Transdisciplinary Design

Narratives of Complexity

Posted on May 15, 2011 | posted by:

Our design led research project has given us the opportunity to reflect on transdisciplinary design both as a mode of thinking and as a collaborative university program. Beyond that it has given me the chance to step back and consider how the methods I use influence my view of the creative process.



Thinking back on the creative methods I have employed through different disciplines I can see that as the scale of my work has changed so has my process for managing and integrating complexity. Orientation, first year of art school, a lifetime ago we were told: “You will learn to see the world.” The undertone seemed to be: ‘that’s a heck of a lot so don’t worry if you don’t get a job after this.’ We kept on worrying about paying off dizzying amounts of debt. However, I believe they did succeed in helping us really see the complexity of what is around us, and beyond us.

Looking back it seems that Fine Art opens a world of complexity: interwoven intents, incentives, emotions, histories and futures. It teaches you to find and capture a moment in that chaos, still loaded with the weight of its connections. Industrial Design appears to mirror that. With industrial design you often find a moment, an insight, a trigger – and step out from there, teasing out the connections, holding on only to those with immediate relevance, the rest influencing from the periphery.

Now, years later, as a strategist I find myself overlaying these experiences onto each other. I often find myself seeing the world as chaotic connections and gaps – collecting moments across disparate experiences, and scales – tracking and refining the shifting, sometimes contradictory, paths. My job, it often feels, is to narrate this thread of understanding, pulling it and reconfiguring it to map opportunity.

As a consultant I have often used a version of what I would call the ‘standard’ design process to narrate the value of design. This ‘standard’ is familiar to creative consultancies, particularly those with product design roots. These are generally depicted as a linear process with four to six stages and a loop to indicate iteration, a key point when describing design’s ability to quickly prototype and test. After years of describing design’s value through this narrative I realize the language that I also use to describe creativity has been influenced by this staged description as well.

In our design led research project we had the opportunity to test our assumptions and think more critically about process. Looking back through my experiences I have been reminded that the linear process I have adopted, as a means to describe creative design work, is manufacturing based  and does not represent how creative thinking and doing happens. Design Thinking too is a part of this tradition, borrowing from existing product based practice narratives to describe a passionless method, reduced to an equation. These design process ‘standards’ do not capture the complexity, negotiation, and intuition of design and creativity.

I can see looking across my experiences that a defined redirective approach reflects how I work (or how I might like to work), where the linear ‘standard’ process may often express what I do within the constraints of a project. This indicates that a defined redirective process can be coupled with a linear method for contained, linear projects. For more complex non-linear challenges, such as open ended research or infrastructure and large system projects, the linear process does not offer an adequate road map. This is the difference between creating a coffee maker on an assembly line and attempting to evolve a public transportation system. The wicked problem is beyond disciplinary silos and requires an approach that is interdisciplinary and redirective.

We need to move from a design approach to a creative approach. From Design Thinking to Creative Thinking and Doing. We need to discuss and utilize our varied approaches, across disciplines, to work within complexity. A paradigm built on the process of making coffee makers and boom boxes simply will not give us a relevant foundation for discussing complexity, failure, emergence or social justice. We need to learn to leverage design’s ability to prototype, creating a culture living and designing in beta, with prototypes as product – a redirective method that has change and agility as fundamental attributes to a successful future.