Designing public services: I choose navigation

Having recently been the guest of two National Health Service hospitals for several weeks, my thoughts have turned to a current issue in design and design management. To what extent can explicit design processes and methods help managers, practitioners and users improve public services? An article in the current print issue of the Royal Society of Arts Journal (online version here) argues that trained designers can play a key role in service improvement and innovation, describing a project by consultancy Think Public.

The Labour government's recent emphasis on choice as being apparently what NHS users want does not ring true for me. I mildly appreciated a choice of food while in hospital (low salt, low fat, vegetarian, Halal, kosher...) and that I was able to choose which hospital to go to. But once in there, I did not really want a choice of consultants: I did not know enough to choose between them. What I did want was clearer navigation through the complexity of hospital treatments, procedures, vocabularies. I wanted clearer wayfinding, better information design, improved visualization of processes. 'Choice' between options was not meaningful for me without help navigating through the situations I was facing.

Now - thanks to high levels of emergency care in the NHS - I am recovering and my baby daughter (who arrived five weeks early) is doing extremely well. As a result of her arrival I won't be posting much in the next few months, most likely until my maternity leave ends in June.

Call for papers: Imagining Business, Oxford, June 2008

Call for Papers: First EIASM Workshop on

Imagining Business
Reflecting on the visual power of management, organising and governing practices

Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, UK,
26-27 June 2008

Keynote Speakers: Paolo Fabbri, Donald Mackenzie & Nigel Thrift

Organizations are saturated with images, pictures, and signs that impact on many different aspects of everyday organizational life. A moment of reflection can produce a long list of examples relating to: budgets and accounting tools, advertising literature, design specifications, public relations leaflets, standard operating procedures, schedules, reports, graphs, charts, organizational hierarchies, and maps, to name but a few.

This raises the question of how we study the role of images in performing all kinds of activities that keep us busy and attentive? Do we focus on images as signs and inscriptions that can be viewed as mediators making others do things (Latour, 2005)? How does this relate to ideas of intensities, affect, engagement, beliefs and passions? Can we explore the difference and multiplicity that underlies such performances in terms of techniques and practices of managing and organizing, and how do images relate to various issues of agency, accountability and responsibility?

Furthermore, imagination as representation is not the focus of this call. Rather than limiting the debate to the role that images have in representing ‘businesses’ of all sorts, we need to explore the role of images as 'forces' in performing business, and enabling possibilities in terms of thinking about and enacting particular orderings.
While images, signs and visualization have been studied from a wide range of perspectives and fields of study (e.g. history, religious iconography, art and visual studies, literature and communication studies, philosophy, sociology, geography, visual anthropology, semiotics, architecture, science and technology studies), within the areas of business, management and organization studies the level of interest has been less evident. A particular focus of this workshop therefore involves bringing together an eclectic assembly of scholars to enable an imaginative forum for discussion and debate in this area of enquiry. We welcome papers and extended abstracts (2500–4000 words) from scholars from a wide range of disciplines that seek to explore theoretical and empirical issues from a diverse set of themes.

Submission deadline: 28th February 2008
Organisers: Lucy Kimbell, Christine McLean, François-Régis Puyou, Paolo Quattrone

For more information go to:
http://www.eiasm.org/frontoffice/event_announcement.asp?event_id=555

Design-led innovation: Not on the Economist's radar yet

Disappointing news for those in the business of promoting design and design management. The Economist's recent report on innovation has not paid attention to the evangelism of designers, academics, and national design bodies like the UK's Design Council who have been talking up the value of design processes and 'design thinking' in organizational life and in innovation in particular. The articles provide a good snapshot of some key ideas - the differences between innovation and invention, the role of creativity, national policy, and organizational implications. They run through some recent thinking including open innovation, disruptive innovation, user-led innovation and service innovation. IDEO's Tim Brown gets a quote, and Doblin's Larry Keeley. But design-led innovation doesn't get a mention.

Where does this leave researchers working in this area - after 40 or so years of research into design processes and design theory, and 25+ years of research into design management? Responses welcome.

Said Business School makes Business Week top 60

This year Said Business School has again made the list of top design schools around the world - one of few business schools to do so. Here's the special report.

The full list is here, which includes many of the most prestigious names in design and engineering education. But as with last year a number of interdisciplinary initiatives and joint programmes has brought several business and management schools on to the list including the obvious contenders Stanford, Rotman, and Harvard.

We're honoured to be included in the top 60 and the recognition it indicates for the work we've been doing in teaching and research. We think of the initiatives we currently have at Said as a prototype for a way of working that acknowledges the strengths and particularities of Oxford and its networks of entrepreuneurs, especially in science and technology. With my Said colleagues, in particular those working in innovation, operations management and marketing, we are now looking at how to build on our early work and iterate these ideas to make a sustainable and valuable contribution to management teaching and research.

Design management - metamorphosis

Design management is a discipline, or interdiscipline, in transition. A recent seminar held at London College of Communications brought together researchers, lecturers and practitioners who work within or on the boundaries of this area. The aim of the day was to create a platform to sustain further debate, analysis and action.

Organized by Naomi Gornick (Brunel), Tom Inns (Dudee), Tony Kent (LCC) and others, the workshop involved this diverse group exploring definitions of design management, its relation to other bodies of knowledge and the value of connecting practice, education and research. Participants included those with a long-standing commitment to research and teaching in this area including Alan Topalian and Brigitte Borja. In discussions there were references back to key workshops and reports in the 1980s, the decade during which design management emerged - with an occasional suggestion that 'none of this is new'.

Les Wynn's account of his role within Xerox raised some of the questions facing both design managers, and the discipline as a whole. Wynn asked how design management must change, given the changing business models facing many organizations to which outsourcing is a common response. Is design just another function of the organization or is it a key capability that should definitely stay in house?

What came across strongly for me was how there continues to be a confusion between design, and design management. Participants discussed design management on both a project level and an organization level. They seemed to be agreement that design management was connected with strategy, and that its visibility and accountability to the highest level of the organization is key to its effectiveness.

I would not expect to see design management emerge as a single, authorizing discipline to build on this earlier history. Rather I notice a number of areas in which the ideas of both design and design management have been taken into conversations about strategy, innovation and organizational design - in the approaches discussed in Boland and Collopy's Managing as Designing, for example, the founding of the d-School at Stanford, the MBA at the Zollverein School of Management and Design and the establishment of Design London (Imperial College, Tanaka Business School and the Royal College of Art). In this diverse and diversifying area of practice and research, I suspect design management is likely to remain fluid. Workshops such as this one will have an important role in bringing together some of that diversity.

London Design Festival

Festivals help make public issues in an area of practice - and this year's London Design Festival, 15-25 September makes visible tensions within current design practice between the commercial and the experimental, design as outcome and design as process, the issue of sustainability, and the relationship between design as conceived of by designers and its various publics - investors, users, consumers, commissioners, manufacturers.

Of particular interest to me are the Financial Times Business of Design talks next week including one on investment in design and another in the role if design in retail. The talks organized by Blueprint include some people I'd love to hear speak - all architects: Peter Cook from Archigram, Zaha Hadid and Amanda Levete from Future Systems. The team at RCA Innovation are putting on two shows, both at the RCA as well as talks and events.

What's missing for me - and this may be an artefact of the sign-up system for festival partners - is attention paid to emerging areas of design such as service design, interaction design, and experience design, which, reliant on intangibles, are often harder to communicate.

Intersections that don't intersect all that much

"Design is changing as it adapts to a world in transition." The Intersections 07 conference held in Gateshead at the end of October aims to explore some of these adaptations. But despite all the emails and leaflets promoting the event and detailing all the interesting speakers, I don't find myself wanting to attend. Some reflections on why:

- Design is allegedly getting more interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary but at Intersections, there are few speakers from non-design places to give their perspective. I more or less know what many designers say/do - but I am increasingly interested in what people who choose, or don't choose, to work with 'designers' think about them.
- On a similar note, I'm not sure that I want to go to an event that is driven predominantly by the agendas of design practitioners, however insightful or thoughtful (as I know many of the speakers to be) in isolation from Design Research/Theory (people like Ken Friedman, Richard Buchanan, Klaus Krippendorff or Nigel Cross), who are also people who think deeply and care passionately about design and how it might be changing.
- Similarly, I have some idea what Tim Brown of IDEO might cover in his presenation on design thinking - a vision of the world in which business people (should) value designers. Despite some stars (like IDEO) and some promoters of this idea (like Business Week), mostly they don't. Again, I would prefer to hear a dialogue between Tim Brown and some of the management academics who offer a more theoretical version of this story (Boland & Collopy, Roger Martin, Jeanne Liedtka)- and even better, some who don't buy into it.
- Why have a panel on the social anthropology of design, but not include the key academics in related fields who have studied design and desiigners in the broadest sense and have interesting things to say eg Harvey Molotch, Lucy Suchman, Nina Wakeford? Again, I don't just want to hear from designers, however famous or insightful.

In summary, Intersections looks to me as if it will present an up-to-the-minute snapshot of key issues in design practice - as viewed from within design practice. And it will offer a design view on intersections between design and other worlds, but without offering deep insights from those other worldviews. Over in Toronto, an event held in June with some similarities called Overlap doesn't quite hit the mark either, although it does draw more directly on disciplines and practices other than design. The event I would like to go to doesn't appear to exist, yet.

Counting Creativity: Routine, Regulation and Evaluation in Design

How do you measure creativity in design? This is the question being tackled by Guy Julier (Leeds Met, design historian) and Liz Moor (Middlesex, sociology/cultural studies) in a AHRC-funded research project which will result in a book to be published next year. At an intimate gathering in Leeds last week, many of the contributors presented their responses to this question in papers that considered fields as diverse as graphic design, advertising, public art, museum exhibition design, cinema production design and - a new area on the UK government agenda - the design of children's play spaces. A recurring theme was the extent to which designers, design managers and clients are increasingly required to account for the value that designers create, while there continues to be a mystery about what designers do, and how, and where their 'creativity' lies. Designers and artists working on publicly-funded projects in particular have to provide accounts of how they are 'adding value' in ways that inherit the most reductive thinking of some management practices. Designers at the agency where contributor Annemarie Ennis works have to record in detail their daily activities in a similar way to lawyers, accountants and management consultants. But her desription of how this data is gathered, amended and used illustrates how such regulation leads to fictionalized evaluation.

Bill Moggridge talk: Designing Interactions

I was struck by something Doors of Perception founder John Thackara said a few years ago - "We know what technology can do, but what is it for?" A guest lecture at Said Business School by IDEO co-founder, award-winning designer Bill Moggridge, provided possible answers, discussing many of the technologies which have become common or even essential in industrialized countries in the last 20 years.

This was our final Design Leadership MBA elective class, open not just to Said students but to the wider university, which I organized jointly with the James Martin Institute. Drawing on material from his recent book Designing Interactions Moggridge raised the issue of the increasing complexity in material world in the objects and networks around us and talke about how to draw on a range of expertises to create new products, services and experiences.

Showing a video of a woman trying to use her i-mode phone to buy a can of drink from a vending machine (it took 35 minutes) communicated clearly the impact of poor design. It reinforced the point we have explored in this MBA elective about the importance of attending to the artefacts through which end users/customers experience products and services. Moggridge's process recommendations for success to avoid what this user experienced include - of course - prototyping.

Describing what's necessary to enable innovation, Moggridge used the term "post-disciplinary design": "Forget your discipline when you're in the project room". He argued that there are three elements to successful innovation through design:
- interdisciplinary design thinking (what to do)
- specialist design skills (how to do it)
- and a general design awareness (how to choose).
For managers and entrepreneurs, I think this means they don't have to all rush off to design school but rather develop an awareness of the design approach (whether it's called design thinking or something else) and improve the organization's ability to make judgements about design.

MBA Design Leadership elective - week 8 - icons, standards, quality and failture

In the final week of our MBA elective in Design Leadership, we drew on recent public and media discussions in response to the London 2012 Olympics brand and logo as a way to discuss success and failure in design. In our conversation we reviewed a range of publicly available resources as data - the London organizing committee's aims for the Olympics, the film that communicates the vision behind the brand, news reports about the problems experienced by viewers from the 2012 advertisements which appeared to trigger epilepsy, the campaign to redesign the logo and the legacy from previous Olympic brands and their graphic identities. For managers, key issues are how to manage the design process to meet the organization's goals, and how to evaluate design effectiveness.

In the second part of the class, we heard from guest speaker Chris Thomason from PDD, a leading independent design company with offices in London. Unlike many other consultancies, PDD offers "concept to cash" consultancy, including expertise in advising clients on manufacturing in China, for example, and in house skills and technology to test prototypes against spec. Their team of 60 people includes not that many "designers" - rather they offer a range of skills and resources including in research, ergnonomics, prototyping, engineering, and psychology. For Chris, a key question for clients was whether they want something similar or something totally different. Failures include failures of timing, of execution and killing off concepts too early. His claim - "We design profit streams for companies" - left the audience with the question about what approaches, methods and skills managers need to deliver on the goals of strategy if they want to explore new areas. Is an understanding of design and design management essential for innovation?

MBA Design Leadership elective - week 7 - managing as designing

In this week's class we looked at the work of academics who propose that designing is a metaphor of value to businesspeople - a way to think about how they might go about their practice, especially in contexts of uncertainty and ambiguity, in the design of all different kinds of forms whether organizations or new ventures.

The two key thinkers in this area are polymath and Nobel prize winner Herbert Simon and Donald Schon. Simon - whose "The Sciences of the Artificial" (1969) provides some of the most ubiquitous quotes in this field - argues that designing underpins all human activity in what he calls the realm of the "artificial". While he proposes that a science of design will be an important area of study and suggests some of its topics, Simon's intellectual foundations in technorationalism make the detail of his ideas unattractive to those who are attentive to the social contexts in which people do things. Schon's "The Reflective Practitioner" (1983) uses emprical studies of how professionals of different kinds go about their practice to propose that problem framing, not just problem solving, is a significant activity for professionals.

The more recent readings are from Boland & Collopy, whose event Managing as Designing in 2002 brought together a wide range of scholars and practitioners interested in exploring this idea. The event led to a publication of the same name (Stanford Business Books, 2004). Writing by Jeanne Liedtka on strategy as design, and Roger Martin on the design of business, is based on the argument that managers should be more like designers. Translating some of the ideas emerging in design research since the 1960s, Liedtka and Martin are reaching a new audience - both are based in business schools (Martin is Dean of the Rotman School, Toronto). After a century in which management education has moved from the scientific closer to the social, I think it'll take a while to absorb ideas from the arts and humanities.

MBA Design Leadership elective - week 6 - User-centred design, inclusive design, participative design

This week's class started with a crit of the design of Saïd Business School. Students came to class with two examples of 'good' design and two examples of 'bad' design, from their experience as users or observations of others. Examples were drawn from the design of the building and fittings, processes and procedures, software and internet services and communications. This exercise generates a discussion about judgements about design, and the management of design in organizations.

We then moved on to discuss emerging issues in design which focus on the end user. Increasing attention is paid not just to the appearance of design artefacts, but also to utility and usability. Interface and human-computer interaction designers have been developing methods that either take a “user-centred” approach – putting the user and their perceived needs and desires at the centre of the design process; or involving end users in the design and development process – participative design, drawing on Scandinvian research and practice that emphasizes democracy in design. Inclusive design methods seek to design products and services that do not exclude users or customers (for example by making text on a phone too small to read for older people or those with poor sight). These developments provide opportunities for managers and entrepreneurs to get closer to the articulated or unarticulated needs and requirements of end users. Instead of seeing these as constraints on design and innovation, is there value in looking at these as opportunities to forge new markets, not just new products or services?

MBA Design Leadership elective - week 5 - Design leadership v design management

In this week's class we hosted Joe Ferry, head of design and service design at Virgin Atlantic, who gave an engaging and inspiring presentation about the role of design at the airline.

Joe's personal story started with his final year student project for his MA in Industrial Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art, which caught the airline’s eye. It was an invention which would become Virgin Atlantic's initial Upper Class Sleeper seat and later a business class standard on most airlines. But Joe's presentation was not just about design - it was about the value of design methods and processes within a difficult commercial context. As an upstart airline challenging the incumbents British Airways and the US carriers, Virgin had to find a way to differentiate itself. The way Virgin Atlantic has gone about this is by giving design a key role.

Having developed his MA project into a seat that was rolled out in the airline (and copied by many others), Joe was then given the challenge of developing the next generation of seating. He lead the team of in-house designers and external design conultants, working closely with engineers, ergonomists and manufacturers, which lead to the £105m investment in Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class Cabin, unveiled in late 2003, the winner of many awards. This is the design not just of seating, but of the whole customer experience.

Joe has a team of 15 designers from a range of backgrounds (architects, interiors, textiles, service design, lighting) who - having learned the constraints they must work within in a highly regulated industry - work closely with external design consultancies. They prefer to work with emerging designers rather than established consultancies, Joe said, for several reasons. Firstly, because they know little about the airline industry and ask difficult questions, challenging the assumptions of the in-house team. Secondly, as emerging companies they are keen to prove themselves and make their mark. Thirdly, in smaller agencies, he said, you know who you are going to work with.

Having used design to re-define the transatlantic business class experience, the challenge is now to continue innovating. Under Joe's leadership, design has played a critical part in creating a commercial success in a demanding industry; it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Another issue will be to what extent concerns about climate change will impact on the airline industry: to what extent will designers be quick to respond to constraints (whether imposed by regulators or in response to public opinion) to devise innovative experiences that minimize their envrionmental impact?

MBA Design Leadership elective - week 4 - Design processes and methods

In this class we explored some key ideas about design, distinguishing between design as outcome and design as process. We then drew on literature in design management to discuss how to manage design processes - as it appears in textbooks and how it is enacted in practice. Drawing on design research over the last 40 years, we explored the implications of the idea that designers co-create the problem space and the solultion space (eg in Cross and Dorst). Understanding design processes and design methods is key for managers and entrepreneurs developing new products, services and ventures. We considered methods such as sketching and prototyping and explored what they offer managers and entrepreneurs and designers at different stages in the design process. From the brief but intense project with the MA students at the RCA, as well as their previous experiences, students were able to see the relevance and importance of visualization methods in exploring and commmunicating design problems and solutions.

MBA Design Leadership elective - week 3

In the third and final week of our MBA students' joint project with MA students from the Royal College of Art, we again visited the college for an engaging and enjoyable afternoon. In the intervening week, the design students took forward their initial ideas, several of which had been iterated in the larger group. The MBAs also had a role in each product/service proposal - using frameworks and analytical tools from their background to contribute to and extend the underlying concept, often at a very early stage. At this workshop, the MBAs did a one-minute pitch for each project, and then the class voted on which three they wanted to hear in more depth. This voting mechanism - primarily decided on because of the limited time available - brought some competition to the proceedings which is (in my experience) not so overt in RCA crits.

In the ensuing discussion, students talked about their encounter with each others' methods and processes in this short project which several saw as having a huge divide between them. Some business students were astonished how quickly the designers were able to generate and develop ideas, for example going from what seemed (to some MBAs) incomprehensible manifestos in week 1 to a product prototype in week 2, or in daily iterations of the project between weeks 2 and 3. There was also a question about how useful 'MBA thinking' could be at the very early stage of these projects.

To give the MBA students a different insight into design-inspired innovation, we then had three presentations by graduating second-year students from three departments with very developed projects. From MA Design Products, Ian Ferguson described the development of his software tool for rapid prototyping machines to enable them to produce objects with more heterogeneity (resembling bone, wood or foam). From MA Industrial Design Engineering, Michael Korn and Komal Vora presented their new design for a fashion boot aimed at people who find it hard to put on shoes, a project which has already won a business plan competition. From MA Design Interactions, Jess Charlesworth talked about her personlized futures methods that draw on her internship at the DTI futures lab.

MBA Design Leadership elective - week 2

The second week of the joint project between MBAs at Saïd Business School and MA Design Interactions students at the Royal College of Art took the design process a stage further. MA students each presented their initial concepts for products and services which ranged from a "Spiritual Gym" to a "Manifesto for a Better London".

The photos show a simple prototype for an "Antenna", a product proposed by Kenichi Okada and Chris Woebken. Inspired by the ways ants sense their environment, these students constructed a simple device which has a microscope at the end of a stick, connected to a laptop showing what the microscope sees. Thus this device offers a different way of looking and making connections - only able to 'see' in extreme detail. But as the second photo shows, using this device in public generates social interactions that generate different kinds of data.

The point of this exercise is not to develop a product from this prototype but rather to explore the ways (student) designers go about generating, testing and communicating their ideas - such as the power of prototyping to instantiate concepts. The MBAs and MAs voted on which products and services to take forward, and then spent time analyzing their features, prioritizing some for the next iteration of the design. The third photo shows one of the matrices generated in which design features are organized under four headings.

MBA Design Leadership elective - week 1: Design thinking/designerly ways of knowing

This is the second year Said Business School has offered this elective and once again 19 students have signed up (out of about 225 students and around 30 electives). As last year, it involves a combination of class-based teaching based on readings (drawing on design management, design research, innovation studies) and practical workshops. This year, the eight-week course includes a three-week project with MA Design Interactions students from the Royal College of Art in London – both institutions trying to find a way to create a meaningful educational experience from different contexts (design/the arts v social science/management) and limited time available.

Our first meeting was held in London where each group of students presented some of the work they had prepared. The MA students, who in the previous week had chosen an extreme organization to research and reflect on personal commitments, presented manifestos which will be the starting point for designing a product, service or product/service system. These often poetic and sometimes moving personal statements gave a flavour of one approach to designing (we cover user-centred design later). The business students presented their often witty MBA-style analyses of the organizations selected by the design students – giving a sense of the kinds of conceptual toolkits and language they use (eg Porter’s five forces) that designers are not generally familiar with.

Readings giving the MBAs resources for understanding how designers think included Cross on designerly ways of knowing, Buchanan on wicked problems and design thinking, and Heskett on significance and utility.

Scenarios: designing probable, preferable and plausible futures

What do designers who make use of scenarios methods need to know about the history of this practice? In a recent talk, Angela Wilkinson, director of scenarios and futures research at the James Martin Institute, gave an overview of the history of scenarios – in her view not just limited to the 20th and 21st centuries but evident too in practices such as reading animal entrails and making maps. Wilkinson divided up scenarios into three schools: the US school emerging from military R&D trying to create probable scenarios to get policymakers to “think the unthinkable”; the French school aiming to envisage and design preferable futures; and the Shell school generating plausible scenarios – her own background – drawing on ideas of conversation, reperceiving and focus.

Other talks in this series include Rafael Ramirez (Said Business School) and BettySue Flowers (LB Johnson Presidential Library).My particular interest will be to see where the emergence in some design consultancies of making artefacts “from the future” as a way of exploring scenarios fits in.

Skoll Forum on Social Entrepreneurship: Enabling social innovation

This year's forum organized by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship filled the foyer, lecture theatres and seminar rooms of Saïd Business School, as well as much of Oxford, with the energy and buzz of entrepreneurs, academics and policymakers from all over the world. I can't do the event justice here but want to reflect on some things I heard at the events I attended.
- The question of handling uncertainty. How do social entrepreneurs and investors/funders handle risk? Are the tools of corporate finance, grounded in traditional economic rationality, useful for those setting up social based ventures? What can we learn from how 19th century social ventures in sanitation, education and health in the UK, for example, developed into public assets?
- The question of scale. For policy makers who want to support or enable sociallly-based ventures, what are the things that can be exported from one particular context? What can't be replicated even if a regional government really wants to try to support social venture models that work elsewhere?
- The question of design. This year's forum included two sessions on 'Design Thinking' run by Debra Dunn and colleagues from Stanford's d-school who ran workshops in which participants explored ideas of user-centered design and visual, iterative methods of framing problems. Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, and an advocate of "integrative thinking" and "design thinking", chaired the closing panel. How can social entrepeneurs use design methods to frame problems and involve stakeholders in co-design?

A year after the Cox Review: design, management and technology education in the UK

Over 30 people attended a workshop organized jointly with the UK Design Council , held at Saïd Business School on Wednesday 21 March. It brought together many of the people currently involved in forging links in the UK between design education, management/business education and research, both those working within higher education institutions and others from related contexts such as NESTA and regional development agencies. International models such as the Stanford d-school, Zollverein, Chicago's Institute of Design and the Rotman School of Mangement in Toronto provided some of the points of comparison. See this blog set up by the Design Council for a deeper discussion. [Unfortunately having helped organize the event, I was ill with flu and unable to attend so the notes below are based on talking to others and reading the Design Council's report.]


The day started with two provocations proposing contrasting positions on the question as to whether the UK is well placed to achieve economic success through the use of design (the Cox Review, commissioned by the UK Treasury, was concerned primarily about the role of design in economic growth and innovation in the UK). Bruce Tether (Manchester Business School) argued against while Nick Leon (Tanaka Business School) argued for.

Then there were several presentations by speakers from higher education institutions developing different models for multidisciplinary teaching and research. Jeremy Myerson (Royal College of Art) described the college's plans for a new centre called Design London set up jointly with Imperial College and Tanaka Business School, recently awarded funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Bob Young (Northumbria University School of Design) presented Northumbria's plans for a multidisciplinary research lab drawing on their experience with an international summer school programme, and the difficulties of getting academics to work across disciplinary boundaries. Nick Wilson (Kingston University Business School) described Kingston's development of 26 new MA programmes developed by specialist arts and design programmes with modules on the creative industries delivered by the business school. Martin Binks (Nottingham Unversity Institute for Enterprise and Innovation) talked about his school's close working links with small and medium sized enterprises and raised the question of how to achieve multidisciplinary projects with 1000 students, not just 10.

Questions that emerged included
- the intellectual underpinning to these developments
- a desire to hear the details, rather than broad strokes/big pictures
- the differences between design management of the 1980s-1990s and these developments

The Design Council is producing a write-up which is available from Aviv Katz.

We have never been disciplinary

Designers typically make claims about being able to integrate between disciplines: that "design thinking" and design methods are effective at drawing together knowledges from different contexts in the process of designing. Once that meant different kinds of (design) specialist; increasingly this means the various stakeholders in a process of creating a venture, especially "users" but also various organizational functions needed to design and deliver a new thing. So, design might be seen as profoundly or indeed determinately interdisciplinary - offering a process to enable collaboration across multiple disciplines.

A colloquium (academese for talkshop) on "Interdisciplinarity and Society" held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, the other day provided me with resources to reflect on this. The day was an ouput of a study led by my collaborator Andrew Barry (Oxford University Centre for the Environment), Georgina Born (anthroplogy, Cambridge) and Marilyn Strathern (anthroplogy, Cambridge) funded by the ESRC which is a comparative study of interdisciplinary research involving a survey of interdisciplinary collaborations involving natural scientists and either social scientists and/or artists worldwide.

Another output will be a book which draws on the contributions from several amazing scholars at the event. These included:
- historian of science Simon Schaffer (Cambridge), who took us on a zoom round his understanding of interdisciplinarity drawing on Foucault: that disciplines organize by assembling in space and especiallly by organizing aesthetic objects in space.
- anthroplogist Lucy Suchman (Lancaster), who talked about the currently fashionable role of anthropology in industry, drawing on her time at Xerox PARC.
- Georgina Born and Gisa Weszkalnys, who described the findings of their study of emerging "interdisciplines" in art-science collaborations, in particular the multidisciplinary teaching programme at UC Irvine called Arts Computation Engineering and the emergence of new aesthetic objects.
- Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard), who drew our attention to the ways that academic departments control disciplines, compete for funds and replicate themselves.

Designers and theorists from different backgrounds and contexts have been turning design into a discipline over 40 years or so, and (in the UK) the teaching of design and most research about design has moved into universities. Design is now identifiable as a range of disciplines, some within the arts tradition and some within engineering. Recently I have been wondering to what extent design (and art too?) can be considered to be disciplinary even though it's now embedded in academia. One the one hand, according to Hebert Simon's definition, nearly any purposeful activity is a design activity. On the other there are students, teachers, professional designers, and theorists whose activities enact the discipline(s) of "design". From another perspective, design processes and artefacts cannot be understood without people engaging with them in context. The boundaries are hard to describe. To follow Latour's "We Have Never Been Modern", I wonder if it is possible to make the claim "We have never been disciplinary". If design is un-disciplined/undisciplinary, might this make its practices and methods particularly suitable as a starting point for multi-disciplinary collaboration?

Event: links between management education and design education

Emerging bridges between design, technology and business education a year after the Cox Review

With the (UK) Design Council I am jointly organizing a half-day event which will bring together many of the UK academics and policymakers involved in making links between management/business education and design education.

It follows a year or so of meetings in response to a report by Sir George Cox to the UK Treasury about Creativity in Business, which argued for better links between management/business education and design education (teaching and research) and the creation of five centres of excellence based around teaching and research. Relevant models include the interdisciplinary d-School at Stanford, Rotman School of Management in Toronto and Zollverein Design Management School in Germany. Find out more at the Design Council's blog.

Date: Weds 21 March 0945-1430 (includes lunch)
Location: Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Aims
_ To share knowledge and experiences of UK higher education institutions working at the intersection of design education and business management education
_ To discuss the implication of findings form the US mission and the Cox Review recommendations for UK HEIs and for national policy
_To discuss barriers and support development opportunities

If you want to attend please contact Aviv Katz at the Design Council.

Designing for social issues: Hilary Cottam

Hilary Cottam - who does not call herself a designer but won the UK Designer of the Year award in 2005 - offers a wonderful example of what "design leadership" might be.

Hilary visited Oxford earlier this week to talk about failure, doubt and misdirection - as part of the "Permission to Fail" series at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, organized by artist Abigail Reynolds. In contrast to another recent speaker in this series, novelist AL Kennedy who talked eloquently about the doubt and amibiguity in her writing practice, Hilary talked a great deal about institutional failture and institutional doubt.

In a range of projects in the UK and internationally, Hilary has developed and used visual and participatory methods to help people in complex and difficult situations make sense of their environment and the sorts of changes they want. She has worked with artists and designers to help people give form to their aspirations, needs and fears. Whether working with her neighbouring slum dwellers in the Dominican Republic, persuading the UK Department for Education to give her £10million to re-design not just a school building in south London but also its processes and organization, and then as the leader of the Design Council's RED unit, Hilary has created opportunities for groups of people to co-imagine and co-design their services.

What I found particularly interesting was the questions she is now asking herself and her team (who have left the Design Council and are setting up a social venture). How do you scale these practices? What institutional forms need to be developed to move away from industrial models of education and health provision? In what ways can we discuss the implications and effects of using what some people call "design thinking" and design methods (visualization, prototyping, user focus)? And if Hilary's goal is "to help people do it for themselves" what are the ethical and political issues that are embedded in this?

Counting creativity

Guy Julier (Leeds Met) and Liz Moor (Middlesex) have convened a research project called Counting Creativity, whose first workshop was held at the Design Council's offices in London last week, bringing together academics and practitioners. The project investigates the growth in practices of accounting, routine organization, systematization and measuring in design studios and companies.

In their introduction to the event, they wrote:
"In recent years, design and, by extension, branding, advertising and design in the built environment, have been increasingly subject to these effects, both internally in their working practices and externally in their evaluation. No doubt this reflects many wider trends in society, but it’s particularly interesting where creativity and systemization actually meet head-on in the design industry. Everyone in creative fields has a view on this. However, we are interested in finding out why this has come about, analyzing what are its effects and considering what can be done to improve design processes."

Hearing first hand from people working in commercial studios (such as an ad agency) or in public sector museums (such as the V&A) brought to life these questions. If designers now have to account for their time in six minute chunks (but actually create a week's worth of data on Monday mornings), how does this make us think about which bits of their work are "creative" and which are not?

In my presentation, I talked about projects in which I undertook unauthorized versions of such practices of evaluation and measurement, for example my book Audit and collaborative project Personal Political Indices (Pindices) with sociologist Andrew Barry. I used these to raise issues such as: being attentive to how these practices are embedded in networks of relations; how data is produced, not gathered; and how data production is tied up with data representation.

I argued that design companies do not have to take an uncritical approach to evaluation and simply reproduce established (and now challenged) practices and procedures drawn from management. Designers might even see the drive to account for their creativity as an opportunity to (re)design such artefacts, building into them the ambiguity and not-knowing which are essential parts of the design process.

New contexts for design

A few days ago I participated in the International Design Principles and Practices Conference, organized by Common Ground (Australia) and held at Imperial College London. In contrast to other academic juggernauts I've attended, this one was pleasingly small and intimate, with an international mix of people from different backgrounds including interior design, engineering, interaction design, design theory and quite a few people from business schools.

I particularly enjoyed two papers, both giving design a refreshing and welcome critical social science treatment: one by Guy Julier from Leeds Met and one by Monika Buscher from Lancaster University. Guy's paper drew on practice theory (such as Harvey Molotch's Where Stuff Comes From) to explore end user motivations enacted through their practices - a perspective which does not often appear in design research or education, as far as I know.

Monika described some work from a larger (100 person) interdisciplinary research project in palpable computing in which she is undertaking ethnographic field studies of how landscape architects work. Informed by Science and Technology Studies, Monika's work is drawing attention to how "the design is negotiated with all the human and non-human agencies" (my notes) in the way these architects go about their work.

Both of these contributions for me raise questions about the intentions of designers, the design process and how it should and can be undertaken and managed. Both provide ways to move away from the historical preoccupation with objects and to pay closer critical attention to the ways people engage with objects and the contexts in which they do so.

The keynote by Ken Friedman, whose teaching and research bridges design (at Denmark's Design School), management (at the Norwegian School of Management) and the arts (artist and founder of Fluxus), shared the fruits of his interdisciplinarity. His articulation of ten challenges for designers was also a statement of the challenges facing entrepreneurs and people in organizations whether in the non-profit, or for profit sectors, given contemporary questions such as climate change, AIDS and poverty.

Reviewing design in 2006

The last few weeks have, as usual, seen the British newspapers I read conduct their reviews of the year and previews of the year ahead with lists and rankings, recommendations and tips. As usual, there were no informed discussions of design practices and outcomes. Indeed design was mostly invisible, although discussed in some papers within distinct categories such as fashion, architecture and consumer electronics/gadgets. Entangled with consumption, design artefacts are the only things you get to read about in these newspapers - as long as you can buy them and put them in your home, on your desk, or on your body. Within the arts pages, in contrast, film, books, visual art, theatre, dance, opera and music each have their critics and commentators discussing not just outcomes but also the contexts of production.

The problem is of course that everything has been through some kind of design process, so a review of design for 2006 might end up being a meta-list. But even if we limited ourselves to the kinds of things taught and researched at design schools and looked for a national discussion of these in the broadsheets, we still find the major UK media outlets keeping silent about design.

I wonder if - hope that - this might change over the next few years. The UK University and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) has just published its figures for acceptances onto undergraduate programmes. The BBC's report on this is worth a read: in second place for 2006 is "design studies" (below law in first place and above management studies at four). Part of the reason, the BBC reports, is a desire for degree-level studies that relate to vocations and professions. But perhaps it's also possible to read into this a desire on the part of these new undergraduates to develop their knowledge and understanding of how the world is designed and how they might into a reflective, informed discussion about their own designing practices. Or it could be that all the DIY makeover programmes on TV have given them visions of future success as future interior designers...

Designing services in science and technology-based enterprises: first event

On Monday and Tuesday, around 30 people from different contexts - all involved in researching, designing or operating services - gathered in Oxford for our first interdisciplinary project workshop in this one-year research project, funded by the AHRC and EPSRC' Designing for the 21st Century initiative. They included senior team members from science and technology-based enterprises, service design consultancies, and academics from different disciplines including strategy, innovation studies, operations management, science and technology studies, computer science and design. The project asks - and will try to answer - how members of these communities understand the designing of services in science and technology-based enterprises. It's therefore a project concerned with sense-making and sharing of understandings. With my colleagues Victor Seidel and James Tansey, I have designed the project to make use of both design research and social science research methods. In a way, the research itself is a process of designing. While we have a goal, intentions, constraints, and a process to get there, but we do know what exactly we are going to produce - what sense we will be able to make across our different domains of knowledge and practice.

In any interdisciplinary group, finding a way to communicate is a key challenge, especially in an area which has seen relatively little academic research (compared, for example, to studies of innovation in products). Our outputs include a document that will propose a vocabulary (glossary, terminology) and possible primer or guide for practitioners. But another - possibly more significant output - will be a group of people who will have been through a sense-making journey together with implications for future question-making, future research and future practice.

We've now set up a project blog so please look there for posts by project participants on both the research process and findings.

Pride, prejudice and design

Re-reading Pride and Prejudice(1813) I'm reminded of the origins of the English word design. In her book Design Management, Brigitte Borja de Mozota draws attention to its origins in the Latin designare: ‘to designate’ and ‘to draw’ and concludes "DESIGN = INTENTION + DRAWING" (Borja de Mozota, 2003, p3). In contemporary English usage, of course, we also still have the usage of the noun connected to plots, treachery or intrigue as in:

"He had designs on someone's property" (see the dictionary.com full listing).

But even being familiar with this I still found myself noticing Jane Austen's extensive usage of both noun and verb forms. Here, for example, is the protagonist Elizabeth's uncle discussing the intentions of Wickham towards her younger sister who has run off with the officer.

"..It appears to me so very unlikely, that any young man should form such a design against a girl, who is by no means unprotected or friendless, and who was actually staying in his colonel's family, that I am strongly inclinced to hope the best." (Odhams Press, London, no date, p267) And similarly Elizabeth's elder sister - heavily in denial - talking of her admirer Mr. Bingley, says she is "perfectly satisfied from what his manners now are, that he never had any design of engaging my affection." (p327)

This is consistent with contemporary (although uncommon) usage. But elsewhere Austen uses the verb form of design in a way that I would be surprised to hear today:

"Mrs. Bennet had designed to keep the two Netherfield gentlemen to supper; but their carriage was unluckily ordered before any of the others, and she had no opportunity of detaining them." (p326)

Reading this novel, in which designs and designing are so entangled with intrigue and seduction reminds me of the role of rhetoric in design. A design (sketch, model, prototype, or proposal) or a designer presents, proposes and seduces. Design activities plan and fashion possible outcomes but they do not always do this honestly. Designing and designs stimulate desire, and with desire comes treachery.

But pray excuse me. I will detain you no longer, dear Reader. I must go and order my carriage.

MBA Design Leadership elective 2006-7

I'm in the process of (re)designing the MBA elective I'll be teaching in the third term of this academic year ("Trinity term" in Oxford speak). Like last year, this will include a three-week project working with MA design students from the Royal College of Art, London. To discuss this I met up with Tony Dunne, professor and head of the Design Interactions department, and tutor Nina Pope, with whom I used to lead a unit (or "platform", in design school speak) in the same department. (Anyone interested in taking that MA might want to attend their open day next week - see the poster on the side.) We'll also be working again with tutor Noam Toran and MA Design Products students. I'm grateful for some feedback from some of last year's MBA students who have helped me understand their goals in taking the elective.

In terms of the formalized bodies of knowledge taught within the MBA, Design Leadership is perhaps best thought of as a boundary-spanning way of thinking that connects with the business disciplines of strategy; operations management; marketing; and innovation studies; and necessarily must also relate to finance and accounting. Last year, students taking my elective also took some of the specialist Marketing, Culture and Society electives offered by Doug Holt and colleagues, Victor Seidel's elective in Entrepreneurship and Technology Ventures; and Victor and Marc Ventresca's Technology and Innovation Strategy elective, and Charlie Leadbeater's elective in Social Entrepreneurship.

Key to my elective are these ideas: the differences between design management and design leadership; understanding non-designers' impact on design in organizations - what is known as "silent design"; and knowledge and understanding of design practices, design methods and what is often called "design thinking". These ideas are underpinned by a pedagogical approach which involves project-based learning as well as more traditional lectures and seminars, and in particular the experience of learning by working directly with designers. It also explores the need for entrepeneurs and managers to tolerate ambiguity, develop visual literacy, and learn through practice about the power of prototyping and other visualizations.

The elective is, as the name suggests, chosen by students (from among 35 offered), and the class size is limited. But luckily all 225 MBAs get to encounter some of this material on the Operations Mangement core course.

Mass collaboration: Silicon Valley comes to Oxford

The school again hosted Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, an intense day of panels and discussions led by (successful, and often serial) internet entepreneurs and those involved enabling infrastructure and services such as venture capital and law.

I benefitted from hearing in-depth presentations by two speakers: first, Matt Cohler, VP of strategy and business operations at Facebook, a social networking site, and Julie Hanna Farris, co-founder and director of Scalix, an Open Source based enterprise email and calendaring application provider. Matt's talk included two key ideas where design disciplines and practices have something to offer entrepreneurs: the first being the requirement to think how to "create value for end users" rather than building a business model, rather than the other way round. The second idea he emphasized was the importance of iterating the product, and learning from user behaviour and feedback. Take a flexible and iterative approach, he advised, in contrast to what's taught in business school; very small details can make a huge difference and you have to keep iterating to find out what the details that matter are.

In her talk Julie Hanna Farris discussed the principles of Open Source software (underpinning its many variants) and how they are disrupting conventional business models. In particular she emphasized community, transparency, authenticity, word of mouth, informality, and motivation. Each of these presents problems for business people and investors used to conventional businesses. Like Cohler, Farris stressed the importance of trying things out and learning: "Fail early and often" - a phrase that design company IDEO also invokes. Her seasoned advice to entrepreneurs included making customers part of the process of building a product - and of knowing customers not just markets. I don't think I heard the word "design" in either of their talks but what design theorists and practitioners would recognise as design principles - iterative processes, human-centred frameworks, co-design with end users - were already there.

The evening panel threw up another set of insights from a panel including Facebook's Matt Cohler; Allen Morgan of venture capitalists Mayfield; Reid Hoffman, CEO and founder of Linked-In; and Chris Sacca, head of special initiatives at Google, chaired by FT journalist Jonathan Guthrie. The post-Web 2.0 future according to these speakers was seen to be: filtered by social context, more personalised, more complementary to your other ongoing activities, and more responsive to your identity. I was struck by a comment from (I think) all four speakers at different points, that they would most likely not invest in an enterprise that didn't come to them introduced by someone they knew. At first glance, this is business as usual: networks of the powerful investing in those to whom they are already connected in some way. But with the ability to design, develop, launch, run and continue to iterate digital networked products with rapid feedback from end users, internet entpreneurs can - if they succeed in instantiating a community around what they offer - perhaps join those networks. (George - if you read this - you already have done 80% of the work with Chatsum).

A question I asked about which practices, and which academic disciplines, had most insights to offer entrepreneurs and investors about end users and their behaviours generated the following suggestions: psychology, social sciences, game theory, and the need to be able to analyse and understand the vast amounts of data being generated (Chris Sacca: "We worship data."). But not, alas, design. There remains a significant gap between what designers are perceived to be able to do - or are educated to do - and what designers are asked to do - and what they can do. I wonder if Bill Moggridge's forthcoming book Designing Interactions (MIT Press) will be on Silicon Valley's reading list.

Dinner chez Arne Jacobsen

After staying the night there last week, this week I had dinner at St Catherine's college - where form meets function (according to a college poster spotted on the way in) - the guest of Andrew Barry, fellow of the college and member of the Oxford Centre for the Environment. Given Oxford's history and much of the existing architecture, it was a radical decision to appoint an architect such as Arne Jacobsen for a new Oxford college. He paid a great deal of attention in the design to the forms both of the buildings and the gardens, and to details of fittings like door handles and the furniture in the senior common room (SCR) and the cutlery at high table (shown here). My hosts indulged me and let me take some pictures and even went as far as asking the steward to show me the two soup spoons - one for the left handed and one for the right handed.

Chez Arne Jacobsen

One of the things about working in Oxford and living in London is that I need to stay over in Oxford every week. Sometimes I stay with friends, but often in the fellows' guest rooms of the colleges. Last night I stayed again at St Catherine's College, designed by Arne Jacobsen and now, forty years or so on, more than slightly worn. But that might not trouble him. As I lay on my patterned duvet in the room, I imagined that Jacobsen would be disappointed how the calm simplicity of his design has been encroached upon by Bed & Breakfast chic, as the images I took show. On the simple desk, the tea making service. On the chest of drawers, the telly. A blanket covering a chair. A fan, for hot days. An electric radiator, for cold ones.

Wonderground: Design Research Society conference, Lisbon

Last week I joined over 250 people attending the Design Research Society's Wonderground conference in Lisbon bringing together researchers working in diverse design disciplines including graphic and product design, architecture, interaction design and the odd engineer. The plenaries were held in the grand Society of Geography built in the mid-19th century. On display were massive statues of the major Portuguese mariners who travelled the world in the 15th century (see Vasco da Gama, to the left), and a large map showing some of their significant journeys, the trails that are so linked to colonization and globalization.

Conferences such as these can be frustrating and stimulating since they involve people at different stages of their professional careers with different levels of knowledge and understanding about their own practices and research and their wider context. So in each presentation you have to focus really hard on both what the presenter is saying and why they are saying it now; I needed a geography, and a history (which we got in a presentation from Nigel Cross), and a sociology and an economy and a politics of design research. What I found valuable about attending was access to a snapshot of design research activity within (mostly) academic contexts to help me situate my own research, within a social science institution. I also liked the vinho verde and the pasteis de nata.

"Go work for a credit reference agency"

I enjoyed reading i-Gitators in Action: Can Service Innovation (Design :-) ) Save the World?, a three-way conversation between GK van Patter (NextD Institute), Chris Downs (live|work, see links on right hand side of page) and Gill Wildman (Plot) discussing among other things the emergence of service design, and the state of design education and promotion in the UK (all references to "design" here meaning design based in liberal arts traditions rather than engineering design or computer science).

As I have remaked in other posts, there is a considerable disconnect between practitioners and academics inventing new domains of knowledge connected with services. Patching between these nodes is not as simple as citing a few references in each others' reading lists or even inviting speakers to join conferences, but rather a more disturbing encounter with the Other: with different ways of thinking about the world, and about what kinds of knowledge can be produced. I think these questions are more fundamental than trying to define which leads: design, or innovation? I regret I am not educated in philosophy but its underlying questions and theories are important and useful. For example, the word "abductive" now pops up regularly in conversations about design (and sometimes in management too: see Roger Martin's contributions to the Rotman business school magazine), although you won't find it in many texts on research methods which (in a gross simplification) focus on comparing inductive and deductive methods. As someone from a design background now situating my practices within a management school framed by social sciences, I am hoping in a modest way to make some useful knots (in the Haraway sense) but cannot do this without engaging with these Others.

Chris' advice to new design graduates was welcome. "Embrace and enjoy the complexity. Get out of college and get a job. Don’t hang around in your school’s new ‘future design blah innovation blah lab.’ Don’t prostitute your services for free to get a toe in the door at IDEO, Humantific, Plot or even live|work. Go and work for a hospital, the government or a credit reference agency. " This advice I think acknowledges the "silent design" (Gorb and Dumas' term, see citation in earlier post) that goes on, all the time, all over the world, where people who are not educated as designers, and do not think of themselves as designers, are busy designing things and re-designing them through usage, like those 70% of services in the global economy. On the one hand we have "silent design" and on the other "noisy design" (my term with this usage, as far as I know): the bigging-it-up of capital-d Designers whose claims about the importance/efficacy/value of their practices are tied up with authorship, ownership, and object-based cultures and economies. In my classes with MBA students this is a key part of my message: Be aware of your own role as designers (managers, entrepreneurs). Know why, how and when to work with design processes and practices. Not silent design, or noisy Design, but reflective, reflexive designing practices that acknowledge entanglements and tolerate difference, ambiguity and incompleteness.

Designing services in science and technology-based enterprises

Funding sucess! With my colleagues James Tansey (James Martin Institute, science and technology studies), Victor Seidel (innovation studies) and Fiona Reid (director, Oxford Science Enterprise Centre), I put together a proposal which we submitted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's Designing for the 21st Century initiative.
Designing services in science and technology-based enterprises involves a group of academics (mostly within social sciences), designers, and technology and science entrepreneurs from a range of disciplines working together to explore how services as designed in science and technology-based enterprises. We have recently heard that the project has been awarded funding and will spend the next 12 months undertaking the project. It involves two kinds of engagement:
- four short projects in which service designers help early stage technology and science entrepreneurs based in Oxford design their services (likely to be B2B) (one design company with each enterprise), taking place February-May 2007
- five events held over a year at SBS, which reflect on these encounters and attempt to develop a cross-disciplinary vocabulary for service design in science and technology enterprises.
Design company participants include: live|work, IDEO, and Radarstation (and one more to be confirmed). Science and technology enterprise participants are currently being approached; they are likely to include companies offering services in biotechnology and information technologies.
Confirmed academic participants include Tony Dunne (Royal College of Art, interaction design), Bill Hollins (Westminster Business School, service operations), Leonieke Zomerdijk (London Business School, service operations), Jennifer Whyte (Tanaka Business School, innovation studies). Within SBS, academic participants include Mari Sako (strategy), Steve New (operations) and Dan Neyland (James Martin Institute). Within Oxford University, participants include Andrew Barry (Oxford Centre for the Environment) and Marina Jirotka (ComLab).
The project's broad research questions ask how participants' ideas about the designing of services change during the project once they are exposed to the approaches and practices within other disciplines and contexts. Outputs will include a publication of the shared vocabulary developed in the project, as well as more traditional academic outputs such as papers for journals and conferences.

If there are Services Sciences, where are the services arts?

Last Thursday I participated in a workshop on Services Science at London Business School, hosted by Chris Voss (LBS) with Aleda Roth (Clemson University), both working within the fields of operations management. The aim of the event was to reflect on a development led by people working at IBM, who since 2004 have been trying to articulate a need and scope for a new multidisciplinary academic discipline of Services Sciences, Management and Engineering. Voss and Roth drew on papers published by the IBM researchers. Afternoon speakers were Richard Taylor, from Hewlett Packard, and Paul Tasker, from Cambridge University's Institute for Manufacturing. Many others are also working to define an area, such as Hewlett Packard which hosted a recent event at its Centre for Systems and Services Sciences.
Two things struck me: the first concerning who is currently contributing to, and leading, conversations about the designing of services; and second, the missing art in Services Sciences.
Based on my reading of the attendees list, the majority of participants were academic researchers working with a management discipline, others with a background in engineering or computer science, and some policy makers and advisers: this was an interdisciplinary and practitioner-academic event. But there were, for example, no (obvious) participants from design backgrounds (meaning design rooted in arts traditions) other than myself - a hybrid, being a designer in a business school - demonstrating the gulf between these communities. Similarly, an International Service Design Conference held in Gateshead earlier this year included speakers almost exclusively from organizations working within the field of design grounded in arts-based education and practices, rather than systems engineering or IT (although IDEO does have an engineering design background); there were no operations managers, no innovation studies researchers, no strategy researchers, no social scientists. I was unable to attend that event but suspect the attendees came from similar backgrounds. I think this gap matters for these reasons: because it must impact on how practitioners and researchers learn from other modes of engaging with the world, knowing the world and practicing on the world; and to avoid re-inventing the wheel.
This disconnection perhaps contributes to the second thing I noticed. Aleda Roth's presentation of IBM's work included a diagram produced by one of the IBM researchers (Jim Spohrer, director of Services Research at IBM Almaden Research Center) which listed which academic disciplines Services Science drew on. That list included management, engineering and social sciences but as far as I could tell, nothing that is part of the humanities. As Roth pointed out in her analysis of the IBM work, "What's missing is the art, the soul, the artistic and creative disciplines." (This lead to a - thankfully brief - discussion by offended engineers who do not like to be thought of as not being creative.)
While I am wary of ascribing to designers and artists the term 'creative' to characterise their distinctive contributions, I am left wondering what it means if an emerging, self-described science (led by a technology company) ignores the contributions to culture, society, technology and economies from work in the humanities, whether that be literature or visual art or anything else in which poetics matter and aesthetics matter. IBM, in its quest to identify the tools needed by future services scientists, might benefit from wondering where the services arts are in its conception of services science.

Donna Haraway's indigestion

"He enriches my ignorance." This quote, from New Zealand writer Ian Wedde talking about his dog, opens one of the chapters of the next book by writer and academic Donna Haraway; this phrase, and the ways of knowing it invokes, struck me as a way to think about designing practices. Haraway visited the James Martin Institute at Saïd Business School last week and I was one of the people who joined her seminar after reading two draft chapters from the new book. The book, as I understand it, tries to rethink human/non-human relations, by presenting what Haraway refered to as "knots" such as her own practice of agility training with her dog/partner Cayenne (already rehearsed in previous work); crittercams (cameras attached to animals for entertainment or research); feral cats: and other examples where humans are entangled with other creatures and with technologies which enact difficult, messy problems.

Haraway talked in terms of "discomfort" being her way in; her work as an attempt to "make worlds by grappling with the ordinary" , enriching some of her reflections on STS (Science and Technology Studies), an approach to doing sociology whose other leading scholars include my colleague Steve Woolgar (who hosted Haraway), Bruno Latour and others. Her comments were an echo of attempts by design and art theorists to characterise the nature of (some?) practitioner work where the kinds of tensions, or knots, that Haraway describes are made manifest in the work. When Haraway said "I'm trying to remain uncomfortable for a lifetime" in relation to her teaching and research practices as a feminist scholar, I was reminded of the messy ambiguity within creative processes: the not-knowing which designers and artists seem well able to tolerate before a project is resolved in some way. Of course this same indeterminacy or necessary ambiguity has been described elsewhere: Buchanan's essay "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking", for example, (in the design studies tradition), or Jonathan Rosenhead's paper "Into the Swamp" (in operations research). I'm currently finding Lacan's model of the Real, Symbolic and the Imaginary a useful way to think about this, where the Real is that which cannot be symbolised. I understood Haraway's use of the term "indigestion" in a similar way. I am wondering if (some) design and art practices are a (the?) way to work through the ignorance, the indigestion, or the Real.

Business Week on design & business education links

Business Week has put together a list of top "D-Schools" which includes some "B-Schools" where there are direct engagements with design such as interdisciplinary projects involving both MBA and MA students. The list includes business schools from North America (such as Rotman School of Management, Toronto, and the Sloan School of Management at MIT) and Europe (only two: Saïd Business School and the new Zollverein School of Management and Design, which as its name suggests is a hybrid). The design schools listed are in Europe, North America, China, South Korea and India (such as Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design, the Royal College of Art, and Rhode Island School of Design). The accompanying article argues that companies are turning to design schools in their hunt for innovation leaders.

Experimental methodologies in art and design research

What are the effects of methodologies created by art and design researchers? Do they have the potential to challenge, and contribute to, research in other disciplines? Yesterday I was part of a one-day seminar on experimental methodologies at Wimbledon School of Art organised by, and for, PhD students in art and design to examine ways of thinking about, and doing, practice-based research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The other speakers were Paul Halliday, urban photographer and sociologist from Goldsmiths, and Malcolm Quinn, reader in critical practice at Wimbledon. Paul Halliday drew our attention to the Surrealists (and others) whose use of the playful and chance in their practice is, he argued, an important contribution to sociology. Malcolm Quinn suggested there was an opportunity for the humanities to learn from artists: from how they approach context, and from the methods they invent, especially the necessity of fabrication. I talked about some of my projects (mostly art commissions) in which I use/disrupt methods of data gathering and presentation common within social sciences. Listening to the PhD students, whether working with paint, lens-based media, performance or drawing, I was reminded of the practices and approaches that constitute art and design education (at least in the UK) but which are not so evident in my current academic context, a school of management in an ancient university. I wonder to what extent playful fabrication is possible within the social sciences - what value it might have here?

Design and complexity

Can designers learn from the emerging field of complexity science? I joined a workshop held at Saïd Business School which was one of the satellite events at the European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS '06). The workshop was part of a wider series, organized as a cluster called Embracing Complexity in Art and Design funded through the first round of the cross-disciplinary Designing for the 21st Century initiative. Of particular value I found the presentation by Lauri Koskela of Salford University. He talked about the differences between ancient Greek terms such as analysis and synthesis and their current meanings, and the confusing attempts of competing contemporary design disciplines and "design science" to articulate theories about design. The ideas explored in Aristotle and Pappus, for example, constitute a proto-theory of design, he argued. Alec Robertson from De Montfort University described the More is More symposium held at the end of 2005 which brought together a range of perspectives. In design, he pointed out, it is considered a truism that 'less is more' but George Rzevski's workshop (at a previous event organised by the cluster) 'Complexity is Beautiful' was the starting point of an idea that challenges this: more is more. Jeff Johnson (Open University) and Eve Mitleton-Kelly (LSE) described interdisciplinary projects they are setting up that bring together social scientists and scientists working with complexity, with design and art practitioners. Like design, complexity is far from being a single discipline but it seems likely that cross-disciplinary discussions may lead to a valuable exchange. My questions would be: how do design practices respond to complex (or complicated) problems? To what extent do traditional or modern methods and skills cope with the challenges of designing complex products, services and environments?

Re-designing public services: a new public discourse

The emerging discipline of service design is becoming strikingly visible on the national agenda ... and is increasingly articulated by designers educated within art & design traditions rather than management or service delivery operations. Last week I attended a public event hosted by RED, a unit of the UK Design Council where three members of their interdisciplinary team of six presented what they do, and how and why they do it. The talk was part of a drop-in open day with a mini exhibition in the room next door. RED is led by Hilary Cottam (who won the Design Museum's Designer of the Year award last year). Its associates include the former head of IDEO's London office, Colin Burns, as well as Charlie Leadbeater, who also teaches social entrepreneurship at Said Business School.

RED is making an argument about the role of design in public services. Its focus is on helping create "a new generation of public services, designed around individuals" that are co-created with them, and that are preventative. Some of these ideas were made public in Feburary when RED published its paper on Transformation Design. Meanwhile over the summer, the influential UK think tank Demos published its paper on similar themes, entitled The Journey to the Interface co-written by Joe Heapy of service designer consultancy Engine, which makes an argument about how public service design can "connect users with reform". It seems as if a vocabulary and set of practices loosely assembled in fields such as experience design and human computer interaction design, enacted in both informal, commercial and academic domains, may now be taken up in public service contexts.

At the RED event, members of the team described their processes and methods and what they want to achieve. Jenny (no surname given) talked about RED's ambition to design for behaviour change: "As designers what we are doing is less about shaping form than shaping behaviour," she said. She went on to acknowledge that this sounded "a bit sinister" but then argued "But actually it's been used for a long time in the private sector." So these practices have the potential to (re)design not just the services, but the service users too. But the outcomes of public service designs are complex. RED sees value in making use of design methods used in Marks & Spencer, for example, to make the consuming experience "compelling and desirable" and applying them to public service contexts. In the M&S context, the use of these methods may well have a clear, measurable business objective: increasing sales, for example - and even here design practitioners may well struggle with framing the design problem, communicating with the client, and measuring the value of the design process and artefacts. How much harder it is to define and agree goals for public services or public goods. To what extent can design-led techniques make the UK more democratic? More healthy? More intelligent?

(all my transcriptions)

Process design paper at EUROMA conference

With my colleague Steve New, I presented a paper at the EUROMA (European Operations Management) conference held in June in Strathclyde. With the title "On the Anonymity and Invisibility of Process Design"we argued that within the field of Operations Management (OM), the task of process design has suffered neglect in the development of Operations Management. Although there is extensive literature on product design and to a lesser extent the design of services, the designing of processes is neglected. We examined how process design remains an essentially invisible and anonymous activity and then presented a three-point manifesto for change. First, we argued that, rather than imagining a target audience of generic Operations Managers, the field of OM should focus on the education and research needs of a newly-founded profession of Process Designers. Secondly we argued that OM needs to understand how to design, not just follow, design processes, and the difference between user involvement and ‘implementation’. Thirdly we argued that great Process Designers should be famous, like architects or product designers.

To illustrate our ideas we brought along some imagined artefacts from this world in which Process Design is a visible and recognised discipline (will be uploaded soon). These included a private view invitation to the opening of a fictional call centre; a screen grab from the Saïd Business School's website with details of a fictional MA/MBA in Process Design, taught jointly with the Royal College of Art; front covers of imaginary magazines for professional process designers; fictional TV listings showing reality TV and documentary programmes engaging with Process Design issues; and finally, a fictional award for Process Designer of the Year - the Voss Award (named - with kind permission - after Professor Chris Voss of London Business School for his years of involvement in OM and research into experience and service design). During the presentation we asked the audience to nominate potential winners for the award and we presented, on this occasion, the Voss Award 2006 to the nominators.

Links between design education and business education

This week I was supposed to be part of a group on a fact finding missing to San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, initiated by the UK Design Council and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Unfortunately owing to recent illness I was unable to join the trip but my Said Business School colleague Marc Ventresca, who teaches and researches in strategy and innovation, was able to go. The aim is to examine models in US education in which design and management teaching and research are integrated in different ways, as part of the process of reflecting on the findings of the UK's Cox Review on Creativity in Business, published late last year. The arranged visits include the Stanford d-school, IDEO, Apple, Chicago's Institute of Design, and on the East Coast, MIT. A report about the trip will be made public by the Design Council.

The questions I hoped to consider on the trip included: How is 'design' enacted in different teaching and research institutions? What ways of working across disciplines are used? How current is the term 'design thinking'? What emphasis is there on service design and interaction design? To what extent do these institutions and organizations make claims about leading by design, and design as strategy?