Recommended strategy:
iterative rich-picture-based Design Thinking
Better approach: move as needed between many deep dives to build a rich picture, reviewing the landscape to set goals, focus, and direction; working on specific design challenges informed by the rich picture; and feeding lessons learned from addressing challenges to enrich our understanding further
REQUIRES GREATER LEVEL OF COORDINATION AND COLLABORATION, AND USE OF TOOLS FOR RECORDING THE BIG PICTURE, MANAGING ACTIVITIES, AND BRINGING DIVERSE PEOPLE TOGETHER, PERHAPS REMOTELY, OVER TIME
Mindomo - more structured
Miro - less structured
Microsoft 365 - task management, communications, document development, synchronous and asynchronous meetings etc.
Digital collaboration tools can make a big difference
Good for building community coalitions for change
Good for building stronger arguments for change
Good for building confidence and capability - individuals and groups can build-up their contributions progressively over time, and see the rich picture building
Allows us to see and change system-level factors
Builds a long-term platform for continuous improvement
Good for promoting diversity
Able to pick up on otherwise hidden details and differences
Richer range of perspectives
If well coordinated we can get many contributions from a network of many different people
Common method: short, isolated sprints
Sometimes used to make people feel like they are making a difference, when in reality they will be ignored
Can make things worse
Can reinforce inequalities and biases
Less chance of building a body of knowledge and community-level support for substantial sustained change
The desire to solve quickly leads us to overlook systems-level issues
Often lead to half-formed ideas that are quickly forgotten
Can sometimes generate immediate solutions to tame problems
How to choose a situation to study
What do you want to get from doing a design study?
Highlight bad design
Showcase good design
Produce academic knowledge about some aspect of the world
Develop relationships, develop community
Develop our design capabilities and those of the communities we work with
Improve some aspect of the world - the primary motivation to do design studies. Types of situation 👉
Situations for a group of people
Situations for a specific person
Related situations
Specific situation
What is a situation?
For example "Jenny having breakfast in Jim's Cafe on a typical Monday morning" - open up to find out more about this framing, and how we chose it. Read more 👉
In this way we build a "rich picture" of inter-related situations needed to see how we can improve situations for Jenny and other wheelchair users
Once we have investigated the situation with a focus on Jenny, we might find that we need to explore the experiences of the people working in the cafe, for example the training they receive, so as to discover how they might help Jenny better
We need to frame the situation so as to meet the needs of our study, but be open to wider details and situations if they enrich our understanding
We might start with that, and then widen out later if that is useful
In this case, Jenny uses a wheelchair, and we are specifically interested in her experience of the situation
We could broaden it to focus on different people using the cafe in different ways
That might then capture greater variations in the situation, with different staff, different types of food, different ambiance, busier...etc.
We could broaden it out to include Jenny in the cafe in tha afternon
This is a fairly narrowly focussed situation
The "situation" we choose to study depends on what we want to achieve (see the link for more on this).
We also need to consider how what happens in the situation impacts beyond the situation, for example in creating pollution
A fully ecological approach considers the situation from the perspectives of other living things and non-living structures in the situation - for example, considering how human behaviour may degrade resources
But not just the human perspective
We want to see things from the different perspectives of the people in the situation
The frame may only be temporary. As we explore the situation we might want to extend to what happens before or after, or what happens in connected spaces, or what happens in a wider system in which the situation happens. We have to use our judgement to decide where to look next to enrich our understanding to serve our goals.
A frame that we put around part of the world so that we can start with a focus for describing a related set of events and features as experienced and acted by one or more people in the situation
What is a design study?
We may want to look at related situations from an a systems perspective, considering how situations are connected by resources flows (including information, considered as a resource), and the protocols, gates, algorithms, channels etc. that control the flow of resources - cultural enablements and constraints are a key aspect of this
In response to these challenges we might need to look in more depth at the situations we have studied, or look at them from different perspectives, or look at other related situations to build a sufficiently rich picture
Our evaluations can lead us to formulating design challenges that we think need to be addressed through change by design - often expressed as "how might we?" questions
As we develop our understanding of the situation and related situations we will want to make value judgements about what we find, we evaluate - are things right? for example, are there inequalities being produced and reproduced, is the environment being damaged?
Often when analysing the details of a situation we need to build a richer picture, this can lead us back to the situation for more description, or to other related situations - we do this iteratively
A good way to focus our descriptive work is to look for "moments that matter" (from Dan and Chip Heath's book) to the people in the study, then analyse why those moments matter, the characteristics that make them matter, how those moments happened, were made possible, are made possible for others, work for some people but not others - we call this analysis.
But we have to be careful that we don't overlook details that don't fit with our expectations, that we aren't deceived and limited by our own assumptions and biases (an awareness of cognitive and cultural bias is essential)
Design theorists have developed models that guide us in looking for and documenting how situations work. Read more 👉
Dan and Chip Heath, The Power of Moments (moments that matter)
Flatness
Troughs
Peaks
Milestones
Transitions
Connection
Pride
Insight
Elevation
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience
Donald Norman's Emotional Design
Reflective
Behavioural
Visceral
Donald Norman's The Psychology of Everyday Design
Mental models
Enabling constraints
Constraints
Affordances
This can be incredibly complex, so we don't try to give an exhaustive description, we look for the "salient details" - those that contribute to our goals in doing the design study
A description of the details of a situation (designed, non-designed, or emergent), the people in the situation, the non-human actors (animals, living systems, machine intelligences), their experiences, intentions, thoughts, actions, interactions, effects, transformations
We call this inter-related set of studies the rich picture - it best built up over a longer period of time, and needs to be documented in an accessible, usable, and updatable way so a range of further studies and design challenges can be developed within it
We need to capture and understand the diversity and shared characteristics of the people involved in situations, including those who determine or influence their creation and what happens in them (people who have more or less consciously designed the situation) Read more 👉
People bring to a situation experience and knowledge of similar situations, we can use this to find ways that a situation might be different
Knowledge about their history can help us to understand this, and give us insights as to how we might improve things
Practitioners do this all the time, but often tacitly, and often in conversation. To get good at it fast, we need to do it more explicitly and more visibly. That is also good, inclusive, project practice, making it easier for a wider range of people to participate in a project.
A design study is often best done in a related set of studies, building a rich picture of a context, so that we can understand how specific details in a situation are shaped by other situations and the interconnections between them (the systems perspective)
Describes, analyses, evaluates a situation, and (sometimes but not always) creatively responds by formulating design challenges and designing/redesigning in response to those challenges
Doing a design study
7. Create
How to recognise success - the FSSG framework
Grow
Spread
Stick
Fit
Creative methods
Oblique strategies - creative methods to use to add random inspiration, when you get stuck and need to try a different approach
Messiness is important for this, as explored by Tim Harford in Messy
Physical movement, art, music, all help
Brian Eno invented the idea of oblique strategies, and created a set of cards for them
Introduce a very different person to the situation, what do they see?
The most common oblique strategy used by designers is to look at the situation from a different perspective, level of granularity (more or less detail), or on a different timescale
Cross-pollination - using ideas and design features from one situation to help design for a different situation
Platform-based designing - using an existing technology platform to speed-up development
Design patterns - high-level, non-detailed, solutions to common design problems, to be adapted for each case, a pattern language is a collection of related patterns
Prototyping - rapidly developing a version of a potential solution, with good enough detail and quality to be realistically tested. Choose the appropriate level of detail for the stage are at 👉
Hi-fi - a more finished product that can be deployed into the field and tested under realistic conditions
Medium-fi
Lo-fi - build fast and rough to see if ideas are "in the ball park" and to get immediate feedback
Playfultyping - like prototyping but more oriented towards discovery, less directly focussed on developing a solution
Note that creative work will often feedback to enrich description and analysis, and may change our evaluations and the definition of the design challenge. Sometimes it leads us to undertake differently framed design studies, especially when we suspect we might find challenges that are more important
6. Evaluate
Note that sometimes this leads us to want to do more, different design studies, rather than to respond creatively. This might be because we think there are other interesting, related situations to explore. Or this we might suspect there are more significant challenges to tackle. We call this "building the rich picture".
The Design Challenge:
Specifically, what do we want to achieve? - often in the form of "how might we...X?" where X is the change we want to achieve
Aim for design changes that will fit, stick, spread, and grow
Give a clear enough indication of how we will know we have succeeded in the challenge, this can change and be more
Cone of Plausibility method - asks the question "what will happen if we do nothing?" what will the situation[s] be like in the future? Next year, 2 years, 5 years, 10...as far forward as we can go, and what would we prefer it to be like?
What depth of change might be needed?
Change what people want from situations like this?
Create a different situation?
Modify a range of similar situations?
Modify the existing situation?
How strongly do we feel about needing to change things we have seen in the situation?
Do we think things need to change? Why?
5. Analyse
2. Impacts beyond the situation 👉
Less good impacts beyond the situation, and how they are caused
Good impacts beyond the situation, and how they are caused
On the environment
On resources
On people
Resources
Opportunities
Relationships
Learning
Happiness
1. Moments that matter approach 👉
Negative moments in the situation
Does this happen repeatedly?
Was it like this by design or by accident?
What caused this?
Are there other people that it is good for?
What's bad about the moment? For who?
What kind of moment 👉
Sadness
Pain
Frustration
Trough
Positive moments in the situation
Are some people excluded from benefitting in this way?
Are some people for whom this doesn't work?
Are there other moments that share these characteristics or are related? How?
How reliable are the conditions that make this possible? How likely to be repeated?
Was it like this by design or accident?
What was required to make this happen as it did?
What's good about the moment? For who?
What kind of moment? 👉
Other...?
Milestone
Transition
Peak
4. Describe
Methods
What to include 👉
6. Impacts beyond the situation
5. Closing
4. Events and impacts, flows
3. Objects with affordances, constraints, enabling constraints
2. The setting
1. Before the situation
3. Discover
Looking for moments that matter
2. Prepare
6. Prepare all resources
5. Make a plan for your observations
4. What methods will suit this study?
Formats
Screen recording
Video
Audio
Photographs
Storyboard
Charts
Service blueprint
Journey maps (moments that matter)
Empathy maps
Playfultyping
Data mining and analysis
Interviews
Guided walk
Participant observation
Live observation
3. Are there ethical issues in doing this study, and how can they be alleviated?
Might your presence in the situation have a negative impact on people in the situation?
Is data being recorded concerning identifiable people?
If yes, then you need to do a GDPR review of your planned methods
Are people being treated as research subjects?
If yes, then this needs a lightweight ethical review
2. What biases might they bring to it? And how can they be avoided?
Are there cultural, social, age, sex, gender biases that might have an impact? How do you mitigate against them?
Consider how people in the situation might be affected by their attitudes and assumptions as well, and how that could change their behaviour in the situation.
Consider your potential bias
Are there aspects of the situation that you are already more familiar with, and others that you aren't? How might that bias you? How can you mitigate against that bias?
Are there people in the situation who are more like you? Might you gravitate towards them? How can you prevent that bias?
Do you already have a solution in mind? How might that skew your observations? How do you make sure that doesn't happen?
1. Who is doing this study? And what roles will they have?
How will they be coordinated?
Are they equipped with the skills and resources they need?
Is the team clear on what they need to do and how they need to work?
Participatory design can have drawbacks, especially if it reproduces power inequalities and biases
In participatory designing the team includes people from the situation that is being studied. This has significant advantages, if they are well-supported 👉
The knowledge they develop through learning about their own situations and those of others can allow them to change their views and habits, and that in itself can lead to successful positive change
They develop their own design capability and can continue to do more designing
They are more likely to support changes that are designed as a result
They have detailed first-hand experience and knowledge
1. Frame
2. Why is this situation of interest to your organisation, community, project?
1. Define the situation
How often does it happen?
Who?
Unknown people
Roles
Known people
When?
Finish
Start
Where?
Physical boundaries
