Matt Ridley shows that the reason why humans have advanced as a culture was because we were able to exchange ideas and learn from each other.

More importantly was his point that people do not know how to do everything, but instead leverages on groups of people knowledgeable in their areas. As a result people are contributors to a collective whole and therefore, it is not how smart a person is, but how well he communicates and interfaces with the world around him.

Awesome talk!

1) A dip in the bed – I got a room with 2 single beds, and it was obvious which bed was the one more frequently used as there was an annoying sunken dip in the middle of the mattress. I’m not sure if house keeping was flipping the mattress in a timely manner.

2) The closet was difficult to open – It has a really nice seemless door design that, being flushed with the wall, was hell to use. I could imaging ladies breaking nails trying to pry the closet doors open. The stiff rollers did not help.

3) House keeping leaves a new clean cup the right side up on the counter top.

4) The shower does not drain properly – I’m drying up in about 2cm deep soapy water.

5) The shower door handle cum towel rack is too low – the bath towel I hang on it brushes the floor. Annoying especially if the floor is wet after a shower.

6) Waste bins are not cleared.

7) Complementary tea bags not refilled.

8) Daily newspaper was not delivered, but eventually turned up after 3 reminders.

9) Air condition vents directly facing the study table where I’m writing this post.

Update: 10) Killed a cockroach in the toilet at 12.16am.

As you can see, on its own, each of these points are not major problems. However when added together these small “irritation points” becomes big enough to impact the total experience. It does not really matter if it is a product or a service, experience design is tough as it requires a 360 degree holistic process when resolving the problem. Not only that, you need an attention to details and a deep understanding what motivates a consumer and what is important to them.

Bruce Nussbaum starts the opening volley with a strong body shove with “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?“.

He writes:

The last time I saw Emily was in Singapore in the fall at the ICSID World Design Congress where she was receiving a roaring applause from the European and American designers on stage after giving a speech about Project H. I loved that speech because it linked the power of design to the obligation to do good. In a world awash in consumption, with many designers complicit in designing that consumption, Emily’s message was right on.

But not to the mostly Asian designer audience. Of course there was polite applause but, to my surprise, there was also a lot of loud grumbling against Emily along the lines of “What makes her think she can just come in and solve our problems?

(snip…)

Are designers the new anthropologists or missionaries, come to poke into village life, “understand” it and make it better–their “modern” way?

(snip…)

…a 20-something woman from the Acumen Fund rushed to the front and said in the proudest, most optimistic, breathless way that Acumen was teaming up with IDEO and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to design better ways of delivering safe drinking water to Indian villagers. She said this to the Indian businessman Kishoreji Biyani, who is the key investor in IDIOM, and to my stunned surprise–and hers–he groused that there was a better, Indian way of solving the problem.

Might Indian, Brazilian and African designers have important design lessons to teach Western designers?

(snip…)

Is the new humanitarian design coming out of the U.S. and Europe being perceived through post-colonial eyes as colonialism? Are the American and European designers presuming too much in their attempt to do good?

Emily Pilloton at Project H response with a right hook with “Are Humanitarian Designers Imperialists? Project H Responds“.

Cameron Sinclair from Architecture for Humanity, jumps into the fray with a body slam calling Bruce “Admiral Akbar”, with “Admiral Akbar, It’s a trap! How over-simplification creates a distorted vision of Humanitarian Design“.

Bruce then puts his hands up in defensive pose with: “Do-gooder Design and Imperialism, Round 3: Nussbaum Responds“.

All the while Design Observer watches on like a boxing referee with “Humanitarian Design vs. Design Imperialism: Debate Summary“.

I was at the same congress in Singapore with Bruce, seated and Tweeting the ICSID congress live maybe two to three rows behind where Bruce was seated. But my take away from Emily’s speech was far different.

Emily shared what she did right and what she did wrong. In particular the leanings that was derived from her activities, especially the huge importance of being integrated into the culture and community. I did not, nor the other people around me, feel we were being lectured on “how to do it right”. (Check out my live coverage of Emily’s Speech and see for yourself?)

Furthermore in the pre-congress “meet the speaker” chat, I manage a few words with Emily and one thing that came out of our discussion was designers need to be both culturally aware as well as be on location to make a difference. It was also why Emily, or Project H for that matter, is not going to go into the slums of Calcutta or farm lands of China but focus on problems in her own backyard. It looks like she learned the hard way with the Hippo Roller.

So the next time I meet up with Bruce, I’ll definitely ask him who expressed such concerns about getting preached or lectured too. I’ve met Bruce online and offline and he, I have to say, has quite a different persona, confusing at times. That being said he is good at digging out issues that despite having some small element truth to it, gets him accused of sensational journalism.

So now let’s go back to this discussion: Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?

Before we go on do check out what I wrote on the OLPC that was, strangely enough, in response to another Bruce Nussbaum article.

In my mind, I find this project (OLPC) was a grand scheme thought out by people who felt their better way of life can transcend across cultures and be equally relevant. It’s pretty much a big brother; I know what’s best for you approach.

The question was should be, is a Laptop the right product for this problem in the first place? Why not one computer, but add more teachers and build more schools? Also there are some discussions that the mobile phone might be a better replacement but it is not an apple (communication) to orange (learning) comparison.

I do understand much research was done, but were there conversations with people it was meant to target? What about the environment the OLPC needs to live in? Electricity something we take for granted is not always available in 3rd world countries, so will it sit in the corner discharged?

At the end of the day, I’m sure there were both top and bottom end considerations in the design process, but this to me is more of a problem of Design by Committee. To many cooks spoil the broth, doing to many things and satisfying too many partner’s needs.

If you are interested, check out my other review on the OLPC that questions the design decision of this product. Interestingly enough, I recently got my hands on an OLPC for real in Japan, (pics to follow) and I stand by what I’ve written.

The problem with this statement is, by my count, 3 years too late. My quote (above) was written 3 years ago. By this time, 3 years later, many awesome designers such as Emily and Cameron have learned from the mistakes of the OLPC and other projects and have found great success in humanitarian design.

So yes while I fully agree Bruce’s proclamation that our good intentions are misplaced, what we should be using is “were misplaced” instead or “are misplaced”. I believe designers figured out what went wrong and while not there yet, we are on the way to getting this fixed. This is really a moot discussion and quite unfairly put, if you ask me, to all those designers that really put their hearts, souls and sometimes lives on the line for humanitarian design.

This article is a dedication to their selfless work. Emily, a hug on me the next time we meet.

What was interesting was that I have been getting feedback that it sounds, from that last post, that I’m against Design Thinking. I have to say that on a cursory glance, that previous article did sound like I was bitching about Design Thinking.

So for the record, I like to say that I am not against Design Thinking. In fact I am fully for it and have said countless of times that I hope Design Thinking becomes a function within organizations so that there are more employment opportunities for graduate designers. What I am against is the way Design Thinking is being “pimped” as the next big thing and how everyone who is anyone is jumping on this bandwagon, rightly or wrongly.

In fact this article is all about fixing the problems with Design Thinking, assuming we all can agree there is a problem in the first place? What value I would have to the design community, if I just complained about it and did not offer some kind of solution?

Right, so now let’s get back to big can of worms shall we?

Design Thinking is Quite a Mess

So as I was saying, after the dust settled in my previous article, I have been involved in online forums and websites tracking this discussion and the sentiments from the bottom up. Sadly indeed, we can see that the Design Thinking is a mess and the confusion is huge.

Raymond Pirouz, in a similar Design Thinking discussion on Linkedin, shared a video of a panel of people discussing Design Thinking. You don’t have to watch it all the way through as it is pretty long, but after about 10 minutes you can tell that their definition of Design Thinking is, for lack of a better phrase, all over the place. It is clear that the panel members all have different opinions, influenced by their background and motivations, of what Design Thinking is.

The always-generous Rita Sue penned a reply to this video that I have shamelessly reproduced here:

The video is very enlightening. Such diversity of opinion about the same subject. No wonder it is such a hard job to explain all this to people in organizations who haven’t a clue. Actually, if they met the Jump guy one day, the Nestle guy another, and Nathan Shedroff another, they may just give up the idea of integrating design at a high level in their organization. It is very frustrating to talk to several experts with diverging opinions when you are trying to learn about what to you is virgin territory. How can you expect “civilians” to know how to move forward?

In the final analysis, I think there is not one way to do any of this. If any one of those points of view are introduced to a company and the activity is led by a very smart person, like one of them, I truly believe the design function/activity will get sorted out, be influenced by the culture, and influence the culture.

I had a friend (long dead) who was in a think tank in a top advertising agency and once wrote an article about how marketing got accepted into companies and or how internal marketing functions were built. It was a similar struggle. There were various configurations organizations adopted or developed for integrating marketing, which is now of course considered a vital function the way we all want design to be. Companies used to look to their ad agencies for their marketing expertise. I think it would be a useful exercise to uncover some of this info. Good discussion!

Indeed, in many ways Design Thinking is much like Marketing when it first had its day. During the early days, Marketing struggled to find acceptance and budgets to get things going. I remember discussing how Marketing ROI should be calculated, and have used similar techniques in my own discussions on Design ROI.

Design, a Core Function in Every Organization.

As mentioned briefly before, what I think should be happening is Design needs to be a function within an organization, core to any business. Just like finance, human resource etc. organizations serious in leveraging the value of design should not try to do it on its own, but hire the relevant people trained or skilled to do the job. My dream is to see companies hiring designers as leaders to drive that function. I’m not implying that this function should be lead by designers only, but I’m more of a view that this is a specialist job, like a CPA, so get people with the right skills and designers at this time seem to be the better choice. Though I do know of very suitable candidates that don’t have a classical design background but have been in the industry for a long time.

Raymond Pirouz, a lecturer in design strategy, also shared that he teaches MBAs design appreciation and design’s application to business strategy. This is similar to my previous comment and seems to be the right way to go. Indeed this would also fall inline with how MBAs learn to understand and appreciate finance, accounting, HR and even logistics.

In this manner we can reduce the backlash of businesses questioning the value of design thinking. Having a designer (or someone suitably trained) entrenched in an organization, responsible for looking after and managing the design process, will allow everyone instead to focus on the results and getting the job done, rather then getting bogged down in the semantics of the Design Thinking process.

It should seem by now, that the way we defined Design Thinking is getting less and less important. Still, if we need to get the man on the street to better appreciate Design Thinking we might need to also rethink how we approach educating the masses on design thinking.

Design Thinking + Design Doing = (Just) Design?

So, in my view, one of the big problems with Design Thinking is the overemphasis on the process. If now we should be focusing on results, then we really need to get back to design (doing) and coming out with meaningful solutions. Furthermore, Design Thinking is but one of the many tools available and should be seen and accepted that creative work is part of a larger system and not some magical panacea.

Ariel Guers writes:

From what I can tell (finishing Ph.D. thesis on decision making in design) Design Thinking cannot really be separated from design doing when the design problem can be characterized as a wicked problem. If you talk about simpler problems, for sure you could separate these two states.

To be able to generate “creative” (very complex term btw) solutions you need to have some kind of artistry (Donald Schön’s term), this artistry is acquired through lots of practice (reflection in-action and on-action). A couple of workshop with post-it are just not enough to turn you into a designer.

Also, according to my own research and understanding of several other researchers (Dorst, Cross or Lawson for instance) designers think in a very different way than what Design Thinking puts forward. Designers usually consider a *very limited* set of alternatives and develop guiding principles right from the start. They don’t postpone judgment and decision making in order to open-up to new alternatives, they rapidly create a rough (partial) solution (to a partially defined problem) and move forward to see what else they can learn about the problem, through iterations. Actually, it’s more complicated than this, of course, but I leave it like that for brevity’s sake.

Before we conclude this article with the few points on how we can fix Design Thinking, lets take a look at a quote by Roberto Verganti in a very awesome article on Core77 titled: Design Thinking Everywhere and Nowhere.

Let’s agree that all of humanity are designers, and that design is one of the things that separates us from the apes. As Jonathan Ive put it: ‘Design is not important. Good design is important.’

First, when we talk of designers, we usually mean professional designers, who have reached an accepted level of competence. They have survived a Darwinian selection process (there are far more graduates than jobs) and have clocked up well over 10,000 hours of practice on projects. We should remember that designers learn by doing, not by learning and practicing a theory, designing involves a lot more tacit knowledge than in other areas of business. It’s therefore hard to believe that senior managers can change their thinking habits of a lifetime after a workshop or two working with designers. And, to be frank, to suggest as much devalues what designers do.

Second, a key factor in creating good design that really does make a difference is great designers. These talented individuals are few and far between and provide critical competitive advantage. Let’s forget about Design Thinking as a magic process, and focus on how designers and managers should best work together to deliver great quality outputs.

He goes on to talk about how “user centered innovation is dead”, but that is another story.

So How Can We Fix the Problems of Design Thinking?

This is indeed a complex problem, that I don’t have a perfect solution. Perhaps Design Thinking needs some Design Thinking to fix it eh? But let me give it a go by synthesizing, then summarizing my key points above:

1) Teach Design Thinking with Design Doing.

2) Anchor Design Thinking as part of a larger holistic process.

3) Leave Design Thinking and managing the design process to the experts. Accept that, just like accounting, not everyone can do it.

4) Finally, call Design Thinking something else.

On that last point, I think Design Thinking has moved on and evolved partly because of this and many other discussions all over the world. I rather just call it Design, a noun, a verb, an action, a process and an object. What do you guy’s think, and do share your suggestions on how we can fix the problems of Design Thinking?

This speech probably took a lot of guts to deliver to the Apple faithful, and not surprisingly much of it was followed with of boos and jeers.

However the thing to note is this key statement below. One that I firmly believe really sets the foundation for the Apple we know today:

(at 7.25mins)

We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.

We have to embrace the notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us, then that is great, cos we need all the help we can get.

And if we screw up and don’t do a good job, then it’s our fault and no one else.

Do stay to the end of the video, as he has a nice monologue of the type of people (consumers) that buy Apple products and how Apple is staying true to them. If you now look back (or forward for that matter) at what Apple has done through the years, you can safely say that he has stayed true in many ways to this vision laid out in 1997. It really is all about making the best products they can make, and puts into context why Steve always says to the audience: “we really love it and think you will to”.

On a side note, his presentation style in 1997 is no different to 2010!

Via: Macworld Boston 1997-The Microsoft Deal.