NextD Journal I ReReThinking Design Conversation 24
Ladder of Fire
taught in school, into the real world without compromising (too much) the integrity of that practice. As I mentioned in my answer to Question 9, we begin our core workshop, “Beyond Usability,” by diving deep into what we call Discovery – methods for understanding the client, their goals and objectives, their financial and other measurable concerns, and their operations. We feel that it is unlikely you’ll have a successful design without coming to grips with these concerns. Typically designers are simply fed “requirements” which specify the parameters for design. We encourage our attendees to challenge requirements and go deeper, in order to ensure that your design will be truly relevant. Additionally, we teach a model for understanding the business value of design, a model we developed in research we did on how organizations value user experience. http://www.adaptivepath.com/reports/businessvalue Something else that’s becoming essential for everyone to understand, at least at a high level, is what we call “content analysis”: a high-level discussion of issues from library and information science such as metadata, taxonomies, classification, etc. To a point you made earlier, most design practice (hell, business practice) still assumes that you tie job titles to compartmentalized skill sets. While not every designer needs to be a librarian, there’s no reason they can’t understand the basics of content analysis and appreciate what it can do for them. C) Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear because in no way do I think that designers have all that much power in the marketplace. They (we) are still marginalized and not given the responsibility and authority we deserve. The situation is changing, and designers’ stars are ascendant. Some forward-thinking businesses are recognizing the “power of design” (as BusinessWeek referred to it), and designers are getting an opportunity to provide their insights at earlier points in the product development cycle. This is great. However, this ascendancy, combined with the hype about “design thinking” (which no one has yet to adequately define), has led to a lot of froth in which anything associated with the concept of design was de facto good. As a natural-born contrarian, I wanted to balance out the discussion by identifying where I have found “design thinking” to be problematic. As I’m writing about this, I’m realizing a tie to a point I was making earlier. I, and my colleagues at Adaptive Path, are relentlessly focused on providing the best user experiences. We try not to be beholden to any particular approach, dogma, or school of thought. We pick and choose from a variety of approaches to solve problems. Often it means borrowing from our design toolkit, but other times it means utilizing “business thinking” – measurement and analysis obviously have their place. Or it might mean borrowing from “engineering thinking” – obsession with the material nature of the problem. Each of these forms of thinking have characteristics which, depending on contexts, can be helpful or hindering. What I was trying to do in that post is show that the design approach is not an absolute good, and it shouldn’t be adopted unquestioningly.
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