The design planning skill-set

“The man who grasps principles can successfully choose his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

ID is a method-focused school, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that methods alone have no value. Only when a principled designer (with the right skill set) applies them will they yield any value. This week’s discussion centered on the skill set and principles of the successful design planner.

It is not just about methods, we need to develop skills and principles:

It is worth taking a moment to talk about design planning, and what we mean when we say “we are a planning school”. Planning is the opposite of doing. For most of its history, design has been focused on the “doing” part, which usually meant making things (like products and communications). Recently, however, the economics of the profession have changed, due to global logistics and technology, and solely focusing on the “doing” side of the equation is no longer (in many cases) a viable business model for design firms and designers.

Even though we are a planning school, that does not mean we aren’t interested in the “doing” side. The result of our work should be a tangible product, communication, or experience. We recognize, however, that to survive as a profession, we need to participate in the “what to make” conversations, and not just be satisfied to acquiesce when told: “go make this”.

I have been fortunate enough work with IIT’s business school (Stuart School of Business) recently on curriculum development. The AACSB (the board that gives accreditation to business schools) has a set of guidelines for what skills and knowledge an MBA student should have upon graduation. As an employer, you are getting a known quantity. This is a first attempt to produce something similar for design planning graduates.

So, what are the skills and principles required to be a successful design planner?

We started by showing the following diagram, which demonstrates how design planning pulls knowledge and skills from several disciplines:

As a result of the lecture, Albert Wang put together a set of diagrams that furthers this thinking:

1. Design planning does not cover all the knowledge in these disciplines

2. It is not something totally new

3. It is about integration (Darn you Rottman for trade marking Integrative Thinking!)

4. Our challenge is to determine what is inside our scope and what is not

We went on to identify the following skills:

> Designing and facilitating effective collaboration
> Communicating and clarifying ambiguous / complex ideas and data
> Storytelling (visual / verbal)
> Problem framing
> Flexible Response
> Modeling
> Scenario Planning (if/then/multiple possible solutions)
> Dealing w/ a Constantly Changing Landscape
> Observational (as opposed to Ethnographic) Research Techniques
> Conditioned Optimism – don’t kill quickly
> Bounded Naiveté
> Principled Problem Solving
> Reasoning by Analogy
> Seeing connections
> Getting Disparate Parties to Work Together

When finished talking about skills, we went on to discuss the principles of our work, captured in the following diagram:

The final topic of discussion was whether we should change the name of “Design Planning”? Should it be “Innovation Planning”? “Innovation Management”? We know there is a big backlash (mainly in the design community) about the word innovation. Any thoughts?

Comments

[Alex Cheek]

Coming out of academic anthropolgy, where theory is really the goal of the whole field, I am often confused and lost due to this lack of accompanying theory as methods are presented and practiced here at ID. I appreciate this line of thought and have been considering it myself lately. I, to go in a slightly different direction, have been considering the idea of calling it "user driven design." To me, the phrase ecompasses a lot of things that you are saying. It starts with users, and that perspective drives through the disciplined and quantitative business parts while giving that perspective the empathy that it needs, then by finishing with design it makes the "result of our work...a tangible product, communication, or experience." Just a thought, but as I think that we should not underestimate the importance of attitude (including empathy and willingness to learn from failure) for furthering goals of sustainability and making wise decisions. To inelegantly paraphrase what Prof Dunne said recently, when CEO's fail, it is rarely because of experience and more related to lack interpersonal skills. Obviously though, the experience, or knowledge of the business issue, would help where empathy does not provide enough guidance (which is often in that world).

[Michael Davis-Burchat]

There is much in your essay that feels helpful, but I am responding to Hamlin's request to speak up when my brain is melting. So hear goes:

If good is the opposite of bad, then can planning be the opposite of doing? Perhaps I miss something in your logic, but it seems a curious message to send; planning opposes design. My hope is that designers (or doers) see themselves as complementary to planners and vice versa. Thanks for the provocation.

[Dan Bassill]

I found information about the May 2007 conference in Chicago as I was searching for people who use design in complex problem solving.

I am also in Chicago, and hosting another conference on the same dates, but in a different location. However, the goals of our conference interlock with the goals of the IIT conference. We want to design better solutions to reach kids born in poverty and provide the learning, and experiences, that help them build habits that enable them to succeed in school and in work.

To create an understanding of the complex problems we are addressing, so that businesses, colleges and others would take more significant roles, the work of information archetects can be valuable intermediaries.

I hope you'll encourage people attending the IIT conference to take a look at the http://www.tutormentorconference.org site and see how we're trying to connect networks via the Internet.

That way people can be in two different conferences on the same date, and still be connected to each other and many others who can't be at either event.

[tartle]

I have struggled with words that have so many meanings we spend too much time debating them. After thirty years I've chosen these:
Innovation
“Innovation is something that changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way or the world in which the customer experiences things. That’s innovation.” Kevin Roberts
Design
“The role of design is to respond to peoples’ changing needs with the requisite sensitivity, intelligence and imagination to enable the integration of those needs into the cultural, economic and ecological environment. By fulfilling this role, design can improve the quality of life.” Gerhard Heufler
Creativity
“Nothing defines creativity better than ‘the ability to defeat habit by originality.’” -Stephen Bayley

So Innovation is an outcome of our new product/service process that includes the management of design.
Our organisation's culture incorporates design thinking from none to completely; I like to think of Leading Innovation in the sense of "we shold become the leading providers of the dining experince to awners of luxury yauchts. By managing design we can decide routes and directions, discover motivating insights, describe ideas and validate concepts, define concept schemes and models, demonstrate viable prototypes, and finally deploy solutions. the 6Ds of innovation and design. So Innovation is about setting direction and getting feedback on viability; design is about how we create valid solutions. The final arbiter is people who buy. Sorry forstreamofconsciousness.

[LeOgAhEr]

I Love you girls

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[dissertaion help]

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