Designing the Design Transition in Traditional Organizations
Posted on October 26, 2018
Hospital de Urgencia Asistencia Pública (HUAP), Santiago de Chile
“Design is no longer just a tool for the development of functional innovative consumer products, but is increasingly seen as a process for radical change –developing services, systems and environments supporting more sustainable lifestyles and consumption habits”[1].
Design is at an inflection point. After decades of being perceived as a technical tool to produce images and objects in service of the market (what I call “old school” design), it grew into a methodology that has enabled people and companies to more holistically approach the creation of products, and from there, into a fluid tool that can transform systems and services throughout the entire span of human life. Design today has the potential to transform society for the better, but this change hasn’t been completely internalized, both by designers and by other actors in the process. Designers today are not usually prepared to manage their unprecedented responsibility, and many people still expect posters and chairs from designers trained in transdisciplinary and strategic development.
After years of pursuing binding leadership positions, designers finally have a seat at the table. So what happens next? There’s a big collision between expectations and reality. Traditional corporations are learning to see design as a catalyst for collaboration and innovation, yet remain inflexible in their corporate structure and ways of thinking. At the same time, designers are eager to work in (and lead) teams that iterate over big transformations, but design school didn’t prepare us for the challenge of pulling together often-reluctant people with strongly-set schedules and mindsets to achieve a common, user-focused goal.
As designers, we need to be prepared to deal with systems that are not used to having a designer involved. This is something I learned firsthand while working as the only designer at the Hospital de Urgencia Asistencia Pública (HUAP) public emergency hospital in Chile during 2014. As you might imagine, public institutions, in general, are very rigid in their corporate structure and are in no way accustomed to change, or to new ideas being brought into their processes. Whenever things do change, it’s because an order came from very high on the command chain, from people usually detached from day-to-day operations. There are no instances of team or cross-team sharing of experiences, and employees don’t normally get a chance to have their feedback heard by their superiors.
I started at the hospital with no experience in any organization of this scale and trying hard to push for what I thought (based on my user research) were meaningful and substantial improvements to the patient experience. But I failed to establish the trust and communication channels necessary to achieve lasting change. I had big, well-formed ideas and the purest of intentions, but failed to get traction for large projects, garnered resentment from administrative workers who thought I was usurping their duties, and wound up designing many dozens of posters, because that’s what everyone thought I was there to do. As Miley Cyrus would say, I came in like a wrecking ball, but sadly, mine was made of rubber.
Nevertheless, it was a valuable experience. These are some things I would do better, given the opportunity:
_Before doing anything, meet people. Identifying the people I would need to work with and meeting each of them face-to-face would have given me a chance to start building mutual trust and rapport, while also learning about the way things are regularly done at the hospital. I would have gained insights to enable me to do a better job, and it would have enabled more ambitious projects, as I would have been more familiar with the communication and management passageways I would have had to navigate to pursue improvements.
_Don’t assume people know what I can bring to the table. Design is still widely regarded as a technical role, and the emerging design positions in this kind of traditional organizations are usually not directly in charge of anyone. Having very recently graduated from a strategically-oriented design school, I was still deeply immersed in the ideals of the methodology. Clearly, my coworkers and I had drastically different definitions of ‘design’. As a newcomer, I would have benefitted from bridging those differences, and from better communicating my role and expectations.
_Generate instances for collaboration and help visualize improvements. As a designer coming into uncharted territory, it’s important to realize that you are not the expert. Creating moments of collaboration with motivated people who have been involved in the organization for a long time and engaging them in activities that generate solutions based on those experiences is a great way to recognize the value of their insights, to generate trust and buy-in, and to build a cultural habit of idea sharing. And because the potential benefits of big efforts are sometimes hard to imagine, designers have a duty to help visualize them in order to rally everyone around progress.
Empathy is a recurring concept in design, yet sometimes we fail to appreciate how it applies to our own processes and assumptions. When a new agent is added to a system, the system has to mutate, because their flows and interconnections will change. Thinking about the hospital as a system helped me understand how my presence changed it, and how I could help ease the system’s adaptation to a new way of working. It’s important for designers to take responsibility in not just shaping external experiences, but also the internal structures and connections that will eventually lead to visible external improvements. An organization that’s receptive to the benefits of design, paired with a motivated and contextually-aware team of designers, can transform its culture into a dynamic system that can respond much better to user needs and changing landscapes. It’s not easy, but it’s a worthwhile effort.
AY
[1] Liam J. Bannon, Pelle Ehn. Design Matters in Participatory Design. Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. (2012)
Donella Meadows. Thinking in systems. (2009).
George Aye. Design Education’s Big Gap: Understanding the Role of Power. (2017). https://medium.com/greater-good-studio/design-educations-big-gap-understanding-the- role-of-power-1ee1756b7f08