Design Judo: A Redirective Method
Posted on May 4, 2011 | posted by:
We began by mapping the domains our research had intersected. First we started with our design exercise on autism. We outlined who we had connected to and groups of people related to this ecosystem we hoped to supplement. We then found another layer, further removed which included the types of resources our work intersected. Next we mapped our research approach, using rings again to illustrate scale of relationships. These showed us the ecosystems we were designing for and researching with. They are like cross sections of a tree showing us a slice through of our research make-up, but what it could not tell us was the growth path we had taken. Our process had seemed in many ways normal for design exercises, design through prototyping, but still we couldn’t quite express the process using the models we were familiar with. This just couldn’t capture what was clearly key to our experience: a shifting of focus again and again. Simply saying iterate, which is a design process staple, didn’t accurately describe it. We began drawing our process – what our process felt like, what turns it had taken. Nothing seemed to fit, we moved back and froth filling the whiteboard with arrows and loops.
Our momentum increased. It became a puzzle, an equation we could not make tangible. As we drew, back and forth, testing ourselves we quickened our pace – talking faster, hurried. We knew we were onto something. The fact that we could not find the answers in our design and business process vocabularies pushed us forward. This was deep play, a heightened awareness of place, time and meaning. It was intense and euphoric. This is what brainstorming at it’s best feels like, a rush of adrenalin as connections suddenly click into place, a pattern, an idea emerges. This is the passion missing from Tim Brown’s book Change by design. This cannot be taught or bought, it must be experienced – a unique colliding of insight and opportunity.
“Well if it isn’t any of these what is it?” Francis asked. “This is new.” Kelly repeated it again two more times trying to sort out just why it felt that way. “Why is it new?” Francis pushed. “It is new because it is not the creative process we have, I have, grown to accept as fact. The linear process…” Kelly drew on the board in the center of a field of our failed sketches, “it includes some indication of iteration, a repetition, but it acts like a cone, each cycle getting more specific, defined by constraints. The end product is practically determined by the first few iterations, after that you simply hone in further and further. That is not at all what we did. That’s not our process – this is a paradigm shift.”
We tested language to suit this, sketches having failed us. It is iterative, but not exactly, it’s not honing in, it’s not cyclical as much as it is shifting, again and again, turning corners, responsive. It’s taking new directions, seeing opportunity with each new insight. It’s redirecting your path. and finally we we came to it, in a rush, it’s a re-directive design method. Not just a process but more than that a method that could be used to draw out insights in a new way, that could allow a project to develop and grow through the process rather than be a perfected version of the earliest insights. This was big. High on adrenalin and caffeine we had to find Eulani, we had to bring her into the magic circle. Francis called, “Where are you? … I’ll be right there, I’m coming over – we are coming over.”
We rushed a few blocks away, talking hurriedly. We entered the bar, nothing special except unlike all the other bars our classmates dragged us to this one wasn’t packed. We headed back past the bar stools to the booths. We quickly sat down barely talking with Eulani’s other classmates who were leaving. Kelly sat down, Francis went to get a drink. “So something big happened.” not able to contain herself. “Really?” clearly thinking we were messing with her. “Something really big… patentable big.” “No you are just pulling my leg, no really?” “So big we had to come find you.” “No way, no fucking way, you must be joking.” Francis returned, “Really – it’s true.” He got out his phone and began recording. “Oh my god you aren’t kidding – this is real?”
Kelly and Franscis nod vigorously in unison still flushed from excitement. “So you know the design process, the standard one, there are variations but they are all about the same, all linear.” I drew on the table top with my finger. “It takes you through steps and always includes some form of iteration, but always honing in.” “Ok.”, still skeptical but curious. “Remember the map you drew, the sketch of a process that keeps branching off? Well this is what we have been doing, it’s redirecting.” Francis and Kelly continue to fill in the details. “But how is it a method, how will it work for business, how does it create efficiency?” “It can be accelerated for business to tighten up the process.” “Well you have to have measurements a way to judge success. You could do that at each redirection, but how would you know you wee done?” “When you reach your pre-determined assigned measured goals, which might evolve, but will be the signal for having ‘made it’… This is new it’s not Tim Brown it is an alternative.”
Then we realized what was missing. Kelly asked, “What’s the one place design can’t seem to handle with its current process, where does design thinking seem to fall short… the wicked problem! Big system challenges where prototyping is ‘live’, where re-direction is imperative.” We rushed on fleshing out the details to make a method from this process we had experienced. “And, and, what if we we test this method through our thesis, each project contributing to a case study?” This wasn’t ideas sitting around to be forgotten, we were ready to make this real.
What we have discovered from our design led research project is a process and potential method for tackling today’s and tomorrow’s biggest challenges, the wicked problems of infrastructure, systems, and designed complexity. We see this method as both liberating and structured, a way for all creative thinkers to dive into the unknown and develop futures we can be proud of. By its fluid nature it gives designers, primed for the open ended – prototyping nature of the re-directive process, a new way to join these types of projects. Finally a method that is not owned by design, but that leverages the skills and intuitions intrinsic to the design world.