systems that are both social and technical. An important idea here was that agency was distributed – it wasn’t just the user that mattered (privileged by a humanistic or rational approach), or the artefact (as hoped for by some designers), but rather the integration of people and things in places in relation to many of other socio-material arrangements that constitutes the world of design.

I cannot hope to summarise this huge body of work. But I will refer to a paper from 2008 by Pelle Ehn, in which he does so, and directly addresses the evolving object of design. Using Wittgenstein’s language games, Ehn talks about design games and focuses on two kinds of game. The first design game is what happens in design projects, when the focus is design-for-use before use. The tradition of Participatory Design with which he was very involved in developing has a strong focus on designing with people and understanding their uses of things. The second design game takes place after a design project, at what Ehn calls “use-time”, when the designers are finished with their work, and are possibly even dead, but still people are using their designs. Thinking ahead to use-time, the object of design is then to create design games which users will engage with in their own ways, understanding that this can never be final or complete.

Although this is useful, there are still questions to explore. One is how to conceptualize in more detail design-after-design: what happens when users engage with designs and infrastructures after project time, at use time; and what happens when they engage with artefacts in quite different contexts to the ones the designer imagined and designed for. A first question is working out an analytical category that helps us think about what that future use is. Can we talk about designing design games when the actors are extremely dispersed in time and space? A second question is, how do some kinds of usage stablise and become routine? A third is, how do different timeframes affect the idea of designers designing design games for design by others after design?

3. In search of ways of understanding this better, I have been drawn to work by scholars in the social sciences who offer another way of thinking about the social world in which designers design, specifically theories of practice. Key writers here are Theodore Schatzki and Elizabeth Shove, drawing on earlier work by thinkers such as Bourdieu, Foucault, Giddens and also Heidegger.

Now, Ehn’s work is centrally concerned with use as practice, based on the idea that it is through our practices that we construct reality. Further, he says “As designers we are involved in reforming practice” (Ehn, 1988: 147). But he stops short of saying this is what designers design.

In what follows I will aim to show why thinking about designing future practices offers something useful to theories of design, and suggest what the consequences might be.

Designing future practices

The proposition I want to explore is that what designers are designing is future practices. I want to see what the opportunities might be of thinking of design in this way.

There is not time to go into practice theory in detail. One important idea is that practices are made up of several elements, which cannot be taken in isolation. Andreas Reckwitz (2002) describes practices as “a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz 2002: 249). A second idea is that practices are dynamic – they can change over time as different elements change. A third is a focus on routines – the repeated, mundane activities that constitute the social world.

As Elizabeth Shove has pointed out in her work on the environmental impact of everyday practices of consumption, new designs for power showers lead to much higher individual water consumption at a time when authorities in many countries want us to conserve water. But instead of looking at bits of what goes on in showering in isolation, Shove argues that we understand how the contemporary practice of showering has come to be – combining both materials, stories and images, and knowledge and skills. Trying to change one of these, without attending to the other entwined elements of the practice, is, she argues, unlikely to be successful.

The idea of practices, therefore, presents a way of ordering what happens in the future in relation to designed artefacts. It shifts attention away from infrastructures or design games that some designers had a hand in designing. In the future, at use time, there are people and their bodies and minds engaging with stuff within particular sets of relations, which constitute particular meanings. Design is always unfinished because practices mobilize artefacts and people and bring them into new kinds of relation with one another.

Ways of revealing practice

Most designers don’t think about their work in this way, although there are inklings of it. The consultancy IDEO, for example, talks in terms of cell-phoning, rather than cell-phones. But in general the default concepts in contemporary design practice are things, users, and contexts, but not social structures and ordering.

I want to offer up an artefact from professional design practice, which is heading in this direction, specifically the customer journey map created by designers of services.

Service designers see their work as concerned with designing all the tangible and intangible elements of a service, both the digital and material touchpoints and scripts within the service encounter. Although service designers do not talk in terms of designing practices, all the elements I outlined earlier are there in the customer journey map – there are people, minds, knowledge, stories, artefacts, structure and agency. The customer journey map is not the only artefact that is required to do this design work, but it is one that tries to articulate the multiple dimensions of using a designed thing in practice, and understanding these routines to be situated, embodied and relational.

I think this view of what designers design is relevant not just to designers of services but to designers of products, communications, buildings and also policies and strategies. It does not diminish the need to pay attention to artefacts – far from it – but it understands the meaning, value and effects of artefacts to be constituted in practice in relation to bodies, minds, stories and knowledge.

Practices presenting a choice

I said earlier that Ehn’s work was based on the idea of practice but that he drew back from stating that designers design practices. For Ehn, what designers design are cultural-material design games (1988; 2008). The context of his early work was a Scandinavian approach to system design that found ways to involve workers in the design process for political reasons. This involved doing system design differently to serve the users – to make the resulting computer artefacts work better in relation to people’s work practices ie to design new computer artefacts that fit with practices, and sometimes creating new ones.

In contrast, Tony Fry (2007; 2009) has argued designers should design new practices to change habitus, to use Bourdieu’s term. Fry’s concern is how design is implicated in making an unsustainable world. Designers need to understand the effects of their stuff on the world and their role in reproducing a way of living which is not sustainable, and to change it into one that is. His response is to propose a “redirective practice” with the ambition of designing another habitus, so that as humans we have a different way of being-in-the-world.

So here is an interesting dilemma – whether to design future practices that are based on how people are now, as Ehn argues, or whether to design future practices that change how people are in the future, as Fry suggests. The former comes out of a Scandinavian commitment to a particular kind of democratic participation; the latter emerges from a deep concern with whether there will be a future in the future. Both are political but have a quite different set of implications.

Clearly there is no right answer to this, but even framing the question highlights the importance of design’s role in world-making.

Implications for teaching and learning and practice

Briefly, I finish with some suggestions about how this approach might change how designers practice and how they are educated.

Although some designers have been moving towards a kind of dematerialized design thinking or to trans-disciplinary design, away from objects, people still need to design stuff. So my proposal is, that designers design stuff but understand the objects they make to be part of existing practices or involved in creating new routines in the future that are unfinished, contingent and, importantly, to some extent unknowable.

The practice-based approach affects how designers of stuff conceive of what they are doing in these ways:
1. It draws our attention to how new designs can create new meanings, knowledge and skills, and potentially new ways of being in the world.
2. It highlights the unintended consequences of designs, which cannot always be known in advance, yet for which designers might consider themselves accountable.
3. It emphasizes the dispersed agency of the various actors that constitute future designs: and makes the designed stuff always in relation to other stuff and people.
4. It raises questions about the time-frames over which designers’ work has effects.

How to bring these ideas into teaching and learning? I speak as someone who for over five years has been teaching exactly this approach to MBA students taking my elective in design. As managers and entrepreneurs, these students are already doing a kind of design activity although they rarely think of it like that. They design products, services, projects, ventures and organizations which create new kinds of practice involving both bodies, minds, things, agency and so on, disrupting existing practices and seeking to modify or replace them with a new kind.

Among other things in my class I
(a) Disrupt the conventions of the lecture theatre arrangement designed for Harvard Business School style case teaching by having students arrange themselves as they want to around the room creating visual artefacts together in teams, a symbolic disruption of one form of education by another;
(b) Create opportunities for people from non-design backgrounds to understand the importance of material artefacts in organizations and their various instantiations as products and services within organizational practices; and
(c) Give them opportunities to use designerly methods such as mapping the service journey or visualizing the service ecology.

Whether this approach is taught to MBAs or to more conventional design students, one important question is then what kinds of knowledge are required. I would say a passing knowledge of sociology and anthropology is essential now that design has realised it is profoundly social. But if you trawl the websites of design schools, the Venn diagram you usually see shows intersecting circles labelled “design”, “business” and “technology”. Ignoring the social worlds in which designed artefacts acquire their value and meaning is a weakness in much current design education.

Conclusion

To conclude, I have argued that although we still fall back on the idea that designers design stuff, it’s more than time to bring in work from Participatory Design, CSCW and other design-based fields that have drawn extensively on anthropology and social studies of science. The contributions here have included attending to users’ work practices; to see agency as distributed; and to be concerned with thinking about design-after-design at use time. I then explored work from theories of practice that offer a slightly different way of thinking about the things that designers design emphasizing routinised ways of doing things – the habits that we take up and the habits that take us up. I believe this is a resource for designers – whose stuff already has unintended consequences. Thinking in terms of future practices offers one way of bringing these more directly into view. However whether designers want to change practices to serve people better, or change practices to change people, is a question that designers must answer for themselves.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Simon Blyth and Cameron Tonkinwise for their feedback on earlier drafts.

Note: This essay is likely to be revised considerably for the proposed book which comes out of this conference. Comments welcome.

MBA Entrepreneurship Project workshops 2011

2011-01-27T13:09:00.011Z

This year, I have again run workshops for MBA students doing the core Entrepreneurship Project(EP) at Said Business School. The EP presents students with some important challenges
- how to explore an idea and develop it sufficiently to create a credible business plan
- how to integrate the various aspects of a new venture including strategy, marketing, operations, HR and finance
- how to work together collaboratively in their teams.

My workshops help with all three difficulties at the tricky early stage of students' projects. Even if they have managed to agree on a project title and a paragraph describing it, often they don't know what to do next. My approach is to use methods and tools from creative design that help explore what the idea is (and reject it and come up with a better one if the team wants to) from different angles, synthesizing key aspects such as end users (or customers) and other key actors, artefacts, technologies and processes, and also integrating organizational functions for the proposed new venture.

The important thing is that these methods are exploratory - they help the team look into and understand a bit better the central idea of their EP project which could be a new service, a bit of technology, or a relationship between people in one place and people somewhere else. The only testing we can do in the workshops is exposing the teams' ideas to one another - through design critiques that give teams valuable feedback from many brains.

The four methods we used were
(1) creating storyworlds: visualizations mapping the key actors involved in a project, starting with a person or a thing;
(2) visualizing the customer journey: representing this as yet imaginary encounter between the user or customer and the enterprrise's offering;
(3) drawing rough sketches of the user interfaces of key touchpoints in an offering; and
(4) making sketches of the service ecology or value constellation to identify actors and relationships between them.

Some teams found some of them hard to create. But they helped the students articulate to one another, for the moment, what their idea is and its implications, which is important to help them identify what research they need to do next.

A year in designing for service: 2010

2010-12-16T16:54:00.027Z

This time last year I said something like service design was now pretty established. So what do I say a year later? Avoiding any single metaphor I could it's a little bit firmer, a bit bigger, a bit more rounded.

In the UK, the year has been dominated by a limited economic recovery and the general election in May, with speculation about what that might mean for public services.The only question was, how big will the cuts be? Even once the Conservative-Liberal Coalition formed, months passed before the cuts in public spending began to take shape affecting nearly every area of public life. What this means for public service commissioners and managers is that service design might be reframed urgently as "how can we do more for less?", with additional pressure to be more transparent and accountable.

But into this mix came a new term - the big society (experimenting with lower case here as a form of resistance) - which is still to be fully defined although this early articulation of the vision remains useful. Since the big society is supposed all about local empowerment, innovation and new ways of doing things, this would seem to be an opportunity for designers, especially service designers but I think it is slightly to early to tell. There are various efforts to understand these developments and seize on this as opportunity for professional design. The Design Council, Institute for Government and NESTA hosted seminars discussing different aspects of the big society, while a review of DOTT Cornwall's work, which has seen the application of design processes and methods to a range of socio-economic issues in Cornwall, proposed this work as an example of big society in action. But is (service) design ready to take these issues? One person I interviewed, responsible for local government services, saw designerly design as a way of achieving innovation - but a key issue for him was the capacity of the organisation to understand its value. The question of the value of design, including service design, will remain an important one for the next year, something that was a key part of the conversation at the Design Management Institute conference in London.

In terms of numbers of people, the Service Design Network conference in Berlin suggested that business was thriving around Europe and Brazil too, with a separate conference in the US. The ServDes research conference in Linköping, Sweden, which I was not able to attend, picked papers which included, to my reading, a bit more rigour but still familiar names rooted in design disciplines. In academic terms, special issues on service design in development at the Journal of Behaviour & Information Technology and International Journal of Design will support a more peer-reviewed dissemination of developing knowledge and on the PhD-Design list there were a few sparks of interest in service design. I'd still like to a see a conference that brings together a mix of speakers as varied as Steve Vargo, Pelle Ehn, Wanda Orlikowski, Lucy Suchman and Tony Fry to talk about designing for service but that might be a year or two away, or never. When I look at the pages of consultancies I know the numbers of employees and associates are still small. The twittersphere suggests to me that service design is still a small community where agreement, rather than difference and dissent, is valued but this is of course shaped by where I am looking. (Please dissent below.)

One of the most exciting examples of service design came from somewhere unexpected. What we Londoners now call Boris bikes (after the current Mayor Boris Johnson, although they were planned by the previous one, Ken Livingstone) is known officially as Barclays Cycle Hire. Similar to schemes in other cities, the London scheme allows you to unlock a bicycle from a docking station, ride off, park it at another station, and be on your way cheaply, efficiently and without producing much carbon dioxide. It was rolled out and runs without a lot of fuss - well designed, well implemented, well used, and already a familiar part of London life. Launched in July, by December there were 108,000 registered users (according to the Evening Standard). Who was it designed by? Why, that well-known service design organization Serco, which designs and runs all sorts of services including prisons. The scheme is a great example of the internet of things realized as a service (including RFID tags in the bikes and data on the scheme made public and presented by various people such as here). It presents a challenge to most discussions of service design I hear. Firstly, your "experience" is constructed at least as much by your own pedalling, road sense, and the weather, as by the touchpoints in the service. And second, the service would not exist without considerable investments in political, institutional and financial capital; the designing of the organizational ecology and the associated processes is as much a part of the service as the bikes or the apps. One aspect of the service I am less impressed with, pointed out to me by Alison Prendiville, is the way the branding (in Barclays Bank's blue) has how made its way around much of inner London, competing with other London brands including those of the borough councils, Transport for London and the Mayor's office.

New books included Christian Bason's Leading Public Sector Innovation, partly drawing on his organization Mindlab's work in Denmark. A highly illustrated book edited by Marc Stickdorn (in which I have a short chapter) also came out making the claim This is Service Design Thinking. I look forward to seeing where the "thinking" tag moves things. Finally Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers' What's Mine is Yours became a (nice-looking) text to wave at people to prove - look! - things ARE changing for the better. I'm looking forward to books including Daniela Sangiorgi and Anna Meroni's and others in progress by Joe Heapy at Engine and Ben Reason, Lavrans Lovlie and Andy Polaine, and there are bound to be more.

My own circumstances changed. After five years on the faculty at Said Business School, my fellowship came to an end and I left, somewhat unhappily. I will still be teaching my MBA elective there, which brings to the class experiential learning of design practices, knowledge of design management and a particular focus on designing for service. In 2009-10 48 MBAs took the class; I have yet to hear how many have picked it for this academic year. I finally finished a paper on service design I've been writing for three years. I did keynotes on service design at the Design Management Institute conference (the text is here) and at the Service Design Network (the video is here). Leaving full time research has however freed me up to explore the value of academic research in consultancy, particularly around service innovation and I have enjoyed working with Engine researching the drivers of change on service organizations, and culture-led service and organization design with TaylorHaig. I also helped Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research organize an event looking at the possibility of bringing design-based approaches to security programmes and policy. Next year I might finally get my book proposal to the editor...in the meantime, happy new year.

v1.1 with errors corrected, sorry, MrStickdorn

Service design at a crossroads

2010-10-19T18:04:00.023Z

Illustration credit Lisa Gornick

Lucy Kimbell
Director, Fieldstudio
Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School

Keynote at Service Design Network Conference, Berlin, 14 October 2010

Introduction

A management consultant, a designer and a cultural anthropologist go into a bar for a drink.

I’ve had a long day helping my client be more efficient and more effective, says the management consultant. I need a drink. And give me a receipt so I can put it on expenses.

The anthropologist sits down next to her. I need a drink too, he says, but while I’m here can I observe what you are doing and take some notes?

The designer sits down next to them. I’ll invent my own drink, he says and gets busy creating an amazing concoction with the bartender.

The time comes to pay the bill.

The designer’s bill is €108. All those special ingredients and so many iterations. But it was worth it, he says. Drunkenly.

The anthropologist’s bill is €7 because he kept having sips of everyone else’s drinks. But he’ll have a terrible hangover from mixing his drinks.

The management consultant ends up with no bill. Why are your drinks free? ask the other two. Well, she says to the designer, I told the barkeeper how to roll out and make money out of the drink you invented. And to the anthropologist, she says, I told him to watch you going round talking to all the customers and find out why they really come here.

Can you teach us how to do this? the designer and the anthropologist ask. Sure, says the management consultant, but the next round is on you.

This story has the structure of a joke but behind these caricatures of three professions lies something more serious. I want to use this story as a way of reflecting on the origins of what we currently call service design and to raise some questions about where it might go next as a field, as a profession and as an emergent discipline.

There are a number of competing stories about service design. One is that it’s a new interdiscipline, a mix of concepts, methods and tools from several different fields, brought together to address the challenges that organisations face as they try to improve and innovate in services. As an interdiscipline it is presented as a happy fusion of the best bits of management or business, design and technology, and the social sciences. In this version of service design, the incompatibilities between the values and worldviews of these different disciplines are smoothed away to produce a better user experience and increased business value.

A second story about service design is that it is the underpinning of anything and everything. This story rests firstly on an expanded version of design usually credited to Herbert Simon (1996) who proposed that what people who want to change existing situations into preferred ones are doing is design, and that therefore design is the core of the professions from medicine to business to engineering. A second foundation is recent research in services marketing, for example Steve Vargo and Bob Lusch’s (2004) idea that service underpins all marketing transactions. If we combine these two ideas – everything is design and everything is service then – wow – service design is key to everything, and a theory of service design would have the status of a Theory of Everything.

A third story about service design is that it is going to shift designers away from their traditional preoccupation with objects and their roles in cocreating the world of unsustainable mass consumption that we live in. In this story, service design redesigns design. The UK consultancy live|work’s early emphasis on using not owning, and work by Ezio Manzini and others inherits a longer tradition in design of critique and questioning. This version of service design places an emphasis on accountability, and asks who or what is service design serving?

These are just three stories about service design – the Interdisciplinary story, Theory of Everything story, and the Redesigning Design story. There are, of course, others. No single person involved in the communities that make up the thing we currently call service design can offer the authoritative account of what it is, where it has come from and where it is going because it is messy, emergent and communal. So what I will do today is offer some reflections on what is going on around us, and pose some questions which, I hope, have something to say about where service design goes next.

Changing contexts

In what follows I note several recent developments shaping the landscape in which professional service design will continue to develop. In each of them, something that looks rather like service design is going on, but is being done in a particular way, often not called service design, or done by people who think of themselves as designers of services. By examining these trajectories, I hope to suggest what steps professional service design might take next.

Carnivorous management consultants
If you read the market research reports on utilities, telecoms, banking and other service industries, there are two important trends. First, the idea that customer experience is a way for service providers to differentiate themselves in mature markets, and second, that organizations will continue to outsource what they see as non-core services. The big IT and management consultancies are ready with their offerings. CapGemini, for example, offers Customer Experience Transformation. This starts with customer insight, then involves developing the customer journey, market positioning, identifying opportunities, and measuring results. Sound familiar? This is the high level thinking that service design consultants want to do, but if management consultants do it, then the designers are left with crafting the touchpoints. But what does not appear here is what a design orientation brings to service design: repeated quick cycles of prototyping and testing propositions, let alone the traditions from Participatory Design of engaging end users in co-design.

Clients doing it for themselves
In a context in which human resources and accounting services can be outsourced, it is a challenge to argue that design is a core capability within an organization. However in reports on the UK design industry, for example, evidence of companies down-sizing their in-house teams in 2000, shifted a decade later to organizations investing in building in-house design teams (although their budgets fell) . Once shifted inside organizations, what is lost in this translation of design’s attentiveness to experiences and aesthetics, let alone its (sometimes) critical and holistic eye? The previous UK government, for example, invested in a knowledge base for pubic service managers to help them create better customer experiences . What happens when designerly concepts and methods are appropriated by clients and propagated by them for people who don’t think of themselves as designers?

Branding on a bandwagon
For branding agencies, service design is an obvious new territory for them to take ownership of. As custodians of large brands, they claim to understand and shape the nature of the relationship customers have with their client organizations. Their core activities – developing customer insights, deep market research, crafting propositions – are already a kind of design and their understanding of what connects people to brands, and their commercial relationships at high levels in organizations, mean they are well-placed to design services. Consultancy WolffOlins’ website , for example, proposes seeing brands as platforms, by which they mean asking brands to consider whether they give power to consumers, or create ways for customers to participate in the brand value and do that with many others, using network effects. But what is not evident here is the internal focus of service design. What service designers have learned from bitter experience, or from reading some management literature, is that the delivery of a designed customer experience often requires redesigning processes and employees’ roles and paying attention to organizational culture and design.

Public services under pressure
In the new economic order, in which banks which were saved by public investment are able to go back to their ways of doing business without much censure, while public budgets are cut around the world, one thing is clear. We need new ways to understand what public services can do for us and our roles in shaping and contributing to the public sphere at a time when there is less money available to invest in them. In the UK, something that looks a bit like service design is happening, but coming from the new coalition government whose major activities since being voted in have been to plan severe budget cuts. This vision of a Big Society says “We want to give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want.” In this vision, people come together to work together because “we are all in it together”, according to Prime Minister David Cameron. It sounds like a perfect opportunity for service designers to step in and help these citizens and communities work together and use their professional skills to guide the public service professionals who have been squandering public money. But it raises questions about what really underlies ideas like David Cameron’s Big Society – and larger questions about the social worlds that service design can help create. If we acknowledge that design is not neutral, and that the unintended consequences of designs may not be known for some years, even decades, it becomes important that service design, with its aspirations to redesigning the social, begins to engage more deeply with social, cultural and political theories about who has power, and how, and why, and ask itself to who or what as a profession service designers should be accountable.

Changing consumption practices
The final trajectory I want to point to is the challenges posed by climate change which, despite serious research, seems to be a problem for the future, rather than a problem for now. At a recent conference on enterprise and the environment, for example, speakers repeatedly contrasted the role of governments in setting targets, creating incentives and regulating to produce new behaviours that have lower carbon impact, versus the role of businesses in modifying activities to produce new behaviours among consumers. What was missing at this conference was evidence of the emergence of service ventures creating new consumption practices outside of big business, which bypass the carrot-or-stick dualism which waits for governments to act, while the planet warms up. Experiments in transition towns, sharable services and other kinds of low-carbon enterprises involve a design orientation and an attentiveness to new ways of conceiving of value. An opportunity here is for designers of services to bring their skills and knowledge into configurations in which there is no obvious client, and in which they have to become designer-entrepreneurs in order to scale up their ideas.

Proposal

In each of these examples I have identified a trajectory – something that looks rather like service design but that is not necessarily thought of that way, presenting both challenges and opportunities. For each of them I have identified a question that I believe service design could find answers to. Combining them, I offer a particular way of conceiving of service design in the near future. It draws on the underlying professions and disciplines that we find in service design today, but proposes a slightly different configuration for tomorrow.

1. While managerial service design can generate customer insights and visualise customer journeys today, tomorrow’s service design can emphasize a design orientation that is centrally concerned with iterative prototyping and testing. Conducting what Michael Schrage (forthcoming) calls design experiments, this service design is well-suited to futures in which organizations need to develop and maintain an open stance about what is the right thing to do next and need help in doing this.
2. While organizations are building in-house capabilities in service design and customer experience today, tomorrow’s service design can make sure that the aesthetics of service is important. Having resisted being confused with mere styling for a decade or more, designers have forgotten how to argue the case for aesthetics mattering but should revisit one of the core things that distinguishes their work from other professions (a point also made by Cameron Tonkinwise in a paper at the Design Thinking Research Symposium 8, Sydney, October 2010).
3. While branding and marketing agencies are moving into designing service experiences today, tomorrow’s service design can bring its ethnographic eye and management expertise into working inside organizations to help them redesign operations and resources in order to deliver services efficiently and effectively but without wasting opportunities for improvement and innovation.
4. While governments find ways to reform or cut public services and call it unleashing community engagement today, tomorrow’s service design can bring its anthropological and sociological expertise into asking critical questions about what kinds of social and public worlds are being created, by whom, and to what end.
5. While governments and big business make limp attempts to reduce carbon emissions through changed behaviours today, tomorrow’s service design can combine the design orientation with a deep understanding of practices to shift from consultancy to mobilise new entrepreneurial offerings.

This is a modest proposal for a way of thinking about designing for service in the near future, which tries not to lose the particular contributions that different disciplines can make to designing for service and the important differences between them. However instead of an interdiscipline in which these differences are smoothed away, I propose a version of service design in which contestation is acknowledged and valued. To go back to the story about the management consultant, the designer and the anthropologist, this version of designing for service takes characteristics of each profession and emphasizes them. The designer insists on aesthetics, novelty and repeated experimentation. The anthropologist invests in careful, close study to understand structures and practices. And the management consultant finds ways to routinise, scale and make money. Each of these core activities has something to offer as the field engages with the challenges and opportunities I outlined above, but in unpredictable ways. Design’s traditional focus on aesthetics and novelty may breed disruption in ways that do not suit highly structured organizations. Management’s reductionism to efficiency and effectiveness may crush creativity and ignore material detail. Anthropology’s commitment to careful analysis of practices and structures may slow things down.

Returning to the three stories about service design I introduce earlier, this future version of service design is not, then, an interdiscipline that smoothes away important differences between professions. Nor is it a Theory of Everything, on the basis that everything is designed or everything is service. It is closer to Redesigning Design because it rests on an understanding of professional design practice that is concerned with (re)making the world in which we live and which we continue to shape, whether we acknowledge it or not. Thought of this way, service design has some implications for design itself.

A management consultant, a designer and an anthropologist go into a bar for a drink. The designer is drunk on his creativity. The anthropologist has a hangover from mixing his drinks. The manager is making money. This is a picture of service design today. What we do want it to be tomorrow?

References

Schrage, M. (forthcoming). Getting Beyond Ideas: The Future of Rapid Innovation. Wiley.
Simon, Herbert. A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vargo, S. & Lusch, R. (2004). Evolving to a New Dominant Logic in Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68(1): 1-17.

Thanks to Kate Blackmon, Simon Blyth, Duncan Fairfax, Engine, livework, Philip Hill, Alison Prendiville, Steve New, Daniela Sangiorgi, TaylorHaig and Cameron Tonkinwise for several conversations which shaped this piece.

Towards a Fieldstudio

2010-10-08T14:23:00.004Z

My five-year design research fellowship at Said Business School, University of Oxford, ended last week. Although my relationship with the school and the university continues, including teaching on the MBA and MSc Major Programme Management, this change has given me a chance to think about several things including
- how academic research (with varying degrees of what people refer to as rigour and relevance) intersects with professional and social worlds, and
- how design worlds (practices associated mostly with the art school tradition, rather than engineering) engage with social and cultural theories, and
- how managers, entrepreneurs and designers go about what they do and to what effect.

I started at Said with a background as a practitioner in interaction design and design management, and occasional player within contemporary art, already in dialogue with social science researchers in particular those associated with Science and Technology Studies (STS). My reason for moving to the school was to have access to scholarly communities for whom art and design practices were other, but who had (I hoped) some interesting knowledge about the contexts in which design takes place in organizations of different kinds and within social worlds more broadly.

One of the ways I explored these intersections was my five years of developing a curriculum for and teaching a MBA elective in design leadership with a focus on hands-on encounters with design practices, collaborations with designers, engagement with theories of design and design management, underpinned by a particular focus on designing for service. Another was contributing to and learning from academic conferences within distinct traditions, from design (eg Design Research Society and European Academy of Design), management and organization fields (eg European Academy of Management) and within the social sciences (eg European Social Studies of Science and Technology). Practitioner focussed conferences such as the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) and Service Design Network (SDN) were particularly stimulating contexts in which I heard about a range of ways that designers and social scientists are engaging with contemporary organizations and issues and making sense of their work. Some of my contributions are available here (to be reworked soon. I hope.)

My various encounters with strands of social science and cultural research, mostly within organization and management studies, as well as reading in theories and histories of design has left me with a sense that designers need to read more and scrutinize the claims we make and hear. Similarly I became persuaded that the institutional practices and temporalities of academia were not an effective way for interesting and useful ideas to reach non-academics who might be able to digest them and weave them into their practices as managers or designers or activists. At a time when climate change and questions of global social justice are becoming even more pressing, this is not good enough. And responses such as discussions of Mode 2 knowledge, on the one hand, or multidisciplinary collaboration on the other, do not yet connect up with some of the individual or organizational actors who might be able to use some of the important ideas developed in universities and reach audiences and publics who can do things with them and to them.

So I have begun thinking about how to bring these contexts together and what this might look like, without appealing to some notion of a bland interdisciplinarity, but rather understanding that knowledge is created, translated and changed in practice as a kind of social accomplishment that is iterative, ongoing and partial. The knowledge of the academy, or rather academies, is knowledge that has to be worked through in the context of workplaces, homes and within the public sphere and also at the level of identities and desires. This creates the opportunity for something I am tentatively calling a fieldstudio. Combining the playful, messy, iterative inquiries of the art or design studio with the unboundedness of the field and the attentiveness of the ethnographer, the fieldstudio is a way of trying out change-making that takes research and action equally seriously.

Somewhere between a consultancy, a knowledge-transfer hub (in the vernacular of the research funders), or a think-and-make-tank, the fieldstudio inquires into things that matter and makes some matter more than others. It is necessarily collaborative and relational in its productions and enactments. It may be sometimes confidential but in other senses is always public. It understands that research is creative and creativity requires research. It is starting around now. Get in touch if you would like to be involved.

Image: Street at Jaywick, Essex, site of a film being made by Somewhere

Design and STS: EASST 2010 conference, Trento

2010-09-22T19:13:00.017Z

The growing interest among design researchers in science and technology studies and among STS researchers in design and arts practices seemed to reach critical mass this year. At the EASST (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology) conference in Trento, Italy, earlier this month there were two tracks concerned directly with design, another looking at the arts and the sciences, and another on video research, all in response to the theme: Practicing science and technology/performing the social.

This was the first time I had been to a major STS event but was pleased to meet people I know who also travel in design and art contexts. Having a chance to be with several of them in a room together for a few hours was stimulating. I have hung around STS people for several years now - a lot of them hired by my former dean, the late Anthony Hopwood, including Steve Woolgar, who still hasn't got used to being in a business school (see the special issue of Organization, January 2009, Does STS mean business?) and also my collaborator Andrew Barry with whom I made Personal Political Indices. With Nina Wakeford (Goldsmiths) I have set up collaborative projects between sociologists of her acquaintance and my and Nina Pope's MA interaction design students at the Royal College of Art (2005). We co-curated with Alex Hodby an interdsciplinary exhibition as part of the EIASM workshop on Imagining Business in Oxford (2008) which included a catalogue (read some of it here). And last year at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change conference we organized a track on design in collaboration with Laurene Vaughan (RMIT, Melbourne) with Guy Julier (Leeds Met) as respondent. These modest experiments in teaching, presenting research and engaging in dialogue have left me surprised how few the exchanges between design and STS have been.

Within mainstream design studies, other than a special issue of Design Issues (Volume 20, Number 3, Summer 2004) on science and technology studies, and recent posts on the PHD-Design list about the validity or otherwise of Actor Network Theory, I do not think that design researchers have taken STS seriously. Within Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Participatory Design, there are much richer conversations with many of the leading researchers such as Lucy Suchman and Jeannette Blomberg moving between several fields, but much of this research has tended to focus on IT-based design rather than say products, communication design, architecture, or the arts more generally. I think there is potential for the version of design based in industrial design to engage more with STS which made EASST particularly enjoyable.

I cannot do justice to the complexity of the debates in this post (or perhaps even in the PHD I'm supposed to be writing) so here's a lite slacker version. STS research is all about noticing local, situated accomplishments and tracing how stable designs are achieved. Design research and practice is getting more social but without asking itself which version of the social is being enacted. STS research talks about studying performativity and materiality but relies still on written texts for producing and disseminating research. Design attends in detail to the material and often to individual designer's practices but neglects seeing design as a collective activity that is not just the work of professional designers. STS research has spent years studying engineering designers and scientists but has not yet grappled significantly with traditions in design and the arts that are open to speculation, serendipity and things being messy and unfinished.

Most of the time I spent at the track organized by Julien McHardy (Lancaster University), Trevor Pinch (Cornell University) and my pal Nina Wakeford with the title Design, Performativity, STS. Papers ranged from ethnographers talking about their art practice, artists talking about their sociological research into mobility using art methods, sociologists performing the work of doing research (see the photo of two participants trying out the research machine designed by Julien McHardy and Kat Jungnickel) and many more. I did a 15 minute version of my performance lecture One Night With Rats in the Service of Art, which draws on 18 month ethnography of the world of fancy rats and rats in science labs that resulted in a live event at Camden Arts Centre, London in 2005.

I also dipped in and out of the other design track organized by Carl Disalvo (Georgia Institute of Technology), Tobie Kerridge (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths, University of London) with the title Speculation, Design, Public and Participatory Technoscience: Possibilities and Critical Perspectives. This included papers on the materiality or lack of it in critical design, speculative design and public participation. Among others I enjoyed conversations with an artist doing a PhD in sociology, an artist doing a PhD in art practice using STS ideas, an ex designer doing a PhD in sociology about design and a designer doing a PhD in design using STS. To invoke an STS concept - some serious academic monsters here.

On the final day of EASST Nina and I organized an impromtu design and STS session open to all. We structured this by asking participants to suggest topics they had heard in the tracks that they wanted to hear more on, and then invited pairs of speakers to take on a topic for around 20 minutes, before we moved onto another one from the shared pot of topics. This worked well in allowing those of us who had been in different tracks to get a sense of the conversations we had missed and also see where some of the existing conversations between design and STS are eg around engagement and participation and the role of artefacts in research.

On Friday there is another event which some of the same people will be at, evidence of Goldsmiths being potentially an important place for this emerging conversation with new people joining them such as Noortje Marres and Michael Guggenheim. Speakers at Making and Opening: Entangling Design and Social Science include Mike Michael, Nina Wakeford, and Bill Gaver from Goldsmiths and also Michelle Murphy, Pelle Ehn, Lucy Suchman and Harvey Molotch. This looks good.

MBA Design leadership elective 2010 - Exploratory prototyping

2010-07-16T15:36:00.023Z

In this fifth iteration of my MBA elective in Design Leadership at Saïd Business School (SBS), this year I again set up a project giving students an opportunity to experience aspects of the design process first-hand. This project was initiated with Alison Prendiville, course director of the MDes Innovation and Creativity at London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts and involved the 48 MBA students taking my class to work over a day and a half with 10 students from LCC with the aim of exploring prototyping and its role as a visual aid with the aim to interpreting and developing ideas.

This post covers in detail what the two groups of students were asked to do, and includes video highlights showing what the students developed together during two workshops in Oxford in April 2010 and discussion of what they learned about prototyping and design-led innovation. It will be of interest to other educators bringing design approaches to management education, to those setting up other kinds of collaboration based around design practices, and to future Oxford MBA students thinking of taking the class next year.

Exploratory prototyping

One of the things designers emphasize in their working practices is creating visualisations of their ideas, even at very early stages. Whether called a sketch or a prototype or a model, these artefacts play important roles in multi-disciplinary and cross-functional collaborations. Depending on the stage a project is at and who is involved, the terminology used and purpose of a visualization may vary. The aim of this workshop was for the MBAs to develop an understanding of the value - and implications - of different kinds of visualization. For the MDes students, the aim was to go beyond thinking of their device as a product and pay more attention to the service system and business model around it.

This first video shows LCC tutor Cordula Friedlander and I introducing the workshop.

MBA-designer collaboration: Introduction (1 of 4) from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

Workshop 1

Project brief: Post-operative remote monitoring sensory device base station/charger

The starting point was a project that the MDes students had already been working on for some weeks, exploring possible designs for a remote monitoring sensory device for post-operative patients.

Context: As the population is getting progressively older, the need for higher quality and better efficiency in healthcare, both at home and in hospital, is becoming more evident. Healthcare providers are coming under increasing pressure to improve the quality of preventative and post-operative care delivered to patients. It is in the interests both of care providers as well as patients, for the patient to leave hospital to continue recovery at home at the earliest opportunity. However, carer and patient need to be reassured of seamless communication and reliable emergency procedures. The latest sensor technologies and wireless communication could enable the care provider to monitor the remote post-operative patient’s recovery process. Logging and analysing this information will give the patient reassurance, or provide early warning feedback to carers.

Where they got to: Working with medical technology researchers from Cranfield University, LCC students developed and tested suitable shapes and ways of engaging with the device based on the researchers’ idea of having the device in the patient’s ear for the duration of 2 minutes. The purpose was to use prototyping methods to develop a sensory device that allows easy and reassuring usage by the post-operative patient at home and to provide a starting point to develop and explore the service system that would support it. Students were expected to test their prototypes amongst themselves but also with other user groups such as elderly people or children. The prototypes were developed by the LCC students, as a first step to engage and demonstrate, to the medical engineers at Cranfield, explorative ideas on how elderly people may use the technology and how feedback from this group needs to be considered early on in the device’s development.

The result of this work was presented as a starting point for the collaboration with the MBA students, which shifted from a focus on the device and interactions with it, to the larger service system and business model.

The second video shows two of the MDes students from LCC, Anna Kassen and Nicola Sherry, presenting to the MBAs what they do in their programme, the user-centred explorations they had done to date, and the prototypes they had come up with.

MBA-designer collaboration: Briefing (2 of 4) from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

The third video shows the groups of MBAs+MDes students presenting their concepts for the device base station. They came up with these based on working together for only a few hours, in ten teams, in which two or three MBAs worked with one MDes student and their existing prototype for the device. Using simple materials such as salvaged card, plastic and paper, the students were briefed to come up with a 3d prototype of the charging/base station for the sensor device.

Brief: The base station for storing and charging the sensory device needs to be compact, discreet and user-friendly. The unit communicates, reassures and alerts the patient and also transmits pulse and temperature readings to the receiving hospital /doctor. The unit will accompany the patient during his or her recovery period at home. Where in the home is the best place for its location? The patient’s reassurance and ease of use will play a vital part in the success of the device.

The patient will need to know:
- is the unit sufficiently charged?
- is the sensory device positioned correctly when in use/ when charging
- start, finish and 2 minute indication?
- what time of day to take the readings, and how the patient is alerted.
- are the readings normal/reassuring or is some action required?
- what to do in case of readings that are not in the normal range.

Other practical issues to consider are
- product packaging (eg consider re-use)
- hygiene
- cable storage
- user manual, instructions.

The task is not only to prototype a unit that could fulfil all the practical functions listed above but more so to explore the opportunities for a new product identity (eg name, colour, materials etc).

Together, the ten short presentations in response to this brief illustrate the different ways prototyping helps with the process of exploring the design space at an early stage of technology innovation. For some teams, the exploration of the base station raised important questions about the nature of the service it will be part of. For other teams, prototyping the base station/charging unit forced them to make assumptions about how people feel when they have just had an operation and how they might engage with the device. For some teams, it helped to focus on a very specific user (eg a parent of a child who has had an operation).

MBA-designer collaboration: Presentations (3 of 4) from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

This final video captures the discussion we had at the end of the workshop, with reflective contributions both from MBA students (shaped by their diverse backgrounds in marketing, engineering and other fields) and the MDes students (not all of whom are designers by training). The discussion ranges from the detail of some of the ideas the teams came up with, as well as the value of early prototyping in a complex project such as this. It illustrates how even a with limited timescale (here, one day) bringing together people who had not worked together before, using visual methods to explore the possibilities for a new device, raises valuable questions about the device and the wider service system it is part of.

MBA-designer collaboration: Discussion (4 of 4) from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

Two weeks after this first workshop, we had second session at SBS.

Workshop 2

The aim of this workshop was for students to develop a deeper understanding of the device/system by creating personas, using role play, and by creating visualisations of the service journey and business model.

Part 1: Creating personas for the post-operative remote monitoring sensory device

Once team members had familiarised themselves with the 10 prototypes of the device and base station, we asked them to develop an assigned persona, someone from the possible future service ecology around the sensor. We gave them a template to help flesh out some fictional details to make that person come alive in the context of the device/service, for example picking a photograph so you know what they look like, think about where they spend their time and what other technologies and devices they use and are familiar with.

The actors we picked were: a patient, a family member, a surgeon/specialist, a general practitioner/family doctor, a nurse, a receptionist, a friend or online contact, support worker for the device/service, a health visitor and a pet. We asked teams to pick a country they were familiar with to explore how the device/system might work in quite different kinds of healthcare system and culture.

Once the teams had created their persona, we then asked students from each team to test their personas using role play to reveal some of their assumptions by acting out what might happen when a team's persona interacted with other actors in the device/system around questions like these:
- The readings on the device seem high. What next?
- The readings are ok according to the device but the patient does not feel well.
- The patient is not able to use the device.
- The patient does not know if the device is working.

This exercise asked students to combine knowledge from their various specialisms, with their imaginations, and make a number of assumptions about the future device/service system. Working in this way helped make more tangible aspects of the device and its service system and ecology, raising important questions about the business model and possible benefits.

Part 2: Service and business modelling

The final part of the 1.5 day collaboration involved the students again working in mixed teams of MBAs and MDes students, developing visualizations of service and business models for the device/system based on work done in the previous workshops including the physical prototypes and personas.

This led to a discussion about the nature of this specific project which is technology-led, where the focus has been on developing a suitable technology, with some work on researching end user experiences by the MDes students which informed their prototyping but without any knowledge about what business models, if any, have informed the proposed device as it is currently conceived of.

Service modelling
We gave teams a template of the service blueprint (or service journey) (developed from Shostack 1982; Bitner et al 2008; Kimbell 2010). This template helped make explicit the activities involved in instantiating a service, who is doing them and what kinds of resources are involved, from databases to packaging to support staff, arranged over time, in different locations, and where value was being co-created.

Business modelling
Having imagined in some detail actors in the service ecology by creating a blueprint showing how they interconnect, the next task was to use this enriched understanding of the service to sketch potential business models. We used Osterwalder’s (2009) business model canvass leaving it up to the teams to decide what kinds of organizations should be actors in the business model.

Discussion

After one and a half days of working together, the MBA students and MDes students came up with a number of valuable ideas that could help shape the design of the post-operative sensor - and perhaps more importantly - its service and business models. Their brief, but intense explorations of the nature of the sensor and what it might mean to imagined patients and other key actors, using 3d prototyping, personas, role play, service journeys and business model visualizations, brought home to them the complexity of design and innovation.

What started off as being conceived of as a question of how to fit a small device in or near a patient's ear comfortably became a question of where the value was being created, for whom, and how. The approach we took of seeing the sensor primarly as a service shifted the students' attention away from questions of physical form, functionality, meaning or usability, to the form, functionality, meaning and usability of the service system. Exploratory prototyping can help bring these questions quickly and vividly to the attention of managers, designers and engineers before committing to design decisions that are inappropriate and wasteful of resources.

Further reading

Buxton, Bill (2008) Sketching User Experiences
Osterwalder, Alex and Pigneur, Yves (2009) Business Model Generation
Verganti, Roberto (2009) Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating what Things Mean

Credits

Organized by Lucy Kimbell (SBS) and Alison Prendiville (LCC)
Faciliators: Lucy Kimbell (SBS), Alison Prendiville and Cordula Friedlander (LCC), Moura Quayle (Sauder School of Business, UBC)
Filming/editing: Dariusz Dziala

Glen Cove Conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy

2010-07-01T20:23:00.011Z

Glen Cove, NY, June 9-11, 2010
Download conference report here

View conference presentations here

Ever keen to expand the boundaries of their practices, design professionals have been moving in the direction of public policy for some years. Moving beyond (but drawing on) concerns with products and brands, and interactions and experiences, some designers have found themselves over the past decade working on the design of systems and services including several in the public sector, situating their role as designers of social action rather than designers of things. Meanwhile some policymakers have created opportunities for designers to apply their approaches to social and economic problems.

In Australia, consultancy Second Road has worked for a decade with the Australian tax office on the design of the tax system, rather than just the tax forms. In 2004, the UK Design Council set up a research unit called RED, to tackle social and economic issues through design-led innovation. Its director, Hilary Cottam, and her colleagues later set up a new consultancy, Participle, which currently works with organizations such as Southwark Council in London. In 2005 UK design consultancy ThinkPublic worked with the National Health Service Institute for Innovation and Improvement to help improve the design of a cancer service, written up in an excellent book (2007) by Paul Bate and Glenn Robert. In 2007 the Danish government re-organized innovation unit Mindlab as a cross-ministerial organization to use design approaches to involve citizens and policymakers in innovation. That same year the Design Council and a regional development agency in the North East of England launched Design of the Times (DOTT), a one-year project bringing design-based approaches to projects that aim to increase sustainability in the region (now running in its second iteration in Cornwall). Last year design consultancy IDEO created a Human-Centred Toolkit for NGOs supported by the Gates Foundation. Researchers from Intel’s People and Practices Research Group recently published a social viability measurement tool for technology projects. End-of-year shows in design school present project after project in which studio-based learning practices are applied to deep-rooted social, political and economic issues.

Designers’ ambitions, and desires to contribute to making significant change in the world, are evident. In such projects, their work often includes research about and sometimes with the communities or stakeholders within which new social action is desired. Research methods range from ethnographically-inspired techniques that try to identify and interpret what matters to communities to participatory methods involving them directly in co-design rather than designing for them. But what designers, or multi-disciplinary teams using “design” approaches, can also bring to such projects is a set of assumptions about knowledge, that can have important consequences for how they, and the communities they claim to serve, understand the work they are doing and what happens within it. Social scientists (who have a lot to say about these assumptions and the nature of research) have come together with designers to discuss such matters for several years at conferences such as the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conferences (EPIC), the Participatory Design Conferences, and the anthrodesign discussion list as well as many other fora. But it is rare to bring these two professions/disciplines together with policymakers, who have different kinds of investments in the design of social action.

The Glen Cove Conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy held in Glen Cove, NY, on 9-11 June, was an event which did so. Initiated by Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), and co-organized by myself (based at Said Business School) and Gerry Philipsen (Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington), this event was conceived of as a small workshop which would bring together – for the first time, as far as we were aware - three groups: policymakers concerned with security in intrastate contexts and post-conflict situations, whose work is typically structured by intergovernmental and national policy goals; social science researchers, in particular ethnographers of communication who pay special attention to the construction of local knowledge, for example, how “security” is understood in communities in which the UN has a mandate to do increase it and having decided to help disarm ex-combatants; and designers and managers involved in designing services shaped by policy concerns about politics, exclusion and access. The workshop was a direct result of Miller and Rudnick’s work since 2005 and increasing concern with how generating local knowledge could shape local action in the UN context. By developing the Security Needs Assessment Protocol (SNAP), Miller and Rudnick have been exploring design as a way to link local knowledge and local action (see the SNAP section of the UNIDIR website which includes the conclusions from an earlier workshop on design and public policy they organized in the Hague in 2009).

The aim of the Glen Cove workshop was to see whether the developments outlined briefly above, in which designers skilled in going through a process of creative enquiry in new contexts, combined with rigorous cultural research, attentive to the necessity and difficulties of generating local knowledge, might be relevant to contexts of international security. A second aim was for participants from these three different professional contexts to reflect on what such an agenda might mean for their disciplines and professions (although not ignoring important differences among them). My introduction above illustrates my own interests in how design professions are changing and what kinds of knowledge and assumptions designers have, or might need to question, in order to design social action and in whose service they are operating.

Since we will be publishing a report about the workshop and its conclusions, I will not go into detail here such as listing all the participants’ names (but see below for a list or organizations) nor what we did and what we concluded. Instead I mention some of the sessions I found most illuminating.

Day 1:
The first sessions set the scene through discussion of current challenges in policy, humanitarian and development activities and the growing awareness for the need for local knowledge for effective local action in an effort not to have strategic goals undermined by poor programme design. These included presentations about the importance of local knowledge from Randolph Kent (Humanitarian Futures Project, King’s College, London, and former UN member of staff in Rwanda and Kosovo); the irrelevance and inadequacy of many guidelines for operational staff by Tore Rose (SecDev, and former UN Resident Coordinator in several countries); and Roz Lasker (Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia) on bottom-up community engagement in public health and tracking who has influence in decision-making.

Day 2:
The second day introduced the two other main threads – design and cultural research. There were presentations from Dick Buchanan (Weatherhead School of Management) presenting design as based on rhetoric and dialectic as useful for professionals of different kinds to practice well; and from my colleague Steve New (Said Business School) about process thinking within the field of operations management in which action on the ground is understood as being complicated and interventions often make things worse. I presented a highly partial overview of key intellectual developments in fields in which participants are concerned with designing services and combining anthropological and design research which helped illuminate the timeliness of this event and its relevance to policy.

The afternoon saw presentations about cultural research from Gerry Philipsen (Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington) about the ethnography of communication which among other things studies the deep cultural knowledge about ways of communicating as strategic action that can be found in particular communities; and from Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick (UNIDIR) describing their efforts within the UN context to generate stories that are of places rather than about them for the benefit of designing more effective, sustainable, and legitimate community security projects and bridging some of the gaps between cultural research, programme design and public policy.

Day 3:
In the morning, five mixed teams (with at least one design-based professional, one cultural researcher and one policy professional) worked together to try to design a process that would generate local knowledge to shape local action in the form of a programme in the UN context. The matter of concern for this exercise was reintegration of ex-combatants in west Africa. As one designer put it: “Designers are quite happy to work on anything.” But this exercise asked teams – few of whom had much knowledge about the particular topic or indeed other team members’ specialist domains – to think about how their different perspectives, knowledge and assumptions might be combined or questioned so that more effective programmes might be designed. For design, this lead to questions such as: Can one really "co-create" with war criminals? Can one really use "empathy" as a formal approach in a post-conflict context with global as well as personal ramifications?

The final plenary session lead to heated discussion – which was for me an indicator of the success of the workshop. I take the view that multidisciplinary workshops or teams, if they work well, will lead to some moments of productive synthesis but also raise equally productive challenges to individuals’ worldviews and disciplinary assumptions. This led to a lively set of activities to identify common agenda items across the disciplinary traditions, driven by policy concerns which several of us are now trying to synthesize. I am confident that new collaborations in action, research and teaching will come from the event.

The organizers and participants are now in dialogue about how to capture and report the workshop, in the short term, and how in the medium term we can find ways to take forward the idea that (1) cultural research has something important to offer the creation of local knowledge in international policy contexts, and that (2) design practices have something to contribute to interpreting and enacting that knowledge in the design of social actions. Hoping to learn from similar discussions in other areas of policy and public service, and contribute to discussions within my own profession, I look forward to helping take this work forward.

Participants came from these organizations:
Bell & Payne Consulting
Carnegie Corporation
Center for Knowledge Societies
Engine Group
George Washington University
King’s College, University of London
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Mindlab
New School for Social Research
Permanent Mission of Sweden to the United Nations
SecDev
ThinkPublic
United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research
UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations
University of Ghana
University of Haifa
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
University of Oxford
Weatherhead School of Management

Links
UNIDIR/SNAP
Aditya Sood’s summary of the workshop on his blog
Write up by Ivo Gormley, Think Public, published in Design Week
Anthodesign discussion listserv
DOTT Cornwall
EPIC 2010
IXDA Interaction Design Conference 2011
Participatory Design Conference 2010
ServDes 2010

Embedding service design

2010-05-18T10:07:00.012Z

Last week's seminar on Embedding Design at the Royal Society of Arts, London, offered a snapshot of current issues in service design and management and raised some questions about what kinds of thing need to be known to bring this approach into large organizations. Organized by Emily Campbell, director of design at the RSA, and the National Policing Improvement Agency as part of their own enquiry into the strategic use of design, the workshop brought together designers, policymakers, anthropologists and managers from organisations seeking improvement and innovation.

Speakers were:

- Lynne Maher, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, who set up the project in which designers ThinkPublic brought an (experience-based) design-led approach to the design of cancer services in the NHS, written up in Bate and Robert's excellent book "Bringing user experience to healthcare improvement" (2007). Lynne described how this work has moved forward through the creation of the "Productive Ward" presented to managers as more efficient, and to nurses as giving them more time to spend with patients, and how she and her team have to translate the language of designers to the languages of the different constituencies they work with.

- Tony Coultas of Skills Development Scotland, a national agency that is now putting customer experience at the centre of their service designing activities, including an in-house team of designers. Tony described how he saw design as an important link between policy and delivery, building a space to create better services and be a catalyst for change by focussing on the customer experience.

- Ben Reason of leading (and indeed the first?) service innovation and design consultancy live|work, described three different ways his firm has worked with clients Streetcar, Haringey Council's housing services, and Skills Development Scotland. Demonstrating a rare modesty among design professionals, he said "Design isn't good at everything" adding that his firm have found they have had to get more and more collaborative. Ben suggested that design is characterised by change, outside-in perspectives, provocation and a horizontal view, where as business is more concerned with consistency, an inside-out perspective, reassurance and being vertical.

- anthropologist Simon Roberts of Intel, sharing his experience of the issues raised by trying to embed anthropology within large organizations. His experience is that the "value" of anthropology is not easy to identify, often connected to a shift in thinking rather than to specific benefits to particular technologies or bits of IP. Given the complexity of modern organizations, he suggested that part of the value was that anthropology "gives the organization an opposable thumb" - invoking a phrase that Roger Martin has also used in his writing.

I gave an overview of design and service theory, lite, summarised in a 2x2 matrix (download PDF here) which captures two tensions in the literature: the "how" of design ranging from an idea of design as determinate and procedural (eg Simon 1969) in which the desired state of affairs is known at the outset, to an idea of design as exploration (eg Cross 2006; Schon 1983; Rittel and Webber 1973); and the "what" is being designed ranging from a conceptualisation that sees products and services as quite different kinds of thing, to a more generalisable idea of service (in the singular) following Vargo and Lusch's (2004) description of a shift to a service-dominant logic in which everything is service. For me, the kinds of practices that emerge from the art-school tradition of exploratory design, which reframe encounters with things and people and structures as opportunities for service, is the space that I understand as designing for service.

The ensuing discussion raised familiar questions. What is design? What is service design? Is it really different from other kinds of design? How can organizations bring in some of its concepts, tools and practices? How can this kind of design be managed and what resources are required? Does it "work" - in terms of helping cut costs or save money (compared to say Lean Manufacturing), or make improvements or innovate? How are Lynne's team trying to scale these practices in the NHS? What works and what doesn't? What might all this mean for the National Policing Improvement Agency, who are at an earlier stage in the process? Is now the perfect opportunity for designing for service to move forward, as the UK faces budget cuts affecting nearly all public services?

As I have found in my research, it is hard to separate these questions out because of the nature of service-based organizations and because (good) designers are attentive to, and able to work with, questions of value rather than just making pretty things and from the end user's point of view the pretty (or ugly, or unusable..) things constitute the service. However any discussion that fails to make the links between emerging practices such as "service design" in the art-school tradition and existing knowledge about services in (often dull) management literatures and the social sciences, will hamper efforts to build the knowledge base organizations need to move forward.

What happens when you turn a business school into a studio for a day

2010-04-22T14:51:00.004Z

Seminar Room A during the break when the MBAs and the MDes students from the London College of Communications were having lunch

MBA Design Leadership elective 2010

2010-04-20T17:29:00.011Z

This is the fifth and most likely final year of my MBA elective in Design Leadership at Said Business School, University of Oxford. My five-year post ends in September and the school is not renewing the fellowship. However tomorrow I look forward to teaching the course, this year with 50 MBA students (out of 225 or so students).

Over the five years the basic principles have remained consistent, drawing on my own art and design education and ongoing research including:
- a commitment to experiential learning
- hands-on playful exploration of studio-based approaches to concept generation and exploration
- opportunities to collaborate with designers
- reading from a range of fields including design theory, sociology and organisation studies
- insights from leading practitioners including Bill Moggridge (IDEO), Joe Ferry (Virgin Atlantic), Chris Downs (livework), Indy Johar (zerozero) and Andrew McGrath (Orange).

When I designed this course, I had a very open brief to create a new elective that would give students an opportunity to learn about design and design management. The school chose the name 'Design Leadership' because that term was being promoted at the time among some practitioners within design management, but it has since been eclipsed by the term 'Design Thinking', another problematic term (see my paper Design Practices in Design Thinking offering a critique). Back then there were hardly any MBA courses with such electives, let alone design-based teaching in the core of business education. Now there are several, although rarely devised and taught by someone from an art and design background, but these developments are still quite minor within the current way of doing things within management schools.

For those interested in such approaches, key business schools to look at are Rotman, Weatherhead, Stanford's d-school and Imperial College, London. In addition a number of design and engineering schools have created new post-graduate programmes based on similar ideas. It has been a great pleasure to get to know some of the faculty who have developed these courses and have a dialogue with them - an effort that is being enabled in particular by Dick Boland and Fred Collopy at Weatherhead whose 2002 workshop 'Managing as Designing' and this year's 'Convergence' event have been particularly inspiring as spaces for critical reflection.

In a context in which the MBA is being challenged (see the current discussion on the HBR blog and ongoing commentary by Bruce Nussbaum and colleagues at Business Week, not to mention a number of excellent books), these efforts are important efforts to reconceive of management education. I have learned a great deal from the students who have taken my elective and from some of my colleagues, as well as many others such as Armand Hatchuel at Ecole des Mines. However since I will be leaving Said in a few months - and I'm disappointed to be doing so - I may not be engaged in these questions in such a hands-on way in the immediate future. For now, back to the prep for tomorrow's prototyping workshop.

The limits of design (thinking)

2010-03-30T19:46:00.021Z

Last week I attended a think tank entitled Design in Our Times organised by Andrea Siodmok and her team at DOTT Cornwall, a year-long project that brings a design approach to (re)designing Cornwall's future to be more sustainable and more inclusive, and University College Falmouth. Two days on a lovely clifftop with some leading UK and international designers, researchers and educators was a chance to assess what is happening in design and its ambitions for world-changing. With keynotes from architect Nabeel Hamdi (Housing without Houses), design researcher Ezio Manzini, Mat Hunter (now at the Design Council, UK) and workshops on day two by people such as ThinkPublic, UsCreates, Asier Perez (I love agitación para la innovación), and Andy Polaine, this was a whistlestop tour through emerging design practice with a focus on co-design and participation and the application of design thinking to complex social and economic issues such as long-term unemployment and transport in the UK's poorest county. (See DOTT Cornwall's event website here). This DOTT project follows a similar project directed by John Thackara in the north east of England in 2007.

These were some of the key things I heard (partly cribbed from an excellent summary by Jeremy Myerson of the RCA of an academic conversation I was involved in):

Design practice is changing and it needs to change.
Some designers are shifting from designing for to designing with, raising questions of authorship, which some others are not so comfortable with.
Design education should teach both design knowledge (or craft skills) and design thinking, the latter which is not the preserve only of designers. But no one was defining what design thinking was. One speaker, Mat Hunter, warned that talk about design thinking as a process that anyone can try tended to miss out the messy, difficult bits which are part of design and which are important.
Public service managers and policymakers are ready to hear what design can offer them (but they are desperate in the face of budget cuts and a lack of trust in the political class).

Now that I dabble in the social sciences and in management, it was strange to be back in a room that was mostly design people talking to other design people about design - and by design people I mean art-school design rather than engineering. I found myself skeptical about a number of things that I heard. I noted:

A lack of interest in reading or referring to literatures outside of design that are extremely relevant to the DOTT agenda, for example within innovation studies, the social sciences and management and organisation studies.
Not much interest among design practitioners in understanding theories of design that are enacted in their work, while some of them struggle with saying what they do and why it matters.
A reluctance to question the values embedded in current design practices - as if being nice people creating collaborative processes to enable co-design gets designers (and policymakers and managers) out of asking themselves challenging questions about power.
An avoidance of recent and less recent design history, as if the turn to co-design and the application of design to social problems means we can forget how implicated design practices are in the styling and branding of ecologically destructive mass consumption, as Tony Fry and others argue.
Not much effort being invested in critically assessing whether, in fact, we can just apply design practices/thinking/methods to social and economic issues. Are the tacit knowledge and methods developed for developing consumer insights really directly applicable to such contexts without much new thought?
An unwillingness to acknowledge the bits that designers do well and the bits they don't. One conversation thread was about how designers are good at scaling. They are not. Management is all about scaling, by replicating products and services globally through standardisation. From Adam Smith to FW Taylor to Henry Ford, increasing operational effectiveness and efficiency is a core activity in management but I can't think of a designer or design writer who has much to say on this.

The Design Council's DOTT programme, and the specific year of projects in Cornwall, is important. There has been a huge effort to mobilise local and regional organisations to engage with the possibility of design and designers helping shape Cornwall's future. It's just that the current framing of the project needs further scrutiny, so that those of us interested in it can make better sense of it, but - more importantly - so that non-designers can understand, question and assess it. John Thackara made the point that design is not known for being self-reflective and critical. We all know that design on its own is not going to save the world - so why do designers in a room on their own still seem to think it can?

Image: Village life by Steven Coombe on Flickr for DOTTshot.

Ron Arad's restlessness

2010-03-02T20:05:00.008Z

Ron Arad, furniture and product designer, architect and design educator, has a major retrospective show now on at London's Barbican Art Gallery (18 Feb - 16 May 2010). Originally from Israel, Arad come to London to study architecture at the Architecture Association, then set up his own practice with Caroline Thorman in the early 1980s and has practiced in London ever since. His work across a range of media and manufacturing contexts demonstrates a consistent curiosity about forms, materials and possibilities - hence the exhibition title 'Restless'. He is also well-known for his playfulness and verbal wit evidenced in chairs that look like they might tip over, and the careful naming of many of the pieces. His architectural work includes private houses and the new Design Museum in Holon, Israel.

Visiting the exhibition raised questions for me about the seductions of this kind of design practice. More concerned with designing for sustainability and for service, I do not follow closely what goes in in furniture design and the world of "design art" and its limited editions. Usually resistant to what seems to be a kind of reckless environmental carelessness in these fields, I have to admit to a partiality to Arad's work. I have one his V&A sofas in blue felt (manufactured by Moroso) and some chairs. I know Arad to be a committed educator from his time as professor of design products at the Royal College of Art (where I used to teach).

But visiting the show I found myself captivated by the way it communicated Arad's ongoing enquiries into what to make and how to make it. On one of the many screens there was a quote saying that many of the manufactured pieces came from studio works, and not vice versa, illustrating nicely the notion that design is not (only) problem-solving but rather an ongoing set of enquiries. In a gallery that usually shows contemporary art, and sometimes architecture, it was a rare example of a design exhibition and a reminder of the value of these kinds of solo shows which give an opportunity to see how ideas have developed over decades. I wonder which service designer, if any, the Barbican might be showing in 20 years' time.

Investigatio: Workshop at Design London/RCA/Imperial College

2010-01-14T17:20:00.013Z

Yesterday I joined around 30 people discussing multi/inter/transdisciplinarity at the Investigatio event in London organised by Anne-Laure Fayard (visiting academic at Design London, from NYU-Poly) and Bruce Tether (Design London). In addition to the workshop, Anne-Laure curated an exhibition exploring "what is research" with work by researchers working in the arts, design, social sciences and management, including Yasmine Abbas, James Auger, Anne-Laure Fayard, Ileana Stigliani, Patrick Stacey, Nina Wakeford, Aileen Wilson, and my own rat project (see image). See Anne-Laure's blog post here.

Since Design London are creating a podcast of the event (available here), I will not say too much here other than to give tweet-sized summaries of the contributions by
- Peter Childs, Professor of Engineering Design, and Marco Aurisicchio, Imperial College, proposing the jet engine as a model of creativity, and design linking creativity and innovation and the importance of language in interdisciplinary encounters
- Tony Dunne, Professor and Head of Department, Design Interactions, Royal College of Art, proposing designers can contribute a great deal if they shift from application to implication
- Bruce Tether, Professor of Design and Innovation, Design London, Imperial College, discussing institutional limits to multidisciplinary research because of the pressure to publish in A-list journals
- Lucy Kimbell (ie me), Clark Fellow in Design Leadership, Said Business School, Oxford (see below); and
- Simon Blyth, IDEO and Julien McHardy, Lancaster University, on user-less design rooted in practices

Here's more or less what I presented.

Aesthetic play and interdisciplinary ambiguity

Many of you will be familiar with debates over the past 10-15 years about the nature of research in art and design, in particular that of practice-based research. I will not rehearse these debates here today, but make three brief observations which will serve to inform what follows.

The first is to note criticism by Michael Biggs and others of the way that art and design research in the UK academy has adopted the natural sciences as the paradigm to which it should aspire and against which its contributions should be assessed (Biggs 2004; Biggs and Buchler 2007; Rust 2007). For Biggs, this undermines the contributions that art and design research can make, because its outputs offer a plurality of interpretations and are open to, although not reliant on, non-linguistic experience.

The second is the important question of aesthetic autonomy, which so far has not been discussed extensively in design research (Ross 2008; Ranciere 2004). Ranciere makes a distinction between three regimes – the first, the ethical regime of images which reflect the collective ethos, rooted in Platonism; the second, the representative regime of art, in which art’s function is mimesis and the Aristotelian idea of consciously shaping matter; and the third, the aesthetic regime of art influenced by Kant and Shiller. This latter regime offers freedom from prescribed criteria, disrupts hierarchies – and – relevant to today, gives art the function of reorganising the accepted perceptions of reality.

The third observation is that the natural sciences – if we can even call them such – are themselves objects of scrutiny and contestation. Research in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), for example, has shown how science and other kinds of knowledge production are very social matters (eg Foucault 1972; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Scientific research is not neutral and the ways that scientific knowledge is produced, legitimised and disseminated are subject to questions of power, value, and difference.

To put this another way
- firstly, the nature and value of practice-based art and design research is still unclear, and
- secondly, the aesthetic regime of art of the past 200 years or so is concerned with reorganising perceptions of reality, and
- even what we might think of as well-established fields saturated with disciplinary rigour as in Kuhnian (1970) normal science, are more messy and ambiguous than many scientists and policy-makers might like to think.

Where does this leave attempts to bring disciplines together to do research? I will argue that it is exactly this ambiguity and disciplinary incoherence that offers opportunities to generate new knowledge, as researchers attempt and fail to combine worldviews and approaches from different disciplines.

There is one further piece of research on which I wish to draw, an empirical study of interdisciplinarity in projects crossing design and IT, social science and design, and art and science (Barry et al 2008). Their starting point was claims about interdisciplinarity rooted in the idea that science is becoming more accountable to society and research is, or should be, more directly relevant to users and stakeholders (Gibbons et al 1994; Nowotny et al 2001).

Research undertaken in Mode 2 knowledge advanced in Gibbons et al (1994) has five criteria:
- knowledge is produced in the context of application
- transdisciplinary research cannot be reduced to disciplines
- it is heterogeneious and there are lots of diverse organisations involved
- it’s more socially accountable and reflexive
- there are diverse quality controls.

When Barry et al set out to examine in more detail so-called interdisciplinary projects, they found the abstract notion of interdisciplinarity promoted by funders and others turned out to be more complicated in practice: two or more disciplines added together do not simply make a nice coherent new field.

Barry et al describe three modes of interdisciplinarity that they identified across the examples they studied in their fieldwork. One, the subordination-service mode, involves one discipline being in service to another, for example artists whose projects were funded to help increase the public understanding of science. The second, the intregrative-synthesis mode, involves disciplines integrating. The third, the agonistic-antagonistic mode, is forged as researchers question disciplinary commitments to ideas of what constitutes reality and knowledge. Barry et al found that some of the interdisciplinary collaborations they studied sprang from a “self-conscious dialogue with, criticism of, or opposition to the limits of established disciplines, or the status of academic research in general and attempts to reconceive or change the object of knowledge” (Barry et al 2008: 29). They found three logics under which claims about interdisciplinarity were advanced (accountability, innovation, ontology) and different kinds of institutional commitment.

My argument today is that this agonistic-antagonistic mode provides a helpful way to think about the positive effects of the disciplinary incoherence and ambiguity I mentioned earlier. If - still early in its trajectory within the academy - art and design research is unclear about the nature of its knowledge and contribution, then it is not necessarily a problem in interdisciplinary research as long as the institutions supporting it are willing and able to recognise the agonistic-antagonistic mode alongside the other modes. In other words, art and design research does not have to be internally coherent, normal science before it engages in interdisciplinary collaboration. It has the potential to mobilise the aesthetic regime of described by Ranciere to reorganise the accepted perceptions of reality within different research fields.

Image: Drawing created by rat, human and software in collaboration through the "Is your rat an artist?" drawing device, part of the Rat Fair organised by Lucy Kimbell at Camden Arts Centre, London, 2005

Visit to Object Research Lab, Amsterdam

2010-01-04T19:45:00.006Z

This week I'm going to Amsterdam, the guest of Dutch artist Yvonne Droge Wendel and the Object Research Lab. Having met some years ago via a mutual friend, Anna Best, we met again at the CRESC social science conference in Manchester, at which the Object Research Lab ran a session offering encounters with objects including some blobs. I was one of three people Yvonne asked to take home one of these blobs to educate it. My pathetic efforts to carry out this commission are documented in my Educating the Blob blog.

If anyone is in doubt that this is a serious activity, please refer to the Lab's reading list here or read the work of object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman, who was a keynote in Manchester. The basic idea of the Lab's work, as I understand it, is to draw attention to objects and objectness, something that artists and designers already do, of course, but which social scientists tend to ignore, even the ones who make claims about methodologies that "follow the object". I like the extremes Yvonne takes this in her earlier work, for example, getting married to a piece of furniture and creating large objects like a big black blob and placing them in public situations. Her work has included collaborating with Anna Best and others to define and publish an Architecture of Interaction, an important attempt to articulate the underlying design elements in interactions.

This week, the other people Yvonne has invited include my Oxford colleague Noortje Marres and designer Jurgen Bey and digital artist/researcher Sher Doruff. I'm not sure what we'll be doing, other than trying to keep warm, but I hope to post something here.

Multidisciplinary Research: Challenging and Rewarding or Too Damn Difficult?

2010-01-04T18:45:00.000Z

Wednesday 13 January 2010
3:30 – 7:00
Organized by Design London
Location - Stevens Building, Royal College of Art, London

There is a lot of encouragement for multi-disciplinary research, from policy makers and research funders, and it is generally seen as a ‘good thing’. Yet the reality is that this is often very difficult to execute. For instance, the definition and the evaluation of the outputs (e.g. prototypes, patents or papers) vary across the disciplines, and the results of multi-disciplinary work might well be regarded as below the standard that each individual disciplines seeks to impose on its own work. Consequently, those engaging in multidisciplinary work lose rather than gain credibility in their own ‘home discipline’. To look at these issues, we are holding a workshop that seeks to examine the barriers, challenges and rewards to multi-disciplinary work. The workshop will be followed by a drinks reception and an exhibition presenting research works from engineering, design and social sciences.

Speakers

Simon Blyth, IDEO and Julien McHardy, Lancaster University
Peter Childs, Professor of Engineering Design, Imperial College
Bill Gaver, Professor of Design, Goldsmiths College
Lucy Kimbell, Clark Fellow in Design Leadership, Said Business School, Oxford
Bruce Tether, Professor of Design and Innovation, Design London, Imperial College
Anthony Dunne, Professor and Head of Department, Design Interactions, Royal College of Art

Discussant

Jeremy Aynsley, Professor of History of Design, Royal College of Art

Organizers

Anne-Laure Fayard, Visiting Scholar, Design London, Imperial College and Assistant Professor of Management, Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Bruce Tether, Professor of Design and Innovation, Design London, Imperial College.

Exhibition

Exhibition will include research projects by James Auger (Royal College of Art), Lucy Kimbell (Said Business School), Anne-Laure Fayard (Design London / NYU-Poly), Patrick Stacey (Design London), Ileana Stigliani (Design London), works from the Interaction Design Studio at Goldsmiths and projectsfrom the Mechanical Engineering Department at Imperial College.

Participation

Places are limited, and will be issued on a first come first served basis. If you want to attend please complete your details here http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/X72BKNQ to reserve a place.

A year in designing for service: 2009

2009-12-16T14:25:00.006Z

A Google search for “service design” is one way of indexing what is a growing field of practice and scholarly enquiry. On the basis of a search today (December 16, 2009), the term is resonant enough to have a long-ish entry in wikipedia (although it “provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject”). What comes next are links to two consultancies: Engine (based in London) and live|work (ditto). Practice leads theory, then. But although they are leading the field, they are extremely small – 20 people at the former, 13 people at the latter, according to their websites today.

This was a year in which service design began to move away from being the province of designers educated and practicing in the art school tradition to an activity in which designers have something important to contribute, but which is not necessarily owned by Design.

Conferences brought together practitioners leading and developing the field with researchers from universities involved in studying and teaching service design, management and marketing. These included the Service Design Network Conference in Madeira and the first Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation in Oslo. The line-up of speakers suggested a shift from the emphasis on designerly service design seen at earlier conferences such as the Emergence conferences hosted by Carnegie Mellon University (2006; 2007) and at Northumbria (2006), drawing in those interested in service design from outside design fields. However these conferences were still dominated by those of us from design school backgrounds (as far as I can tell from attending one, and reading the public material of the other). In contrast, the Frontiers of Service Conference in Hawaii included “service design” on its list of topics but the only person I know who went was a researcher rooted in academic HCI.

At the beginning of the year, anecdotal accounts of consultancies laying off staff suggested a despondency matching the world we found ourselves in characterised by financial and ecological crisis. But by the end of the year, I was hearing reports of new clients, new projects or at least things ticking over. New consultancies formed too – like Snook, whose public stance is evidence of a refreshing modesty and optimism among the design community.

New books explicitly mentioning service design and introducing it to a wider field included Tom Lockwood’s edited book republishing articles from the Design Management Journal by livework, IDEO and others. Satu Miettinen and Mikko Koivisto brought together many others to suggest how organizations can go about Designing Services with Innovative Methods. The #service design twitter community of designers involved in service design became a busy and valuable resource.

Roberta Tassi published her research undertaken for her graduation thesis as a fairly comprehensive list of service design tools. Daniela Sangiorgi from Lancaster and others founded a web resource called Service Design Research, a very readable way of getting a handle on different research perspectives. This aims to build an understanding and foster a dialogue on where ideas and concepts of Service Design have come from, how these evolved over the last two decades as well as report and review current research and service design practices.

The year ahead will no doubt create opportunities to build on these developments as what is still a diverse field continues to create ways of legitimising and authorising practice (eg professional qualifications), defining the boundaries of the field and drawing in other kinds of service practitioners and researchers. I hope that people involved in the field will continue to ask important questions, which should include

- Politics. How are service designers going to position themselves in relation to questions of power? As with Participatory Design, one way of understanding the introduction of new technologies sees them as increasing managerial control over service employees and indeed customers. When are designers going to become more reflective and critical of the politics involved in designing for service?
- Scope. Do service designers really want to focus mostly on the design of services (public or private) or scale up to policy issues? From the international arena - the United Nations, World Bank and so on – to national and regional services, a whole collection of serious problems face policy-makers, elected representatives and citizens. Whether called service or transformation design, or something else, in what ways can practitioners seize opportunities to move beyond the legacy of industrial design and articulate a vision of designing for service that moves beyond designing services (industrial outputs defined as what products are not, cf Vargo and Lusch 2004) to designing for service?
- Knowledge. What kinds of knowledge do service designers and managers need in order to design better services for and with others? What are the strengths and limits of the design-school approach to designing for service? What published and developing knowledge bases should those involved in designing services draw on? When will service designers start paying serious attention to established fields with literatures on which they can draw including Participatory Design, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, anthrodesign, services marketing, service operations, science and technology studies and feminism?

In next year’s Google search I hope to see some surprises. A service design consultancy with 100 people! The UN taking forward the work of the UNIDR (Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick who spoke in London and Oxford in November) introducing service design and planning for field engagements in 50 countries! Oxford, Harvard, the Royal College of Art and MIT introducing new multidisciplinary service design and innovation masters courses! The new UK Conversative-Lib Dem government creating a Design Unit in the Cabinet Office to provide hands-on consultancy for government departments aiming to increase efficiency and innovate based on designing for service rooted in end user experiences and practices! Ten new books! Large consultancies such as Accenture and McKinsey training consultants in designerly methods and approaches! Oliver King or Joe Heapy or Lavrans Lovlie or Chris Downs or Ben Reason as keynote speaker at Frontiers of Service! Check back in a year and we’ll see.

Call for papers: Art of Management conference, Turkey, 2010

2009-12-16T11:31:00.007Z

Track at Art of Management Conference, Turkey, 2010: ARTFUL ORGANIZATION DESIGN

Daved Barry & Stefan Meisiek, School of Economics and Management (FEUNL), Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Lucy Kimbell, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

This track focuses on ‘artful’ organization design, reflecting recent revisionist trends in organizational practices and the organization studies literature. In particular, there has been a significant rise in approaches that reflect more of an arts-based sensibility rather than the scientific/engineering mindset that has characterized organization design efforts since the late 1800’s. Representative works of this revisionist perspective include Boland and Collopy’s “Managing as Designing,” Mintzberg and Liedka’s “Strategy as Design,” Martin’s “Design Thinking,” and IDEO’s articles/videos on service and culture design, all of which focus on design-as-process. These approaches to organization design seek a meeting between art and science, and craft and technology in design practice. Importantly, they stress going beyond a sole focus on instrumentalism in design—great designs should not only deliver utilitarian outcomes but should also create delightful and meaningful ones. Thus, an organizational appraisal system designed from this new approach should not only result in useful appraisals, but should also be a pleasure to use and enrich the work life with a sense of possibility.

In this track, we push the arts-based approaches to the forefront. To do so, we will depart from the regular presentational track format and host a design studio where we work on live organizational issues.

Specifically, we will provide designers, artists, and organization scholars interested in our track with basic information about Garajistanbul (www.garajistanbul.org), an Istanbul-based performing arts organization. This organization and its presented issues will be our ‘design site’; the design brief appears below. Designers, artists, and organization scholars selected from those who apply to our track will be invited to develop either 1) an artful design exercise to take place during the conference; or 2) a design sketch or proposal engaging with organization’s issues, and to submit this to us. In place of the usual paper submission, this will be used to select participants to take part in the track. The form of the submission will be open and might include whatever activities submitters are familiar with or would like to experiment with (e.g., visual methods, role play, modeling methods, narrative techniques, philosophical inquiry, etc.).

At the Art of Management conference, then, our track participants will briefly introduce their artful design exercises or solutions, and then we will continue to work on, discuss, and explore possibilities in the design studio. We imagine a multistage process in which participants create designs for Garajistanbul, discuss them in plenary, receive feedback, and go into another design phase. There might be 3 or 4 phases in all, in which we aim to understand the participants’ design assumptions and methods in a hands-on way and to amplify these methods via feedback. Stakeholders from Garajistanbul will be invited to take part—either as ongoing commentators, or as a ‘review panel’ on the last day.

The resulting designs will be documented and may provide the basis for a special issue in Aesthesis, or a ‘thin book’ on artistic approaches to organizational design. Apart from a desire to discover and share new design approaches, a key aim of the track is to begin to build a network in which people interested in artful approaches to organizational design can meet one another, both at this Art of Man conference and also in the following years.

Design Brief:

The design site for our track at the Art of Management conference is Garajistanbul (www.garajistanbul.org). In their own words, Garajistanbul “is an international, non-profit, contemporary performing arts organization that owns a venue in Istanbul, Beyoglu; makes productions and publishes a magazine called "gist". Garajistanbulpro and 10+ are the two production units. Garajistanbul tours regularly abroad, especially Europe.”

Your task as a potential conference participant is to design either an exercise or sketch initial design proposition that could help Garajistanbul redesign its services and activities, organization design, corporate identity and culture, and/or strategy. If you develop a design exercise, it should be doable within the conference period. Members of Garajistanbul will share further materials online (organizational charts, rules and routines for organizing, photos of the site and people, etc) prior to the conference in September, which will allow you to prepare your sketch or exercise. They will also join us at the conference site, and, if time permits, we will visit the premises and see what they are doing.

Abstracts for papers should be approximately 500 words, but we will accept any form of media submission you feel appropriate. Your abstract should be sent to the stream conveners (dbarry AT fe.unl.pt; smeisiek AT fe.unl.pt; lucy.kimbell AT sbs.ox.ac.uk) and copied to Jane Malabar at artofman@essex.ac.uk by 1st February 2010.

We look forward to your imaginings.
Daved, Stefan, and Lucy

What if…? …..Report on Service Design Network conference 2009

2009-11-17T19:47:00.011Z

Report on Service Design Network conference 2009

The conference archive including presentations is here.

My (short) conference paper is here, and a recent longer essay: Kimbell, L (2009) 'The Turn to Service Design' in Julier, G and Moor, L, 'Design and Creativity: Policy, Management and Practice', Berg.

This is a partial and highly particular account of the Service Design Network conference, Madeira, which I attended a few weeks ago. It’s partial since I do not aim to give a full account of what the conference was trying to achieve (as I understood it), nor everything that went on, which others have been doing much better than I could. And it’s particular, because I attended and spoke at it in my current manifestation as a researcher and educator situated in a management school and involved in teaching on the MBA. My remarks below should be read as critical reflection that I hope will be of use to others, some of which I have already discussed with the organisers. I raise what I believe are important questions for an emerging community seeking not just to survive but also grow, as it thinks about how to create new institutions and ways of validating its knowledge.

While I have a background in interaction design practice and live art, now supplemented by a vast amount of reading in management fields, anthropology and design theory, I am concerned at present with the body of knowledge on which a service design profession or even discipline might rest. What do organisations, groups and societies need to know in order to design for service? How can they go about designing for service? Who should be involved in designing and why and what ethical concerns exist about co-design, participation and accountability in designing for service? What kinds of knowledge are relevant and what assumptions and world views are they based on? What happens to “service design” when “non-designers” (such as marketing consultancies and management consultancies) take on some of these practices, do them systematically and routinely and at scale, win the clients and do the projects? What are the strengths and weaknesses of a designerly approach to designing for service? The SDN conference was not a good place to go to get answers to these questions. This is not to say the event was not of value – I enjoyed hearing from Joe Heapy (Engine), Lavrans Lovlie (live|work), Ben Reason (live|work), Bas Raijmakers (STBY), Bruce Tether (Imperial College) and many others (although I didn't need to travel 1000km by air to meet them).

I will comment in detail on one talk, not in any way as a personal attack but rather as the most clear example illustrating my concerns, which apply to the event as a whole. In their presentation, Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell from Continuum talked about employee motivation in service design. To me, a European, they came across as arrogant, an interesting counterpoint to the more modest presentations by UK/Nordic consultancies the day before. It was a very polished, enjoyable presentation – full marks for use of rhetorical devices – but I was left disappointed by the sense I got from the speakers that no one other than a Designer could produce useful knowledge in relation to the design of service. Perhaps that is the case - but I doubt it.

There were two examples from their talk where there is extant literature the speakers seemed unaware of. First, the idea that employees in service organisations play an important role in constituting a service – interesting, yes, but that’s what Bitner et al were looking at in their paper on critical incidents in the service encounter in 1990 and Solomon et al in 1985. That’s well over 20 years ago. Second, the speakers shared insights about the gap between expectations raised by service organisations in their advertising (such as United Airlines) and the actual service delivered. A great insight – and one that is captured in the 5 gaps model of service quality created by Parasuraman et al in 1985, again over 20 years ago. But there was no sense from these speakers that they felt they had any responsibility as designers to keep track of relevant literature or – even better – work out what new research was needed as part of efforts to design better services. If this view is true, and is one that is shared by other individual designers and consultancies, then the knowledge upon which a professional field of service design could rest is unlikely to develop significantly.

Some may argue that it’s not a designer’s job to go and read academic literature. However I believe that these days most designers, consultants and design educators would see research as part of design. For the practitioners spanning anthropology and design (eg the anthrodesign mailing list), research – which includes reviewing what is already published – is a very important part of their work. I am not going to suggest how individual designers or consultancies should go about their work, but I am interested in what an emerging field of professional practice thinks it is doing, how it understand its knowledge, practices and institutions in relation to those of adjacent fields and the rewards it gives to its leading figures. Earlier I asked questions about what was involved in designing for service. But in terms of a developing profession, there are also questions of what constitutes good service design practice and who is defining what ‘good’ means within the context of professional standards. One particular challenge faced by those involved in designing for service is how to understand the social - not something taught in many design schools, still hampered by a legacy of craft and objects.

On the plane home I sat with several other participants who also had to leave slightly early. I asked one of them – a leading figure – if he had learned anything from the conference. He said he had not. It seems to me that if a network such as this, however young and under-resourced, is not stretching its core community, then it may not survive.

This journey allowed us to digest and share our different experiences of the conference. I began to think about my impressions as a shortlist of if onlys which I have now translated to a list of what ifs, which serve as my benchmark for future service design conferences.

- What if the conference brought together those interested in designing for service, broadly conceived, rather than mostly service designers educated and practising professionally within Design?
- What if that definition included those from services marketing, management, innovation, information systems and adjacent fields?
- What if the people present, speakers and participants, did not assume that the social worlds which they are involved in designing for, and which their designs create, were not just givens but were things to be researched and interpreted?
- What if there was no underlying but unpsoken assumption that “design” is owned collectively by researchers, practitioners and educators rooted in design schools?
- What if the keynote speakers came from outside the core field, to help articulate the boundaries between it and other fields?
- What if members of this community actively took responsibility to extend their knowledge by reading literature from diverse fields? (see Jeff Howard’s blog as a generous example of someone digesting existing literature for others)
- What if members of this community began to think seriously about the underlying assumptions about knowledge and what constitutes “the social”?
- What if practitioners who are close to action began to identify and share where they see gaps for further research, whether through practice or academia?

Image: £20 note showing moral philosopherAdam Smith, a foundational figure in economics whose work underpins the idea of exchange value, now being challenged by scholars such as Vargo and Lusch (2004; 2008) who suggest we attend to value-in-use in order to understand the transition from a goods-dominant logic to the emerging service-dominant logic

Report: Oxford seminar on Managing as Designing: What next?

2009-11-10T13:53:00.004Z

Notes from a workshop held on Friday 30 October at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Attended by about 40 people.

Introduction

It’s 40 years since Herbert Simon published The Sciences of the Artificial in which he wrote the now much-quoted phrase “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (1996:111). While Rittel and Webber (1973) and many others have questioned the rather top-down, technocratic view of design that Simon seemed to be arguing for, he did make a distinction between the purposes of the social sciences and of design that many scholars and practitioners are still finding useful today.

But now, 40 years later, things are quite different. There has been around four decades of research within design and engineering schools mostly into established fields such as industrial design, architecture and engineering design, generating descriptions of design activity. Alongside this, there has been research in management fields including New Product Development and innovation studies and more recently organization design. Science and technology studies have contributed a perspective on how innovations emerge that challenges the individualist accounts of some management scholars.

Simon’s insight was not really seriously taken up until Boland and Collopy’s workshop in 2002 and subsequent book titled Managing as Designing (2004), which brought several of these approaches together staging a wider conversation about the role of aesthetics and the arts more generally in organisational life. Boland and Collopy brought to management attention the idea not just that some abstract notion of design was important, but rather that design in the arts-based tradition offered something important to management practitioners and scholars – what they call a “design attitude”.

The value of designers’ practices educated in this tradition is what some people call “design thinking”. This autumn, three books are being published that have design thinking in the title, by Roger Martin, dead of the Rotman School of Business; Tom Lockwood, president of the Design Management Institute; and Tim Brown, who leads the design innovation consultancy IDEO. Alex Ostwerwalder has just published a book on the design of business models. Other new books based on academic research include Roberto Verganti’s book on design-driven innovation, and a forthcoming book by Armand Hatchuel and Benoit Weil. If you read Business Week you will have noted its latest ranking of top design schools which includes many business schools which are now teaching design in the MBA– though so far, very few teach design in the arts-tradition in the core curriculum.

To discuss these developments, we invited leading scholars within management, organization and design to share their thoughts on what is going on at the moment and what happens next.

Please note that what follows are slightly edited notes taken by hand while I was chairing the workshop. Any mistakes are mine. If you quote from this blog, please add this disclaimer.

Presentations

Richard J Boland, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University
What am I for?
- Valuing the existential moment
- Appreciating action (Dewey) as the basis of enquiry, all knowing and creation of knowledge comes from acting in the world.
What am I against?
- Assuming a ‘presented’ world.
- Thinking that an acceptable conclusion is that everything is socially constructed – that is the starting point.
Research
- Design and use of representations, how people make meaning, use metaphors, perspective making and taking, distributed cognition, representing temporality.
- Visual representation did a better job of representing financial data than numbers in predicting bankruptcy (Zhao et al)
- 10 years with Gehry, design attitude, digitisation
- Systems of gestures, discourse practices and representational forms that will enhance team learning in healthcare
- Theorygarden.com – causal reasoning for children

Blanche Segrestin, Ecole des Mines
- Why do we need a new theory of design?
- Context: a shift in innovation, not just improving products and services but rather the changing identities of objects. Organisations don’t know what competences they need.
- Existing theories of design are problem solving (Simon) and systematic design (Pahl and Beitz). Existing theories of creativity focus on cognition (Torrance, Guilford). But we need to understand how to combine planning and evaluation with imagination and deviance. This is what C-K theory (Hatchuel and Weil) provides, which helps companies structure exploratory processes which generate new concepts and new knowledge.
- A brief may be clear but it is asking for something that is unknown. We need to produce knowledge for design, which involves working on unknown and partly undecidable objects.

Ken Starkey and Sue Tempest, Nottingham University Business School
- Business schools champion expertise masquerading as science, which leads to functional incompetence. In the search for technical competence (which has proved to be illusory) business schools have lost their capacity for reflexivity.
- MBA courses focus on personal advantage at the expense of public purpose, with a narrow curriculum focussed on analytics.
- The market logic has subverted the logic of professionalism (Khurana)
- “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what stories do I find myself a part?’” (McIntyre)
- Foucault offers an emphasis on power and knowledge, ethics and technologies of the self
- How do we develop a narrative imagination using the arts and humanities to think about new design spaces?
(See their forthcoming paper, “The Winter of Our Discontent: The Design Challenge for Business Schools” in Academy of Management Journal of Learning and Education 8(4))

Bruce Tether, Imperial College/Design London
- MBA students want to know what’s the takeway? What can they use on Monday morning? Design is difficult because it’s harder for them to reflect that they may have changed their way of thinking.
- How does design in a business school environment achieve legitimacy?
- Is design a fad? Can we really deliver?

Rafael Ramirez, Institute for Science, Innovation and Society/Saïd Business School
- How do changes in context change what to design and what is good design?
- How do turbulent environments change the context for business design? How do you plan when you can’t predict?
- How to create enclaves of productive possibilities, using scenarios to design value constellations to push back the turbulence?

Respondent

Jennifer Whyte, University of Reading/ Design Innovation Research Centre
- Talking about both managing and designing involves talking about a large space
- Questions of micro and macro – how do you design a financial system
- A danger of romanticising design

Discussion

Boland: Design truly is a practice. At Weatherhead we try to implement a more studio-based approach to MBA education. They work on a project as a design project, developing an ability to engage in a practice in a particular way and giving them an orientation that they are involved in shaping the world that other people are going to live in.

Starkey: How do we design an education system to equip people to handle things like the financial crisis?

Segrestin: How do we teach something that will be obsolete in a few years? More important is how to apprehend change.

Boland: We need to challenge business schools. They are historians of the recent past and gear students up to reproduce it. One possibility is challenging the business schools, waking them up. Another is to take design and business schools and morph into another kind of school so that organisational leaders become more broad-based.

Ramirez: The MBA is a locked-in standard. Exec ed and doctoral students are the research lab for management education.

Boland: The thing that intrigues me about design is its relentless commitment to inquiry.

Boland: I’m always surprised at the opposition set up between management and design. The world of the manager is addressing the unknown and designing collective action.

Segrestin: The models of the firm we have are 19th century models based on commercial activity. We lack a model of collective design activities that are not just commercial activities. We need to go back to look at the designing firm.

Whyte: Inquiry is central to design and to reflective management practice. …When you are creating businesses, you are creating social and material domains. But we should be wary of transplanting ideas from one to another simplistically.

Starkey: In Europe, for business schools, the student isn’t the customer, the customer is society.

Thanks to the Design Council who supported the refreshments during the event.

Coming up: The limits of design: Designing for Security and Sustainable Development

2009-10-20T11:36:00.005Z

For over a decade, design professionals have been extending their remit from the design of objects and buildings to the design of services, systems and environments. Their "design thinking" is now being imported to business school curricula. Magazines such as Business Week are promoting design-led innovation as essential for business. But businesses are not the only contexts that designers are now working in. In the most recent developments, a UN agency has worked with service innovation and design consultancy live|work. International design and innovation consultancy IDEO has produced a Human-Centred Design Toolkit for NGOs. Public service design group Participle has co-designed solutions to the challenges of ageing with older people themselves. One of them is a new social enterprise called Southwark Circle, now up and running and supported by Southwark Council. The NHS is bringing experience-based design to its service design and development. At a time when design thinking is reaching way beyond the design profession, it's time to take stock and ask: Is design thinking the way forward for solving complex "wicked" problems such as security and development? Can designers really design anything they turn their hands to? Are there limits to design thinking and, if so, what are they?

Speakers + panel
- Derek B Miller and Lisa Rudnick, Security Needs Assessment Protocol, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research
- Daniel Dickens, Southwark Circle
- Jeff Masters, Commission Secretary, Commission on 2020 Public Services
- Joseph Harrington, Engine Group
- Alison Prendiville, London College of Communications
- Lucy Kimbell, Saïd Business School

Organised by Saïd Business School and London College of Communications
Graphic by Tony Pritchard

The limits of design: Designing for security and sustainable development
Weds 11 November 7-9pm
London College of Communications
Elephant and Castle, London SE1

To attend, please contact graphics@lcc.arts.ac.uk with subject line 'Limits of Design'
We think we'll be able to create a podcast for distribution after the event

Coming up: Managing as Designing - What next? Seminar in Oxford

2009-10-12T16:01:00.004Z

Seminar on Managing as Designing: What next?

Friday 30 October 3-5.30pm
Said Business School, University of Oxford

Scholars and educators have been revisiting Simon's (1969) claim that design is concerned with what should be, making it central to professional education in management. Since Boland and Collopy's "Managing as Designing" workshop (2002) at Case Western Reserve University, several other schools of management have started paying attention to design approaches, whether conceived of as a "design attitude" (Boland and Collopy 2004) or "design thinking" (Dunne and Martin 2006). Some oganisation scholars argue that management is a design science and that design should be brought to established disciplines such as organization design (eg van Aken 2005; Bate and Robert 2007; Jelinek et al 2008; Starkey et al 2009) and that design - rather than Simon's problem-solving - is central to innovation (eg Hatchuel 2001; Hatchuel and Weil 2009). This seminar asks: What are the key ideas that underpin these developments? What do they mean for management education and research?

Speakers
Richard J Boland, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University
Blanche Segrestin, Ecole des Mines, Paris
Ken Starkey, Nottingham University Business School
Bruce Tether, Design London, Imperial College

Respondent
Jenny Whyte, University of Reading

Chair and organizer
Lucy Kimbell, Said Business School

Participating
If you want to attend please email Esther Vicente to reserve a place at esther.vicente@sbs.ox.ac.uk. References will be available on the InSIS website shortly: http://www.insis.ox.ac.uk

Centre de Gestion Scientifique, Ecole des Mines http://www.cgs.ensmp.fr/
Design Innovation Research Centre http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~kcs07jw/projects.htm
Design London http://www.designlondon.net/
Ken Starkey http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/business/LIZKS.html
Weatherhead School of Management http://design.case.edu/
Jennifer Whyte http://www.icrc-reading.org/profile/detail.asp?ProfileID=77

Location
Saïd Business School
University of Oxford
Park End Street
Oxford OX1 1HP

References
Bate, P. and Robert, G. (2007) Bringing user experience to healthcare improvement: The concepts, methods and practices of experience based design. Oxford: Radcliffe.
Boland, R., and Collopy, F. (2004). Design matters for management. In R. Boland, R. and F. Collopy (Eds.), Managing as designing (pp. 3-18). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Dunne, D., & Martin, R. (2006). Design thinking and how it will change management education: An interview and discussion. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 5(4), 512–523.
Elmquist, M. and Segrestin, B. (2009) Sustainable development through innovative design: Lessons from the KCP method experimented with an automotive firm. Int. J. Automotive Technology and Management, 9 ( 2), 229-244.
Ewenstein, B. and Whyte, J. (2009) Knowledge practices in design: The role of visual representations as epistemic objects, Organization Studies, 30, 1, 7-30.
Hatchuel, A. (2001) Towards design theory and expandable rationality: The unfinished programme of Herbert Simon. Journal of Management and Governance, 5 (3-4) 260-273
Hatchuel, A. and Weil, B. (2009) C-K design theory: An advanced formulation. Research in Engineering Design, 19, 181-192.
Jelinek, M., Romme, G., and Boland, R. (2008). Introduction to the special issue: Organization studies as a science for design: Creating collaborative artifacts and research. Organization Studies, 29(3), 317-329.
Starkey, K. Hatchuel, A. Tempest, S. (2009) Management research and the new logics of discovery and engagement. Journal of Management Studies, 46 (3), 547 -558.
van Aken, J. E. (2005). Management research as a design science: Articulating the research products of Mode 2 knowledge production. British Journal of Management, 16, 19-36.
Yoo, Y., Boland, R, Lyttinen, K. (2006) From Organization Design to Organization Designing, Organization Science, 17 (2), 215-229.

Managing as designing: Does it actually work?

2009-09-22T22:27:00.039Z

In 2002 Dick Boland and Fred Collopy of the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, organised a workshop with the title "Managing as Designing", drawing on their experience of working with Frank Gehry as his practice designed their new Peter B Lewis building. The event brought together practitioners and academics working in art and design, music, architecture, the social sciences and management. The book they edited (2004) resulting from contributions to the workshop (including from Frank Gehry, Karl Weick, Wanda Orlikowski, Lucy Suchman, Peter Coughlan and many others) was probably the first major development in the increasingly fashionable exploration in management research of Herbert Simon's idea that management is a kind of design activity.

Since then, Dick and Fred, now joined by design theorist Dick Buchanan (previously at Carnegie Mellon University), have begun to integrate their ideas into the MBA at Weatherhead, one of few management schools to put managing as designing into the core teaching programme. But the question facing all of us teaching this stuff is - what impact does it really have? We don't yet know. We need to explore and test the ideas.

As part of their ongoing enquiry, Fred and Dick invited me to join them and other colleagues Kalle Lyytinen and Youngjin Yoo (Temple University) to organise a workshop that aimed to use art and design techniques to enable a group of people from different organisations to think about their futures. They invited 40+ people from Cleveland cultural and educational institutions to join us for a day and half. As workshop designer and facilitator, I helped design and deliver the experience of the event. We used techniques to get participants to explore and visually assemble defined stakeholders' experiences of the eight institutions and their boundaries in the present (what is) as a way of imagining them in the future (what could be). Case's website will post more details of what we did. But for now, here are a few of my observations.

- Dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty about what to do and how to do it is the central challenge facing those involved in organisational futures.

- Design techniques such as personas and customer journey scenarios are powerful methods even for first-time users that help ground their ideas and facilitate temporary, cross-institutional teams.

- Small groups working on individual ideas within a larger ecology produce platforms for others to work with, resulting in the emergence of new concepts that are unlikely to have been imagined and so could not have been intentionally designed.

- The creation of new concepts creates new barriers.

Fred, Dick and their colleagues are in an ongoing enquiry about the way these concepts might develop in these institutions - not just as a piece of research but as stakeholders in the city of Cleveland. As researchers and educators in this emerging field, we are all interested in how this way of approaching organisational questions about the future shapes the way individuals and organisations act.

Asking if managing as designing "works" is of course an overly simple question. But one way of thinking about how to explore what it does is to bring together people from diverse organizations to experience what it could be. I got people to play on the floor and make things with each other - testing Fred and Dick's own tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity in our workshop design. What we saw was people making important new connections with each other as they went through a shared experience, the results of which I believe will impact (positively) on the city of Cleveland in the weeks, months and years to come.

>>>> See Youngin's blog post here

Yes, even the toilets too

2009-09-15T18:35:00.005Z

For a while I have been saying that the thing about service designers is that they attend to the mundane details of the service, everything from the design of posters to websites to text messages to physical environments to interactions with people - all of these are to be designed along with the orchestration of the end-user's encounters with them.

I recently had a chance to go visit a design project two friends were involved in. On the way back from a trip to Dorset, a couple of us dropped off at the redesigned Little Chef restaurant, which UK readers will probably remember as a slightly greasy but comforting roadside chain of restaurants. Now, they've been rebranded (I guess) and redesigned, or at least the one at Popham has. And the one we visited was even on TV - with conceptual chef Heston Blumenthal involved in redesigning the menu. And yes, the food was pretty good, still within the realm of fast-ish, roadside drop in eateries, but more locally-sourced, and a bit more for the vegetarians.

But what excited us even more was the re-design of the space by Ab Rogers Design, which included attention to details such as the conventional ones - layout, colour and materials for the restaurant but also the menus, employee uniforms, little comments on the tilling, little plastic flies on the ceiling which is covered with blue skies, and - the best bit - especially since I know the brilliant people who did it - the music in the loos. Tim Olden is a genius at picking bits of quirky and cheeky music, which plays as you enter the loo at the Little Chef in Popham and Dom Robson is a genius about making the technology work. I can't wait to go back.

Ab Rogers Design mostly do exhibition design, and are not particularly visible in the service-design world. But their reconceiving of the Little Chef brand and its service - not just its restaurant - communicates a similar attention to the detail of the visitor/customer/stakeholder experience. Yes - even in the toilets too - but in this case, it's especially the toilets.

Object Practices in Design: CRESC conference, Manchester

2009-08-26T09:43:00.012Z

With Nina Wakeford (Goldsmiths, London) and Laurene Vaughan (RMIT, Melbourne), I organised a panel for the annual conference (1-4 September) of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, in Manchester. The conference title - "Objects - What Matters? Technology, Value and Social Change" - offered, we thought, an opportunity to consider the transition in design theory and practice away from objects at a time when social science is increasingly paying attention to them.

Panel: Object Practices in Design

This panel addresses two moves: the shift within design from attending almost exclusively to objects, towards users and stakeholders in their engagements with objects; and the shift within social theory away from societies and people towards objects. Attending to objects, in particular their form, has been central to design theory and practice since the emergence of a modern discipline of design. For Alexander (1962), designers were makers of form. Designers were concerned with how to create the right form balancing form and function and his contribution was to propose a systematic rational method to get to the right form. Then, discourse about design moved from a focus on the outputs of design to a generalisable "design thinking" (Buchanan 1992) which could be applied to nearly anything. For Buchanan, designers' problems were ill-structured or "wicked" (Rittel and Webber 1973) and their solutions could take form as signs, objects, environments or systems. The emergence of design problems at the intersection of humans and digital technologies spawned new ways of thinking about design especially an increasing focus on "users". User-centred design, interaction design and experience design all decentred the object in design with ethnographic and participatory practices entering design discourse - even if activities in many design studios and design schools looked and sounded remarkably stuck on the forms of the new digital objects. Krippendorff's (2006) recasting of design as human-centred formalized a theory of design as being about stakeholders and the meanings they create through interacting with objects, even as social theories were paying increasing attention to objects and less to meaning.

Papers

Beyond design thinking: Design-as-practice and Designs-in-practice
Lucy Kimbell, Said Business School, University of Oxford

Recent publications by scholars, practitioners and government bodies claim that design, or rather design thinking, has the power to stimulate or drive innovation and transform organizations and even societies. But the term “design thinking” is confused and the literature on which it is based is contradictory. This paper contributes to understanding design activity and its effects by reviewing literature and identifying problems with the concept drawing on theories of practice in sociology, science and technology studies and organization studies. It proposes an alternative way of conceiving of design activity, without privileging the work done by designers, by attending to the practices of others involved in constituting design outcomes. Introducing a pair of concepts – design-as-practice and designs-in-practice – to replace design thinking solves a number of problems facing researchers in design and management. The paper’s contribution is to make an explicit link between design and social science in order to advance understanding about designers’ work and value creation.

Design and Affect
Laurene Vaughan, RMIT University, Melbourne

This paper will discuss the relationship between design, the object and affect. Typically, but not always, objects are designed to exist in the world of human habitation. Objects are designed, modified, adapted and adopted by people as part of the everyday experience of living; and just as objects are “designed” by people, it can also be said that people are designed by the objects of their world. Through a particular discussion of the phenomenon of dress the intimate relationship between people and material culture will be explored.

The Model and the Object
Nina Wakeford, Goldsmiths, University of London

Based on research amongst experience designers, this paper discusses the origins and use of the ‘experience model’ in design practice. Often a graphical representation, the experience model is understood as a way by which knowledge can be passed between user-centred researchers and the designers. Drawing on theories of the work of visual representations in Science and Technology Studies (e.g. Henderson’s On Line and On Paper, 1998) this paper discusses the way in which the model might be said to constitute an object within design practice, rather than an intermediary stage in reaching the object. Looking back at the history of one design consultancy which pioneered such models, the paper also reflects on the ways in which models work as aesthetic objects, and the challenges this poses to STS thinking about visual representations.

Discussant: Guy Julier (Leeds Metropolitan University)

When I have the other papers, I'll post them here.

About the image: A photo of architectural models taken with permission at the marvellous 4-d modelshop in London E1

(Re)Introducing experience-based service design

2009-08-10T11:13:00.004Z

When you are a researcher, you are supposed to know your field which in practice means something like knowing the history and origins of the field; understanding key concepts, theories, methods and tools; and keeping up to date with leading practitioners and other researchers. So this is your job. And you have your tricks for accessing the leading thinking and practice most likely combining the institutional (libraries, journals, databases, academic conferences, professional meetings, magazines) and the more informal (blogs, twitter, facebook, personal communications and oh yes – gossip). And then every now and then something comes along and makes you realise that your tricks have failed you. Something you really should have known about, but you didn’t, illustrates just how partial your research is.

This has recently happened to me. In the process of putting together a proposal about design for service in healthcare, I came across important work that was not on my radar. It really should have been (especially since I had downloaded the journal paper but never read it and trawl through service design blogs where the work was mentioned). But it was not.

I publish this confession here to point other researchers and practitioners interested in service design and design-led innovation to work that makes a valuable contribution to research and teaching by describing and analysing the application of design-based approaches based in attending to experience to innovation in healthcare services. Bate and Robert’s book (see below) draws in detail on a pilot study involving London-based consultancy Think Public using what Bate and Robert call “experience-based design” approaches and methods with head and neck cancer patients, carers and staff as a way to improve services in an English hospital. Bate and Robert’s discussion of the roots of experience design (or service design rooted in stakeholder experience) in phenomenology, ethnography and narrative offers managers an intelligent but digestible analysis of what this approach does, how, and why it matters. It's on my MBA reading list for next year for sure.

Book
Bate, Paul and Robert, Glenn (2007) Bringing User Experience to Healthcare Improvement: The Concepts, Methods and Practices of Experience-Based Design, Oxford: Radcliffe.
Some of the book is available to read here.

Web resources
Think Public
The NHS Institute of Innovation and Improvement has synthesized this study and presents an overview of experience-based design. People working inside the NHS can order a toolkit and access other resources.

Academic paper
Bate, Paul and Robert, Glenn (2007) "Toward More User-Centric OD: Lessons From the Field of Experience-Based Design and a Case Study." Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 43; 41

From Scale to Scalography - international workshop

2009-07-07T17:21:00.006Z

Ahead of tomorrow's workshop entitled Scalography, organised by my colleagues in the Oxford Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, I've just finished adding my scalar interferences to the lecture theatre where it is taking place. When Steve Woolgar first started telling me about this event, I found myself imagining rather grand (to my mind, architectural) interventions to the room. But instead what we've done (helped by Linsey McGoey, Noortje Marres, and Tanja Schneider, is make some modest additions to the lecture theatre as the photo shows.

I hope to write up the event. In the meantime use the link to view the programme for the day and links to papers, including the provocation piece by Woolgar et al.

Social networking site, 1691

2009-06-11T18:27:00.003Z

Lloyd's coffee house v2. See wikipedia.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 8

2009-06-11T17:46:00.005Z

Managing as designing

This final class engaged with Boland and Collopy’s proposal that managing is designing and Roger Martin’s call that managers be more like designers. Developing further Herbert Simon’s distinction between the sciences (exploring what is) and design (what could be), these educators have begun to change management education in theory and in practice. Armand Hatchuel's further development of Simon's ideas provides an important way forward for theories of design and their relevance to managing and organising, beyond problem-solving.

To test some of these ideas, the class undertook a short practical exercise in which they applied design frameworks to business models. Inspired by the example of Alex Osterwalder, whose blog and forthcoming book describe how his firm applies design to business modelling, the class first sketched a business model known to them; discussed it; and then selected other frameworks to apply, such as mapping stakeholders; analysing it for usefulness, usability and desirability; and creating stakeholder journeys. What all the groups found was that the (apparently simple) activity of drawing a diagram helped the group reach understanding and agreement about what they were talking about. Some groups learnt nothing new by drawing the business model of the organisation they were discussing; they found they had to find new ways to represent the organisation visually in order to generate ideas. Others found that combining the business model diagram with the stakeholder map helped them generate new concepts that could potentially reframe the core business. One group acted out their understanding of the difference between the company’s core offering and how competitors might respond to customer needs, illustrating how human-scale stories offer decision-makers meaningful accounts that highlight opportunities for change.

At a time when people all over the world are facing huge challenges, both business education and design’s role in creating unsustainable consumption are being criticised. Meanwhile design schools are beginning to offer MBAs (like at CCA, led by Nathan Shedroff, interviewed here) and b-schools are teaching design practice as part of MBA electives (like mine) or in their core curriculum (like at Imperial College, or Case Western Reserve). But it’s too early to tell what impact these educational developments will have and indeed, whether these new institutional arrangements will last. This elective I have designed and taught will continue to exist at Said Business School for one more year (since my current fellowship will end in September 2010). I’m grateful to the students with whom I have had an opportunity to learn through prototyping these ideas over the past four years.

Further reading

Boland, R. and Collopy, F. (eds) (2004) Managing as Designing, Stanford Business Books
"Managing is Designing? A conversation with Fred Collopy & Richard J. Boland Jr.", Next Design Leadership Institute Journal, 8.1
Dunne, D. and Martin. R (2006) “Design Thinking and How It Will Change Management Education: An Interview and Discussion”, Academy of Management Learning & Education, (5) 4, pp. 512–523.
Hatchuel, A. (2001) "Towards Design Theory and Expandable Rationality: The Unfinished Programme of Herbert Simon", Journal of Management and Governance, 5: 3-4, pp. 260-273
Martin, R. (2006) “Designing in Hostile Territory”, Rotman magazine, Spring/Summer pp. 4-9
Martin, R. (2003) “The Design of Business”, Rotman magazine, Winter pp 7-10
Starkey, K., Hatchuel, A. and Tempest, S. (2004) “Rethinking the Business School”, Journal of Management Studies, 41:8, December, 1521-1531

Coming up: Tactical Play, July 1

2009-06-09T19:20:00.004Z

I'm looking forward to this event, organised by curator Sophie Hope and Elaine Speight, taking place at Birkbeck in London on July 1. More details on their blog here. Most of the speakers are artists and social scientists who use playful enquiry as a tactic for research.

I'm going to be talking about my rat project and showing (at long last) a short film I made about the event I organised at Camden Arts Centre back in 2005 attended by about 40-50 rats and 400 people and which showcased the world premier of the "Is Your Rat an Artist?" drawing competition for human-rat-software assemblages.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 7

2009-06-04T16:57:00.013Z

Emerging practices in design

For this class, the MBA students travelled to London. First we visited the Hub at Kings Cross to meet Inderpaul Johar of architecture practice 00:, who designed it. Then we went to see the newly-opened show SuperContemporary at the Design Museum, followed by a visit to service design consultancy Engine. Together, these encounters offered a rich set of experiences illuminating some of the current conversations within design practice.

The Hub is a fast growing enterprise offering members desk space at convenient locations in major cities. Unlike other such offerings, The Hub is designed around a shared ethos with a particular focus on social entrepreneurs. Involved in designing both the physical space and the way it operates in practice, Indy explained how the design of the social architecture is critical to the success of the operation – for example, having a strong gatekeeping function, and employing a “host” who helps people connect with one another. We also saw how the physical arrangement of space, combined with these practices, resulted in a viable and profitable social enterprise with much higher use of space than similar ventures. Indy talked more broadly about his firm's practice and the ways they aim to design sustainable institutions, not just physical assets.

Later, we visited Engine Group, one the leading service design consultancies, where Aviv Katz and Gavin Maguire talked us through two projects - one public sector and one commercial. In their work for Kent County Council, Engine have helped create the Social Innovation Lab for Kent (SILK). This work has resulted in the council's own teams learning design approaches and methods and developing new tools to help use design to lead to innovation in council services. (See this video). We also heard Engine's experience of working with Virgin Atlantic on the design of the terminal within a terminal in London's Heathrow, where insight gathering was used to generate service principles on which to base the design of the customer experience delivered through various touchpoints.

I hope to do a separate post about SuperContemporary, the new show curated by Daniel Charny at the Design Museum open until October 4, but if I run out of time, I’ve included a few images here including a visionary garden hanging over London's Trafalagar Square by El Ultimo Grito with Urban Salon.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 6

2009-06-02T14:29:00.005Z

Users, stakeholders, customers: People!

This class was an opportunity to get messy through design. I asked the students to use two design methods - following "extreme users" and "experience prototyping" - to analyse the stakeholder experience at the train station, come up with improvements, and quickly prototype the improved experience to share their ideas.

Like von Hippel’s lead users, the idea of extreme users offers to way to understand the service by looking at the margins of the stakeholder group (eg people who do not speak or read English). By looking at the service through the experience of extreme users, the students uncovered some surprising assumptions built into it. Analysing these may offer easy ways to improve the service experience from the point of view of many other kinds of stakeholder.

Having been to the station following one of the members of the team (the extreme user - see the photo in which the student presents a piece of paper to the customer service rep saying he doesn't speak English) and documenting this through photography, video and sketching, the teams generated ideas to solve the problems they identified. The next task was to mock up, using whatever means seemed appropriate, the experience of part of the service, as a way of making tangible and testing some of the improvements they came up with. Finally, we invited someone to walk through these prototypes.

The reading for this week drew on recent work on the boundaries of ethnography and design ("anthrodesign"), participatory and inclusive design, and the notion of wicked problems. Once multiple stakeholders with very different ways of understanding the world are asked to frame problems, design methods which serve to create visual and experiential representations can play an important role in tackling such problems.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 5

2009-05-20T18:01:00.005Z

Design management + design leadership

This class looked at how design is managed within large organisations and the things that managers of design processes, strategies and the design function need to consider.

First, we used a video case I'm developing of Joe Ferry, head of design at Virgin Atlantic Airways, and his colleague Angus Struthers, lead service designer. Joe and his team are responsible for several innovations in their industry including the first fully flat bed in business class; Virgin Atlantic's Clubhouses; and the "terminal within a terminal" at London Heathrow's Terminal 3, including the proposition that passengers can get "from the limo to the lounge in 10 minutes". Prompted by material from my interviews with Joe and Angus, the class engaged with a number of issues, including:
- the strategy for design: styling or differentation
- interfacing between the design function and the rest of the organisation eg engineering, marketing and operations
- evaluating the contribution design makes to organisational effectiveness

Then, our guest speaker Les Wynn from Xerox, gave us an analytical lecture drawing on his 8+ years with the organisation, during a transition from a technology-led manufacturer of photocopies, to a market-led supplier of services. Hearing this detailed account of the change in the role of design and and how design is managed raised several questions similar to the Virgin case.

Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa: Video

2009-05-20T17:50:00.008Z

A think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa: MBA students collaborate with designers from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

Over one day, the MBAs and designers used visual methods to frame and tackle problems facing the organisation. Soul of Africa employs women to make shoes which are sold around the world, while a percentage of the profits goes back to help communities in South Africa affected by AIDS. Mixed teams worked on strategy, operations, marketing and design combining creative and analytical approaches to generate recommendations for Soul of Africa. This short film gives an overview of what happened on the day.

The MBA students then carried on working on the project as part of their assessed work. Their documents were shared with Soul of Africa, who may take some of the ideas forward.

Organised as part of the MBA Design Leadership elective, Said Business School, University of Oxford in April 2009.

For more information about Soul of Africa visit http://www.soulofafricacharity.org/

Design Thinking track at EURAM 2009

2009-05-19T19:06:00.005Z

At last week's European Academy of Management in Liverpool, a gathering of organisation and management academics mostly but not only from Europe, I was delighted to spend time with some scholars paying serious attention to questions of designing and it relation to managing. The track on Design Thinking, Management and Innovation was co-chaired by Armand Hatchuel, from Ecole des Mines and Rachel Cooper, Lancaster. Hatchuel and Weil's C-K (Concept Knowledge) theory is an important contribution to the study of management, via engineering design theory, and formal logic. Not that this was being presented at EURAM on this occasion...Hatchuel's chairing encouraged speakers and those listening or asking questions to take seriously the claims we were making, whether rooted in economics, sociology or by way of Foucault.

I particularly enjoyed papers by
- Le Masson, P., Hatchuel A. and Weil, B, on new design strategies;
- Starkey, K, on Foucault and the history of the business school;
- Bejean, M, Segrestin, B. and Hatchuel, A. on art-based firms, and
- Stigliani I. and Ravasi, D. on how organisations collaborate with external consultancies
(written in pseudo citation format for any readers searching for references).
I was left with a sense that the work being done in North America by Boland and Collopy, and by Roger Martin, and others, is in an important dialogue with these ideas, whether they are familiar with these scholars or not.

Some references

Hatchuel A., 2002. Towards design theory and expandable rationality : The unfinished program of Herbert Simon. Journal of Management and Governance 5:3-4
Hatchuel A., 2001. The two pillars of new management research, British Journal of Management, Vol.12, special issue, (S33-S39)
Hatchuel A, Weil B. 2003. A new approach of innovative design: an introduction to C-K theory. In: Proceedings of the international
conference on engineering design (ICED’03), Stockholm, Sweden, pp 109–124
Hachuel, A., Weil, B. 2009. C-K design theory: an advanced formulation, Research in Engineering Design, Volume 19, Number 4 / January
Starkey, K.; Hatchuel, A.; Tempest, S. 2009. "Management research and the new logics of discovery and engagement", Journal of Management Studies, 46 (3), pp. 547 -558.

2009-05-10T09:29:00.001Z

Ahead of my visit to Liverpool next week (and Tate Liverpool and, even better, FACT...) here is my paper I'm giving at the European Academy of Management (see . I've already had loads of useful criticism including from journal editors (within management/org studies). I'm posting it here in the expectation of reworking the paper after EURAM and welcome other feedback from readers.

Design practices in design thinking
Abstract

Management and organization scholars interested in design typically draw on Simon’s (1969/1996) distinction between science and design. Scholars, educators and practitioners proposing that managers adopt “design thinking” often describe the practices of professional designers, but neglect the studies of designers’ activities in design studies. For its part, that tradition has paid little attention to the practice turn in contemporary social theory and the role of non-designers in constituting designs during consumption. This paper contributes to discussions about the value of the ways designers do things by using the practice perspective to attend to what constitutes design practice. Drawing together these traditions – studies of what designers do within design studies, and practice theory within organization studies – a pair of concepts is proposed: “design-as-practice” and “designs-in-practice”. Using this pair offers a way to move beyond discussions of individual designers and acknowledge the work done by others in constituting designs.

Key words
Design thinking, design, practice, design-as-practice, designs-in-practice

Download the paper from here

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 3

2009-05-07T14:01:00.005Z

In this class we undertook a “crit” (critique) of design at Said Business School and began to generate a vocabulary for talking about the success or failure of design outcomes. I asked MBAs to identify two examples of ‘good’ design at SBS and two examples of ‘bad’ design based on their own criteria, and bring them to class. Examples included service and process design, product and furniture design, web/interface design, graphic and communication design, interior design and architecture.

Through this discussion of what makes good or bad design we attended to the practices of people who uses the outcomes of design processes, whether they have been designed by professional designers or not - designs-in-practice. Our discussion of criteria for good and bad design drew on different ways of making judgements about design such as Vitruvius: firmness, commodity and delight; Sanders (1992): useful, usable and desirable; and IDEO's framework of desirable, feasible and viable.

Our second activity was to write briefs based on these criteria for design improvements in the school. Students took one of the issues they had identified, mapped the stakeholders connected to this issue, prioritised one, and then defined criteria from that point of view for a re-design.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 2

2009-05-07T13:54:00.004Z

After the 'think and make tank' collaborative workshop with designers the previous week, this session offered the MBAs a chance to consider and discuss what is distinctive about what designers do, how they do it, and the sorts of artefact they create along the way – what is sometimes called “design thinking” or “designerly ways of knowing”. Studying the research into designers’ work demystifies the creative design process and offer students insights about what to expect when products and services are designed by or with professional designers.

But the term “design thinking” has limitations – although people using it may claim to be user-centred, it nonetheless privileges the designer as the key agent in design, ignoring decades of work in anthropology and sociology. Introducing the terms “design-as-practice” and “designs-in-practice”, the elective offers students a way to understand that design is not just about what designers do (or how they think), but also about what stakeholders, users and artefacts themselves do in constituting design.

In this class we watched the well-known ABC TV segment in which the product design and innovation consultancy IDEO re-designs a shopping cart in just five days. A second viewing gave students a chance to analyze in detail the process the designers use to come up with their innovative re-design and identify when there was divergent and convergent thinking and use of methods such as ethnographically-inspired research, visualisation, brainstorming, and prototyping. Attending to the design or management of the process was identified as an important skill.

MBA elective: Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa

2009-04-29T16:15:00.004Z

During a one-day workshop, 37 MBA students worked with 11 designers from different disciplines to help frame and tackle some of the current challenges facing Soul of Africa, which employs women hand-stitching shoes which are sold internationally, with the profits going back to support AIDS-affected communities in South Africa.

Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa

2009-04-21T19:20:00.004Z

Tomorrow, the 36 or so MBAs taking my Design Leadership elective will be joined by 12 designers and three representatives from Soul of Africa, for a one-day workshop. The aim of the event is to bring together the ways of problem framing and solving typically used by MBAs with designers from different disciplines, to help Soul of Africa engage with some of the challenges it is faced with. From Soul of Africa, we will be joined by co-founder Lance Clark, Galahad Clark of Terraplana, Franziska Amaral, and Martin Foley. Soul of Africa was originally started with £30,000 and has raised over $2m which has been invested into South African communities affected by AIDS. Women handstitch shoes which are then shipped to the UK and US, and sold in major retail outlets such as Clarks and Next.

The designers - selected from an open call to participate to which over 75 people responded - are from backgrounds in textiles and fashion, graphics, industrial design, design management, interaction design. They are: Titi Abiola, Stephanie Chen, Jason Coop, Rachel Manning, Dejan Mitrovic, Kathryn Moores, Olive Ntkula, Lars Rosengren, Pammi Sinha, Tom Tobia and Rachel Turner.

To help facilitate the day, my colleagues and others helping are: Marc Ventresca, university lecturer in innovation at the school; Sarabajaya Kumar, Skoll Centre for Social Entpreneurship; Trudi Lang, DPhil candidate, InSIS; Meng Zhao, DPhil candidate; Caroline Norman, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, course leader MA Design Management; and Hermeet Gill, MBA alumnus who did my elective last year. We'll also be joined for some of the day by Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entpreneurship. I'm grateful for their support and for our internal admin team for making this happen.

In a week or two I'll be posting a short film showing some of the day's activities and some the approaches we are using. Right now, however, I need to go and make some props.

The difference between art and design: Aurabox

2009-04-09T08:33:00.000Z

One of the things that comes up in discussions of design is if, and how, it's different from art. At last week's European Academy of Design in Aberdeen, there was talk of critical design, a term associated with Dunne and Raby (see my earlier post about the conference) as well as other practitioners. One of the claims Fiona Raby made in her keynote at EAD was that in contemporary art, now you can do pretty much anything, nothing is shocking or draws attention, whereas it can be a radical gesture to present an artefact in the context of design, inviting audiences to imagine something in use through proposition and speculation.

Here's a contribution to that discussion. It's a work called Aurabox (2005). It looks a bit like something you might buy at IKEA. But what is not (yet) at IKEA is the two embedded LED lights indicating the status of the object's aura, either on or off. It's inspired by Walter Benjamin's idea in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) that "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.". Here's a short film showing the Aurabox in the group show Product and Vision in Berlin in 2005.

European Academy of Design 2009: Design Connextity

2009-04-06T12:54:00.004Z

This is an image from Dunne & Raby's Technological Dreams Series: No.1 Robots (2007). Fiona Raby was one of the keynotes at last week's European Academy of Design 2009 conference in Aberdeen. What I enjoyed about the conference was its ability to step through several of contemporary design's realities, from work by Dunne and Raby (as exemplars of "critical design") to mainsteam design management to Josephine Green, who helps Philips think about and visualise futures. Fiona teaches on MA Design Interactions at the RCA, and alongside her and Tony's work, showed lots by their students (some of whom were collaborators with my MBA students on a short project in 2007). At the other extreme, Josephine Green gave insights into how a traditional manufacturer of objects is using design to visualise and rethink its core activities to engage with some of the challenges facing contemporary societies (see some slides from a similar talk here). I also very much enjoyed the talk by Julian Bleecker of the Near Future Lab, originally an engineer, now following what he calls an "undisciplined practice" at Nokia's Design Strategic Projects studio in LA. Julian's stated aim of creating more habitable near futures by combining material practices with knowledge practices was a model which complements my own efforts.

Ideas running round this conference included the fairly standard (how can design's value be understood...communicated...appreciated) to new disciplinary specialisms (eg service design, design for sustainability). For me, the benefit of attending, in addition to catching up with UK and international colleagues, was hearing how distinct approaches to design - from critical design, to Daria Loi's work in the Digital Homes group at Intel, to Stuart Walker's gentle arrangements- all involve the material practices of design in making things public through creating visual and tangible forms.

Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa

2009-03-25T11:07:00.005Z

We've had an amazing response to our call for designers to participate in the one day workshop in April. In this 'think-and-make-tank', designers will collaborate with 36 Oxford MBA students and participants from the Soul of Africa organization to help frame and tackle some of the challenges this social enterprise is facing. A few weeks ago I put out a call to designers via emails to colleagues and friends, via blogs and on twitter. Over 75 designers applied, from many different disciplines, many from outside the UK including Finland, France, South Africa and the US. I was only able to pick 12 and that was very hard indeed. Our resources limited us to covering travel expenses in the UK.

From reading through the designers' statements, I have a strong sense that the shift that was already taking place within design education and practice, away from a fascination with highly styled consumer goods to a design practice that is concerned with equity and sustainability, has now changed things permanently. As the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship opens today in my building at Said Business School in Oxford, it's clear that designers, both students, professionals and educators, want to apply their practice to systemic problems we are all implicated in. One of the challenges is to create opportunities for that to happen.

Further details about the think-and-make-tank will be posted in in the next few weeks. For those interested in creating projects of their own, here are resources that may help through inspiration or more directly.
Social Innovation Camp
The RSA Design Directions Awards
Audi Design Foundation

Steve Vargo: Service-dominant logic

2009-03-23T18:08:00.003Z

Vargo and Lusch are key thinkers within management studies addressing the theory gap in services - of relevance to service designers as much as to service managers. At a seminar organized by the Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) last week, I was able to hear Steve Vargo first hand on the service-dominant logic. References to the key papers are below. There's also a book which I have not yet read. This is the quick summary of what Vargo presented which draws on the papers. Calling their ideas a 'logic' does not mean Vargo and Lusch are making claims to something that works similarly to a mathematical proof. Rather, they are drawing attention to the underlying dynamics of economic theory if it's rethought as to do with service, rather than products to which, in the industrial production model based on a (mis)reading of Adam Smith, value is added. The fundamental idea is that people (and organizations) exchange services for services.

1 There are no services - only service. (The use of the singular draws attention away from 'services' as offerings that are produced slightly differently to products, to the concept of a service-based economic model. This has already been influential in the renaming of the IBM-led initiative services science as service science.)

2 There is no new service economy. Instead all economies are inherently service economies. Some services are direct and some are indirect, involving goods or money.

3 There are no producers and consumers. Instead all parties are what Vargo and Lusch currently call 'resource integrators' playing a role in assembling resources in to offerings. Service is a process.

4 Goods are not 'goods'. Intead goods are value propositions within service. Goods (what some people call products) are 'appliances' for service delivery.

5 Firms do not create value. Value is co-created.

6 There is no B2C. Instead, economic interactions are all B2B in which all of us are resource integrators operating at different scales.

My apologies to Steve Vargo if I have got their ideas wrong in this summary.

References
Vargo, S. and R. Lusch (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic in Marketing,” /Journal of Marketing, /68, 1-17
Invited Commentaries on “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing”, /Journal of Marketing /Vol. 68 (January 2004), 18–27
Vargo, Stephen L. and Lusch Robert (2008), "Service-dominant logic: continuing the evolution," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1), 1-10.

Designers wanted: Join a Think-and-Make-Tank for Soul of Africa

2009-03-03T10:38:00.007Z

Wednesday 22 April 2009 10-5.30pm
Saïd Business School, Oxford

We need up to 10 designers who want to use their design practices and skills to help social enterprise Soul of Africa tackle some of the challenge facing it, during a one-day workshop in Oxford in collaboration with MBA students.

The workshop is a participative, creative "think-and-make-tank" that brings together people from management and from design to use visual methods to analyze and tackle specific problems identified by an organization. MBA students from Saïd Business School will be joined by designers from different disciplines to help social enterprise Soul of Africa engage with key challenges.

Soul Of Africa is a charitable initiative and a self-sustainable project created to facilitate employment and funding aimed at helping orphans affected by AIDS through the sale of hand-stitched shoes. Unemployed and unskilled women in South Africa are trained to hand-stitch shoes, giving them the self-empowering ability to feed their families and provide them with essential health care.

Download more details here.

What we are looking for

Designers (recent graduates, current MA or BA design students, and design professionals) are invited to take part. Ideally, we’d like a mixture of people from these backgrounds:
- visual communication
- product/industrial design
- service design
- interface design
- fashion
- design management

How to get involved

To apply, send an email to Lucy Kimbell (lucy dot kimbell at sbs dot ox dot ac dot uk), to arrive on or by Friday 20 March 2009.

The email must include
- your name and contact details and any institutional affiliation
- your design discipline (eg product, visual communication)
- up to 150 words on why you want to participate.

Successful participants will be contacted by Friday 3 April at the latest. Reasonable travel expenses to Oxford (standard class return, UK only) will be reimbursed to those who attend the workshop, on the production of a receipt.

Apprenticeships: an economic history

2009-02-25T18:11:00.004Z

Contemporary art and design practices - even if now taught in art and design departments in modern universities - bear some relation to the institutions of apprenticeships that developed over hundreds of years in several European countries. A seminar at Said last week raised some interesting questions about what we think we know, and what we actually know, about such apprenticeships. Tim Leunig of LSE, an economic historian, gave a wonderful seminar for the Centre for Corporate Reputation drawing on his work into apprentices in London in the pre-modern period. Given access to a huge set of data (produced a man whose job allowed him time to input vast amounts of data from historical records) about 161,000 London apprentices between 1420-1930, Leunig and colleagues found out some interesting things which challenged their - and my - assumptions about how people were trained in pre-industrial societies in England.

Looking specifically at records from 1600-1750 from 760 London companies (eg vintners, grocers) whose members were masters offering seven-year apprenticeships, Leunig and colleagues found, to their surprise, that
- kinship relations and local connections were not important in how young men chose their masters in London;
- nor were their fathers' trades important in the decisions they made about what to become apprentices in; and
- nor did the distance of their village or town from London have that much of an impact either.
There remain questions about how these young men did make decisions about who to pick to be their masters and what information they had available. But this research suggests that these young men made choices that were not encumbered by things we associate with pre-modern societies - such as kinship and location. Like "modern" apprentices, they made other kinds of choices.

Being of an ethnographic orientation myself, I must confess I have never really "got" quantitative research before. But now I do! The way these scholars framed questions around the data set, crunched numbers to produce something meaningful, and then told a clear story about it was an inspiring piece of scholarship.

Economies of contribution: a developing research agenda

2009-02-11T18:33:00.007Z

At the invitation of Scott Lash and Götz Bachmann (cultural studies, Goldsmiths), philosopher Bernard Stiegler (Centre Pompidou) and Robert Zimmer (computer science, Goldsmiths), a diverse group gathered at Goldsmiths for a day or two to consider the idea of economies of contribution. The workshop included perspectives from media, art, design, software and other fields of theory and practice. In their introduction, the organizers outlined the emergence of a shift from consumer capitalism to an economy of contribution raising questions such as
- Are movements such as Open Source and Wikipedia just detached phenomena, or are they the pioneers of a new economy?
- How do specific localities and regions shape different economies of contribution?
- What are the new power relations and new forms of exploitation?
- How can we use and shape this economy of contribution?
Recent work on open source, crowdsourcing and user-generated content of course was relevant. What was distinctive here was to bring together those with a focus on cultural production, understood as art, design, film, software and broadcast, whether done by professionals or amateurs (if those terms fit).

During the workshop, presentations of research and practice included work by media artist Graham Harwood (MediaShed), Bronac Ferran (who organized the CODE conference in Cambridge in 2001 which had laid out many of the issues); artist Neil Cummings, several of whose projects have questioned the role of cultural collections (see Capital, 2001, at Tate); and Matt Fuller whose work emphasizes the importance of the commons. From Tate, there were presentations by Jennifer Mundy (research), Anna Cutler (learning) and James Davies (online) describing how they are designing new forms of consumption/engagement/contribution to their collection. From Centre Pompidou, there was an overview of some of the technologies of annotation they are developing such as Lignes de Temps. Unfortunately I had to miss the second day and presentations by design/art/media practitioner David Garcia, media theorists from Goldsmiths and others.

My contribution (here, about 7 pages, PDF) was to suggest resources from management and organization literatures that might have something to offer this emerging area, such as practice theory and the turn to design. At a time when the debt-laden consumerist economy seems to be in a tailspin, it is time to pay attention to ways of practice and organizing, and invent new cultural forms that invite a range of modes of participation, engagement and contribution. Media artists - specifically those inventing cultural forms that create novel arrangements of people, software and objects enabling new sets of relations; and service designers - who foreground the involvement of stakeholders in co-designing arrangements of objects and people over time and space - have, I believe, something important and distinctive to offer in the face of these challenges.

Image: screengrab from my project Making a Difference at the University of Plymouth (2004)

MBA Design Leadership elective - Think and Make Tank

2009-02-05T17:26:00.004Z

This year's MBA elective in Design Leadership at Oxford from April-June will include a one day workshop in which the MBA class will collaborate with design students to help social enterprise Soul of Africa address some of the challenges they currently face. The exact details are being worked out, but I'm putting up this post now while the MBAs are considering signing up for the elective.

A think-and-make-tank is a participative, creative workshop that brings together people from management and from design to use visual methods to analyze and tackle specific problems identified by an organization. A one-day event such as this will crystallize ideas that can be taken forward by the organization, complementing its other activities.

The people involved on the day will be:
- approx 20-25 MBA students from Saïd Business School, taking the Design Leadership elective
- approx 8-10 MA design students from different disciplines such as product design, fashion and design management
- people from the Soul of Africa organization, including co-founder Lance Clark
- Saïd Business School faculty

To make best use of the day, Lance has identified three challenges facing the organization which the workshop will be designed to tackle, which are: marketing and communications; service operations/organization design; and product management. The combination of creative and bright students from management and from design will, we hope, serve to generate tangible, useable ideas for the organization, as well as offering an engaging learning experience.

We are seeking a small amount of funding to support this workshop, so please get in touch with me if you can help.

Things I've recently been ....

2009-02-05T13:36:00.003Z

In the last few weeks, here are some of the things I've been consuming (or co-producing, depending on your theoretical orientation)

Reading
This Book Will Save Your Life, AM Holmes
A Late Dinner: Discovering the Food of Spain, Paul Richardson
Maisie's Bus, Lucy Cousins
A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), by: Bruno Latour, keynote at Design History conference, Cornwall, 2008
ZEITHAML, V. and BITNER, M.J., 2003. Services marketing: Integrating customer focus across the Firm, 3rd ed., New York, NY: McGraw-Hill
The Two Cultures, CP Snow
BIJKER, W. 2004. Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs: Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
ALEXANDER, C. 1962. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Looking at
Abigail Reynolds, The Universal Now, 17 Gallery, London
Turner Prize Show, Tate Britain
Cold War Modern, V&A

Watching
House
Lost
BBC CBeebies: In the Night Garden

Listening to
Montserrat Figueras Ninna Nanna

Eating and drinking
Smoked mackerel
Porridge
A bottle of Luigi Bosca Malbec from Argentina (thank you Tomas)

Introducing the critique to an MBA class

2009-02-05T09:18:00.004Z

When Dick Boland visited us last term, one of the things he talked about was a paper by his Managing as Designing collaborator Fred Collopy (whose Fast Company blog is worth reading). As I recall, the idea was to apply an aspect of design practice - the crit (or critique) - to artefacts such as financial instruments. Inspired by their use of the crit, I decided to make explicit this way of approaching idea generation and development within our MBA Entrepreneurship Project this term.

I first experienced crits as part of my MA in what would now be called digital arts at Middlesex University's art school, a strange and wonderful course where they taught artists and designers to program in C so we could write our own software. Then later I taught in art and design colleges, where the crit is a standard part of the teaching and learning environment, mostly at the RCA in London on the MA Interaction Design which is also rooted in that art school tradition.

I can't cite any papers on this yet. What I know about crits is all tacit knowledge and reflection in practice - but the main features were as follows:
- the student presents to a group (faculty, possibly other students) their work to date
- they actually have to show artefacts (a model, a sketch, a set of photos from research, ideally several things)
- they have to explain what the artefact is, how they got to it, and why they did what they did so far (their reasoning)
- and what they plan to do next and why.
And then the people present, both teachers and other students, ask lots of incredibly difficult questions ranging from the nature of the enquiry, the method, the tools, but also the reasons. And also may suggest very concrete ideas too like what other materials or tools to try or other people's work to look at.

Viewed through the lens of practice theory, this is activity in which learning is embodied and situated, in which artefacts play key roles, in which habits and routines develop, in which there is thinking, and doing, and saying. It is therefore not something that can easily be ported to another context, such as the one I am now in, a business school.

But I thought I'd try. Having already introduced the idea to students taking my MBA elective in Design Leadership (in which we do a crit of the Said Business School), I decided to bring in a crit to this year's Entrepreneurship Project. Still at an early stage of their project development, the MBA teams presented along the lines described above, and received a lot of feedback from the people present - members of faculty and my guest designer/researcher Bas Raijmakers of STBY. Doing this prototyped a way of teaching that seemed to work but was novel in our school, where lectures and supervision are the dominant modes of learning and teaching. Oxford (and Cambridge) pride themselves on their tutorial system which has turned out great thinkers and doers, for many many years. Art and design schools have also turned out great thinkers and doers using the crit. The artefacts produced in each case vary (essays v anything at all that an art or design student might create) but the underlying method has some simliarities. But the crit offers something special in a context in which uncertainty about the problem space is high. For students generating ideas for a new business in the EP, it is not even clear what the problem or opportunity is, and it is here that art and design approaches are of value.

Photo by Alice Wang from workshop/crit during project involving MA and MBA students, Said Business Schooll 2007

Public innovation and digital media: what should public subsidy pay for?

2009-01-23T19:23:00.005Z

This is a very big question, addressed by many of the great and the good, but I have an answer which comes at the end. The question underpinned a session on Public Innovation at the Oxford Media Convention 2009, held at Said Business School yesterday. Four speakers, two from the big bucks public broadcasters, one from a government taskforce, and one from a consultancy background and network of media activists, shared their visions for what was involved in public innovation in broadcast and digital media. This being the UK, with its long history of taxpayer-funded broadcasting and internet content, it was not a surprise that social and political agendas were taken for granted (although what currently mattered and to who, was not). Most likely other bloggers and twitters will give a better summary than me of the event, but I wish to draw out two tensions. And then answer the big question. At no direct cost to the public purse.

Richard Halton, (not sure of his current job title but something like) director of new media at the BBC, pointed to how the BBC, across much of what TV and radio people call its "output", now has such a raft of online services that there is "no difference between digital and non-digital". Current activities include Canvas, an effort to create common standards for convergence between online media and TV. And of course the BBC i-Player is a brilliant way for people around the world (those online, anyway) to access recent BBC radio and TV programmes. But in his talk, Halton several times referred to "content".

What is this "content"? And does his use of this term suggest the web-friendly BBC still has not understood the changes happening in peoples' homes, schools, offices, devices, heads, and lives? I love the BBC. I used to work as a business journalist on the BBC World Service in the early 1990s, and in 1997, when other institutions were still unsure what to do with the web, the BBC commissioned my company Soda to make online learning environments for children. But if the BBC still has the mindset that its job is to squirt content through media platforms at people (who may get to send in some of their "content" too) then it may not survive the next decades.

In contrast Jon Gisby, director of new media and technology at Channel 4, did not talk content. Instead he talked about the take-up of broadband in the UK in 2008 and "what people do with broadband" (notice the verb, do). While I am old enough to remember enjoying the launch of Channel 4 Television, I was convinced by his presentation of a vision of public innovation across media platforms that is not about pushing content. His discussion touched on the digital divide, media literacy, education, health and accountability - all terms connected with what institutions think taxpayers want from digital media. His vision questioned on a deep level where organizations that have a history of public service broadcasting should go next. Government spend online is also relevant, he argued, saying "every government department is realising it's a media business". Examples of things that Channel 4 is involved in include 4IP, a £50m fund run by Tom Loosemore to drive public digital media.

So here are two positions: there is stuff called content and there are platforms and technologies, or, there are sets of relations and things that people do which involve practices and infrastructure. Whichever view ends up dominating the public discussions about innovation in public media, there remains the question of what all that money should be spent on. Here is my answer. I think it could work for either position.

Public subsidy should not be spent just on more content, or more technology, but on processes that involve multi-disciplinary teams who take seriously insights learned from ethnography/participant observation, visual methods, and prototyping and involve many others in co-designing the future of public media. These teams should contain social scientists (who know something about people and their practices), designers (who know something about working through uncertainty and ambiguity using visual methods and prototypes), engineers (who can build things) and MBA-types (who are good at turning ideas into marketable models with numbers attached), and then the people who we might have called audiences but now are stakeholders. The brief to these teams is to imagine, invent, discover, create - or in a word - design the future for public media services driven by people's practices. Contemporary design practice and theory acknowledges the necessary incompleteness in design processes. Investing in that a design process attentive to the practices of people would be a start.

Designing new enterprises

2009-01-21T20:53:00.004Z

This academic year, I'm teaching on the MBA Entrepreneurship Project, a term-long process during which the students generate, explore and develop ideas for new enterprises which they pitch to VCs at the end of term. My contribution is to help with the early stage of idea generation - which the problem space is not defined, let alone solutions in the form of identifiable products, services, strategies, or organizational forms. At this early phase of the development of a venture, design methods can play an important role in identifying practices which might offer business opportunities. Visual methods - such as this collage shown here- create ways for teams, often from diverse national and professional backgrounds, to work together. It might have been an idea to test whether those teams making use of the workshops I'm offering come up with "better" projects. Better for who?, of course. But what I'm seeing each week is that projects are moving from the realm of high level strategies, markets, and organizations to identifiable customers with practices around which services and products can be organized.

Blog party

2009-01-18T21:03:00.000Z

Building Space with Words is a project by social scientist Anne-Laure Fayard (assistant professor of Management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, NYU-Poly) and artist Aileen Wilson, associate professor of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute. Along with several others, I have been invited to join their blog conversation where they/we discuss matters such as disciplines, practices, materiality, art v science, social science v science and so on. Indeed the subjects being discussed, and the range of backgrounds of the contributors are such that I was worried that I couldn't keep up with all the posts and all the threads. But then I realised it is rather like being at a party of people, some of whom know each other, or know of each other, or faintly recognise each other, with two hosts who keep offering drinks or things to eat, and introduce you to each other. But where are the gatecrashers?