Skip to main content

Transformation Design, Part Deux

I mentioned the new study of "transformation design" in an earlier post. Briefly, it's using design principles to rework organizations. I think it's a great way to think about it, and anyone who cares about optimizing anything ought to have the topic resonate with them. Thanks to Chris, who emailed me that the UK Design Council's full paper has been uploaded to their website (it was previously only an excerpt).
More than 30 years ago, Charles Eames, the American multidisciplinary designer, was asked, ‘What are the boundaries of design?’. He replied, ‘What are the boundaries of problems?’.

This point is as relevant today as it was in 1972, but the way we view problems has changed significantly since then.

Traditionally problems were seen as complicaed challenges that could be solved through breaking them down into smaller and smaller chunks – like fixing a car.

RED believes that the most important modern problems are complex rather than complicated. Complex problems are messier and more ambiguous in nature; they are more connected to other problems; more likely to react in unpredictable non-linear ways; and more likely to produce unintended consequences. [...]

Traditionally, organisations have been designed for a complicated rather than a complex world. Hierarchical and silo structures are perfectly designed to break problems down into more manageable fragments. They are not, however, so effective handling high levels of complexity. For this reason, many of our most long standing institutions are now struggling to adapt to a more complex world.
As they say, read the whole thing! My thoughts are that of course this has to be a) workable and b) totally useful - the paradigm shift that we're needing to make at this point societally. I'm surprised, but not terribly so, by pushback from designers. I think the argument that something's designer is the ultimate authority in its form is highly overstated. Designers design loads of things that continue to be improved upon, transformed, etc. Not to mention the fact that if you look at what happens to an architect's work, say, at a zoning meeting, that argument kind of flies out the window, doesn't it?

Anyway, I think that design is a great way of looking at the problems of organizations, and the problems organizations are called upon to solve. The people aspect is precisely what calls for design. After all, you can build a house as a piece of art but there's a small market for that. Mostly, you build a house to function as a house, and the better the architect understands the way people work, the better he'll be able to do that.

Popular posts from this blog

We've Always Done it That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change

From what I can tell, the impetus for this book was that the folks who wrote it, Jeff De Cagna , David Gammel , Jamie Notter , Mickie Rops and Amy Smith , were “concerned by the instinctively conservative approach to organizational stewardship that far too many association executives and volunteers continue to pursue in the early years of the 21 st century.” I took notes throughout the book, and now I realize they are far too extensive to make a very good book review. And I am definitely the choir that this book is preaching to. However, I really, really liked the problems these folks addressed and they pretty much slaughtered and butchered several sacred cows. This book is not extensive narrative or heavily footnoted, but it is based on the collective experience of 5 people who together have worked with many different organizations, and the collective themes will be familiar to anyone in the field. On a meta level, this book takes observations of what’s happening in the
Read more

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.
Read more

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of "
Read more